Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region
HKSAR Government recruitment activities in Beijing and Shanghai wrap up (with photos) HKSAR Government recruitment activities in Beijing and Shanghai wrap up (with photos) *************************************************************************************
A series of recruitment activities organised by the Civil Service Bureau (CSB) in Beijing and Shanghai wrapped up today (September 24), attracting an online and in-person participation of over 1 800 Hong Kong people interested in applying for and learning about civil service posts in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government. Five recruitment talks on the Administrative Officer (AO) and Executive Officer (EO) grades were held at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Shanghai (SHETO), East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Renmin University of China, and China University of Political Science and Law respectively. Most of the attendees were university students with immense interest in the AO and EO grades, and they were keen to ask questions on the relevant grades. The CSB had specifically arranged for serving AO and EO colleagues who had studied or lived on the Mainland to share their work and personal experiences, and encourage university students to join the civil service. The Principal Assistant Secretary for the Civil Service (Administrative Service), Ms Yen Pun, and the Senior Principal Executive Officer (General Grades), Miss Iris Ma, also introduced the entry requirements, training programmes, examination and interview arrangements, as well as tips on preparing for examinations of the AO and EO grades at the seminars. In addition, representatives of the CSB participated in the “Gathering with Hong Kong Students and Youth in East China Region to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” organised by the SHETO to introduce the AO and EO grades to the young participants. The aim was to enable them to know more about the work and career prospects of the grades concerned, and encourage them to apply for civil service posts in the HKSAR Government. The CSB is currently conducting a joint recruitment exercise for the civil service grades of AO, EO II, Assistant Trade Officer II and Transport Officer II. The application deadline is October 4. Eligible applicants are encouraged to seize the opportunity to apply. For details, please visit the CSB’s website at www.csb.gov.hk.
Ends/Tuesday, September 24, 2024Issued at HKT 18:38
GOVERNOR GREENWILL SEEK $45 MILLION IN ADDITIONAL WELFARE RELIEF FOR HAWAIʻI FAMILIES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 23, 2024
The state of Hawai‘i will implement rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that are expected to generate an additional $45 million in benefits for Hawai‘i’s struggling families.
The changes — prompted by a recent study by the University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization (UHERO) — mean that an extra 13,000 to 14,000 households will be eligible for an average of $3,200 a year in SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps.
“This is going to provide a huge relief for our working-class families who are struggling with Hawai‘i’s highest-in-the-nation cost of living,” said Governor Josh Green, M.D. “In identifying a critical opportunity for our SNAP program, UHERO’s research team is enabling us to make much-needed changes to our social welfare system so that families living from paycheck to paycheck can afford to put more food on their tables.”
In Hawai‘i, SNAP is one of the largest welfare programs available to low-income families. Currently, a family of four can receive as much as $1,759 a month in SNAP benefits. In a typical month, the total value of SNAP benefits in Hawai‘i exceeds $60 million.
For decades, the SNAP eligibility criteria were controlled by the federal government. Following changes to the program in 2000, states were given more flexibility to adjust the eligibility rules by establishing a program of “broad-based categorical eligibility” (BBCE). Through BBCE, states were able to eliminate asset limits, which prevented households with high savings from receiving SNAP benefits. BBCE also allows states to raise limits on the amount of income households can receive and still qualify for SNAP.
According to UHERO, eliminating another income criteria known as the “net income limit” will expand the number of Hawaiʻi households receiving SNAP benefits by 13,000 to 14,000. (“Net income” in the SNAP program is defined as the total monthly household income after deducting certain non-food household expenses like rent, utilities, medical costs, childcare costs and others. Before BBCE, households needed to have a net income below the federal poverty line to qualify for SNAP benefits.)
Also according to UHERO, eliminating this limit will add little overhead: The state only needs to pay half of the additional administrative costs associated with the additional SNAP cases that would result. In 2019, Hawai‘i’s share of SNAP administrative costs was only about 5.6% of the amount of SNAP benefits that the state paid out to Hawai‘i families.
“This decision has far-reaching implications,” said Dylan Moore, a co-author of the UHERO report. “This change may further increase benefit payments by making it easier for households to understand whether they are eligible for SNAP.”
The Hawai‘i Public Health Institute’s Social Impact Policy Manager Nate Hix co-authored the report.
# # #
Media Contacts: Erika Engle Press Secretary Office of the Governor, State of Hawai‘i Phone: 808-586-0120 Email: [email protected]
Makana McClellan Director of Communications Office of the Governor, State of Hawaiʻi Cell: 808-265-0083 Email: [email protected]
Posted on Sep 23, 2024 in Latest Department News, Newsroom
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
ʻOIHANA MAHIʻAI
JOSH GREEN, M.D. GOVERNOR
KIAʻĀINA
SHARON HURD CHAIRPERSON
HAWAI`I BOARD OF AGRICULTURE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NR24-28
September 21, 2024
COCONUT RHINOCEROS BEETLE FOUND IN WAIKOLOA TRAP
HONOLULU – A single coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB) has been found in a trap this week by the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture (HDOA) during routine monitoring in Waikoloa on Hawai‘i Island. This is the first detection of CRB on the island since October 2023 when a Waikoloa resident reported finding a total of six grubs (larvae) in a decaying palm tree stump. The trap that the CRB was found in this week is located about 200 yards from the earlier detection.
HDOA set 30 traps around Waikoloa and has been conducting routine monitoring with the assistance of volunteer area residents. The Big Island Invasive Species Committee has set additional traps, as has the University of Hawai‘i, whose traps have cameras that allow real-time monitoring.
The pheromone traps are used for early detection of infestations. The traps do not attract all CRB in the area and are not effective as an eradication method. Surveillance for CRB has been ongoing on all islands, including traps at airports, harbors and other strategic locations.
HDOA and CRB Response teams are now focusing on eradication efforts in the area where the beetle was found. Initial surveys in the immediate area did not detect obvious signs of CRB damage in palm trees.
“CRB surveillance on Hawai‘i Island has been ongoing and early detection is key to prevent the establishment of breeding populations,” said Sharon Hurd, chairperson of the Hawai‘i Board of Agriculture. “We ask everyone to keep an eye out for CRB, especially in their compost and mulch piles which are major breeding grounds of the beetle.”
Residents on all islands are asked to be vigilant when purchasing mulch, compost and soil products, and to inspect bags for evidence of entry holes. An adult beetle is about 2-inches long, all black and has a single horn on its head. CRB grubs live in decomposing plant and animal waste. Adult CRB prefer to feed on coconut and other larger palms and are a major threat to the health of these plants.
Residents may go to the CRB Response website at: https://www.crbhawaii.org/ to learn more about how to detect the signs of CRB damage and how to identify CRB life stages. Reports of possible CRB infestation may also be made to the state’s toll-free Pest Hotline at (808) 643-PEST (7378).
The CRB is a large scarab beetle that was first detected on O‘ahu in 2013. The beetle has since been detected in many neighborhoods on O‘ahu and was detected on Kaua‘i in May 2023, where collaborative eradication efforts continue. CRB grubs were found in Kīhei, Maui, in November 2023, but have not been detected on the island since.
CRB is a serious pest of palm trees, primarily coconut palms, as the adult beetles bore into the crowns of the palms to feed on the trees’ sap. New unopened fronds are damaged in this way and when fully opened, may break and fall unexpectedly. If CRB kill or damage the growing point of the palm, the tree may die. Secondary fungal or bacterial pathogens may also attack the wounds caused by CRB, thereby killing the tree as well. Tree mortality after CRB attack has been reported to be anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent. Dead trees then become a safety hazard as they may fall unexpectedly after the trunk rots, potentially resulting in bodily injury or property damage.
CRB is a major pest of palms in India, the Philippines, Palau, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Nukunono, American and Western Samoa and Guam. It is still not known exactly how the beetles arrived in Hawai‘i.
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Media Contact: Janelle Saneishi, Public Information Officer Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture Phone: 808-973-9560 Cell: 808-341-5528 [email protected] http://hdoa.hawaii.gov
Karen Mollica (BA Honours [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 after completing internships in Guyana and Costa Rica.
Karen Mollica (BA Honours [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 after completing internships in Guyana and Costa Rica. Her early assignments included serving as coordinator of the Landmine Action Team and as a case officer for several West and Central African countries. She then worked at the Canadian International Development Agency, serving as First Secretary at the High Commission in South Africa and as Counsellor and Head of Cooperation at the Embassy in Jordan. Upon her return to headquarters in 2019, she was appointed Director of Policy, Planning and Operations for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she held until 2022. Most recently, she served as Director and Senior Ministerial Advisor in the Office of the Minister of International Development and Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy to the Holy See.
Ajit Singh (BA [Communications], University of Winnipeg, 2003; BA Honours [Political Science], University of Winnipeg, 2004; MA [International Law], United Nations University for Peace, 2006; JD, Osgoode Hall Law School, 2012) has lived, studied and worked in a multilingual environment in 6 countries on 4 continents. He joined the Government of Canada in 2008 after working in media, education, the United Nations and civil society organizations. He then practised private law in Toronto and was called to the Ontario Bar as a barrister. In 2013, he joined the Privy Council Office in the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat. He subsequently worked at the Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat, where he was responsible for relations with Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Latin America, as well as legal files. In 2017, he joined Global Affairs Canada as Deputy Director in the Foreign Policy Planning Division, where he led the Foreign Ministers’ Events team during Canada’s G7 Presidency in 2018. He then worked in the Conflict Prevention, Stabilization and Peacebuilding Division. In 2021, he joined the Department of National Defence as Director of Operations. He returned to the Privy Council Office in 2022, this time to become the first person to hold the position of Director of International Crisis Response.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and/or sentence structure not be perfect.
NAVAL AIR STATION SIGONELLA, Sicily (Sept. 4, 2024) – Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Jose Navarro, 25, from Bremen, Indiana, joined the Navy in 2016 to be part of something bigger than himself. He arrived at Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella in March 2023.
“I show up and take care of my Sailors, day in, day out,” said Navarro, who was recently selected as U.S. Naval Medical Readiness and Training Command (NMRTC) Sigonella’s Senior Sailor of the Quarter. According to his leadership, Navarro has demonstrated exceptional leadership and worth ethic as the Human Resources department leading petty officer.
Four junior Sailors have benefitted from Navarro’s mentorship; two have been promoted and two have earned college degrees. He has also managed more than 1,000 pieces of correspondence, more than 100 permanent change of station transfer transactions, ten awards boards, five awards ceremonies, and one command physical readiness assessment as the command fitness leader.
“Petty Officer Navarro’s dedication and achievements exemplify his outstanding performance in his leadership role,” said Lt. Julius C. Wiseman III, human resources department head, U.S. Naval Hospital Sigonella. “Furthermore, he recently achieved the milestone of graduating with a Master of Healthcare Administration from Louisiana State University Shreveport.”
In addition to his administrative duties, Navarro holds several collateral duties, including: serving as Morale, Welfare and Recreation president; supply officer; assistant command fitness leader; and command, pay and personnel administrator. Navarro feels these roles help the command improve and help Sailors.
“Serving means making sacrifices to help others,” said Navarro.
Navarro’s proudest achievement in the Navy is promoting quickly and proving to himself that he can get what he wants if he works hard for it.
U.S. Naval Hospital Sigonella ensures maximum readiness by providing high-quality, safe patient and family-centered care to maximize force health protection for all beneficiaries, to included NATO and transient DoD forces in the U.S. Fifth Fleet and U.S. Sixth Fleet areas of operation.
NAS Sigonella provides consolidated operational, command and control, administrative, logistical and advanced logistical support to U.S. and other NATO forces. The installation’s strategic location enables U.S., allied, and partner nation forces to deploy and respond as required, ensuring security and stability in Europe, Africa and Central Command.
For more news and information from NAS Sigonella, visit https://cnreurafcent.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NAS-Sigonella/ or https://www.facebook.com/nassigonella/.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Silvaco Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SVCO, “Silvaco” or the “Company”), a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through AI software and innovation, today announced that its 2024 TCAD Baseline Release simulation platform with digital twin modeling, provides support for planar CMOS, FinFET and Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor technologies, enabling semiconductor companies to accelerate technology development.
Silvaco’s latest TCAD technology platform, enables advanced CMOS Process and Device simulation to support the development of next-generation semiconductor devices. This platform boosts performance, yield and efficiency across the evolving semiconductor design and manufacturing landscape. The solution enables highly accurate 3D process simulation, using digital twin-like precision and integrates stress simulation to model deformed structures. Additionally, the platform supports cryogenic applications through an atomistic quantum transport approach, enabling straightforward modeling of transistor structures down to 1 Kelvin.
“Our TCAD platform has gained significant traction in the Display, Photonics, Memory and Power Semiconductor markets, where our solutions have been instrumental in driving innovation and enhancing performance,” said Dr. Babak Taheri, Chief Executive Officer, Silvaco. “We have now extended our comprehensive suite of tools to the advanced CMOS market, enabling next-generation advancements in technologies to address growing markets such as foundries, 5G, AI and high-performance computing. Our newly released TCAD platform has been utilized by a strategic customer for the past few years and is now available for broad market adoption. This new capability for advanced CMOS technology enables customers to accelerate their technology development with significant cost savings.”
“Nanotechnology, like GAA, exhibits advanced quantum physical effects,” said Tillmann Kubis, Associate Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. “Over the past six years, our team of scientists has collaborated with Silvaco to enable the simulation of full devices, such as nanowires and GAAs, powered by NEMO5 which is an NEGF-based atomistic quantum transport simulation tool developed at Purdue and licensed by Silvaco. This collaboration is now enabling Silvaco’s TCAD simulation performance with atomistic accuracy.”
“This latest release of our TCAD platform is the culmination of years of intensive development, refinement and industry collaboration in order to meet the demanding needs of designing in advanced CMOS process technologies,” said Eric Guichard, Senior VP and General Manager TCAD Business Unit, Silvaco. “The latest release of our TCAD platform now incorporates digital twin modeling for CMOS technologies, as well as atomistic simulation technologies to provide a highly competitive and attractive alternative solution for semiconductor companies designing in advanced Planar CMOS, FinFET and emerging GAA process technologies.”
About Silvaco
Silvaco is a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through AI software and innovation. Silvaco’s solutions are used for semiconductor and photonics processes, devices, and systems development across display, power devices, automotive, memory, high-performance compute, foundries, photonics, internet of things, and 5G/6G mobile markets for complex SoC design. Silvaco is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has a global presence with offices located in North America, Europe, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, each as amended, that are intended to be covered by the “safe harbor” provisions of those sections. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the Company’s expectations, beliefs, intentions, plans, or strategies related to the release and adoption of its 2024 TCAD Baseline Release simulation platform, the anticipated benefits of this platform for advanced CMOS, FinFET, GAA, and other emerging technologies, and the potential advantages for customers in terms of performance, cost savings, and accelerated technology development. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by the use of words such as “anticipate,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” “estimate,” “potential,” “continue,” and similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.
These statements are based on the Company’s current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those described in the Company’s most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.
Media Contact Tyler Weiland +1 972-571-7834 press@silvaco.com
Source: Dr David Robie – Café Pacific – Analysis-Reportage:
Headline: Chinese ‘baseless rumour’, Nauru ‘justice’ for refugees and Fiji diabetes
David Robie talks on 95bFM about current Pacific issues
Reuben McLaren of 95bFM talks to Professor David Robie, director of the Pacific
Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, on the centre’s Southern Cross radio programme.
