Instagram’s influence is not limited to personal interactions; it has become a vital tool for businesses and influencers alike. Brands leverage Instagram to showcase their products, tell their stories, and build customer loyalty. For influencers and content creators, Instagram offers a platform to share their passions, build a following, and ultimately, monetize their content.

The allure of Instagram is evident in its diverse user base, ranging from teenagers sharing their daily lives to celebrities and brands reaching millions. Its impact on popular culture, consumer behavior, and even political discourse is undeniable, making it a central part of today’s digital landscape.

The Concept of Making Money on Instagram

Making money on Instagram revolves around the idea of leveraging one’s follower base to generate income. This can be achieved through various methods, such as sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, and selling products or services directly to grow Instagram followers. The key to monetizing Instagram is not just having a large number of followers to buy Instagram followers but engaging them in a way that translates into profitable actions, whether that’s buying a product, visiting a website, or promoting a brand.

The platform offers tools like Instagram Shopping, Stories, Reels, and IGTV, allowing creators to showcase products and services innovatively and engagingly. These tools, combined with the power of visual storytelling and personal connection, make Instagram an effective channel for monetization.

The Numbers Game: How Many Followers Do You Really Need?

Breaking Down Follower Tiers

When it comes to making money on Instagram, how to get followers on Instagram can play a significant role, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems. Instagram accounts can generally be categorized into different tiers based on follower count:

• Nano-Influencers: 1,000 to 10,000 followers. These accounts may have a smaller reach, but they often boast high engagement rates. Brands are increasingly partnering with nano-influencers for their authentic connection with their audience.
• Micro-Influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers. Micro-influencers are known for their niche content and dedicated following. They are attractive to brands looking for a targeted audience with specific interests.
• Macro-Influencers: 100,000 to 1 million followers. These influencers have a broader reach and are often considered opinion leaders in their respective fields. They are well-positioned to secure lucrative deals with larger brands.
• Mega-Influencers and Celebrities: Over 1 million followers. This tier includes celebrities and top influencers. They have massive reach and can command high fees for sponsored content, but their engagement rates can be lower compared to smaller accounts.

The number of followers needed to make money on Instagram can vary, but it’s not always about high numbers. Brands often look for engagement rates, niche influence, and content quality over sheer follower count. However, having a substantial number of followers can be beneficial. For those starting out, the temptation to buy Instagram followers might seem like a quick solution to boost numbers. But it’s important to note that authentic engagement often outweighs the number of followers. Brands are increasingly savvy about distinguishing genuine influencers from those with artificially inflated numbers. Therefore, the focus should be more on how to get followers on Instagram organically to build a genuine and engaged audience.

When considering how to get followers on Instagram, the emphasis should be on strategies that foster real and meaningful interactions. This includes regularly posting high-quality content, engaging with followers through comments and stories, and using relevant hashtags. These practices not only help in attracting genuine followers but also enhance the chances of making money on Instagram. While it might be tempting to buy Instagram followers for a quick boost, cultivating an authentic audience can lead to more sustainable and profitable opportunities. Collaborating with brands, affiliate marketing, and sponsored posts become more viable and lucrative when you have a dedicated and engaged follower base, underscoring the importance of genuine growth strategies on Instagram.

The Relationship Between Followers and Earning Potential

The potential to earn money on Instagram is not solely dependent on the number of followers or buy Instagram followers. Engagement rate, which is the level of interaction followers have with your content, plays a crucial role. Advertisers and brands often prefer to work with accounts that have high engagement rates, as this indicates a more active and committed audience.

While to grow Instagram followers can increase the visibility and reach of your content, it doesn’t automatically translate to higher earnings. A smaller, more engaged audience can be more valuable to certain brands than a larger, less engaged one. For instance, a nano-influencer with a highly engaged following in a specific niche may attract brands related to that niche, even if their overall follower count is low.

Quality Over Quantity: The Importance of High-Quality Followers

High-quality followers on Instagram are those who are genuinely interested in your content and engage with it regularly. This engagement can take many forms, such as likes, comments, shares, and saves. These followers are not just passive observers; they actively interact with your posts, creating a dynamic community around your brand or persona.

The value of high-quality followers lies in their tendency to be more loyal and responsive. They are more likely to trust your recommendations, participate in discussions, and purchase products or services you endorse. This level of engagement is crucial for brands and businesses, as it often translates into higher conversion rates and more effective influencer partnerships.

Engagement Rates and Their Impact on Revenue

Engagement rate is a key metric on Instagram, typically calculated to how to get followers on Instagram by dividing the total number of interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) by the total number of followers, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. A high engagement rate indicates that your content resonates well with your audience, which is a significant factor for brands when choosing influencers for partnerships.

Instagram followers can enhance your engagement rate, making your profile more appealing to brands seeking impactful influencer partnerships. Essentially, acquiring a smaller follower count from buying Instagram followers but with higher engagement can potentially yield greater returns than having a larger follower base with minimal interaction.

Strategies to Increase Instagram Followers

Content Creation Tips

• Consistency is Key: Regular posting keeps your audience engaged and helps attract new followers. Create a content calendar to ensure you stick to a reliable posting timetable.
• Quality Visuals: Since Instagram is a visually-driven platform, high-quality images and videos are essential. Invest time in learning photography basics or graphic design to enhance your content’s appeal.
• Authenticity Matters: Authentic content resonates more with audiences. Share genuine stories, experiences, and thoughts that align with your personal brand or business ethos.
• Engage with Your Audience: Respond to comments, engage in conversations, and actively participate in your community. This not only solidifies your bond with your current followers but also draws in fresh ones.

Leveraging Hashtags and Trends

• Relevant Hashtags: Employ hashtags with a strategic approach to enhance the exposure of your posts. Conduct research and incorporate hashtags that align with both your content and your target audience.
• Trending Topics: Jump on trending topics and challenges relevant to your niche. This can increase your visibility and attract followers interested in those trends.

Collaborations and Cross-Promotions

• Collaborate with Other Creators: Partner with other Instagram users in your niche for shoutouts or joint content. This exposes your profile to a new, relevant audience.
• Engage in Cross-Promotions: Work with brands or influencers on promotional campaigns. This can be a mutually beneficial way to gain exposure and increase followers.

Monetization Methods on Instagram

Instagram offers several avenues for monetization, each catering to different types of content and audiences. Understanding these methods can help you effectively turn your Instagram presence into a revenue stream.

Sponsored Content and Brand Partnerships

• Sponsored Posts: Brands pay you to create content that features their products or services. These posts should align with your niche and be disclosed as sponsored to maintain transparency with your audience.
• Brand Ambassadors: Some companies seek long-term partnerships where you consistently feature their products in exchange for compensation. This requires a strong alignment between your brand values and the company’s products.

Affiliate Marketing

• Affiliate Links: You can earn a commission for sales made through affiliate links that you share in your posts or Instagram stories. This method is effective if you have an engaged audience that trusts your recommendations.
• Promo Codes: Similar to affiliate links, promo codes offer your followers discounts, while you earn a commission for each sale made using your code.

Selling Products or Services

• Instagram Shop: If you have products to sell, setting up an Instagram Shop allows your followers to purchase directly from your posts and stories.
• Online Courses or E-Books: If your expertise lies in a specific area, consider selling digital products like courses or e-books.
• Exclusive Content: Platforms like Patreon can be integrated to offer exclusive content to subscribers for a fee.

Tools and Techniques to Grow Instagram Followers

To grow Instagram followers requires a combination of the right tools and techniques. Here’s an analysis of some of the most impactful ones:

Analytical Tools for Better Engagement Understanding

• Instagram Insights: This built-in tool provides data to grow Instagram followers demographics, post performance, and engagement. Utilize this data to customize your content strategy.
• Third-Party Analytics Apps: Tools like Iconosquare or Hootsuite offer deeper insights into your account performance and can help optimize your posting schedule.

Effective Use of Instagram Stories and Reels

• Instagram Stories: Use stories for more personal, behind-the-scenes content. Polls, questions, and swipe-up links (for accounts with over 10,000 followers) can significantly boost engagement.
• Instagram Reels: Capitalize on this feature to create short, engaging videos. Reels often have a wider reach than regular posts and are a great way to attract new followers.

Additional Techniques

• SEO for Instagram: Optimize your profile for search by using relevant keywords in your bio and hashtags in your posts.
• Engaging Captions: Write captions that encourage to grow Instagram followers to engage, like asking questions or sharing relatable stories.
• Community Engagement: Actively engage with other accounts, participate in relevant conversations, and build relationships within the Instagram community.

Case Studies: Success Stories and What We Can Learn from Them

Analyzing Successful Instagram Profiles

• Fashion Influencer: Consider a fashion blogger who started with a few thousand followers. By consistently posting high-quality, trend-focused content and engaging with her audience, she attracted the attention of small fashion brands. Collaborations and sponsored posts became regular, and to grow Instagram followers count. She now works with international brands, illustrating the power of niche content and brand alignment.
• Travel Photographer: A travel photographer leveraged his stunning visuals to grow his following. By tagging travel agencies and tourism boards in his posts, he secured sponsored trips and gear sponsorships. His growth shows the importance of visual appeal and strategic tagging in monetizing an Instagram account.
• Fitness Trainer: A personal trainer used Instagram to share workout tips and health advice. Through regular posts and engagement, he built a loyal following. He then launched his line of fitness e-books and online coaching sessions, transitioning from influencer to entrepreneur. His journey underscores the potential of selling your own products and services.

Strategies Employed by Top Earners

• Consistency and Quality: Regular posting of high-quality content was key in building their brands.
• Engagement with Followers: Responding to comments and messages helped in forming a loyal community.
• Diversification of Revenue Streams: They didn’t rely on just one monetization method but explored various avenues like sponsored content, product sales, and affiliate marketing.

Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Algorithm Changes and Their Impact

• Understanding the Algorithm: Stay updated with changes in the Instagram algorithm. Prioritize content types favored by the algorithm, like Reels or Stories.
• Diversification of Content: Mix up your content types (posts, Reels, IGTV, Stories) to ensure broader reach.

Dealing with Competition and Saturation

• Find Your Niche: In a crowded platform, having a unique niche can help you stand out.
• Innovative Content: Be creative and try new content ideas to keep your audience engaged and attract new followers.

Maintaining Authenticity and Trust

• Balance Sponsored Content: Too much sponsored content can turn off followers. Strive for equilibrium between sponsored and naturally occurring content.
• Transparent Disclosure: Always disclose sponsored content to maintain trust with your audience.

Evolving with Trends and Audience Preferences

• Stay Trend-Informed: Keep an eye on emerging trends and adapt your content accordingly.
• Listen to Your Audience: Regularly solicit feedback from your followers to understand their changing preferences.

Conclusion

The journey to making money on Instagram is both challenging and rewarding. It requires a blend of creativity, strategy, and persistence. Monetizing your Instagram account is a journey that goes beyond just accumulating followers. It involves building a community, creating engaging content, and strategically leveraging the platform’s features. By understanding the nuances of Instagram’s ecosystem and continually adapting your strategy, you can turn your Instagram presence into a rewarding and profitable venture.

ALSO READ: Optimizing Your Instagram Account for Successful Business Development

The post How Many Followers Do You Need to Make Money on Instagram? appeared first on Australian Times News.

Changing Courtship Rituals

Swiping Right and Left

Who needs to go to a bar anymore when you can just swipe right? Brisbane locals have a myriad of dating apps at their fingertips, from Tinder to Bumble. This makes it easier to meet new people but, at the same time, has transformed how we approach relationships.

Traditional Meetups Are Less Common

Gone are the days when you’d just meet someone spontaneously at a local Brisbane park or café. Now, you’re more likely to get to know someone through their profile than a casual face-to-face interaction.

Authenticity and social media Filters

Showcasing the Best Parts

It’s tempting to show only the ‘highlights reel’ of your life on social media. But this can lead to unrealistic expectations. When you finally meet up in person, those curated images don’t always align with reality.

Bridging the Gap

The challenge then becomes how to bridge the gap between your online persona and who you truly are. Because let’s face it, the person who loves camping in their Instagram posts might not be as outdoorsy as they seem.

Unconventional Relationships

Friends With Benefits and More

Alternative relationships are getting a lot of attention these days, in part because social media platforms give us the means to explore them. It’s not just about monogamy anymore.

Sugar Dating in Brisbane

It’s interesting to note that even the concept of sugar dating in Brisbane has found its place in the city’s dating scene. Although it’s a different form of relationship, social media platforms have given it visibility, making it a recognized part of the modern romance lexicon.

The Perils of Too Much Information

Over-Sharing and Relationship Milestones

Posting that you’re ‘In a Relationship’ with someone after just a few dates might seem a bit premature, but social media pushes us to broadcast these milestones. The issue is that this public declaration can sometimes pressure the relationship.

When Private Becomes Public

Before social media, a disagreement with your partner might have stayed private. Now, it’s easy to air your grievances online, which can lead to unnecessary drama.

Maintaining Connections, Losing Depth

Catching Up or Keeping Tabs?

While it’s easy to ‘stay connected’ online, the depth of those connections can suffer. Remember when catching up with an old flame meant more than just a cursory glance at their latest social media updates?

Quality Over Quantity

Building meaningful relationships takes more than a ‘Like’ or a ‘Follow.’ While you may have hundreds of ‘Friends’ online, how many of those people truly know you?

The Impact on Long-Distance Relationships

Geography Isn’t a Deal-Breaker Anymore

The ease of communication that social media provides makes maintaining a long-distance relationship more manageable than ever before. Especially in a sprawling area like Brisbane, your perfect match might not be within a convenient distance. Social media tools help you stay connected, even if you’re separated by miles of Queensland landscape.

Virtual Dates

Physical presence is important in a relationship, but virtual meet-ups have started to supplement in-person dates. Couples are now watching Netflix together online or having dinner over a video call. While it can’t replace the feeling of being near someone, it offers a different kind of intimacy that’s unique to our time.

Dealing with Breakups in the Social Media Age

The Ubiquitous “Unfriend” Button

Deciding whether or not to unfriend an ex after a breakup is often more complicated than it should be. The act carries weight; it signifies the end of a chapter in a very public way. In Brisbane, as in other places, social media often complicates the already messy process of moving on.

Post-Breakup Etiquette

Blocking or unfollowing an ex might seem like a quick solution, but it’s worth considering the emotional impact. Sometimes you’ll find yourself scrolling through past messages and posts, which can make healing more difficult. Navigating post-breakup interactions online is a modern problem that many of us are still figuring out.

Finding a Balance Between Online and Offline

Scheduling Offline Time

Having immediate access to potential partners can be exhilarating but also exhausting. It’s essential to step back and spend time away from the screen. Go for a hike around Brisbane, catch a live gig, or just hang out with friends—no phones allowed.

Reclaiming Reality

Social media can make us feel connected while fostering a sense of isolation. It’s a paradox that many of us grapple with. Remember, a fulfilling romantic life in Brisbane or anywhere else involves a blend of online interaction and real-world experiences.

Conclusion

In sum, the influence of social media on modern romance, especially in Brisbane, is multifaceted. While there are benefits, like the ease of meeting new people, there are also drawbacks, such as a shift away from authentic interactions and meaningful connections.

ALSO READ: Top 10 things that provoke couple fights

The post The Influence of Social Media on Modern Romance in Brisbane appeared first on Australian Times News.

This article has a look at some of the pivotal cybersecurity best practices that are advised for Australian enterprises, particularly as we head into a year that holds fresh challenges.

Strengthening Remote Work Security

With the surge in remote work since the pandemic, securing remote environments has become crucial. Cafés have become offices, and public Wi-Fi is increasingly used. Employing secure Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and thorough employee training to recognise and report threats are steps in the right direction. 

These measures not only bolster the security framework but also cultivate a culture of awareness and responsiveness towards potential cyber threats​. In 2024, it will be more important than ever to have a culture, from head to toe, that has a mindset for security at all times.

Preparing for Privacy Law Changes

The Australian federal government is on track to introduce changes to privacy laws in 2024. Organisations are advised to prepare by creating comprehensive maps of organisational data, which will be pivotal in adhering to the new regulatory framework. This proactive approach will ensure organisations are compliant, reducing the risk of legal complications​.

Optimizing Security Investments

The economic situation right now and evolving threat actor tactics are driving the need for optimisation and consolidation of security investments. A keen focus on the return on investment (ROI) of cybersecurity technology will be essential to ensure resources are effectively utilised, else costs will get out of control. This approach promotes swift value realisation against invested costs, crucial in a landscape where threats continue to evolve rapidly​.

Addressing Misconfigurations and Patch Management

Unpatched vulnerabilities have been persistent issues. Adopting a systematic approach encompassing regular patch management and security audits to monitor and correct misconfigurations is essential to fortify security posture – automation will also be key, here. This approach minimises the exploitable vulnerabilities, thereby reducing the risk of data breaches​.

Enhancing IoT Security

The exponential growth of IoT devices presents a significant security risk due to their often inadequate built-in security. Proactive security integration during the developmental phase of IoT devices, regular firmware updates, and a strict selection process prioritising high security standards are advisable practices. These measures will contribute to mitigating the risks associated with the rapidly changing IoT landscape​.

Re-evaluating Phishing and Security Awareness Training

Despite substantial investments in training, phishing remains a significant threat. Companies are advised to re-evaluate their expenditure on phishing and security awareness training. Investments in technologies like remote browser isolation can substantially mitigate risks by isolating malicious content, ensuring seamless and secure browsing experiences​. Sometimes, we need to concede that training isn’t impenetrable, and so 2024 could see a shift towards more software tools.

Embracing Next-Gen Cybersecurity Technologies

Investing in next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and zero trust capable platforms is likely going to be prudent. These technologies, coupled with a proactive and informed approach to cybersecurity, will be the basis of defending against the evolving cyber threats.

The integration of these best practices is instrumental in navigating the complex cybersecurity terrain of 2024. By adopting a proactive and informed stance, organizations in Australia can significantly enhance their cybersecurity resilience.

ALSO READ: What is Log4j? A cybersecurity expert explains the latest internet vulnerability, how bad it is and what’s at stake

The post The best Cyber security practices for 2024 appeared first on Australian Times News.

If your VPS (virtual private server) were to be the target of a hacker, you could easily lose access to all your data, hindering your ability to continue operations and trading. That’s why you need to have data backup and recovery measures in place to ensure cyber-attacks.

Aside from disasters that could necessitate the use of backups, having a solid backup strategy is also useful for giving people remote access to data while they travel or are working from home.

Let’s look at data backup best practices for a virtual private server (VPS) because ultimately, this will help you be able to recover your data. If you don’t have these in place, you won’t be able to retrieve the data efficiently quickly, or at all. This leads to a loss in profit and time (and we all know time is money).

Frequency of data backup

Advice on how frequently data needs to be backed up has changed over the years. With an increase in ransomware, which is malware where files are encrypted and then payment is demanded to regain access, there has been a need to save data much more frequently. Previously it was recommended that backup should happen once a week only, then it became every 24 hours and now the urgency has increased to multiple times in a single day.

Use the 3-2-1 backup rule

The three (3) in this rule refer to keeping the original data and then having at least two backups of the original. The two (2) refer to the use of two different or dissimilar storage types or devices. So, for example, if one copy is saved on an internal hard drive, the other one needs to be placed in a cloud source. One (1) refers to keeping one copy of the data off-site (externally).

Test your backups

You may be backing up your data regularly but what if the process didn’t work properly and you cannot access or recover the data when needed? To prevent this issue, you need to regularly restore your backups to a test environment where you can then check that all of your data can be retrieved as expected.

Choose the right backup method

There are three (3) main backup methods, namely:

1. Full backup: This is the most comprehensive method where all data is sent to another location for storage, regardless of circumstances.
2. Incremental backup: All changes to files that were done since the last full backup.
3. Differential backup: Backup of all additions and alterations to data since the most recent incremental backup was done.

Each backup method has its own pros and cons, and the one you choose will depend on your organization’s needs and the technology that is accessible.

For example, a full backup requires a high storage space, has a slow backup speed but the fastest restoration speed, and stores lots of duplicates. On the other hand, a differential backup requires the lowest amount of storage space, has a fast backup speed but a slow restoration speed, and saves no duplicates.

Look at data retention

It’s not reasonable to keep every single piece of data indefinitely. First of all, data backup takes up a lot of storage space, and second of all, if you’re going to need to restore data, you only want to go through the process to access the most important files. This is why you need a data retention policy that states what data your organization keeps, how long data is kept, and where it is kept.

Do also keep in mind that things like personal data may potentially be protected by policies like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU which restricts how long and how it can be stored.

Encrypt your data backups

Once your data has been backed up and stored, you still run the risk of that data being accessed by nefarious third parties or even intercepted while the actual backup process is underway. This is why you have to also encrypt your backup data. Encryption is when data is converted from normal text into ciphertext using complex mathematical algorithms and encryption keys.

Backup encryption has several benefits, including preserving data integrity, giving privacy, protecting against hackers, and ensuring only authorized individuals have access to valuable information. It also helps you comply with regulations and policies on information storage.

Keep your backup plan updated

Your backup plan usually includes what data should be backed up, the tools and means for backing up the data, the frequency of data backups, and the procedure to follow should lost data have to be recovered. As your organization or business grows, your backup plan has to also change and evolve to meet your current needs.

Contact Beeks Group at sales@beeksgroup.com to learn about our unique self-service customer portal that allows customers to order, configure, and deploy their own virtual private server.

ALSO READ: E-Commerce Solution: The Modern Day Market

The post The Importance of Data Backup and Recovery in VPS Technology appeared first on Australian Times News.

However, mobile gaming worldwide is massively on the rise and is currently more popular than ever, overtaking console gaming when it comes to which devices people prefer gaming from. 

Microsoft Xbox has already stated that it is now focusing more on mobile gaming than ever as players shift towards this trend, so will PlayStation get left behind if they don’t move faster?

The question being asked here is, is Sony PlayStation fighting a losing battle? Let’s dive straight in and find out. 

Is Sony PlayStation fighting a losing battle?

The PlayStation 4 and 5 video game consoles remain king after Microsoft Xbox recently admitted it had lost the war. However, a younger generation of players are now playing more from their smartphones and tablets than they are from their consoles, which could spell the end for Sony PlayStation consoles. 

For now, they aren’t going anywhere, but who knows what might happen in the future. 

One of the main reasons so many players are moving away from traditional console gaming is because they can now play many of their favourite games, whether it’s Call of Duty Mobile, live dealer online blackjack, or Pokémon GO, on their preferred handheld device. 

In other words, mobile devices are the far more convenient option for gamers. Video game consoles are seen as clunky, restrictive, and inconvenient. They can’t easily be moved around like a smartphone or tablet device and cannot be taken outside.

Mobile users can easily take their games/smartphones with them wherever they go and play their favourite games from almost any location. This is something that you simply cannot do from a console. 

Until sales of PlayStation consoles are at a critical level, the company will continue to produce them and create unique content for them. There may come a time when they have to shift their focus towards mobile gaming and take a step back from producing their iconic consoles. Only time will tell. 

What are the most popular mobile/handheld devices for gaming in 2023?

The players who have moved away from traditional consoles and have turned to handheld gaming tend to use the following devices. Some of the best ‘dedicated’ handheld gaming devices on the market today are the following:

• SteamDeck
• Asus ROG Ally
• Nintendo Switch
• Nintendo Switch Lite
• Nintendo Switch OLED
• PlayStation Vita

When it comes to smartphones that have been specifically built with gaming in mind, some of the best devices on the market today are the Apple iPhone 14 Plus, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the Nubia Red Magic 7 Pro, and the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate. 

Others include the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, and the Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro. Although Sony PlayStation fans have the PlayStation Vita, it would be fantastic if Sony could start working on a cutting-edge smartphone like one of these top-of-the-range devices. 

