Australia to amend law making Facebook, Google pay for news

by Rod McGuirk

This combination of file photos shows a Google sign and the Facebook app. Global digital platforms The author of proposed Australian laws to make Facebook and Google pay for journalism said Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020, in Australia, his draft legislation will be altered to allay some of the digital giants' concerns, but remain fundamentally unchanged. (AP Photo/File)

The author of proposed Australian laws to make Facebook and Google pay for journalism said Thursday his draft legislation will be altered to allay some of the digital giants' concerns, but remain fundamentally unchanged.


Australia's fair trade regulator Rod Sims, chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said he would give his final draft of the laws to make Facebook and Google pay Australian media companies for the news content they use by early October.

Facebook has warned it might block Australian news content rather than pay for it.

Google has said the proposed laws would result in "dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube," put free services at risk and could lead to users' data "being handed over to big news businesses."

Sims said he is discussing the draft of his bill with the U.S. social media platforms. It could be introduced into Parliament in late October.

"Google has got concerns about it, some of it is that they just don't like it, others are things that we're happily going to engage with them on," Sims told a webinar hosted by The Australia Institute, an independent think-tank.

"We'll make changes to address some of those issues—not all, but some," Sims said.

Among the concerns is a fear that under the so-called News Media Bargaining Code, news businesses "will be able to somehow control their algorithms," Sims said.

"We'll engage with them and clarify that so that there's no way that the news media businesses can interfere with the algorithms of Google or Facebook," Sims said.

He said he would also clarify that the platforms would not have to disclose more data about users than they already share.

"There's nothing in the code that forces Google or Facebook to share the data from individuals," Sims said.

Sims was not prepared to negotiate the "core" of the code, which he described as the "bits of glue that hold the code together, that make it workable."

These included an arbitrator to address the bargaining imbalance between the tech giants and news businesses. If a platform and a news outlet can't reach an agreement on price, an arbitrator would be appointed to make a binding decision.

Another core aspect was a non-discrimination clause to prevent the platforms from prioritizing Australia's state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corp. and Special Broadcasting Service, whose news content will remain free.

Sims said he did not know whether Facebook would act on its threat and block Australian news, but he suspected that to do so would "weaken" the platform.

Spain and France and have both failed to make Facebook and Google pay for news through copyright law. Sims said he has spoken about Australia's approach through fair trading laws to regulators in the United States and Europe.

"They're all wrestling with the same problem," Sims said.


Explore further Google says Australians could lose free search services

© 2020 The Associated Press. 

TRANSHUMANISM 666

'I choose to be a cyborg': Why I implanted computer chips in my hands

by Tamara P Banbury, The Conversation
  

Cyborgs are people with additional technological hardware connected to their bodies. Credit: Shutterstock

I have computer chips in my hands.


The tiny (two millimeter by 12 millimeter) glass ampules are nestled just under the skin on the back of each of my hands and were implanted by a local body piercer several years ago.

The chip in my right hand is a near-field communication device that I scan with an app on my smart phone to access and rewrite the information I have stored on it. It can contain a minuscule 888 kilobytes of data storage and only communicates with devices less than four centimeters away. In my left hand is a chip designed as a digital verification device that uses a proprietary app from the developer Vivokey.

The implant procedure is neither difficult nor extremely painful. I can feel the bump of the chips under my skin and often invite others to feel it. The bump does not protrude from the back of my hand—if I didn't tell someone it was there, they would not be able to tell by sight that I had an implant. But they are not undetectable.

An implanted chip can be a secure storage location for emergency contact information, used as an electronic business card, or as an electronic key to unlock your door. I give public presentations and interviews about my research and, as a result, do not store private data on my chip.

Choosing technology

There are thousands of people all over the world with chip implants; people I call "voluntary cyborgs."

Voluntary cyborgs are people involved in the community and practice of implanting technology beneath their skin for enhancement or augmentation purposes and I've counted myself as a member of this subculture for several years. My research in the community has focused on the formation of a distinct subculture and its representations in popular media.


I coined the term voluntary cyborgs to make a distinction from medical cyborgs, who have had technology—like pacemakers, insulin pumps, IUDs and more—implanted by medical professionals for rehabilitative or therapeutic purposes. I intentionally emphasize the voluntary aspect of the implant practice to stave off inferences of coerced microchipping theories popular with a vocal groups of implant critics and detractors.

Conspiracy theories about microchips in humans have been around for years; some of these theories originate from an interpretation of a Bible passage.