David speaks about various upheavals around the Pacific, including the alleged Chinese military “base plans” for Vanuatu,
Nauru abolishing its Appeal Court
Artist Susan Connolly pictured at the opening of her exhibition GROUND (100+one) at the FE McWilliam Gallery
The F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council are delighted to present GROUND (100+one), an exhibition by Belfast based painter Susan Connolly which is now on view at the Banbridge arts venue.
GROUND (100+one), an exciting new body of work, responds to the specific context of the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and is informed by Connolly’s research into Mainie Jellett’s groundbreaking artwork, Decoration (1923), the first modern abstract painting exhibited in Ireland.
Connolly pushes painting to its limits through processes that include layering, scoring, cutting and peeling paint from its support. The title GROUND refers to the one thing shared by every painting – a surface, on which to apply the pigment. (100+one) references the number of years since Jellett’s piece Decoration was first exhibited in Ireland and also the one hundred paintings and collages that Connolly set herself the task of producing for this exhibition.
Jellett’s approach to painting was shaped by the time that she spent in Paris studying and collaborating with the Cubist artist Albert Gleizes. Decoration provoked confusion and hostility when it was first exhibited in Dublin in 1923. Connolly’s interest in Jellett is both as a pioneer and an abstract painter who challenged preconceptions of painting.
Curator of the FE McWilliam Gallery, Dr Riann Coulter said; “Susan is one of our most innovative painters and her engagement with Mainie Jellett’s iconic piece, Decoration, which now hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, has produced a fascinating body of work that is both a homage to Jellett and a contemporary continuation of her efforts to expand definitions of painting.”
Originally from Kildare, Susan is now based between Belfast and Waterford where she is a lecturer and Course Leader in the Visual Art Department of South East Technological University. She studied at Limerick College of Art and Design, the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and Belfast School of Art where she was awarded an MFA and PhD. Susan is a member of Queen Street Studios and her work is in public and private collections throughout Ireland including the Arts Council of Ireland the Office of Public Works.
The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition art book designed by Alex Synge with texts by Sarah Long, Craig Staff and Riann Coulter.
GROUND (100+one) continues at the FE McWilliam Gallery until 2 November 2024. For further information including opening times go to FE McWilliam Gallery
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region
​Following are the remarks by the Secretary for Health, Professor Lo Chung-mau, at a media session after receiving vaccinations against seasonal influenza and COVID-19 today (September 24):
Reporter: What do you think of Professor Dennis Lo possibly becoming the new head of CUHK (Chinese University of Hong Kong)? Is there any progress about the review submitted by the HA (Hospital Authority) Review Committee?
Secretary for Health: I am still waiting for the official announcement of the Vice-Chancellor and President of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As far as Professor Dennis Lo is concerned, I know that he is a very renowned scientist involving in genetic molecular diagnostics, especially in pre-natal diagnosis and, more recently, early diagnosis of cancer. I really look forward to the official announcement by the Chinese University of Hong Kong about the next Vice-Chancellor and President. Of course, as far as the Chinese University of Hong Kong is concerned, they have a first-class medical school. Our healthcare service depends very much on the graduates from both existing medical schools, including that of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
About the report of the Review Committee, I understand that the Committee has already submitted the report to the Hospital Authority. As the Chairman of the Hospital Authority has just mentioned, they are studying it in detail because there are 30 recommendations on different aspects of the governance and management of the Hospital Authority. The Hospital Authority is studying it in detail and will make certain analysis and further recommendations to the Health Bureau. We will work together to see how we can, based on this report, improve and enhance public healthcare services in Hong Kong.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the remarks.)
TOPEKA—Applicants who successfully passed the Kansas bar examination will be sworn in as Kansas attorneys at 9:30 a.m. Friday, September 27, in Topeka.
The ceremony will take place at The Beacon at 420 SW 9th St.
New attorneys can choose to be sworn in during the ceremony Friday or at another time by a state or federal judge.
Chief Justice Marla Luckert will preside over the Supreme Court, and District Judge Toby Crouse will represent the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.
Doug Shima, clerk of the Kansas appellate courts, will administer the state oath. Traci Anderson, a clerk from the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, will administer the federal oath.
New attorneys
New attorneys eligible to be sworn in, listed alphabetically by county, are:
Barton
Clarissa Noelle Ratzlaff, Great Bend Jack Leander Roenne, Great Bend
Butler
Hayley Ann Koontz, Benton
Cherokee
Addison Alese Tucker, Galena
Cowley
John Michael Taylor, Atlanta Christin Dunnell Smith, Winfield
Douglas
Madisyn Dianne Schmitz, Eudora Michael Aaron Archer, Lawrence Elm P. Beck, Lawrence Damien James Burger, Lawrence Chad Josiah Cook, Lawrence Jackson Scott de la Garza, Lawrence Rosston Joseph Eubank, Lawrence Anna Christine Hedstrom, Lawrence James Andrew Henderson, Lawrence Natalie Alison Jabben, Lawrence Carter Michael Jones, Lawrence Makaylah Lynn Jones, Lawrence Jared James Lenz, Lawrence Sarah Kathryn Lynch-Chaput, Lawrence Jillian Elizabeth Roy, Lawrence Isabela Guadalupe Solorio, Lawrence Collin Winslow Studer, Lawrence Chloe Ann Thompson, Lawrence Trace Lee Tobin, Lawrence Elijah Jeffrey Waugh, Lawrence Hudson David Weaver, Lawrence
Ellis
Brianna Kay Brin, Hays
Ford
Nichole Marie Byer, Dodge City
Harvey
Destiny Dawn Denney, Newton
Johnson
Mandi Michelle Abbott, Leawood Megan Elizabeth Gannon, Leawood Madisen Kate Hane, Leawood Benjamin Richard Baker, Lenexa Annie Elizabeth Birney, Lenexa Drew Elizabeth Davis, Lenexa Juliana Mare Herrera, Lenexa Emily Hope O’Donnell, Lenexa Samuel Alejandro Sketers, Lenexa Lucas Ryan Zoller, Lenexa Cinthia Terrazas, Mission Dilini Lankachandra, Mission Hills Madeline Lizette Ames, Olathe Tristin Andrieu Lewis Dierking, Olathe Isaiah Cole Eaton, Olathe Morgan Renee Hood, Olathe Kelsey Danielle Saunders, Olathe Lindsay Marie Barash, Overland Park Brooke Ashton Brownlee, Overland Park Cody Von Byrd, Overland Park Wangxue Deng, Overland Park Makenzie Ryan Fankhauser, Overland Park Emily Rosalyn Featherston, Overland Park Jamie Elizabeth Gallagher, Overland Park Richard Ryan Love, Overland Park Alden John Vogel, Overland Park Molly Sue Wackerly, Overland Park Tiffany Lauren Wylde, Overland Park Caitlin Daly McPartland, Prairie Village Julea Miranda Pina, Prairie Village Elizabeth Grace Rohr, Prairie Village Monica Sandu, Prairie Village Andrew Dean McLandsborough, Roeland Park Caroline Maria Rene McCord, Shawnee Nicholas Christopher Kaechele, Spring Hill Caitlin Alyse Kremer, Spring Hill
Leavenworth
Angelique Joeann Margve, Basehor
Lyon
Nickolas Reid Velo, Emporia
Pottawatomie
Daniel Mark Frazier, Saint Marys Margaret Elizabeth Shermoen, Wamego
Riley
Carolo Dionicio Gonzalex, Manhattan Joseph Logan Hoover, Manhattan Candice Lea Wilson, Manhattan
Saline
Emma Rose Dipota, Salina William David Strommen, Salina
Sedgwick
Michael Dee Vinson, Derby Michael Roy Van Deest, Maize Gabrielle Christine Altenor, Wichita Joel Geoffrey Amend, Wichita Leslie Nichole Anderson, Wichita Cameron Joseph Edens, Wichita Brooke Stanton Flucke, Wichita Baron Jack Hoy, Wichita Sophia Ana Padgett, Wichita Caitlin Corrine Riffer, Wichita Makaela Breanne Stevens, Wichita Ethan John Ward, Wichita
Shawnee
Joshua Nolan Becker, Topeka Loretta Anne Caballero, Topeka Jacob Wendell Cibulka, Topeka Kiley Jan-Elizabeth Deain, Topeka Andrew Zachary Foreman, Topeka Edgar Fuentes, Topeka Quinn McLean Hughes, Topeka William Elliot Woody Naeger, Topeka Dylan James Pryor, Topeka Jacob Christian Alexander Reaves, Topeka Carly Paige Steward, Topeka Megan Kristine Walden, Topeka Gabriel Reece Walker, Topeka
Wyandotte
Olivia Leigh Banes, Bonner Springs Bailey Hannah Baker, Kansas City
_______________
Arizona
Noel Kenmadu Ahaneku, Maricopa Chance Matthew Berndt, Phoenix
Colorado
Emily Jean Marie McCurley, Larkspur
Florida
Bryna Rachelle Faimon, Pensacola
Iowa
Spencer Ray Mitchell, University Heights
Missouri
Samantha LeAnn Mishler, Independence Kevin Christopher Birzer, Kansas City Austin Marcus Polina, Kansas City Brien Charles Stonebreaker, Kansas City Vincent Cyrus Amiri, Kearney Kyleigh Jo Rupe, Lee’s Summit
New York
Rebecca Rachel Halff, New York
Oklahoma
Paige Elizabeth Harding, Afton
South Carolina
Zachary Christian Freeman, Aiken
Virginia
Cody Grant Hoagland, Concord Alisha Deanna Mehdi, Herndon
Members of the UConn community and the general public are invited to join in a bipartisan conversation about fostering civic and democratic engagement at The Dodd Center for Human Rights at UConn Storrs on Thursday, September 26, 2024, when Congress to Campus comes to UConn.
The flagship program of the nonprofit organization FMC – a bipartisan, voluntary alliance of former U.S. Senators and Representatives who advocate for representative democracy at home and abroad – Congress to Campus offers a unique civic educational experience by engaging honest dialogue with bipartisan teams of former members of Congress, congressional staff, and American diplomats.
“We know from our own work at UConn on programs like Democracy and Dialogues just how powerful it can be to engage in meaningful and civil discussion on the most critical issues we, as a society, are facing,” says James Waller, the inaugural Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice at UConn and director of Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs, which is hosting the Congress to Campus event.
“We hope that this event will showcase how civil discourse, and even disagreement, can be a productive and healthy part of our democracy,” Waller says.
Congress to Campus sessions have been held on 183 campuses in 43 states and seven countries, reaching more than 57,000 students in the last 10 years alone.
Loretta Sanchez (contributed photo)
UConn’s Congress to Campus event will feature a discussion with the Honorable Loretta Sanchez (D-CA, 1997-2017), a former senior member of the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees; and the Honorable Fred Upton (R-MI, 1987-2023), a former chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and top Republican leader of the Subcommittee on Energy.
Their discussion will be moderated by NBC Connecticut anchor and reporter Amber Diaz ’11 (CLAS), and UConn President Radenka Maric will deliver welcoming remarks
While visiting UConn, Reps. Sanchez and Upton will also engage with members of the broader community in a series of workshops small group discussions, keynotes, and classroom visits on topics including civil discourse, messaging and disinformation, democracy and human rights, and participation and inclusion.
The event is co-sponsored by UConn’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, School of Public Policy, Department of Political Science, Undergraduate Student Government, Department of Residential Life, Community Outreach, Office of Outreach and Engagement, and the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work.
Fred Upton (contributed photo)
It’s supported by Citizen Travelers, the nonpartisan civic engagement initiative of Travelers.
“We’re so grateful for our many partners on this event, and we hope students as well as members of our UConn community and the greater public will join us for this important conversation,” says Waller.
The Dodd Center is home to robust academic programs and innovative external engagement in human rights, including the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, its Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs, the University Archives and Special Collections, and the Center for Judaic and Contemporary Jewish Life.
The outreach and engagement arm of human rights at UConn, Dodd Human Rights Impact works to develop and support programs and initiatives that seek to directly impact local and global communities by helping them meet their human rights challenges.
Space is limited. Please click here to register for this event.
For more information about Dodd Impact, visithumanrights.uconn.edu/dodd-impact-programs.
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
The first project of the new season at the HSE ART GALLERY on Pionerka will continue the cycle of paired solo exhibitions of “teachers and students” of the HSE School of Design. This time, the main characters will be the head of the profile “Modern Painting” and its graduates – Vladimir Potapov and Sasha Podgorodskaya.
The format of double solo exhibitions allows, firstly, to present a cross-section of the most significant works of young authors created during their years of study, and secondly, to compare the perspectives of students and their teachers.
The title of Vladimir Potapov’s project, “The Duration of Decay,” refers to the artist’s personal exhibition, “The Moment of Decay,” in the Art Ru Agency space in 2011. For him, this was not only his first solo project in Moscow, but also his first attempt to go beyond the classical painting convention of “canvas and oil.” The exhibition allowed him to chart a path and showed prospects for finding practical answers to the question, “Is painting alive today?”
The various stages of this journey are reflected in the exhibition at HSE ART GALLERY. The works on display belong to different series created by Potapov from 2012 to 2022. This range allows us to cover the author’s wide range of tools and radically different methods that have developed over the course of a decade.
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
Please note; This information is raw content directly from the information source. It is accurate to what the source is stating and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
This post originally appeared on theTransform with Google Cloud blog. It was first published April 12, 2024; last updated with new use cases September 24, 2024.
Since generative AI first captured the world’s attention, there’s been a vigorous discussion about what, exactly, the new technology is best used for. While we all enjoyed those early funny chats and witty limericks, we’ve quickly discovered that many of the biggest AI opportunities are clearly in the enterprise, government, and with exciting new companies.
When we first published this post during Google Cloud Next ‘24, we showcased 101 of the best use cases out of the hundreds featured across the event. Now, we’re adding another 84 to the list as customers across the globe continue to put generative AI to work.
[If you’ve visited this post in the past, you can find the newest use cases listed at the top of each section.]
In a matter of months, organizations have gone from AI helping answer questions, to AI making predictions, to generative AI agents. What makes AI agents unique is that they can take actions to achieve specific goals, whether that’s guiding a shopper to the perfect pair of shoes, helping an employee looking for the right health benefits, or supporting nursing staff with smoother patient hand-offs during shifts changes.
In our work with customers, we keep hearing that their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes, and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; code creation; data analysis; cybersecurity; and creative ideation and production.
Hundreds of Google Cloud customers have now put AI agents and gen-AI solutions into production throughout their businesses and the world — with many seeing a tangible return on investment. They have come to rely on Google Cloud technologies that include our AI infrastructure, Gemini models, Vertex AI platform, Google Workspace, and Google Distributed Cloud.
Here’s a snapshot of how 185 of these industry leaders are putting AI to use today, creating real-world use cases that will transform tomorrow.
Customer agents
Similar to great sales and service people, customer agents are able to listen carefully, understand your needs, and recommend the right products and services. They work seamlessly across channels including the web, mobile, and point of sale, and can be integrated into product experiences with voice and video.
1.Alaska Airlines is developing natural language search, providing travelers with a conversational experience powered by AI that’s akin to interacting with a knowledgeable travel agent. This chatbot aims to streamline travel booking, enhance customer experience, and reinforce brand identity.
2. Bennie Health uses Vertex AI to power its innovative employee health benefits platform, providing actionable insights and streamlining data management in order to enhance efficiency and decision-making for employees and HR teams.
3. Beyond 12, a tech-enabled nonprofit focused on student empowerment, has developed an AI-powered college coach to offer scalable coaching to first-generation students that’s available over text, app, and the web.
