Philippines teachers outraged over 'politicking' in school learning


FILE PHOTO: Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo's campaign rally

Fri, April 8, 2022

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines education ministry came under fire from teachers on Friday over a learning module that contained negative content about presidential candidate Leni Robredo, and praise for incumbent Rodrigo Duterte, including a fake endorsement from Britain's queen.

In one online module, students age 17-18 were required to identify spelling, grammar and content errors from a sample of news headlines, and detect statements that were "unsubstantiated generalisations", all of which involved opposition leader Robredo.

The module, which was created in 2020, started circulating on social media on Thursday, just over four weeks away from a presidential election.

Duterte is not running for re-election but has a bitter rivalry with Robredo, who has been critical of his government's pandemic response and effectiveness of his bloody war on drugs.

ACT Teachers Partylist, a congressional group representing teachers, expressed outrage over the learning material and said teachers had struggled enough from two years of pandemic restrictions on face-to-face learning.

"Strict adherence to the procedures and safeguards in the production of modules will give justice to them and will ensure that the people's taxes indeed go to quality education instead of shoddy teaching materials and politicking," it said in a statement.

Education Secretary Leonor Briones said the module had not passed the standard review process and had since been withdrawn.

In a text message she said authorities also were "exerting all efforts to warn teachers against participating in partisan politics".

Other exercises contained quotes that students where required to examine for accuracy, credibility and reasonableness, including one about Duterte purportedly by Britain's Queen Elizabeth, saying "Filipinos are very fortunate to have him".

Robredo on Friday said education authorities should not publish content that "would poison people's minds".

A UNION DEMAND SINCE 1936

Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours. Here's what you need to know


Hayley Smith
Fri, April 8, 2022, 

Workers carry out lunch on 2nd Street in San Francisco last fall. A proposed bill in the state Legislature would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees.

 (David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

A proposed bill winding its way through the state Legislature could make California the first state in the nation to reduce its workweek to four days for a large swath of workers.

The bill, AB 2932, would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees. A full workday would remain at eight hours, and employers would be required to provide overtime pay for employees working longer than four full days.

The bill was authored by Assembly Members Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) and Evan Low (D-San Jose). At the federal level, a bill by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside) is pushing for similar changes under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Reached by phone Friday, Garcia said the idea was prompted in part by the exodus of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of whom were seeking a better quality of life. More than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"We've had a five-day workweek since the Industrial Revolution," Garcia said, "but we've had a lot of progress in society, and we've had a lot of advancements. I think the pandemic right now allows us the opportunity to rethink things, to reimagine things."

Garcia and other proponents say a four-day workweek would lead to an increase in productivity and profits, and point to case studies already underway in Iceland and at companies such as Kickstarter. (The Times' editorial board in September argued that the concept was worth a try.)

Opponents say a four-day workweek would stunt job growth in the state and could create untenable conditions for employers. The California Chamber of Commerce included the bill on its "job killer" list, writing that it would significantly increase labor costs, expose employers to litigation and impose requirements that are "impossible to comply with."

Here's what you need to know about this potentially monumental change:

Who would be covered by AB 2932?

The bill as written would apply to employers in California with at least 500 employees. According to the state's Employment Development Department, that's about 2,600 businesses and more than 3.6 million employees.

Unionized workforces, or those with collective bargaining agreements, are exempt, Garcia said.

How would it work?

The bill seeks to amend Section 510 of the California Labor Code by redefining the workweek from 40 hours to 32, with eight-hour workdays remaining in place.

Under the bill, employees who work in excess of 32 hours would be compensated at a rate of at least 1.5 times their regular rate of pay, as is currently required for those who work in excess of 40 hours.

Crucially, the bill would also prohibit employers from reducing an employee's regular rate of pay as a result of the reduced hourly workweek requirement.

Garcia said conversations are ongoing about how the rules would work for salaried employees. She said the bill does not apply to workers with collective bargaining agreements because "I like to think of this as a floor, and oftentimes our bargaining agreements are better."

But, she added, "we have to start the discussion someplace."

What are the potential benefits?

Iceland ran two large-scale trials of the concept between 2015 and 2019, in which about 1% of the nation's workforce reduced their workweek to 35 or 36 hours with no reduction in pay.

The nation found that productivity and service remained the same across the majority of trial workplaces, and worker well-being increased dramatically across a range of indicators, including perceived stress and burnout and health and work-life balance.

As a result of the trials, at least 86% of the country's workforce are now working shorter hours or gaining the right to shorten their hours.

"The fact of the matter is many other companies are already doing this, and other countries too, so I think this is the direction we're going," said Low, the bill's co-author, noting that many companies that have tried similar strategies have also reported better customer engagement and lower utility costs.

"This is going to attract more [employees] to your company, because it's undisputed workers are looking for more flexibility," he said.

What are the potential disadvantages?

Ashley Hoffman, a policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce, said additional labor costs imposed by the bill would amount to a minimum 10% increase in wages per employee per week, among other concerns.

"This significant rise in labor costs will not be sustainable for many businesses," she wrote in opposition to the bill, noting that labor costs are often one of the highest costs a business faces, and that many companies operate on very thin profit margins.

"Such a large increase in labor costs will reduce businesses’ ability to hire or create new positions and will therefore limit job growth in California," Hoffman said. "This is especially true now as businesses are still recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 and resulting rises in supply chain costs."

Hoffman also said the bill could have the unintended consequence of a reduction in hours for workers.

What happens next?

AB 2932 is currently with the Labor and Employment Committee for review.