Conspiracy theories

Clickbait headlines and social media hashtags have been making the rounds with increasing frequency in the last few months, describing the fears and conspiracy theories about the involuntary microchipping of people. The latest incarnation of these doomsday prophecies suggests that tech billionaire Bill Gates will employ microchips to fight COVID-19.

The article was inspired by a Reddit Ask me Anything thread with Gates on March 18 that focused on a single phrase: digital certificates. Conspiracy theorists started to make sensational predictions about microchips as a feasible solution to identification verification issues and authenticating vaccination status.

The proliferation of online media articles and posts debunking the claim that Gates plans to surreptitiously implant microchip tracking devices into people as part of a COVID-19 vaccine reinforced the conspiracy theorists.
PBS explores both sides of the microchipping debate.

Controlling choices

These recent conspiracy theories of enforced and involuntary chip implants led me to consider why some people are worried about having computer chips embedded in their bodies against their will.

The answer lies in perceived body autonomy.

Research in 2017 showed a quarter of the American population believed in conspiracy theories and are these beliefs are driven by feelings of anxiety, alienation and disenfranchisement.

The right to govern one's body and what is done to it by others, is not a privilege held by everyone. This realization can come as a surprise to those who want to modify their bodies with technological implants for convenience, fun or experimentation.

Members of historically marginalized groups—women, racialized people, queer people, disabled people and children—are not shocked at this lack of body autonomy. The state, organizations and medical communities have restricted, regulated and governed their bodies for hundreds of years.

Cyborg autonomy

One goal of my work is to highlight the struggle for body autonomy through the experience of the cyborg. The right to morphological freedom—to modify one's body as one desires—is one aspect of body autonomy that cyborgs routinely face.

If cyborgs can win the right to alter their bodies by redefining the boundaries of acceptable body modification, then these rights can extend to other groups fighting for bodily integrity and autonomy. Collaboration with scholars and advocates in disability studies, queer and feminist studies, medical and legal scholars as well as human rights activists is an approach to take.

Recent news of involuntary and forced sterilizations happening in detention camps run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is horrific and illustrates just one of the abuses of body autonomy that a government can inflict on people—citizens or otherwise.

Cyborg consent

Implanted chips are not useful for covert surveillance or monitoring. Current available microchip technology is not capable of tracking people's locations. There are no batteries or GPS transmitters both powerful and small enough to be safely and unobtrusively embedded in our bodies without our knowledge.

There is no need for governments or other shadowy organizations popular with conspiracy theorists to embed tracking devices inside human bodies as our smartphones already perform this function. Most smartphone users signed away any expectation to privacy with various apps and location services long ago.

People say they can always leave their phones at home, but do they really? It feels as though you're missing a part of yourself when you don't know where your phone is. The feeling in the pit of your stomach, you pat your pockets, reaffirming your loss through contact with your body. It is already a part of body construct.

I do not worry that I will be implanted with a chip without my knowledge but I am very concerned that people may one day be implanted without their consent.

I worry chips may be used for overt, unethical suppression of movement by governments. It is why the right to body autonomy must be a legally declared, international human right upheld by courts and governments around the world.


Explore further

Coronavirus anti-vaxxers: one in six British people would refuse a vaccine – here's how to change their minds
Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Card finally trumps cash in Germany as virus prompts change

by Ed Frankl

Health concerns are encouraging people in many countries to use contactless card payments

Card payments will surpass cash transactions for the first time in Germany in 2020 as the pandemic changes shoppers' behaviour, a study said Thursday.


"As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, German consumers showed an abrupt shift in payment behaviours, increasingly using card payments over physical cash for hygiene reasons," said Ratna Sita, a researcher at Euromonitor International.

In a country where cash is king, Germans have stubbornly kept up a tradition of using cash, even as consumers in other countries switched to the ease and speed of cashless payments in recent years.

But with the spread of COVID-19 came the desire to avoid touching notes and coins.

The German government further sped up the shift by doubling the transaction limit on contactless payments to 50 euros ($59).

Card payments will "exceed cash payments in Germany for the first time in history" in 2020, the Euromonitor study said.

The study also found that younger citizens especially are more trusting of technological advances like paying by smartphone, and less worried about privacy than previous generations.

Cashless payments in Germany are expected to account for around 55 percent of transactions in 2020, while the value of card payment transactions to surge by 28 percent from 2019 to 2025, the study said. Cash transactions are projected to drop by 34 percent over the period.

Cashing in with card

A barista at the trendy Bruehmarkt cafe in Frankfurt's business district said about 25 percent of the coffee shop's income was now by card, compared with just 10 percent before the pandemic.