4. CareerVillage is building an app called Coach to empower job seekers, especially underrepresented youth, in their career preparedness; already featuring 35 career development activities, the aim is to have more than 100 by next year.
5. Character.ai built its realistic conversational chat platform using the full stack of Google Cloud AI services, including for model training and daily operations, allowing it to manage terabytes of conversations each day without interruption.
6. Click Therapeutics develops prescription digital therapeutics designed to treat disease. Its Clinical Operations team leverages Gemini for Google Workspace to transform complex operations data into actionable insights, so they can quickly pinpoint ways to streamline the patient experience in clinical trials.
7. Formula E can now summarize a two-hour long race commentary into a 2-minute podcast in any language, incorporating driver data and ongoing seasonal storylines.
8. General Motors’ OnStar has been augmented with new AI features, including a virtual assistant powered by Google Cloud’s conversational AI technologies that are better able to recognize the speaker’s intent.
9. Gojek, an Indonesia-based super app, launched “Dira by GoTo AI,” a Bahasa Indonesia AI-powered voice assistant integrated into their GoPay service, allowing customers to use voice command to eliminate typing and scrolling, and complete tasks like bill payments and money transfers with fewer steps.
10. GroupBy, an ecommerce service provider, developed an AI-first Search and Discovery Platform powered by Vertex AI Search for Retail. This solution is meticulously designed to optimize revenue, strengthen brand loyalty, and drive sales growth for B2C and B2B retailers.
11. Hotelplan Suisse built a chatbot trained on the business’s travel expertise to answer customer inquiries in real-time, and, following that success, it plans to use gen AI to create travel content.
12. Justicia Lab is developing an AI-powered assistant that will simplify legal processes for asylum seekers and immigrants; by uploading a picture from a legal letter or document, users can extract valuable information and then receive personalized guidance and next steps.
13. Mercado Libre has incorporated semantic search into its digital shopping platforms, using AI embeddings from the Vertex AI Agent Builder, which greatly improved product recommendations and discoverability for more than 200 million consumers across Latin America.
14. Motorola’s Moto AI leverages Gemini and Imagen to help smartphone users unlock new levels of productivity, creativity, and enjoyment with features such as conversation summaries, notification digests, image creation, and natural language search — all with reliable responses grounded in Google Search.
15. mRelief has built an SMS-accessible AI chatbot to simplify the application process for the SNAP food assistance program in the U.S., featuring easy-to-understand eligibility information and direct assistance within minutes rather than days.
16. Personal AI offers a “personal language model” using only the data of one individual or brand and allowing them to control and own how it is used. Built on your own data, facts, and opinions, it creates a responsive and interactive messaging experience that helps people be more productive and deepen relationships.
17. PODS worked with the advertising agency Tombras to create the “World’s Smartest Billboard” using Gemini — a campaign on its trucks that could adapt to each neighborhood in New York City, changing in real-time based on data. It hit all 299 neighborhoods in just 29 hours, creating more than 6,000 unique headlines.
18. Quora developed Poe, its own generative AI platform for people to discover and chat with AI-powered bots, including Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral’s Large 2 — many of which are hosted on Google Cloud’s purpose-built AI infrastructure.
19. ScottsMiracle-Gro built an AI agent on Vertex AI to provide tailored gardening advice and product recommendations for consumers.
20. Snap has deployed the multimodal capability of Gemini within its “My AI” chatbot and has since seen over 2.5-times as much engagement within Snapping to My AI in the United States.
21. Tabiya has built a conversational interface, Compass, that helps young people find employment opportunities; the platform asks questions and requests information, drawing out skills and experiences and matching those to appropriate roles.
22. Telecom Italia (TIM) implemented a Google-powered voice agent to address many customer calls, increasing efficiency by 20%.
23. UPS Capital launched DeliveryDefense Address Confidence, which uses machine learning and UPS data to provide a confidence score for shippers to help them determine the likelihood of a successful delivery.
24. Volkswagen of America built a virtual assistant in the myVW app, where drivers can explore their owners’ manuals and ask questions, such as, “How do I change a flat tire?” or “What does this digital cockpit indicator light mean?” Users can also use Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to see helpful information and context on indicator lights simply by pointing their smartphone cameras at the dashboard.
25. ADT is building a customer agent to help its millions of customers select, order, and set up their home security.
26. Alaska Airlines is developing a personalized travel search experience using advanced AI techniques, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content.
27. Best Buy is using Gemini to launch a generative AI-powered virtual assistant this summer that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions, and more; in-store and digital customer-service associates are also gaining gen-AI tools to better serve customers anywhere they need help.
28. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Vertex AI to modernize transportation operations for a smoother, more efficient journey.
29. Etsy uses Vertex AI training to optimize their search recommendations and ads models, delivering better listing suggestions to buyers and helping sellers grow their businesses.
30. IHG Hotels & Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app.
31. ING Bank aims to offer a superior customer experience and has developed a gen-AI chatbot for workers to enhance self-service capabilities and improve answer quality on customer queries.
32. Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retailers, has put customer service at the center of its AI strategy, including using Vertex AI to create “Lu’s Brain” to power an interactive conversational agent for Lu, Magalu’s popular brand persona (the 3D bot has more than 14 million followers between TikTok and Instagram).
33. Mercedes Benz will infuse e-commerce capabilities into its online storefront with a gen AI-powered smart sales assistant. Mercedes also plans to expand its use of Google Cloud AI in its call centers and is using Vertex AI and Gemini to personalize marketing campaigns.
34. Oppo/OnePlus is incorporating Gemini models and Google Cloud AI into their phones to deliver innovative customer experiences, including news and audio recording summaries, AI toolbox, and more.
35. Samsung is deploying Gemini Pro and Imagen 2 to their Galaxy S24 smartphones so users can take advantage of amazing features like text summarization, organization, and magical image editing.
36. The Minnesota Division of Driver and Vehicle Services helps non-English speakers get licenses and other services with two-way real-time translation.
37. Pepperdine University has students and faculty who speak many languages, and with Gemini in Google Meet, they can benefit from real-time translated captioning and notes.
38. Sutherland, a leading digital transformation company, is focused on bringing together human expertise and AI, including boosting its client-facing teams by automatically surfacing suggested responses and automating insights in real time.
39. Target uses Google Cloud to power AI solutions on the Target app and Target.com, including personalized Target Circle offers and Starbucks at Drive Up, their curbside pickup solution.
40. Tokopedia, an Indonesian ecommerce leader, is using Vertex AI to improve data quality, increasing unique products being sold by 5%.
41. US News saw a double-digit impact in key metrics like click-through rate, time spent on page, and traffic volume to its pages after implementing Vertex AI Search.
42-45. IntesaSanpaolo, MacquarieBank, and Scotiabank are exploring the potential of gen AI to transform the way we live, work, bank, and invest — particularly how the new technology can boost productivity and operational efficiency in banking.
Employee agents
Employee agents help workers be more productive and collaborate better together. These agents can streamline processes, manage repetitive tasks, answer employee questions, as well as edit and translate critical communications.
46. 2bots offers technology solutions, such as chatbots and virtual agents, built with Google Cloud’s AI solutions; these intelligent chatbots and content generation tools are transforming the way companies interact with their customers.
47. Augment is building an AI personal assistant that offers enhanced note-taking and collects information across your apps, including calendar, email, texts, and social media, so users can more quickly and easily find personal information and keep their lives organized.
48. Bayes Impact builds AI products to support nonprofits, and its flagship product, CaseAI, is a digital case manager that integrates with an NGO’s current system to add smart features to draft action plans tailored to a beneficiary’s unique history; caseworkers have saved 25 hours of work per week on average.
49. Bell Canada has built customizable contact center solutions for its business customers that offer AI-powered agents to address callers, and Agent Assist, which listens when a human agent is on, offering suggestions and sentiment analysis. AI has contributed $20 million in savings across customer operations.
50. Best Buy can generate conversation summaries in real time using Contact Center AI, allowing live agents to give their full attention to understanding and supporting customers, resulting in a 30-to-90-second reduction in average call time and after-call work. Both customers and agents have cited improved satisfaction.
51. Camanchaca, a Chilean seafood company, took only six weeks to develop Elon, a virtual assistant that aims to provide more efficient customer service through digital channels, enhancing Camanchaca’s customer interactions.
52. Certify OS is automating credentialing, licensing, and monitoring of medical providers for healthcare networks, relieving the burden of time-consuming and often siloed information.
53. Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs widely uses Gemini for Google Workspace, estimating that employees are saving an average five hours per week just with AI capabilities in Gmail. Gemini is also streamlining time-consuming, manual processes through uses like AI-generated transcriptions and auto-formatting of pharmaceutical lab results or FDA compliance documentation.
54. Dun & Bradstreet built an email-generation tool with Gemini that helps sellers create tailored, personalized communications to prospects and customers for its research services. The company also developed intelligent search capabilities to help users with complex queries like, “Find me all the companies in this area with a high ESG rating.”
55. England’s Football Association is training Vertex AI on the FA’s historical and current scouting reports so they can be transformed into concise summaries, helping national teams discover future talent.
56. Fireflies.ai can transcribe, summarize, and analyze meetings, recordings, and other voice conversations to save time and improve collaboration and information sharing across teams.
57. Fluna, a Pan-African digital services company, has automated the analysis and drafting of legal agreements using Vertex AI, Document AI, and Gemini 1.5 Pro, achieving an accuracy of 92% in data extraction while ensuring security and reliability for sensitive information.
58. Hemominas, Brazil’s largest blood bank, partnered with Xertica to develop an omnichannel chatbot for donor search and scheduling, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency. The AI solution has the potential to save half-a-million lives annually by attracting more donors and optimizing blood supply management.
59. Hiscox used BigQuery and Vertex AI to create the first AI-enhanced lead underwriting model for insurers, automating and accelerating the quoting for complex risks from three days down to a few minutes.
60. LiveX AI delivers AI Agents that swiftly enhance product education, boost customer conversion, reduce churn, and provide personalized customer support, with the goal of offering everyone a seamless VIP experience across their customer journey.
61. Opportunity@Work is applying gen AI to scale a suite of software tools and APIs that help employers identify “STAR” job candidates — “skilled through alternative routes” such as community college, military service, and on-the-job experience — helping fill roles in a tight market and expand opportunities.
62. QuantumMetric has introduced Felix AI, powered by Gemini Pro, to simplify digital analytics and decision making. Felix AI automatically summarizes a user’s web or mobile session and consolidates the moments that matter most into short, readable summaries for customer service workers.
63. Randstad, a large HR services and talent provider, is using Gemini for Workspace across its organization to transform its work culture, leading to a more culturally diverse and inclusive workplace that’s seen a double-digit reduction in sick days.
64. Sprinklr built Sprinklr AI+ into its unified customer experience management platform, giving brands gen-AI capabilities for customer service, insights, social media management, and marketing that has enterprise-grade governance, security, and data privacy built-in.
65. Thomson Reuters added Gemini Pro to its suite of large language models approved for employee use; with its 2-million-token context window, Gemini makes some tasks as much as 10-times faster to process and can process entire documents in context.
66. Warner Bros. Discovery built an AI captioning tool with Vertex AI and saw a 50% reduction in overall costs, and an 80% reduction in the time it takes to manually caption a file without the use of machine learning.
67. The U.S. Air Force built a new proof-of-concept portal for searching, browsing, and reading e-published PDFs — all within a 90-day deadline that leveraged the prebuilt tools and speed of Vertex AI Search and Conversation.
68. Avery Dennison empowered their employees with generative AI to enable secure, flexible, and borderless collaboration for enhanced productivity to drive growth.
69. Bank of New York Mellon built a virtual assistant to help employees find relevant information and answers to their questions.
70. Bayer is building a radiology platform that will assist radiologists with data analysis, intelligent search, and to create documents that meet healthcare requirements needed for regulatory approval. The bioscience company is also harnessing BigQuery and Vertex AI to develop additional digital medical solutions and drugs more efficiently.
71. Bristol Myers Squibb is transforming its document processes for clinical trials using Vertex AI and Google Workspace. Now, documentation that took scientists weeks now gets to a first draft in minutes.
72. BenchSci develops generative AI solutions empowering scientists to understand complex connections in biological research, saving them time and financial resources and ultimately bringing new medicine to patients faster.
73. Cintas is using Vertex AI Search to develop an internal knowledge center for customer service and sales teams to easily find key information.
74. Covered California, the state’s healthcare marketplace, is using Document AI to help improve the consumer and employee experience by automating parts of the documentation and verification process when residents apply for coverage.
75. Dasa, the largest medical diagnostics company in Brazil, is helping physicians detect relevant findings in test results more quickly.
76. DaVita leverages DocAI and Healthcare NLP to transform kidney care, including analyzing medical records, uncovering critical patient insights, and reducing errors. AI enables physicians to focus on personalized care, resulting in significant improvements in healthcare delivery.
77. Discover Financial helps their 10,000 contact center representatives to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures during calls.
78. HCA Healthcare is testing Cati, a virtual AI caregiver assistant that helps to ensure continuity of care when one caregiver shift ends and another begins. They are also using gen AI to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care.
79. The Home Depot has built an application called Sidekick, which helps store associates manage inventory and keep shelves stocked; notably, vision models help associates prioritize which actions to take.
80. Los Angeles Rams are utilizing AI across the board from content analysis to player scouting.
81. McDonald’s will leverage data, AI, and edge technologies across its thousands of restaurants to implement innovation faster and to enhance employee and customer experiences.
82. Pennymac, a leading US-based national mortgage lender, is using Gemini across several teams including HR, where Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Gmail is helping them accelerate recruiting, hiring, and new employee onboarding.
83. Robert Bosch, the world’s largest automotive supplier, revolutionizes marketing through gen AI-powered solutions, streamlining processes, optimizing resource allocation, and maximizing efficiency across 100+ decentralized departments.
84. Symphony, the communications platform for the financial services industry, uses Vertex AI to help finance and trading teams collaborate across multiple asset classes.
85. Uber is using AI agents to help employees be more productive, save time, and be even more effective at work. For customer service representatives, they’ve launched new tools that summarize communications with users and can even surface context from previous interactions, so front-line staff can be more helpful and effective.
86. The U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs is using AI at the edge to improve cancer detection for service members and veterans. The Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM) is deployed at remote military treatment facilities around the world. The prototype device is helping pathologists find cancer faster and with better accuracy.
87. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has improved the quality and efficiency of their patent and trademark examination process by implementing AI-driven technologies.
88. Verizon is using generative AI to help teams in network operations and customer experience get the answers they need faster.
89. Victoria’s Secret is testing AI-powered agents to help their in-store associates find information about product availability, inventory, and fitting and sizing tips, so they can better tailor recommendations to customers.
90. Vodafone uses Vertex AI to search and understand specific commercial terms and conditions across more than 10,000 contracts with more than 800 communications operators
91. WellSky is integrating Google Cloud’s healthcare and Vertex AI capabilities to reduce the time spent completing documentation outside work hours.
92. Woolworths, the leading retailer in Australia, boosts employees’ confidence in communications with “Help me write” across Google Workspace products for more than 10,000 administrative employees. It’s also using Gemini to create next-generation promotions, as well as for quickly assisting customer service reps in summarizing all previous customer interactions in real time.
93-97. Box, Typeface, Glean, CitiBank, and Securiti AI discuss developing AI-powered apps across the enterprise, with measurable returns on investment for marketing, financial services, and HR use cases.