Final note

Based on current trends and expert predictions, it seems certain that the future of gaming is from a mobile/handheld device. For players who prefer playing and watching the action across a big screen, smaller devices can easily be hooked up to a huge Smart TV screen, eliminating the need for a console. 

There are also numerous mobile phone gaming accessories players can purchase for their devices to improve their mobile gaming experience even more. It’s an exciting time for mobile users who enjoy playing the world’s best games, and it will be interesting to see which direction things will go in over the next five to ten years. 

The post The Rise of Mobile Gaming: Is Sony PlayStation Fighting A Losing Battle appeared first on Australian Times News.

A Brief Introduction to Blockchain

Blockchain is a ledger technology that is employed to record and verify payments spanning several systems in an enduring and trustworthy way. This ledger not only authorizes all the transactions, but also keeps a copy of all activities that are done on the chain in the form of a log, also called a block. The log is then stored in a series of interrelated networks called the chain. 

Blockchain uses digital signatures in order to verify the authenticity of each blockchain transaction. Therefore, the information stored in the computerized system can be considered really accurate and complete.

Importance of Blockchain

Because it allows for instantaneous access to shared, clear, and unchangeable details, blockchain technology is crucial for organizations. Owing to all these distinguishing traits, blockchain technology allows companies to keep track of their payments, purchases, manufacturing, and more. 

It has made many things very easy for companies such as making complex processes simpler and managing things in a proper way. The blockchain technology has opened new opportunities for individuals and possibilities.

Moreover, blockchains also empower individuals to directly access and benefit from cryptocurrencies as they completely eliminate the need for intermediaries, b. 

Blockchain offers peer-to-peer facility. Peer-to-peer is a process in which two persons directly make a transaction between each other. And there is no involvement of a third-party such as banks. 

For example, two parties make a transaction. The details of the transaction will remain secure between the two parties. No third party will have access to the information of the transaction.

The Role of Decentralization in the Blockchain

Blockchain’s decentralized nature is a key differentiator from more conventional computer networks. Furthermore, this technology is not controlled any centralized authority. Rather, it functions as a decentralized ledger where activities are authenticated by a collection of interrelated computers called nodes rather than ruling parties. 

Blockchains rely on their transparency to function. Since all dealings are documented in a central ledger, activities could be easily reviewed and accessed by anybody. This openness boosts safety by making it easier to spot and resolve any anomalies or unusual occurrences. 

Furthermore, stakeholders in the decentralized ledger are each given an individual identity number consisting of letters and digits that are linked to their activities. This contributes to an even higher level of openness and responsibility, as all users know they are always being closely monitored. 

Conclusion

Blockchain has the potential to alter the way in which centrally managed systems handle financial interactions and evidence storage. Blockchain’s decentralized nature and the security and transparency it offers have enormous room to revolutionize many sectors.

ALSO READ:  How Is Blockchain Revolutionizing The Travel Industry

The post What is Blockchain Technology and Why Is It Important in the Modern World? appeared first on Australian Times News.

What Makes an Electric Car Eco-Friendly?

Electric cars are eco-friendly for a number of reasons. Firstly, they emit zero emissions while driving, meaning they do not contribute to air pollution. This is particularly important in cities, where air pollution can cause health problems for residents. Secondly, electric cars are more energy-efficient than traditional cars, as they convert around 60% of their energy into driving, while traditional cars only convert around 20%. This means they require less energy to run, which in turn reduces the need for fossil fuels.

The BMW I4

The BMW I4 is a new electric car that has recently been released. It is one of the most environmentally friendly electric cars available, with a range of up to 366 miles on a single charge. It is also very fast, with a 0-60mph time of just 4 seconds, making it a fun car to drive.

The BMW I4 is also very efficient, with a battery capacity of up to 83.9 kWh, which is one of the largest in the electric car market. This means it can travel further on a single charge than many other electric cars. The BMW I4 also has a regenerative braking system, which recovers energy that would otherwise be lost during braking, further increasing its efficiency.

The BMW I4 is made from sustainable materials, including recycled plastics and renewable natural fibres. This reduces the car’s carbon footprint and helps to preserve natural resources. The car is also designed to be recyclable, with up to 95% of its components able to be recycled at the end of its life.

Other Environmentally Friendly Electric Cars

The BMW I4 is not the only environmentally friendly electric car available on the market. Here are some other eco-friendly electric cars you might want to consider:

Tesla Model 3: This electric car is known for its impressive range, with a maximum range of up to 358 miles on a single charge. It is also very fast, with a 0-60mph time of just 5.3 seconds. The Tesla Model 3 is made from sustainable materials and is designed to be recyclable.

Nissan Leaf: The Nissan Leaf has been around since 2010 and is one of the most popular electric cars on the market. It has a range of up to 239 miles on a single charge, making it a great option for city driving. The Leaf also has a quick-charging system, allowing it to charge up to 80% in just 40 minutes.

Hyundai Kona Electric: The Hyundai Kona Electric is a compact SUV that has a range of up to 300 miles on a single charge. It is also very fast, with a 0-60mph time of just 6.4 seconds. The Kona Electric is made from sustainable materials and has a regenerative braking system, making it an eco-friendly choice.

Jaguar I-PACE: The Jaguar I-PACE is a luxury electric car that has a range of up to 292 miles on a single charge. It is also very fast, with a 0-60mph time of just 4.5 seconds. The I-PACE is made from sustainable materials and has a regenerative braking system, making it an eco-friendly option for those who want a luxury car.

Why Choose an Electric Car?

There are several reasons why you might want to choose an electric car over a traditional gasoline-powered vehicle. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, electric cars emit zero emissions while driving, making them an excellent choice for those who want to reduce their environmental impact. This is particularly important in cities where air pollution is a major problem.

Secondly, electric cars are generally more energy-efficient than traditional cars, which means they require less energy to run. This can help to reduce your energy bills and reduce your reliance on fossil fuels. Additionally, electric cars are often cheaper to maintain than traditional cars, as they have fewer moving parts and require less frequent maintenance.

Finally, electric cars are becoming more affordable, with prices gradually decreasing as the technology becomes more mainstream. The BMW I4, for example, is priced similarly to many high-end gasoline-powered cars, making it an attractive option for those who want a luxury car with a low environmental impact.

Conclusion

If you’re in the market for an environmentally friendly car, there are plenty of options available to you. The BMW I4 is one of the most impressive electric cars on the market, with a range of up to 366 miles on a single charge and a fast 0-60mph time. However, there are also other eco-friendly electric cars available, such as the Tesla Model 3, Nissan Leaf, Hyundai Kona Electric, and Jaguar I-PACE.

Choosing an electric car is a great way to reduce your environmental impact, save money on energy bills, and enjoy a fun and efficient driving experience. With more and more electric cars hitting the market each year, it’s an exciting time to be a part of the electric car revolution.

ALSO READ: With Ford’s electric F-150 pickup, the EV transition shifts into high gear

The post Most Environmentally Friendly Electric Cars: A Guide to Eco-Friendly EVs appeared first on Australian Times News.

The GDPR Classes Cookies as Online Identifiers

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects individuals and the information by which they can be identified, directly or indirectly, applying very strict rules for processing data based on consent. Examples of personal data include first and last names, phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle registration plate numbers, social media profiles ID/links, etc. Since cookies can store a wealth of data, they can be considered personal data in certain circumstances, meaning they’re subject to the GDPR. A good example is represented by cookies used to authenticate client requests and maintain session information, which involve the processing of personal data. Website operators need a legal basis to deploy certain types of web technologies. 

Attention must be paid to the fact that not all cookies can be classified as personal data. For example, cookies that remember the language selection of the user don’t allow for any conclusions about their identity. If cookies don’t process personal data that can be used to identify or single out a person directly or indirectly, they don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR, so it’s not necessary to apply data privacy guidelines to the use of cookies. The use of these cookies could leave traces that could be used to create profiles of individuals if they’re linked to unique identifiers, so the processing must comply with the GDPR. 

The PECR And GDPR Go Hand in Hand 

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) sits alongside the GDPR and imposes specific rules on privacy rights relating to electronic communications. It’s forbidden to send marketing communications without prior permission from the recipients, so it’s a good practice for businesses to keep a list of people who object and refrain from conveying promotional messages. Equally, it’s no longer possible to make the provision of a service dependent on the data subject’s consent. Where the PECR rules apply, they’re regarded as more important than the GDPR, so website operators setting cookies must take into account PECR compliance and then look to the GDPR. 

Cookies Pose Risks to Data Security 

The more targeted cookies become, the more invasive they are. As a matter of fact, cookies can be so invasive that antivirus programs label them as spyware. Websites place cookies on individuals’ devices without obtaining their consent to gather more data and serve more targeted ads. It’s necessary to display a cookie banner upon the user’s first visit, implement a cookie policy, and allow the user to provide consent. Continued scrolling or browsing can’t be considered valid consent. The risks aren’t limited to the business, which can incur a fine for failing to comply with the data protection rules; website visitors are at risk as well. 

Cookies are simple text files stored on your device by your web browser. They can’t infect your computer or phone with viruses or other malware, but depending on how they’re used and exposed, they can turn out to be a real security risk. For instance, capturing authentication cookies over insecure channels allows hackers to exploit the situation to steal the credentials to gain illegitimate access. Cookies should only be accessed over secure SSL/TLS channels. Threat actors use the cookies to change passwords and emails associated with other accounts or trick unsuspecting victims into downloading additional malware. 

Cookie Litigation Is on The Rise 

Websites that operate in the UK are covered by the GDPR, so they must include a warning notifying users that they collect personal data for processing and get consent from visitors before they can store cookies on their devices. There are drastic consequences for not complying with the laws. The GDPR enables individuals to claim compensation from an organisation arguing distress due to the unauthorised use of their personal data. Please don’t hesitate to consult https://www.databreachcompensationexpert.co.uk/data-breach-compensation/ for further information. If the processing of personal data isn’t realised in a fair, lawful, and transparent manner, it breaches Article 5 of the GDPR, triggering a data violation. 

More often than not, organisations place non-essential cookies on devices automatically without offering clear information about the purposes of the cookies, thinking there’s no need to have a consent capture mechanism on the website. An ever-increasing number of companies are taken to court (or investigated) under cookie consent rules. Any person who has suffered material or non-material damage due to the unlawful processing of personal biometric and geolocation data can receive compensation for the damage sustained. Simply put, the business is liable for damages. Discomfort or feelings of uneasiness don’t entitle data breach victims to compensation, to be clear. 

Final Thoughts 

To be compliant with the GDPR, an organisation must consider its use of cookies and have cookie requirements for its website. Even if cookies are continually evolving, it’s essential to inform users the site uses cookies and obtain consent to place cookies in their browsers. These are the minimum requirements, of course. From start-ups and large-scale businesses to universities, everyone needs to comply with the data protection rules. Internet users must have the option to withdraw consent by deleting all the cookies from the domain, meaning they should have easy access to update their preferences. 

All things considered, being online can be a frustrating experience. Even if the GDPR requires a Yes/No choice, companies force users to click the “accept” button, thus, violating the law. If your personal data has been involved in a GDPR data breach, compensation may be awarded to you for your losses.  

ALSO READ: 7 Challenges Technology Should Lookout for this 2023

The post Are Cookies Personal Data According to The GDPR?  appeared first on Australian Times News.

Innovation in technology is evident in even gambling news websites like captaingambling.com. They display effective reviews, analyses, and present multiple games to their users. Technology has played a pivotal role in shaping these businesses. To help you understand how technology pioneers will shape our lives, this guide provides comprehensive predictions of all the mature technology trends that will come to pass in 2023. 

Use of No-Code AI

In 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) will ditch jargon for simple drag-and-drop interfaces, resulting in no-code AI. Today, everyone uses computers without understanding the traditional programming of the operating system. Similarly, AI operations and explanations became more functional without the programmer writing a single line of code. Increased acceptance among the general public will enable more industries to fully harness the power of AI-based intelligence to create smarter products. No-code AI has already entered the market with its user-friendly interface in various fields, such as retail and website development. 

Marketing in Metaverse

The metaverse market will grasp a whopping $800 billion by 2024. Metaverse is a 3D virtual simulation that allows people to interact with each other across multiple platforms. In the age of Internet 3.0, advertisers will see endless marketing opportunities for this immersive experience, turning it into a hotbed of brand awareness and engagement. Brands like Nike are already using different kinds of AI and virtual reality (VR)-powered experiences to track consumer choices and patterns in their Metaverse stores. Others are also looking to improve the user experience by connecting their brick-and-mortar stores to the metaverse via QR codes.

Virtually Immune Systems

This system refers to the overall architecture of practices drawn from software design, automation, operations, development, and analysis. It aims to reduce business risk and improve the overall customer experience by neutralizing bugs, threats and system vulnerabilities. The importance of DIS lies in automating various elements of a software system to better combat virtual threats of all kinds.

Supply Chain Challenges

The Covid-19 pandemic extends to challenge global supply chains with supply shortages, delays and disruptions. Manufacturers and technology companies around the world are constantly struggling to source the parts and consumables they need.

One of the biggest challenges is the bizarre shortage of semiconductors, resulting in slow production in many industries. When the pandemic hit, chip makers responded to changing demand (particularly lower demand from automakers and higher demand for consumer electronics) and relocated their manufacturing facilities to reflect these changes.

Security Threat

Cyberattacks are on the rise, and as more businesses go digital, they acquire more data. This makes it alluring to cyber criminals looking to loot your data or hold it for ransom. In addition to these risks, the advent of quantum computing could make existing security systems obsolete. Quantum computing speeds up the factorization of prime numbers and makes cryptographic attacks more efficient.

Companies that hold sensitive digital data should invest in cybersecurity solutions that abate quantum computing threats through risk management plans or by using quantum computing to cut down risk.

Talent Shortage 

As the pace of technological innovation increases, you need people who can build and nurture new digital technologies. IT leaders cite talent shortages as the biggest barrier to adopting new technologies, advancing to implementation, cost, and security risks. Faced with this talent shortage, companies are introducing new and innovative in-house training businesses such as coding boot camps and training universities. This allows you to recruit and train prospects and internal employees who want to advance their careers.

Genomics

Genomics has not only deepened our understanding of growth and modern health analytics, but it has also strengthened our thinking about neural networks. In the next few years, rapidly evolving technologies such as bacterium intelligence, next-generation genome sequencing (NGS) data analysis dais, and scarless genome amendment will leverage AI to decode hidden genetic codes and patterns and transform genomic data. 

Analytics and metagenomics will be major aggregators. biotechnology industry. Tech trends for 2023 will also see the rise of functional genomics, which uses epigenome editing to reveal the impact of the intergenic province on biological processes.

Conclusion

The staggering pace of technological modernization makes it difficult to predict the list of tech trends for 2023. Especially when life-changing breakthroughs happen every day. 2023 presents unique challenges for businesses. Overcoming these five key technological challenges can separate the companies that endure and thrive from those that get lost.

ALSO READ: 5 warning signs of a data breach in your business  

The post 7 Challenges Technology Should Lookout for this 2023 appeared first on Australian Times News.

However, besides being prepared for a potential system hack, it’s also essential to know what actually happens during a data breach. Sometimes, it’s easy to get carried away with work and not notice subtle changes in the company’s system. Therefore, we’ll briefly discuss some of the warning signs you should be aware of during a data breach. 

Slow internet or devices 

From time to time, having issues with the Internet connection or a bug with your computer is acceptable, but when it comes to prolonged internet problems, it is a silent sign of a data breach. While you may overlook this aspect, it’s better to check it with the IT department and make sure what you’re avoiding is not a sign of malware. 

If you make the right security investments, your security policy and end-user programs should be able to report any unusual activity immediately and start an investigation on all devices that seem to have internet issues or are sluggish.

Locked user accounts 

Similar to the previous issue, being unable to access your accounts can sometimes happen due to a human mistake. However, when multiple employees have the same problem, and it can’t seem to have a solution, this is clear proof that you’ve been breached. At this point, there’s not really much that your IT department can do other than review account access and password changes. 

Another action that you can take is claim data breach compensation.

Most of the time, you can track the cause of locked user accounts. Usually, when passwords are weak and never change, it’s easier for hackers to get into a system and guess people’s passwords. As a preventive action, make sure all your employees use complex passwords and know the importance of keeping them safe. 

Critical file alterations 

This is one of the most apparent serious problems. When entering a company’s system, most cyber attackers can modify, delete or replace files within your network. It usually takes up to a few minutes, but it may not be that obvious, especially when it comes to older files. There’s also the case when you might ignore these modifications because there’s a difference between normal changes and the ones that are signaling

a data breach. 

For example, a few years ago, Target, one of the biggest American retailers, ignored warning signs of a data breach reported through its threat-detection tool, leading to 70 million customers’ information being disclosed illicitly. Some say that companies have yet to learn when it comes to checking their systems regularly and devising security plans, which can be clearly seen in how prepared companies are when it comes to risk assessment. 

Unusual system behavior

When dealing with a data breach, all computers are able to scan and detect malware infection automatically. But for that to happen, all devices would need to be packed with enough cybersecurity protection to function properly. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t invest correctly in cybersecurity, which leads to becoming an easy target for hackers. 

During a data breach in a weak system, unusual things happen, such as the following:

• An unexplainable increase in pop-up messages unrelated to the company’s activity;
• Sudden computer or computer crashes, occurring more than once;
• Suspicious anti-virus warnings that don’t seem genuine;
• A more than usual slow browser 

In some instances, these abnormalities can cause the device to continue running even after shutting down, which is a signal of active tampering. This needs to be immediately reported because this is an alarming issue.

Atypical administrative user activity 

Compromised user accounts are way more dangerous than just being locked out of your account. This is an obvious sign that an internal or external threat has already entered the system. There are clear signs of this, such as:

• A history of viewing sensitive information; 
• A high volume of database transactions; 
• Sudden permission changes; 

Technological barriers are critical, but employee training is not less essential. That’s because monitoring and prevention go hand in hand in these situations. If employees don’t learn about the basics of keeping data secure, monitoring cyber issues can be useless since there’s no action taken. 

How can companies protect themselves against data breaches? 

Data breaches and cyberattacks can have multiple forms, so it would be challenging to be prepared for any form of it. However, there are many ways in which your company could protect essential data. The first tip is to invest enough in cybersecurity because your IT department won’t be able to monitor these changes single-handedly. But other actions could also help you figure out a good security plan, such as the following:

• Restricting access to reduce vulnerabilities because if too many people have access to a system, this means there are higher chances for a data breach to occur;
• Performing frequent audits and re-evaluations regarding possible security practices, you may adopt or employees respecting protocols;
• Improving general security by approaching better system architecture, VPNs, traffic monitoring and restrictions;
• Training your employees to follow proper security practices, educating them on the most common cyber threats and establishing security protocols;

When dealing with cyber security, you need to accept that things change, and there are no chances of surviving a data breach if you can’t change your approaches. Therefore, you need to constantly look at what’s new in the world of cybersecurity and what ways hackers use now to break systems. 

Bottom line 

The signs of a data breach in a company can be more or less obvious. However, if you’re knowledgeable in this area and know what can happen, you’ll be able to rapidly recognise these signs and take action to minimise the potential negative outcomes.

ALSO READ: New Technologies Driving Customer Service

The post 5 warning signs of a data breach in your business   appeared first on Australian Times News.

Technology is rapidly replacing and improving human interaction in this service, and there are several technologies at the forefront of the movement. Below, we take a deeper look at how exactly these innovative technologies are shaping the digital customer service industry in Australia.

Live Support

When an issue arises online, no customer wants to have to wait around for days before they can get the help they need to resolve the issue. This is especially prominent in industries where customers are depositing and withdrawing their hard-earned money, such as shopping or online gambling.

When items are purchased online, the customer is left in a limbo period where they are without their money or the product (until it arrives), trusting your service to deliver. It is thus essential to provide them with as much as support as possible during this period and afterwards to ensure they continue to trust in your service. The same concept applies to online subscription payments – a customer’s commitment hinges on their trust in you as a provider. When the stakes are customers’ own wealth, businesses cannot afford to let their customers down and this is why crypto-friendly casino BitStarz and other online casinos offer extra financial protection through the mode of cryptocurrency as well as a 24/7 live chat. A concerned customer is not a happy customer, so having the technology to offer a 24/7 live support chat is crucial in maintaining customer satisfaction.

Data Accumulation and Monitoring

For businesses to truly support their customers, they need to understand their wants and needs. The astounding level of data monitoring that technology affords in today’s world offers an unprecedented opportunity to truly understand customer habits. Data analysis thus becomes invaluable in the pursuit of perfect customer service. Recorded conversations via mobile or chat logs as well as the data collected by digital cookies can paint a detailed picture of customer needs; this can then be pivotal in developing advanced chatbots as part of the aforementioned 24/7 hour live support. Identifying patterns in queries and needs can help to solve recurring issues faster so that customers are not left in a limbo state of the unknown. Instead, their problems can be solved at a much faster rate thanks to the technology available.

Mobile Optimisation

Part of quality customer service entails ensuring that users can easily navigate your website to find what they want to find, do what they want to do and not get tripped up by any easily fixed hurdles. Part of this includes an optimized experience across all devices – a website should be easy-to-use whether it’s accessed on a mobile, PC, or tablet. Amazon’s website is a great example of optimized cross-compatibility.

Customer service is not something that can be ‘maxed out’, per se. There is no maximum service that a business can offer, so it is important to focus on constantly improving the service that one does offer. New, innovative technologies are a sure way to be confident that a business is keeping up with competitors in terms of customer experience. A memorable customer service experience can be the competitive edge that brings customers towards one business compared to its competitors – be sure to get yours right.

ALSO READ: Quick tips for reducing digital footprints and staying safe

The post New Technologies Driving Customer Service appeared first on Australian Times News.

Computer Numerical Control machining, also known as CNC machining, is a cost-effective method of increasing efficiency in the workplace. Various industries, including marine, aerospace, automotive, and medical, are increasingly turning to them to manufacture intricate and complex parts. The reason is the many advantages they have over traditional methods.

Businesses use CNC machines for milling, drilling, and turning. Drills operate by spinning the drill bit, while lathes work by moving the material against the drill bit. CNC milling uses rotary tools to remove material from the unit. With Computer Numerical Control, all these machining types have become more efficient and accurate, thus providing several benefits. 

What are the Advantages of CNC Machines?

The advantages of the CNC machines include: 

Improved Personnel Safety

The CNC machine isolates machines from humans and mitigates risks associated with it. The CNC machinery can operate without an operator, reducing accidents and dangers to life and limb. Nowadays, CNC machines can even change the tools they use automatically! The software can cause a change in design even if you or the device is not in direct contact with it.

Because of this, it limits human intervention to supervisory tasks. Remotely monitoring the software program’s execution and performing reactive or preventive maintenance allows you to avoid problems. It minimizes the need to engage and creates a safer working environment.

Labor Economics

The operator needs to observe each part of a traditional machine tool and move it accordingly to operate it. So, each worker will run only one machine tool at a time. Since the advent of CNC machines, they process most pieces in about half an hour during each setup. An operator does not need to do anything to use the tool. 

Operators only need to check for errors in the setup or program when the tool automatically moves. When this happens, the operator is free to operate more devices during the time in between. You can save money by hiring one operator to use several machine tools instead of hiring more employees.

Reduce Human Error and Inconsistencies 

Handmade products or parts are not as consistent and accurate as those made with CNC machinery. A CNC machine creates multiple pieces that are virtually identical with an average variation of less than 0.020mm—sometimes as little as 0.003mm using design software, detailed model references, and precision tools. No conventional machine can duplicate these results, not even the most advanced. Consequently, you’ll get a very uniform product. 