There was already a trend in the last few years of fewer and fewer people paying by cash, he said, but the upsurge came after the cafe adapted to remove a minimum card limit at the start of the pandemic to allow customers to pay any way they wanted.

Maxim Hofer, one of the study's authors, said the trend is here to stay after the pandemic "accelerated" the shift to cashless payment.

"There isn't any sign for a rebound for cash after the pandemic, because there are so many advantages for card payment, and because the infrastructure is now there," he added.

Cashless transactions rose 48 percent in May 2020 compared with the same month the previous year, according to the National Association of German Cooperative Banks.

However, it is not unusual to find small retailers that don't take cards in Germany.

Credit cards are still not widely used, with debit cards making up three-quarters of all card payments in 2019, according to Germany's central bank. Discount supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl only allowed credit cards to be used in 2015.

The culture of using cash is often cited as part of Germans' traditional fear of debt and fiercely guarded privacy—a hangover from the country's dark history of mass surveillance under both the Nazis and the East German Stasis.


Explore furtherUK debit cards overtake cash for first time: study

Ford to build electric truck plant in Michigan, add 300 jobs

This Feb. 15, 2018, file photo shows a Ford logo on the grill of a 2018 Ford Explorer on display at the Pittsburgh Auto Show. Ford Motor Co. will offer early retirement incentives with hopes of cutting its U.S. white-collar workforce by 1,400 more positions. President for the Americas Kumar Galhotra told employees about the offers Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Ford says it will add 300 jobs at a new factory that's being built to assemble batteries and manufacture an electric version of the F-150 pickup truck.


The new plant is being built in Dearborn, Michigan, where Ford is starting to produce a new version of the F-150 that's due in showrooms this November.

Ford's F-series pickup is the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. with nearly 900,000 sold last year.

Ford says the new electric truck will go on sale in mid-2022. The company says it's investing $700 million in its Rouge factory complex to make the new trucks. Ford also plans a plug-in gas-electric hybrid version.

The company says a study done by the Boston Consulting Group found that the F-Series brings in $42 billion in U.S. revenue. That's more than whole companies such as McDonald's, Nike and Netflix.


Explore further  Ford, VW to collaborate on vans, pickup, electric vehicle

© 2020 The Associated Press.

Poop knives, arachnophobic entomologists

 win 2020 Ig Nobels

by Mark Pratt
   

In this Sept. 12, 2019, file photo, the 2019 Ig Nobel award is displayed at the 29th annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The spoof prizes for weird and sometimes head-scratching scientific achievement will be presented online in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

Maybe this year's Ig Nobels, the spoof prizes for dubious but humorous scientific achievement, should have been renamed the Ick Nobels.


An anthropologist who tested an urban legend by fashioning a knife out of frozen human feces, and a man who found that spiders oddly give scientists who study insects the heebie-jeebies, are among the 2020 winners.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday's 30th annual Ig Nobel ceremony was a 75-minute prerecorded virtual affair instead of the usual live event at Harvard University. Even so, it managed to maintain some of the event's traditions, including real Nobel Prize laureates handing out the amusing alternatives.

"It was a nightmare, and it took us months, but we got it done," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the event's primary sponsor.

This year's winners also included a collection of world leaders who think they're smarter than doctors and scientists, and a team of Dutch and Belgian researchers who looked at why chewing and other sounds people make drive us crazy.

Metin Eren has been fascinated since high school by the story of an Inuit man in Canada who made a knife out of his own excrement. The story has been told and retold, but is it true?

Eren and his colleagues decided to find out.

Eren, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio and co-director of the university's Experimental Archaeology Lab, used real human feces frozen to minus-50 degrees Centigrade and filed to a sharp edge.

He then tried to cut meat with it.

"The poop knives failed miserably," he said in a telephone interview. "There's not a lot of basis empirically for this fantastic story."

The study is a little gross but makes an important point: There are a lot of narratives out there based on phony or unproven science.

"The point of this was to show that evidence and fact checking are vital," he said.

Richard Vetter won an Ig Nobel for his paper looking at why people who spend their lives studying insects are creeped out by spiders.

His paper, "Arachnophobic Entomologists: Why Two Legs Make all the Difference," appeared in the the journal American Entomologist in 2013.

Vetter, a retired research associate and spider specialist who worked in the entomology department at the University of California Riverside for 32 years, found during the course of his work that many insect lovers hate spiders.