98-99. Highmark Health and Freenome join Bristol Myers Squibb to explore how AI can improve efficiency and innovation across care delivery, drug discovery, clinical trial planning, and bringing medicines to market.
Code agents
Code agents are helping developers and product teams to design, create, and operate applications faster and better, and to ramp up on new languages and code bases. Many organizations are already seeing double-digit gains in productivity, leading to faster deployment and cleaner, clearer code.
100. Labelbox has built a fully managed AI model evaluation solution directly integrated into the Vertex AI platform, allowing Google Cloud users to seamlessly launch human evaluation jobs and set specific criteria for evaluation, such as question-answering and summarization; this eases and accelerates the ability to deploy human-in-the-loop AI systems with higher levels of trust and authority.
101. Leroy Merlin, a global home improvement retailer, developed its Pull Request Analyzer using Vertex AI. This generative AI solution summarizes code changes, helping developers understand projects faster and improve code review efficiency.
102. Linear, a product development platform, built Similar Issues, a feature that uses AI to detect and prevent duplicate or overlapping tickets and ensures cleaner and more accurate data representation.
103. Magic is building a developer platform with a 100-million-token context window, so organizations can upload extremely large code bases and more easily query and build on them using gen AI assistance.
104. Pinecone provides infrastructure for developers to build accurate, secure, and scalable AI applications, allowing companies to easily ground gen AI apps in their proprietary data for use in AI search, retrieval-augmented generation, coding agents, and more.
105. Regnology built its Ticket-to-Code Writer tool with Gemini 1.5 Pro to automate the conversion of bug tickets into actionable code, significantly streamlining the software development process.
106. Weights & Biases, a creator of AI tools for developers, created W&B Weave, a lightweight toolkit to track, evaluate, and debug gen AI applications built with Gemini, so teams can confidently go from demo to production.
107. Capgemini has been using Code Assist to improve software engineering productivity, quality, security, and developer experience, with early results showing workload gains for coding and more stable code quality.
108. Commerzbank is enhancing developer efficiency through Code Assist’s robust security and compliance features.
109. Quantiphi saw developer productivity gains of more than 30% during their Code Assist pilot.
110. Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform.
111. Seattle Children’s hospital is using AI to boost data engineering productivity and accelerate development.
112. Turing is customizing Gemini Code Assist on their private codebase, empowering their developers with highly personalized and contextually relevant coding suggestions that have increased productivity around 30 percent and made day-to-day coding more enjoyable.
113. Wayfair piloted Code Assist, and those developers with the code agent were able to set up their environments 55 percent faster than before, there was a 48 percent increase in code performance during unit testing, and 60 percent of developers reported that they were able to focus on more satisfying work.
Data agents
Data agents are like having knowledgeable data analysts and researchers at your fingertips. They can help answer questions about internal and external sources, synthesize research, develop new models — and, best of all, help find the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet, and then help get the answers.
114. 180Seguros is powering its data management platform for employees with Google Cloud AI and BigQuery to improve operational metric tracking, allowing for 3X faster query times.
115. Addy AI is helping mortgage lenders and banks automate their lending processes with custom AI models trained on Vertex AI. For example, the platform can extract loan opportunity details from lengthy email threads with numerous attachments.
116. Bayer Crop Science has developed Climate FieldView, a comprehensive agricultural platform with more than 250 layers of data and billions of data points; AI-powered recommendations allow farmers to design and monitor their fields for greater yields and efficient fertilization, with the added benefit of reduced carbon emissions.
117. CME Group is building a first-of-its-kind cloud-based commodities trading platform with AI tools built-in, offering CME’s trading customers access to deeper insights and smarter trades as well as rapid experimentation on new trading strategies that won’t interrupt existing trade flows.
118. Digits is developing next-gen accounting software for startups and small businesses; using AI-driven bookkeeping, expense management, and financial analysis, Digits enables business owners to achieve financial clarity and focus on growth.
119. Elanco, a leader in animal health, has implemented a gen AI framework supporting critical business processes, such as Pharmacovigilance, Customer Orders, and Clinical Insights. The framework, powered by Vertex AI and Gemini, has resulted in an estimated ROI of $1.9 million since launching last year.
120. Full Fact, a UK-based nonprofit working in 18 countries to combat misinformation, is now using gen AI to actively monitor stories so its 30 fact-checking partner organizations can focus on addressing specific claims and harmful information.
121. Fullstory, a digital behavioral data platform, is building the ability to analyze and summarize user behavior on a site to create more informed and enriching chatbot experiences; responses are more relevant and accurate, ultimately improving virtual agent performance and customer experience
122. GamudaBerhad, a Malaysian infrastructure and property management company, has integrated a Gemini-powered conversational agent into its cloud-based Tunnel Insight platform, providing faster information and insights during construction projects.
123. IntelligenciaAI is using AI models to research novel new drugs, relying on Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure to deliver scalable research that is accurate and transparent to meet the stringent needs of medicine.
124. IPRally built a custom machine-learning platform that uses natural language processing on the text of more than 120 million global patent documents, creating an accurate, easily searchable database that adds more than 200,000 new sources a week.
125. Ipsos built a data analysis tool for its teams of market researchers, eliminating the need for time-consuming requests to data analysts, which is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models as well as Grounding with Google Search to enhance real-world accuracy from contemporaneous Search information.
126. Materiom, a startup researching zero-waste, bio-based alternatives to fossil-fuel-made products like plastics, is creating a gen AI tool that enables entrepreneurs to develop novel compostable materials with broad applications; AI offers faster research and information gathering to speed up the development process.
127. Mendel has built a clinical AI system designed to break down the longstanding silos in medical data, boosting accuracy, accessibility, and ultimately patient health outcomes.
128. NeuroPace, a medical device company, built a solution to quickly identify effective epilepsy treatment options best suited to different patients; by analyzing brainwave patterns, it can find similar patients and apply successful therapies, streamlining personalized care.
129. NotCo, a Chilean food tech company, partnered with Eleven Solutions to develop a conversational AI chatbot powered by Gemini; the chatbot has revolutionized data access, allowing employees to instantly query their SAP system and gain real-time insights for faster, data-driven decision-making.
130. SURA Investments, the largest asset manager in Latin America, developed an AI-based analysis model for employees that allows them to better understand customer needs and improve customer experience and satisfaction.
131. AI21 Labs offers a BigQuery integration called Contextual Answers that allows users to query data conversationally and get high-quality answers quickly.
132. Anthropic has partnered with Google Cloud to offer its family of Claude 3 models on Vertex AI — providing organizations with more model options for intelligence, speed, cost-efficiency, and vision for enterprise use cases.
133. The Asteroid Institute is using AI to discover hidden asteroids in existing astronomical data. This is a major focus for astronomers researching the evolution of the Solar System, investors and businesses hoping to fly missions to asteroids, and for all of us who want to prevent future large asteroid impacts on Earth.
134. Contextual is working with Google Cloud to offer enterprises fully customizable, trustworthy, privacy-aware AI grounded in internal knowledge bases.
135. Cox 2M, the commercial IoT division of Cox Communications, is able to make smarter, faster business decisions using AI-powered analytics.
136. Essential AI, a developer of enterprise AI solutions, is using Google Cloud’s AI-optimized TPU v5p accelerator chips to train its own AI models.
137. Generali Italia, Italy’s largest insurance provider, used Vertex AI to build a model evaluation pipeline that helps ML teams quickly evaluate performance and deploy models.
138. Globo, one of Brazil’s largest media networks, is using Service Extensions and Media CDN to fight piracy during live events by blocking pirated streams in real time.
139. Golden State Warriors are using AI to improve the fan experience content in their Chase Center app.
140. Hugging Face is collaborating with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and Google Cloud hardware and software.
141. Kakao Brain, part of Korean technology company Kakao Group, has built a large-scale AI language model that is the largest Korean language-specific LLM in the market, with 66 billion parameters. They’ve also developed a text-to-image generator called Karlo.
142. Mayo Clinic has given thousands of its scientific researchers access to 50 petabytes worth of clinical data through Vertex AI search, accelerating information retrieval across multiple languages.
143. McLaren Racing is using Google AI to get up-to-the-millisecond insights during races and training to gain a competitive edge.
144. Mercado Libre is testing BigQuery and Looker to optimize capacity planning and reservations with delivery carriers and airlines to fulfill shipments faster.
145. Mistral AI will use Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, to further test, build, and scale up its LLMs, all while benefiting from Google Cloud’s security and privacy standards.
146. MSCI uses machine learning with Vertex AI, BigQuery and Cloud Run to enrich its datasets to help our clients gain insight into around 1 million asset locations to help manage climate-related risks.
147. NewsCorp is using Vertex AI to help search data across 30,000 sources and 2.5 billion news articles updated daily.
148. Orange operates in 26 countries where local data must be kept in each country. They are using AI on Google Distributed Cloud to improve network performance and deliver super-responsive translation capabilities.
149. Spotify leveraged Dataflow for large-scale generation of ML podcast previews, and they plan to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with data engineering and data science to build better experiences for their customers and creators.
150. UPS is building a digital twin of its entire distribution network, so both workers and customers can see where their packages are at any time.
151. Workday is using natural language processing in Vertex Search and Conversation to make data insights more accessible for technical and non-technical users alike.
152. Woven — Toyota‘s investment in the future of mobility — is partnering with Google to leverage vast amounts of data and AI to enable autonomous driving, supported by thousands of ML workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer. This has resulted in resulting in 50% total-cost-of-ownership savings to support automated driving.
152-153. Broward County, Florida, and Southern California Edison are using geospatial capabilities and AI to improve infrastructure planning and monitoring, generate new insights, and create regional resilience for communities facing climate challenges today and tomorrow.
154-155. Kinaxis and Dematic are building data-driven supply chains to address logistics use cases including scenario modeling, planning, operations management, and automation.
156-157. NOAA and USAID are among the U.S. government agencies using Google Cloud AI to unlock critical data insights to streamline operations and improve mission outcomes — all with an emphasis on responsible AI.
Security agents
Security agents assist security operations by radically increasing the speed of investigations, automating monitoring and response for greater vigilance and compliance controls. They can also help guard data and models from cyberattacks, such as malicious prompt injection.
158. Apex Fintech is using Gemini in Security to accelerate the writing of complex threat detections from hours to a matter of seconds.
159. Exabeam has built a generative AI copilot for security analysts into its New-Scale Security Operations Platform.
160. Fiserv, a developer of financial services technology, can now summarize threats, find answers, and detect, validate, and respond to security events faster with the Gemini in Security Operations platform.
161. NetRise developed Trace to provide software supply chain security by introducing AI-powered intent-driven searches; these allow users to search their assets based on the underlying motives or purposes behind the code and configurations, rather than solely relying on signature-based methods.
162. Palo Alto Networks is using Gemini to create a grounded AI assistant for 24/7 security platform support in order to improve agent efficiency and response time; grounding the assistant in organizational data and security protocols has greatly improved the accuracy of responses.
163. BBVA uses AI in Google SecOps to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats with more accuracy, speed, and scale. The platform now surfaces critical security data in seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours, and delivers highly automated responses.
164. Behavox is using Google Cloud technology and LLMs to provide industry leading regulatory compliance and front office solutions for financial institutions globally.
165. Charles Schwab has integrated their own intelligence into the AI-powered Google SecOps, so analysts can better prioritize work and respond to threats.
166. Fiserv’s security operations engineers create detections and playbooks with much less effort, while analysts get answers more quickly.
167. Grupo Boticário, one of the largest beauty retail and cosmetics companies in Brazil, employs real-time security models to prevent fraud and to detect and respond to issues.
168. Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM, the AI-driven security operations platform, is built on more than a decade of expertise in machine-learning models and the most comprehensive, rich, and diverse data store in the industry. Backed by Google’s advanced cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services, including BigQuery and Gemini models, the combination delivers global scale and near real-time protection across all cybersecurity offerings.
169. Pfizer can now aggregate cybersecurity data sources, cutting analysis times from days to seconds.
Creative agents
Creative agents can expand your organization with the best design and production skills, working across images, slides, and exploring concepts with workers. Many organizations are building agents for their marketing teams, audio and video production teams, and all the creative people that can use a hand. With creative agents, anyone can become a designer, artist, or producer.
170. AdoreMe marketers write differentiated product descriptions in one hour, a tedious task which used to take 30-40 hours a month thanks to Gemini for Google Workspace.
171. Globo, the largest media group in Latin America, is using Google Cloud’s AI to hyper-personalize content for its streaming users, and create a better experience for spectators.
172. Higgsfield.ai built a number of text-to-video apps for consumers, including Diffuse 2.0, which can combine users photos, videos, and texts through AI models to create more realistic avatars.
173. Jasper trains its suite of creativity-, writing-, and marketing-focused AI models on Google’s AI infrastructure, delivering on-brand, data-optimized assets faster and at scale to teams large and small.
174. Puma is using Imagen to customize product photos on its website, saving time and ensuring they are locally relevant across markets; PUMA India has already seen a 10% increase in click through rate.
175. RadissonHotel Group personalized its advertising at scale in collaboration with Accenture and using Vertex AI and Gemini models, training them on extensive datasets stored in BigQuery; ad teams saw productivity rise around 50% while revenue increased from AI-powered campaigns by more than 20%
176. SquareEnix is using customer data to develop AI-optimized marketing assets to keep its gamers engaged, sharing personalized emails suited to each player’s preferences, leading to a 20% increase in email opens and a 10% increased retention rate.
177. Urmobo, a mobile-device management platform, created a virtual agent, Odin, that significantly improved user experience and reduced support tickets by enabling clients to interact with the platform using natural language.
178. The World Bank is developing a tool to extract key information from research literature on the causal impact of development interventions, with the ultimate goal to empower decision-makers to allocate the $220B in annual aid and trillions in annual impact investing more effectively.
179. Belk ECommerce is using generative AI to craft better product descriptions, a necessary yet time-consuming task for digital retails that has often been done manually.
180. Canva is using Vertex AI to power its Magic Design for Video, helping users skip tedious editing steps while creating shareable and engaging videos in a matter of seconds.
181. Carrefour used Vertex AI to deploy Carrefour Marketing Studio in just five weeks — an innovative solution to streamline the creation of dynamic campaigns across various social networks. In just a few clicks, marketers can build ultra-personalized campaigns to deliver customers advertising that they care about.
182. Major League Baseball continues to innovate its Statcast platform, so teams, broadcasters, and fans have access to live in-game insights.
183. Paramount currently relies on manual processes to create the essential metadata and video summaries used across its Paramount+ platform for showcasing content and creating personalized experiences for viewers. VertexAI Text Bison is now helping to streamline this process.
184. Procter & Gamble used Imagen to develop an internal gen AI platform to accelerate the creation of photo-realistic images and creative assets, giving marketing teams more time to focus on high-level planning and delivering superior experiences for its consumers.
185. WPP will integrate Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities into its intelligent marketing operating system, called WPP Open, which empowers its people and clients to deliver new levels of personalization, creativity, and efficiency. This includes the use of Gemini 1.5 Pro models to supercharge both the accuracy and speed of content performance predictions.
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Sri Lanka has sworn in 55-year-old leftist politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake as its new president. There was no clear winner after the first round of votes from Saturday’s election had been counted. But Dissanayake, who is commonly known by his initials AKD, emerged victorious after a count of the second-choice votes.
His election is something of a watershed. It was the first time since Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 that the presidential race was decided by a second round of counting after either of the top two candidates failed to win the mandatory 50% of the vote. And it was also the only time that voters have elected a candidate who does not belong to the country’s traditional ruling elite.
