Old NASA satellite falling from sky this weekend, low threat
WHEN CHINA SAID THIS EVERYONE'S HAIR WAS ON FIRE

In this photo made available by NASA, the space shuttle Challenger launches the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite in 1984. On Friday, Jan. 6, 2023, the U.S. space agency said the 38-year-old NASA satellite is about to fall from the sky, but the chance of wreckage falling on anybody is “very low.” It's expected to come down Sunday night, give or take 17 hours. (NASA via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

MARCIA DUNN
Fri, January 6, 2023

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A 38-year-old retired NASA satellite is about to fall from the sky.

NASA said Friday the chance of wreckage falling on anybody is “very low.” Most of the 5,400-pound (2,450-kilogram) satellite will burn up upon reentry, according to NASA. But some pieces are expected to survive.

The space agency put the odds of injury from falling debris at about 1-in-9,400.

The science satellite is expected to come down Sunday night, give or take 17 hours, according to the Defense Department.

The California-based Aerospace Corp., however is targeting Monday morning, give or take 13 hours, along a track passing over Africa, Asia the Middle East and the westernmost areas of North and South America.

.The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, known as ERBS, was launched in 1984 aboard space shuttle Challenger. Although its expected working lifetime was two years, the satellite kept making ozone and other atmospheric measurements until its retirement in 2005. The satellite studied how Earth absorbed and radiated energy from the sun.

The satellite got a special sendoff from Challenger. America's first woman in space, Sally Ride, released the satellite into orbit using the shuttle's robot arm. That same mission also featured the first spacewalk by a U.S. woman: Kathryn Sullivan. It was the first time two female astronauts flew in space together.

It was the second and final spaceflight for Ride, who died in 2012.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Venezuela owes over $20 million to law firms on guarding overseas assets


Fri, January 6, 2023 

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela owes $20.7 million to U.S. law firms handling litigation against creditors seeking to collect unpaid debts from bond defaults and nationalizations carried out more than 15 years ago, according to a document seen by Reuters.

The South American nation owes bondholders and companies more than $60 billion over companies nationalized under then-President Hugo Chavez as well as over defaulted bonds from the country and state oil firm PDVSA.

Some U.S. courts have granted creditors rights to negotiate the sale of Venezuelan assets abroad in order to collect debts, such as the Citgo refinery, the crown jewel of Venezuela's overseas assets, and a subsidiary of PDVSA.

However, some assets are protected by the U.S. Treasury Department.

The interim government of former opposition leader Juan Guaido, who was removed at the end of last year by assembly vote, had hired some eight law firms to handle litigation with companies and bondholders, including one seeking to nullify PVDSA's 2020 bonds, which had offered Citgo as collateral.

Between October 2020 and October 2022, Venezuela's opposition parliament authorized payments of nearly $30 million to the lawyers, but according to the document, they have yet to be paid $20.7 million.

In the document, a report from the interim government's prosecution team, the lawyers say failure to pursue the lawsuits would risk losing the overseas assets.

Opposition groups maintain that control of overseas assets is not at risk, despite last month's removal of the interim government, though they have not given details of what will happen with ongoing litigation.

(Reporting by Vivian Sequera and Mayela Armas; Writing by Sarah Morland; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

There was a lot of pee on the CES 2023 show floor

Urine analysis technology was an unexpected highlight of this year’s show.


Daniel Cooper
·Senior Editor
Sat, January 7, 2023 

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and I’m not sure if you can count four instances of a product as a trend, but it’s certainly an interesting thread at this year’s CES. At this year’s show, a quartet of companies are showing off urine analysis tools designed to be used at home by the general public. These are positioned as a natural evolution of the fitness tracker, a device you can use to keep an even closer eye on your health and fitness. Most of them are built for your toilet, testing your pee for any number of easy-to-identify maladies. But is this the next great frontier of consumer health tracking? That rather depends on the public’s desire to delve deep into their own bladders.

My cynical take: I suspect the reason we’re seeing these pop up is because the wearables world is now played out. Back in 2019, I wrote that we’d reached the point where there were no new features that could be fitted to a smartwatch, fitness tracker or ring. Or, at least, none that were as valid, effective or accurate as what you now expect every device on the market to offer. Once it was possible to put a single lead ECG in a watch, there were no new health-tracking worlds left to conquer that didn’t involve breaking the skin.

Dr. Audrey Bowden is Dorothy J. Wingfield Philips Chancellor Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, and head of the Bowden Biomedical Optics Laboratory. Dr. Bowden tells Engadget that clinical urinalysis is used as a “first line screening for many diseases and conditions such as diabetes and kidney disease,” but added that it can “also play a role in ordinary, routine checkups, such as during pregnancy.”

You may have seen your physician ask you for a urine sample and then stir a dipstick dotted with colored squares of reaction paper into the liquid you’ve just produced. In addition to visually checking urine for cloudiness (an obvious sign of a problem), these squares can run a wide variety of tests as part of this first-line screening process.

Each square corresponds to a different test, looking for factors like pH as well as the presence of blood, or white blood cells. Blood, for instance, can indicate kidney stones or cancer, while white blood cells are a clue your body is fighting an infection. If there’s excess glucose in the urine, it’s likely that diabetes is the culprit. Ketones would indicate ketosis, nitrites could indicate bacteria in the urinary tract, and so on.

Dr. Bowden added that for many conditions, urinalysis is not a “definitive diagnostic, but rather serves as an initial prompt to perform a more complete investigation.” And that since the clinical procedure has been to test for urine when there’s already evidence of a problem, it’s not clear how effective daily testing can really be.