"It always struck me as funny that when I talked to entomologists about spiders, they would say something along the lines of, 'Oh, I hate spiders!'" he said in a telephone interview.

He found that many bug lovers had had a negative experience with a spider, including bites and nightmares. The fact that spiders are often hairy, fast, silent and have all those creepy eyes freaks out entomologists, he said.

This year's Ig Nobel for Medical Education was shared by a group of world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Russian President Vladimir Putin for their attitude around the pandemic.

"These are all individuals who realized that their judgment is better than the judgment of people who have been studying this their entire lives, and were more insistent about it," Abrahams said.

Abrahams made efforts to reach out to the world leaders to accept their awards, with no luck. "It would have been fun for them to take part," he said.

Damiaan Denys and his colleagues earned the Ig Nobel in medicine for pioneering a new psychiatric diagnosis—misophonia—getting annoyed by noises others make.

Denys, a professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and a psychiatrist who specializes in patients with anxiety, compulsive and impulsive disorders, was inspired by a former patient who became so enraged by people who sneezed that she felt like killing them.

"I had a lot of knowledge about compulsive disorder but these complaints did not meet any existing clinical picture," he said in an email.

In order to keep the tradition of real Nobel Prize winners handing out the Ig Nobels, organizers came up with a bit of video wizardry. Each winner was mailed a document that they could print out that included instructions on how to assemble their own cube-shaped prize. To make it look as if the real Nobel laureates were handing them out, they handed their prizes off screen, and the winner reached off screen to pull in the one they had self-assembled.

As usual, most winners welcomed the recognition that comes with the spoof prize—sort of.

Denys said that while the Ig Nobels ridicule legitimate scientific work, they also bring attention and publicity.

Eren attended the Ig Nobel ceremony in 2003 when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard, so he was thrilled to finally win one of his own.

"To be honest, it was a dream come true," he said.


Explore further    Nobel Prize banquet cancelled over coronavirus: Nobel Foundation

More information: www.improbable.com/ig-about/th … obel-prize-ceremony/

'Poop knives,' narcissist eyebrows win Ig Nobel Prizes

Knives made from feces and a new method to detect narcissists by their eyebrows won at the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The prizes are awarded to research that makes "people laugh and then think."


Is this view enough to tell if he's a narcissist?


Narcissist eyebrows, poop knives and an alligator on gas were among the topics of scientific studies honored with awards in this year's Ig Nobel Prizes held on Thursday.

The 30th edition of the satiric prize, which the organizers describe as honoring scientific achievements that "make people laugh and then think," took place online instead of the live event at Harvard University because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Ig Nobel winners

Among the winners of the 2020 prizes: A study by scientists from Austria, Sweden, Japan, the United States and Switzerland, involving a female Chinese alligator inside an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air — induced to bellow — won the "acoustics prize."

Read more: Pen-chewing research wins Ig Nobel prize for German scientist

Metin Eren, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio and co-director of the university's Experimental Archaeology Lab, used real human feces and froze it to -50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit) before filing it to a sharp edge. He then tried to cut meat with it.

Metin and his colleagues were inspired by the story of an Inuit man in Canada who made a knife out of his own feces.

"The poop knives failed miserably,'' he said in a telephone interview, AP news agency reported. "There's not a lot of basis empirically for this fantastic story.''

But there was an important message behind the study that one the citation for "materials science."

"The point of this was to show that evidence and fact-checking are vital," he said.

The "psychology prize" was awarded to a group of Canadian and American researchers who devised a method to detect narcissists using an eyebrow examination.

A US researcher won the entomology prize for his collection of evidence that entomologists — those who study insects — are afraid of spiders.
Well done, leaders?

The "medical education" prize was given to the leaders of Brazil, Britain, India, Mexico, Belarus, the US, Turkey, Russia and Turkmenistan for "using the COVID-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can."

The leaders of these countries have been criticized for downplaying the significance of the pandemic.

Sturdy fabric-based piezoelectric energy harvester takes us one step closer to wearable electronics

by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Fabrication process, structures, and output signals of a fabric-based wearable energy harvester. Credit: The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

KAIST researchers presented a highly flexible but sturdy wearable piezoelectric harvester using the simple and easy fabrication process of hot pressing and tape casting. This energy harvester, which has record high interfacial adhesion strength, will take us one step closer to being able to manufacture embedded wearable electronics. A research team led by Professor Seungbum Hong said that the novelty of this result lies in its simplicity, applicability, durability, and its new characterization of wearable electronic devices.


Wearable devices are increasingly being used in a wide array of applications from small electronics to embedded devices such as sensors, actuators, displays, and energy harvesters.