Sri Lanka has long been held in the tight grip of a handful of powerful political families. The Rajapaksa dynasty, for example, had dominated Sri Lankan politics for well over two decades before mass protests over a severe economic crisis unseated the country’s leader, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in 2022.
AKD’s campaign rhetoric centred largely around corruption as the key culprit in the economic woes facing the country. Previous governments have been linked not only to corruption, but also to human rights abuses and the military’s encroachment on the civilian space. Persuaded by his logic of openness and transformation, voters saw AKD as an opportunity to change Sri Lanka’s stale political system.
Following his election, AKD declared in characteristic Marxian mode: “This victory belongs to all of us.” Assuaging the demands of the masses for change will be a priority.
Voters have chosen a new president for the first time since mass protests unseated Sri Lanka’s leader in 2022. Color Collector / Shutterstock
AKD comes from a strong leftwing ideological background. He leads a political outfit called the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), which is by no means a heavyweight party. It has only three members in the country’s 225-member parliament, and does not come with an attractive pedigree.
The JVP is seen in Sri Lanka as a fringe reactionary party due to its involvement in violent insurrections and targeted assassinations that left thousands dead in the 1980s. Given Sri Lanka’s fractious ethno-nationalist politics, how the JVP and its new national leader carry the masses forward on a national regeneration project would be anybody’s guess.
But AKD has shown himself to be aware of the underlying tensions in the country and, since becoming the JVP’s leader in 2008, has apologised for the party’s past violence. In his swearing-in speech, AKD declared: “We need to establish a new clean political culture … We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”
The road ahead
There are several critical challenges that AKD needs to face head on – the most important of which concerns the country’s failing economy. After all, it was acute economic hardship that drove the citizenry to vote for political change.
In the past, a substantial portion of whatever Sri Lanka managed to procure through its two main sources of income, tourism and remittances sent home by citizens living abroad, went towards settling its external debts. However, these earnings were hit badly by the pandemic and the country’s economic woes spiralled out of control.
The rate of inflation soared and dwindling reserves of foreign currency resulted in acute shortages of essential goods and services. Then, in May 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time in its history.
This scenario quickly led to a national emergency. Faced with the most devastating economic crisis since independence, a countrywide uprising (colloquially known as the aragalaya) ousted Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office.
The removal of Rajapaksa secured an uneasy peace, and things have since tentatively improved on the economic front. Ranil Wickremesinghe took over as the interim president in 2022 and his administration managed to secure a loan worth US$3 billion (£2.2 billion) from the International Monetary Fund.
The economy now appears to be on a slow path of recovery. It is expected to grow in 2024 for the first time in three years, supported by a narrower trade deficit and growing remittances.
Sri Lanka’s interim president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has congratulated Dissanayake on winning the election. Ruwan Walpola / Shutterstock
AKD is aware of the enormity of the burden he carries. As he admitted while accepting the role of president: “I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen. There are things I know and don’t know. My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.”
His pro-working class and anti-political elite campaigning without doubt made AKD popular among youth, and helped him secure victory. But his ideology may well be at odds with the foreign lenders who have kept the economy afloat for past two decades.
Sri Lanka’s new president faces a precarious balancing act to satisfy both a population high on hopes of populist subsidies and the demands of external lenders to tighten the country’s belts.
Amalendu Misra is a recipient of British Academy and Nuffield Foundation Fellowships.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Louise Arseneault, Professor in Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London
When was the last time that you felt lonely? It’s an uncomfortable question, but for 3.83 million people in the UK, 7.1% of the population, the answer is probably “right now”.
Loneliness has become a worrying public health matter because it is common and is often associated with people experiencing physical and mental health problems. There is now taxpayers’ money being spent at the local, national and international levels on initiatives to minimise loneliness and the harmful effect it can have on people’s health. But are those investments misjudged?
New research from Guangzhou Medical University in China has challenged the notion that loneliness can cause ill health. Instead, the findings suggest that loneliness might be considered an associated feature for many diseases (a so-called “surrogate marker”) as it was shown to not be a root cause for poor physical and mental health.
The researchers used data from the UK Biobank in which over half a million people aged 37 to 73 were asked to report how often they felt lonely. They conducted analyses based on the distribution of genetic variants in the population (known as “Mendelian randomisation”) to test the causal effect of loneliness on a wide range of diseases, including physical and mental health problems.
This is certainly an interesting study; however, there are several points we must consider when reflecting on the findings. It is important to note that UK Biobank data isn’t the best for testing the causal effects of loneliness on health.
Although many participants have taken part in UK Biobank, they are volunteers who tend to be white, older and have higher levels of education than the general population in the UK. Many of the participants also follow a healthier lifestyle than the population as a whole.
Although loneliness doesn’t discriminate and can affect anyone, at all ages, and from all walks of life, this participation bias can influence the findings as it may conceal important associations.
The study also captured a snapshot of loneliness from a single time in adulthood. We all experience loneliness from time to time, but its effect on health depends at what age a person feels lonely, why they feel lonely and for how long. This detail isn’t captured in this data.
Some of our own research in this area shows that mental health difficulties and poor general functioning are often experienced alongside feelings of loneliness. However, our findings also show that loneliness in early adolescence can have long-lasting effects, especially related to education and employment prospects –– so-called “socioeconomic outcomes”.
This study also measured loneliness in participants in their late 30s and older. Again, previous research has shown that loneliness can start early in life and is associated with later depression and poor socioeconomic outcomes, both of which are shown in this paper to be important factors associated with health.
The ideal is to conduct analyses with data from studies that observe people from childhood to old age, and which have measured loneliness earlier in life and health in later life to best understand the links between loneliness and health.
Also, this study used hospitalisation data to determine health outcomes. While this type of data is valuable, it captures information only from participants who seek treatment and represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to diseases. Loneliness may affect health in more subtle ways that won’t be caught here.
This is not to be over-critical of the study, however. The importance of depression and socioeconomic status as mechanisms through which loneliness translates into poor health is an essential message from this study. For example, loneliness may result in difficulties at work or worsening mental health, which could in turn increase a person’s risk of physical disease.
Identifying surrogate markers of poor health is also valuable as it opens the door to better and earlier ways to support vulnerable people. For example, someone may not feel comfortable revealing that they experience symptoms of depression, but they are fine with talking about their feelings of loneliness. Loneliness may act as a red flag in some circumstances. This is especially important when diseases are accompanied by stigma, such as many mental health conditions.
Loneliness is intertwined with a range of health conditions throughout life and is considered both a contributing factor to and an outcome of poor health. This study acknowledges that.
Loneliness has a complex relationship with health
To measure the importance of loneliness for public health relevance solely as a causal factor oversimplifies its complex and intricate relationships with health. This is where further research using data that is representative of the general population is needed. It would allow researchers to unpick the pervasive role of loneliness in shaping health and wealth for all people.
What this study cannot answer is an important question: should we continue to invest in initiatives designed to tackle loneliness as a means of improving population health? As ever, the answer is not a binary one.
While this study may not report a causal relationship between loneliness and diseases, ample evidence indicates that it precedes, accompanies and results from poor health. Current strategies have proven to be limited in their effectiveness, particularly for people with lower incomes and less education.
If we consider the occurrence of loneliness alongside mental health difficulties and low socioeconomic status, and a better understanding of the mechanisms that underpin loneliness, we might find these initiatives become more effective.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Johanna L.A. Paijmans, Postdoctoral research fellow in Zoology, University of Cambridge
Many large mammals have lost genetic diversity, often thanks to the actions of people shrinking their populations. The implications can be severe because without genetic diversity, a population does not have a “genetic database” to fall back on to adapt to environmental change.
The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) is no stranger to this reduction in diversity. Human activity has driven populations to dangerously low numbers, leaving them with a shrinking genetic pool. This loss threatens the lynx’s ability to adapt to changing environments, putting their survival at risk.
Our team’s research reveals how the Iberian lynx interbred with its cousin, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) over the past few thousand years. This mingling may have boosted the Iberian lynx’s genetic diversity. This is a crucial factor for its survival, especially as the species faces such an uncertain future.
Low genetic diversity can lead to “inbreeding depression”, where closely related animals breed and produce offspring that are less fit for survival. In extreme cases, this can push entire populations, or even species, to the brink of extinction.
To boost the genetic diversity of populations on the brink, conservationists sometimes turn to “genetic rescue”. This involves introducing individuals from different populations in the hope that they will breed with the local animals, reducing inbreeding and enhancing genetic diversity.
While this strategy can be effective, it’s not without risks. Introducing animals that are too genetically different can disrupt or dilute beneficial traits, potentially harming the population’s ability to survive and reproduce. It’s a phenomenon known as “outbreeding depression”. Despite these risks, genetic rescue remains a valuable tool in conservation, though it’s often approached with caution.
One of the most severe cases of reduced genetic diversity is the Iberian lynx, once the world’s most threatened cat species. It’s mostly found in parts of Spain and Portugal.
Rescue and recovery
Today, the Iberian lynx is recovering from near extinction. More than 400 reproductive females were reported in the 2023 census. This is a massive increase from just 25 in 2002. This turnaround is largely thanks to an ambitious conservation programme over the past two decades, involving coordinated breeding programmes and reintroductions.
Part of this success is due to the “genetic rescue” effect, where mixing the two remaining genetically distinct populations helped boost the species’ genetic diversity. Despite this progress, the Iberian lynx still faces significant challenges. The population is far from reaching the minimum of 1,100 reproductive females needed to be considered genetically viable. So, its genetic diversity remains one of the lowest ever recorded.
Further genetic rescue could be a solution to enhance diversity. But there’s a catch – no other Iberian lynx populations exist in the world that could serve as a source of new genetic material.
Ancient DNA can be extracted from historical remains or subfossil (animals that are not ancient enough to be considered true fossils but are not considered modern either) samples. By studying these, scientists can gain valuable insights into the genetic past of species, offering a stark comparison with their present day counterparts.
In 2015, our colleague Maria Lucena-Perez first visited the lab of another of our colleagues, Michael Hofreiter, in Germany to generate the very first whole genome data from ancient Iberian lynx bones. Extracting ancient DNA from bones is a highly specialised process that requires dedicated cleanroom facilities to prevent contamination from modern DNA.
Working together, our team successfully extracted nuclear DNA from three ancient Iberian lynx specimens. Two of these were approximately 2,500 years old. The third dated back more than 4,000 years. This marked the first time nuclear DNA had ever been retrieved from ancient Iberian lynx. Maria’s achievement has significantly advanced our understanding of how the genetic makeup of the Iberian lynx has evolved over thousands of years.
Our team analysed and compared the DNA with that of modern Iberian lynx. To our surprise, the ancient lynx showed even lower genetic diversity than their modern descendants. Given the sharp decline in their populations over the past few centuries, this finding was both unexpected and puzzling.
Species interbreeding
The missing piece of the puzzle came with the discovery that modern Iberian lynx populations share more genetic variants with the closely related Eurasian lynx than their ancient counterparts did. This suggests that the two species successfully interbred within the past 2,500 years, boosting the genetic diversity of today’s Iberian lynx.
These findings align with extensive genomic evidence of ancient gene flow from Eurasian lynx into the Iberian lynx genome. While the two species don’t share the same habitats today, they once coexisted in the Iberian Peninsula, and possibly in southern France and northern Italy. This situation would have provided plenty of opportunities for interbreeding.
The potential for these two species to naturally meet and breed is growing once more as their ranges continue to expand. This could open up new possibilities for genetic diversity in the future.
The advent of whole nuclear genome analysis over the past 30 years has revealed numerous cases of cross-species interbreeding, such as between polar bears and brown bears. This suggests that the case of the lynx is not so unusual. But the Iberian lynx stands out as the first documented example where interspecies breeding significantly increased species-wide genetic diversity.
We still don’t fully understand the exact effect of this genetic boost, particularly whether it improved the population’s fitness and survival. One intriguing possibility is that the Iberian lynx has managed to persist despite its extremely low genetic diversity, thanks to recurrent genetic rescues by the Eurasian lynx.
While there’s more to learn, our research offers an unexpected but important case study for the broader discussion on genetic rescue. If we can better predict the chances of inbreeding and outbreeding depression when interbreeding happens, we could use genetic rescue more effectively as a conservation tool in the ongoing biodiversity crisis.
Johanna L.A. Paijmans receives funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship “RESOURCEFUL”.
Axel Barlow receives funding from NERC, ERC.
José A. Godoy receives funding from the Spanish Dirección General de
Investigación Científica y Técnica through competitive research grants (projects CGL2013-47755-P, CGL2017-84641-P, PID2021-123358OB-I00) and from EU funded LIFE+ program (LIFE19 NAT/ES/001055 – LIFE LYNXCONNECT)
A series of recruitment talks organised by the Civil Service Bureau in Beijing and Shanghai wrapped up today, attracting over 1,800 Hong Kong people who are interested in applying for civil service posts in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government.
Five recruitment talks on the administrative officer (AO) and executive officer (EO) grades were held at the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office in Shanghai (SHETO), East China University of Political Science & Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Renmin University of China, and China University of Political Science & Law respectively.
The participants, mostly university students, joined the talks online or in person.
At the seminars, participants were introduced to the entry requirements, training programmes, examination and interview arrangements, as well as tips on preparing for AO and EO grade exams.
In addition, the bureau had specifically arranged for serving AO and EO colleagues who had studied or lived on the Mainland to share their work and personal experiences.
The bureau’s representatives also attended a SHETO event to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, taking the occasion to introduce the AO and EO grades to the young participants, with a view to encouraging them to apply for civil service posts in the Hong Kong SAR Government.
A joint recruitment exercise is being held for the civil service grades of AO, EO II, assistant trade officer II and transport officer II. The application deadline is October 4.
On September 1, Cairo wrote to the UN security council to protest against Ethiopia’s continued filling of Africa’s second largest reservoir and bringing two more power generating turbines into operation. Egypt sees any new infrastructure development on the Nile as a potential threat, since the river is the source of over 98% of the country’s water.
Egypt calls this a violation of international law and Ethiopia’s obligations to “prevent significant harm”. Ethiopia’s policies, it says,
could result in an existential threat to Egypt … and would consequently jeopardise regional and international peace and security.
Ethiopia has told Egypt to “abandon its aggressive approach” towards the dam. Ethiopia says that it must allow the Blue Nile’s water to flow through the dam’s turbines and on to Egypt to generate the hydropower for which it has been built, thus guaranteeing the overall flow to Egypt.
I have tracked the Nile disputes since the 1970s, first as a development journalist, then as a civil engineer and senior public servant. More recently, my research on water and regional integration for regional development agencies has provided further insights. My 2021 study considered the lessons to be learnt for today’s water challenges from centuries of the use and management of Nile waters.
Ongoing tension between Egypt and Ethiopia over control of the Nile River has a long history. Therefore, in one sense, the row between Egypt and Ethiopia is nothing new.
The countries went to war as far back as 1874, even as they both were also battling European colonialism. Ethiopia won the war of 1874 and, 20 years later, beat back Italy’s attempt to colonise it, at the battle of Adwa.
However, Egypt gained long term advantage from treaties negotiated by the British, which gave Cairo almost total control over the Nile. Egypt is still asserting the rights and privileges conferred by those colonial era treaties even though they are being challenged by other Nile countries. In my view, this is because Egyptians are still trapped by their past fears. As Norwegian professor Torje Tvedt has explained, these fears were deliberately entrenched by past colonial authorities.
