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Microsoft has joined forces with Europe's publishers to deepen the troubles of Google and Facebook, launching a project to develop an Australian-style arbitration system for the EU that would force Big Tech to pay for news.
The move by the US company aims to align with the press industry, exploit the difficulties of its Silicon Valley rivals and promote its own search engine Bing as a copyright-friendly alternative for news.
The project announced yesterday will involve Microsoft working with Europe's four leading lobby groups for news publishers to develop a legal solution to “mandate payments” for the use of content by “ gatekeepers that have dominant market power”.
The informal coalition, which will propose that the plan is added to forthcoming EU legislation on Big Tech, includes the European Publishers Council, News Media Europe and bodies for European magazine and newspaper publishers, which represent news outlets.
Microsoft and the publishers said yesterday they will support a form of arbitration, and will look closely at the model developed in Australia, which has prompted Google to strike a flurry of licensing deals and Facebook to stop sharing Australian news on its service.
Christian Van Thillo, a Belgian media executive who is chair of the European Publishers Council, welcomed “Microsoft's recognition” of the value “our content brings to the core business of search engines and social networks”.
“It is crucial that our regulators don't get misled into thinking that side deals on the basis of a standalone product are the same thing,” he said, adding: “All publishers should get an agreement-no one should be left out.”
Microsoft has backed the Australian reforms and has urged other governments to follow suit. Unveiling the project with European publishers, Casper Klynge, a vice-president of Microsoft, said access to quality news was “critical to the success of our democracies”.
The Australian system has exercised regulators globally, who are also seeking ways to empower publishers in licensing talks with Google and Facebook. Canada is preparing Australia-style laws, and the EU and UK are looking at importing parts of the system into upcoming laws. It remains unclear whether Facebook's boycott of news in Australia has altered lawmakers' opinions.
EU governments are implementing a recent overhaul of copyright law, which strengthened the claim of publishers to seek compensation for the use of news snippets by Google. But industry executives and some members of European Parliament are concerned the provisions, which do not include an arbitration system, are too easy for Big Tech groups to sidestep. Google recently reached a licensing deal with French publishers, but paid smaller sums than settlements with Australian publishers. Google and Facebook criticised the Australian reforms as unworkable and unfair. Facebook had not commented on Microsoft's initiative in Europe.
[A] its ambition to dominate the European news industry
[B] its intention to promote its own search engine Bing
[C] its plan to establish a new global copyright system
[D] its purpose to overcome the difficulties it is facing
[A] Europe's four leading lobby groups
[B] major publishers in Europe
[C] news media from Europe
[D] Big Tech companies like Facebook
[A] is about to replace the international copyright law
[B] has gained a wide support from the whole world
[C] has exerted significant influence on Facebook
[D] has received a negative response from Microsoft
[A] Big Tech groups will boycott their reform of copyright law.
[B] Big Tech groups will avoid the new copyright law easily.
[C] It is no use overhauling a series of copyright laws about news.
[D] It is hard to strike a balance between news sharing and payment.
[A] Microsoft Promotes Search Engine Bing
[B] Big Tech Companies Need to Pay for News
[C] Microsoft Backs Europe's News Industry
[D] The Challenges EU's News Industry Faces
When it comes to identifying scents, a “neuromorphic” artificial intelligence beats other AI by more than a nose.
The new AI learns to recognize smells more efficiently and reliably than other algorithms. And unlike other AI, this system can keep learning new scents without forgetting others, researchers report online March 16 in Nature Machine Intelligence . The key to the program's success is its neuromorphic structure, which resembles the neural circuitry in mammalian brains more than other AI designs.
This kind of algorithm, which excels at detecting faint signals amidst background noise and continually learning on the job, could someday be used for air quality monitoring, toxic waste detection or medical diagnoses.