"Now we have an opportunity for business and labor and workers to have an honest and frank conversation about what this looks like, and then we'll make changes accordingly," Low said, adding that the bill was a "work in progress."

A hearing date has not yet been set, he said.

Facebook Suffers a Big Setback

The ambitions of the social network in the metaverse are shaken up.

ROB LENIHAN
APR 9, 2022 8:07 PM EDT

In 1992 novel "Snow Crash", author Neal Stephenson coined a term to describe a place where human avatars interact with each other.

That term was "metaverse" and since that time the word has become part of the lexicon as the concept moves away from the realm of science fiction and into daily life.

A Costly Conversion

The company formerly known as Facebook (FB) - Get Meta Platforms Inc. Class A Report went so far as to change its name in October to Meta as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse as "the next frontier."

The metaverse has been defined as a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection, but Meta has been running into some significant obstacles on the road to that next frontier.

The company was rocked after Frances Haugen, a former product manager, accused the social media giant of of putting profits over the impact of hate speech.

The conversion has also been costly, with Meta Platforms posting weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings in February.

The results hit Zuckerberg right in the wallet, as he lost $29.7 billion from his net worth, while his company dropped almost $237 billion in market capitalization a day after the results came out.

The company said its Reality Labs division lost $10.2 billion in 2021, more than double the operating losses recorded in 2020 - $4.62 billion. In 2019, the operating loss was $4.5 billion.

And now comes the Security and Exchange Commission.

The agency recently ruled that Meta must give investors an opportunity to consider and vote on a shareholder proposal that questions the ”social license to operate an emerging technology like the metaverse” without fully understanding the potential risks and negative impacts.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner of Arjuna Capital, one of the parties who filed the proposal in December, said the "SEC’s decision is a victory for investors that seriously question Zuckerberg’s leadership and pivot into the metaverse."
'We Value the Views of Our Investors'

"This ruling clears the way for investors to further understand the potential psychological and human rights risks of the metaverse and weigh in on whether Meta should be pumping $10 billion a year into an emerging technology, especially when they are so clearly failing to manage the risks on their core platforms," Lamb told TheStreet.

She added that it is important to keep in mind how material Meta’s pivot to the metaverse is to investors.

"Meta stock suffered the largest decline in stock market history when it reported negative earnings growth last quarter, driven by this $10 billion investment," she said.

In response, a Meta spokesperson said “we value the views of our investors and regularly engage with them to get their perspective. We look forward to continuing the dialogue, including at our Annual Shareholder Meeting in May."

Meta came out against the proposal in its proxy statement, saying "we believe that we have the right approach in place for our metaverse efforts."

"Given that we are already working with numerous researchers, experts, and advocates around the globe to better understand potential risks and mitigations, which is informing how we design the products and experiences that are just being built, our board of directors believes this proposal is unnecessary," the proxy statement said.

The proposal it is unlikely to pass since Zuckerberg controls the voting shares. However, this does not mean the controversy will disappear.

"There are a confluence of pressures that Meta is facing, from anti-trust litigation, to whistleblower testimony, to congressional hearings," Lamb said. "It’s important for investors to speak up, which is what we are doing through this proposal, but there are other factors at work that Meta needs to respond to. We have been advocating for better governance at Meta for 6 years and we will continue to do so."

Kenny Ching, assistant professor at the WPI Business School, said that, in general, "we do not have great evidence for the benefits or drawbacks of the metaverse, as the phenomenon is not only nascent but extremely complex."

'Pump The Brakes'

"While there is some early research suggesting that the metaverse environment may promote toxic antisocial behavior," he said, "this view has to be tempered by the positive impact such as potential productivity boosts through gamification and obviation of physical distance."

Ching said that it will be interesting to see the findings from the third party evaluation, and the subsequent legal development.

"While we should regard the findings with a healthy dose of skepticism," he said, "the case itself will be a test for how society will eventually come to accept--or reject--the metaverse."

In a way, Ching said, "the reactions to the case are probably more important than the eventual findings."

"My overall prediction though, is that momentum for the metaverse's growth will not be adversely impacted," he said. "It is unlikely findings from the evaluation will be definitive given how complex and nascent the phenomenon is."

Justin Lacche, Commissioner of the Omniverse Sports League, which features four minor league sports teams competing physically and in the metaverse, said there is a long-established history where regulatory commissions "pump the brakes" when technology or new paradigms evolve very fast.

"It's very important for businesses to partner with regulatory agencies to demystify the metaverse to avoid unnecessary blocking purely on awareness issue," he said.

For his own part, Lacche said he has been impressed many municipalities and regulatory agencies as the world evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"It is in all of our interests as business people, technologists those of us in social science, who want to democratize opportunity to calmly get on the same playing field of understanding because then we all can move fast together," he said.

Viruses that could save millions of lives

Agence France-Presse
April 04, 2022

Bacteria-eating viruses: Researchers at the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages in Tbilisi 

Vano SHLAMOV AFP

It may seem strange after a pandemic that has killed millions and turned the world upside down, but viruses could save just as many lives.

In a petri dish in a laboratory in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, a battle is going on between antibiotic resistant bacteria and "friendly" viruses.

This small nation in the Caucasus has pioneered research on a groundbreaking way to tackle the looming nightmare of bacteria becoming resistant to the antibiotics on which the world depends.

Long overlooked in the West, bacteriophages or bacteria-eating viruses are now being used on some of the most difficult medical cases, including a Belgian woman who developed a life-threatening infection after being injured in the 2016 Brussels airport bombing.
After two years of unsuccessful antibiotic treatment, bacteriophages sent from Tbilisi cured her infection in three months.