A medical professional I interviewed, who requested anonymity for fear of compromising their professional standing, expressed skepticism both about the accuracy of these tests as well as their utility. They said that if people were running tests at home on a regular basis, it runs the risk of providing hypochondriacs with another reason to clog up care centers.

Dr. Shubha K. De (MD) is a Urologic surgeon who is presently working on a PhD in biomedical engineering. He raised a concern that, in primary care facilities, medical staff know how to validate the data they’re presented with, and to screen out false positives. This may not be the case in an at-home setting, and added that the accuracy of some tests vary wildly — a dipstick test to identify a bladder infection is roughly 80-percent accurate, but to diagnose bladder cancer, it falls to just 3 percent.

The most talked-about gadget at CES is surely Withings’ U-Scan, which even Jimmy Kimmel joked about in his opening monologue on Thursday. Given that Withings is already such a big name in the health-tracking world, it’s little surprise that it’s hogged the attention. The company showed off a device that sits on the dry part of your toilet bowl, and samples some of your trickle as you pee. Once that fluid is captured inside the device, it runs a sample through a microfluidic cartridge (with reaction paper) and uses a reader to look at the result. Once completed, the results are sent to your phone, with suggestions on what you might do to improve your health.

When it’s eventually released, U-Scan will offer a cartridge for menstrual cycle tracking, as well as one to monitor your hydration and nutrition levels. It’s this latter cartridge I tried during my time in Vegas this week, and it looked at the pH of my urine as well as the specific gravity (relative density) of my pee. But the company promises that it will eventually be able to identify nutrient levels, fat metabolism, ketones and quantities of vitamin C.

Both of these have raised red flags with professionals who are concerned that these analyses don’t suit a one-size-fits-all model. Dr. Bowden said that menstrual cycle tracking based on “‘normalization’ curves may have been developed with too narrow a demographic to capture all interested users.”

Dr. Bowden was also resistant to the idea that nutritional information can be extracted given clinical urinalysis doesn’t offer data about those markers. She said urine samples don’t really “provide reliable information over a given time window,” and added that a “daily analysis of food nutritional content may be a stretch.” Although she did say that it may be possible to detect “accumulated nutritional deficits.”

Dr. De, however, says that it may be possible to extrapolate nutritional information back to a person’s diet using urine analysis. They said that physicians currently ask patients to run 24-hour urine collections, and that fluid is then examined for specific substances — like uric acid — to make inferences on dietary intake. “This is not always perfect, and currently needs some correlation with one’s diet history,” but added that it’s plausible to imagine that, with a “user friendly app and some AI” that it could work well.

Withings is looking to develop more clinical tests, and has said that it’s already working on a way to screen for bladder cancer markers. It’s here that my source who asked not to be named feels would offer real value to groups who are at risk of the disease. They said that a targeted monitoring program may help identify instances of the cancer early, which should dramatically increase survival rates.

Image of Yellosis' Cym Seat urine analysis device.

Korean company Yellosis graduated from Samsung’s startup incubator some years ago, and already produces the Cym Boat personal urine testing kit. Cym Boat offers a small stick with reaction paper squares, which you then stand in a boat-shaped piece of card lined with color-calibration squares. Take a picture on your smartphone, and you’ll be able to look at the blood, protein, ketones, pH and glucose levels within your urine.

At the show, it also showed off its next-generation product, Cym Seat, which uses a metal arm to hold a paper stick under a person as they pee. Once completed, it slides the strip in front of an optical scanner, and after a minute, the results are pushed to your phone. But this device, which is expected to launch by the end of 2023 and cost around $1,000, automates the existing process rather than adding anything new.

Image of Vivoo's toilet-mounted urine analysis device.

Similarly, Vivoo, which also offers a reaction-paper stick which can be analyzed by a smartphone app, is building its own toilet-mounted hardware, which pushes a pee stick into the toilet bowl and then pulls it back in once it’s collected a urine sample. An optical scanner then reads the reaction squares before depositing the stick in a collection bin for disposal later.

Image of Olive's urine analysis toilet

Rounding out the group is Olive, which is taking a dramatically different tack. The device harnesses spectroscopy rather than reaction paper, with hardware that sits under your toilet seat, and a bank of LEDs flashing toward rear-mounted photodiodes. The potential for such a technology is far greater than reaction paper, and there are some studies that have pointed to being able to identify infection with it.

Olive is presently being used in a handful of locations in the Netherlands, including an assisted living facility. Co-founder Corey Katz told Engadget that one of the most surprising uses for the technology was for personnel to keep accurate records of patient bathroom visits. Katz added that work is presently under way to find a way to measure levels of protein in urine to identify instances of preeclampsia.

The company says that there’s a broad number of conditions that spectroscopy could be used to test for. This includes hydration and ketosis all the way through to stress, creatinine levels and electrolyte balances. The hope is that a finished version of the hardware will be ready to go by the end of 2023, although it’ll only be sold to business customers.

There are issues, including around data security, especially for menstrual cycle tracking in countries like the US. Companies that could expose fertility data will need to be mindful of the legal context that is presently in place post-Roe.

If Dr. De has a final concern, it’s a worry that these at-home devices will encourage patients to take medical matters into their own hands without the supervision of a physician. “If [urine analysis systems] direct you to take supplements which jeopardize pre-existing medical conditions,” for instance, “then it could be quite dangerous.”