Despite their many advantages, high costs and complex fabrication processes remained challenges for reaching commercialization. In addition, their durability was frequently questioned. To address these issues, Professor Hong's team developed a new fabrication process and analysis technology for testing the mechanical properties of affordable wearable devices.

For this process, the research team used a hot pressing and tape casting procedure to connect the fabric structures of polyester and a polymer film. Hot pressing has usually been used when making batteries and fuel cells due to its high adhesiveness. Above all, the process takes only two to three minutes.

The newly developed fabrication process will enable the direct application of a device into general garments using hot pressing just as graphic patches can be attached to garments using a heat press.

Measurement of an interfacial adhesion strength using SAICAS. Credit: KAIST

In particular, when the polymer film is hot pressed onto a fabric below its crystallization temperature, it transforms into an amorphous state. In this state, it compactly attaches to the concave surface of the fabric and infiltrates the gaps between the transverse wefts and longitudinal warps. These features result in high interfacial adhesion strength. For this reason, hot pressing has the potential to reduce the cost of fabrication through the direct application of fabric-based wearable devices to common garments.

In addition to the conventional durability test of bending cycles, the newly introduced surface and interfacial cutting analysis system proved the high mechanical durability of the fabric-based wearable device by measuring the high interfacial adhesion strength between the fabric and the polymer film. Professor Hong said the study lays a new foundation for the manufacturing process and analysis of wearable devices using fabrics and polymers.


He added that his team first used the surface and interfacial cutting analysis system (SAICAS) in the field of wearable electronics to test the mechanical properties of polymer-based wearable devices. Their surface and interfacial cutting analysis system is more precise than conventional methods (peel test, tape test, and microstretch test) because it qualitatively and quantitatively measures the adhesion strength.

Professor Hong explained, "This study could enable the commercialization of highly durable wearable devices based on the analysis of their interfacial adhesion strength. Our study lays a new foundation for the manufacturing process and analysis of other devices using fabrics and polymers. We look forward to fabric-based wearable electronics hitting the market very soon."

The results of this study were registered as a domestic patent in Korea last year, and published in Nano Energy this month. This study has been conducted through collaboration with Professor Yong Min Lee in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at DGIST, Professor Kwangsoo No in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST, and Professor Seunghwa Ryu in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KAIST.


Explore further

Body heat through flexible fabric could power IoT devices for health monitoring for people, pets, machinery

More information: Jaegyu Kim et al, Cost-effective and strongly integrated fabric-based wearable piezoelectric energy harvester, Nano Energy (2020).

DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.104992

Journal information: Nano Energy

Provided by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
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Trump must contend with a mobilized religious left, new research finds

by Amanda Skofstad, University of Notre Dame


While more than 80 percent of white Evangelicals voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, their mobilization at the congregation level has since generally plateaued, and new research finds that progressive congregations have surged in their political activism, likely in direct response to Trump administration policies.


A new study by Kraig Beyerlein, University of Notre Dame associate professor of sociology, and Mark Chaves, Duke University professor of sociology, analyzes data from the National Congregations Study (NCS)— a nationally representative sample of U.S. congregations over time—and finds that the very congregations that should have increased their mobilization the most under Trump in fact increased it the least, including on issues for which Trump has strongly advocated, like immigration and endorsing candidates.

Even on issues that inspired religious liberty executive orders, like endorsing political candidates and wanting to do so without losing tax-exempt status, conservative and predominantly white evangelical Protestant congregations trail well behind Black Protestant churches. In addition, these churches increased their political activism the most between the Obama and Trump administrations.

With the 2020 presidential election on the near horizon, Beyerlein discusses what he and his co-researcher learned about the political engagement of U.S. congregations—and how that may impact results on Nov. 3.

When you examine faith-based political activity at the congregation level, what are you measuring?

The NCS contains a range of political activities, such as offering opportunities for involvement during religious services, organizing voter registration drives or get-out-the-vote efforts, distributing voter guides, hosting candidates as speakers, lobbying elected officials, and mobilizing marches or protests. In more recent waves of the NCS, the cause or issue (such as immigration or poverty) for which congregations lobby or march has also been measured. And for some of these causes or issues, the NCS captures the particular side of the mobilizing effort—pro- or anti-immigrant rights, for example.

What surprised you most about the mobilization of America's congregations during 2018-19?