"We use those phages that kill harmful bacteria" to cure patients when antibiotics fail, Mzia Kutateladze of the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages told AFP.

Even a banal infection can "kill a patient because the pathogen has developed resistance to antibiotics," Kutateladze said.

In such cases, phagotherapy "is one of the best alternatives", she added.

Phages have been known about for a century, but were largely forgotten and dismissed after antibiotics revolutionized medicine in the 1930s.

Stalin's henchman

It didn't help that the man who did most to develop them, Georgian scientist Giorgi Eliava, was executed in 1937 on the orders of another Georgian, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's most notorious henchman and the head of his secret police.

Eliava had worked in the Pasteur Institute in Paris with French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d'Herelle, one of the two men credited with discovering phages, and persuaded Stalin to invite him to Tbilisi in 1934.

But their collaboration was cut short when Beria had Eliava killed, although his motive still remains a mystery.

With the World Health Organization now declaring antimicrobial resistance a global health crisis, phages are making a comeback, especially as they can target bacteria while leaving human cells intact.

A recent study warned that superbugs could kill as many as 10 million people a year when antimicrobial resistance due to overuse of antibiotics reaches a tipping point. That could come within three decades.

'Training' viruses

While phages-based medicines cannot completely replace antibiotics, researchers say they have major pluses in being cheap, not having side-effects nor damaging organs or gut flora.

"We produce six standard phages that are of wide spectrum and can heal multiple infectious diseases," said Eliava Institute physician Lia Nadareishvili.

In some 10 to 15 percent of patients, however, standard phages don't work and "we have to find ones capable of killing the particular bacterial strain," she added.

Tailored phages to target rare infections can be selected from the institute's massive collection -- the world's richest -- or be found in sewage or polluted water or soil, Kutateladze said.

The institute can even "train" phages so that "they can kill more and more different harmful bacteria."

"It is a cheap and easily accessible therapy," she added.

Last-resort treatment

A 34-year-old American mechanical engineer suffering from a chronic bacterial disease for six years told AFP he "already felt improvement" after two weeks at the Tbilisi institute.

"I've tried every possible treatment in the United States," said Andrew, who would only give his first name.

He is one of the hundreds of patients from around the globe who arrive in Georgia every year for last-resort treatment, said Nadareishvili.

With the traditional antimicrobial armory depleting rapidly, more clinical studies are needed so that phagotherapy can be more widely approved, Kutateladze argued.

In 2019, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a clinical study on the use of bacteriophages to cure secondary infections in Covid patients.

Beyond medicine, phages are already being used to stop food going off, and they "can be used in agriculture to protect crops and animals from harmful bacteria," Kutateladze said.

The institute has already conducted research on bacteria targeting cotton and rice.

Bacteriophages also have potential to counter biological weapons and combat bioterrorism, with Canadian researchers publishing a 2017 study on using them to counter an anthrax attack on crowded public places.

© 2022 AFP

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BIOPHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGE

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BACTERIOPHAGE

A new COVID wave is probably coming, and America just doesn’t seem to care



Erin Prater
Sat, April 9, 2022

It was a viral moment that elicited both nervous laughs and tears of joy from a pandemic-weary nation: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis awaiting his state's first COVID vaccine shipment in December 2020, staring at a delivery door like a child stares at a fireplace on Christmas Eve.

“Any minute now we’re going to hear a doorbell,” Polis says with childlike glee, his words muffled by a surgical mask.

“And then we’re going to ….” He dramatically pauses before saying, “of course, let the vaccine in.”

Before he finishes his sentence, a bell shrieks.

“Ope, there we go!” Polis exclaims, making a rapid rotation to hit a button and open the warehouse door.

“This is the Pfizer vaccine, arriving here in Colorado, to end the pandemic!” he exclaims as the door opens slowly, awkwardly revealing a delivery man who perhaps wasn’t aware he’d been chosen to save mankind—or at least Coloradans.

Polis’ giddy anticipation mirrored the mental state of so many Americans in those weeks before Christmas 2020. The potential side effects were unnerving, maybe, but the vaccine was coming.

To end the pandemic and nine months of isolation and tragedy.

That was the hope. But it wasn’t reality.

“I think some of it is just human nature, that you want to believe there will be a quick technological fix,” Fractal Therapeutics CEO Arijit Chakravarty told Fortune. His position is summed up by the headline of his searing new article published to Lancet-affiliated preprint journal medRxiv: “Endemicity is not a victory: the unmitigated downside risks of widespread SARS-COV2 transmission.”

Scenarios under which the U.S. sees surges of a variant more deadly than any seen before are plausible, Chakravarty and his colleagues contend.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths could ensue annually, they say. COVID could become the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., beating out the most common maladies like heart disease and cancer.

“It’s not a specific prediction about the future,” Chakravarty hedged. “We’re not saying the world will end on Tuesday, April 7, 2024. But the goal is to make people say, ‘Gee, some scenarios out there are really quite ugly.’”
A ‘one-way ceasefire’

Chakravarty isn’t alone in worrying about what happens next. He has good company in Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who has become the face of America’s COVID response. He said this week that a surge of COVID is likely this fall, and an increase in cases over even the next few weeks would not be surprising.

Fauci’s remarks contrast with a sudden vanishing of the Omicron wave that gripped the country in December and January (and ruined many people’s holiday plans). Cases fell so far so fast that big cities like New York relaxed mandates that had been in place for nearly two years. In New York’s case, famously unvaccinated celebrities like basketball star Kyrie Irving are free to play indoors again, and masks are off at most restaurants and retail outlets, bringing it in line with the rest of the country.

March is seeing cases creep back up again as bosses consider a widespread return to the office.