Of course, there are other things that independent experts (and journalists) will need to test when these devices make it out into the real world. Dr. Bowden raised concerns that urinalysis tests can be “impacted by a number of external factors,” which clinical settings make an effort to control for. Will these devices be accurate enough for the jobs they’ve been bought to do? And will the conclusions they provide be worthwhile? There’s a lot to work through before these products become ubiquitous in bathrooms around the world.

The quest to find King Tut is detailed in new book about the storied pharaoh

Jacqueline Cutler, New York Daily News
Sat, January 7, 2023 


Ancient Egyptians made him a god.

Modern Egyptologists made him immortal.

When Tutankhamun came to the throne around 1330 B.C.E., he still counted his age in single digits. When he died, his body weakened by malaria, Tut was not quite 20. His death was so sudden he was buried in a borrowed tomb.

And then, eventually, forgotten.

“Thirty centuries and more would pass before Tutankhamun’s name was heard again in the Valley of the Kings, after an American digger’s chance discovery of a few scraps of burial equipment,” writes Nicholas Reeves in “The Complete Tutankhamun.”

In 1909, that find led explorer Theodore Davis — a retired businessman and amateur archeologist — to a small underground chamber. He proudly announced he had found Tut’s tomb.

“Of course, he was wrong, as we now know and as [British archeologist] Howard Carter immediately saw,” Reeves writes. “For him, the Davis finds were mere pointers to a burial yet to be found – a burial he was determined to uncover. From 1917 on, while colleagues loudly scoffed, Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, cleared every likely location down to bedrock in search of this archeological Holy Grail.”

Five years later, their quest was rewarded.

Born in England in 1874, Carter’s precocious talent as an artist won him his first job at 17, doing sketches for archeologists on a dig in Egypt, then still a British protectorate. “Young Carter’s enthusiasm was real and intense,” Reeves writes. “He was a quick learner and his abilities were considerable.” By 1899, Carter had a government position in Egypt and supervised expeditions.

The young Englishman, though, was a hothead.

In 1905 when drunken French tourists began insulting the guards at a historic site, Carter threw the visitors out. Then, he refused to refund their money; the ensuing argument led to a fistfight. Outraged, the tourists complained to the British consul general. The official told Carter he would have to apologize.

Instead, Carter quit. He went into business for himself as “a gentleman dealer,” discovering — and sometimes selling — antiquities.

Economic security required a patron, however. Carter found one in George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth earl of Carnarvon. The British noble was on vacation in San Francisco in 1903 when he saw a recently discovered Egyptian mummy on display at the city’s exclusive Bohemian Club.

Archeology, the lord mused, might make an amusing hobby.

After two mostly disappointing years on his own — his main find was a mummified cat — Carnarvon decided to hire Carter. Even after, the work was slow going. Carter always insisted that Tutankhamun’s tomb was close at hand. However, by 1922 his patron had grown less convinced. Finally, he summoned Carter back to England to tell him he wouldn’t pay for another expedition.

Carter impulsively offered to pay for it himself.

“Impressed by Carter’s commitment, the fifth Earl relented,” Reeves writes. “The digging would continue and he, not Carter would again foot the bill. But it would be their last throw of the dice.”

The gamble paid off.

On Nov. 4, 1922, the team’s water boy, Hussein Abd el-Rassul, discovered what looked like the top of a staircase just under the desert sand. By the next day, the team had uncovered 16 steps leading to a plastered-over entrance covered in official, largely illegible seals. Was this Tut’s tomb at last?

Carter ordered the entrance temporarily reburied. He put his life’s quest on hold to wait a bit and cabled Carnarvon to return to Egypt. He waited eagerly for his sponsor’s return for more than two weeks. Once Carnarvon finally arrived, the dig resumed.

Slowly, one underground corridor, then another, were revealed. Both showed signs of ancient burglaries, with holes in the walls roughly replastered.

This didn’t overly worry Carter. Graver robbing was common even during the time of the pharaohs and was swiftly punished. Usually, whatever damage the robbers did was quickly repaired, and the criminals were then publicly impaled.

The only real question was how far the thieves had gotten before they were caught.

Finally, the Englishmen arrived at another plastered-over doorway, also covered with seals — some bearing the hieroglyphs for Tutankhamun’s name. Carter knocked a small hole in the wall and thrust in a candle.

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker,” Carter wrote later, “But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist.”

“Can you see anything?” Carnarvon called out.

“Yes,” Carter answered. “Wonderful things.”

They had found the tomb of the great Tut – untouched.

It would not remain that way for long. Work began immediately and proceeded with meticulous care. Diagrams were made to show precisely where the objects had been found; almost endless photographs were taken. Only then were more than 5,000 of the king’s treasures painstakingly removed.

Some were remarkably preserved, golden statues still shining brightly, jewels glittering in their settings. Naturally, even in a sealed chamber, some objects showed the ravages of time; clothing was crumbling into dust. The mummy’s wrappings were black with ancient rot.

The exhumation took a decade.

Right from the start, though, this engaged the public’s attention. In England, the ongoing story was covered exhaustively and exclusively by The Times. Entertainers responded with novelty songs like “Tutankhamun Shimmy” and “Old King Tut Was a Wise Old Nut.”

And when the real news wasn’t exciting enough, some reporters invented stories. When Carnarvon died in 1923 from an infected mosquito bite, gossip quickly proposed far more thrilling theories. After all, hadn’t the warning “Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of Pharoah” been inscribed over the royal grave?

Still, this was yet another rumor. But it didn’t stop papers from writing about “the mummy’s curse.” Abandoning his character Sherlock Holmes’ cold logic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle warned that supernatural “elementals” guarded the ancient king. Conspiracists began cataloging all the mysterious deaths associated with the expedition.