This wave of the NCS asked whether congregations had endorsed candidates, and if not, whether they would do so if this action would not put their tax-exempt status at risk. Four percent of congregations had engaged in this partisan political activity, and 17 percent of those that had not said they would if tax law was changed in their favor. Combining these numbers, then, over one-fifth of congregations across the United States would endorse candidates if they were free to do so without legal repercussions.

While this number is higher than anticipated, the real surprise was the type of congregations that would be most likely to endorse candidates under this condition. Predominately white evangelical Protestant churches—critical mobilizing sites of Trump's political base—were the least likely, at 11 percent, despite the president signaling his approval by signing an executive order in May 2017, though the implementation of this order remains unclear. Black Protestant churches led the way, by far, in terms of both actually endorsing candidates and desiring to do so if tax law was changed. Moreover, almost half of politically liberal congregations reported that they would endorse candidates if they could. By comparison, only 11 percent of politically conservative congregations answered they would.

Thus, despite Trump's intention to promote this partisan political activity among conservative churches around the nation by attempting to change tax law, the data indicate conservative churches would be the least likely to take advantage of the opportunity to do so.

What are some of your key takeaways on the faith-based political activity of Catholic parishes, especially on immigration and sanctuary churches?

I was very excited that the 2018-19 NCS included a question asking congregations whether they had declared themselves as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. Up to this point, we lacked a nationally representative estimate of this important and timely congregation-based political activity.

Overall, we found 4 percent of congregations had done so at the time of the 2018-19 NCS. Even though the question asked about declaring rather than actively housing undocumented immigrants, this low number is not surprising given the costs and risks involved in latter, for which the former is a first step. For instance, government repression is a possibility, which happened to churches during the 1980s Sanctuary movement. Given the current administration's anti-immigration policies and rhetoric, it certainly seems like history could repeat itself.

Against this backdrop, it is notable that nearly a third of Catholic parishes declared themselves as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants under the Trump regime. Combined with their relatively high levels of lobbying or marching for immigrant rights in the 2012 and 2018-19 NCS waves, it is clear that Catholic parishes are an important faith-based force to defend and uphold the human dignity of people regardless of the country in which they were born.

How does the political activity in this fourth wave of data compare to previous waves?

We observed a significant uptick in nearly half of the political activity measures repeated across NCS waves.

Importantly, we found that the post-2012 mobilizing surge was concentrated among Black Protestant churches. Not only does this reflect the historical continuity of activism within Black Protestant churches—during the U.S. civil rights movement, for instance—but also the fact that these churches are likely rising up to confront violence against Black people and an administration that does not represent their interests (the majority of members of Black churches vote Democrat).

On the former point, we observed from the fourth wave of the NCS that nearly half of Black Protestant churches organized a discussion about policing in the last year, which is much higher than the rate of congregations of other religious groups. Since prior waves of the NCS did not ask this question, we do not know whether this represents an increase over time for this activity in Black Protestant churches, but it is clear that this issue is of greater salience to these congregations.


Explore furtherMultiracial congregations have nearly doubled in the United States

Provided by University of Notre Dame

Implications of powerful DNA-altering technology are too important to be left to scientists and politicians: researchers

by Science in Public

Citizen assemblies are ideal for probing the complexities of genome editing. 

Credit: Alice Mollon

Designer babies, mutant mozzies and frankenfoods: These are the images that often spring to mind when people think of genome editing.


The practice, which alters an organism's DNA in ways that could be inherited by subsequent generations, is both more complex and less dramatic than the popular tropes suggest.

However, its implications are so profound that a growing group of experts believe it is too important a matter to be left only to scientists, doctors and politicians.

Writing in the journal Science, 25 leading researchers from across the globe call for the creation of national and global citizens' assemblies made up of lay-people to be tasked with considering the ethical and social impacts of this emerging science.

The authors come from a broad range of disciplines, including governance, law, bioethics, and genetics.

The immense potential, and threat, of gene editing was vividly demonstrated in 2018, when geneticist He Jiankui announced he had used the technology to create two genetically altered babies.

Dr. He was eventually jailed by Chinese authorities, but his rogue work threw crucial questions about gene-editing humans firmly into the spotlight. How should this technology be used—and who should make those decisions?

The questions go well beyond our own species. Gene editing potentially offers a way to change mosquitoes and wipe out malaria, to boost crop resilience and reduce starvation, or to produce pigs full of organs easily transplanted into humans.

It can also can potentially prevent conditions such as sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis and even some forms of cancer.

But every good promise, at least in the popular imagination, is mirrored by a bad one: accidentally mutated disease-carrying insects, sterile crops, new treatment-resistant illnesses—and babies engineered for super-strength or musicality.