It is imperative in industries requiring high uniformity, such as automotive, aerospace, dentistry, and medical. Also, it’s crucial for companies that build complicated machines or electronics that need to fit perfectly. A slight variation in size, shape, or texture might lead to a malfunction in the final product. It enables you to replicate any object repeatedly, regardless of how complex or detailed it is. 

Fast and Efficient

An operator often has to change cutting tools manually when operating a conventional milling machine. The operator’s judgment determines the results, which are time-consuming and inefficient.

The rotating carousels of CNC mills can accommodate up to 30 different tools. The spindle automatically exchanges these tools during machining, facilitating efficient and rapid cutting operations. You can create your parts quickly with CNC mills, whereas conventional methods may require days (or weeks).

Better Quality Finish with Water Or Oil-Based Coolants 

Using methods other than CNC-based machining can result in low accuracy levels due to vibrations. Because of this vibration, conventional cutting is not as precise as CNC machining.

CNC machining creates a better surface finish than conventional cutting because it does not cause vibrations and is not as noisy as traditional cutting. CNC technology reduces secondary operations like polishing, which is both time-consuming and costly.

What are the Disadvantages of the CNC Machines?

The disadvantages of the CNC machines include:

High Initial Purchase Cost

You may initially see CNC machining as an expensive option. Despite the expense, it is an investment in long-term savings, increased efficiency, and client retention. CNC services cost more initially. It is common for businesses across a wide variety of industries to rely on a trusted vendor for CNC machining services. It will be more expensive to produce the first run than subsequent runs.

Renders Skills Obsolete

CNCs also work toward making conventionally manual skills obsolete, which some machinists believe is a disadvantage. Hands-on training, such as operating lathes, mills, drills, and more, equips students with math and science skills. Many businesses have benefited from CNC machining, but it has also reduced conventional machining, leading to job losses. Many experts disagree, however, that manual skills will disappear. Some believe that small and specialty projects will support traditional machining.

Is CNC Machinery Right For You? 

If you want to know whether CNC machinery is right for your project, it will help to speak with an experienced manufacturing engineer who can explain the advantages and disadvantages. Besides your manufacturing budget, they’ll consider how many units you need, how fast you’d like them built, and how complicated the part is. You’ll benefit from this customized, holistic approach to manufacturing.

The post What are the Advantages and the Disadvantages of CNC Machines? appeared first on Australian Times News.

This leading company supplies high-end home theaters, award winning HiFi stereo setups, or everything in between for the ultimate bespoke audio solutions that will elevate your living space.

Intelligent home automation solutions

Distinction Audio provides cutting-edge smart home automation systems to residential customers and commercial clients all around the world.

The intuitive user interface of this multi-award-winning smart home entertainment and control system allows you to take command of your home’s audio and video, television, climate control, lighting, and other systems from anywhere in the house or anywhere in the world.

This system combines whole-home audio and video with TV, climate control, lighting, and other home systems.

And now, thanks to Intelligent Touch Panels and voice control made possible by Amazon Alexa, it is simpler than ever before to connect your living room and every other room in your home to create a truly intelligent home environment.

Distinction Audio smart home solution and connected devices will provide you with a delightfully straightforward experience overall.

With a sophisticated yet simple to operate ELAN smart home automation system, you may improve your home life by increasing the number of entertainment options available to you, streamlining the performance of mundane tasks, and making more efficient use of the resources available to you.

Bespoke designs and installations

The Distinction Audio team of international designers can design a bespoke solution for each area that complies with CEB22 and CEB23 recommendations.

Whether you are interested in a fixed seat dedicated home cinema room, a multi-purposes media/living space, on a super yacht in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or anything in between, their team can accommodate your needs.

Distinction Audio reaches both internationally recognized standards of audio perfection and the happiness of their customers through the use of the market-leading software known as “The CEDIA Designer.”

The world-famous manufacturers that provide in-wall and on-wall speaker systems for each installation assist the team in meeting the design demands while allowing for ample headroom and effortless performance.

With the help of this program, the team is able to rapidly produce technically flawless dedicated cinema or media room designs, audio and video calibration reports, aesthetically pleasing renders, 3D CAD drawings, and a client-ready proposal that is more than 30 pages long.

The CEDIA Designer is compliant with the CTA/CEDIA CEB-22 and CEB-23 Home Theatre Audio and Video Recommended Practices, which boosts performance and removes subjectivity from the cinema design process.

Final Thoughts

By supplying you with a variety of high-quality audio components and accessories, Distinction Audio makes it possible for you to have an enhanced experience when listening to music. The use of their devices enables a more nuanced level of interaction between listeners and the music they enjoy.

You might also be interested in: Technology of the future: What’s new in tech this year

The post Bespoke audio solutions to elevate your living space appeared first on Australian Times News.

So it’s no surprise that all successful tech companies run comprehensive trials before they fully commit to a product or service. What is more surprising is the country in which they choose to test.

Far, far away

For one thing, its very isolation means that testing can be carried out discreetly. So if it proves that the product or service in question is simply not viable or is beset with issues then there’s very little chance of the rest of the world finding out about it.

Then there’s the geography of the country. With a wide range of areas from big urban centers like Auckland and Wellington to more remote, rural regions it means that it can act as a microcosm of other, larger, countries like the US that have a similar mix of environments.

Early adopters

That the common language is English also counts in its favor, as does the fact that New Zealanders are relatively well-educated. And, perhaps because the country can feel relatively cut off from the rest of the world, the population is quick to adopt new technology and ideas.

A prime example of this phenomenon came in 2016 when it was one of the first countries to be introduced to Pokémon Go. The enthusiasm with which the innovative AR game was greeted by New Zealanders was soon to be repeated all around the world.

The citizens’ willingness to embrace the new has also been shown in the huge popularity of online casinos. This has seen many open in the country and to help consumers find the best online casinos, sites such as Bonusfinder New Zealand analyzed the various options through factors such as bonuses and payment methods to provide a comprehensive review. Therefore, consumers have all the information they need to know when exploring this market.

A roll-call of success

The use of New Zealand as a testing ground is by no means a new phenomenon. As long ago as the 1980s it was one of the first places in the world to start using the EFTPOS payment technology that is used almost everywhere and by all kinds of businesses today.

One organization that has consistently relied on New Zealand as a testing ground is Facebook. Although understandably secretive about the details, it’s believed that these tests included a trial of a Snapchat-style app and their online Marketplace.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tested a do-it-yourself website-building program called Sway while worldwide pizza take-out business Domino’s has been experimenting with deliveries by drone.

So next time you discover a great new piece of tech, there’s a good chance that the Kiwis have tried it first – and that is why it will be working so well for you.

The post Why Tech Testers head straight for New Zealand appeared first on Australian Times News.

It’s also a known fact that streaming has been in such high demand for more than a decade. And in 2022, just about every brand has developed its own streaming services. 

What all began with Netflix in the early 2000 era has morphed into a digital empire of streaming television. And now we can watch anything from new or early release movies to sitcoms from the ’70s and ‘80’s all from the comforts of our couch, without having to buy those once coveted boxed DVD sets. 

But what’s the best way to access these streaming services? With all of the streaming devices and app installers on the market today, which one is the best and most convenient?

Firestick

Perhaps one of the more popular and most robust of all streaming devices is Amazon’s Firestick. And this is for very good reasons.

With the popularity of Amazon, it’s a no-brainer that the company’s streaming devices would be a huge success. And though there is a ton of Amazon self-promotional content that comes along with the Firestick line and there are many mixed reviews, the device offers top speed and is streamlined to plug directly into your HDMI port on your TV, which is easily concealable.

Additionally, the Firestick also allows you to access Amazon Music, and to search for items by voice command, with Alexa as an assistant. But it does have limitations, which is why many with this device are turning to learning how to jailbreak, offering access to a huge variety of your favorite entertainment.

Roku

Roku generally stands at the top of the list of all streaming devices simply because of the ability to access thousands of channels all from one platform. In fact, you can even access Netflix and watch the latest season of Stranger Things, when it finally comes out in May of 2022. 

But not only does Roku come equipped with thousands of channels, you can download as many channels as you want, and the device also comes in a few differing styles and interfaces. Whether you prefer the streamlined streaming stick which fits discreetly behind your TV, or the display models, each device has a set of features that suit a variety of users’ needs.

As of 2022, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K stands as one of the fastest models and adds Dolby Vision as an added bonus. In addition, Roku operates an app-first operating system, making it user-friendly across multiple streaming channels.

Chromecast

If you love Google products and services, you’re going to have to check out Chromecast if you haven’t already done so. And this only adds to the enormous dimension of services and products that Google has on the market in 2022

Chromecast was ranked alongside the Roku 4K as one of the best streaming devices in 2021. And this device offers users a wide range of features that are definitely hard to beat.. 

Google’s Chromecast device offers Dolby Vision just like the Roku, and also has a Google assistant voice search feature. 

In addition, Chromecast also allows you to integrate other Google services such as Google photos and YouTube TV, making your entertainment experience comprehensive and competitive. However, Google’s latest version of Chromecast is largely the most popular, with mobile apps available. 

Apple TV

If you’re not watching the award winning Lasso on Apple TV, you’re probably missing out on one of the greatest feel-good sitcoms ever created. And this is just one of Apple TV’s many shows that you can sit back and enjoy at an affordable price.

Apple TV offers a different variety of entertainment, but this isn’t unlike Hulu or Netflix at all. It’s just another option that you can consider. But getting the Apple TV shows requires getting the Apple TV box, which can be costly.

However, some manufacturers of smart TV’s such as LG and Vizio are offering Apple TV pre-installed, which means that you only need to pay for the Apple TV service itself.

It’s safe to say that streaming services are here to stay. And there may come a time when cable or satellite TV as we know it will become a distant memory, much like that old antenna that once sat on the tops of homes across the country. 

The post 4 of the Top Rated Streaming Devices that you need to be using in 2022 appeared first on Australian Times News.

This article will dive into Instagram TV and tell you all you need to know about Instagram TV views. You can also learn how you can boost account development with the help of this platform feature. Let’s begin.

So, What is Instagram TV?

In 2018, Instagram announced the launch of IGTV or Instagram TV. The app focused on users being able to watch long-form vertical video content. On Instagram, the app allowed video, but the video it allowed tended to be shorter form.

The idea of IGTV was to be a mobile alternative to websites such as YouTube, with a focus on vertical-style video. While vertical videos were initially shunned, they quickly grew in popularity because they were easy to record on smartphones. Therefore, the goal of IGTV was to have videos designed exclusively with that in mind.

How Does it Work?

Instagram TV allowed you to make videos for up to an hour along, and everyone could use it. Using the Explore page, one could find the IGTV video, which curated a list of videos just for the user. These videos also could give previews, which could help you determine if the long-form video was for you.

IGTV videos blended well with the rest of the app. Users could use a preview to entice viewers to watch their video, and one could also share their videos inside their stories. This way, savvy users could direct their followers to watch the video.

The App Itself

IGTV was available as its own app, which was separate from the Instagram app itself. A user could sign-on, and on the home page, be able to visit other users who had longer-form videos. Like a regular Instagram image, users could also like, comment, and share the video with other people.

What made IGTV so great for marketers is that it took advantage of the fact that video content is now the norm. Every person watches video content nowadays, with over 1.5 hours watched on average. With IGTV, users could make an exciting video to catch the user’s attention, then promote their business with it.

How Uploading Worked

IGTV had an intriguing way of uploading video content, with videos needing to be at least a minute long. Depending on the platform used, the length would depend on that. For example, if you were using a desktop, your videos could be up to an hour, but mobile-only allowed up to 15 minutes. Even though vertical video ruled IGTV, one could also be able to upload horizontal content.

With IGTV, one could post a cover photo for the video, which could entice viewers to check the video out. In addition, after you upload the video, you could also add a description and title.

Like any platform, views on Instagram TV depended on when someone posted the content and its relevance to the user. For example, someone targeting people needing financial help could post accounting tips, or someone who wanted to target fitness buffs could have published their entire workout video.

It was also possible to buy Instagram TV views to add more eyes to your content with any other platform.

The Birth of Instagram Video

In March of 2022, IGTV shut down after the announcement in October 2021 that Instagram was combining IGTV with feed videos. However, users can still upload longer-form video content, with a few extra features added. For example, Instagram Video made it easier for users to watch clips, add filters, or tag people.

One reason for this was the competition from other video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. Instagram found that making a separate app was a waste of resources, and rather than do that, integrating videos into their platform was much more accessible.

Therefore, when we talk about IGTV and buying IGTV views, we’re also talking about Instagram video views. Many people still call Instagram videos IGTV, with the name still being used by some parts of Instagram.

How You Can Make Great Content on Instagram Video/ IGTV

With that said, how can you make content on IGTV that shines? We’ll give you a quick rundown on how you can do this.

Think About The Ideal Length and Type of Video You Want

With Instagram Video, you can create videos up to an hour long, but shorter videos can be vital. Your audience could be people who enjoy shorter form content, but they could be people who like longer content. For example, if your channel creates shorter films, longer-form content can work. For a social media influencer, shorter content might be the solution.

What makes Instagram video so unique is that you can experiment with different lengths and see which works well for the algorithm on your end. Often, a combination of longer and shorter videos can be what you need.

Also, should your video be horizontal or vertical? As we mentioned, vertical video has been the norm nowadays, but if you want a more cinematic video, the videos offer can also be ideal. Again, using both horizontal and vertical could be a great solution.

Create an Interesting Video Thumbnail

One rule of thumb with any video creation website is to make a thumbnail that will get people talking. The thumbnail is the first thing people will see when they look at your video, and you want to think of it like a movie poster or cover for your film.

With your video, look for the most interesting, attention-grabbing part of it to use as your thumbnail. Put yourself in the perspective of your viewer. If you were a viewer scrolling through Instagram, which thumbnail would grab your attention the most? You can find the correct thumbnail for you to entice your audience.

Edit it

With most Instagram videos, you aren’t filming anything professional, but having some editing in your video is not necessarily a bad thing. Filters and stickers can give your video some visual flair to entice your viewers.

The trimming option on your video is also ideal. For example, you might have a video where some scenes are filler. Filler scenes can make your audience not want to watch any more of your video, but you can avoid these problems with your videos by trimming them. Also, keep your video well-paced so you don’t avoid creating a video that can make people lose interest fast.

Types of Videos People Like

On Instagram, people love a variety of videos. Let’s show you several examples of this.

Tutorials

Tutorials work well as long-form videos. For example, if you are a makeup artist, you may make a long video about your makeup routine. If you are a mechanic, teaching your viewers how to fix a car issue could be ideal. Tutorials usually don’t require much editing. Just turn the video on, and then be yourself. As long as you explain yourself well, you can obtain an audience.

Showcasing a New Product

Another way to hype your audience is to make a video teasing or showcasing a new product you have coming down the pipeline. For example, if you are a makeup influencer, you might have a new makeup product coming out, and a video can be an excellent way to show it to the world.

Behind the Scenes

This type of video is another one to consider, as it can let your audience see a different side of you. A clip can show you how you make the magic happen and show your audience what you’re like outside of your content.

Q&As

This type of video is ideal if you want to interact with your audience. Your audience can submit questions to you, and you can answer them as you see fit. Q&As can help you answer any frequently asked questions, and it’s simple for you to film the video. Usually, they require little writing beforehand, and they can help you interact with your audience uniquely and excitingly.

A Series

Another way to be successful on Instagram is to create a series. Sometimes, all it takes to have success is a well-executed creative idea. With a series, you can make it serialized or center around a specific theme, with each video being a little different. If you have a budget, you can even create elaborate stories to have your audience come back every time.

It Needs to Fit Your Brand

Perhaps the most significant rule of video making on Instagram, or any other platform, is that the videos need to fit your brand. So you need to get people into knowing what your videos are about when they watch them and not stray too far from the image you’re trying to sell with these videos.

This statement is not to say that your videos need to follow a specific formula and never stray far from it, but you want to make sure that your company comes first and foremost. Of course, your brand can evolve, and your videos can reflect that.

Good Content is Key

We should mention that while Instagram TV has changed, the rules remain the same. If you make great content, people will come and enjoy what you have to say with your videos. So with your content, brainstorm some ideas, then make them happen.

So is Consistency

Having a consistent upload schedule can work as well. While Instagram uses algorithm-based content curation for your followers, uploading at a similar time can get people to notice your video better.

With Instagram, you can schedule uploads. If most of your audience is active while you’re inactive, planning your videos can certainly help. With that said, be sure to interact with the comments when you are busy, as that will help to boost your place in the algorithm.

Promotion is Key As Well

With Instagram, making great content can bring people to it, but sometimes, the algorithm is not kind to you. Quite often, you might need to pay to boost your videos, especially if you feel as though one video can get many people talking.

Besides boosting your posts, you might also want to buy some viewers. Buying legitimate viewers can get more eyes on your video, not just from those you’ve purchased but also from others brought there from the algorithm. But, again, it’s easy for you to do, and the cost is less than you would think.

While social media is free to use, paying to boost your posts is how many networks make that extra money, so keep that in mind. With most social media campaigns, you’ll need to spend some money. Also, while word of mouth can work, it’s one part of your toolbox.

Last word

Instagram TV lives on through Instagram video, and as a content creator, taking advantage of it is ideal. While Instagram started as a photography app, video content currently rules it. By creating video content that will get people talking and taking advantage of marketing, you can grow your brand like never before. So take advantage of video content before your competition, and purchase some views to enhance your account.

The post What is Instagram TV, and How Does it Work? appeared first on Australian Times News.

Whether you are a recruiter, salesperson, or entrepreneur, LinkedIn can prove to be very useful for reaching your business goals. However, to obtain the best from LinkedIn, you need to show your presence on the platform and engage with other users there. The best way to engage with your connections and others on LinkedIn when you keep busy is to use LinkedIn automation tools.

LinkedIn automation helps in generating leads by maintaining your presence on the platform. You can send personalized messages, run personalized campaigns, collect data, and more. This article will describe the best LinkedIn automation tools to use to up your LinkedIn game. In addition, these LinkedIn automation tools also offer integration with other marketing tools. So, you can create effective campaigns to accomplish your professional goals. 

Why you Should Consider Using LinkedIn Automation Tools?

The primary objective of every business person is to grow their business with time and reach heights of success. However, the ever-growing competition and the need to be multi-functional is making it difficult to mark your business presence manually on social platforms. 

Thus, comes the need for LinkedIn automation tools. It will help you streamline your online presence without you having to put in manual efforts or invest time every day. Here is why you should consider using the automation tools: 

1. Help in automating your routine tasks
2. Get Ready Leads
3. Easily process leads and know which campaign got you the maximum leads
4. You can work on your Linkedin while working on other tasks. The automated campaign will run on its own. 

Hence, to ease your daily tasks and reduce time investment on LinkedIn, you can delegate the tasks to automation tools.

Best Linkedin Automation Tools

There are several LinkedIn automation tools that you can use to generate leads and maximize your reach. However, we discuss the six best connect automation tools with unique features to help in your LinkedIn marketing: 

• Dripify
• Octopus CRM
• Dux-Soup
• LinkedIn Helper 2
• MeetAlfred
• Zopto

Dripify

Dripify is a cloud-based LinkedIn automation software that can help in creating sales funnel within minutes. You do not have to bother about keeping your laptop or PC switched on because it works on a cloud base. 

You do not need to import the leads from the CSV and set the prospecting sequence. Finally, you can set the time and trigger from the control panel, and your job is done. In addition, it allows you to establish a selective workflow and lets you analyze the campaign performance by making a summary report. 

Pros

• Easy learning tutorials
• Easy-to-use even for beginners with no technical knowledge

Cons

• No mobile app
• Needs improvement in downloading data options. 

Octopus CRM

Octopus CRM is ranked among the best LinkedIn automation tools for its high-quality performance. It helps in generating customizable sales funnels in no time. It not only sends messages and connection requests but also assists in converting potential clients into paying customers. 

In addition, it has a simple 3 step process to start using it. First, you find the target audience and add it to the campaign. And finally, you launch the campaign to perform all the automated tasks added to your list. 

Pros

• Great performance Management 
• Customer Segmentation
• Self-service Portal 
• Integration with Sales navigator 

Cons 

• Need more training videos
• Does not have a filter to segregate imported lists

Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup is recently becoming popular as a nice LinkedIn automation software. It helps ease the communication process with your leads and prospects on LinkedIn. You can personalize your messages, give them a more human touch, and even add images to the automated messages. 

It is ranked among the top lead generation tools and is used by more than 70,000 users globally. It offers three pricing plans to choose from as per the business requirements. The plans vary for individuals, teams, and Agencies.

LinkedIn Helper 2

Linkedin helper 2 is a LinkedIn automation platform that helps automate and optimize your LinkedIn profile. Originally, it came as a standalone desktop application; however, now it is used as a tool to increase your LinkedIn reach and connections. 

In addition, it has a completely automated workflow to generate organic leads by running campaigns using targeted lists. Interestingly, you can handle multiple LinkedIn accounts with one LinkedIn helper launcher on your desktop or laptop with separate IP addresses. 

Furthermore, you can send custom images and import contacts to CSV, which you can later use on your social media and other platforms. It is designed to work as a smart browser to imitate human behavior. It restricts profile visits, limits your daily actions, and takes reasonable pauses between activities. Thus, it is also safe to use. 

MeetAlfred

MeetAlfred is among the top-ranking automatic lead tools to run effective end-to-end social selling campaigns. It helps you in running personalized conversations without any human intervention. Furthermore, you can send messages in bulk by installing them on Chrome. 

LinkedIn runs on active engagement; thus, MeetAlfred maximizes your connection engagement and reach by sending push notifications, follow-up messages, and connection requests to a targeted list. Apart from this, this LinkedIn autopilot helps you get an insight into the campaign performance on the dashboard. You can also optimize your drives based on your follower base. 

Another way that MeetAlfred helps you meet professional goals is by detecting the LinkedIn warnings and working on them in real-time. However, some people find the pricing a bit expensive for handling a single social media platform, while others find it reasonable given the number of features it supports. 

Zopto

The zopto is another cloud-based LinkedIn lead generation tool that is helpful to startups and new enterprises, agencies, and SMEs looking to increase their reach. Using Zopto, you can import/export contacts from CSV, capture leads, and even integrate the database with other marketing tools. It is a one-stop answer for all your LinkedIn marketing needs. 

You can also convert your prospects into paying clients through automated messages, follow-ups, and more, apart from nurturing your leads. Therefore, it is trusted by more than 5 million users around the globe. It offers two pricing plans to suit different business requirements. It accepts payments on a monthly and yearly basis via different payment gateways. 

It has a mobile app for the Android operating system. Likewise, it supports web apps and windows but not Mac. In other words, the platform is only useful to people using Windows and Android. 

How to personalize outreach on Linkedin?

Every LinkedIn user needs to understand that personalizing your outreach greatly affects the customer relationship. Using LinkedIn tools seems like an easy task to people who do not take personalizing the outreach seriously. People tend to make LinkedIn bot profiles to skip paying for LinkedIn premium features. However, it is not a great idea and a serious cause of concern. 

LinkedIn works on interaction principles; thus, to increase your interaction with prospect clients and existing leads, it is suggested that you utilize the following guidelines for personalizing your outreach:

1. Running niche-specific campaigns
2. Understand Your Target Audience
3. Keep it short and Crisp.

Conclusion

LinkedIn automation tools are in high demand these days as the platform is now treated like a treasure for generating leads. It sure demands a person and business invest time. However, the automation tools help increase the outreach by offering various personalizing features. 

You can use free versions of automation tools; however, it would be better to fit the lead generation amount into your budget and get the most of it by investing in the right tool. There are several automation tools that you can pick for your business. 

The automation tools are fit for everyone, from startups to big enterprises. So why wait? Choose from the best LinkedIn automation tools and start your business growth journey today! 

The post Top 6 LinkedIn Automation Tools appeared first on Australian Times News.

In this article, we’re going to give you some general advice about finding the optimal app for your organization. We’ll also review three of the web’s leading brands.  