With these perspectives, my view is that the current controversy over the Ethiopian dam still reflects historical conflicts rather than a careful analysis of present challenges.
Now 90% complete, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has begun to generate electricity. A series of good rainy seasons have allowed the reservoir to start filling rapidly without affecting Egypt’s water availability.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam offers not just cheap green electricity for Ethiopia and the sub-region as well as reliable irrigation supplies and flood control for Sudan. Once filled, its storage could offer supply security and increase the amount of water available for Egypt as well.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
What, then, are the issues that have prompted Egypt’s recent protests and what are the possible solutions to the problems raised?
The immediate technical challenge is to continue filling the dam without disrupting flows to Sudan and Egypt. The filling process might have to be interrupted if there is a regional drought. So recent developments, notably the greater focus on the rate at which the dam will be filled rather than the legality of its construction, suggest that there is a shift in positions which neither side is yet willing to acknowledge publicly.
This shift will be supported when other future-focused issues are raised. For instance, there must be negotiations about the supply of electricity to support Sudan’s irrigation expansion, although this is on hold due to the war in Sudan. In the longer term, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia could cooperate to use the GERD’s storage to help Egypt to manage its Aswan High Dam more efficiently. Aswan currently suffers very high evaporation losses, which could be reduced if its reservoir levels were better controlled. The GERD could help to do this.
Unfortunately, the history of colonial Britain repeatedly threatening to cut Egypt’s Nile water supplies has been deeply imprinted in Egyptian public consciousness. It is understandable that Egyptians still fear a similar threat from Ethiopia. The responsibility now falls on Ethiopia to show good faith in its operation of the dam and to work with Egypt to change the combative discourse.
Potential for cooperation
Egypt’s repeated complaints have alerted Ethiopia and international organisations of the need to act carefully. If there is another regional drought, Ethiopia will need to slow the rate at which it completes filling its dam. Informal liaison structures are monitoring the situation and such a response would help to build a more constructive engagement with Egypt.
Water is a patient teacher. Every season provides an opportunity for those who live with its natural cycles to understand it better. The hope is that, if the three countries experience the benefits of some seasons of the dam’s operation, the natural cycle will reveal the potential for cooperation and mitigate the conflict.
When peace returns to Sudan, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will enable a vast expansion of irrigation to develop its role as a regional breadbasket. The dam will also help to manage Nile floods which regularly cause death and destruction, even to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
Efforts to promote cooperation between the East African countries that share the White Nile have been relatively successful. However, such cooperation on the Blue Nile will need much greater trust between the parties. To achieve this trust, the countries and their people will have to overcome centuries of cultural and political preconceptions. This will require much patient work and interaction, which is not easy in the current climate.
– Egypt’s fears about Ethiopia’s mega-dam haven’t come to pass: moving on from historical concerns would benefit the whole region – https://theconversation.com/egypts-fears-about-ethiopias-mega-dam-havent-come-to-pass-moving-on-from-historical-concerns-would-benefit-the-whole-region-239418
What’s the right choice for storing your photos?Wasim Ahmad, CC BY
Taking photographs used to be a careful, conscious act. Photos were selective, frozen moments in time carefully archived in albums and frames. Now, taking a photograph is almost as effortless and common as breathing – it’s something that people do all the time in the age of smartphone cameras with seemingly endless digital film.
But the downside to capturing every moment is that it creates a mountain of those moments to save for the future. Those photos can be easily lost if they’re not archived properly. All it can take is one accidental dip in the toilet for your phone, and all that data is lost forever.
So what’s a practical backup strategy for the average person? Here are a few ways to make sure memories are never lost:
Cloud storage
The simplest way to archive your photos is cloud storage. For Apple users, there’s iCloud, which starts at US$0.99 per month for 50 gigabytes all the way to $59.99 per month for 12 terabytes with various tiers in between. With an average iPhone photo clocking in at 3 megabytes, that’s a little over 16,000 photos for the cheap plan and 4 million or so for the largest plan. Google’s Google One cloud storage is most cost effective for yearly plans, with 2TB going for $99.99 per year and 5TB going for $249.99 per year.
The actual amount you can store in that space does vary greatly with how a file is shot. Video has larger file sizes than photos. HEIF files, a newer format on Apple phones, compresses files into smaller packages, but long-term compatibility is unknown since the format hasn’t been in use for as long as the standard JPG file, which has been around since 1992.
Storing your photos in a cloud service like iCloud is probably the easiest method. Chris Messina/Flickr, CC BY-NC
While cloud services from big providers generally provide the easiest way for most average folks to back up their photos, and operate with little to no intervention via apps that are already on the phone constantly uploading every photo taken, there are risks involved.
Big companies often change their policies about how photos are saved. For instance, depending on what phone and when it was bought, Google’s cloud storage may have saved photos in a “storage saver” format that lowers the quality of images by sizing them down or compressing them differently. This affects your ability to make high-quality prints or view the photos on high-resolution screens down the road. Unless someone is astute enough to notice small text here and there that mentions it, most users won’t even realize it’s happening.
And what happens to cloud services when things go badly wrong? Users of photo backup service Digital Railroad found out the hard way. In 2008, the company abruptly shut down and gave its users 24 hours to download everything before the servers were shut down. Photographers rushed for the exits, trying to grab their photos on the way out, only to strain the servers to the point where few were able to recover anything at all. If this was the only way photos were backed up, it’s a lost cause.
So while the cloud is easy, costs can add up and terms of service can change at a moment’s notice. What are some ways for photographers to control their own fate?
Hard drives and network-attached storage
Manually taking photos off a phone may take some extra time, but the approach offers peace of mind that cloud services can’t necessarily match.
Almost all phones can plug into a computer’s USB port and use the built-in photos app on both Windows or MacOS to download photos to a computer. Apple users can use a method called AirDrop to send photos wirelessly to other Apple devices as well, including laptop and desktop computers.
Now loading photos onto a local hard drive built into the machine can fill it up quickly, but there is a cost-effective way to get around that – namely, external hard drives. Theses are storage devices that you can plug into your computer as needed. They can be of the older and less expensive type with spinning platters or more modern solid-state drives that can survive a drop and greater temperature changes than the older drives can.
These are different than flash drives, more commonly known as thumb drives because of their small size, that are designed as temporary storage to shuffle photos from one place to another.
It’s easy to buy more than one hard drive to have duplicate backups in case of failure or catastrophe, but the downside is that there’s no easy access from the internet to your photos, and backup is generally a process that users must remember to do.
Network-attached storage is one way to solve the cloud storage problem while retaining the ability to access photos from the internet. These are essentially hard drives – sometimes multiple hard drives linked together for even greater or faster storage – that are connected to a router that allows for access to the internet through specialized software.
While not as easy as most third-party cloud storage services, once it’s set up, a network-attached storage unit is a flexible way to store your photos safely and accessibly. There are even companies that specialize in fireproof and waterproof units for extra insurance in case of disaster.
Printing photos
If cloud storage and hard drives seem too complicated, there’s always the old-fashioned approach of printing. There’s still something magical about seeing a photo on a wall or in an album, and thankfully there are ways to print professional-quality archival prints without having to go to a drugstore.
Desktop photo printers are a way to bring those digital photos into the physical world, ready for organizing in photo albums. Leksey/Wikimedia
The easiest and most cost-efficient types of printers are dedicated 4×6 printers using a technology similar to professional labs called dye-sublimation. These yield high-quality, waterproof prints that cost about the same as what one would pay for drugstore developing. HP makes its popular Sprocket line of printers, though those require a phone and an app to print from, which makes plugging in a memory card from a professional camera out of the question. However, Canon’s Selphy lineup includes many models with screens and a card slot to make that possible.
The rabbit hole goes very deep, and there are many professional printers that can print even larger sizes. Canon and Epson dominate this space, marketing a range of pigment- and dye-based printers that can emphasize archival needs or color saturation, respectively.
Another option is ordering a photo book, which, as the name suggests, is a physical bound book of your photos. However, photo books are probably more appropriate for memorializing an event – trip, wedding, project – than general archiving, given the typical costs and number of photos involved.
There’s little reason to not make some sort of backups of photos in 2024, whether that’s on printed media, hard drives or in the cloud. The important thing is not which method to use, but to do it at all.
Wasim Ahmad does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New rules that went into effect in July 2024 provide the first federal protections specifically for parents with disabilities. These new rules ban discrimination against parents and caregivers with disabilities throughout the child welfare system.
In 2010, I found that three-quarters of states had laws which said that a parent’s disability could be used as the grounds for terminating their parental rights. Most of these state laws focused on parents with intellectual and developmental disabilities or mental health disabilities, though some listed physical disabilities and other types as well.
Many of these laws were vague and used outdated language such as “mental deficiency.”
Parental disability is the only grounds for termination of parental rights that focuses on a condition of the parent. The rest focus on behaviors. For example, parental poverty is not listed as grounds for termination of parental rights in any state, but neglect – a behavior – is.
State laws were only one of the issues parents with disabilities encountered related to child protection. For years, there had been confusion as to how the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal law banning disability discrimination, applied to parents in the child welfare system. Until 2015, most state courts denied ADA claims by parents with disabilities who believed they were discriminated against.
One of the main biases that parents with disabilities face is the “presumption of unfitness bias.” This is a widespread bias that parents are unable to parent solely because of their disability.
This bias can lead child welfare workers to not consider that parents with disabilities can rely on “parental supports” to assist them in parenting, ranging from adaptive cribs and baby monitors to in-home helpers. It also can result in parents with disabilities being held to a higher standard than others.
State laws specifically naming parental disability as a for termination of parental rights, the lack of federal protection, and widespread biases left parents with disabilities vulnerable in encounters with the child welfare system.
Gaining national attention
Two federal actions in the early 2010s brought national attention to parents with disabilities.
First, the National Council on Disability, the independent federal agency that advises the federal government on disability issues, released a report in 2012 called Rocking the Cradle. That report focused on the widespread discrimination faced by parents with disabilities; highlighted and called for changing the state child protection laws; and called for the application of ADA protections in child welfare cases involving parents with disabilities.
This report received a lot of media attention and led to more awareness of the plight of these parents.
Then, in 2015, Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services released guidance directing child welfare agencies to protect parents with disabilities from discrimination. This was the first federal action indicating that the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act applied to child protection services.
This guidance followed the departments’ investigation of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families’ removal of a newborn baby from Sara Gordon, a new mother with a developmental disability, in 2012. The Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services found that the state agency had made assumptions that Gordon was unable to take care of her child and unable to learn parenting skills. The state agency had also failed to take into account that Gordon had support systems in place. She lived with her parents, and her mother had quit her job to assist with parenting.
Making progress for parents with disabilities
The momentum for protecting parental rights has led to some positive changes.
A few states changed their own child protection laws to address some of these problems before the federal government took action by providing new protections for parents with disabilities. In addition, the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services have reached agreements with state agencies in Oregon, Georgia and Massachusetts related to discrimination against parents with disabilities.
In particular, it is promising that Section 84.60 of the rule clarifies that disability discrimination is not allowed in any part of the child welfare process. Child welfare agencies throughout the United States now must ensure that they are not making decisions based on speculation, stereotypes or generalizations.
Thanks to changes in the federal rule, when a child welfare agency evaluates how a child is being parented, the tools it uses must be backed by research. The evaluations must be conducted by a qualified professional and tailored to the needs of the individual parent. Agencies must ensure that parents with disabilities can participate in any services they provide. These services include parent-child visitation, parenting skills programs, family reunification services and child placements in foster care settings or in the care of another relative.
Disability advocacy groups applauded this new rule when it went into effect in the summer of 2024.
I believe these new rules will protect parents with disabilities when interacting with child protection authorities. They will also make it easier for child welfare agencies and state courts to recognize disability discrimination when it appears in their caseloads or on their dockets.
Elizabeth Lightfoot receives funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research and the Arizona Developmental Disabilities Planning Council.
On September 1, Cairo wrote to the UN security council to protest against Ethiopia’s continued filling of Africa’s second largest reservoir and bringing two more power generating turbines into operation. Egypt sees any new infrastructure development on the Nile as a potential threat, since the river is the source of over 98% of the country’s water.
Egypt calls this a violation of international law and Ethiopia’s obligations to “prevent significant harm”. Ethiopia’s policies, it says,
could result in an existential threat to Egypt … and would consequently jeopardise regional and international peace and security.
Ethiopia has told Egypt to “abandon its aggressive approach” towards the dam. Ethiopia says that it must allow the Blue Nile’s water to flow through the dam’s turbines and on to Egypt to generate the hydropower for which it has been built, thus guaranteeing the overall flow to Egypt.
I have tracked the Nile disputes since the 1970s, first as a development journalist, then as a civil engineer and senior public servant. More recently, my research on water and regional integration for regional development agencies has provided further insights. My 2021 study considered the lessons to be learnt for today’s water challenges from centuries of the use and management of Nile waters.
Ongoing tension between Egypt and Ethiopia over control of the Nile River has a long history. Therefore, in one sense, the row between Egypt and Ethiopia is nothing new.
The countries went to war as far back as 1874, even as they both were also battling European colonialism. Ethiopia won the war of 1874 and, 20 years later, beat back Italy’s attempt to colonise it, at the battle of Adwa.
However, Egypt gained long term advantage from treaties negotiated by the British, which gave Cairo almost total control over the Nile. Egypt is still asserting the rights and privileges conferred by those colonial era treaties even though they are being challenged by other Nile countries. In my view, this is because Egyptians are still trapped by their past fears. As Norwegian professor Torje Tvedt has explained, these fears were deliberately entrenched by past colonial authorities.
With these perspectives, my view is that the current controversy over the Ethiopian dam still reflects historical conflicts rather than a careful analysis of present challenges.
Now 90% complete, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has begun to generate electricity. A series of good rainy seasons have allowed the reservoir to start filling rapidly without affecting Egypt’s water availability.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam offers not just cheap green electricity for Ethiopia and the sub-region as well as reliable irrigation supplies and flood control for Sudan. Once filled, its storage could offer supply security and increase the amount of water available for Egypt as well.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
What, then, are the issues that have prompted Egypt’s recent protests and what are the possible solutions to the problems raised?
The immediate technical challenge is to continue filling the dam without disrupting flows to Sudan and Egypt. The filling process might have to be interrupted if there is a regional drought. So recent developments, notably the greater focus on the rate at which the dam will be filled rather than the legality of its construction, suggest that there is a shift in positions which neither side is yet willing to acknowledge publicly.
This shift will be supported when other future-focused issues are raised. For instance, there must be negotiations about the supply of electricity to support Sudan’s irrigation expansion, although this is on hold due to the war in Sudan. In the longer term, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia could cooperate to use the GERD’s storage to help Egypt to manage its Aswan High Dam more efficiently. Aswan currently suffers very high evaporation losses, which could be reduced if its reservoir levels were better controlled. The GERD could help to do this.
Unfortunately, the history of colonial Britain repeatedly threatening to cut Egypt’s Nile water supplies has been deeply imprinted in Egyptian public consciousness. It is understandable that Egyptians still fear a similar threat from Ethiopia. The responsibility now falls on Ethiopia to show good faith in its operation of the dam and to work with Egypt to change the combative discourse.
Potential for cooperation
Egypt’s repeated complaints have alerted Ethiopia and international organisations of the need to act carefully. If there is another regional drought, Ethiopia will need to slow the rate at which it completes filling its dam. Informal liaison structures are monitoring the situation and such a response would help to build a more constructive engagement with Egypt.