In fact, of the 22 people who had witnessed the opening of the sarcophagus, only two died within the decade. Carter died in 1939, at 64. Others lived well into their 80s. So much for the swift wings of death.

One of the last to go was Dr. D.E. Derry, who died in 1969 at 87. He had performed the autopsy, cutting open the rotting bandages to examine the dead ruler. What he found was the spindly body of a buck-toothed teenager, his spine twisted by scoliosis. The great and young king likely needed a cane to walk.

He had also failed to produce an heir. The mummified fetuses of his two children had been entombed with him.

Even if the pharaoh had come to a sad and lonely end, his impressive possessions lived on. Glittering gold masks and alabaster statues. Jewelry that was out of this world — fashioned from meteorites. Ebony board games and silver trumpets. Wine, meat and baskets of spices. All had been packed away to accompany him on his journey to the afterlife.

And he did achieve immortality – in a way. King Tut still lives on – in myth, museums, even an “SNL” skit, and, of course, secure in his place in history.

Tesla owners in China protest against surprise price cuts they missed

Sat, January 7, 2023 

SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Hundreds of Tesla owners gathered at the automaker's showrooms and distribution centres in China over the weekend, demanding rebates and credit after sudden price cuts they said meant they had overpaid for electric cars they bought earlier.

On Saturday, about 200 recent buyers of the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 gathered at a Tesla delivery centre in Shanghai to protest against the U.S. carmaker's decision to slash prices for the second time in three months on Friday.

Many said they had believed that prices Tesla charged for its cars late last year would not be cut as abruptly or as deeply as the automaker just announced in a move to spur sales and support production at its Shanghai plant. The scheduled expiration of a government subsidy at the end of 2022 also drove many to finalize their purchases.

Videos posted on social media showed crowds at Tesla stores and delivery centres in other Chinese cities from Chengdu to Shenzhen, suggesting wider consumer backlash.

After Friday's surprise discounts, Tesla's EV prices in China are now between 13% and 24% below their September levels.

Analysts have said Tesla's move was likely to boost its sales, which tumbled in December, and force other EV makers to cut prices too at a time of faltering demand in the world's largest market for battery-powered cars.

While established automakers often discount to manage inventory and keep factories running when demand weakens, Tesla operates without dealerships and transparent pricing has been part of its brand image.

"It may be a normal business practice but this is not how a responsible enterprise should behave," said one Tesla owner protesting at the company's delivery centre in Shanghai's Minhang suburb on Saturday who gave his surname as Zhang.

He and the other Tesla owners, who said they had taken delivery in the final months of 2022, said they were frustrated with the abruptness of Friday's price cut and Tesla's lack of an explanation to recent buyers.

Zhang said police facilitated a meeting between Tesla staff and the assembled owners at which the owners handed over a list of demands, including an apology and compensation or other credits. He added the Tesla staff had agreed to respond by Tuesday.

About a dozen police officers could be seen at the Shanghai protest and most of the videos of the other demonstrations also showed a large police presence at the Tesla sites.

Protests are not a rare occurrence in China, which has over the years seen people come out in large numbers over issues such as financial or property scams, but authorities have been on higher alert after widespread protests in Chinese cities and top universities at the end of November against COVID-19 restrictions.

'RETURN THE MONEY'

Other videos appearing to be of Tesla owners protesting were also posted to Chinese social media platforms on Saturday.

One video, which Reuters verified was filmed at a Tesla store in the southwestern city of Chengdu, showed a crowd chanting, "Return the money, refund our cars."

Another, which appeared to be filmed in Beijing, showed police cars arriving to disperse crowds outside a Tesla store.

Reuters was unable to verify the content of either video.

Tesla does not plan to compensate buyers who took delivery before the most recent price cut, a spokesman for Tesla China told Reuters on Saturday.

He did not respond when asked to comment on the protests.

China accounted for about a third of Tesla's global sales in 2021 and its Shanghai factory, which employs about 20,000 workers, is its single most productive and profitable plant.

Analysts have been positive about the potential for Tesla's price cuts to drive sales growth at a time when it is a year from announcing its next new vehicle, the Cybertruck.

"Nowhere else in the world is Tesla faced with the kind of competitors that they have here [in China]," said Bill Russo, head of consultancy Automobility Ltd in Shanghai.

"They are in a much bigger EV market with companies that can price more aggressively than they can, until now."

In 2021, Tesla faced a public relations storm after an unhappy customer climbed on a car at the Shanghai auto show to protest against the company's handling of her complaints about her car's brakes.

Tesla responded by apologising to Chinese consumers for not addressing the complaints in a timely way.

(Reporting by Brenda Goh, Zhang Yan and Casey HallEditing by Kevin Krolicki and Tomasz Janowski)

Thousands of Israelis protest new government's policies




A person wears a knit cap in the colors of the Palestinian and Israeli flags in Tel Aviv, Israel, during a protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. Thousands of protesters turned up, days after the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in the country's 74-year history was sworn in.

 (AP Photo/ Tsafrir Abayov)


SHLOMO MOR
Sat, January 7, 2023 

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Thousands of Israelis took to the streets Saturday evening to protest plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government that opponents say threaten democracy and freedoms.

The protesters gathered in the central city of Tel Aviv days after the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in the country’s 74-year history was sworn in.

“The settler government is against me,” read one placard. Another banner read, “Housing, Livelihood, Hope.” Some protesters carried rainbow flags.

The protest was led by left-wing and Arab members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. They contend that proposed plans by the new Cabinet will hinder judicial system and widen societal gaps.