When it comes to the blissful oblivion of many to the pandemic’s continued existence, “motivated reasoning” is to blame, says psychologist Paul Thagard, a philosopher and cognitive scientist who authored the paper “The cognitive science of COVID-19: Acceptance, denial, and belief change.”

Another term for motivated reasoning: “a complicated version of wishful thinking.”

“People look at what makes them happy instead of evidence,” Thagard says. “This virus has been very unpredictable. People want to believe it’s going to get better and better. It’s not based on solid knowledge of the biology of the virus.”

If another severe wave of COVID were to hit the U.S., Thagard predicts the country would see a similarly large wave of denial, “one more application of motivated reasoning.”

“Right now things don’t look that bad in North America, generally, because hospitals aren’t that full. That could change fairly quickly.”
Vaccines aren't enough

Current vaccines have failed to end the pandemic.

That’s a key argument Chakravarty and his coauthors make in their new paper.

It’s a reality, they say, that so many are failing to recognize as they buy into the scenario that the pandemic is becoming milder and will continue to, and that the pandemic is shrinking to endemicity and will continue to shrink in scale.

“Public-health authorities in many countries have advocated for a strategy of using the vaccines to limit morbidity and mortality while permitting unchecked SARS-CoV-2 spread (‘learning to live with the disease’),” Chakravarty’s team writes.

But that strategy seems to rely on future waves of COVID being less deadly, either due to weaker but more transmissible strains of the virus taking hold, or due to population immunity that is inevitably temporary, the authors write. And it ignores the fact infection fatality rates of future COVID variants may wax and wane.

“Omicron was mild. Maybe if there’s a BA.3, it will be mild too,” Chakravarty says. “But just because it was named Omicron 3 doesn’t mean it couldn’t be its own beast.”

Writing the paper wasn’t easy, Chakravarty says.

“We, as a team, went back and forth—this took months to write,” he says. “Emotionally, it’s a difficult conclusion to come to. It doesn’t help you sleep well at night.”

Regarding COVID, “You have to mitigate the risk of the worst thing without having a big debate about whether or not it’s going to happen today. People aren’t really having that conversation.”

He and his colleagues realize an approach like China’s zero COVID policy isn’t sustainable. The team recommends an approach of “subtle changes” that “don’t require endless amounts of personal sacrifice,” and that “slow down evolution and work on limiting the spread.”

Among their proposals: upgrading air quality and ventilation in buildings, since most transmission occurs indoors; widespread surveillance of virus transmission; and focusing on the development of preventative medicines and next-generation vaccines that can reduce the spread.

But with Congress bickering over a $10 billion COVID aid bill and the U.S. running out of funds for things like vaccines and research, the U.S. is quickly losing its ability to “see what’s happening and react nimbly.”

“We’re more and more flying blind,” he says.

A World Health Organization official recently aid we may be entering a "period of ceasefire" with the virus, but Chakravarty says "it takes two parties to agree to a ceasefire. Another word for a one-way ceasefire? Surrender.”

'We get comfortable with what happens'

Chakravarty says America is now rolling the dice with its COVID strategy.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says it’s the no-plan plan.

In short: The American approach to COVID seems to be “ignore it and hope it goes away, and hope the interventions we have right now are functional enough to make it tolerable,” he says.

“And the answer is, not yet. We have good tools. We’re better than we were two years ago, but this virus is pretty tricky. It’s fooled us every time we thought we understood something.

“In many ways, we were unprepared and playing catch-up.”

COVID isn’t the only public health crisis about which Americans have become complacent, Benjamin says.

“We get tired of an issue,” he says. “We park it. We get comfortable with what happens. Thousands of people die from gun violence every year. That’s something that, when it happens, particularly mass shootings, everyone says, ‘It’s terrible. We must do something.’

“But the political will to do something about it quickly fades.”

He worries the most about politicians getting COVID fatigue and potentially failing to pass another COVID aid bill to fund, among other things, surveillance of the virus and research on new variants.

“Resource allocators have a tendency to, when something happens, throw a lot of money at it—usually not quite enough, never for long enough,” he says. “Then they withdraw funding, and their expectation of performance far exceeds the money put into it.

“We’re seeing that happen right now.”
A cautionary tale

This isn’t the first time Americans have turned a blind eye toward disease, says John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history.”

The 1918 flu pandemic “killed young people and children, and the elderly largely escaped it—despite that, people grew tired of taking precautions.”

The flu, an H1N1 virus thought to have originated in birds, was first identified in the U.S. in the spring of 1918. It spread worldwide in waves, infecting about a third of the world’s population and killing at least 50 million, with about 675,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many were previously healthy young adults and young children.

When it comes to America’s collective memory, the flu pandemic was left out, a seeming historical amnesia.

“That’s the single question I was asked most when my book came out in 2004: ‘How come I never heard of this?’” he says.

He’s not entirely sure, though it might have something to do with people at the time being more accustomed to death by infectious disease, World War I, and historians writing about “what people did to people,” but not about what nature did to people.

Thagard offers a cautionary tale: a fourth wave of the 1918 flu pandemic that came in 1920 at a time when the public was weary.

“They pretty much entirely ignored it—and the fourth wave, in some cities, was the deadliest yet,” Barry says.

“People just didn’t want to deal with it, just as we don’t want to deal with it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Amazon Has a Secret Weapon Against Rising Labor Costs

Amazon workers popped champagne celebrating successful unionization, but the company's robotics could blunt the worker revolution.

TONY OWUSU
APR 8, 2022 4:02 PM EDT

For decades Amazon's (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report story has been about growth as the company transformed from a small online bookstore to the global e-commerce behemoth that it is today.