Choose the Best Electronic Signature Software in 3 Easy Steps

1. Compare features and packages – An e-signature platform built for multinational enterprises will be unsuitable for a small mom-and-pop business (and vice versa). Equally, different packages for the same app will be designed for organizations of varying sizes. Making a list of required features will help you decide whether or not apps are suitable for your business and the specific demands of your document workflow. You may, for example, need payment integrations in your documents or require support for bulk sending. 
2. Take your top choices for a test drive – Most if not all major digital signature apps offer free trials. Sign up for one before purchasing a paid subscription. Some of the main things to pay attention to in the trial phase are ease of use (particularly of the primary interfaces), customer support, and compatibility with your existing apps (accounting, project management, online storage, etc.). 
3. Ensure assistance during the implementation phase if needed – Onboarding is always a time-consuming task, especially if software is expected to be used across an entire organization, as is often the case when it comes to e-signing and document management. Assistance during the often-difficult onboarding period can be of immense benefit. Some providers give onboarding support, and it’s worth being aware of this when deciding between apps. 

E-Signature SaaS Apps: Top 3 Picks

Here is our selection of three of the top apps currently on the market:

• PandaDoc – PandaDoc is a feature-rich document management solution. Along with core e-signature functionality, which is available on its free plan without any document upload caps, users also have access to a document editor, project management tools, a library of pre-written templates, and more. Whether you’re looking for a fully-fledged platform or a stripped-down e-sign tool, PandaDoc should be part of your consideration process. 
• Adobe Sign – Adobe Sign offers a well-designed e-signature tool that includes all the features you would expect: drag-and-drop signature fields, notifications, bulk sending, and tracking tools. It’s built for use primarily with PDFs, so this is something to be aware of. 
• signNow – signNow is a popular solution that comes with a dependable set of core features, including unlimited templates, bulk sending, personalized document branding, and a mobile app. Unfortunately, integrations are only available on the $50 per user per month premium plan. 

The post Find the best electronic signature software in three easy steps appeared first on Australian Times News.

You use bots on a daily basis and probably didn’t realize it. With the development of apps, calling on the phone to order food delivery seems a thing of the past, now everything is done through mobile apps without the need to talk to an operator. 

Well, you should know that in that order you are ordering a task to a bot. Let us tell you more!

Definition of the Concept

Under this second meaning, bots (apheresis of a robot) are software or computer programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) to perform automated tasks over the Internet as if they were human beings.

They are capable of performing a large number of tasks (editing texts, moderating conversations, answering questions, sending emails) and their responses are increasingly accurate and precise.

Although it may not explain to you exactly how to win without maximum betting online like experts, it achieves high levels of satisfaction among their customers, who can perform actions at any time of the day. Whether it’s making a reservation at a restaurant or requesting an answer to a question, bots are here to help you.

What Are Bots Capable Of?

This technology of the future has been programmed to perform a multitude of actions to help Internet users in their daily tasks. Here are some of the things they can do:

• Provide answers much faster than a human being would and also, they have a differential advantage, they can be called upon at any time of the day.
• Learn from each conversation with users and, as a result, simulate more accurate human conversations. One example is Anna, the IKEA chatbot.
• Automated text editing. Its tasks include correcting spelling mistakes, maintaining consistency in links, proposing predictive text based on user conversations, and so on.
• Or perform actions such as making reservations at a restaurant, when we tell it to do so.

How Bots Work

Bots make use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive computing specifically programmed to mimic sophisticated tasks that humans can perform, replicating the processing of the human brain in the following aspects:

• Natural language processing: They must be prepared to structure, understand, and assign meaning to sentences. This phase is known as NLU or natural language understanding.
• Reasoning: They have to know how to systematize and organize ideas to solve certain problems. Once we understand what we have been told, we must have the logic to be able to perform the expected action in that situation.
• Navigation and Planning: Of action in various environments for which they are programmed.

Most Famous Types of bots

Life is not all that pretty. On the Internet there are several types of bots, some are designed to help users in their daily tasks, and others to develop malicious actions. We will tell you which are the most common ones:

Social Network Bots

Social networks are part of the daily life of most people and are the best way to share content among your community of followers. Remember, if you haven’t published it, it doesn’t exist!

We can find bots on social networks like Instagram, Telegram, or Twitter. These can help you boost the content of your social network and even your website, getting them to reach a wider audience and consequently, increase sales.

Voice Bots

Voice bots, better known as voice-activated virtual assistants, are, together with chatbots, the ones we use the most in our daily lives. The best known are Siri, Alexa, and Cortana from Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

These small assistants are able to advise the user and solve their questions through a conversation as any person would do. Currently, in view of the great reception they have had, many companies are trying to include them in the development of their activities as the first line of innovation and to ensure an unprecedented user experience.

Spam Bots

E-mail is one of the most useful ways to reach a large number of people on the Internet. Hence, all companies use it as a method of outreach, such as a newsletter, for example.

We have all suffered the abuse of spam emails in our inboxes. The truth is that there are bots created especially to send promotional emails that mostly seek to deceive the user, obtain sensitive data, or fraud.

The post What is a bot and what are bots used for? appeared first on Australian Times News.

There are many solutions to working around these potential drawbacks. Creative Brand Design, an experienced web design agency in London, details all of the tips necessary to run a successful website design project across different time zones. 

Implement Collaboration Tools

Without team communication and collaboration, a project may not get complete or may conclude with poor results. Therefore, it is essential to have collaboration tools whereby the team can collaborate as if they were working together in person. 

A program like Slack allows communication and project management. There, the team can work together, share feedback, make calls, and send files. 

Speaking of files, digital file tools are also another useful collaboration tool. Cloud-based digital documents make it easy for teams to work together on the same project, see notes, make changes, and edit in their own time. The free Google suites of collaboration tools include docs, drive, sheets, meetings, and more, which are all great tools to implement if you want to manage projects despite the different time zones. 

For example, a web design project may require Google documents to create and share text. Using docs, the team can view, edit, and share the work so that everyone can monitor and manage it in their own time. They won’t need to work on the document at the same time to edit or complete their task. Instead, the team can access and manage the file no matter where they are and what time of day it is. 

Another useful collaboration tool from Google is the Google Calendar. There, team members can view the schedule, plan meetings, and send invites to others in any time zone.

No matter if the team is working on creating a mobile-compatible web project or one to enhance the speed of a website, it will always help to utilise collaboration tools so that everyone can share and manage the project around the world.

Communicate Frequently

Along with collaborating through the same tools, it is essential to keep up communication. Although you might be able to see what your team members on the web design project are doing, you might need to ask questions or provide a solution for an issue they are having. 

Frequent communication can be done through virtual meetings on Zoom or through messaging apps, such as Slack.

It isn’t as easy as working in an office together where you can quickly grab your teammate for an impromptu meeting. However, digital communication channels can ensure that the team can keep up consistent and regular communication. 

Create A Clear Plan

A clear plan of action for a web design project is crucial. This will ensure that every team member in different time zones will know what the short and long-term goals are. 

Speaking of goals, it is also useful to set goals within the plan. Short-term goals will encourage the team to stay focused. After completing each one, they can feel accomplished. These small goals are the pathway to success and reaching the final long-term goal.

Digital meetings, regular messages, and collaboration tools can ensure that everyone is reminded of these goals, new tasks, and the overall plan.

To create a clear plan, you will need to have a final goal. This goal should be clear and concise. Having several loose goals will make things confusing and also hinder the focus of team members. For instance, if the web design project is to create a mobile app to coincide with an existing business website, then the completion is the final goal. You should avoid making more than one goal as each project should be focused on individually for the best results. 

Once a clear plan is in motion, then this should be shared with the team. This can be done through a virtual meeting or through a shared Google doc. Either way, making sure that everyone sees and understands the plan of action will make sure that everyone works towards the same outcome. 

Each week, the team should come together to discuss where they are at and also be reminded of the plan. Again, this will help everyone focus and understand what the final expectations are. As you will need to communicate in different time zones, this might be more easily achieved through sharing documents. Or, having smaller digital meetings with team members that are of a similar time zone. 

Celebrate Results

Just like you would in an office environment, it is essential to celebrate results when you work digitally. Even if your teammates are in different time zones, making sure that you celebrate goals together as much as possible will keep you focused and on top of your work. 

It is much easier to forget goals and achieve new things when you are not working with a physical colleague. However, the reality is that you are still working with a colleague and therefore, you should celebrate achievements. 

When a project is complete, or when a goal is hit, every team member should make sure to remind the others of this success. This will ensure that nobody dismisses the hard work that you have put in. Making sure that everyone tries to send a reminder to celebrate will ensure that everyone is accountable. Having accountability will make sure that you celebrate just as you would when working in a physical team. 

Overall, it is important to know that it is more than possible to run a successful web design project on a time difference. Simply utilising digital collaboration and communication tools can make the project run just as smoothly as a physical team project in an office. 

The post How to run a web design project on a time difference appeared first on Australian Times News.

An overview of digital footprints

A digital footprint can be active or passive. An active footprint is information you share voluntarily, like pictures on social media. On the other hand, the passive footprint is the information that your internet browsing device reveals, like your IP address. 

Companies often use passive information for marketing purposes like targeted ads, which aren’t too problematic. However, active footprints can be damaging. For instance, criminals can track and research your lifestyle using social media posts and use the data for phishing attacks. It all relates to the fact that people tend to overshare on social media, leading to valuable information becoming available to anyone. 

Possible to minimize the digital footprint

You must understand that becoming completely anonymous online is not exactly possible. However, you can always keep a tab on how many footprints you intend to leave online to protect your privacy. Companies are always looking for new ways to track users, and preventing them is simply impossible. However, there are several smart ways to reduce your digital footprint, thereby stonewalling all attempts to access unauthorized data. 

Delete unused or dormant online accounts 

Many online service providers and websites won’t delete personal details of users/customers until and unless explicitly asked to do so via email. On the other hand, some social media platforms and forums allow users to edit their account information or completely delete their accounts. Deleting all unused or dormant accounts is an excellent way of reducing your digital footprint.   

Avoid sharing your email address

Irrespective of whether you’re signing up for a new online service or placing an inquiry on a website, you’ll be asked to share your email address. A smart way of ensuring your online safety is by providing a secondary email address. Do not use your primary email address to prevent unsolicited emails and cybercrime traps. 

Another smart way to avoid sharing a primary email address is to create an anonymous email account. You can provide this email address to sign up for services you don’t intend to use repeatedly. 

Provide fake information 

Well, it is a clever move only if you have the liberty of providing fake information for the service you’re signing up for. There is no way service providers can verify the information you provide. However, you should never use these tactics while signing up for banking or financial services or paying for products or services. 

Do not log in with your Facebook login 

Most websites and online service providers give the option of signing up using Facebook credentials. However, you must always avoid using your Facebook credentials to sign up for a service, as that would lead to sharing the information with the website owner or a third party. 

Double-check privacy settings 

Every time you share personal information on your social media account, the default settings allow it to be shared across the board. However, if you don’t intend to do this, you can always change your privacy settings. You can choose to share your personal information with only a select few by changing the privacy settings. 

Avoid sharing too much personal information 

Scamsters and cybercriminals are on the lookout for users’ personal information, so it’s unwise to share too much information that can be used for phishing attacks or scams. 

Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service 

The safest way to browse the internet is to use tools that help you stay under the radar. A VPN is one such tool that prevents unnecessary IP tracking and safeguards data on unsafe networks or websites. Thus, download VPN tools to protect your online activities with end-to-end encryption, thwarting most eavesdropping attempts. It can also offer other benefits, like blocking ads or phishing websites. 

Digital footprint under control 

Digital footprints are something most users might not even think about. However, it is important to know just how much data you share online. While you can limit the data you reveal on social media, stopping passive footprints requires more effort. Luckily, there are some tools that can help you minimize the data you share without even realizing it.  

The post Quick tips for reducing digital footprints and staying safe appeared first on Australian Times News.

Technology we didn’t know we needed

Now, imagine having a lightbulb that is able to track everything related to your health? Yes, the time of the functionality of the lightbulb has changed and we will no longer only need a lightbulb for the purpose of lighting a room. This may sound like something you may or may not want but technology is here to stay and there is plenty more where that came from, like Electronic design services.

The Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light

So, the Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light is the newest and latest light bulb that will do more than just light up your room. Gone are the days when you needed a health-tracking kit. Now you have something that could do more than one job. According to Science Focus, you are able to interact with the invention as well. 

The color-changing BMW

A color-changing car may be the last thing that is on your list but what if I told you that you could change the color of your car according to your mood? Well, this is exactly what it can do with the touch of a button. This is somewhat of an interesting gadget to have but when would one really need it? Regardless thereof, some are bound to fancy this one.

More: Dental Care in Australia: An essential investment in good health

Samsung eco remote

Another one of the gadgets presented at the CES event is something very small but has been the talk of the town. Much of these gadgets are not readily available at this point but they will be quite soon. 

Samsung has had quite a good amount of tech to showcase at the event but this one has been the most interesting of them all. In this invention, Samsung aimed to create something that is eco-friendly. With that, they were able to create a device that would never need to charge! All it needs is solar energy to function.

Mayht Solar-powered speaker

Attributing the same qualities of the eco-friendly remote, this speaker also functions with solar power. This device will never have to be replaced with batteries or be charged. It simply does not have any cables to go with it either so it is quite minimalist. 

The post Technology of the future: What’s new in tech this year appeared first on Australian Times News.

Presently, Samsung never ceases to disappoint and their new S22 series is set to release on March 4th is ready for pre-order. While you get set on ordering your new gadget, the next step is to have a look at some accessories!

So what’s new in the Samsung S22?

Well, for most people and Samsung lovers, the biggest attribute is photo quality. Just wait until you see how beautiful your pictures will be in night mode!

If you’ve ever wanted to take a lovely photo at night time but your image just didn’t reflect all the beauty around you, then this one is for you. 

Nightime has never looked better!

The zoom feature will come in just as handy if you’re traveling and spot something pretty and worth capturing. It could also be great to show people something they wouldn’t have seen before. 

So, it will be pretty interesting to see what users will be doing with this device and what they will come up with things upon its release. 

More: Tyrese Haliburton is no longer with the Sacramento Kings

What else you’re getting

Now, Samsung is actively trying to diverge from the older versions of the previous editions. Why have it any other way in an ever-changing and evolving world? 

Not only has Samsung come out with a new series of phones but they have also announced that selected Galaxy phones will have at least five years’ worth of security updates.  

Now, long gone are the days when you receive a power brick inside your box. This time around you’ll only receive a type c cable and all the standard bits and pieces as well as a setup manual as reported by 9News. 

The post Samsung: All about the new Samsung S22 and its release appeared first on Australian Times News.

Thanks to advanced live streaming technologies, Internet users across the globe can watch engaging video content streamed in real time. Live streaming technologies also let you create and share your videos.

What is Live Streaming?

Essentially, live streaming is one of many data transmission methods. Live streaming is a way to share video content or a video file from a remote storage location online.

A few seconds of the video file are transmitted online at a time, so streaming client devices can play the video without downloading it first.

In other words, video content shared this way online is sent in real time. It has not been stored or recorded previously. As advanced as it is, live streaming technologies are used in many different industries.

Live streaming is especially popular in the video gaming industry. Speaking of the video gaming industry, there are many different video gaming streaming platforms. Twitch owned by Amazon is one of them.

Besides Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Steam also have a huge base of fans scattered all over the globe who consume video content in real time via these platforms.

What Do You Need for High Quality Live Streaming?

The viewership of popular video streaming platforms has tremendously risen in the past several years. According to this ReaseachandMarkets report, the popularity of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Twitch, and other live streaming platforms will increase even more in the years to come.

According to the same report, the video streaming industry is expected to reach a staggering value of US$223 billion in seven years from now at a predicted growth of twenty-one percent.

Thanks to different technological advancements, the demand in the market will also significantly increase in the years to come.

One of the major factors contributing to the growth of the video streaming industry is the adoption of cloud-based services and products.

The growth of the video streaming industry is also positively impacted by the use of AI-based solutions that significantly boost the video quality of content streamed in real time.

This leads us to the most basic requirements for high quality live streaming. When discussing high-quality live streaming, the most important thing to check out is your Internet connection.

Without a stable Internet connection, you will not be able to create and share high-quality video content without constant interruptions.

Having a faster broadband connection is even better and it most certainly boosts live streaming. How slow or fast the minimum network connection speed should be depends on the website or the platform on which you want to stream videos.

Some websites require a network connection speed of 700Kbps and higher for high-quality live streaming. Some sites require a network connection speed of 2MB and even higher for high-quality streaming. Professional live streaming services for example use ‘bonded’ internet connections which splits the data stream across multiple connections allowing for video bitrates of up to 6mbits.

All in all, the faster the Internet connection, the more high-quality live streaming is. For high quality live streaming, you also need a high-quality camera. Whether you are using an HD camera or a standard-definition camera, your camera must be there

Depending on which live streaming platform you join, hardware requirements vary. Some websites require 3GB of RAM. Some require a 64-bit or 32-bit processor if you want to stream videos using your webcam.

In addition, you need the latest Adobe Flash Player plug-in for most websites and of course, a web browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Explorer, or Safari.   

The post Technical Requirements for High Quality Live Streaming appeared first on Australian Times News.

As a result, a quick search online will reveal a wide array of cookie checker tools, but knowing which cookies are active on your site is not sufficient to become compliant with the GDPR. You must, among other things, also control them and then hand over this control to your users. Keep reading for a short introduction to cookies and the GDPR.

Cookies are vital for the digital economy

Almost every website uses cookies, and chances are that the website where you have found this article is also running on cookies. Cookies are small text files, that collect and contain information about a website’s visitor. There are four categories of cookies: Necessary cookies, preference cookies, statistics cookies, and marketing cookies. Cookies were invented in the early 90’s and are named after the real-life fortune cookies.

Upon first contact with a website, the website will place cookies on the visitor’s browser. The cookies then gather information such as IP address, device specification, location etc. Should the visitor return to the website at a later time, the website can then recognize the visitor and use the information from the cookies to give the returning visitor a pleasant user experience. However, not all cookies exist to improve the user experience, as the majority of active cookies on the world wide web are statistics and marketing cookies. 

Statistics and marketing cookies are typically provided by third party services like Google and Facebook and their main purpose is to collect data on the website visitor’s online behavior. This information can then be used to optimize the website for conversions and the cross-tracking nature of most marketing cookies enable website owners to let their display ads follow their visitors around on the internet.

The GDPR reversed the power balance

The GDPR, the most significant data protection initiative in 20 years, came into effect on May 25^th, 2018. The purpose of the GDPR is to give individuals in the EU control over how their data is used. This is done by setting strict requirements for organizations that collect and processes personal information about their users, including demands for transparency, valid user consent, and documentation.

This means that if your website caters to users from the EU or your website just happen to have visitors from the EU by coincidence, then you are obligated to follow the regulations of the GDPR.

An important aspect of the GDPR is to give end users control of their data, which includes guidelines as to how to revoke their consent and for their data to be forgotten.

Should an organization fail to become compliant with the GDPR, the organization can face heavy fines of up to €20 million or 4% of the organization’s global yearly turnover, whichever is higher.

The post Cookie compliance in a GDPR age appeared first on Australian Times News.

The cloud service – which provides on-demand computing platforms to individuals and businesses – went down across in various North American locations due to a “an impairment of several network devices.”

A notice posted on the website read: “The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices in the US-EAST-1 Region. These devices are receiving more traffic than they are able to process, which is leading to elevated latency and packet loss for the traffic traversing these are seeing improvement in availability across most AWS services. We continue to work toward full recovery for all impacted AWS Services and API operations.”

The web service allows deliveries from the online megastore to take place when organised over a network, which caused several delays across the region when workers were unable to organise courier logistics.

Amazon spokesman Richard Rocha told The Washington Post that while some issues “had been resolved”, the company was “[still] working towards full recovery across services.”

Further issues were caused by the network for video doorbell company Ring, which carries Amazon’s signature home security product.

In a statement on their website, Ring said: “We have identified an issue that may cause failures throughout the app such as settings changes not saving and live videos (dings, motions, live views) to fail to connect.”

The post Amazon Web Services outage takes down Netflix and Disney Plus appeared first on Australian Times News.

The tech giant has reportedly had to stop the production line “for several days” owing to supply chain limitations and China’s ongoing issues with chips.

A supply chain manager told newspaper Nikkei “Due to limited components and chips, it made no sense to work overtime on holidays and give extra pay for front-line workers […] That has never happened before. The Chinese golden holiday in the past was always the most hustling time when all of the assemblers were gearing up for production.”

The report goes on to describe the situation as the “nightmare before Christmas” and indicates that Apple failed to meet production targets in both September and October for the iPhone 13, missing out by about 20%.

This also led to a knock-on effect of Apple’s other flagship devices – including the iPad and older generations of the iPhone such as the iPhone 12 and the iPhone SE.

Nikkei reports: “Over the same period, the reallocation of the shared components squeezed iPad assembly even more, leading to about 50% less production volume than planned, while the production forecast for older generations of iPhones also dropped around 25%.”

The report also went on to state that sources had claimed the situation had “not improved much” by November.

The halt comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook previously attributed the production issues to problems brought on by COVID, as well as industry-wide chip shortages.

He told CNBC: “We had a very strong performance despite larger than expected supply constraints, which we estimate to be around $6 billion. The supply constraints were driven by the industry wide chip shortages that have been talked about a lot, and COVID-related manufacturing disruptions in Asia.”

The post Apple halts iPhone production appeared first on Australian Times News.

PushAMZ is the leading e-commerce account management company in the world. It helps investors start, manage, and scale up their Amazon and Walmart automation stores. What this means is that as an investor, you get an extra passive income stream completely hands-free. The way it’s set up, this mechanism offers you to make between 10–30% passive monthly yields without any of your funds being held.

For an investor looking for investment opportunities that don’t involve brick and mortar businesses, partnering with PushAMZ may be the answer for several reasons. One, you will be working with a seasoned team that knows what it’s doing. The company’s founders, Luis Millan and Mac Ismail are expert e-commerce entrepreneurs with years of experience.

Luis has been in the tech space for years and has been featured in Forbes and the International Business Times several times. Mac is an entrepreneur who has worked with government agencies on procurement and international logistics. He has also worked with some of the largest global trends in Australia, Dubai, the UK, Africa, and the US. The two have vast management skills and have each led teams of 50 tech employees in large organizations in the past.

Luis and Mac started from scratch to create PushAMZ and made it an 8-figure revenue business within a short time. Today, they lead a team of 100+ worldwide and generate passive incomes for 120 investors. So far, they have worked on 150+ e-commerce campaigns. Luis acts as the COO, and Mac is the chairman.

The company’s executive management team also includes Jonathan Maxim, Stephanie Schuldt, and Chase Alley. Jonathan acts as both the chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer. Chase is a brand ambassador, and Stephanie is both a brand ambassador and influencer. In fact, Stephanie is the second reason you should give this partnership deeper thought.

Besides being on the executive management team, Stephanie is also PushAMZ’s client. An enthusiastic lover of the ocean and everything that comes with it, Stephanie is a 3x spearfishing world record holder and former seasoned corporate executive. She is also a 200-ton boat captain, a master free-dive instructor, and a divemaster.

Thanks to the passive income she gets from her partnership with PushAMZ, she lives on her catamaran sailboat with her dog Zeaky full-time. At the moment, she is preparing to sail the world from the Bahamas. Stephanie’s lifestyle is one of many and one Luis believes is possible for everyone. He says, “Invest in passive income, and one day, you won’t have to work anymore. Then you can do whatever work (or play) you want.”