The left-wing protesters slammed Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who on Wednesday unveiled the government’s long-promised overhaul of the judicial system that aims to weaken the country’s Supreme Court.

Critics accused the government of declaring war on the legal system, saying the plan will upend Israel’s system of checks and balances and undermine its democratic institutions by giving absolute power to the new governing coalition.

“We are really afraid that our country is going to lose the democracy and we are going to a dictatorship just for reasons of one person which wants to get rid of his law trial," said Danny Simon, 77, a protester from Yavne, south of Tel Aviv. He was referring to Netanyahu, who was indicted on corruption charges in 2021, allegations that he has denied.

Protesters also called for peace and co-existence between Jews and Arab residents of the country.

“We can see right now many laws being advocated for against LGBTQ, against Palestinians, against larger minorities in Israel,” said Rula Daood of “Standing Together,” a grassroots movement of Arabs and Jews. “We are here to say loud and clear that all of us, Arabs and Jews and different various communities inside of Israel, demand peace, equality and justice.”

New York City public schools ban OpenAI's ChatGPT

But enforcing it will be tricky, and AI-generated content isn't going anywhere.


NurPhoto via Getty Images

Will Shanklin
·Contributing Reporter
Fri, January 6, 2023 

On Tuesday, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT from school devices and WiFi networks. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, released by OpenAI in November, quickly gained a foothold with the public — and drew the ire of concerned organizations. In this case, the worry is that students will stunt their learning by cheating on tests and turning in essays they didn’t write.

ChatGPT (short for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is a startlingly impressive application, a sneak preview of the light and dark sides of AI’s incredible power. Like a text-producing version of AI art (OpenAI is the same company behind DALL-E 2), it can answer fact-based questions and write essays and articles that are often difficult to discern from human-written content. And it will only get harder to tell the difference as the AI improves.

“While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for New York City public schools, wrote in an email to NBC News. Still, the organization may have difficulty enforcing the ban. Blocking the chatbot over the school’s internet network and on lent-out devices is easy enough, but that won’t stop students from using it on their own devices with cellular networks or non-school WiFi.


OpenAI is developing “mitigations” it claims will help anyone identify ChatGPT-generated text. Although that’s a welcome move by the Elon Musk-founded startup, recent history isn’t exactly rife with examples of big business putting what’s best for society over the bottom line. (Relying on AI powerhouses to self-regulate sounds as foolproof as trusting the fossil-fuel industry to prioritize the environment over profits.) And artificial intelligence is big business: OpenAI has reportedly been in talks to sell shares at a $29 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable US startups.

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022. 

(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Not everyone in the education community is against the AI chatbot. Adam Stevens, a teacher at Brooklyn Tech who spent years teaching history at NYC’s Paul Robeson High School, compares ChatGPT to the world’s most famous search engine. “People said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago when students could ‘find answers online,’” he told Chalkbeat. He argues that the bot could be an ally for teachers, who could use it as a baseline essay response, which the class could work together to improve upon.

Stevens believes the key is to invite students to “explore things worth knowing” while moving away from standardized metrics. “We’ve trained a whole generation of kids to pursue rubric points and not knowledge,” he said, “and of course, if what matters is the point at the end of the semester, then ChatGPT is a threat.”

No matter how schools handle AI bots, the genie is out of the bottle. Barring government regulation (unlikely in the near future, given the US Congress’ current trajectory), AI-powered answers, essays and art are here to stay. The next part, dealing with the potential societal fallout — including the automation of more and more jobs — will be where the real challenges begin.

EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?


A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023. New York City school officials started blocking this week the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text

 (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

MATT O'BRIEN
Fri, January 6, 2023 at 12:32 PM MST·5 min read

Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.

That's one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.

The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they're also looking for ways to detect misuse.

The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.

WHAT IS CHATGPT?

ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 but is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has a close relationship with Microsoft.

It's part of a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they've learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.

But unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” such as OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions.

Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email. All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.

WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS?

As with similar systems, ChatGPT can generate convincing prose, but that doesn't mean what it says is factual or logical.

Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it, other than a promise that ChatGPT will admit when it's wrong, challenge “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to generate offensive answers. Since then, however, its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people's expectations.

“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.

Altman added that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now."

"It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”

CAN IT BE USED FOR WRITING SCHOOL PAPERS?

This is what ChatGPT said when The Associated Press asked it to answer that question in all caps from the perspective of a principal shouting a brief message through a school’s PA system:

“DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”

But when asked to answer the same question on its own, ChatGPT offered this more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or any other automated writing tool for school papers, as it is considered cheating and does not benefit the student in the long run."

WHAT DO SCHOOLS SAY?

Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set policies on if and how it can be used.

The New York City education department said Thursday that it's restricting access on school networks and devices because it's worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

But there’s no stopping a student from accessing ChatGPT from a personal phone or computer at home.

"While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.

HUMAN OR AI?

“To determine if something was written by a human or an AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistency in writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. These may be signs that the text was generated by an AI.”

That’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how to tell the difference.

OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.

“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.

DOES THIS THREATEN GOOGLE?

There's been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years — it's just more cautious about releasing it in the wild.

It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for ever-bigger, ever-smarter AI language models that could be “pre-trained” on a wide body of writings. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words across a sentence to predict meaning and context. Some of those advances are now baked into Google searches.

But there's no question that successive iterations of GPT — which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — are having an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.

HEY CHATGPT, CAN YOU PUT ALL THIS IN A RAP?

"ChatGPT’s just a tool,

But it ain’t no substitute for school.

You can’t cheat your way to the top,

Using a machine to do your homework, you’ll flop.

