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While complicated, sensitive hybrids and range-limited electric vehicles with long charge times have been gaining considerable traction in Jordan in recent years, there is, however, a cogent case to be made for the mid-size double cabin four-wheel-drive turbo-diesel pick-up truck being particularly well-suited for local conditions.

A dual use personal and work form of transport trading on rugged durability and ability, generous space, useful mod-cons and equipment, reasonable comfort, fuel efficiency and off-road prowess, the mid-size pick-up’s convenience and value make it a compelling daily drive family vehicle proposition.

Assertive yet understated

Somewhat of a newcomer to the global mid-size pick-up market and even more recently to Jordan, the Foton Tunland first launched in 2011 and is well-positioned and expected to be competitively priced to make inroads into a segment traditionally dominated by Japanese manufacturers. Driven over 700km in Tunland S 4x4 double cabin guise on Jordanian roads and trails including some gruelling weather, surface and elevation conditions, the Chinese manufacturer’s pick-up proved itself to be much on par with mostly Japanese rivals in terms of driving dynamic, practicality, equipment comfort and efficiency.

Aesthetically assertive yet understated, with diamond-like headlights and big but unexaggerated chrome grille and foglamp housings, the Tunland 4x4’s equal width to height ratio, chunky tyres and subtle wheelarch blisters provide a grounded road presence and sportier profile that reduces height between the wheelarch top and bonnet line. A sloped bonnet and fascia, and pyramid-like rear lights also accentuate its confident stance, while concave cargo bed surfacing keep its flanks visually interesting. Compared with competitors with recently adopted higher and chunkier bonnets, the Tunland’s bonnet angle and moderate A-pillar thickness provide terrific in-segment front and side visibility.

Low-rev response

Established in 1996 and based in Beijing, Foton’s line of commercial vehicles and SUVs benefit from cooperation with several global manufacturers including Cummins engine manufacturer and Daimler AG, not to mention research and development centres in Japan and Germany. In this vein, the Tunland is offered with a choice of 2.5- and 2.8-litre Isuzu-sourced turbo-diesel four-cylinder engines, a more powerful Cummins-sourced engine, and German Getrag 5-speed manual gearbox. Fitted with the more 2.8-litre Isuzu engine, the driven Tunland S 4x4 produces 114BHP at 3,600rpm and 206lb/ft at 2,300rpm, and is capable of a 150km/h maximum.

Low-revving like most turbo-diesels, the Tunland does its best work between its peak torque and power point and redlines at 4,000rpm, but there is little point in revving beyond 3,600rpm.

However, its small turbocharger spools up quickly to make its comparatively responsive at low rpm and with much less low-end turbo lag than expected. Capable of carrying its 1,930kg mass to a 150km/h maximum, the Tunland is, however, at its best between 60-120km/h when it is relaxed and riding a generous mid-range sweet spot, while highway on the move acceleration is adequately confident and versatile.

Confident off-roader

Expected to complete the 0-100km/h benchmark time in around 12-seconds, the Tunland is also capable of confidently climbing 30 per cent slopes, but it can feel slightly stressed but willing on especially steep and slow hot weather hill climbs. That said, working the Tunland’s accurate and slickly mechanical feeling gear lever and intuitively user-friendly clutch pedal is a joy when driving through inclines, along winding routes or in traffic. Driving the rear wheels in normal circumstances, the Tunland’s four-wheel-drive is engaged quickly and smoothly at standstill through push-button controls for off-road driving.

Easily dispatching most trails and moderate off-road situations in rear-drive and with four-wheel-drive for more difficult and particularly loose surfaces, the Tunland’s low ratio four-wheel-drive only really needs to be engaged for the most extreme conditions where sustained low speed at high power is required. A confident and adept off-road machine, the Tunland 4x4 features generous 200mm ground clearance and 26 degree approach and 20 degree departure angle to clear deep ruts and crests. Meanwhile, its good visibility and accurate steering allow one to easily place it through narrow off-road trails, roads and parking garages alike.

Rugged and balanced

Using tough body-on-chassis construction with rugged leaf spring and live axle rear suspension to deal with its huge 2,730kg gross weigh capacity, the Tunland meanwhile easily dispatches rough and uneven trails, let alone being able to dispatch Amman’s numerous potholes and bumps in its stride, and with no fear of damage. Its 245/70R16 tyres are meanwhile a very good compromise for off-road driving, grip, impact absorption and steering feel. The Tunland’s independent double wishbone coil spring front, however, provides good wheel travel and angles for off-road and smooth, reassuring on-road driving.

Combined with accurate rack and pinion with intuitive feel, the Tunland turns into corners with reassuring grip, stability and agility as it copes with road elevations and textures. Balanced throughout with decent body lean control for its segment, the rear suspension is, however, slightly bouncy at the rear over rough roads as are all pick-ups in this segment. Willing to be hustled along at a fairly brisk pace through winding switchbacks, the Tunland’s steering requires more turning lock input than many cars, but is well-weighted and nuanced, and in tight confines provides a tight and very usefully manoeuvrable turning circle.

Space and efficiency

Stable and reassuring on highway, the Tunland is a confident and comfortable long distance cruiser, with ride quality smoothening at speed. With a commanding view inside, its driving position is particularly good, and is alert, spacious, ergonomic, comfortable, and with easy reach of controls, even without steering reach adjustability or adjustable lumbar support. Spacious front and rear, the Tunland’s rear seat access, knee room and head room especially impressed and is favourable to many mid-size SUVs and saloons. Meanwhile rear-parking sensors proved useful given how tricky it is judging rear distances in pick-ups. 

As refined as most pick-ups the Tunland well damps vibrations, while some diesel clatter noise is not especially intrusive or unexpected in this segment. Well laid out inside, it features plenty of hard tough surfaces, but which are nicely finished. Equipment includes two rear head rests, dual airbags, air conditioning, electric windows, remote central locking and
USB/CD player. The Tunland’s 8l/100km combined fuel efficiency and long driving range — anecdotally estimated at 800-900km — very much impressed, even through demanding test drive conditions. Meanwhile, a more powerful, capable and highly equipped Cummins diesel engine-powered version is expected in Amman soon.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 2.8-litre turbo-diesel, in-line 4-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 93 x 102mm

Compression ratio: 17.4:1

Gearbox: 5-speed manual, four-wheel-drive, low gear transfer

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 114 (115.5) [85] @3,600rpm

Specific power: 41BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 59BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 206.5 (280) @2,300rpm

Specific torque: 101Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 145Nm/tonne

Top speed: 150km/h

Fuel consumption, combined: 8-litres/100km

Fuel capacity: 76-litres

Length: 5,310mm

Width: 1,860mm

Height: 1,860mm

Wheelbase: 3,150mm

Tread, F/R: 1,600/1,580mm

Overhang, F/R: 925/1,280mm

Minimum ground clearance: 200mm

Approach angle: 26 degrees

Departure angle: 20 degrees

Gradeability: 30 degrees

Kerb weight: 1,930kg

Gross weight: 2,730kg

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbones, coilovers/leaf springs, live axle

Steering: Power-assisted rack & pinion

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/drums

Tyres: 245/70R16

Here we go again as desperate dieters sending out distress signals in the most critical month of the year: It is swimsuit season!

I do not know about you, but I was supposed to drop three dress sizes by now, but the only thing that is dropped since last summer is everything else on my body as gravity insists on getting the upper hand. Unless you are living on a different planet where gravity is not an issue for you, then our only solace is that we are in this journey together! It does not mean we need to give up and let go. After all, that is for losers and if there is anything you can say about desperate dieters is this: we are not losers! If we were, we would not be here in the first place, would we? We would have lost the weight and gone on with our lives.

What we gain

There is a positive aspect to being a desperate dieter, and that is the fact that every time we gain and lose and gain again, we grow stronger and gain: 

• Confidence in knowing what works and what does not and what we are willing to give up and what we are not willing to sacrifice 

• Wisdom and gumption as we remain steadfast in never giving up on ourselves even when every diet has failed us, and every swimsuit has proven not to hold up under pressure

• Insight into who we are and what our cravings are saying about us

• Knowledge as we seek to understand the parts of our souls that have gone under-nourished as a result of starving them all these years while silencing our heart’s desires instead of feeding them with kindness and self-compassion

We judge ourselves in front of our mirrors and on top of our scales. We are our worst critics, and we stand idly by, watching silently as the negative self-talk goes on in our heads like a broken record-breaking our hearts. We often behave like our worst enemy instead of being our own best ally.

Embracing
who we are 

I am ending this maddening cycle now during swimsuit season! Let us embrace who we are and discover the magic of what will happen when we start respecting ourselves for who God made us to be. 

The moment we learn to stop judging and begin to start loving our bodies is the moment we awaken to the realisation that we can now begin to be kind to ourselves. 

Kind in the way we look at ourselves and in the way we think of ourselves and in the way we feed ourselves and in the way we feed our thoughts and our bodies and our souls. That is where true healing begins. 

A big splash

There is absolutely no limit to what our bodies can do when we set our minds to exercise and eat what is beneficial to us. And when we mess up, may we learn to forgive ourselves and be self-motivated to get right back in the waters of life even if we have to make the biggest splash!

After all, is not that what we used to love to do when we were kids? Do you remember playing the game where we would jump into the pool where the winner was the one who made the biggest splash? 

Let is not lose sight of the child inside us who still knows how to have fun even when it comes to shedding excess weight. Life is too short not to enjoy every moment so here’s to living it to the fullest even during swimming season. 

So go ahead, make a splash — you might be surprised how refreshing it feels to let the child inside you live a little!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

Fragile Nation, Shattered Land: The Modern History of Syria

James A. Reilly

Boulder/London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2019, Pp. 258

In this book, James Reilly, professor of history at the University of Toronto, analyses the political, social and economic transformations that occurred in the territory that is modern-day Syria, with an eye for understanding how the country could have descended into civil war in 2011.

His account is far from dry as he sketches brief, but fascinating, portraits of the places and people that made history from the Ottoman era until the present. Making the narrative even more lively are the sections about cultural life in each time period, from the barber who chronicled life in Damascus’s Old City in late Ottoman times up to the well-known modern Syrian writers, poets and film-makers. There are also sections on early women’s organising.

During most of the Ottoman era, there was hardly a specifically Syrian national identity, and Reilly shows how closely events in Syria at this time were connected to developments in what is today Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. By the late 19th century, however, Syrian intellectuals’ participation in the Nahda (Arab Awakening) laid the groundwork for Arab nationalist sentiments, while a “new literary genre of the historical novel introduced to the reading public a fresh way of thinking about the past… Arabic readers could imagine that they were heirs to a drama that stretched back to antiquity and celebrated the heroes of old”. (p. 77) One notable example was “Zenobia” (1871), written by Salim Bustani about the Roman-era queen of Palmyra. 

Reilly traces the gradual development of a specifically Syrian national identity and identifies several tendencies that emerged in Ottoman times that have persisted until the present. One of these is urban-rural tension, whereby the rural population regarded the cities as “rapacious or exploitative. Urban-rural tensions and contestations would prove to be an enduring feature of Syria’s modern history”. (p. 24)

The gap between urban and rural areas has been named among the causes of the recent war, which seems doubly ironic considering that the initial Baath take-over was led by officers and politicians of rural background, and the first years of Baathist rule brought vast improvements in rural areas. According to Reilly: “Ambitious young people of rural and small-town origins saw opportunities that their parents could only have dreamed of.” (p. 140)

Another recurring feature in modern Syria’s history has been the emergence of local power centers. In some cases, this fostered an independent Syrian national identity, such as when Sultan Atrash unleashed resistance to French occupation by leading the initial revolt in Jabal Druze, which then spread to other areas and sectors of the population. In other cases, the existence of local power centres has led to fragmentation as events since 2011 have shown.

While Mohammad Ali’s foray into Syria resulted in the imposition of a modern state formation for nine years, it was the restoration of Ottoman rule and its institution building after the sectarian conflicts of 1860, that really changed things. “From this point onward, Syrian Arab elites would adapt to modern statehood rather than try to resist it.” (p. 64) 

It was not always a smooth adaptation. The colonial division of the area after World War I separated Syria from its familiar context as the centre of Balad Al Shem, ended the assumed diversity of the Ottoman Empire and posed new challenges. “Syria’s long-standing ethnic, social and cultural diversity was an awkward fit for the new, post-World War I paradigm of political community embodied in the nation state… These efforts to construct a unified nation… were all the more daunting in the face of a French colonial administration whose practice was to emphasise and deepen Syria’s political and social differences.” (p. 112)

As a result, newly independent Syria was plagued by coups and shifting governments for over a quarter of a century until the rule of the Baath Party stabilised. The 1940s, the decade when Syria declared its independence, also witnessed the emergence of the League of National Action and the Islamic associations, forerunners of the Baath Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, respectively. As the author notes, this “anticipated Syria’s future political conflicts”. (p. 107) 

Still, despite these challenges and having fewer resources than Egypt for example, Reilly asserts that “Syria would hold a prominent place in the development of a modern Arab cultural imagination” (p. 116), which of course makes the recent war even more tragic.

Reilly deals with many other questions and events. One comes away from the book with much valuable information, but also a sense of how complicated Syria’s history is. To help the reader keep the record straight, the book ends with a chronology (1516-2018), a Who’s Who of important people and a glossary of terms, in addition to the usual notes and index. If one wants to gain new insights into Syria in a highly readable form, this book is recommended.

Many patients with gallstones and abdominal pain do not feel better after a procedure to remove their gallbladder, and a recent study suggests this surgery may not always be necessary. 

Treatment guidelines in many countries recommend that doctors perform a minimally invasive operation known as a laparoscopic cholecystectomy to remove the gallbladder when patients have abdominal pain associated with gallstones. But in non-emergency cases, there is no consensus on how doctors should choose which patients might be better off with nonsurgical treatments and lifestyle changes. 

For the current study, researchers tested whether patients with gallbladder conditions being treated at outpatient clinics might have better outcomes and less post-operative pain if surgeons adopted a strict set of criteria for operating instead of the “usual care” practice of operating at surgeons’ discretion. 

Researchers randomly assigned 537 patients with gallstones and abdominal pain to receive usual care, and 530 patients to get surgery only if they met five criteria: severe pain attacks; pain lasting at least 15 to 30 minutes; pain radiating to the back; pain in the upper abdomen or the right upper quadrant of the abdomen; and pain that responds to pain relief medication. 

Pain relief was no better or worse with the restrictive criteria than it was with usual care. With both approaches, at least 40 per cent of patients still had abdominal pain 12 months later. 

But fewer people had operations with the restrictive criteria: 68 per cent compared with 75 per cent in the usual care group. This suggests that surgeons need to rethink whether gallstone surgery is necessary in every case and reconsider their criteria for recommending operations, researchers write in The Lancet. 

Patients should “be aware that there is a high chance that your gallbladder operation will not resolve all your abdominal pain”, said study co-author Dr Philip de Reuver, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Radboud University Hospital Nijmegen in The Netherlands. 

“A good way to minimise unnecessary surgery is shared decision making,” de Reuver said by e-mail. “Patients should make a list of their symptoms and doctors need to tell which symptoms are most likely to be resolved after surgery and which are less likely or unlikely to be resolved.” 

The main goal of the study was to prove “non-inferiority” of restrictive surgical selection criteria as compared with leaving the choice up to the surgeon. To prove this, researchers estimated that there would need to be at least five percentage points separating the proportion of patients who were pain-free one year after surgery. 

With restrictive criteria, 56 per cent of patients were pain-free after 12 months, as were 60 per cent of patients with usual care. This difference was too small for the restrictive criteria to be considered “non-inferior” to usual care. 

There was no meaningful difference in gallstone complications related to participating in the trial; 8 per cent of patients in the usual care group and 7 per cent in the restrictive criteria group experienced complications like acute gallbladder pain or pancreatitis. 

Surgical complication rates were also similar between the groups, affecting 21 per cent of patients in the usual care group and 22 per cent in the restrictive criteria group. 

At the end of the day, the study suggests that more work is needed to determine the best criteria for selecting patients for surgery, said the co-author of an accompanying editorial, Dr Kjetil, Soreide of the University of Bergen in Norway.

 “Jumping to a cholecystectomy may not always yield good outcomes, although many patients do still benefit from having a cholecystectomy,” Soreide said by email.

“One needs to be aware that this is not necessarily a ‘quick fix’ to avoid disappointment after surgery,” Soreide added. “Hopefully further studies will give better insight to what might cause symptoms and when a gallbladder surgery is likely to relieve symptoms.”

NEW YORK — One of the co-founders of Facebook called on Thursday for the social media behemoth to be broken up, warning that the company’s head, Mark Zuckerberg, had become far too powerful.

“It’s time to break up Facebook,” said Chris Hughes, who along with Zuckerberg founded the online network in their dorm room while both were students at Harvard University in 2004.

In an editorial published in The New York Times, Hughes said Zuckerberg’s “focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks”, and warned that his global influence had become “staggering”.

Zuckerberg not only controls Facebook but also the widely used Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, and Hughes said that Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than a check on the chief executive’s power.

“Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability,” said vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg.

“But you don’t enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company.”

Clegg, a British former deputy prime minister, reasoned that carefully crafted regulation of the internet is the way to hold technology companies accountable, and noted that Zuckerberg has been advocating for just that.

Facebook and its family of services have many competitors, and can find corporate efficiencies when it comes to data centres, talent and other resources that can work on its various offerings, Clegg said.

Hughes, who quit Facebook more than a decade ago, was photographed in the newspaper together with Zuckerberg when both were fresh-faced students launching Facebook as a campus networking tool. 

He accused Facebook of acquiring or copying all of its competitors to achieve dominance in the social media field, meaning that investors were reluctant to back any rivals because they know they cannot compete for long.

Zuckerberg “has created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice”, wrote Hughes, who is now a member of the Economic Security Project, which is pushing for a universal basic income in the United States. 

After buying up its main competitors Instagram, where people can publish photos, and WhatsApp, a secure messaging service, Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users across its platforms and made a first quarter profit of $2.43 billion this year.

‘Break up Facebook’s monopoly’

“The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of 2 billion people,” said Hughes.

The company has been rocked by a series of scandals recently, including allowing its users’ data to be harvested by research companies and its slow response to Russia using Facebook as a means to spread disinformation during the 2016 US election campaign. 

Facebook is reportedly expecting to face a fine of $5 billion. It has also been investing heavily in staff and artificial intelligence to fight misinformation and other abuses at its platform.

A whistleblower group in Washington filed an official complaint that Facebook was unwittingly auto-generating content for terror-linked groups using its platform that its artificial intelligence systems do not recognise as extremist.

Facebook’s software was automatically “creating and promoting terror content”, the National Whistleblowers Center added in the complaint, by creating “celebration” and “memories” videos for extremist pages that had amassed sufficient views or “likes”.

The group said Thursday it filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of a source that preferred to remain anonymous.

In his editorial, Hughes urged the government to break Instagram and WhatsApp away from Facebook and prevent new acquisitions for several years.

“The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people,” Hughes said.

“Even after a breakup, Facebook would be a hugely profitable business with billions to invest in new technologies — and a more competitive market would only encourage those investments,” he said. 

Hughes said the break-up, under existing anti-trust laws, would allow better privacy protections for social media users and would cost US authorities almost nothing.

Hughes said that he remained friends with Zuckerberg, noting that “he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic”.

The active ingredients of commonly-used sunscreens end up in the bloodstream at much higher levels than current US guidelines from health regulators and warrant further safety studies, according to a small study conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) researchers and published on Monday. 

The over-the-counter products originally marketed to prevent sunburn with little regulation are widely used to block radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer, the most common malignancy in the United States. 

The study of 23 volunteers tested four sunscreens, including sprays, lotion and cream, applied to 75 per cent of the body four times a day over four days, with blood tests to determine the maximum levels of certain chemicals absorbed into the bloodstream conducted over seven days. 

The study found maximum plasma levels of the chemicals it tested for — avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene and in one sunscreen ecamsule — to be well above the level of 0.5 nanogrammes per millilitre (ng/mL) at which FDA guidelines call for further safety testing. 

For example, the maximum concentration of avobenzone was found to be 4 ng/mL and 3.4 ng/mL for two different sprays, 4.3 ng/mL for a lotion and 1.8 ng/mL for the cream. 

Researchers did not name the products used in the study. 

The effects of plasma concentrations exceeding the FDA’s limit is not known and needs to be further studied, the research team wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). 

The results in no way suggest that people should stop using sunscreen to protect against the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, researchers said. 

“The demonstration of systemic absorption well above the FDA guideline does not mean these ingredients are unsafe,” Dr Robert Califf and Dr Kanade Shinkai said in an editorial that accompanied the study in JAMA. 

“The study findings raise many important questions about sunscreen and the process by which the sunscreen industry, clinicians, specialty organisations and regulatory agencies evaluate the benefits and risks of this topical OTC medication,” they added. 

David Andrews, a senior scientist at the nonprofit health and environmental advocacy group Environmental Working Group, called for thorough testing of sunscreen ingredients. 

“For years the sunscreen chemical manufactures have resisted common sense safety testing for their ingredients and now FDA is proposing that these common ingredients must undergo additional testing to stay on the market,” Andrews said. 

However, the Personal Care Products Council trade association pointed out limitations of the study and expressed concern that it may confuse consumers. 

Sunscreens in the study were used at “twice the amount that would be applied in what the scientific community considers real-world conditions,” said Alexandra Kowcz, the group’s chief scientist. 

If you are dreaming of operating a superfast computer, a really really fast one, your dream may come true in 10 to 15 years. Superfast here refers to machines that would be hundreds or even thousands times faster than what we have today. Actually it is impossible at this point in time to even estimate how much faster the computers will be, for they will be built on quantum computing, a technology that is much different from the one used today.

Quantum physics is that part of physics that deals with subatomic dimensions. At this level the “standard” laws of physics do not apply anymore. It is a world of its own, one that has been mostly theoretical so far but where actual implementations and applications are going to be very real, quite tangible.

In a recent documentary broadcast on German-French cultural TV channel Arte, the presenter tried to explain in layman’s terms the rather esoteric notion of quantum physics. He gave an example. In traditional computing, the memory bits can take the value of zero or one, the very basis of the binary system. In quantum computers the bits (called qubits here) can have the zero and the one value, at the same time, but in various statistical states, like for example 35 per cent zero and 65 per cent one.

He wittily added “if you have perfectly understood this, then there must be something wrong with you!” In other words he was acknowledging that few people really understood the theory, and it was normal to see it as something mysterious at this point. The fact remains that actual applications are coming, and because of the subatomic size of the components that will be used, among other considerations, the speed of the machines will be incredible.

Currently computers gain a little speed every three or four years. Compared to the laptops computers made twenty years ago, today’s models are like cars to bicycles. As great as it is, this speed of change, however, will be nothing compared to what quantum computers may bring us; it will be a mind-blowing high-tech revolution, something beyond imagination.

Reading about such drastic change brings the expected questions: do we really need such computing speed? Will they be making laptops based on quantum computing or will it be a design exclusive to server computers and networks? Will price be affordable for the home users?

Only the answer to the first question is easy. The others are impossible to answer at this point.

Yes, we definitely need and can use the fastest computers that the industry can make. No machine will be fast enough. Our needs to process, treat and exchange ever larger sizes of digital contents keep growing, and networks of all kinds, wired or wireless, are expanding beyond what we thought was conceivable a mere 10 years ago. All this needs fast machines.

Quantum computers will probably be seen only as server machines at the beginning – again, something estimated to materialise in 10 to 15 years from now. When will the technology move to small offices and homes, to mobile devices? It cannot be predicted in any way. The same is true about cost. It is impossible to have even a rough estimate; even those in the industry have no idea about it.

We only can observe that computer technology is becoming relatively cheaper, if we consider the performance of the machines and all they let us do, but that at the same time we are spending a lot on high-tech. Suffice it to see the price of high end models of smartphones for example, which is in the range of JD600 to JD800 in Jordan. Who would have thought that we would spending such amounts of money on portable telephones, however smart they may be?

The only thing we can do about quantum computers now is to watch the news and perhaps prepare — mentally at least — for the big change to come.

By Carolyn Crist

Rubber playground surface material may protect kids from some injuries but could be harboring a different source of harm, a study in Boston suggests. 

Researchers tested lead levels in the soil, sand, mulch or rubber surface materials in 28 playgrounds and found the rubber surfaces often averaged two or three times the lead levels of the other materials. Many of the highest lead levels were also found in soil surfaces, making sand and mulch the healthier surface choices for playgrounds, the study team writes in PLoS ONE. 

“Playgrounds use a variety of materials to protect children against injuries. However, we should always consider the full suite of health effects associated with materials that children come into contact with,” said study author Nick Arisco of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. 

Most research on lead exposures in children’s outdoor play areas has focused on soil contamination. Rubber surfaces have been used more in recent years for injury prevention and to recycle waste tyres, he said. 

“Understanding the benefits and risks of using different materials can help inform healthier playground design moving forward,” he told Reuters Health by email. 

Arisco and colleagues examined lead levels in poured-in-place rubber and compared them to levels in soil, sand and wood mulch materials from randomly selected playgrounds in neighbourhoods representing every socioeconomic category in the city. They chose Boston in part because from 2009 to 2013, the lower-income neighbourhoods of East Boston, North Dorchester, Roxbury and Mission Hill contributed a disproportionate number of the entire city’s cases of elevated blood lead levels in children. 

In the study, each playground tested had at least two types of surface material, so a total of 85 samples were included in the analysis. Overall, the testing found that average lead levels in soil surfaces were 66 microgrammes, or parts per million, per gram of soil. For rubber surfaces, the average was 22 microgrammes per gram, and mulch averaged 9 microgrammes per gram with sand averaging 8.5 microgrammes per gram. 

For rubber and soil, however, there were wide ranges of readings. One soil sample exceeded the 400-microgramme limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency for play areas, the study team notes. In addition, nine playgrounds had a soil sample greater than 80 microgrammes. 

Two playgrounds had a rubber sample with greater than 80 microgrammes of lead per gram, which exceeds the 80-microgramme limit set as a residential soil guideline in California. Public health experts prefer to use the California limit, especially for play areas where children as young as 6 months old play. 

“One reason children are especially vulnerable to exposures to lead and other chemicals is because they spend a lot of time on the ground, touching things and then putting their hands to their mouth,” Arisco said. 

Parents can encourage children to wash their hands after playing on playgrounds and remove their shoes at the door to prevent contaminated soil from tracking inside. For outdoor play areas at home, parents can cover the soil with a top layer of clean sand or mulch, he added. 

In addition, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention created an online guide to preventing lead poisoning that also answers frequently asked questions. No safe blood lead level in children has been identified, and even low levels can affect attention and academic achievement, according to the CDC. 

“Unfortunately, urban soils are often invisibly and severely contaminated with lead dust generated from multiple sources,” said Howard Mielke, an environmental health researcher at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Mielke, who wasn’t involved with the research, noted that one option to reduce lead exposure used by some childcare centres he has studied was to import low-lead soil from outside of the city to put in play areas. 

“The public needs to be aware that urban soils became invisibly lead-contaminated [in past decades] as a result of industrial activities,” he said by email. “Fortunately, the amount of lead in soil is decreasing since lead was banned in gasoline.”

By Munsif Vengattil and Paresh Dave

HYDERABAD/SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past year, a team of as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India has ploughed through millions of Facebook Inc. photos, status updates and other content posted since 2014.

The workers categorise items according to five “dimensions”, as Facebook calls them.

These include the subject of the post — is it food, for example, or a selfie or an animal? What is the occasion — an everyday activity or major life event? And what is the author’s intention — to plan an event, to inspire, to make a joke?

The work is aimed at understanding how the types of things users post on its services are changing, Facebook said. That can help the company develop new features, potentially increasing usage and ad revenue. 

Details of the effort were provided by multiple employees at outsourcing firm Wipro Ltd. over several months. The workers spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the Indian firm. Facebook later confirmed many details of the project. Wipro declined to comment and referred all questions to Facebook.

The Wipro work is among about 200 content labelling projects that Facebook has at any time, employing thousands of people globally, company officials told Reuters. Many projects are aimed at “training” the software that determines what appears in users’ news feeds and powers the artificial intelligence underlying many other features.

The labelling efforts have not previously been reported.

“It’s a core part of what you need,” said Nipun Mathur, the director of product management for AI at Facebook. “I don’t see the need going away.”

The content labelling programme could raise new privacy issues for Facebook, according to legal experts consulted by Reuters. The company is facing regulatory investigations worldwide over an unrelated set of alleged privacy abuses involving the sharing of user data with business partners.

The Wipro workers said they gain a window into lives as they view a vacation photo or a post memorialising a deceased family member. Facebook acknowledged that some posts, including screenshots and those with comments, may include user names. 

The company said its legal and privacy teams must sign off on all labelling efforts, adding that it recently introduced an auditing system “to ensure that privacy expectations are being followed and parameters in place are working as expected”.

But one former Facebook privacy manager, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed unease about users’ posts being scrutinised without their explicit permission. The European Union’s year-old General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has strict rules about how companies gather and use personal data and in many cases requires specific consent.

“One of the key pieces of GDPR is purpose limitation,” said John Kennedy, a partner at law firm Wiggin and Dana who has worked on outsourcing, privacy and AI.

If the purpose is looking at posts to improve the precision of services, that should be stated explicitly, Kennedy said. Using an outside vendor for the work could also require consent, he said.

It remains unclear exactly how GDPR will be interpreted and whether regulators and consumers would see Facebook’s internal labeling practices as problematic. Europe’s top data privacy official declined to comment on possible concerns.

A Facebook spokeswoman said: “We make it clear in our data policy that we use the information people provide to Facebook to improve their experience and that we might work with service providers to help in this process.”

US Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat and leading critic of social media, told Reuters in a statement that large platforms increasingly are “taking more and more data from users, for wider and more far-reaching uses, without any corresponding compensation to the user”.

Warner said he is drafting legislation that would require Facebook to “disclose the value of users’ data, and tell users exactly how their data is being monetised”.

Project

Human-powered content labelling, also referred to as “data annotation”, is a growth industry as companies seek to harness data for AI training and other purposes.

Self-driving car companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo have labellers identify traffic lights and pedestrians in videos to fortify their AI. Voice assistant developers including Amazon.com Inc. have people annotate customer audio to improve AI’s ability to decipher speech.

Facebook launched the Wipro project in April last year. The Indian firm received a $4 million contract and formed a team of about 260 labellers, according to the workers. Last year, the work consisted of analysing posts from the prior five years.

After completing that, the team in December was cut to about 30 and shifted to labelling each month posts from the prior month. Work is expected to last through at least the end of 2019, they said.

Facebook confirmed the staffing changes but declined to comment on financial details.

The company said its analysis is ongoing so it could not provide any findings from the labelling or resulting product decisions. It has not told labellers the purpose or results of the project, and the workers said all they have inferred from their limited view is that selfies are increasingly popular.

The Wipro labellers and Facebook said the posts are a random sampling of text-based status updates, shared links, event posts, Stories feature uploads, videos and photos, including user-posted screenshots of chats on Facebook’s various messaging apps. The posts come from Facebook and Instagram users globally, in languages including English, Hindi and Arabic.

Each item goes to two labellers to check accuracy, and a third if they disagree, Facebook said. Workers said they see on average 700 items per day. Facebook said the target average is lower.

Facebook confirmed labellers in Timisoara, Romania and Manila, the Philippines are involved in the same project.

Among Facebook’s other labelling projects, one worker in Hyderabad for outsourcing vendor Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. said he and at least 500 colleagues look for sensitive topics or profane language in Facebook videos.

The aim is to train an automated Facebook tool that enables advertisers to avoid sponsoring videos that are, for example, adult or political, Facebook said. Cognizant did not respond to a request for comment.

Another application of labelling involved the social network’s Marketplace shopping feature, where it automated category recommendations for new listings by first having labellers and product experts categorise some existing listings, Facebook’s Mathur said.

Private posts

Facebook users are not offered the chance to opt out of their data being labelled.

At Wipro, the posts being examined include not only public posts but also those that are shared privately to a limited set of a user’s friends. That ensures the sample reflects the range of activity on Facebook and Instagram, said Karen Courington, director of product support operations at Facebook. 

Facebook’s data policy does not explicitly mention manual analysis.

“We provide information and content to vendors and service providers who support our business, such as by providing technical infrastructure services, analysing how our products are used, providing customer service, facilitating payments or conducting surveys,” the policy states.

Europe’s GDPR also requires companies delete user data upon request. Facebook said it has technology to routinely sync labelled posts with both deletion requests and changes to content privacy settings. 

Facebook and other companies are testing techniques to curtail the need for outsourced labelling, in part to analyse more data faster and cheaper. For instance, AI training data for news feed rankings and photo descriptions for the blind came from hashtags on Instagram posts, Facebook’s Mathur said.

“We try to minimise the amount of things we send out,” he said.

Smartphones might ironically be the answer to selfie-related deaths, two wilderness medicine specialists say. 

Hundreds of people have lost their lives in pursuit of daring selfies to impress their social media followers. But smartphone technology that uses global positioning system (GPS) location, or measures altitude, could potentially be harnessed to prevent these unfortunate incidents, the two experts suggest. 

In a letter published in the journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, Gerard Flaherty and Michael Smith, both from the National University of Ireland Galway, discuss how cell phones could be used to transmit verbal safety warnings to users who are about to take photographs in dangerous locations, such as the edge of a cliff. 

“Based on the GPS location or altitude of the tourist, we propose that there may be scope for providing verbal safety messages to individuals with their phone in camera mode, warning them that they are too close to a vertical drop. In such cases, the camera function may be disabled until the person moves away from the dangerous no selfie zone,” Flaherty and Smith write. 

Research has shown that India tops the list of countries that see the highest number of selfie deaths, followed by Russia and the US. Most victims are young men in their 20s. 

Technology is still new to much of India and with affordable Internet, people are posting more photographs online to be acknowledged by peers — one of the main reasons behind risky selfies, explained Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, an associate professor at India’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi. 

Kumaraguru and his team have worked on developing tech solutions to the problem, including Saftie, an app that crowdsources data from users who flag locations they consider dangerous. 

He believes interventions of this sort are most likely to be effective, particularly if the data gathered are put to use in popular apps like Google Maps. 

Flaherty and Smith also discuss other precautions that have been put in place to mitigate selfie deaths, including warning signs and the creation of no-selfie zones. Authority figures like park rangers and wilderness medicine providers have also been deployed to counsel tourists and ensure they respect safety notices. 

Safety interventions could also be targeted at the groups most affected. 

“There has been very little research done on gender differences in relation to travel health impairments. It would be intriguing to explore more deeply the gender-based differences in adventure tourist risk-taking and self-photography behaviour in future studies,” Flaherty told Reuters Health in an e-mail. 

Kumaraguru, however, believes that the very phones capable of causing selfie deaths are the most effective tools to prevent them. 

“You could do no-selfie zones, you could put banners all around, you could put fliers all around, but will that have an impact?” he asks. 

“Without phones, without technology, how would you create awareness among people on a large scale?” 

But Katrin Tiidenberg, an Associate Professor of Social Media and Visual Culture at Tallinn University, Estonia, told Reuters Health she believes “selfie-related deaths are likely highly over-sensationalised [and] overreported”.

Tiidenberg, who authored a book called “Selfies: Why We Love [and Hate] Them,” added, “Some people behave in risky ways. That was true before selfies. So I think people should be counselled to be mindful of the risks in potentially dangerous natural and tourist destinations, but I don’t think there is a reason to make the whole thing about selfies by creating ‘no selfie zones.’”