The new AI is an artificial neural network, composed of many computing elements that mimic nerve cells to process scent information. The AI “sniffs” by taking in electrical voltage readouts from chemical sensors in a wind tunnel that were exposed to plumes of different scents, such as methane or ammonia. When the AI sniffs a new smell, that triggers a cascade of electrical activity among its nerve cells, or neurons, which the system remembers and can recognize in the future.
Like the olfactory system in the mammal brain, some of the AI's neurons are designed to react to chemical sensor inputs by emitting differently timed pulses. Other neurons learn to recognize patterns in those blips that make up the scent's electrical signature.
This brain-inspired setup primes the neuromorphic AI for learning new smells more than a traditional artificial neural network, which starts as a uniform web of identical, blank slate neurons. If a neuromorphic neural network is like a sports team whose players have assigned positions and know the rules of the game, an ordinary neural network is initially like a bunch of random newbies.
As a result, the neuromorphic system is a quicker, nimbler study. Just as a sports team may need to watch a game only once to understand the strategy and implement it in new situations, the neuromorphic AI can sniff a single sample of a new scent to recognize this scent in the future, even amidst other unknown smells.
In contrast, a bunch of beginners may need to watch a game many times to figure out the strategy used-and still struggle to adapt it to future game scenarios. Likewise, a standard AI has to study a single scent sample many times, and still might not recognize it when the scent is mixed up with other smells.
[A] its timed pulses
[B] its neural circuitry
[C] its neuromorphic structure
[D] its man-machine interaction system
[A] detecting faint signals
[B] monitoring air quality
[C] mimicking human nerve cells
[D] reconstructing mammalian brains
[A] It works basically the same way as traditional AI.
[B] It is designed to recognize patterns in the blips of electrical signs.
[C] It sniffs by releasing electrical voltage from chemical sensors.
[D] It can remember a new scent through a string of electrical activity.
[A] the similarity between the neuromorphic AI and mammalian brains
[B] the distinction between the neuromorphic AI and other AI
[C] the complication for the neuromorphic AI to mimic human brains
[D] the difficulties of assigning team members' positions and duties
[A] the random newbie
[B] the olfactory system
[C] the traditional artificial neural network
[D] the neuromorphic system
Scientists have been documenting humans' difficulties coping with extreme heat for over a century. Much of that work, however, has taken place in laboratory settings to allow for a high degree of control.
For instance, a few decades ago, social psychologist Craig Anderson and colleagues showed undergraduates four video clips of couples engaged in dialog. One clip was neutral in tone, while the remaining three showed growing tension between the couples. The undergraduate students watching the clips were each sitting in a room with the thermostat set to one of five different temperatures, ranging from a cool 14°C to a hot 36°C. The researchers then asked the students to score the couples' hostility level. Anderson, now of Iowa State University in Ames, found that students in uncomfortably warm rooms scored all the couples, even the neutral one, as more hostile than students in rooms with comfortable temperatures did. (Interestingly, students in uncomfortably cold rooms also scored the couples as more hostile.)
Heat tends to make people more irritable, says Anderson, whose findings appeared in the 2000 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology . And as a result, “they tend to just perceive things as being more nasty when they're hot than when they're comfortable.”
Research suggests that such perceptions can give way to actual violence when people lack an escape hatch. But this “heat-aggression hypothesis” has been hard to demonstrate outside the lab because teasing out the effect of heat from other environmental or biological variables linked to aggression is tricky in the messy real world. Studies in the last few years, however, have started confirming the idea.
For instance, a July working paper out of the National Bureau of Economic Research came close to re-creating the level of control found in a lab by focusing on prisoners in Mississippi prisons and jails that lack air conditioning. Economists Anita Mukherjee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nicholas Sanders of Cornell University looked at rates of violence across 36 prisons from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2010. Overall, each facility averaged about 65 violent acts per year. But the pair found that on days above around 27°C-which occur about just over 60 days per year-the probability of violence among prisoners rose 18 per cent.