To fuel that growth, the company has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in acquisitions, technology and, perhaps most importantly, warehouses, to deliver goods with unprecedented efficiency.

But the upfront costs Amazon had to pay to become one of the world's most valuable companies could pale in comparison to the ancillary costs the company now faces.

Amazon was so aggressive with its anti-union tactics that the National Labor Relations Board sued Amazon in federal court last month before workers began voting in the union election.

This week the NLRB counsel issued a memo calling for a ban on mandatory anti-union meetings.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.6% in April. Employers have raised wages in order to entice workers back into the labor market in recent months, leading to a 5.6% increase in wages to $31.73, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics.

Amazon says it took a $4 billion charge in the fourth quarter driven mainly by labor costs.

"The early wave disruption was handling volume without the capacity to handle it and then quickly playing catch-up," Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said during the company's earnings call.

"And as that was starting to improve, labor took a turn in the United States, especially labor availability, and we've really had to scramble to add workers."

That scramble led to the company raising hourly wages and offering improved benefits to draw workers, and while those initiatives helped the company get through the holiday season, it came at a steep cost.

Now, with unionization efforts, those costs could rise.


Amazon Is Losing Unionization Battle

Last week, workers at a warehouse in Staten Island became the first to successfully unionize.

Workers at the warehouse nicknamed JFK8 voted 2,654 to 2,131 in favor of of forming the union, a wide margin of victory for the pro-union side.

The company was trounced despite an anti-unionization campaign that included walls at JFK8 papered with "Vote No" banners, an anti-union website and weekly mandatory meetings.

For years Amazon did everything it could to head off unionization efforts at its fulfillment centers. As part of that, the company paid $4.3 million to anti-union consultants in just 2020 alone, according to documents filed with the Department of at Inflation

Now, the union could potentially challenge Amazon's labor practices, disrupting the breakneck pace of work Amazon sets for warehouse and delivery employees, and set new hourly wage requirements, according to CNBC.

“We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC.

Amazon undoubtedly now looking for a solution to its labor issues.

Amazon's Long-Term Labor Solution

Investors reward companies for keeping labor costs down.

Any time a public company announces mass layoff, you can bet there will be an accompanying bump in the company's stock price.

The reason is that investors often believe that if a company can maintain production levels while trimming labor costs, gross margins will invariably rise.

Amazon currently employs about 1.1 million people in the United States. That headcount is augmented by the 200,000 robots the company has working, according to Automation World.

In 2012, Amazon acquired robot-coordinated order fulfillment company Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash.

Amazon Australia opened the largest warehouse ever built on the continent. The 200,000 square-meter facility is the size of 24 rugby fields.

But its size isn't the only thing interesting about the facility. It is also the first "robotics fulfillment center" in the southern hemisphere.

Robots will team with 1,500 workers to house and move around 20 million items. For comparison sake, JFK8 is about 80,000 square meters with a human head count above 8,000 workers.

Amazon has specifically built many of its warehouses to accommodate mobile robots, which can autonomously transport entire shelf units around the facility to complete fulfillment and delivery.

Those robots currently work in conjunction with human workers who do the packing and shipping.

The company is set to open a massive robotics facility in Tallahassee, Florida later this year.

Going Beyond Robots

But robotics will only become a larger part of the Amazon ecosystem, and the shipping industry in general.

The Warehouse Robotics Market was valued at $9.88 billion in 2021, according to Mordor Intelligence, but it is expected to jump to $23.09 billion by 2027 with a compound annual growth rate of 15.33%.

According to Bank of America, it is estimated that by 2025, 45% of all manufacturing tasks will be executed by robotic technology.

According to DHL, 80% of warehouses are still manually operated with no supporting automation.

"While significant advances have been accomplished in robotics, the human workforce still holds the upper hand in running a well-organized warehouse," Mordor Intelligence said.

"Forecast of long-term labor shortages across the United States and Europe, as well as sustained pressure on supply chains to deliver orders quicker and more precisely, has caused operations executives to seriously assess that question as they look for answers to staffing challenges."

Workers at JFK8 popped champagne bottles at the news conference announcing the union vote. But their efforts to improve their working situation may eventually lead to Amazon accelerating its own efforts to trim its warehouse headcount in the name of the all mighty bottom-line.

Amazon admits that it needs human workers. It hired more than 400,000 people during the pandemic and still complained of staff shortages in its most recent earnings call.

But as time goes on and the company refines its robotics, those staff shortages could become a relic of a bygone era.

USA
The jobs market favors workers for the first time in a half-century. 

No one in the press corps can hear it

Image via Shutterstock.

Jason Sattler

April 08, 2022

It’s easy to forget how dire the job market was – and just about everything was – during the last year of the Trump presidency.

Americans were forced to consider theft and murder to make sure their families had enough toilet paper amid a once-a-century plague that will, by the time it’s over, have killed more than a million of us.

I guess we’re just supposed to pretend that never happened, like a fresh hell of a sermon interrupted by the sudden toot of a pastor’s fart – or Donald Trumps’ trademarks in China – or Michael Avenatti.

But letting the memory of the wreckage left behind by Republican presidents is why we get so many more Republican presidents.

So prepare for a haunting flashback.

Before 2020, America had never seen more than a million weekly unemployment claims, not even during the Great Recession.

Late in March 2020, nearly 3 million workers filed claims.

That was followed by 5.9 million, then 6.1 million. Pretty much the populations of Los Angeles and Chicago combined were out of work.

That weekly hemorrhaging didn’t drop below a million until last August. It didn’t hit pre-pandemic levels until last October.