Water is a patient teacher. Every season provides an opportunity for those who live with its natural cycles to understand it better. The hope is that, if the three countries experience the benefits of some seasons of the dam’s operation, the natural cycle will reveal the potential for cooperation and mitigate the conflict.
When peace returns to Sudan, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will enable a vast expansion of irrigation to develop its role as a regional breadbasket. The dam will also help to manage Nile floods which regularly cause death and destruction, even to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
Efforts to promote cooperation between the East African countries that share the White Nile have been relatively successful. However, such cooperation on the Blue Nile will need much greater trust between the parties. To achieve this trust, the countries and their people will have to overcome centuries of cultural and political preconceptions. This will require much patient work and interaction, which is not easy in the current climate.
Mike Muller has received funding from the African Development Bank and South Africa’s Water Research Comission for work on regional cooperation in water resource management. He has been a member of the Global Water Partnership’s Technical Committee, chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Water and been funded by the World Bank’s Cooperation in International Waters (CIWA) programme for contributions to the Nile Basin Initiative. He was also funded by UNESCO to attend a conference in Khartoum, organised with Sudan’s Ministry of Water Resources Irrigation and Electricity, on integrated and sustainable water management.
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region
SITI commences visit to Wuhan (with photos) SITI commences visit to Wuhan (with photos) *******************************************
The Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry, Professor Sun Dong, began his visit to Wuhan, Hubei Province today (September 24). Professor Sun called on Vice Governor of Hubei Province Ms Chen Ping, and exchanged views on the development of innovation and technology (I&T) and new industries in Hong Kong and Hubei. At the meeting, Professor Sun introduced the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s plan and latest work on leading the development of the city’s I&T industry. He also learned about Hubei’s strengths in I&T and advanced manufacturing, particularly the development of chips and new energy vehicle industries. They also explored ways to further strengthen co-operation between Hubei and Hong Kong in technological innovation and industry development. Professor Sun later visited the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. It is one of the first six national research centres approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology, and is a research platform focusing on fundamental science and technology in the fields of optoelectronics for information, energy and life. Professor Sun was briefed on the laboratory’s development history, research conditions and innovation achievements, as well as the comprehensive support and services it provides to the “Optics Valley of China, Wuhan” and the development and industrialisation of the optoelectronics industry. Professor Sun then visited the Jiufengshan Laboratory to learn about its work on promoting the development of the fundamental research of compound semiconductor in order to support Wuhan to become a global compound semiconductor innovation centre and industry cluster. In a tour of the laboratory’s chip process lines and professional testing infrastructure, he was kept abreast of the facility’s efforts in pushing forward the technological frontier by aiming at research and development (R&D), technology development, transformation of R&D outcomes as well as detection and analysis on compound semiconductor. Professor Sun visited the Wuhan East Lake High-tech Development Zone in the evening and received an update on the development of the optoelectronics information industry cluster, as well as the efforts and achievements in building the “World Optics Valley”. Professor Sun also encouraged the East Lake High-tech Development Zone to set up accelerators and incubators in Hong Kong. The Commissioner for Industry (Innovation and Technology), Dr Ge Ming, also joined the visit. Professor Sun will continue his visit to Wuhan tomorrow (September 25).
Ends/Tuesday, September 24, 2024Issued at HKT 21:30
In the trailer for Ridley Scott’s hotly anticipated sequel to Gladiator (2000), a new gladiator (played by Paul Mescal) goes to battle in “the greatest temple Rome ever built – the Colosseum”.
He comes up against naval warfare, a cutthroat promoter (Denzel Washington) and a stampeding rhino. But how much of this really took place in Roman times? As always with films based in the past, pedantic historians will jump in to assess the degree of cinematic licence and historical misinterpretation. So it is with the forthcoming Gladiator II.
The trailer for Gladiator II.
Did gladiators fight rhinos?
One thing that certainly did not happen was a warrior mounted on a rhinoceros (even a non-computer-generated one) charging at a group of gladiators. However, there is a record of a rhino at the inauguration of the Colosseum in 80BC. It didn’t fight men, but a bull, bear, buffalo, bison, lion and two steers. The other rare mentions of rhinos in Rome are of those in menageries, to be admired as exotic creatures.
This Roman interest in foreign, wild animals was the basis of the initial beast spectacles which began in 275BC with an exhibition of captured war elephants. Such non-violent displays of animals continued into the imperial era, but in 186BC the first staged animal hunt (venatio), featuring both lions and leopards, took place and by 169BC beast hunts had become an official part of republican state festivals.
Later, under the emperors, collecting and transporting beasts, especially unusual and foreign ones, to be displayed – but more often killed – demonstrated imperial power, territorial control and the vastness of the empire. Thousands of animals were brought from Africa and elsewhere to Roman arenas to be slaughtered for entertainment and the meat from the dead animals was given away to the spectators (it was easier than trying to dispose of the many carcasses).
Those who fought the beasts were not gladiators but specially trained hunters (venatores) armed with spears. The venatio could also feature fights between animals, as with the Colosseum rhinoceros, but most often the contest consisted of bulls against an elephant or bear. Animal hunts outlasted gladiatorial combats as a source of spectator entertainment, but as both the size of the empire and imperial funds diminished, greater reliance was placed on domestically reared “wild” animals.
Were there sea battles in the Colosseum?
More credence in historical terms can be given to the film’s staged sea battle (naumachia) in the flooded Colosseum. Such spectacles were expensive to stage and were reserved for special occasions.
The first one recorded was for Emperor Augustus in 2BC. Held on an artificial lake, it featured 30 large ships carrying some 3,000 marines plus an unspecified number of rowers. Participants in a naumachia, typically either convicted criminals or prisoners of war, were expected to kill each other or drown, though, the demonstration of fighting ability and courage could gain them a pardon.
The Naumachia by Ulpiano Checa (1894) imagines naval warfare in the Coliseum. Museo Ulpiano Checa
The grandest sea battle was provided by Emperor Claudius on Lake Fucinus, a spectacle involving 100 ships and some 19,000 marines and oarsmen. It was at this event that the fighting men reportedly said “hail, emperor, we who are about to die salute you”, mistakenly assigned to gladiators in so many films, including the first Gladiator.
Literary sources (not always to be trusted in antiquity as they were often written well after alleged events) claim that the Colosseum was flooded for a sea battle at its inauguration. After some debate, historians now accept that the engineering mechanisms were in place so that, at least in its early days, the Colosseum could have accommodated a naumachia.
Did a thumbs down really mean death for a gladiator?
Gladiator II also showcases the misconstrued sporting legacy of the thumbs up signal to spare a defeated gladiator who requested mercy or the converse of a thumbs down from those who wished him to die.
The arena was a large, noisy place and hand signals were often used as a means of communication. Indeed, rather than verbally requesting mercy, the defeated warrior himself would raise the index finger of his right hand, or even the hand itself, both of which were recognised pleas for clemency.
When the crowd opted for the death of a fighter they indicated this by means of pollice verso, literally a turned thumb, with no direction specified. When the hand was waved the sign indicated that the gladiator’s throat should be cut by his conqueror. Those who wished to save the vanquished, but courageous, fighter gave the sign pollice compresso, a compressed thumb but one often hidden from sight so as not to cause visual confusion.
Gladiators were valuable assets. Promoters, who had paid a hiring fee (typically 10-20% of their value) for them to fight, were reluctant to incur the full asset value demanded as compensation should they die. Especially when, at the crowd’s insistence, they could have a choice in the matter.
In many instances the event had been promoted to curry favour with the spectators so to go against their wishes would be counterproductive. However, whether the ultimate decision-maker gave a thumbs up or thumbs down is debatable. The idea that this occurred seems to have developed around 1872 with the popularity of a painting by French artist, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In it he depicts vestal virgins giving the dreaded sign. Although titled Pollice Verso, it became conventionally referred to as “the thumbs down painting”.
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Wray Vamplew 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.
Theodore Roosevelt speaks during the Progressive campaign of 1912.AP Photo
This year’s presidential election has a former president, Donald Trump, running for a nonconsecutive term. It’s the fifth time in U.S. history that’s happened.
Historically, a former president running for a nonconsecutive term has prompted voters to change their party allegiances.
In 1848, Martin Van Buren, a former Democratic president, ran as a candidate for the newly formed Free Soil Party and attracted many Northern Democrats who had grown disillusioned with their party’s pro-slavery stance. The Free Soil Party outperformed Democrats in three Northern states and enabled the other major party, the Whigs, to win the presidency.
And in 1856, former Whig President Millard Fillmore headed the newly formed American Party, otherwise known as the Know-Nothing party. When faced with a choice between two candidates, Fillmore and Democrat James Buchanan, who both seemed deeply complicit with slavery’s expansion, many Northerners voted for the new antislavery Republican Party.
Fillmore’s candidacy in 1856 made a Republican sweep of the North virtually impossible, ensuring victory for Buchanan, who only won 45% of the popular vote.
Theodore Roosevelt’s run in 1912 also saw dramatic changes in voter behavior. With the former president on the ballot, millions of voters cast ballots for the other major party or a brand new party.
By this time, Roosevelt had become one of the most famous men in the world. Reformers praised his ability to attract attention and build support for progressive causes.
These characteristics repulsed conservative Republicans and traditional Democrats who feared Roosevelt’s return to power.
After failing to secure the Republican nomination, Roosevelt headed the newly formed Progressive Party, winning six states and 88 electoral votes, the strongest showing for a third party candidate ever.
However, the split in the Republican ranks enabled Democrats to win by an electoral landslide.
One former president ran for a nonconsecutive second term and won: Grover Cleveland, whose two terms ran from 1885-1889 and 1893-1897.
The rise of progressivism
When Roosevelt ran in 1912, he saw a society convulsed by rapid change.
A political reform movement known as progressivism emerged across political parties. It sought to address problems with immigration, urbanization, political corruption, industrialization and the concentration of corporate power.
Roosevelt’s political career tapped into progressivism’s growing momentum. First elected vice president as a Republican in 1900, he assumed the presidency in September 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley.
Campaigning on his progressive “Square Deal” — focused on consumer protections, control of large corporations and conservation of natural resources — in 1904, the popular incumbent won reelection in the largest electoral landslide the country had seen.
But in 1908, Roosevelt declined to run for a third term. Instead, he advocated successfully for William Howard Taft, his secretary of war.
At the Republican National Convention, however, party leaders rejected Roosevelt and confirmed Taft’s nomination. Roosevelt’s supporters stormed out, complaining that leaders had manipulated rules and procedures to block the former president.
Despite his loss of the nomination, Roosevelt assured his supporters that he felt as “strong as a Bull Moose” and expressed interest in “bolting” from the Republican Party.
Roosevelt’s threat to leave his party was echoed more than 100 years later by another former president running for a nonconsecutive term. In late 2023, Trump refused to participate in the Republican presidential primary debates and refused to rule out the possibility of running as an independent.
In doing so, Trump’s candidacy hampered efforts to seek an alternative candidate. It also disregarded opportunities to win over skeptical Republicans.
The rise of the Bull Moose Party
In a matter of weeks after Roosevelt failed to get the Republican nomination, the Progressive Party, popularly known as the Bull Moose Party, held its national convention and nominated Roosevelt as its first presidential candidate.
Theodore Roosevelt arrives at a hospital after New York saloon keeper John F. Schrank attempted to assassinate him in Milwaukee in 1912. Harlingue/Roger Viollet via Getty Images
Roosevelt faced off on Election Day against the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft; Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate; and the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
Many Republicans cast their ballots for Wilson, seeing his candidacy as more viable than Roosevelt’s. Some did so out of disgust for what they saw as Roosevelt’s egotistical and radical campaign.
The split in the Republican Party created an opportunity for Democrats, who had been shut out of the presidency for decades.
Historical parallels are never perfect. However, the 1912 election invites some comparison, as one of the world’s most famous men runs for the third time for the presidency.
The 2024 election will be close. Wary of Trump’s return to power, will disillusioned Republicans vote for Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris, choose a third-party candidate, or sit out the election?
Graeme Mack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Dietary rules that unite and define American cuisine can so easily be perverted to use disgust to divide Americans. In the U.S., cow is food and dog is friend. Chicken is food. Cat is companion. The sharp lines between the animals Americans eat, love, protect and exterminate help write the dietary rules that define American norms.
What we eat, what we don’t and with whom we break bread are just some of the food rules that unite and define Americans. Think of how turkey – or tofurkey – unites Americans behind the Thanksgiving ritual. Bottled water. Ice. Ballpark hot dogs. Airplane pretzels. Movie theater popcorn.
Food can also establish group identity apart from the mainstream. Think of the many factions of vegan, vegetarian, paleo, grain-free and carnivore dieters who use food to express a political position. Also, of course, religious dietary proscriptions have worried scholars for centuries so that Jews, Muslims and Christians may never share a meal.
There is no evidence that Haitians are stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. There is evidence, however, that racists have long twisted dietary rules to divide people and dehumanize immigrants. Trump told a lie to draw a line between Americans and others who allegedly eat the animals Americans love.
A sign at a popular hot dog restaurant in Chicago reads ‘Immigrants eat our dogs,’ on Sept. 12, 2024, two days after the presidential debate. Scott Olson/Getty Images
The legend of delicious pets
The myth of eating pets traces back to old legends in Europe, Australia and the United States that “immigrants are stealing our cats and dogs for their dinner tables or to serve in ethnic restaurants,” writes the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand.
Two of the most common food-based legends center on “Oriental restaurants serving dog (or cat) meat, and legends about Asian immigrants in the United States capturing and cooking people’s pets,” Brunvard writes.
By 1883, the legend was so well-established that the Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo offered US$500 to anybody in New York for proof that Chinese people were eating cats or rats. No proof was found, but that didn’t stop the racist jokes or urban legends.
None of the many examples deserve retelling. But scholars, for example, have cited “sick jokes” such as a “new Vietnamese cookbook is titled 100 Ways to Wok Your Dog.”
Or as comedian Tessie Chua joked about her multiracial Chinese, Filipino and Irish identity in 1993 when she said, “That means I eat dog, but only if I can wash it down with Guinness Stout!”
In 1971, mainstream news outlets, including Reuters, reported an “outrageously silly urban legend” of a pet poodle named Rosa served at a Hong Kong restaurant, complete with chili sauce and bamboo shoots.
In 1980, Stockton, California, was seized by racist rumors of Vietnamese families stealing expensive purebred dogs for dinner.
More precise, maybe, than the adage that “we are what we eat” is that we are what we won’t eat. Shunning our neighbor for their vile food – stinky, strange, unpalatable – is also decidedly an American tradition.
“Garlic eater” was at one time recognizable in the U.S. as an ethnic slur for Italian Americans in the early 20th century. The names “spaghetti bender” and “grape stomper” were also used, but “garlic eater” stuck because, as one scholar argued, “garlic served as an ‘olfactory signifier’” – a distinguishing odor – “for the alien who consumed it.”
To an outsider, being called a lentil- or polenta-eater seems more like praise for a healthy diet than a racial epithet, but such are the vagaries of racism: People hate who they hate and justify it however possible.
Other examples of how food can distinguish communities abound. In the Amazon, the Parakanã people appreciate tapir meat but abhor monkey. The Arara people, their neighbors, feel the opposite. Both groups are disgusted by one another. Curry, garlic, tapir, polenta, lentils – it doesn’t matter what the nail is, but how the hammer hits.
Philomene Philostin, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Haitian origin, works in her store in Springfield, Ohio, that caters mainly to Haitian residents. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Rumors with real-life consequences
Urban legends about food and racist rumors can have serious consequences. Earlier in 2024, a false rumor that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in Fresno, California, cooked pit bulls led to such vile harassment that the owner, David Rasavong, moved the restaurant to a new location.