The future can only get better for PushAMZ as a company. They are looking to get back to fulfillment and their own in-house warehousing. In addition to Amazon and Walmart, they have also expanded into newer platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Etsy. They are looking to diversify their client portfolios and increase the size of the overall net

The post “Get Passive Income Streams and Free up Time for Play,” Says the PushAMZ Team appeared first on Australian Times News.

Google recently released the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones, and although there were no announcements about a folding phone at the company’s latest launch event, 9to5Google claims there’s a new code hidden in the Google Camera app that suggests a foldable Pixel will see an official release next year.

There has also seemingly been an update to the name of the folding phone, as it used to be codenamed Passport but now seems to be using the codename Pipit.

The bad news is that according to 9to5Google’s APK Insight team, it appears Pipit is set to feature the 12.2-MP Sony IMX363 sensor used in the Pixel 5 as its main camera sensor instead of the much larger, and much higher-res Samsung GN1 sensor Google uses in the new Pixel 6.

Elsewhere, it seems Pipit will feature a 12-MP IMX386 sensor to power an ultra-wide camera, and two IMX355 sensors as selfie cameras to ensure users can take expert snaps with both the interior and exterior cameras.

As of the time of writing, there are no other details confirmed about the rumoured folding phone, and Google are keeping things under wraps. We’ll keep you posted about any upcoming news regarding Google’s foldable phone.

The post Google’s foldable phone rumoured for 2022 appeared first on Australian Times News.

To that end, Walsh looks for companies that could be strengthened and expanded by its SaaS platform that Thryv owns and operates. It’s why Thryv acquired Sensis, an established marketing services business in Australia.

A Rebranding and New Local Edition Launch

Sensis has been around since the late 1800s, when Australia launched its first telephone directory. With a history and firm presence in the country, Thryv is rebranding and adding  services based on what small businesses need today and adding functionality to round out the company’s service offerings.

SMB owners can look forward to the launch of new business management products, all carefully curated to meet the needs of professionals today. Those who already know Sensis can expect far more than a name change — they can expect services and packages that address real concerns and obstacles in their industry.

The VP of product and marketing, Ryan Cantor, said the products have already been adapted for Australian businesses and they’re able to integrate into popular platforms (e.g., Xero, and MYOB). Cantor remarked, “We are pleased to welcome Australian small businesses to the Thryv platform. With Thryv, small businesses can centralize their day-to-day activities through one elegant, easy-to-use dashboard.”

How Thryv Is Helping Small Business Owners

Thryv is an all-in-one business software that brings many needed tools into one place. The software does everything that a small business owner’s disparate set of current tools may do, plus much more. It offers ease and efficiency by consolidating functionality into one platform.

This isn’t just another app that employees and owners have to learn, but a platform that has been created  based on the needs of a business owner.   Thryv prides itself for being an organization that  understands the nuance between two distinctly different types of organizations.

A small cupcake shop in Australia will have very different needs than a niche roofing contractor in America. By building in capabilities for both owners though, Thryv has managed to come out ahead in a competitive landscape. The Sensis rebranding helps highlight the software and its benefits, so small business owners in Australia can access technology that can give their business a welcome refresh.

A Mutually Beneficial Acquisition

Sensis got its start when Australia launched its White Pages in 1880. In 1975, the Yellow Pages was introduced to the country. By 1994, both the White and Yellow Pages also migrated to the internet. The company went through a rebranding from Pacific Access to Sensis in 2002.

Thryv (listed on NASDAQ as THRY) purchased Sensis for $260 million in March, a deal that came 7 years after the Australian telecommunications company Telstra sold off its 70% stake in Sensis to a private equity firm in the US for $425 million. 

John Allan, the CEO of Thryv Australia and former CEO of Sensis, believes it makes sense to change the corporate identity of Sensis to match that of its parent company. It’s a natural step that aligns with the intention to grow the software offering in Australia (along with the core marketing services business).

Thryv CEO Joe Walsh and Allan are both firmly committed  to small businesses. Small business owners are vital to the economy and are major employers across the world.. The name change to Thryv is symbolic of Sensis’ updating itself to become a more integral part of small business in Australia.

As with every endeavor of Thryv, the company is devoted to getting the rebranding right. Allen said, “Since March, our teams in Australia and the US have been working around the clock to bring the Thryv software solution to market.” This collaboration, completed halfway around the world, speaks to the staff’s strong belief in the project.

As it scales and launches its SaaS platform, the company considers the needs of the client and how to best meet them where they are. At the same time, in Australia, Thryv is supporting 100,000 customers (both government and business) through its traditional marketing services product, branded under the names Yellow and White Pages .

The Value of the Thryv Suite of Products

CEO Joe Walsh and his team have identified how small businesses work in the modern age. Even before the pandemic, customers were coming to expect modern tools from small businesses, and they didn’t always wait for them to catch up with the times before moving onto a competitor.

From payments to appointment setting to automated marketing communication, Thryv products help businesses put customers first. The company considers not just how people interact with businesses, but also how they find them in the first place.

In the US, Thryv owns The Real Yellow Pages, both print and online, so the team understands what it means to connect consumers  to the right local business at the right time. Now small businesses in Australia can also see how more efficient software products can drive them to build and manage their customer lists, while generating everything from better reviews to more detailed invoices.

Joe Walsh doesn’t want hard-working small business owners to be left behind simply because they didn’t have the right tools available to them. Thryv products aren’t meant to  make tasks required to run a business easier to check off one-by-one.  For example, in the software, communication can be sent out automatically so customers feel connected.  It means customers inevitably get better service, and have fewer unanswered questions.

These are perks that the Australian small business market is about to discover now that Sensis has become Thryv and has a new set of tools to offer small businesses.  As Thryv looks to the future, CEO Walsh and his staff envision a much stronger foothold in the country, as well as stronger relationships between the company and the small business owners they serve.

The post Thryv is rebranding New Acquisition Sensis to bring better business software to Australian SMBs appeared first on Australian Times News.

There is no doubt that IoT devices have a great purpose in personal and professional use. However, what many people overlook are the security threats that come along with using internet-enabled devices. As a result, many businesses are putting their infrastructure to risk without even realizing it. A solution to this issue would be to create a network that is secure enough to support IoT devices without risk.

The Issues with IoT Devices

While they generally seem helpful and convenient, IoT devices can be a great source of risk for any infrastructure. Some of the threats related to IoT security include denial of service attacks, botnet threats, man-in-the-middle threats, identity and data theft, ransomware attacks, and other incidents such as remote recording. With that in mind, here are five reasons why you should think twice before incorporating IoT devices into your network.

IoT Devices Require a Lot of Management

Handheld and stationary IoT devices require a lot of physical management, which is something many companies fail to consider at first. Businesses that frequently use IoT devices to manage workflows should also use tracking and management tools to keep those devices in optimal shape. Without proper asset management, IoT devices might not be efficient enough, or they may become prone to security threats over time.

The Risk of Loss or Theft

While mobile IoT devices can serve as a great asset in your business, they can also be classified as a liability due to the high risk of loss and/or theft. Since these devices are very valuable, people might try to get their hands on them. Not only is losing the device going to be a significant financial loss, but it also implies the loss of data connected to that digital tool. 

Hence, mobile devices can serve as a backdoor to higher levels of security infrastructures. Besides, even if you don’t run into any tech-savvy criminals who might try to take advantage of your mobile devices, you might simply misplace them at the wrong time and end up losing valuable data and the device itself.

IoT Devices Are Not Secured

Whether you’re new to using IoT devices or have some experience under your belt, you should keep in mind that these devices are not secured right out of the box. The lack of default security features means that you have to go through several steps to protect your data and device before using it. This includes changing the default passwords, updating the operating systems, and ensuring there is no suspicious activity taking place within the network. 

Another good protective measure is to use a VPN to reduce security risks when operating IoT devices. What is a VPN? It’s a cybersecurity tool that keeps your connection safe and protects your privacy. Since many such devices operate automatically, it is best to install a VPN on your router. That way, all devices connected to that network will be protected by encryption.

Lack Of Experience with Such Devices

Let’s face it, IoT devices are relatively new on the market, and, as such, they might seem unfamiliar to most users. This can become a problem if you try to incorporate IoT devices in companies where people are not educated or trained to handle them. Besides, IoT devices produce such massive amounts of data that it can be easy for hackers to hide malicious traffic in high volumes of information flowing through IoT systems. The point is, your team should be well trained before taking on the challenge of handling IoT devices.

No Decommissioning Process in Place

What do you do with IoT devices once your company is done using them? You can’t just throw them in the trash, right? You need to have a specific decommissioning process set in place that will protect your company and its data. Keep in mind that IoT devices carry a lot of data, including proprietary information about your company, as well as individual user credentials. All of this can be exploited if it gets into the wrong hands. With that said, make sure to put together a plan on how to safely dispose of IoT devices once you no longer need them.

How to Protect Your Network

The rapid adoption of IoT devices in business has led to various security vulnerabilities. A study by IBM and the Ponemon Institute has shown that it takes up to 280 days for businesses to identify a data breach in their system, which is extremely concerning if you consider the volume at which security attacks are taking place nowadays. The risk of a data breach becomes even higher if you’re not implementing the proper security measures.

These include tracking and managing your IoT device inventory, conducting security training, and ensuring your staff members are on the same page when handling IoT devices. Most importantly, make sure to use a virtual private network to add an extra layer of protection to your entire network. If you’ve never integrated VPN services in your business before, now is the time to research what a VPN is and how it can help improve your security efforts.

The post IoT: The most overlooked Digital Security Threat? appeared first on Australian Times News.

Employers previously not well-informed of the technology are also joining the RPA team to promote their businesses digitally. In short, robotic process automation, being an efficient technology, is attracting many companies and significantly impacting today’s digital transformation.

We’ll learn more about how these two terms are interlinked and their role in boosting computerization.

RPA & Digital Transformation Share an Intrinsic Bond

Applications running digitally through a network of software are incomplete without robotic automation, that being a necessity of today’s world. Business users new to shifting internal processes or finding ways to adopt technology will definitely need RPA assistance. Nowadays, RPA as a service is notably utilized for nearly all industrial processes, for example, application deployment, risk management, data analytics, fraud detection, etc. Moreover, RPA helps companies face critical challenges appearing while they’re transferring to modernization.

A wise business owner is the one who creates ways of mutually adjusting RPA and digital transformation to leverage his products. Robotic process automation never left the industry even in the hard times of covid-19. The accurate access of this service helped employees solve business queries even in lockdown. They both share a symbiotic relationship having a positive influence on each other. When we say that, it means the involvement of RPA in a company benefits it to produce error-free and quick outputs.

Effect of RPA on Digital Transformation

Since we started adding technology to our routine tasks, we have observed more positive influences on our lives than negative ones. Similarly, whatever software houses practiced RPA in their systems resulted in more efficient business processes. It wouldn’t have a destructive impact on any IT company beginning to normalize RPA strategies for long-term scalability effects. Let’s see how it has influenced the digital transformation till today!

Helped Align Business Strategies

There was no proper start or ending up of digital processes before RPA was introduced. It caused much chaos between staff members due to continuous faults and errors appearing. Hence, the origination of RPA strategies helped organizational programs arrange themselves with technology. A simple example of this system is if a company is focused more on customer support, it should prefer RPA for an improved experience.

Provided Governance

Enterprises were satisfied acquiring a short-term, limited success they achieved from working manually but wouldn’t focus on the latest technologies. Since RPA got involved, it changed the scenarios and struggled first to scale the companies and then shift to easy accessibility. Therefore, providing complete governance to utilize digital transformation and achieve goals.

Improved Business Stability

The lack of using advanced software and automated processes made small-scaled to large-scaled companies very unstable. The robotic process automation and a team of highly skilled developers made essential changes to digital industries and brought stability. We are proficient at providing the best RPA services, so you can even contact DICEUS to get more details.

If we continue discussing, there’s an extensive list of factors highly affected by RPA that improved digital transformation. But one should not forget that robotic process automation cannot handle everything alone, but a community of everyone (including web developers, office staff, and other software) is involved.

Bottom Line

RPA assisted organizations with the best opportunities to leverage their processes and be something on their own. The compatibility and efficiency it brings along is the true spirit for us to emphasize these things in our digital world and step ahead of just sitting eight hours a day in the office. The world is much more than that now!

The post How is RPA Influencing Digital Transformation? appeared first on Australian Times News.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has asked the social media giant to demonstrate that the LED light on the glasses is an effective way to notify other people that they are being recorded by the wearer.

The Italian privacy watchdog the Garante had previously raised concerns about the smart glasses.

The first Facebook and Ray-Ban specs went on sale earlier this month, they resemble typical sunglasses but also contain two cameras mounted on the front that enables the user to record content and upload it to a new app called View.

However, European regulators are concerned about the little indicator.

The DPC said: “While it is accepted that many devices including smart phones can record third party individuals, it is generally the case that the camera or the phone is visible as the device by which recording is happening, thereby putting those captured in the recordings on notice. With the glasses, there is a very small indicator light that comes on when recording is occurring. It has not been demonstrated to the DPC and Garante that comprehensive testing in the field was done by Facebook or Ray-Ban to ensure the indicator LED light is an effective means of giving notice.”

The post Facebook warned over small LED camera on Ray-Ban glasses appeared first on Australian Times News.

The social media giant has been testing changes to its algorithm in the US, Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil over the last few months, and has now announced it is ready to expand the update to more countries.

According to the site, the change will put “less emphasis” on political content when it comes to pushing news stories to people’s feeds in a bid to slow the rate of misinformation on the platform.

Facebook said: “We’re gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment on or share political content.

“At the same time, we’re putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed.”

However, the social media site is receiving backlash for reducing political content, even though they also received criticism for the previous system too.

Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian House of Commons, believes the change will “throttle political conversation” on the platform, while some journalists are concerned about what the update will mean for their content.

Journalism scholar Valérie Bélair-Gagnon tweeted: “Yet another example of how platforms regulate/affect journalism with Facebook moves to lower News Feed’s political volume (and could reduce traffic to some news publishers, companies that post lots of political content). (sic)”

The post Facebook to limit political content on News Feeds appeared first on Australian Times News.

Performance

The very first thing you have to look for is performance. While you may not think that it’s that important, you have to think about requirements not only now, but in the future. Buying a powerful phone will ensure that it will be able to keep up and still run great a few years down the line.

RAM and processor power are the two things that you will need to look out for. The processor will dictate how pretty much everything runs on your phone. The processor is like the brain of your phone and can enhance many functions, such as image processing, for instance. If you want to perform heavy tasks on your phone and want it to run smoothly, you have to go with a strong processor.

If you have no idea about how processors work and which one you should pick, some popular options include Exynos 990, Snapdragon, Apple A13 Bionic, and Kirin 990. Apple chipsets are known for their RAW processing power and the Snapdragon is the closest you’ll get to this on your Android.

You should also check how you use your phone. Not everyone will need all of this processing power. If you never record videos or rarely use your phone to watch them, there is a strong chance that you don’t need a super-powerful processor. The same goes if you don’t do streaming or barely use apps. In this case, you could look for low and mid-range processors like the Snapdragon 675, 730, and 730G, or the MediaTek Helio G90T or G85 to name just a few.

RAM is also very important. RAM dictates how many tasks you can perform at once. If you like to run multiple apps in the background, this is where good RAM comes in handy. Some smartphones go overboard with the RAM, some even having as much as 16GB, which is more than in many personal computers.

If you only use your phone to make calls and use WhatsApp, you don’t need that much. Something in the 3GB to 4GB territory should be more than enough.

Your Budget

Budget is also very important when buying a phone. In this case, it would be wise to look at manufacturers that have a reputation for releasing great phones at low prices, such as Xiaomi, Oppo, and Motorola. If you want to keep costs down, we would also suggest that you consider looking at cheap SIM only deals. Companies like Lebara have very flexible cheap SIM only deals that you can choose from. One of the greatest things about their deals is the variety, but also the fact that you will never have to worry about going above your data or minutes. Everything is capped at zero and they offer great options such as the possibility to use your phone as a mobile hotspot or sharing data with your family or friends. 

The Operating System

A lot of people will religiously go for one operating system over the other without understanding why. For some, a smartphone has to be an Apple even if they don’t even use most of its capabilities. Many of these people could actually be better served by an Android.

If you need something that you’ll be able to customise and will be adaptable, go for an Android. Another very important thing to consider is how dependent you are on Google’s suite of products. 

If you use Gmail, Google Drive, or Google Meet, you know that they’ll always be optimised for your Android. Also, if you’re using something like a Chromebook, you won’t have to worry about compatibility issues. You also never know if Google will decide to release a version of one of their apps for iOS or not.

iOS, on the other hand, is usually a better option for people who need something simple. Buying an iPhone also means that you can get more service and your phone will be supported for longer. Another point in the iPhone’s favour is that it’s generally thought to protect your privacy better.

One issue with iOS, however, is that it can be very rigid. You can’t use split screens as you do on iPads. You cannot customise your home page or use launchers to completely transform the interface. And only apps that are available on the App Store can be sideloaded. 

Both operating systems also have very different user experiences. The iPhone doesn’t have a back button, for instance, which means that navigation can vary greatly between apps. While some say that it’s intuitive, having to learn how to go back on every app can become frustrating after a while.

One of the things with Androids is that different phones will have different interfaces. Samsung has its One UI 2 skin that is on top of Android and has greatly improved over the years. So, try as many as you can before you make your decision and pick the one that you’re the most comfortable with.

The Display

This one is very important. A bad display will make your phone almost unusable in certain conditions. You need a screen with low glare that can be viewed from any angle without any loss. When it comes to display type, you usually have the choice between LED and AMOLED. AMOLED is the latest technology and comes in different variants like Super AMOLED and OLED. These have better contrasts and darker blacks. They can also help reduce battery consumption by turning off black pixels to display ‘true black’.

You then need to look at the resolution. You have Full HD, Quad HD, and Full HD+. There is a difference in resolution between Quad HD and Full HD, but it’s very hard to see with an untrained eye, so Full HD should be more than enough for you.

Last, but certainly not least, you want to know how resistant to impact the display is. There is no reason for you to walk around with a cracked phone when you can get something, robust such as Gorilla glass. Gorilla 5 and 6 displays are common on recent models and will provide your device with reasonable protection. We still strongly suggest that you invest in a case, however.

Storage and Camera

The two last things you need to pay special attention to are storage space and the camera. You need enough storage not only for apps, but for updates, and these can balloon very quickly, so we would suggest that you go with a device with at least 128GB of storage. Check how much space is being taken by bloatware as well.

The camera is also important, but the price has to justify the quality. Here, we would suggest that you look at sensor size instead of mega-pixels. Most models today will have serviceable cameras, so unless you want to take professional high-res photos, this is not something you should obsess over.

This is everything you need to know about choosing a good mobile phone. Make sure that you do your research before you pick any model, look at reviews, and don’t go by trends.

The post How to choose the right mobile handset appeared first on Australian Times News.

However, there is a small disadvantage to it. As Instagram has gotten popular and nearly every small to large scale business has been using the App for promotion, the competition in Instagram has become very high.  Due to the overcrowding of pages on the App, there is a very timid chance your posts will reach the targeted audience. However, it can be improved if you have large numbers of followers, and your posts get a large number of people who keep your posts alive and let your business grow.

Why should you buy Instagram Followers?

Success on Instagram is determined by the number of followers you have and the more interaction you do on the App. The number of people liking and commenting on your posts and the shares your posts gets. It all adds up to your page’s impression and gives the viewer a little idea about how your Instagram Profile is doing.

There are many ways to increase followers, but they all require a lot of dedication, time, and commitment to the page. Interaction takes time, and sometimes it becomes tedious to be available on the internet. Thus a more comfortable and efficient way to increase followers is to buy them. The reason behind buying followers is simple, the more followers you have, the larger audience you target, and your posts get a more significant reach.

Here are the three best sites to buy real Instagram followers UK from in 2021.

1. IGfollowers.UK

If you are looking to increase your followers and likes, you have to look no further than IGfollowers.UK. They provide genuine followers and likes for your account and are among the most credible sources on the internet. The website will help you get immense growth, increase your website traffic, and generate more sales. The site has been working since 2013 and has helped 1000s of brands. Their years of experience allow them to safely, legally, and securely provide their services. 

Packages

The site offers some great packages for significantly fewer prices.

Some of them are:

• 100 IG followers for 1.25 pounds
• 3000 IG followers for 27 pounds
• 5000 IG followers for 40 pounds
• 10,000 IG followers for 65 pounds
• 25,000 IG followers for 165 pounds

They also have some big discounted offers like:

Package 1 includes 2000 followers and 1000 likes for 30 pounds.

Another package includes 10,000 followers and 5000 likes for 90 pounds.

Authenticity

One of the most significant advantages of using IGfollowers.UK uses authentic easy to increase followers and likes, so you do not need to waste your time and money on buying fake followers. They bring real people to like and follow your account. Real followers would mean more genuine engagement rather than fake followers.

Fast delivery

Another perk of this site is the quick and fast delivery system deployed here along with high-quality service, rather than waiting for weeks or months after making the payment, like in other sites, IGFollowers.UK make sure that you get the results right after the order is confirmed and the price is completed.

Instead of wasting your money on useless and ineffective ways, you should trust those methods that work. IGfollowers.UK makes sure that you do not have to wander from place to place in search of followers. You have to make a one-time investment into this site, and the results will shock you. They will save you from ineffective strategies and fake followers. Their services are worth it.

Customer Service & Refund Policy

They care for their customers and are dedicated to them. Their highly effective and excellent support staff is proof of it. Their support staff is actively answering all your queries. You can drop off your questions regarding any issues, and they will get to you in less than 24 hours. You can always feel free to ask them about their different packages, rates, and policies.

They also have a unique refund policy that very few sites offer. You could get a refund if they were unable to increase your followers due to a system error. Additionally, if you see a loss in your followers, which is highly unlikely, you can get a refill. You have to tell them about it, and they will look into it themselves without any extra money. So stop worrying about losing followers.

2. BuyInstagramFollowers365.CO.UK

BuyInstagramFollowers365.co.uk is another top website for quality Instagram services. For years, they are providing high-quality services and friendly 24/7 customer support to their customers. They provide automatic and instant delivery. The site is ready to fill your profile with original and genuine followers and likes. It also boosts your brand exposure. The site has more than one million active and real accounts that will make you an Insta-Star. As when you have more followers on your Instagram account, it is much more likely that other people will choose to follow you. Your profile will be much more attractive, and they will pull more people towards your brand and the products you are offering.

Packages

• 100 Instagram Followers for 1.49 pounds
• 250 Instagram followers for 4 pounds
• 500 Instagram followers for 6 pounds
• 1000 Instagram followers for 10.5 pounds
• 5000 Instagram followers for 45 pounds
• 25,000 Instagram followers for 199 pounds

How to Place an Order

Placing an order is very easy and fun on Buyinstagramfollowers365.co.uk. There are just three steps to it.

• Select the Package

You have to select the package which comes right out after you open the website and choose one from it depending on your budget and the number of followers and likes you need. Once you select the package, you will be taken to the status of your profile.

• Entering Information

The next thing to do is to enter your necessary details, such as the Instagram username. You also have to make sure your profile is public and then email to get your order started immediately. You will then have to enter your information, and you can confirm it for secure checkout.

• Checkout

The next thing to do is select the payment option from our different payment options and proceed through the secure payment gateway. Once your payment has been received, they will start adding IG followers to your account.

The site never requires sensitive information from the customer like their IG password. They honour your confidentiality, and they only need your username and your social media profile. They provide 24/7 Customer support and a brilliant return policy that returns your money under 30 days if you do not like the results.

3. BuyInstagramFollowers.UK

Buyinstagramfollowers.UK is one of the best sites to provide the highest quality likes and followers in the market. They offer a wide range of packages depending upon your needs and budgets.