Plagiarism’s a no-no,

And ChatGPT’s text is not your own, yo.

So put in the work, earn that grade,

Don’t try to cheat, it’s not worth the trade."

Canada posts hefty job gains, raising chances of another rate hike

HIKE TAXES ON THE 1% NOT RATES

Fri, January 6, 2023 
By Ismail Shakil

OTTAWA, Jan 6 (Reuters) - The Canadian economy recorded a massive jobs gain in December and the jobless rate unexpectedly declined, according to official data released on Friday that raised the likelihood of the Bank of Canada raising rates again this month.

The economy gained a net 104,000 jobs in December, far exceeding analysts' forecasts, while the jobless rate decreased to 5% from 5.1% in November, Statistics Canada data showed.

Analysts surveyed by Reuters had forecast a net gain of 8,000 jobs and for the unemployment rate to edge up to 5.2%.

The employment gain was largely driven by full-time work, particularly among youth aged 15 to 24, and was spread across industries, Statscan said.


The average hourly wage for permanent employees rose 5.2% in December on a year-over-year basis, down from 5.4% in November.

The Canadian dollar was trading 0.5% higher at 1.35 to the greenback, or 74.07 U.S. cents, after recouping its earlier losses following the jobs data.

The Bank of Canada, which hiked rates at a record pace of 400 bps in nine months to 4.25% last year, has said it will be more data-dependent in setting the policy rate.

The strong jobs report raises the probability of another 25-bp increase at the central bank's January meeting, said Andrew Grantham, senior economist with CIBC Capital Markets.

"However, the next CPI report and the BoC's own business and consumer surveys, released in two weeks' time, will also be important in making that final decision."

Money markets now see a 75% chance of a 25-bp rate increase in January, up from roughly 60% before the data.

"The conventional wisdom was that the Bank was almost done, that maybe there would be one more quarter point hike in January and that would be it. And I think that broad-based assumption has to be at the very least questioned," said Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets.

Employment in the goods-producing sector rose by a net 22,200, mainly in construction. The services sector was up by a net 81,700 positions, led by transportation and warehousing as well as information, culture and recreation.

Employees in the private sector rose by 112,000 in December, the largest increase since February, while public sector and self-employed workers were both little changed,

Statscan said.

 (Reporting by Ismail Shakil; Additional reporting by Dale Smith in Ottawa and Fergal Smith in Toronto; Editing by Jan Harvey and Nick Macfie)

Fed's 'inclusive' jobs promise hits inflation control reality


 A hiring sign is seen in a cafe as the U.S. Labor Department released

 its July employment report, in Manhattan, New York City

Thu, January 5, 2023
By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Aiming to fortify broad labor market gains among U.S. minority groups over the previous decade, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in 2020 engineered a historic promise to try to maintain that progress by giving "broad-based and inclusive" employment a status equal if not superior to the central bank's pledge of low inflation.

Amid a still-raging escalation in prices, however, that commitment has taken a blow. Officials at the Fed's Dec. 13-14 policy meeting acknowledged an economic slowdown needed to thwart inflation also meant "the unemployment rate for some demographic groups - particularly African Americans and Hispanics - would likely increase by more than the national average."

It was a stark admission that highlights the dilemma the Fed faces as it balances a battle with the worst outbreak of inflation since the 1980s against possible damage to the second goal of its "dual" mandate: full employment across society.


Data on Friday showed 223,000 jobs were added in December, about double what the Fed feels is sustainable. Wages continued to rise, though at a more moderate rate, and unemployment rates for Blacks and Hispanics held near record-low levels. The longer that job market strength persists, the more Fed officials may feel compelled to break it with ever-higher interest rates.

"The view that labor markets remain too tight is the consensus shared by both hawks and doves," Tim Duy, chief U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors, wrote following the release on Wednesday of minutes from the December meeting that he felt showed the Fed "willing to bear the costs" of forcing the unemployment rate higher.

"I don't think we can understate the importance of labor market outcomes," Duy wrote. "If the labor market doesn't soon slow markedly, the Fed will need to push policy rates" beyond the 5.00%-5.25% range most officials now see as an endpoint.

The target federal funds rate is currently set in a range of 4.25% to 4.50%.

'SURGE PRICING'

The job market has befuddled central bankers during the COVID-19 pandemic as much as inflation. Early expectations that a flood of workers back into the labor market would ease wage and hiring conditions proved optimistic. The labor force participation rate has stalled below its pre-pandemic level and some officials feel supply "appears to be constrained," the December meeting minutes showed.

Even with uncertainty surrounding the economy, demand to hire remains strong. There are still far more job openings than people looking for work.

Though that is a possible recipe for steadily rising wages, the Fed's focus on the labor market as a possible driver of future inflation is not without controversy.

Some economists and policymakers have argued the sources of inflation lie elsewhere and shouldn't require dramatically higher unemployment to fix. Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard has cited still-large corporate profit margins, for example, while Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari recently likened the current dynamic to the sort of "surge pricing" used by companies like ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies Inc when high demand meets unbending supply.

Others argue a full return to 2% inflation may prove harder than expected, and the cost to growth and employment of the final increment may prove too high to bear.

The Fed itself projects the unemployment rate rising just over a percentage point, to 4.6% from the current 3.5%, by the end of 2023, an increase that would typically be associated with a recession, though not an excessively harsh one.

The minutes from last month's meeting, however, may be a warning of what lies ahead, and stand as a blow to the job-friendly framework formally adopted by the Fed in mid-2020 and crafted with the view that a strong job market and low inflation can coexist.