The American Rescue Plan – along with various pandemic-related reprieves – built on previous and considerable efforts to soften the pain of the pandemic by putting money into workers’ pockets.

The result of this sort of bottom-up economics?

An explosion of job growth unlike any seen before.

We are now seeing the lowest unemployment claims in more than 50 years. 2021 was literally the best year of job growth ever recorded.

You’d think that’d be big news.

Sure, if the president were Republican.

Look, it’s easy to pretend this remarkable recovery, which has seen all jobs lost regained six years faster than it took the job market to recover from the Great Recession, was inevitable or predictable.

It wasn’t.

“Pre-Rescue Act, CBO projected the unemployment rate would be 5.1 percent this past quarter, not go below 4 percent until 2026, and would never go below 3.9 percent. In fact, it fell to 3.6 percent in March,” Seth Hanlon, a former special assistant to President Obama for economic policy, noted.

You may not be aware of the good news.

You’re not alone.

A recent poll found only 12 percent of Americans knew we’d just experienced the best year of job growth ever. In comparison, 43 percent of our fellow citizens believe in the existence of demons.

What explains this catastrophic cognitive dissonance?

Some of it is complicated.

Much of the good news has been buried in constant positive revisions by the government of job numbers. That process dulled deadlines.

It’s also hard to celebrate the good news during a pandemic that’s still killing the unvaccinated, immunocompromised and the unlucky.

(And anyway, work sucks.)

But the simple reason for Americans not knowing how effective the American Rescue Plan has been is psychological abuse.

The Washington press corps, warped by the influence of rightwing media, tends to ignore good job news under Democratic presidencies.

Consider this: Do you know more jobs were created in 2014, the year Obamacare went into effect, than any year so far in the century before 2021? That’s after five years of Republicans predicting the opposite?

What’s going on now is more nefarious, though, It comes from people who know better. They understand well this newfound labor power.

It’s Corporate America.

That’s why workers having the best job security in their lives is continually framed not as victory for Joe Sixpack, but as a crisis.

"US businesses are not laying off workers because they know the enormous challenges they're facing in filling open positions," Ryan Sweet, of Moody's Analytics, told Reuters. "If initial claims remain below 200,000 for a period of time, it will raise a red flag with the Fed."

Not enough layoffs should raise a red flag?

Is the job market too good?

(How dare you ask for a raise! I should be on my superyacht!)\

These Scrooge-before-Ghosts-Scared-Him headlines are more common than headlines about the balance of power shifting toward the interests of labor. An excellent example of this comes courtesy of Axios: “Worker shortage thwarts Biden’s ‘millions’ of jobs pledge.”

More nefarious, however, is the fixation by the press corps on the allegation that “inflation” is driven by workers' newfound advantages.

For Republicans, the advantages of discounting the best job market for workers in half a century are obvious. They need to justify resuming power. For Corporate America, record profits are not enough.

They are acutely aware of the success of unionizing efforts at an Amazon warehouse and at multiple Starbucks’ locations. They see how hard it is to hire when workers don’t live in terror of unemployment.

They see Democratic majorities in the Congress having the power, though not yet the votes, to clawback some of the massive giveaways corporations racked up during the Trump administration.

And they want their layoffs back.

Unfortunately, the press corps is happy to help.

So is the Fed – with rate increases likely to deflate the jobs market than help mitigate inflation, which has as much to do with the pandemic and the flimsiness of anti-worker supply chains as anything.

Workers haven’t had much to celebrate for a long time. It’s hard to celebrate an economy fundamentally rigged to fluff the super rich.

But we better understand the power we have.

Corporations want it back, fast.

How a deluge of lockdown volunteers rescued UK’s hidden weather history


THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 25, 2022

When it rains, it pours. Make hay while the sun shines. Save for a rainy day. Come rain or shine. The English language is overflowing with phrases about the weather, especially rain, or the lack of it. Fascination with the weather seems embedded in the UK’s national identity, but there is much people still need to learn about it.

Scientists know there were terrible floods and brutal droughts in the country’s past which could happen again. And as the climate changes, intense downpours in particular are likely to become more common and even more extreme.

The government advises that defences must be able to withstand floods which are so rare that they only occur once every 100 years. What does such a flood look like? We need as much data from the past as possible to accurately describe these events so that homes are properly protected.

Sadly, much of this information is stored in hand-written paper records which amateur meteorologists compiled over centuries. But thanks to the work of modern volunteers, millions of rainfall measurements were recently made available to science, vastly expanding our understanding of Britain’s climate, revealing new records and shedding light on just how extreme the weather can get.

A treasure trove of data

Starting in the 1860s, The British Rainfall Organisation (BRO), led by meteorologist George Symons, collected rainfall observations from around Britain and Ireland by calling on volunteers to send in their records. They dug up measurements from as far back as 1677, from newspapers and other publications, as well as diaries kept by weather enthusiasts.

The BRO collated these observations on 66,000 pieces of paper. Each sheet contained measurements of the rain that fell each month during a particular decade in a particular location.

New rainfall data was immediately stored on computers from 1960 onwards, and the paper sheets were carefully stored in archives where they were largely forgotten. Turning the five million handwritten measurements into digital data a computer can analyse is an enormous task which requires human eyes to recognise the often hard-to-read numbers.

A ten-year rainfall sheet for Forbury Gardens in Reading during the 1890s. National Meteorological Archive, Author provided

An opportunity arose in early 2020 during the first national lockdown. The National Meteorological Archive had scanned the paper sheets and made the images available online. The University of Reading launched a citizen science project called Rainfall Rescue, asking the public to help make these measurements available to science once more.