Packages 

They have some great Instagram packages that are:

• 100 followers at 1.89 pounds
• 250 followers at 3.89 pounds
• 500 followers at 5.89 pounds
• 1000 followers at 9.89 pounds
• 2500 followers at 24.89 pounds
• 10,000 followers at 90.89 pounds

How to buy a package

Buying a package is very easy from buyinstagramfollowers.UK, as it involves three easy steps.

The first step is to choose the package you want, from the wide range of packages mentioned above.

Secondly, you would need to enter details about what you need to boost and tell your Instagram account and the URL link. Luckily they care for your privacy, and they do not need your password.

Lastly, you can pay via card or PayPal. After the payment is received, they will start working on your account and increase your followers.

Benefits of buying followers from buyinstagramfollowers. UK

• They give high quality and genuine followers.
• No password needed
• The safe and easy way.
• 24/7 customer support who are always there to help you with your queries and issues.
• Secure payment methods, like PayPal available, and no way of money getting wasted.
• Fast delivery is provided; just after the payment is verified, they start working on your profile and gain followers.
• They are guaranteed, and if the customer is not satisfied, they will return 100% of the money. That is why they stand high and remain one of the best sites to buy all the services.

The post Top 3 best sites to buy Instagram followers in the UK appeared first on Australian Times News.

Probably the least expensive suppliers are NOW Broadband, Plusnet, Shell Energy, and John Lewis. Every one of them offers remarkable minimal effort ADSL standard broadband items.

Nonetheless, with average UK Broadband velocities of 10-11Mbps, they more likely than not will not be quick enough for family homes or various inhabitants’ families.

We suggest you spend a smidgen more and pursue quicker fiber broadband help for more prominent families.

Look at broadband rates

The quicker your broadband, the better your online experience will be. That implies you can anticipate more responsive web-based gaming and smoother streaming.It’s likewise essential that when in doubt, the quicker your broadband, the more individuals you can have online simultaneously with no stoppage or adverse consequence on the nature of your service.Need a smidgen more assistance? Here is our purchaser’s management for tracking down the elite broadband speed.

Check the agreement length

Is it accurate to say that you will be at your location long haul? In which case, you may not be reluctant to join the two years, and 18-month gets progressively normal among commonly recognised name suppliers, like BT and Sky.

In case you think you’ll be at your location for a year, you should take a gander at NOW Broadband, John Lewis, Zen Internet, and Onestream. Every one of whom offers one-year contract terms.

Need broadband for an understudy home? Virgin Media and BT both offer understudy cordial broadband arrangements with nine-month contract terms that mean you will not take care of anything for broadband while you’re at your folks’ home throughout the late spring break.

Suppose you need truly momentary broadband assistance, maybe in light of the fact that you’re emigrating or intend to live at a location for a couple of months. In that case, you might need to investigate one-month home broadband from Virgin Media or Cuckoo.

Consider set-up costs

Fortunately, these days, practically all suppliers defer set-up costs on broadband and telephone bargains insofar as you’re pursuing an agreement of a year or more.

That goes whether you’re pursuing most fiber broadband bundles or a less expensive standard ADSL administration.

Nonetheless, the better quality super-fast and ultrafast broadband bundles from any semblance of Virgin Media and BT by and large expect you to pay for establishment. Except if your premises have been provisioned for a practically identical help before, that is.

You may likewise be obligated to pay an energise when you sign for pay-TV from specific suppliers. For example, Sky charges you to introduce the satellite dish that is needed to get Sky TV.

Additional items and additional items

If you need to tweak your bundles with additional items, for example, whenever calls or TV packs that get you admittance to the premium game or film debuts, it merits recollecting that these can truly expand the cost of your bundle.

Yet, it’s almost consistently less expensive to package every one of your administrations together in a solitary bundle and get from them one supplier than it is to get them from isolated providers.

Furthermore, you’ll profit from the accommodation of having only one month-to-month bill to pay as well, so it’s simpler to monitor your outgoings.

What broadband bundles are accessible?

There are three primary kinds of home broadband – ADSL, link broadband, and fiber optic broadband.

We utilise your postcode to show just what’s accessible around there. A few suppliers offer various sorts, while others are experts in a single specific innovation.

•       ADSL – Broadband conveyed down your phone line is as yet the most well-known sort in the UK and regularly offers average rates of around 10Mb. You need an active telephone line, which means paying line rental. Look at ADSL bargains here.

•       Fibre optic broadband – Super-fast broadband conveyed by fiber-optic link transmitting information at the speed of light. Most fiber broadband, including BT fiber, actually needs a phone line yet offers average paces of 67Mb. Look at fiber bargains here.

•       Cable broadband – Virgin Media’s not quite the same as different suppliers, with a link broadband organization that doesn’t depend on BT’s foundation. You’ll get average paces as high as 362Mb and will not need to pay line rental. Look at link broadband arrangements here.

Enter your postcode underneath to discover what’s accessible around there:

Think about broadband arrangements around there.

The post What to consider when selecting a broadband package appeared first on Australian Times News.

VidClipperis a free video editor, just download it on your devices and make the desired video. You can add tons of features and songs to your montage. Whether you make a video to give a professional touch or to make it at a beginner level, it is one of the comprehensible software for you. But one thing you should keep in mind, these video editing software soft wares are very professional and often get hard to understand. Though it takes a few minutes to make a video, the first thing which you need to understand is how this application works? 

Edit your video on VidClipper:

These steps are not difficult, but if you are a beginner, here is an easy guide for you. 

1. First, download the software by using a download button.
2. Once the downloading gets complete, you will see different ratios on your screen like 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 3:4, etc. 
3. Select the one which suits you the best. The standard screen ratio is 16:9. If you want to make a vertical video you can select 9:16. 3:4 and 1:1 are perfect for Instagram videos.
4. Now you can see an “import” button. Select all the pictures and videos which you want to add to your montage.
5. You can easily drag your pictures and videos. If you think an XYZ picture has to come later or first, you can easily select and then drag it. Rearrange them until you get the desired montage. 
6. This software will give you a wide variety of features, transitions, and effects. It is not mandatory to apply only one filter or effect, you can select as much as you can.
7. You can add a song to your montage. This software also offers you some built-in songs, you can even use them too. If you do not like them you can also import other songs from your phone’s storage. 
8. Edit as many times as you want. Apply different filters and effects and once you are done with making it, you can export it back to your gallery. 
9. Select the quality of your video and here you go. 

Frequently asked questions:

In which operating systems can you download the VidClipper?

You can easily download this software on windows 7, 8, and 10. 

Where can you use the VidClipper?

VidClippercan make every type of videos like vlogs, music albums, YouTube videos, Instagram videos, tutorials, and other kinds of transition videos. You can also use it to make informal videos like make a birthday video for your closest friend and can make greeting card videos for your wedding, or any kind of celebration. In short, enjoy unlimited videos by using the VidClipper. 

Why choose a VidClipper?

 You may find hundreds of other editing software on Google, but you must be wondering how this software is unique among others. Always go and learn about the features which any application offers you. So if you get amazed by them, then you should probably go for them. 

What type of features VidClipper offers?

It is one of the best video montage maker as it offers several unique features like transitions, filters, effects, you can write a text on your video, and add the desired song in the background.

What are the pros of editing video VidClipper?

There are many pros which VidClip offers like it is very user-friendly. As the process of making a video is quite simple and easy, you can easily make the desired videos. The other main benefit of using an editor is its reliability, it is made by professionals for almost every purpose. 

The post How to edit videos on VidClipper? appeared first on Australian Times News.

No Time To Die,  Daniel Craig’s swansong as 007, originally slated for an April 2020 release date, has subsequently been pushed back three times. It’s bad news for all parties involved. The longer this expensive film sits on the shelve, the more interest the loans required to make it in the first place accrue. And it’s not just the waiting game that’s costing the makers of 007’s latest adventure millions, it’s also the product placement. The James Bond franchise has long relied on product placement to meet its budget requirements. This is not to imply that the franchise is nothing without its slew of advertisers; in fact, it would be a fair to say that the relationship between the film makers and the companies that showcase their latest products is one of mutual symbiosis. Both the 007 brand and those it promotes command power and status – they want to be in bed with each other. It’s unlikely that Aston Martin is going to saddle up with Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise.  However, for the first time in its history,  the 007 brand is facing a crisis it’s never had to before – outdated product placement – namely in the form of its smartphones.

A franchise that’s been shaken and stirred

The James Bond franchise has always been a centre piece for various high profile companies looking to further their commercial reach, and while the brands themselves have changed over the years – Aston Martin, then Lotus, then BMW, then Aston Martin again – everything with the exception of the timeless Vodka Martini has always been the very latest. This has been the status quo up until now. In the past, the franchise has faced various challenges; Harry Satlzman and Cubby Broccoli notoriously fell out with each other and it showed in The Man With The Golden Gun while Australia’s George Lazenby made the fatal career error of making only one film in the franchise – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  Like the franchise itself, Bond has faced insurmountable odds,  but now both have been done in by the pandemic and even though the latest date for the release of No Time To Die is October 2021, there are simply no guarantees. Last year Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan rolled the dice and released Tenet. Its profit was $163 million, practically a failure by today’s superhero-blockbuster-induced-high-standard requirements. In an ideal world, the makers of No Time To Die are expecting the coveted billion dollar mark to be surpassed for a number of reasons – but mainly because it is Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007.

Nokia and Bond are on the line

Nokia as a company offers a really interesting if not original case study. The old saying, ‘oh how the mighty hath fallen’ might be applicable. The force with which Nokia dominated the mobile phone market in the early 90’s and early 2000’s was such, that if you were in the market for a mobile phone, you simply looked no further. Apple’s launch of the iPhone triggered the era of the smartphone and in the process derailed Nokia completely. It’s only in the last few years that the company has managed to start resembling its former self, so much so that anyone involved in online trading might want to look to Nokia and using CFD when investing in mobile industry stocks.   By locking in a deal with the James Bond franchise, Nokia had secured itself a spot on one of the best vehicles for advertising. In what can only be described as taking full advantage, the company has attempted a triple whammy by bringing back its famous 3310 and bundling it with it’s 2019 Nokia 7.2, and its showrunner, the Nokia 8.3 5G – meant to be handled by Mr. Bond himself. While the 3310 is likely there for kicks and nostalgia, the other two, especially the last one, are there to boost sales. The problem is that all this was done with the intention of the original release date of April 2020, by which time the 7.2 would only have been 6 months old. The show-stopper, the Nokia 8.3 5G,   would see a subsequent release in September of the same year.  If the October 2021 release date is adhered to, the 7.2 will be two years old and the 8.3 will be just over a year old. In essence Bond will be exhibiting dated technology, which will be an ironic first for the super spy who has in the past always had the latest stuff. The dilemma and thus question is quite clear: do the film-makers re-shoot the smartphone sequences or not?

There is no clear answer

There is no clear answer to this question.  Re-shoots are costly, even if it means re-inserting the phone through some fancy CGI. Also, is it a case of ego? Does Bond’s macho image stand to be tainted if he’s hawking a phone that’s over a year old? Not necessarily; in the past 007 has used his classic Aston Martin way after the fact. Of course the key word here is ‘classic’ and while this might be somewhat applicable to the Nokia 3310, it’s not to 8.3 5G. Only time will tell what the eventual fate of both the latest Bond adventure and what was the latest Nokia phone will be.

The post Are Nokia & ‘No Time To Die’ Out Of Time? appeared first on Australian Times News.

The appearance of the first chatbots on dating sites

There have been dozens of dating assistants on websites throughout the years. The original dating chatbots emerged sometime in 2017, with sites like Match.com leading the way. These bots could engage you in a conversation, answer questions about the site, and more. The chatbots have gotten so life-like in their communication that it takes an average person a few direct interactions and requests to determine if the bots are human. Still, Forbes states that 86% of people prefer personal interactions to chatbots, but 62% of humans don’t mind using them.  These can be useful is a person is trying to hone their opening message on a dating site, but it can also be disappointing because these chatbots aren’t capable of carrying out a relationship.  

How chatbots communicate with us

The chatbots that we see on dating sites today are not true AI. Although they might seem very responsive, spend a little time “talking” with one and you’ll see that it’s a simulacrum. In the most basic sense, a chatbot on any website right now will analyze your sentence, pick out keywords, and attempt to respond with a sentence that is still about the same topic. If you were on a dating site and said “friendships”, then the chatbot might respond with a non-specific, pre-programmed sentence such as “I think we should stay friends, too.” While websites are getting better at simulating human interactions, due in part to computer learning, they’re still a way off from becoming true partners with whom to talk. As they continue to learn, the closer they come to passing the Turing test and acting as though they’re a real human.   

How AI capabilities used in dating services

AI will eventually be utilized in dating services in many fashions. From concierge services of directing people around the site to helping people build better dating profiles, AI will be everywhere. Some people are worried about the amount of data collection required for such a service to be impactful for a particular user, though. Consequently, some site users may never wish to adopt AI dating services at all. Aside from profile construction, AI can also identify trends in online dating particular to a single user or users in general and help a person optimize their searches, profiles, and pictures to get the most attention possible. 

Cybersecurity with AI

Another major impact that AI will have on the future of dating sites is cybersecurity suites. Presently, the security on a site is protected by various kinds of coding, but it’s a losing battle. People are using dating sites for scams, to promote spam, and to simply harm people. However, the fact of the matter is that AI will become a powerful tool to identify and remove such negative aspects and behaviour from dating services. AI can look at the information in a way that is much faster and more geared towards identifying trends that demonstrate a person is acting in bad faith. The AI will find scammer accounts, automatically dispel spam, and remove people from the dating site that have no business using it. We’re a while away from this level of AI integration into dating sites, but they’re getting smarter every day. 

Using the dating sites of the future will ensure that people have experiences with AI. Chatbots and security are just two ways in which we’ll see the appearance of AI in the near future. However, that doesn’t mean you need to worry about seeing a true AI or prepare to have your data combed over. As a technological society, we are still several years away from seeing the true form of AI emerge and impact our sites.

The post Cyber-Dating: Everything you need to know about AI and chat bots appeared first on Australian Times News.

The main differences between Neon and LED signs

Neon lights have significant differences when you place them side-by-side with LED lights. Notwithstanding that the first neon light was created in 1898, manufacturers continue to innovate around them. LED light is a relatively recent invention (1962). Consequently, one major advantage that LED seems to have over neon signage is lower energy consumption. While LED signage can run 24 volts, very large neon signage can require up to 15,000 volts. However, when the lighting is smaller, the difference between the two diminishes. Other differences you should bear in mind include;

Safety

Neon signs are usually fragile because the gas is contained in a glass tube. Therefore, they come with open circuit protection, which automatically cuts off current when there is tube damage. Since LED signs are sturdier, they lack a protective feature. It is paramount to bear this in mind when making your choice.

Cost of repair

Fixing neon signage is easier than LED signage. Whenever there is an accident with neon signage, you only have to change the tubes. With LED signage, it is a different ball game. Each of the LEDs is manually fixed to the base. This means that you have to work on them one at a time—and there are usually so many of them. 

Aesthetics

Neon signs bring a cool ambiance with toned-down lighting to the environment. LED signs, on the other hand, are brighter—but that tends to irritate the eyes. Also, neon tubes can be twisted into alluring shapes, making them more aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. The neon tube technology allows you to get as creative as possible with your signage. 

Colour variation

The combination of colours often makes signage more attractive. It is easier to pull off a colour blend with a neon glow. LED usually has a solid mono colour. This can be limiting for someone with wild creative imagination. Also, neon has an omnidirectional glow, which means you can fix it just anywhere. The lighting of LED, on the other hand, is unidirectional. Consequently, this limits how and where you can place your signage. 

Popularity

Neon signage is often the first choice for many establishments—and this is partly due to its flexible design. They can operate all-day-long, thus, making them suitable for businesses. Notwithstanding that LED is a newer technology, its popularity is growing. 

Summary

Your choice will likely boil down to taste, personal preference, or the intended use. However, it is crucial to consider what others think about your signage. Always remember that the goal is to get everyone’s attention.

The post Choosing between custom Neon Signs and LED Signs appeared first on Australian Times News.

It may be obvious but when it comes to buying new ink for your printer, compatible ink is far cheaper than the genuine versions. This is not because it is poor quality but because the companies that make it have fewer overheads and lower advertising budgets.

Choosing compatible ink can save you more than fifty percent of what you normally spend and provide you with more ink than you usually get! Sound too good to be true? It is because big name brands have to recover the costs of the printers, they sell at below market value, meaning that if you choose to stick with genuine ink you are helping to pay for printers that other people have bought!

2 – Compatible Ink Arrives Quickly

Another great thing about getting compatible ink for printer machines is that the majority of companies offer speedy delivery options. Most compatible ink services are online businesses that depend on repeat custom to stay afloat and so offer free and quick delivery to keep you interested.

Think about the amount of time you usually spend having to go to the store and buy your ink and then think about how much time you could save by purchasing it online one day and having it delivered to your door within 48 hours – online is definitely the way to go if you ask us!

3- Compatible Ink Is Great Quality

Many of us believe that getting new ink from a genuine ink supplier means that you are getting access to the best quality without question. This is not true. Compatible ink is actually far better quality than genuine ink because these companies rely on you being impressed so that they can stay in business. Smart Ink is one of these specialist suppliers and when we took a look at their cartridges, we were shocked at how much better they printed and how much more ink we got in each cartridge.

Printer ink is the most expensive liquid on the planet and many big name brands sell it for more than triple the amount they pay for it. When you buy from a specialist ink company you are not buying a poor quality product, you are just paying for the ink alone, meaning you get great ink time and time again.

Try Compatible Ink Today

Now you know the top three reasons why replacement ink cartridges are better than genuine ink cartridges, why not give them a go! You’ll save money, time and effort and get a better quality finish every time. We think compatible ink is the way to go – order yours today!

The post Three reasons why it is better to use compatible ink appeared first on Australian Times News.

Email marketing is a general term that applies to all strategies that you use to promote your business with emails.

Depending on your current needs and strategies, email marketing can perform serve different purposes:

• Educate about your products;
• Raise brand awareness and recognition;
• Drive traffic to where you need it;
• Warm up subscribers;
• Generate sales;
• Move customer down the sales funnel;
• Collect feedback;
• Keep your brand on top of the mind;
• Build a community around your business.

The reason for such service versatility is the cross-functional format of email messages. They can include text, numbers, symbols, promo-codes, images, animation, video, links, CTA, full contacts, etc. which make them convenient and easy to use.

It can take only one email to deliver the details about the new product release or event, add corresponding photos, add other users’ reviews, include the introductory video and add the promo code on the first order. So far, no other communication channels are able to deliver so big volumes of diverse info.

What’s more, with the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology on the rise, it’s possible to create dynamic emails that would enable you to complete many transactions within the email itself, without opening a website page. For example, today you can already choose the product item and place an order straight in the email message, as well as RSVP to an event or leave a comment or feedback.

Another advantage of email marketing is that anyone can do it. There are many email editors with free email templates you can use to learn to create and test emails. Most of them are of a drag-and-drop format, meaning you need no HTML code skills to operate them. A drag-and-drop editor is like a constructor where you can build a template out of ready blocks depending on your needs.

And if you need more advanced features, like behavioral segmentation or personalization, you can use the service of an ESP. ESP is short for an email service provider. It’s a software platform that, among other things, helps you track and store customer data and use it to segment and personalize your campaigns.

Most modern ESPs are multichannel and not limited to emails only. They can help send different types of messages, like SMS, web pushes and mobile pushes, and provide other marketing solutions, like pop-up forms, chatbots, website recommendations, subscription forms, etc.

Types of Emails

In terms of content and purpose, emails are divided into promotional and educational. However, few emails solely belong to one category. Most often, one message incorporates features of both types and is a mix of promotional and educational content. There are also service emails like confirmations, reset, alerts etc. that aim to provide details on your account or shopping activity. 

In terms of the final recipients they’re meant for, emails are divided into bulk and transactional.

Educational and Promotional

As suggested by their names, educational and promotional emails serve to educate people on your brand and promote your products, respectively. Of course, the final aim of all emails is to drive sales, but educational emails do it in a less direct way. They rather warm up the audience, tell the story of the brand and its values, and share the current company’s activities.

Newsletters, welcome email series, onboarding guidelines and manuals, pro advice and Q&A, download files typically belong to educational content.

Promotional emails are emails whose main goal is to generate an instant sale. They contain several CTA, sales terms (if you run one) and promo codes or other incentives like free shipping, gift for a friend, access to gated content, etc.

Holiday sales, product promotions, limited-time offers, event announcements, new arrivals, giveaways, seasonal clearance belong to promotional content.

Educational vs. promotional email

Bulk and Transactional

Bulk emails are emails sent to multiple recipients. It can be your whole contact base or certain segments. Newsletters, promos, event announcements, welcome emails, and holiday congratulations belong to bulk emails.

Transactional emails are emails sent to one recipient in response to their account or shopping activity. A subscription confirmation, order placement, password reset, payment, and even abandoned browse on the website can trigger a transactional email.

Bulk vs. transactional email

How to Use Email Marketing the Right Way

Any brand serious about their marketing results should incorporate all the above types into one solid strategy. But when you’re only starting with email marketing, it’s easy to get confused with abundant information and unknown terms. The best way is to get started steadily and build your email strategy step by step. Here are some tips on how to do it.

• Grow your email list slowly. Even if you have only 50 subscribers in your base, don’t rush into buying contact lists. Such a purchase can cause you many problems with contact base hygiene and sender reputation. Instead, add a subscription form on your website or social media pages. Introduce a referral program that would encourage people to share your content with friends. Collaborate with brands that have a similar target audience and promote each other via all channels.
• Start segmenting from the start. The earlier you start dividing your customers based on their preferences and shopping behavior, the better. Even with a small contact base, start to build segments and test different condition combinations. And then, when you have one million subscribers, you’ll already know the mechanics and will have lean segmentation processes.
• Deliver relevant content. With competition flourishing, people can always go looking for more interesting things elsewhere. To avoid this, monitor your audience’s preferences and respond to changes in them. Also, keep the track of the email design trends and add the most relevant to your campaigns.
• Analyze the results. Provided you have no problems with deliverability, open rate and click rate are the first metrics to pay attention to. Their fluctuation is normal but a sudden decline is a warning sign and a signal to revise your strategies.

Today, email marketing offers more solutions than just to send promo codes. It’s an effective tool to draw your customer portrait, build brand recognition and promote other channels email subscribers may not know about. And with mobile optimisation offered by most ESPs, you can be sure your message will be opened and consumed on any device.

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Ittay Weiss, University of Portsmouth

MIP^* = RE is not a typo. It is a groundbreaking discovery and the catchy title of a recent paper in the field of quantum complexity theory. Complexity theory is a zoo of “complexity classes” – collections of computational problems – of which MIP^* and RE are but two.

The 165-page paper shows that these two classes are the same. That may seem like an insignificant detail in an abstract theory without any real-world application. But physicists and mathematicians are flocking to visit the zoo, even though they probably don’t understand it all. Because it turns out the discovery has astonishing consequences for their own disciplines.

In 1936, Alan Turing showed that the Halting Problem – algorithmically deciding whether a computer program halts or loops forever – cannot be solved. Modern computer science was born. Its success made the impression that soon all practical problems would yield to the tremendous power of the computer.

But it soon became apparent that, while some problems can be solved algorithmically, the actual computation will last long after our Sun will have engulfed the computer performing the computation. Figuring out how to solve a problem algorithmically was not enough. It was vital to classify solutions by efficiency. Complexity theory classifies problems according to how hard it is to solve them. The hardness of a problem is measured in terms of how long the computation lasts.

RE stands for problems that can be solved by a computer. It is the zoo. Let’s have a look at some subclasses.

