CasoC Blog: 03/2023

3/27/2023

Russian women give birth in Argentina (video)

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3/26/2023

TikTok's CEO and US lawmakers

A U.S. ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, the country's most popular social media for young people, seems increasingly probable after the grilling of its CEO by Washington lawmakers last week.

The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, defended his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users.

Chew spent much of the five-hour hearing stressing TikTok’s distance from the Chinese government. He talked about Project Texas – an effort to move all US data to domestic servers – and said the company was deleting all US user data that is backed up to servers outside of the country by the end of the year.

Chew emphasized that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.

TikTok has more than 150 million active monthly US users. That’s almost half the US.

TikTok began its meteoric rise in 2018. Today, a majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people ages 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.

This has raised a number of concerns about the app’s impact on young users’ safety, with self-harm and eating disorder-related content spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app. TikTok has introduced features in response to such criticisms, including automatic time limits for users under 18.

Who is Shou Zi Chew?

Chew was born in January 1983 in Singapore. After completing mandatory military service for the Singaporean government as a teenager, he then moved to England to enroll at University College London. After earning a bachelor's degree in economics, he then landed a job as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in London.

A few years later, he left that role to move again — this time to the United States — to enroll in Harvard Business School in 2008. While still at Harvard, Chew took an internship in 2009 at a then-modest startup technology company called Facebook.

After graduating from Harvard in 2010, Chew spent a decade working for a venture capital firm in Hong Kong and a consumer electronics manufacturer in Beijing.

In 2021, he joined TikTok and its parent company ByteDance in a dual role of TikTok CEO and ByteDance chief financial officer. Chew reports to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

Chew is married to Vivian Kao and they have two children

From The Guardian (edited)

US Congress grills TikTok CEO (captions)

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The reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral (video)

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Professional bear huggers wanted

The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish is hiring for “professional bear huggers”

Unfortunately, a love of bears is not the only qualification you’ll need to become a conservation officer. Candidates must have a bachelor’s degree in “biological sciences, police science or law enforcement, natural resources conservation, ecology, or related fields.”

Interested applicants “must be able to hike in exhausting conditions, have the courage to crawl into a bear den, and have the trust in your coworkers to keep you safe during the process”.

Applications for the next class of conservation officer trainees are open until the end of the month

The job duties include a lot more than just bear-hugging. Each conservation officer is responsible for “enforcing the game and fish laws” and must

educate the public about wildlife and wildlife management,
conduct wildlife surveys,
capture problem animals,
investigate wildlife damage to crops and property,
assist in wildlife relocations and ´
help to develop new regulations.

Black bears are New Mexico’s state animal. Estimates place the population at around 6,000 bears.

From CNN (edited)

3/16/2023

GPS and 3 simple words (video)

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Farming in Ukraine

Food prices around the world increased when Russia invaded Ukraine last year because in many places food production stopped. Ukrainian farmers left their fields to fight in the war or go to safer places. The war will reduce Ukraine’s production by 10 to 20 million tons.

At least 10.5 million hectares of farmland are damaged. That is 25 percent of Ukraine’s farmland. Tanks and explosions destroyed some farmland completely.

Farmers lost equipment and storage buildings and it will be expensive to replace them.

Andriy Vadaturskyi is the head of one of Ukraine’s largest grain producers. He said farmers need financial help. Today there is a problem of high prices, but there is food ready to ship out of Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea. However, in one year the situation will be worse.

The Ukrainian government will need $15 billion to remove the mines and make the soil healthy again.

The problems do not end with the soil, mines and other land damage. The war destroyed roads and railways. It will cost more than $35 billion to rebuild roads and other transportation lines.

Farmers have enough money right now, because they had a good year just before the war started. However, half the farmers will have serious financial problems if the war goes into 2024.

The future of Ukrainian farmers is grey at the moment.