But there’s a more hopeful side to the issue of food being used as a way to divide or unite people, too. The Latin origins for the words company and companionship mean the people we share our bread with.
Garlic is now as central to American cuisine as apple pie. Nowadays, Americans are so much the better for the sushi, garlic and curry – and the diversity behind the deliciousness – that flavor American cuisine.
Adrienne Bitar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrew J. Hoffman, Professor of Management & Organizations, Environment & Sustainability, and Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan
The U.S. has seen a large number of billion-dollar disasters in recent years.AP Photo/Mark Zaleski
Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowners insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country.
There are a few reasons, but a common thread: Climate change is fueling more severe weather, and insurers are responding to rising damage claims. The losses are exacerbated by more frequent extreme weather disasters striking densely populated areas, rising construction costs and homeowners experiencing damage that was once more rare.
Hurricane Ian, supercharged by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in October 2022 and caused an estimated $112.9 billion in damage. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images
Just a decade ago, few insurance companies had a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate risk as a core business issue. Today, insurance companies have no choice but to factor climate change into their policy models.
Rising damage costs, higher premiums
There’s a saying that to get someone to pay attention to climate change, put a price on it. Rising insurance costs are doing just that.
Increasing global temperatures lead to more extreme weather, and that means insurance companies have had to make higher payouts. In turn, they have been raising their prices and changing their coverage in order to remain solvent. That raises the costs for homeowners and for everyone else.
The importance of insurance to the economy cannot be understated. You generally cannot get a mortgage or even drive a car, build an office building or enter into contracts without insurance to protect against the inherent risks. Because insurance is so tightly woven into economies, state agencies review insurance companies’ proposals to increase premiums or reduce coverage.
The insurance companies are not making political statements with the increases. They are looking at the numbers, calculating risk and pricing it accordingly. And the numbers are concerning.
The arithmetic of climate risk
Insurance companies use data from past disasters and complex models to calculate expected future payouts. Then they price their policies to cover those expected costs. In doing so, they have to balance three concerns: keeping rates low enough to remain competitive, setting rates high enough to cover payouts and not running afoul of insurance regulators.
But climate change is disrupting those risk models. As global temperatures rise, driven by greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use and other human activities, past is no longer prologue: What happened over the past 10 to 20 years is less predictive of what will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. each year offers a clear example. The average rose from 3.3 per year in the 1980s to 18.3 per year in the 10-year period ending in 2024, with all years adjusted for inflation.
With that more than fivefold increase in billion-dollar disasters came rising insurance costs in the Southeast because of hurricanes and extreme rainfall, in the West because of wildfires, and in the Midwest because of wind, hail and flood damage.
Hurricanes tend to be the most damaging single events. They caused more than US$692 billion in property damage in the U.S. between 2014 and 2023. But severe hail and windstorms, including tornadoes, are also costly; together, those on the billion-dollar disaster list did more than $246 billion in property damage over the same period.
As insurance companies adjust to the uncertainty, they may run a loss in one segment, such as homeowners insurance, but recoup their losses in other segments, such as auto or commercial insurance. But that cannot be sustained over the long term, and companies can be caught by unexpected events. California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out nearly 25 years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in that state.
To balance their risk, insurance companies often turn to reinsurance companies; in effect, insurance companies that insure insurance companies. But reinsurers have also been raising their prices to cover their costs. Property reinsurance alone increased by 35% in 2023. Insurers are passing those costs to their policyholders.
What this means for your homeowners policy
Not only are homeowners insurance premiums going up, coverage is shrinking. In some cases, insurers are reducing or dropping coverage for items such as metal trim, doors and roof repair, increasing deductibles for risks such as hail and fire damage, or refusing to pay full replacement costs for things such as older roofs.
Some insurances companies are simply withdrawing from markets altogether, canceling existing policies or refusing to write new ones when risks become too uncertain or regulators do not approve their rate increases to cover costs. In recent years, State Farm and Allstate pulled back from California’s homeowner market, and Farmers, Progressive and AAA pulled back from the Florida market, which is seeing some of the highest insurance rates in the country.
In some cases, insurers are restricting coverage. Roof repairs, like these in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., after Hurricane Ian, can be expensive and widespread after windstorms. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
State-run “insurers of last resort,” which can provide coverage for people who can’t get coverage from private companies, are struggling too. Taxpayers in states such as California and Florida have been forced to bail out their state insurers. And the National Flood Insurance Program has raised its premiums, leading 10 states to sue to stop them.
According to NOAA data, 2023 was the hottest year on record “by far.” And 2024 could be even hotter. This general warming trend and the rise in extreme weather is expected to continue until greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are abated.
In the face of such worrying analyses, U.S. homeowners insurance will continue to get more expensive and cover less. And yet, Jacques de Vaucleroy, chairman of the board of reinsurance giant Swiss Re, believes U.S. insurance is still priced too low to fully cover the risk from climate change.
Andrew J. Hoffman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Karen Mollica (BA Hons [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 following internships in Guyana and Costa Rica.
Karen Mollica (BA Hons [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 following internships in Guyana and Costa Rica. Her early assignments included coordinator in the Anti-personnel Mine Action Team and desk officer for several countries in West and Central Africa. She subsequently moved to the Canadian International Development Agency and served as first secretary at the High Commission in South Africa and as counsellor and head of cooperation at the Embassy to Jordan. Upon her return to Headquarters in 2019, she became director of policy, planning and operations for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she held until 2022. Most recently, she served as director and senior departmental adviser in the Office of the Minister of International Development and as chargé d’affaires at the Embassy to the Holy See.
Ajit Singh (BA [Communications], University of Winnipeg, 2003; BA Hons [Political Science], University of Winnipeg, 2004; MA [International Law], United Nations University for Peace, 2006; JD, Osgoode Hall Law School, 2012) has lived, studied and worked in multiple languages in 6 countries on 4 continents. He joined the Government of Canada in 2008 after working in media, academia, the United Nations and civil society organizations. He later worked in private law in Toronto and was called to the Bar of Ontario as a barrister and solicitor. In 2013, he joined the Privy Council Office in the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat. He then worked in its Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat, where he led on relations with Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia regions and Latin America and on legal files. In 2017, he joined Global Affairs Canada as a deputy director in the Foreign Policy Planning Division to lead the team responsible for the foreign ministers’ track during Canada’s 2018 G7 presidency. After this, he worked in the Conflict Prevention, Stabilization and Peacebuilding Division. In 2021, he joined the Department of National Defence as a director of operations. In 2022, he rejoined the Privy Council Office, this time as the first person to hold the position of director of international crisis response.
Source: Government of the Russian Federation – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
Dmitry Chernyshenko held a meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the International Financial Security Olympiad
September 24, 2024
Dmitry Chernyshenko held a meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the International Financial Security Olympiad
September 24, 2024
Dmitry Chernyshenko held a meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the International Financial Security Olympiad
September 24, 2024
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Dmitry Chernyshenko held a meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the International Financial Security Olympiad
A meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the International Financial Security Olympiad was held under the chairmanship of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko.
The Director of the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, Yuri Chikhanchin, also took part in it.
At the meeting, the program for the final stage of the fourth Olympiad, which will take place from September 30 to October 4 in the federal territory of Sirius, was approved, as well as the composition of the jury and the appeal committee.
In his opening remarks, Dmitry Chernyshenko noted the expansion of the geography of the participants of the International Financial Security Olympiad. This year, more than 550 finalists from 36 countries will come to the final in the hospitable federal territory of Sirius.
“Despite the current international situation, we have managed not only to maintain, but also to expand the level of organization and holding of the Olympiad. This year, more than 550 children from 36 countries will come to Sirius; last year, there were 19 countries. I consider it important that the Olympiad participants will not only win, but also receive opportunities to enter the country’s leading universities and employment prospects,” the Deputy Prime Minister emphasized.
He also recalled that on September 17, a founding conference was held at the site of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation and the launch of the International Movement for Financial Security was launched, which united representatives from 36 countries.
According to Rosfinmonitoring Director Yuri Chikhanchin, schoolchildren, students, representatives of financial intelligence agencies, the business community, and the scientific and educational sphere will meet at the Sirius venues. The final stage program includes more than 40 educational events for schoolchildren and students, including meetings with future employers and career guidance events.
“The events of the final week of the Olympiad are aimed at achieving educational results, professional development of participants, creating conditions for the formation of a cultural and moral environment based on traditional civilizational values, as well as involving participants in the sports movement. As part of the educational direction, schoolchildren and students will be able not only to demonstrate their knowledge, but also to acquire new competencies in master classes, panel discussions and interactive workshops,” said the director of Rosfinmonitoring.
Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Dmitry Afanasyev shared details of the final stage of the Olympiad and reported on the results of the qualifying stages of the fourth Olympiad, noting that in 2024 the number of participants in the final has increased.
The program of the final stage of the fourth Olympiad includes a meeting of the Council of the International Network Institute in the field of AML/CFT, the international forum on financial security “Sirius-2024”, “Conversations on equal terms”, a phygital basketball tournament, master classes, panel discussions and a number of other events of educational, professional, cultural and sports orientation.
The meeting was also attended by Deputy Minister of Education Olga Koludarova, State Secretary – Deputy Head of Rospotrebnadzor Mikhail Orlov, Head of the educational foundation “Talent and Success” Elena Shmeleva, First Deputy Governor of Krasnodar Krai Igor Galas, General Director of ANO “National Priorities” Sofia Malyavina, representatives of the Executive Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, the Bank of Russia, the International Training and Methodological Center for Financial Monitoring (ITMCFM), PJSC Promsvyazbank and universities of the International Network Institute in the Sphere of AML/CFT.
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
Please note; This information is raw content directly from the information source. It is accurate to what the source is stating and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
http://government.ru/nevs/52784/
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and or sentence structure not be perfect.
Source: United States Senator for Rhode Island Jack Reed
KINGSTON, RI – U.S. Senator Jack Reed and U.S. Representative Seth Magaziner today joined with University of Rhode Island (URI) leadership, researchers, scientists, professors, and students to celebrate a $795,000 federal earmark to boost secure computing and data infrastructure capabilities, capacity, and storage through high-performance computing (HPC) upgrades that will advance research in undersea vehicle technology as well as research focus areas across URI’s departments.
The federal funds secured by Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner will help advance the “RI-SEC: Secure Computing & Data Infrastructure for the University of Rhode Island” project. This initiative will help ensure URI can keep up with the evolving role that HPC plays in a wide range of academic disciplines and will strengthen and expand the partnership between researchers at URI’s National Institute of Undersea Vehicle Technology (NIUVT) and subject matter experts with the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat.
“As Rhode Island’s flagship public research institution, the University of Rhode Island needs access to cutting-edge technology and computing capabilities to ensure they can stay up to speed on developments and breakthroughs in a wide range of academic fields,” said Senator Reed, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m glad to have worked with Congressman Magaziner to deliver this federal funding for URI which will help make strategic upgrades and strengthen partnerships with experts at the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat. This project will help URI make new, exciting advancements, better educate students on modern technology, and attract more researchers, scientists, professors, and others.”
“This funding will help the University of Rhode Island build on its leadership status as a center for cutting-edge research and education,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner. “This grant will enhance the technology available to students and researchers across a variety of high tech fields, and will help make our state more economically competitive.”
“As the state’s public flagship research university, URI is engaged in cutting-edge research that is accelerating discovery in key sectors of the state’s Blue Economy, while training the next generation of Rhode Island’s workforce,” said President Marc B. Parlange. “With support from Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner, this federal earmark will enhance the University’s computational resources to expand large-scale research opportunities in undersea vehicle technology for our faculty, students, and industry partners.”
Following the earmark announcement, URI President Marc B. Parlange and Dean of Engineering Anthony Marchese accompanied Senator Reed and Representative Magaziner for a tour of the National Institute of Undersea Vehicle Technology (NIUVT) – a federal, public, and private partnership at URI that provides research and technical support to advance current and future technologies in the undersea vehicle domain.
The federal funding secured by Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner will primarily assist NIUVT in upgrading HPC capacity and strengthening cyber security in order to carry out and bolster its work linking academic researchers and subject matter experts with the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat, which helps build the U.S. Navy’s most advanced submarines.
Through the RI-SEC project, increased cybersecurity and data management enhancements and the hiring of new information technology (IT) security staff will offer more control and flexibility in capability, capacity, and data storage. These key upgrades will help NIUVT strengthen their work with the Navy and Electric Boat and will also help other departments at URI expand research by leveraging artificial intelligence, HPC, and other cutting-edge digital advancements.
Source: United States Senator for Rhode Island Jack Reed
KINGSTON, RI – U.S. Senator Jack Reed and U.S. Representative Seth Magaziner today joined with University of Rhode Island (URI) leadership, researchers, scientists, professors, and students to celebrate a $795,000 federal earmark to boost secure computing and data infrastructure capabilities, capacity, and storage through high-performance computing (HPC) upgrades that will advance research in undersea vehicle technology as well as research focus areas across URI’s departments.
The federal funds secured by Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner will help advance the “RI-SEC: Secure Computing & Data Infrastructure for the University of Rhode Island” project. This initiative will help ensure URI can keep up with the evolving role that HPC plays in a wide range of academic disciplines and will strengthen and expand the partnership between researchers at URI’s National Institute of Undersea Vehicle Technology (NIUVT) and subject matter experts with the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat.
“As Rhode Island’s flagship public research institution, the University of Rhode Island needs access to cutting-edge technology and computing capabilities to ensure they can stay up to speed on developments and breakthroughs in a wide range of academic fields,” said Senator Reed, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m glad to have worked with Congressman Magaziner to deliver this federal funding for URI which will help make strategic upgrades and strengthen partnerships with experts at the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat. This project will help URI make new, exciting advancements, better educate students on modern technology, and attract more researchers, scientists, professors, and others.”
“This funding will help the University of Rhode Island build on its leadership status as a center for cutting-edge research and education,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner. “This grant will enhance the technology available to students and researchers across a variety of high tech fields, and will help make our state more economically competitive.”
“As the state’s public flagship research university, URI is engaged in cutting-edge research that is accelerating discovery in key sectors of the state’s Blue Economy, while training the next generation of Rhode Island’s workforce,” said President Marc B. Parlange. “With support from Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner, this federal earmark will enhance the University’s computational resources to expand large-scale research opportunities in undersea vehicle technology for our faculty, students, and industry partners.”
Following the earmark announcement, URI President Marc B. Parlange and Dean of Engineering Anthony Marchese accompanied Senator Reed and Representative Magaziner for a tour of the National Institute of Undersea Vehicle Technology (NIUVT) – a federal, public, and private partnership at URI that provides research and technical support to advance current and future technologies in the undersea vehicle domain.
The federal funding secured by Senator Reed and Congressman Magaziner will primarily assist NIUVT in upgrading HPC capacity and strengthening cyber security in order to carry out and bolster its work linking academic researchers and subject matter experts with the U.S. Navy and Electric Boat, which helps build the U.S. Navy’s most advanced submarines.
Through the RI-SEC project, increased cybersecurity and data management enhancements and the hiring of new information technology (IT) security staff will offer more control and flexibility in capability, capacity, and data storage. These key upgrades will help NIUVT strengthen their work with the Navy and Electric Boat and will also help other departments at URI expand research by leveraging artificial intelligence, HPC, and other cutting-edge digital advancements.