These implications are so important, believe researchers led by Professor John Dryzek, head of Australia's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, they should be examined not just by those in the field, but by the general public: teachers, plumbers, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers.

Dryzek and colleagues believe that citizens' assemblies—groups of lay-people tasked with diving deep into the ethical and moral issues thrown up by genome editing—will provide a valuable guide for scientists, doctors and politicians around the world.


"The promise, perils and pitfalls of this emerging technology are so profound that the implications of how and why it is practiced should not be left to experts," Dryzek said.

In the Science paper, the researchers say their proposed global assembly should comprise at least 100 people—none of whom would be scientists, policy-makers or activists working in the field.

The international meeting will take place after several national versions have been conducted. Events in the US, UK, Australia and China are already planned and fully funded by organizations including the Kettering Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Australian Government Medical Research Future Fund Genomics Health Futures Mission, and the Wellcome Genome Campus.

Projects in Belgium, France, Germany, Brazil and South Africa are also well advanced.

"The fact that they are made up of citizens with no history of activism on an issue means they are good at reflecting upon the relative weight of different values and principles," Professor Dryzek said.

"Think of how we trust juries in court cases to reach good judgements. Deliberation is a particularly good way to harness the wisdom of crowds, as it enables participants to piece together the different bits of information that they hold in constructive and considered fashion."

Citizen-based deliberations are not unusual, as recent plebiscites in Ireland and Australia illustrate. However, the global assembly would be significantly different.

"The issues to be discussed in this assembly are different from the types of issues examined in other forums of this nature—for example, whether same sex marriage should be legalized," said co-author Dianne Nicol, professor of law at the University of Tasmania.

"I don't think the goal of the citizens' assembly should be to answer questions of whether heritable genome editing should be prohibited globally. Rather, it should be about better understanding community concerns and expectations."

It will also be about social justice, added Professor Baogang He, chair of international studies at Australia's Deakin University.

"A global citizens' assembly will help to develop moral and political regulation on genome editing experiments, and to ensure fair access to the technologies," he said.

"It will help global civil society guard against ill use of genome editing for the interest of a few."

Co-author Herve Chneiweiss, Director of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee and member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on the Governance of Human Genome Editing, said the selection process for the global assembly must reflect differences rather than geopolitics.

"Too many people would make a real deliberation impossible, not enough should make it inefficient," he said.

"Our goal should be to be representative. Thus it is not a Senate where each state would get one vote, whatever the number of its population. The '100' should represent the diversity of cultures and origins."

Another co-author, genetic counselor Professor Anna Middleton from Society and Ethics Research, Wellcome Genome Campus in the UK, said new gene-altering practices will eventually impact the whole world.

"For technologies such as genome editing it is crucial to understand social impact," she said.

"The whole globe has the potential to be affected by this, so we must seek representation from as many public audiences as possible across the world."

Professor Dryzek said funding for the global assembly was already well advanced, with funders including the Australian Research Council already on board. He hoped the interest generated by the Science paper would provide a pathway to more.

The planning process and eventually the assembly itself is being recorded by Emmy Award-winning Australian documentary-makers Genepool Productions.

"This is not about providing a speakers platform, rather a thinkers pool," said Genepool creative director and co-author Sonya Pemberton.

"The researchers have come up with a powerful and people-focussed approach to examining a world-changing technology. Capturing this world-first event on film, I hope, will preserve the historic occasion, amplify the global conversation, and provide a template for citizen deliberation on other, equally important matters."

Explore further Report: Heritable genome editing technology is not yet ready for clinical use

More information: J.S. Dryzek el al., "Global citizen deliberation on genome editing," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abb5931

Journal information: Science

Provided by Science in Public

Emissions may add 40 cm sea level rise by 2100, experts warn

by Patrick Galey

The gigantic ice caps contain enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres

Sustained greenhouse gas emissions could see global sea levels rise nearly 40 centimetres this century as ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland continue to melt, a major international study concluded Thursday.


The gigantic ice caps contain enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, and researchers are increasingly concerned that their melt rates are tracking the UN's worst case scenarios for sea level rise.

Experts from more than three dozen research institutions used temperature and ocean salinity data to conduct multiple computer models simulating the potential ice loss in Greenland and Antarctic glaciers.

They tracked two climate scenarios—one where mankind continues to pollute at current levels and another where carbon emissions are drastically reduced by 2100.

They found that under the high emissions scenario ice loss in Antarctica would see sea levels rise 30 cm by century's end, with Greenland contributing an additional 9 cm.

Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.

Even in the lower emissions scenario, the Greenland sheet would raise oceans by around 3 cm by 2100—beyond what is already destined to melt due to the additional 1C of warming humans have caused in the industrial age.

"It's not so surprising that if we warm the planet more, more ice will be lost," said Anders Levermann, an expert on climate and ice sheets at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

"If we emit more carbon into the atmosphere we will have more ice loss in Greenland and Antarctic," he told AFP.

"We have in our hands how fast we let sea levels rise and how much we let sea levels rise eventually."

ISMIP6 mean projections for rise in sea levels through 2100 due to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The red-shaded area is the projection for the pessimistic scenario, while the blue-shaded is the projection for the optimistic scenario . Credit: Heiko Goelzer, et al., The Cryosphere, September 17, 2020.

Outpacing predictions

Until the turn of the 21st century, the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets generally accumulated as much mass as they shed. Runoff, in other words, was compensated by fresh snowfall.

But over the last two decades, the gathering pace of global warming has upended this balance.

Last year, Greenland lost a record 532 billion tonnes of ice—the equivalent of six Olympic pools of cold, fresh water flowing into the Atlantic every second. This run-off accounted for 40 percent of sea level rise in 2019.


The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a special report on Earth's frozen spaces predicted last year that Greenland ice melt could contribute 8-27 cm to ocean levels by 2100.

It estimated Antarctica could add 3-28 cm on top of that.

A study published earlier this month in Nature Climate Change said the mass already lost by melt-water and crumbling ice between 2007-2017 aligned with the most extreme IPCC forecasts for the two sheets.

They also predicted a maximum of 40 cm sea level rise by 2100.

Authors of Thursday's research, published in a special edition of The Cryosphere Journal, said it highlighted the role emissions will play this century on the world's seas.

"One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise is how much ice sheets will contribute," said project leader Sophie Nowicki from the University of Buffalo.

"And how much the ice sheets contribute is really dependent on what the climate will do."

Levermann said uncertainty in the projections "cannot be a reason to wait-and-see" in terms of emissions cuts.

"We already know that something will happen. We just don't know how bad it is going to get."


Explore furtherSea level rise from ice sheets track worst-case climate change scenario

More information: tc.copernicus.org/articles/special_issue1019.html

Heiko Goelzer, et al. The future sea-level contribution of the Greenland ice sheet: a multi-model ensemble study of ISMIP6. The Cryosphere. September 17, 2020. doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-3033-2020

Hélène Seroussi, et al. ISMIP6 Antarctica: a multi-model ensemble of the Antarctic ice sheet evolution over the 21st century. The Cryosphere. September 17, 2020. doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-3071-2020

Journal information: Nature Climate Change


© 2020 AFP

Consumers value difficult decisions over easy choices

by Jeanne Hedden Gallagher, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Let's say you want to purchase a camera, and you're comparing two different advertisements. In one, the font, colors, and layout make the information easy to read. The other has an obscure style that takes more time for you to understand. If you decide to purchase the second camera with the more confusing advertisement, new research out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that, over time, you'll likely be happier with your choice.


In a paper co-authored by Gaurav Jain, an assistant professor of marketing in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer, researchers found that disfluency, or the difficulty for an individual to process a message, increases people's attitudes toward that message after a time delay.

"This research has real-life impact," Jain said. "Most of the time, marketing communicators try to make their message clear. What we learned, however, is that there are certain times, especially when people need to make choices, when we should actually use disfluent stimuli so that whatever people are choosing, they will like it once time has passed."

Using primary data collection designed by Jain of about 500 diverse individuals, researchers also found that consumers misattribute the time spent in the decision-making process. Rather than recognizing that the lengthy decision came from trying to understand the information, when looking back on the process, consumers instead believe they spent the time on making the decision. This leads the consumer to believe the decision they made was informed and worthy.

These findings have implications for marketing communications in many fields.

"When people are making decisions," Jain said, "be it choosing between insurance products, retirement funds, or even when choosing an elected official, marketers and designers need to remember that if we can make an individual spend some time in that choosing process, it's more likely people will stick with the option they chose over time."

Jain posits that when consumers' attitudes about a product increase, the impact on post-purchase decisions like returns and reviews of the product will be more favorable to the brand.


Explore further

Consumers prefer round numbers even when the specific number is better news

More information: Gaurav Jain et al, (The lack of) fluency and perceptions of decision making, Journal of Marketing Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1080/13527266.2020.1815072

Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute