How the World Has Changed From 1917 to 2017

One hundred years ago, things looked a little bit different.

1. World Literacy Rates

- 1917: The world literacy rate was only 23 percent.

- Today: Depending on estimates, the world literacy rate today is 86.1 percent.

2. Travel Time

- 1917: It took 5 days to get from London to New York; 3.5 months to travel from London to Australia.

- Today: A nonstop flight gets you from London to New York in a little over 8 hours, and you can fly from London to Australia in about a day, with just one stop.

3. Average Price of a US House

- 1917: The average price of a U.S. house was $5,000. ($111,584.29 when adjusted for inflation).

- Today: As of 2010, the average price of a new home sold in the U.S. was $272,900.

4. The First Hamburger

- 1917: The hamburger bun was invented by a fry cook named Walter Anderson, who co-founded White Castle.

- Today: On average, Americans eat three hamburgers a week. That's a national total of nearly 50 billion burgers per year. And now we’re even inventing 100 percent plant-based beef burgers… produced by Impossible Foods and available at select restaurants.

5. Average Price of a Car in the US

- 1917: The average price of a car in the US was $400 ($8,926.74 when adjusted for inflation)

- Today: The average car price in the US was $34,968 as of January 2017.

6. The First Boeing Aircraft

- 1917: A Boeing aircraft flew for the first time on June 15.

- Today: In 2015, there were almost 24,000 turboprop and regional aircraft, as well as wide body and narrow body jets, in service worldwide.

7. Coca-Cola

- 1917: On July 1, 1916, Coca-Cola introduced its current formula to the market.

- Today: Today, Coca-Cola has a market cap of about $178 billion with 2015 net operating revenues over $44 billion. Each day, over 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola drinks are enjoyed in more than 200 countries.

7. Average US Wages

- 1917: The average US hourly wage was 22 cents an hour ($4.90 per hour when adjusted for inflation)

- Today: The average US hourly wage is approximately $26 per hour.

8. Supermarkets

- 1917: The first "super" market, PigglyWiggly, opened on September 6, 1916 in Memphis, TN.

- Today: In 2015, there were 38,015 supermarkets, employing 3.4 million people and generating sales of about $650 billion.

9. Billionaires

- 1917: John D. Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire on September 29.

- Today: There are approximately 1,810 billionaires, and their aggregate net worth is $6.5 trillion.

For context, Rockefeller’s net worth in today’s dollars would have been about $340 billion. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, is worth $84 billion today.

10. Telephones (Landlines vs. Cellphones)

- 1917: Only 8 percent of homes had a landline telephone.

- Today: Forget landlines! In the US, nearly 80 percent of the population has a smartphone (a supercomputer in their pockets). Nearly half of all American households now use only cellphones rather than older landlines. And as far as cost, today, you can Skype anywhere in the world for free over a WiFi network.

11. Traffic (Horses to Cars)

- 1917: In 1912, traffic counts in New York showed more cars than horses for the first time.

- Today: There were approximately 253 million cars and trucks on US roads in 2015.

12. US Population

- 1917: The US population broke 100 million, and the global population reached 1.9 billion.

- Today: The US population is 320 million, and the global population broke 7.5 billion this year.

13. Inventions and Technology

- 1917: The major tech invention in 1917? The toggle light switch.

- Today: The major tech invention of today? CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, which enables us to reprogram life as we know it. And we are making strides in AI, robotics, sensors, networks, synthetic biology, materials science, space exploration and more every day.

14. High School Graduation Rates

- 1917: Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

- Today: Over 80 percent of all Americans graduated high school this past year.

15. Cost of Bread

- 1917: A loaf of bread was $0.07 ($1.50 when adjusted for inflation).

- Today: A loaf of bread costs $2.37.

16. Speed Limits

- 1917: The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

- Today: The maximum speed limit in most cities is about 70 mph.

Just wait for the next 100 years.

From Singularity Hub

A historic Oscars blunder (video)

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'La La Land's' Opening Scene (video)

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Bees that play soccer (article and video)

LONDON — Using sweet treats and months of patient coaching, scientists in England have taught a group of bumblebees how to play soccer.

The 18-month study at Queen Mary University of London saw scientists train 50 bees to move a small yellow ball to a circled location in order to score a goal and receive a sugary food reward.

The first group of bees then showed others in the colony how to play, with the second group impressing scientists by expanding the game.

“The bees solved the task in a different way than what was demonstrated, suggesting that observer bees did not simply copy what they saw, but improved on it,” said Olli J. Loukola, who co-led the study.

“This shows an impressive amount of cognitive flexibility, especially for an insect.”

Their sporting prowess follows a study last year where the scientists taught bees to pull strings to get food and then relay what they learned to others.

Co-author professor Lars Chittka said it had taken months to teach the first bees how to play football, but that the second group picked up the game from their colony peers within 30 minutes.

Further studies will follow to better understand how an insect with a brain the size of the head of a pin can learn so much.

“Our study puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioral flexibility,” professor Lars Chittka said.

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Article source: VOA News

Why is English so much fun?

Flight Attendants New Training Program (audio)

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Dubai’s taxi drones (art. & video)

AT TIMES it can feel like we are living in an episode of “Travel Futurama”. This week: flying drone taxis.

Dubai, a city that sometimes seems to inhabit a time zone five years ahead of the rest of the planet, has embraced another improbable travel innovation, to go alongside its enthusiasm for hyperloop trains and long driverless metro lines. This week, the Emirati metropolis announced it is to test passenger-carrying drones in its skies by July.

The unpiloted drone taxis won’t exactly replace the traditional earthbound sort, since they will be able to carry only one passenger, who together with luggage cannot weigh more than 100 kilograms. And it will have a range of just 50 kilometres, or half an hour of flying time. But if it works, the long-term implications are huge not only for Dubai, which has the world’s deadliest roads, but also for congested cities around the world. While others sit bumper-to-bumper, a passenger in these new drones will be able to cruise above the gridlock at an average speed of 100 kilometres an hour.

That might seem like a desert mirage, but the concept has already sprung up elsewhere, if only as an aspiration. In June 2016, the state of Nevada, USA, cleared the world’s first passenger-carrying drone for testing. The craft is the same one being introduced in Dubai, the Chinese-made Ehang 184, a compact pod with four dual-propeller extensions that navigates by using sensors.

Pilotless drones might cut costs by eliminating the need to pay for labour although people on the ground will monitor the vehicles. It is not hard to envisage a future in which business travellers use piloted flying cars like Uber’s for intercity journeys, and trips between cities are taken in drones. Add to the mix some other innovations—like the aforementioned hyperloop, that could whizz people between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes, and the driverless on-the-ground taxis that will inevitably become a reality and a multimodal transportation future akin to Futurama doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Eventually.

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Article edited from The Economist

Adidas Shoes Made From Ocean Plastic (art & video)

Adidas’ latest running shoe is subtle and soft-looking, with stitching that evokes the sea. It’s also made almost entirely from plastic recovered from the ocean. 

Last year Adidas announced it was working on a shoe with the intent of playing a small role in cleaning up the oceans and adjust its supply chain to better reflect the constraints of climate change.

Partnering with Parley for the Oceans, a non-profit committed to reducing plastic 

waste in the oceans, Adidas developed a finished product earlier this year with 95% ocean plastic recovered from near the Maldives. 

And the shoe isn’t just a gimmick. It represents real change for the brand.

Soon, 7,000 pairs of the “Ultra BOOST Uncaged Parley” will be on sale for $220 each. The brand aims to produce 1 million pairs of the sneakers from more than 11 million plastic bottles.

As Adidas notes on the product page, the shoes are “ spinning the problem into a solution. The threat into a thread.”

This initiative allows consumers everywhere to show their appreciation for the oceans and could potentially spur other companies to see the ocean’s waste problem as an opportunity for innovative environmentalism.    

It’s no secret that the world’s oceans are filled with plastic and that this is harming marine life. 

Each year, 8 million tons or 7.2 billion kilograms of plastic enter the world’s oceans. There are about 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the oceans today. Big pieces of plastic are routinely ingested by animals that then face a range of health problems. As plastic breaks down it leaches toxic chemicals into the water and deteriorates into small debris that blanket the ocean’s floors and are ingested by organisms up and down the food chain.

On its own, Adidas is merely chipping away at the problem, but the huge multinational corporation is shining a light on the problem and is lending credibility to clean-up efforts. 

When supply chains become circular and self-sustaining, the environment is protected from overexploitation and pollution. If this becomes the norm, then environments everywhere will be saved. And then there will be a lot more space to test out these sneakers. 

Edited from Global Citizen

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‘Traffic Lights’ Are Coming Back (video)

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Missile System in South Korea (audio)

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The moon is older than first thought (video)

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Job for Chocolate and Candy Taster

Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

READING, England — Some people like to take a break from work with a quick bite of chocolate. But what if a quick bite of chocolate was your work?

That is the opportunity being offered by Mondelez, the company that makes Cadbury chocolates and Oreo cookies and is hiring part-time tasters to test its products.

At first glance, the job description could hardly be better: Get paid to taste candy, chocolate and cookies. More than 4,000 applicants have submitted resumes for just two openings since the roles were advertised and promoted on social media.

But, Mondelez insists, those hoping for an easy opportunity to stuff their faces — for money, at least — should think again.

Applicants must go through three days of vetting at the company’s consumer research center in this city just outside London. The process calls for them to spend two and a half hours a day having their taste buds put to the test, as they try to join around 60 tasters who already work for Mondelez.

It’s no easy task.

The testing is done in so-called sensory booths, where red-tinged lights mask differences in the appearance of various chocolates, leaving applicants to focus on taste and smell. Air pressure in the booths is controlled so that smells are automatically sucked upward and away.

Three plastic cups are passed through a small hatch in the booth, each one holding a small amount of chocolate. Applicants must discern which one tastes most like the reference sample.

Between batches — the process puts applicants through 20 rounds of tasting — tasters must wait two minutes and cleanse their palates with crackers and water before moving on.

Reviews are scientific and clinical — saying you like a particular kind of chocolate is not enough, and even terms like “caramel” are discouraged (Mondelez technicians prefer tasters be able to name the constituent parts of caramel).

Many applicants are unable to even differentiate between certain flavors, according to Dr. Afsha Chugtai, who oversees projects at the research center.

This is not the first time the job has been advertised, but Mondelez’s decision to promote the openings on social media left it inundated with applications.

The job typically attracts a range of applicants, but many are mothers drawn by a flexible work schedule and an expectation that new hires will work 7.5 hours a week.

Caroline Robbins, who left a job in retail banking to have a baby when she saw an advertisement for the position, was herself once an aspiring taster.

Now a technician at the research center, Ms. Robbins recalled of her application, “I just couldn’t believe it, that there was an advert for a chocolate taster.”

From The New York Times

The ultimate drone: a robotic bee

Robotic pollen collector

IT IS, in one way, the ultimate drone. In another, though, it is the antithesis of what a drone should be. Drones are supposed to laze around in the hive while their sisters collect nectar and pollinate flowers. But pollination is this drone’s very reason for existing.

The drone in question is the brainchild of Eijiro Miyako, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, in Tsukuba, Japan. It is the first attempt by an engineer to deal with what many perceive as an impending agricultural crisis.

Pollinating insects in general, and bees, in particular, are falling in numbers. The reasons why are obscure. But some fear certain crops will become scarcer and more expensive as a result. Attempts to boost the number of natural pollinators have so far failed. Perhaps it is time to build some artificial ones instead.

Dr Miyako’s pollinator-bot does not look much like a bee. It is a modified version of a commercially available robot quadcopter, 42mm across. By comparison, a honeybee worker is about 15mm long. But the modifications mean it can pollinate flowers. Specifically—and crucially—Dr Miyako has armed it with paintbrush hairs that are covered in a special gel sticky enough to pick pollen up, but not so sticky that it holds on to that pollen when it brushes up against something else.

Previous attempts to build artificial pollinators have failed to manage this. Dr Miyako, though, has succeeded. Experiments flying the drone up to lily and tulip flowers, so that the gel-laden hairs come into contact with both the pollen-bearing anthers and the pollen-receiving stigmata of those flowers, show that the drone can indeed carry pollen from flower to flower in the way an insect does—though he has yet to confirm that seeds result from this pollination.

At the moment, Dr. Miyako’s drones have to be guided to their targets by a human operator. The next stage will be to fit them with vision that lets them recognize flowers by themselves. Fortunately, visual-recognition software is sufficiently developed so this should not be too hard. In future, when you are walking through an orchard in bloom, listen out for the humming of the drones as well as the buzzing of the bees.

Article from The Economist and New Scientist

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The Art and Science of Winemaking (captions)

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Cold money (audio)

Former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson, center, accompanied by his wife Andrea, talks with his attorney Robert Trout

Money found in food boxes in freezer of former Congressman William Jefferson.

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Personalized Handshakes (captions)

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Paris Flower-Growing Toilet

The Uritrottoir urinal 

In cities the world over, men (and, to a lesser extent, women) who urinate in the street — al fresco —cost millions of dollars for cleaning and the repair of damage to public infrastructure.

Now, Paris has a new weapon against what the French call “les pipis sauvages” or “wild peeing”: an eco-friendly public toilet that looks more like a modernist flower box than a receptacle for human waste.

You can even grow flowers in its compost.

The Parisian innovation was spurred by a problem of public urination so endemic that City Hall recently proposed dispatching a nearly 2,000 officers to try to prevent bad behavior, which also includes leaving dog waste on the street and littering cigarette butts. Fines for public urination are steep — about $75.

Even that was not deterrent enough, officials say. A small brigade of sanitation workers still has to scrub about 1,800 square miles of sidewalk each day.

Paris public toilet Uritrottoir — a combination of the French words for “urinal” and “pavement” — was designed by Faltazi, a Nantes-based industrial design firm.

The Uritrottoir has graffiti-proof paint and does not use water. Its top section also doubles as an attractive flower or plant holder.

It works by storing urine on a bed of dry straw, sawdust or wood chips. Monitored remotely by a “urine attendant” who can see on a computer when the toilet is full, the urine and straw is carted away to the outskirts of Paris, where it is turned into compost that can later be used in public gardens or parks.

Fabien Esculier, an engineer who is known in the French media as “Monsieur Pipi” because of his expertise on the subject, said the Uritrottoir was more eco-friendly than the dozens of existing public toilets which are connected to the public sewage system.

“Its greatest virtue is that it doesn’t use water, and produces compost that can be used for public gardens and parks,” he said.

Two of the toilets were installed on Tuesday outside Paris’s Gare de Lyon, a railway station that has become ground zero in the capital’s war against public urination. The SNCF, France’s state-owned national railway, plans to roll out more across the capital if the Uritrottoir is a success.

 “I am optimistic it will work,” said Maxime Bourette, the SNFC maintenance official who ordered the toilets for the railway. “Everyone is tired of the mess.”

It remains to be seen whether the toilets are cost effective. The SNCF paid about $9,730 for two toilets. It will cost about $865 a month to pay a sanitation worker to clean the toilets and take away the waste. A large model can handle the outflow of 600 people; a smaller model absorbs 300 trips to the toilet.

 A designer of the Urritoir, Laurent Lebot, 45, an industrial engineer who has also invented an eco-friendly vacuum cleaner, said “Public urination is a huge problem in France. Urine degrades lamp posts and telephone poles, damages cars, pollutes the Seine and undermines everyday life of a city. Cleaning up wastes water, and detergents are damaging for the environment.”

"Fountain"

Among the highest fines for an act of public urination — about $37,500 — was meted out to 77-year-old Pierre Pinoncelli, a French citizen who in 1993   urinated on the artist Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Dadaist porcelain urinal “Fountain”— signed “R.Mutt” and considered a masterpiece of conceptual art — before hitting it with a hammer.

In 2006, he was fined about $230,000 after he attacked the artwork a second time.

    Edited from The New York Times

     

Chile's forest fires

View of the remains of Santa Olga, 350 kilometers south of Santiago,

Chile's massive forest fires that have killed 11 people and destroyed nearly 1,500 homes will cost the government $333 million, Finance Minister Rodrigo Valdes told reporters on Friday.

The government will reallocate $100 million from the current budget to mitigate the effects of the fireses, while another $233 million will be taken out of a rainy day fund that the government maintains for such situations.

"Those are the costs that the state will have to assume in the preliminary estimate that we're doing," Valdes said. "That situation can change when we have more information, and it will depend on how the wildfires evolve."

Valdes said the estimates do not include damages to small and medium sized producers. The government will not need to issue debt to help with the aid effort. Experts are calculating the potential impact on economic growth.

Losses for Chile's private sector have been significant in some cases. Chile's forestry industry, one of the country's main export sectors, reported $350 million in losses as of Monday.

According to official figures, the fires have so far consumed over 580,000 hectares (1,433,000 acres).

Foreign firefighters and specialists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, France, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain, the United States and Venezuela have teamed up with local rescue teams to fight the 41 active fires.

Forest fires are a regular feature of Chile's hot, arid summers, but a nearly decade-long drought combined with historically high temperatures have created tinder-like conditions in the nation's central regions.

A wildfire approaches Chile's Dichato community

Edited from VOA News