Volunteers were shown an image of a single sheet and asked to type the values for a particular year into the website. Each sheet was shown to at least four different volunteers to iron out any mistakes. We estimated the process would take many months. It took just 16 days.

We had not expected 16,000 volunteers to pitch in. Whether it was people with more spare time or those looking for a distraction during the pandemic, the public response was extraordinary. Night and day the data poured in. Some volunteers looked at more than 1,000 pages, and 100 million keystrokes later, the project has yielded more than 3.3 million rainfall measurements taken between 1677 and 1960 from thousands of locations. These are now available online and have been processed by the Met Office to improve the national rainfall statistics.
New weather records

Before Rainfall Rescue began, UK records stretched back to 1862, but only data from 19 rain gauges were available for that year. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, data from more than 700 rain gauges are now available for 1862, allowing us to map rainfall variation in far greater detail than ever before.
Additional data uncovered by Rainfall Rescue could expand available statistics further. Ed Hawkins/National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Author provided

We can also look further back in time and map rainfall across the UK for every month since 1836. This is the year that Charles Darwin returned to the UK on the Beagle with Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy (who later set up the Met Office), and is the year before Queen Victoria began her reign.

The data from Rainfall Rescue before 1862 is new to science, and so our records need updating. The driest year on record for the UK used to be 1887. It is now 1855.

February 2020 had been the wettest on record for many regions of the UK, while May was the driest in many places. But those record-breakers have now lost their status. For many regions, February 1848 was wetter than 2020 and, for others, May 1844 was drier than 2020.

Other significant events emerge from the data too. April 1842 is now the driest April on record for the UK. November and December 1852 set records for being extremely wet, with significant flooding across the country.

We’re just beginning to analyse the new data, and still adding information from more locations. This will offer invaluable insight into how the UK’s climate is changing and put recent weather in perspective, preparing us for the future with better understanding of what the weather has thrown at us in the past.

Rainfall Rescue has extended the UK’s rainfall statistics by 26 years. Ed Hawkins/National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Author provided

The sheets of paper which made this possible were assembled by an earlier army of volunteers who dedicated themselves to recording rainfall, every day, often for many decades. Lady Bayning took measurements from 1835 to 1887, even bringing her rain gauge as she travelled from Norfolk to London for the social season. William Buckley Pugh contributed 65 years of rainfall observations at his mill near Hull and later in retirement.

Thousands of other people took measurements at waterworks, factories, vicarages, canals, railway stations, lighthouses and hospitals across the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland. Their efforts, the vision of George Symons, and now the time and commitment of thousands of online volunteers have transformed our knowledge of rainfall in these islands.

Author

Ed Hawkins
Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading
Disclosure statement
Ed Hawkins receives funding from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Natural Environment Research Council.

How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs?

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 28, 2022 

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs? – Kinjal, age 11, Delhi, India

When the rock now known as the Chicxulub impactor plummeted from outer space and slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago, cockroaches were there. The impact caused a massive earthquake, and scientists think it also triggered volcanic eruptions thousands of miles from the impact site. Three-quarters of plants and animals on Earth died, including all dinosaurs, except for some species that were ancestors of today’s birds.

How could roaches a couple of inches long survive when so many powerful animals went extinct? It turns out that they were nicely equipped to live through a meteoric catastrophe.





If you’ve ever seen a cockroach, you’ve probably noticed that their bodies are very flat. This is not an accident. Flatter insects can squeeze themselves into tighter places. This enables them to hide practically anywhere – and it may have helped them survive the Chicxulub impact.
Cockroaches have flat bodies that help them squeeze through tiny spaces. They’re also strong and fast.

When the meteor struck, temperatures on Earth’s surface skyrocketed. Many animals had nowhere to flee, but roaches could take shelter in tiny soil crevices, which provide excellent protection from heat.

The meteor’s impact triggered a cascade of effects. It kicked up so much dust that the sky darkened. As the sun dimmed, temperatures plunged and conditions became wintry around the globe. With little sunlight, surviving plants struggled to grow, and many other organisms that relied on those plants went hungry.

Not cockroaches, though. Unlike some insects that prefer to eat one specific plant, cockroaches are omnivorous scavengers. This means they will eat most foods that come from animals or plants as well as cardboard, some kinds of clothing and even poop. Having appetites that aren’t picky has allowed cockroaches to survive lean times since the Chicxulub extinction and other natural disasters.

Another helpful trait is that cockroaches lay their eggs in little protective cases. These egg cartons look like dried beans and are called oothecae, which means “egg cases.” Like phone cases, oothecae are hard and protect their contents from physical damage and other threats, such as flooding and drought. Some cockroaches may have waited out part of the Chicxulub catastrophe from the comfort of their oothecae.

Cockroach egg cases are about 0.5 inches long (10 millimeters) and contain up to 50 eggs, depending on the species. VitalisG/iStock via Getty Images

Modern cockroaches are little survivors that can live just about anywhere on land, from the heat of the tropics to some of the coldest parts of the globe. Scientists estimate that there over 4,000 cockroach species.

A handful of these species like to live with humans and quickly become pests. Once cockroaches become established in a building, it’s hard to rid every little crack of these insects and their oothecae. When large numbers of roaches are present in unsanitary places, they can spread diseases. The biggest threat they pose to human health is from allergens they produce that can trigger asthma attacks and allergic reactions in some people.

Cockroach pests are hard to manage because they can resist many chemical insecticides and because they have the same abilities that helped their ancestors outlive many dinosaurs. Still, cockroaches are much more than a pest to control. Researchers study cockroaches to understand how they move and how their bodies are designed to get ideas for building better robots.