That was the case through the record-long expansion that began in 2009 and was still underway when the pandemic hit.

Officials then expected inflation to rise for any number of reasons, from the Fed's own massive bond purchases to a steadily falling unemployment rate. It didn't, and remained so persistently low that policymakers worried they might face Japan's fate, where the central bank's inability to raise inflation to the 2% target presented risks of its own.

'WAGE-PRICE SPIRAL'

The new framework aimed to fix that with a built-in bias against raising rates until inflation had not just returned to the 2% level but exceeded it, allowing loose credit to power the economy, and prices, higher. In theory, more jobs and lower joblessness would also result.

That approach, embodied in policy statements in the critical months when rising inflation took hold in 2021, has been criticized as anchoring the Fed to a course of action officials were too slow to abandon.

Policymakers have acknowledged as much, even as they also argued it would have made little difference if they had mobilized against inflation a few months earlier.

What they fear developing now is a different problem altogether: Inflation that may become driven by the very labor market conditions they promised to encourage.

The notion of a "wage-price spiral" remains disputed, since inflation so far has exceeded average wage gains.

But as inflation ebbs from what Fed officials hope will prove a mid-2022 high point, Powell and others await a moderation in wage gains too.

The inflation now proving the hardest to uproot is in the labor-intensive services sector, where prices are most sensitive to workers' earnings "and therefore would likely remain persistently elevated if the labor market remained very tight," the minutes noted. "While there were few signs of adverse wage-price dynamics at present, (policymakers) assessed that bringing down this component of inflation to mandate-consistent levels would require some softening in the growth of labor demand."

That conclusion doesn't mean the new framework is dead. In fact, the Fed will almost certainly reapprove that approach at its Jan. 31-Feb. 1 policy meeting. Powell has argued the best way to honor the mandate, in fact, is by controlling inflation now so that a more sustainable job market emerges.

But the immediate conflict between the two may be growing close.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider;Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

South Dakota regulators approve permit for wind turbine farm

Dominik Dausch,

 Sioux Falls Argus Leader
Sat, January 7, 2023 

South Dakota could soon add dozens of wind turbines to its energy generation repertoire.

On Thursday, the state Public Utilities Commission voted 3-0 to approve a permit for North Bend Wind Project, LLC, a wind energy facility proposed by ENGIE North America, an energy company based out of Texas.

The project would be located west of the company's 92-tower Triple H Wind Farm and would consist of up to 71 wind turbines spread across approximately 46,931 acres of land within Hughes and Hyde County. The company's permit application also states the project would generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity for the Southwest Power Pool, an electric grid manager that supplies electricity to much of South Dakota.

Before the permit was given the thumbs-up by the commission, Chairman Chris Nelson addressed objections to the project brought by Hughes County farmers Michael and Judi Bollweg. A letter from Michael argued the wind turbines, some of which he said would stand only a few hundred feet away from crop land, would make it impossible and dangerous for agricultural aircrafts to apply pesticides. He also stated some affected lands are used to farm sunflowers, and farmers stand to lose $684 per acre should their fields go untreated.

Anthony Crutch, lead developer for North Bend, told the commission an agreement had been reached with the family. He explained an ENGIE site manager would coordinate with pilots to determine a time to shut down their turbines to allow sprayers to fly unhindered.

"We do recognize these towers have impacts on non-participating landowners," Crutch said.

One concern that remains unresolved, however, is the project's proximity to an air route surveillance radar near Gettysburg.

According to a North Bend Aviation Constraints Study, the radar, which is located approximately 41.47 nautical miles northwest of the project, could fall within the line of sight of the Federal Aviation Administration/Department of Defense-owned instrument.

The filing notes that an "in-depth radar impact study … may be required."

North Bend ranges in cost between $265 and $285 million, according to the permit application. The wind farm was expected to be operational by late 2022.

Rapper who became the voice of the Iranian revolt is in danger of execution


Sanam Mahoozi
Sat, January 7, 2023

Hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi rapped with blistering conviction about the Islamic Revolution’s “failure,” filming himself at protests and inspiring demonstrators to “battle” the country’s ruling clerical establishment.

Now the popular performer could be hanged in public after a court charged him with “corruption on earth” — a term that authorities use to point to a broad range of offenses that threaten social and political well-being and carries a possible death sentence.

Fear for his safety have also grown after Salehi’s official Twitter account posted Friday that despite being in danger of losing his eyesight, he was being repeatedly beaten.

The rapper was among the thousands who attended demonstrations for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was detained in September by the country’s “morality police’’ after allegedly breaking the country’s strict dress codes. She died in a hospital three days later after falling into a coma.

The government has denied mistreating Amini, but the protests over her death only grew in the weeks that followed as more young people died and security forces brutally cracked down on demonstrators. Now, what started as an outburst of nationwide anger at the treatment of women and girls has morphed into a demand for deep and fundamental change.

Iranian mourners march towards Aichi cemetery in Saqez, to mark 40 days since Mahsa Amini's death, on Oct. 26, 2022. (ESN / AFP - Getty Images)

Using his voice and lyrics, Salehi came out in support of the anti-government protesters from the beginning.

“Unity is the secret to our victory, we are all Iran’s family,” he said in the caption to an Instagram post uploaded Sept. 22, six days after Amini’s death. In the accompanying video, he stands on a darkened street and speaks directly to the camera while demonstrators around him chant.

At the heart of the protests, and Salehi’s lyrics, is the conviction that the government must go.