Though that doesn't seem that hot, most of those days had an average maximum temperature of roughly 34°C; nor do those temperature readings account for Mississippi's high humidity, Mukherjee says. Moreover, many of the country's aging prisons lack both air conditioning and proper ventilation, and temperatures inside them often exceed temperatures outside.
[A] it has been mostly under experimental environment
[B] it has been primarily completed over a century before
[C] it has not taken the age of participants into account
[D] it has lacked control experimental data in general
[A] score the couples' dialogs as less neutral
[B] demonstrate compassion towards others
[C] perceive the couples' dialogs as more hostile
[D] show little concern about the couples' dialogs
[A] they feel too hot
[B] they are less hostile
[C] they have many options
[D] they are at a comfortable temperature
[A] explaining how hostility would influence prisoners
[B] proving that the probability of violence is controllable
[C] exposing the inside story of the prisons in Mississippi
[D] providing evidence for the “heat-aggression hypothesis”
[A] The probability of violence is rather low on average.
[B] The hotter the weather, the more violent prisoners become.
[C] The prisoners in them are all rebellious and cruel.
[D] They transfer prisoners as frequently as possible.
With smoke-belching container ships, diesel cargo-moving equipment and thousands of polluting trucks, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the single largest source of pollution in the nation's smoggiest area.
The communities around the ports have the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the region. And Southern California faces a two-year-later deadline to clean up smog but air quality has been getting worse, not better, in recent years.
With so much at stake, why are Los Angeles and Long Beach leaders dragging their feet on cutting emissions?
A couple of years ago, both mayors of Los Angeles and Long Beach pledged to transform the port complex into a zero-emission facility by 2035. But the region can't wait so long for cleaner air. There's growing frustration from air quality regulators and environmentalists that the ports-which are seeing record traffic-are not aggressively pushing for cleaner equipment and emission cuts now.
Case in point: In March, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach voted to impose a small fee on shipping containers in order to help truckers buy cleaner vehicles. This fee—$20 on a standard-size container-was modest: It equated to about 1% of the cost to ship a container through the ports and would raise only a fraction of the money needed.
Still, the fee was the first major commitment in the ports' Clean Air Action Plan. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The ports delayed the fee amid the economic uncertainty. But over the months, global trade rebounded, e-commerce boomed and the ports were overwhelmed with ships and record numbers of cargo containers. Still, the fee was postponed.
The delay has had real impacts. The incentive program was supposed to encourage drivers to choose zero or near-zero emission models when they replaced their trucks. Instead, about 97% of the old trucks have been replaced by diesel models. Trucks are responsible for 25% of port emissions.
The race for cleaner air has been hampered by the reality on the ground. Last year ended up being one of Southern California's smoggiest years in decades. Climate-change-fueled heat waves and wildfires have worsened air quality. More than 80% of the region's smog-forming pollution is created by vehicles and equipment that local air quality officials do not directly regulate.
The ports sit in the middle of a complex web of global trade. They cannot minimize the impact that the dirty supply chain has on the communities in the shadow of all the ships, trains and trucks. Los Angeles and Long Beach have the ability to push logistics companies and the world's biggest retailers, including Amazon and Walmart, to clean up their operations faster. Southern California needs results.
[A] are facing the worst economic situation
[B] are becoming better-known for their capacity
[C] are making a fast-paced economic transformation
[D] are experiencing poorer air quality conditions
[A] meet the two-year-later deadline to cut emissions
[B] make the ports of their cities zero-emission
[C] seek advice from environmentalists
[D] invest more money in cleaner equipment
[A] It was a great increase in the cost.
[B] It didn't take effect for some reason.
[C] It was of no use to cut emissions.
[D] It was opposed by logistics companies.
[A] is closely related to the lack of environmental awareness among the residents
[B] has much to do with all the trucks running in port areas
[C] comes from climate-change-fueled heat waves and wildfires
[D] stems from vehicles and equipment that are not directly regulated
[A] The improvement of air quality in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
[B] The compromise between economy and environment.
[C] The closure of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
[D] The tougher restrictions on the workers of logistics companies.