As a scientist, I see all insects as beautiful, six-legged inspirations. Cockroaches have already overcome odds that were too great for dinosaurs. If another meteorite hit the Earth, I’d be more worried for humans than for cockroaches.

Author

Brian Lovett
Postdoctoral Researcher in Mycology, West Virginia University

Hidden away in a museum, we found the skull of a rare armoured dinosaur that roamed Queensland 105 million years ago

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 28, 2022 

You might think all important dinosaur “discoveries” are made as soon as fossils are collected in the field – that palaeontologists instantly know the significance of what they’ve found.

This is often true. But sometimes, and maybe more often than you’d think, fossils will be stored in museum collections for years before the right researchers come along to “rediscover” them. This was the case for one Australian ankylosaur skull, which we’ve published about today in the journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences.

Originally discovered in 2005 near the regional Queensland town of Boulia, the specimen remained at the South Australian Museum until we enquired about the museum’s dinosaur collection.

Ankylosaurs, the so-called “armoured” dinosaurs, are a group of dinosaurs that lived from the Early Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous – roughly 196 to 66 million years ago.

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Compared to other dinosaurs, such as the long-necked sauropods and smaller herbivorous ornithopods, ankylosaur remains are rarely found in Australia and the broader southern hemisphere. So you can imagine our excitement when we “rediscovered” Australia’s second ankylosaur skull.

An analysis of the skull bones and teeth suggests it belongs to the genus Kunbarrasaurus, which also contains the first Australian ankylosaur skull.

Read more: Introducing Australotitan: Australia's largest dinosaur yet spanned the length of 2 buses

What were ankylosaurs like?

Ankylosaurs were medium-to-giant herbivorous dinosaurs (anywhere between 200-5,000kg) that walked on four legs and were covered in armoured plates or spikes. Some are recognisable by tail clubs, such as the five-tonne Ankylosaurus magniventris from North America.

Of the 75 recognised ankylosaur species, only five are from the southern hemisphere. Several small and incomplete fossils are spattered across the ancient Gondwana supercontinent – which is now dispersed and broken up into Australia, India (which back then was in the southern hemisphere), Africa, Antarctica and South America.

These fossils offer tantalising hints of what was once a widespread ankylosaur presence in these regions. The five Gondwanan ankylosaur species are Kunbarrasaurus ieversi and Minmi paravertebra from Australia, Antarctopelta oliveroi from Antarctica, Spicomellus afer from Africa, and Stegorous elengassen from Chile.

A dinosaur from Boulia

The bones of the ankylosaur from Boulia were found encased in a large, hard rock called a concretion. Concretions often form around organic matter, and likely helped the initial preservation of the fossil. When it was discovered, all that was visible was a series of rock chunks that could have easily been overlooked.

The Boulia ankylosaur was excavated from the Warra station in 2005. 

(Block in the bottom left contains ankylosaur limb bones)

 Benjamin Kear (Uppsala University)

The collected fossils include limbs, vertebrae, many armoured plates and, excitingly, a partial skull. Along with several skull bones, the skull also includes the impressions of many teeth from the upper jaw.

The entire skull block was scanned at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. The synchrotron shoots x-rays at the specimen, generating a series of images that can be processed to reveal the bones in 3D (as seen below).

This technique is often used for fossils that may otherwise get damaged or lose important information if physically removed from the rock.

We analysed the scans and discovered the bones are those of the roof of the mouth (or the palate). We also found several teeth “floating” within the block.

Placing southern ankylosaurs in the family tree

Identifying this new ankylosaur as Kunbarrasaurus suggests this particular dinosaur was potentially more widespread in Queensland than previously thought, and may have existed for more than five million years. But what do ankylosaurs from Australia, and Gondwana more generally, tell us about the group’s evolution as a whole?

As it stands, the vast majority of ankylosaurs are from either North America, Europe, or Asia. And most are from the late Cretaceous (100 to 66 million years ago). However our study suggests a separate and possibly earlier diversity of ankylosaurs in the south, a theory which is supported by recent discoveries from South America and Africa.

The southern radiation of ankylosaurs includes the species from Australia, Chile and Antarctica, all of which together form the group called Parankylosauria.

A reconstruction of Kunbarrrasaurus ieversi from Richmond, Queensland. Australian Geographic

The importance of the Boulia ankylosaur

Because the fossil block was scanned with x-rays and reconstructed in 3D, we were able to explore aspects of the ankylosaur’s airways, or “choanae”. These were not well preserved in the first and only other known Kunbarrasaurus skull.

Typically ankylosaur choanae are long, located close to the front of the snout and can have multiple openings within the palate. Coupled with complex nasal passages, these features point to the group generally having a keen sense of smell.

However, in the Boulia ankylosaur there is only one opening on each side, and they are located towards the back of the palate. This suggests Kunbarrasaurus did not have the complex nasal system seen in ankylosaurs such as Pawpawsaurus campbelli and Euplocephalus tutus. As such, it may have had a reduced sense of smell compared to most of its northern counterparts.

There is still a lot we don’t know about ankylosaur evolution, especially the Gondwanan species. Perhaps more of these discoveries await us in museum troves.

Read more: Dinosaurs were already in decline before the asteroid wiped them out – new research

Authors

Timothy Frauenfelder
PhD Candidate in Palaeontology, University of New England

Nicolas Campione
Senior lecturer, University of New England

Phil Bell
Palaeontologist, Earth Science Faculty, University of New England

Disclosure statement

Nicolas Campione receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Phil Bell received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Timothy Frauenfelder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.