In a music video titled “Fal” — meaning fortunetelling in Persian — uploaded to YouTube in late October, he raps about the “44 years” since the theocratic regime was installed after the Iranian Revolution deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

He takes on the diverse group, from austere-looking clerics known as mullahs to those dressed in “suit and tie that they have embezzled,” as well as “lobbies of the government abroad.”

“How many young people did you kill to build towers for yourself?” the rapper demands of a shadowy figure dressed in black.

“Someone has lost their young children and someone has lost their youth. Someone’s crime was having hair that flows free in the wind,” Salehi sings. “Someone’s crime was having a brave heart and a sharp tongue.”
‘Not a place for justice’

On Oct. 30, the state news agency ISNA reported that intelligence officers had arrested Salehi again as he was trying to flee the country. NBC News could not confirm the exact events that led to his arrest or check official accusations because independent reporting is tightly restricted in Iran.

On Dec. 6, state media ran video of his alleged confession, overlaid by one of Salehi’s own protest songs.

“Music can produce violence,” he said. “I have made mistakes, I do apologize. I apologize to you and the society for any violence that I have instigated.”

More than 500,000 people have signed a petition for his release.

The public execution of Majidreza Rahnavard (Mizan News via AFP - Getty Images)

Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, said he felt no confidence that the country’s courts would find justice for those swept up for demonstrating — including high-profile detainees like Salehi.

“These courtrooms are really not a place of justice since they don’t involve any investigation, due process or the right of a defendant to defend himself and have independent counsel,” the Iranian-born Ghaemi said.

Salehi is now waiting to see whether a death sentence passed in November will be upheld. After initially not being allowed legal representation of his own choosing, he was permitted to get access to personal lawyers, which was confirmed in a tweet by his counsel, Amir Raesian, on Dec. 29.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, or HRANA, estimates the number of arrests related to the protests to be more than 18,000 people. Iran’s judiciary spokesperson has announced the number to be more than 1,000, according to the official news agency IRNA.

Iran’s Mizan news agency, under the country’s judiciary, reported Saturday that two people, Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini were executed early Saturday for allegedly killing a security official, making it four men known to have been executed since the demonstrations began.

While Salehi is one of many to have been detained, few have captured the attention of supporters abroad, as well as at home.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah, tweeted his support for Salehi on his birthday Dec. 3.

In this Monday, Sept. 19, 2022, photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, a police motorcycle and a trash bin are burning during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the nation's morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran. Spontaneous mass gatherings to persistent scattered demonstrations have unfolded elsewhere in Iran, as nationwide protests over the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police enter their fourth week. (AP file)More

German lawmaker Ye-One Rhie said she had never heard of the rapper or his music before she became his political sponsor.

The artist’s charges that carry a death sentence were handed down “for making music, for rapping about freedom, human rights and injustice,” she told NBC News via email in December

“That’s not a crime. That’s freedom of speech,” she added.

For weeks, European politicians have taken on the political sponsorships of prisoners in Iran, acting as advocates by talking to the media and writing to the European Union and the U.N. to put pressure on the Iranian government.

“He expressed the feelings that many of the people who are protesting on the streets of Iran have toward the regime of the Islamic Republic,” said Rhie, who was elected to the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, in September 2021 and stays abreast of Salehi’s case by keeping in touch with people in Iran. “By standing in solidarity with the revolution, and by going out on the streets himself, he made himself a target.”

Omid Memarian, a well-known commentator and a critic of the Iranian government, also tweeted his support Monday.

“This is Toomaj Salehi,” he wrote, reposting a Salehi video supportive of the protesters. “Listen to Toomaj. His voice is louder than ever!”

“Here is the battlefield,” Salehi says in the video. “It is time to attack the enemy without fear.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Iran executes 2 men in latest protest crackdown, drawing global outcry

Joseph Wilkinson, New York Daily News
Sat, January 7, 2023 

Two anti-regime protesters in Iran were hanged Saturday in the country’s latest show of force against demonstrators.

Mohammad Mehdi Karami, a 21-year-old national karate champion, and Mohammad Hosseini, 20, had been convicted in show trials of killing a volunteer member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Their trials “bore no resemblance to a meaningful judicial proceeding,” Amnesty International said.

Iran has now executed four people in connection with the nationwide protests that began in response to the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini. At least 500 more protesters have also been killed, according to human rights groups.

Authorities have used live bullets, in addition to non-lethal weapons, when attempting to quell the protests. The demonstrations erupted after Amini, 22, died in police custody following her arrest.

She was arrested after she allegedly violated the country’s strict hijab laws. Women are required to wear hijabs in public in Iran.

On Nov. 3, Ruhollah Ajamian, a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s volunteer Basij force, died in the Tehran suburb of Karaj. Police claimed that Karami and Hosseini killed him.

The two men were convicted in closed-door trials in which they couldn’t choose their attorneys or view the evidence against them. The trials lasted less than a week.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on Twitter that the pair were “hanged by the regime in Iran because they didn’t want to submit to its brutal and inhuman actions.”

“Two further terrible fates that encourage us to increase the pressure on Tehran through the EU,” Baerbock wrote.

The first protest-related execution was carried out on Dec. 8, when Mohsen Shekari was hanged. Shekari was accused of attacking a police officer. Four days later, Majidreza Rahnavard was executed after he was accused of fatally stabbing two members of the Basij.

All four sham convictions included forced confessions, which were aired on Iranian state TV. As many as 41 more death sentences have been handed down in recent weeks, according to Iranian media.

Prominent Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti was arrested for expressing support for Shekari on social media. She was released from custody on Wednesday.

Alidoosti is one of several prominent Iranians who have been arrested in connection with the protests.

With News Wire Services