The class P consists of problems which a known algorithm can solve quickly (technically, in polynomial time). For instance, multiplying two numbers belongs to P since long multiplication is an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. The problem of finding the prime factors of a number is not known to be in P; the problem can certainly be solved by a computer but no known algorithm can do so efficiently. A related problem, deciding if a given number is a prime, was in similar limbo until 2004 when an efficient algorithm showed that this problem is in P.

Another complexity class is NP. Imagine a maze. “Is there a way out of this maze?” is a yes/no question. If the answer is yes, then there is a simple way to convince us: simply give us the directions, we’ll follow them, and we’ll find the exit. If the answer is no, however, we’d have to traverse the entire maze without ever finding a way out to be convinced.

Such yes/no problems for which, if the answer is yes, we can efficiently demonstrate that, belong to NP. Any solution to a problem serves to convince us of the answer, and so P is contained in NP. Surprisingly, a million dollar question is whether P=NP. Nobody knows.

Trust in machines

The classes described so far represent problems faced by a normal computer. But computers are fundamentally changing – quantum computers are being developed. But if a new type of computer comes along and claims to solve one of our problems, how can we trust it is correct?

Imagine an interaction between two entities, an interrogator and a prover. In a police interrogation, the prover may be a suspect attempting to prove their innocence. The interrogator must decide whether the prover is sufficiently convincing. There is an imbalance; knowledge-wise the interrogator is in an inferior position.

In complexity theory, the interrogator is the person, with limited computational power, trying to solve the problem. The prover is the new computer, which is assumed to have immense computational power. An interactive proof system is a protocol that the interrogator can use in order to determine, at least with high probability, whether the prover should be believed. By analogy, these are crimes that the police may not be able to solve, but at least innocents can convince the police of their innocence. This is the class IP.

If multiple provers can be interrogated, and the provers are not allowed to coordinate their answers (as is typically the case when the police interrogates multiple suspects), then we get to the class MIP. Such interrogations, via cross examining the provers’ responses, provide the interrogator with greater power, so MIP contains IP.

Quantum communication is a new form of communication carried out with qubits. Entanglement – a quantum feature in which qubits are spookishly entangled, even if separated – makes quantum communication fundamentally different to ordinary communication. Allowing the provers of MIP to share an entangled qubit leads to the class MIP^*.

It seems obvious that communication between the provers can only serve to help the provers coordinate lies rather than assist the interrogator in discovering truth. For that reason, nobody expected that allowing more communication would make computational problems more reliable and solvable. Surprisingly, we now know that MIP^* = RE. This means that quantum communication behaves wildly differently to normal communication.

Far-reaching implications

In the 1970s, Alain Connes formulated what became known as the Connes Embedding Problem. Grossly simplified, this asked whether infinite matrices can be approximated by finite matrices. This new paper has now proved this isn’t possible – an important finding for pure mathematicians.

In 1993, meanwhile, Boris Tsirelson pinpointed a problem in physics now known as Tsirelson’s Problem. This was about two different mathematical formalisms of a single situation in quantum mechanics – to date an incredibly successful theory that explains the subatomic world. Being two different descriptions of the same phenomenon it was to be expected that the two formalisms were mathematically equivalent.

But the new paper now shows that they aren’t. Exactly how they can both still yield the same results and both describe the same physical reality is unknown, but it is why physicists are also suddenly taking an interest.

Time will tell what other unanswered scientific questions will yield to the study of complexity. Undoubtedly, MIP^* = RE is a great leap forward.

Ittay Weiss, Senior Lecturer, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Cathy Foley, CSIRO

Universities and other research organisations in Australia have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In May, a group led by Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel forecasted severe impacts for our research workforce. These included the loss of the equivalent of up to 21,000 full-time jobs in universities this year, including around 7,000 related to research.

These effects are now becoming very real. Universities and other research institutions are losing income as international students disappear. Several universities have announced they will cut jobs, and plenty more are expected.

Recovering these jobs won’t be quick or easy. There will be lasting impacts on our research sector.

At the same time, however, science and technology are essential to the recovery from this crisis, and to the long-term future of our economy.

In 2019 CSIRO released our Australian National Outlook report, which identified the key areas to drive innovation to secure our future prosperity. It said we need to reinvent our industries to make us more unique and more profitable, or risk falling into slow decline. Little did we know we would already be in recession in 2020.

Future economic growth will depend on the creation of future industries such as advanced manufacturing, hydrogen, space and quantum technologies. Science, including social sciences, will also underpin the delivery of many public sector services, including water management, land management and defence.

Invest now to prepare for the future

Expertise doesn’t grow overnight. Australia’s response to COVID-19 has been led by scientists we invested in decades ago. To face the challenges of the future, we need to invest today in the people who will be the leaders of tomorrow.

Both men and women will be the leaders of the future. Evidence suggests women in STEM, who are already underrepresented, are being hit hard by COVID-19 impacts.

Supporting these women is a key to future success: research shows increasing the number of women in leadership positions by just 10% boosts a company’s market value by 6.6%, or an average of A$105 million. Extrapolate that across entire industries and you are going to get some big numbers.

One way forward

The best response to this crisis will vary for different organisations. CSIRO’s approach is to continue working with universities and business to run programs that grow Australia’s future STEM workforce.

Each year, CSIRO recruits around 100 graduates from STEM higher degrees as postdoctoral fellows. In the past 24 months we have recruited 155 of these, of whom just over a third are women.

This year we are making as many positions available as possible, as quickly as we can. We are currently recruiting 50 postdoctoral positions and we plan to advertise another 20 later in the year.

The challenge

Without a thriving science and technology sector, Australia will not generate the innovation that spurs economic growth.

There are many other postgraduate students looking for placements and jobs, as well as the university staff and academics who will potentially be retrenched.

These are highly skilled people and we need them in our workforce. Our challenge is to support them to be taken up in other sectors by organisations looking to boost research and development, or help them create new businesses of their own.

Continued investment in R&D during economic downturn can give industries and businesses a competitive edge.

Research by McKinsey following the 2008 downturn found organisations were reluctant to cut R&D activities, seeing them as a competitive advantage for future growth. Organisations that gained the greatest benefit from R&D expanded their programs.

With all these skilled researchers coming into the market, there is an opportunity for industry to take them on and increase business investment in R&D, which has fallen in recent years and left Australia well below the OECD average.

Either way, instead of letting this amazing workforce disappear, we have an opportunity to help them find a different pathway to impact, one that may also help Australian businesses boost the sophistication of their products at the same time. Lemons to lemonade, as they say.

We need our scientists now more than ever to help us develop the high-value industries that will secure our future jobs and prosperity.

We can’t let our future STEM skills become a casualty of COVID-19, or we will pay for it in decades to come.

Cathy Foley, Chief Scientist, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Monica Grady, The Open University

Next spring is going to be a busy time for Mars. In close succession, three spacecraft will arrive at the planet, joining the dozen or so craft already circling Mars. Two of the spacecraft were launched in the past couple of weeks by newcomers to martian exploration: the United Arab Emirates’ Al-Amal (meaning Hope) and China’s Tianwen-1 (which means Question to Heaven).

The third vessel will be NASA’s Mars 2020, containing the Perseverance rover, which just took off successfully from Florida. While this rover will be just one of many on the red planet, it is our best bet for finding life there for the time being.

The sudden flurry of activity is a result of planetary dynamics: every two or so years, the orbits of Earth and Mars align so that the two bodies are at their closest to each other. This results in a shorter interplanetary transit time, of just over six months. The next such launch window will not be until 2022 – when it is expected that the European Space Agency’s ExoMars 2022 will join the throng.

It is legitimate to question why we keep sending rockets to Mars. Surely we have acquired enough images of the surface and its landscapes to know that water used to be there, but has now vanished? True enough – but there are still mysteries to solve: when did the water go, and why? And, of course, the biggest question of all: is (or was) there life on Mars?

The three missions have different objectives: Hope will orbit the planet for at least two Earth years (one Martian year), acquiring data on Mars’ weather – just like the weather satellites orbiting Earth. Tianwen-1 will orbit Mars and is carrying a rover that will be parachuted down to the surface at Utopia Planitia, where it will analyse the soil and take images of the surface.

Perseverance will arrive almost at the same time – but a couple of thousand kilometres away in Jezero Crater. It will be deposited on the surface by sky-crane technology (see the video below), the same method that delivered Curiosity so successfully in 2012.

Perseverance carries a full complement of scientific instruments that will measure all the usual things that get measured on Mars: the chemistry and mineralogy of the rocks and soil, the amount and type or organic material present at and just below the surface, and so on. But there are two other features of the mission that make it unique.

First of all is the helicopter/drone – called Ingenuity – that will be released from beneath the rover. This will fly from Perseverance and circle around before landing away from the rover. It is not certain what the range of the drone will be – although the flight will only last a few minutes and Ingenuity will land only a few metres away from the rover.

The idea behind the flight is to test the concept of atmospheric flight on Mars. Eventually, it is anticipated, drones will be able to fly for much longer and for greater distances. This could help guide rovers, identifying features worth investigating and hazards to avoid.

The second unique feature is a drilling and caching system. Perseverance is the first rover to have the capability to drill a core, about ten centimetres long and one centimetre in diameter, and extract it intact from the drill hole. Perseverance will take samples from a range of different rock types as it traverses the crater floor. The drill cores will be left in a small pile – a cache – for collection, possibly in early 2027, and subsequent transport back to Earth (estimated arrival time is still not known, but maybe around spring 2032).

Sample return

Why is it so important to bring samples back from Mars? The instruments carried by Perseverance will be able to undertake fairly sophisticated chemical analyses of the rocks and soil. But even though the instruments and measurements are a tremendous achievement, they do not have the full range of equipment that we employ on Earth to squeeze every drop of information from a rock.

Tests to check for organic compounds – and whether they might have a biological origin – require a chain of different analyses that are far too elaborate and complex to be undertaken on Mars. Boiling acids, alcohol rinses, addition of chemicals, subtraction of solids, are steps in the chemistry needed to extract and separate organic molecules from their rocky hosts. This just cannot (as yet) be done on Mars.

The rocks will be weighed and measured practically on a grain-by-grain basis and analysed, in some cases down to the individual atoms from which the material is composed. This will be an international effort – there is already a multi-national panel (called MSPG-2) which will draft the requirements for the first sets of analyses and how the samples will be stored, curated and subsequently distributed to the wider scientific community.

There is another set of reasons to bring samples back from Mars – the future of human exploration of Mars. If we send humans to Mars, we have to know how to bring them back again. We have not returned anything directly from another planetary body since the Apollo 17 astronauts left the Moon in December 1972. Yes, we have captured bits from a comet and an asteroid and returned them to Earth – but those missions did not land, collect and come back.

We have been investigating Mars for a long time: for over 150 years by telescope, 50 years from orbit and 20 years by rovers. Only another 12 years, then, before we can analyse Mars in our own laboratories.

Perseverance to get things done is a gift of humanity. Here’s hoping that the rover will live up to its name.

Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Andrew Cruden, University of Southampton

The UK electricity system is undergoing significant and rapid change. It has the world’s largest installed capacity of offshore wind, has effectively stopped generating electricity from coal, and has recorded a 20% drop in demand since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, this transition from traditional, reliable coal to weather-dependent wind and solar generation brings with it increasing challenges to match electrical supply and demand at every instant. This is where large grid-scale energy storage systems could help regulate and buffer supply and demand, and improve grid control.

The UK government recently announced the removal of planning barriers to building energy storage projects over 50MW in England and 350MW in Wales. This, the government feels, will enable the creation of significant new energy storage capacity. The UK currently has 1GW of operational battery storage units and an additional 13.5GW of battery projects under development at the planning stage.

This intervention by the government creates a planning environment that could enable the UK to reach its target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This could happen with either a high proportion of large-scale, centralised renewable generation, or with more of a priority on smaller community schemes such as locally owned wind turbines and solar panels. Batteries will, in particular, contribute significantly to the grid regulation of a further 30GW of offshore wind by 2030 (to achieve the UK target of 40GW of offshore wind by that year).

But pursuing ever larger, stationary battery systems may not be the optimal solution for the UK to have a renewable energy future. Instead, the answer could lie in the country’s garages and car parks.

As the UK has moved from fossil fuel to renewable energy electricity generation, CO₂ emissions from the energy supply sector have fallen from over 40% of the UK total in 1990 to 25% in 2019. This means the transport sector is now the largest emitter, producing a third of all UK CO₂ emissions.

This has led to a growing focus on the introduction of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles. As just one in ten cars sold in the UK fall into the these categories, there is still some way to go to reducing the impact of petrol and diesel vehicles. Significantly more infrastructure is needed to support them, and their growing popularity increases the amount of electricity that the grid needs to provide, one-third of which is still produced from natural gas.

However, electric vehicles could also help with making electricity production greener. When an electric vehicle is plugged in for re-charging, it is effectively enabling the electricity grid to access its battery. When you have many vehicles all plugged in at once, they create a very large aggregated battery store. This is a concept known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and could create a much larger and cheaper alternative energy store than stationary large battery systems.

There are 38.2m licensed vehicles in the UK, including some 31.5m cars. If these were all battery electric vehicles (each storing an average of 50kWh of energy and connected via a 7kW charger), this could create a nationwide distributed mega battery with a capacity of 220.5GW. This would be over 15 times the size of the currently planned large battery storage.

Cheaper option

The costs of this aggregated battery would also be much easier to bear as individual vehicle owners would purchase the cars and batteries, instead of government and private investors having to spend millions on big projects. The cost of electric vehicle batteries has fallen some 87% over the last ten years to an average of US$156/kWh (£123/kWh), and is on a trajectory to reach around US$100/kWh by 2023.

Large grid-scale stationary battery system costs are at least double this amount. This is because civil engineering works, cabling, enclosures, power electronics and even air conditioning systems for regulating battery temperature are all required for large stationary battery systems.

Vehicle-to-grid storage is still a nascent concept. It requires dedicated two-way charging equipment that can also communicate with the vehicles, as well high-level aggregator control systems. However all of this technology exists.

Indeed there are a range of V2G demonstrator projects within the UK. Nissan, in particular, has embraced this technology and already offers a more limited_ vehicle-to-home (V2H) system that lets people use their cars to store energy from rooftop solar panels until it is needed in the home at night.

So while the UK government is correct that the national grid needs more energy storage to support the shift to further renewable energy generation, a focus on building large, expensive batteries isn’t necessarily the answer. Instead, electric vehicles could enable the British public to conveniently share their cars to help create a cleaner, more altruistic post-COVID world.

Andrew Cruden, Professor of Energy Technology, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Vikrant Minhas, University of Adelaide

China has launched its Tianwen-1 mission to Mars. A rocket holding an orbiter, lander and rover took flight from the country’s Hainan province yesterday, with hopes to deploy the rover on Mars’s surface by early next year.

Similarly, the launch of the Emirates Mars Mission on Sunday marked the Arab world’s foray into interplanetary space travel. And on July 30, we expect to see NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover finally take off from Florida.

For many nations and their people, space is becoming the ultimate frontier. But although we’re gaining the ability to travel smarter and faster into space, much remains unknown about its effects on biological substances, including us.

While the possibilities of space exploration seem endless, so are its dangers. And one particular danger comes from the smallest life forms on Earth: bacteria.

Bacteria live within us and all around us. So whether we like it or not, these microscopic organisms tag along wherever we go – including into space. Just as space’s unique environment has an impact on us, so too does it impact bacteria.

We don’t yet know the gravity of the problem

All life on Earth evolved with gravity as an ever-present force. Thus, Earth’s life has not adapted to spend time in space. When gravity is removed or greatly reduced, processes influenced by gravity behave differently as well.

In space, where there is minimal gravity, sedimentation (when solids in a liquid settle to the bottom), convection (the transfer of heat energy) and buoyancy (the force that makes certain objects float) are minimised.

Similarly, forces such as liquid surface tension and capillary forces (when a liquid flows to fill a narrow space) become more intense.

It’s not yet fully understood how such changes impact lifeforms.

How bacteria become more deadly in space

Worryingly, research from space flight missions has shown bacteria become more deadly and resilient when exposed to microgravity (when only tiny gravitational forces are present).

In space, bacteria seem to become more resistant to antibiotics and more lethal. They also stay this way for a short time after returning to Earth, compared with bacteria that never left Earth.

Adding to that, bacteria also seem to mutate quicker in space. However, these mutations are predominately for the bacteria to adapt to the new environment – not to become super deadly.

More research is needed to examine whether such adaptations do, in fact, allow the bacteria to cause more disease.

Bacterial team work is bad news for space stations

Research has shown space’s microgravity promotes biofilm formation of bacteria.

Biofilms are densely-packed cell colonies that produce a matrix of polymeric substances allowing bacteria to stick to each other, and to stationary surfaces.

Biofilms increase bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics, promote their survival and improve their ability to cause infection. We have seen biofilms grow and attach to equipment on space stations, causing it to biodegrade.

For example, biofilms have affected the Mir space station’s navigation window, air conditioning, oxygen electrolysis block, water recycling unit and thermal control system. The prolonged exposure of such equipment to biofilms can lead to malfunction, which can have devastating effects.

Another affect of microgravity on bacteria involves their structural distortion. Certain bacteria have shown reductions in cell size and increases in cell numbers when grown in microgravity.

In the case of the former, bacterial cells with smaller surface area have fewer molecule-cell interactions, and this reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics against them.

Moreover, the absence of effects produced by gravity, such as sedimentation and buoyancy, could alter the way bacteria take in nutrients or drugs intended to attack them. This could result in the increased drug resistance and infectiousness of bacteria in space.

All of this has serious implications, especially when it comes to long-haul space flights where gravity would not be present. Experiencing a bacterial infection that cannot be treated in these circumstances would be catastrophic.

The benefits of performing research in space

On the other hand, the effects of space also result in a unique environment that can be positive for life on Earth.

For example, molecular crystals in space’s microgravity grow much larger and more symmetrically than on Earth. Having more uniform crystals allows the formulation of more effective drugs and treatments to combat various diseases including cancers and Parkinson’s disease.

Also, the crystallisation of molecules helps determine their precise structures. Many molecules that cannot be crystallised on Earth can be in space.

So, the structure of such molecules could be determined with the help of space research. This, too, would aid the development of higher quality drugs.

Optical fibre cables can also be made to a much better standard in space, due to the optimal formation of crystals. This greatly increases data transmission capacity, making networking and telecommunications faster.

As humans spend more time in space, an environment riddled with known and unknown dangers, further research will help us thoroughly examine the risks – and the potential benefits – of space’s unique environment.

Vikrant Minhas, PhD candidate, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ine Steenmans, UCL and Neil Morisetti, UCL

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) successfully launched its Mars mission dubbed “Al Amal”, or “Hope”, from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan on July 20. This is the first space mission by the UAE, and the first Arab mission to Mars – making the world’s first launch countdown in Arabic a moment for the history books.

The mission’s journey to its launch date has arguably been at least as remarkable as the launch itself. With no previous domestic space exploration experience, planetary science capacity or suitable infrastructure, the nation managed to put together a delivery team of 100% local, Emirati staff with an average age of under 35. And setting a deadline of six years rather than ten, as most comparable missions do, it pulled the launch off on time and within budget – now proudly joining the small cadre of nations who have launched a mission to reach Mars.

But given these odds, and the fact that Mars missions are notorious for their high failure rates (about 30% since the early 2000s), why did the UAE aim for the red planet in the first place? Space programmes have historically been used as catalysts for geopolitical influence. What’s more, we often think of them as costly endeavours of scientific curiosity, with few immediate and tangible benefits here on planet Earth. Does this reflect the UAE journey?

Space missions typically depart trying to answer scientific questions, before they ask how their value can extend to the society behind it. The Hope mission, however, has inverted this traditional logic. Instead, its conception arose from a quest to fundamentally redirect a nation’s trajectory.

The UAE’s mission has been timed to coincide Hope’s arrival into Martian orbit with the nation’s 50th anniversary as an independent country. Through its design and execution, the mission aims to diversify UAE’s economy from traditional activity, including oil and finance. Instead, it wants to inspire a young Arab generation towards scientific and entrepreneurial careers – and away from other, less societally beneficial pathways.

Hope will also study the Martian atmosphere and gather data to generate the first truly holistic model of the planet’s weather system. The analysis and insights generated will help us better understand the atmospheric composition and ongoing climate change of our neighbour planet.

Lessons for aspiring nations

What could other nations learn from this distinctive approach to space exploration? Can a space mission really transform a national economy? These are the questions at the heart of an external review of the Emirates Mars mission undertaken by a group of researchers at the Department for Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London.

Over the course of five months, we undertook a comprehensive evaluation of the impact and value generated by the mission less than five years after its inception. What we found was that there’s already evidence that the mission is having the intended impact. The country has massively boosted its science capacity with over 50 peer-reviewed contributions to international space science research. The forthcoming open sharing of Hope’s atmospheric data measurements is likely to amplify this contribution.

The nation has also generated significant additional value in logistics by creating new manufacturing capacities and know-how. There are already multiple businesses outside the realm of the space industry that have benefited from knowledge transfer. These are all typical impacts of a space mission.

But while that is where most studies of the value of space missions stop looking for impact, for the UAE this would miss a huge part of the picture. Ultimately, its Mars mission has generated transformative value in building capacity for a fundamentally different future national economy – one with a much stronger role for science and innovation.

Through a broad portfolio of programmes and initiatives, in just a few years the Hope mission has boosted the number of students enrolling in science degrees and helped create new graduate science degree pathways. It has also opened up new sources of funding for research and made science an attractive career.

One of the lessons is therefore that when embedded within a long-term, national strategic vision, space exploration can in the short term generate major benefits close to home. While space may appear to primarily be about missions for science, when designed in this way, they can be missions for national development.

Hope will reach Martian orbit in February 2021. Only then will its scientific mission truly take off. But its message of Hope has already been broadcast.

Ine Steenmans, Lecturer in Futures, Analysis and Policy, UCL and Neil Morisetti, Vice Dean (Public Policy) Faculty of Engineering Sciences, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Christopher Davies, University of Leeds

The Earth’s magnetic field, generated 3,000km below our feet in the liquid iron core, is crucially important to life on our planet. It extends out into space, wrapping us in an electromagnetic blanket that shields the atmosphere and satellites from solar radiation.

Yet the magnetic field is constantly changing in both its strength and direction and has undergone some dramatic shifts in the past. This includes enigmatic reversals of the magnetic poles, with the south pole becoming the north pole and vice versa.

A long-standing question has been how fast the field can change. Our new study, published in Nature Communications, has uncovered some answers.

Rapid changes of the magnetic field are of great interest because they represent the most extreme behaviour of the ocean of molten iron in the liquid core. By tying the observed changes to core processes, we can learn important information about an otherwise inaccessible region of our planet.

Historically, the fastest changes in Earth’s magnetic field have been associated with reversals, which occur at irregular intervals a few times every million years. But we discovered field changes that are much faster and more recent than any of the data associated with actual reversals.

Nowadays satellites help monitor changes in the field in both space and time, complemented by navigational records and ground-based observatories. This information reveals that changes in the modern field are rather ponderous, around a tenth of a degree per year. But, while we know that the field has existed for at least 3.5 billion years, we don’t know much about its behaviour prior to 400 years ago.

To track the ancient field, scientists analyse the magnetism recorded by sediments, lava flows and human-made artefacts. That’s because these materials contain microscopic magnetic grains that record the signature of Earth’s field at the time they cooled (for lavas) or were added to the landmass (for sediments). Sediment records from central Italy around the time of the last polarity reversal almost 800,000 years ago suggest relatively rapid field changes reaching one degree per year.

Such measurements, however, are extremely challenging, with results still being debated. For example, there are uncertainties in the process by which sediments acquire their magnetism.

Improved measurements

Our research takes a different approach by using computer models based on the physics of the field generation process. This is combined with a recently published reconstruction of global variations in Earth’s magnetic field spanning the last 100,000 years, based on a compilation of measurements from sediments, lavas and artefacts.

This shows that changes in the direction of Earth’s magnetic field reached rates that are up to ten degrees per year – ten times larger than the fastest currently reported variations.

The fastest observed changes in the geomagnetic field direction occurred around 39,000 years ago. This shift was associated with a locally weak field in a confined region just off the west coast of central America. The event followed the global “Laschamp excursion” – a “failed reversal” of the Earth’s magnetic field around 41,000 years ago in which the magnetic poles briefly moved far from the geographic poles before returning.

The fastest changes appear to be associated with local weakening of the magnetic field. Our model suggests this is caused by movement of patches of intense magnetic field across the surface of the liquid core. These patches are more prevalent at lower latitudes, suggesting that future searches for rapid changes in direction should focus on these areas.

The impact of society

Changes in the magnetic field, such as reversals, probably don’t pose a threat to life. Humans did manage to live through the dramatic Laschamp excursion. Today, the threat is mainly down to our reliance on electronic infrastructure. Space weather events such as geomagnetic storms, arising from the interaction between the magnetic field and incoming solar radiation, could disrupt satellite communications, GPS and power grids.

This is troubling – the economic cost of a collapse of the US power grid due to a space-weather event has been estimated at around one trillion dollars. The threat is serious enough for space weather to appear as a high priority on the UK national risk register.

Space weather events tend to be more prevalent in regions where the magnetic field is weak – something we know can happen when the field is changing rapidly. Unfortunately, computer simulations suggest that directional changes arise after the field strength begins to weaken, meaning we cannot predict dips in field strength by just monitoring the field direction. Future work using more advanced simulations can shed more light on this issue.

Is another rapid change in the magnetic field on its way? This is very hard to answer. The fastest changes are also the rarest events: for example, the changes identified around the Laschamp excursion are over two times faster than any other changes occurring over the last 100,000 years.

This makes it difficult for scientists to predict rapid changes – they are “black swan events” that come as a surprise and have a big impact. One possible route forward is to use physics-based models of how the field behaves as part of the forecast.

We still have a lot to learn about the “speed limit” of Earth’s magnetic field. Rapid changes have not yet been directly observed during a polarity reversal, but they should be expected since the field is thought to become globally weak at these times.

Christopher Davies, Associate professor, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Salvatore Domenic Morgera, University of South Florida

How the brain works remains a puzzle with only a few pieces in place. Of these, one big piece is actually a conjecture: that there’s a relationship between the physical structure of the brain and its functionality.

The brain’s jobs include interpreting touch, visual and sound inputs, as well as speech, reasoning, emotions, learning, fine control of movement and many others. Neuroscientists presume that it’s the brain’s anatomy – with its hundreds of billions of nerve fibers – that make all of these functions possible. The brain’s “living wires” are connected in elaborate neurological networks that give rise to human beings’ amazing abilities.

It would seem that if scientists can map the nerve fibers and their connections and record the timing of the impulses that flow through them for a higher function such as vision, they should be able to solve the question of how one sees, for instance. Researchers are getting better at mapping the brain using tractography – a technique that visually represents nerve fiber routes using 3D modeling. And they’re getting better at recording how information moves through the brain by using enhanced functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood flow.

But in spite of these tools, no one seems much closer to figuring out how we really see. Neuroscience has only a rudimentary understanding of how it all fits together.

To address this shortcoming, my team’s bioengineering research focuses on relationships between brain structure and function. The overall goal is to scientifically explain all the connections – both anatomical and wireless – that activate different brain regions during cognitive tasks. We’re working on complex models that better capture what scientists know of brain function.

Ultimately a clearer picture of structure and function may fine-tune the ways brain surgery attempts to correct structure and, conversely, medication tries to correct function.

Wireless hot spots in your head

Cognitive functions such as reasoning and learning use a number of distinct brain regions in a time-sequenced manner. Anatomy alone – the neurons and nerve fibers – cannot explain the excitation of these regions, concurrently or in tandem.

Some connections are actually “wireless.” These are electric near-field connections, and not the physical connections captured in tractographs.

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My research team has worked for several years detailing the origins of these wireless connections and measuring their field strengths. A very simple analogy of what is going on in the brain is how a wireless router works. The internet is delivered to a router via a wired connection. The router then sends the information to your laptop using wireless connections. The overall system of information transfer works because of both wired and wireless connections.

In the case of the brain, nerve cells conduct electrical impulses down long threadlike arms called axons from the cell body to other neurons. Along the way, wireless signals are naturally emitted from uninsulated portions of nerve cells. These spots that lack the protective insulation that wraps the rest of the axon are called nodes of Ranvier.

The nodes of Ranvier allow charged ions to diffuse in and out of the neuron, propagating the electrical signal down the axon. As the ions flow in and out, electric fields are generated. The intensity and structure of these fields depends on the activity of the nerve cell.

Here at the Global Center for Neurological Networks we’re focusing on how these wireless signals work in the brain to communicate information.

The brain’s nonlinear world

Investigations into how excited brain regions match up with cognitive functions make another mistake when they rely on assumptions that lead to overly simple models.

Researchers tend to model the relationship as linear with a single variable, measuring the average size of a single brain region’s response. It’s the logic behind the design of the first hearing aid – if a person’s voice grows twice as loud, the ear should respond twice as much.

But hearing aids have greatly improved over the years as researchers have come to better understand that the ear is not a linear system, and a form of nonlinear compression is needed to match the sounds generated to the listener’s capability. In fact, most living things do not have sensing systems that respond in a linear, one-to-one manner to stimuli.

Linear models assume that if the input to a system is doubled, the output of that system will also be doubled. This is not true of nonlinear models, where many output values can exist for single value of the input. And most scientists agree that neural computations are in fact nonlinear.

A crucial question in understanding the link between brain and behavior is how the brain decides the best course of action among competing alternatives. For example, the frontal cortex of the brain makes optimal choices by computing many quantities, or variables – calculating the potential payoff, the probability of success and the cost in terms of time and effort. Since the system is nonlinear, doubling the potential payoff may make a final decision much more than twice as likely.

Linear models miss out on the rich variety of possibilities that can occur in brain function, especially those beyond what anatomical structure would suggest. It’s like the difference between a 2D and 3D representation of the world around us.

Current linear models just describe the average level of excitation in a brain region, or the flow across a brain surface. That’s much less information than my colleagues and I use when building our nonlinear models from both enhanced functional magnetic resonance imaging and electric near-field bioimaging data. Our models provide a 3D image of information flow across the surfaces of the brain and to depths within it – and get us closer to representing how it all works.

Normal anatomy, physiological dysfunction

My research team is intrigued by the fact that people with totally normal-looking brain structures can still have major functional problems.

As part of our research into neurological dysfunction, we visit individuals in hospice, bereavement support groups, rehabilitation care facilities, trauma centers and acute care hospitals. We are consistently startled to realize that people who have lost loved ones can exhibit similar symptoms to those of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Grief is a series of emotional, cognitive, functional and behavioral responses to death or other kinds of loss. It’s not a state, but rather a process which can either be temporary or ongoing.

The healthy-looking brains of those suffering physiological grief do not have the same anatomical problems – including shrunken brain regions and disrupted connections between networks of neurons – that are found in those of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

We believe this is just one example of how the brain’s hot spots – those connections that are not physical – plus the richness of the brain’s nonlinear operation can lead to outcomes that wouldn’t be predicted by a brain scan. There are likely many more examples.

These ideas may point the way to the mitigation of serious neurological conditions through noninvasive means. Bereavement therapy and noninvasive, electric near-field neuromodulation devices can reduce the symptoms associated with the loss of a loved one. Perhaps these protocols and procedures should be more widely offered to patients suffering from neurological dysfunction where imaging does reveal anatomical changes. It could save some of these individuals from invasive surgical procedures.

Diagramming all the brain’s nonphysical links using our recent advances in electric near-field mapping, and employing what we believe are biologically realistic many-variable nonlinear models, will get us one step closer to where we want to go. Better understanding of the brain will not only reduce the need for invasive operating procedures to correct function, but will also lead to better models for what the brain does best: computation, memory, networking and information distribution.

Salvatore Domenic Morgera, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, Tau Beta Pi Eminent Engineer, University of South Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Benjamin Z. Houlton, University of California, Davis

Why has Earth’s climate remained so stable over geological time? The answer just might rock you.

Rocks, particularly the types created by volcanic activity, play a critical role in keeping Earth’s long-term climate stable and cycling carbon dioxide between land, oceans and the atmosphere.

Scientists have known for decades that rock weathering – the chemical breakdown of minerals in mountains and soils – removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transforms it into stable minerals on the planet’s surface and in ocean sediments. But because this process operates over millions of years, it is too weak to offset modern global warming from human activities.

Now, however, emerging science – including at the California Collaborative for Climate Change Solutions’ (C4) Working Lands Innovation Center – shows that it is possible to accelerate rock weathering rates. Enhanced rock weathering could both slow global warming and improve soil health, making it possible to grow crops more efficiently and bolster food security.

Rock chemistry

Many processes weather rocks on Earth’s surface, influenced by chemistry, biology, climate and plate tectonics. The dominant form of chemical weathering occurs when carbon dioxide combines with water in the soil and the ocean to make carbonic acid.

About 95% of Earth’s crust and mantle – the thick layer between the planet’s crust and its core – is made of silicate minerals, which are compounds of silicon and oxygen. Silicates are the main ingredient in most igneous rocks, which form when volcanic material cools and hardens. Such rocks make up about 15% of Earth’s land surface.

When carbonic acid comes in contact with certain silicate minerals, it triggers a chemical process known as the Urey reaction. This reaction pulls gaseous carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combines it with water and calcium or magnesium silicates, producing two bicarbonate ions. Once the carbon dioxide is trapped in these soil carbonates, or ultimately washed into the ocean, it no longer warms the climate.

The Urey reaction runs at a higher rate when silicate-rich mountains such as the Himalayas expose fresh material to the atmosphere – for example, after a landslide – or when the climate becomes hotter and moister. Recent research demonstrates that humans can speed up the process substantially to help fight modern global warming.

Accelerated weathering

The biggest limit on weathering is the amount of silicate minerals exposed at any given time. Grinding up volcanic silicate rocks into a fine powder increases the surface area available for reactions. Further, adding this rock dust to the soil exposes it to plant roots and soil microbes. Both roots and microbes produce carbon dioxide as they decompose organic matter in the soil. In turn, this increases carbonic acid concentrations that accelerate weathering.

One recent study by British and Americans scientists suggests that adding finely crushed silicate rock, such as basalt, to all cropland soil in China, India, the U.S. and Brazil could trigger weathering that would remove more than 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. For comparison, the U.S. emitted about 5.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2018.

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Farming with rocks

One compelling aspect of enhanced weathering is that, in controlled-environment studies involving basalt amendments of soil, cereal grain yields are improved by roughly 20%.

As basalt weathers, it increases vital plant nutrients that can boost production and increase crops yields. Mineral nutrients such as calcium, potassium and magnesium create healthier soils. Farmers have been amending soil with rock minerals for centuries, so the concept is nothing new.

At the Working Lands Innovation Center, we are conducting perhaps the largest enhanced weathering demonstration experiment on real farms in the world. We are partnering with farmers, ranchers, government, the mining industry and Native American tribes in California on some 50 acres of cropland soil amendment trials. We are testing the effects of rock dust and compost amendments on greenhouse gas emissions from the soil, carbon capture, crop yields, and plant and microbial health.

Our initial results suggest that adding basalt and wollastonite, a calcium silicate mineral, increased corn yields by 12% in the first year. Working with California’s greenhouse gas emissions trading program and our state’s diverse agricultural interests, we hope to establish a pathway that would offer monetary incentives to farmers and ranchers who allow enhanced rock weathering on their lands. We aim to create a protocol for farmers and ranchers to make money from the carbon they farm into the soil and help businesses and industry achieve their carbon neutrality goals.

Why negative emissions matter

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, nations have pledged to limit global warming to less then 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. This will require massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Pulling carbon dioxide from the air – also known as negative emissions – is also necessary to avoid the worst climate change outcomes, because atmospheric carbon dioxide has an average lifespan of more than 100 years. Every molecule of carbon dioxide that is released to the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion or land clearing will remain there for many decades trapping heat and warming Earth’s surface.

Nations need a portfolio of solutions to create negative emissions. Enhanced weathering is poised for rapid scale-up, taking advantage of farm equipment that’s already in place, global mining operations and supply chains that currently deliver fertilizers and seeds worldwide. By addressing soil erosion and food security along with climate change, I believe rock weathering can help humans escape the hard place we find ourselves in today.

Benjamin Z. Houlton, Professor of Global Environmental Studies, Chancellor’s Fellow and Director, John Muir Institute of the Environment, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Gareth Dorrian, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Nottingham Trent University

Neowise is the first bright comet to be visible with the naked eye from the northern hemisphere since the mid-1990s. Another thing that makes this comet interesting is that it has a relatively long orbital period, meaning it was only discovered a few months ago.

Halley’s comet, for example, takes about 75 years to return to the same position near Earth, meaning everybody has the opportunity to see it potentially twice during their lifetime. Neowise has an orbit of almost 6,800 years, meaning that the last generation of people to see it would have lived during the fifth millennium BC. This was a time well before the written word, when the global human population was about 40 million people.

The cause of this really long return time is the elliptical shape of Neowise’s orbit around the Sun. In the early 17th century, astronomer Johannes Kepler derived his laws of planetary motion, which apply to any object orbiting in space, including comets. These laws state that objects on highly elliptical orbits will move fast near the barycenter – the centre of mass of two or more bodies that orbit one another – of the path and much slower further away.

So comet Neowise will only be seen for a few weeks near Earth while it is near perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun). It will then spend thousands of years moving slowly near the other end of its orbit. It’s aphelion (farthest point) is estimated at 630 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

To put that in perspective, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is the farthest human crafted object from Earth and it is currently at a mere 150 AU. The dwarf planet Pluto also has an elliptical orbit, which ranges from just 30 AU at perihelion to 49 AU at aphelion.

Comets often have two tails, and comet Neowise is no exception. One is made of electrically neutral material such as water ice and dust particles forming the distinct white fuzzy shape around the comet and its tail. As the Sun heats up the comet, these tiny particles are released and create a shining tail behind it.

The second tail is made from a plasma – an electrically charged cloud of gas. This shines by fluorescence, the same process that causes aurora on Earth, and is used in neon lighting. Colours can be green or blue depending on the kind of charged gas escaping from the comet. As the plasma flows away from the comet it is guided by the Sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind. This causes separation between the two tails – one being driven by the comet’s direction, and the other by the Sun’s magnetic field.

How to spot Neowise

Even though Neowise is very distant from Earth, with its closest approach on July 22 being almost as far away as Mars, it is still visible in the night sky to the naked eye – hovering near the northern horizon.

The comet is estimated to currently be at magnitude 1.4 – a measure of brightness astronomers use, with smaller numbers denoting brighter objects. Venus, which is the brightest planetary object in the sky, is about -4. Comet Hale-Bopp reached a maximum magnitude of 0 in 1997 due to its exceptionally large size, while comet McNaught was visible from the southern hemisphere with a maximum magnitude of -5.5.

Neowise may get brighter over the next week, but which level of brightness it reaches will depend primarily on how much material erupts from its surface rather than the distance from the Earth. This material consists of highly reflective water ice particles from the nucleus of the comet erupting outwards, shining when they catch the sunlight.

Rich history

The history of cometary observations is extensive, making vital contributions to the development of modern astronomy, and has had quite an impact on human history. Halley’s comet, for example, was famously featured on the Bayeux Tapestry as it made an appearance in the months leading up to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 (magnitude estimated at about 1).

In the late medieval period, comets helped astronomers to fundamentally refine their understanding of the solar system. An essential component of the then standard Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system, which dominated astronomy for 15 centuries, mandated that the planets were fixed to a series of concentric transparent celestial spheres, with the Earth at the centre.

Even after the Copernican revolution, which put the Sun at the centre of the solar system, the celestial spheres were retained as a concept. However, in the late 1500s several astronomers, includinig Tycho Brahe, noted that comets with their highly elliptical orbits seemed to pass through these spheres without hindrance. These observations contributed to the eventual abandonment of the Ptolemaic system entirely, and the subsequent explanation of planetary orbits by Johannes Kepler, which is still in use today.

Important observations during the space age include the first close encounter between a comet and spacecraft. Halley’s comet was imaged from a distance of just a few hundred kilometres by the Giotto spacecraft. And in 2014 the Rosetta spacecraft became the first to orbit a comet, and deploy a lander on the surface, sending back remarkable images to Earth.

The sobering role of comets in shaping planetary evolution was also demonstrated spectacularly in 1994 when comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 collided with Jupiter

With the constant increase of light pollution in the night sky the observation of comets with the naked eye is becoming much rarer. For now, though, Neowise presents a fantastic opportunity for millions of people to see a night sky phenomenon which typically only presents itself perhaps once in a decade or more. Enjoy the view!

Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The craft is scheduled to land at the RAAF-controlled Woomera Range Complex on 6 December this year. The 122 188km² site is approximately 450km north-west of Adelaide.

Hayabusa2’s landing details were confirmed this week in a joint statement issued by Dr Hiroshi Yamakawa, President of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) and Dr Megan Clark, Head of the Australian Space Agency.

Returns from surface of asteroid 350-million km away

Its descent at Woomera will mark the end of a six-year mission to Ryugu, a 900m-wide asteroid located around 350-million km from Earth.

Hayabusa2 returns with samples of both the surface and subsurface of the asteroid. The surface samples were collected in February 2019. The sub-surface samples were collected in July of the same year, but only after the spacecraft had first fired a copper ‘bullet’ into the surface in order to expose the material below.

The spacecraft left the surface of Ryugu in November 2019 to begin its long journey back toward Earth.

Scientists are eager to examine the space material

According to the website Space.com, “planetary scientists are eager to get the Ryugu material into their labs here on Earth, where it can be studied in great detail with a variety of powerful instruments”.

The Ryugu samples could shed considerable light on asteroid formation and evolution, as well as the role that carbon-rich space rocks may have played in helping life get going on Earth, researchers believe.

“Successfully realising this epoch-making sample-return mission is a great partnership between Australia and Japan and will be a symbol of international cooperation and of overcoming the difficulties and crisis caused by the pandemic,” the two agencies said in their joint statement.

The statement added that “the Agency and Jaxa are working through Jaxa’s application for Authorisation of Return of Overseas Launched Space Object, which will need to be approved [by the Australian government] under the Space Activities Act (1998)”.

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Meghan S. Miller, Australian National University and Louis Moresi, Australian National University

Our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically changed human activity all over the world. People are working from home, schools are closed in many places, travel is restricted, and in some cases only essential shops and businesses are open.

Scientists see signs of these changes wherever they look. Carbon dioxide emissions are down, air quality has improved, and there is less traffic.

The drop in activity has also been a surprising boon for earthquake scientists like us. Our sensitive instruments are detecting far less of the noise and vibration produced by humans in motion — which means we have a unique opportunity to listen in on tiny earthquakes we might never have detected otherwise.

The seismic hum of humans

Seismometers are sensitive scientific instruments used to detect earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and nuclear tests, by recording the movement of the ground. They often detect mining activity and can even pick out crowds responding to football games — so-called “footyquakes”.

On top of this, everyday human activity creates a high-frequency seismic “hum” that is stronger during the day and weaker at night. This is particularly evident in urban environments, but is also observed in rural or unpopulated areas.

The decrease in this noise signature was first identified in March by Belgian scientists as lockdown measures were introduced in Europe. These early results, computer codes and data were widely shared on Twitter, sparking an enthusiastic collaboration of seismologists around the world who found this change in signal everywhere they looked.

Schoolyard sounds

In Australia, the change in human behaviour was most dramatically observed in the data recorded by the Australian Seismometers in Schools (AuSiS) network. These instruments are research-quality seismometers that are maintained by school students — our next generation of geophysicists.

The usual happy schoolyard sounds and hubbub disappeared at many schools, as they shut and most or all students stayed home. The usual hum of the children (and teachers) during the school day, observed in the movement between classrooms, and during lunchtimes or Saturday morning sports, abruptly stopped at locations such as Ulladulla High School on the south coast of New South Wales and Keysborough Secondary College in suburban Melbourne.

At other schools, such as Daramalan College in Canberra, there was only a small decrease in human noise, with the school seismometer recording people commuting to work in essential public services and government offices that continued to operate throughout the initial lockdown. The seismometer at North Rockhampton State High School in Queensland also saw less of the effect, as the students were still able to attend classes.

The level of noise recorded across Australia during lockdown compares to the Christmas week. When restrictions began easing, the signal was similar to the annual January pattern when schools are closed, most businesses are open but many people are away on holiday. As schools reopened across Australia in mid to late May, noise levels were mostly back to “normal” except for what is usually observed for Saturday morning sports.

Lockdown 2.0

However, regional differences became even more pronounced as metropolitan Melbourne reinstated stay-at-home restrictions on July 8. As a second spike of COVID-19 cases was detected in Victoria and then ramped up in late June, the level of movement began to drop again.

In the seismic noise signal from Keysborough Secondary College, we can see the school holiday quiet period becoming quieter still as further restrictions to school activity were enforced.

Earthquake detection

The low level of background noise from humans recorded in the seismic data during lockdown gives us a window of opportunity to study smaller earthquakes. Detection of small earthquakes or motion on fault lines is essential for seismic hazard assessment.

Small events are typically identified by looking at changes in amplitudes of signals, but very small events have small amplitude signals and these cannot be observed because they are drowned out by the background noise.

This time of quiescence in seismic noise due to the COVID-19 emergency provides a unique opportunity to learn more about small earthquakes occurring in previously unidentified locations.

Meghan S. Miller, Associate Professor; Program Director AuScope Earth Imaging, Australian National University and Louis Moresi, Professor of Geophysics, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Kobi Leins, University of Melbourne

The list of US figures whose Twitter accounts were hijacked by scammers on Wednesday US time reads like a Who’s Who of the tech and celebrity worlds: Tesla boss Elon Musk, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former president Barack Obama, current Democratic nominee Joe Biden, celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, billionaires Warren Buffett and Mike Bloomberg, the corporate accounts of Apple and Uber, and more besides.

The point of the hack? To lure followers into sending US$1,000 in Bitcoin, with the classic scammer’s false promise of sending back twice as as much.

After a preliminary investigation, Twitter said it believed the incident was “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”.

The details are still far from clear, but it seems likely someone with administrative rights may have granted the hackers access, perhaps inadvertently, despite the presence of two-factor authentication on the accounts – widely considered the gold standard of online security. It appears insiders may have been involved, although the story is still unfolding.

The use of the niche currency Bitcoin limited the number of potential victims, but also makes the hackers’ loot impossible to trace. Ironically enough, Bitcoin is a currency designed for a post-trust world, and the anonymity of its transactions makes the hackers even harder to track down.

Whom do we trust?

This is not the first time we have seen the complex and profound impact social media can have. In 2013, hackers gained access to @AP, the official Twitter account of the respected Associated Press news agency, and tweeted:

Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is Injured.

The stock market dived by US$136.5 billion almost immediately but bounced back within six minutes, illustrating the interconnected systems that move so quickly a human cannot intervene – algorithms read the headlines and the stock market collapsed, albeit fleetingly.

By shorting stocks, whoever hacked AP’s Twitter account stood to make enormous profits from the temporary stock market tank. We do not know what the financial benefits, if any, to the hackers in 2013 were.

This week’s Twitter hack definitely had financial motives. The Bitcoin scammers in this recent hack netted more than US$50,000.

More sinister still, however, are the implications for democracy if a similar hack were carried out with political motives.

What if a reliable source, such as a national newspaper’s official account, tweets that a presidential candidate has committed a crime, or is seriously ill, on the eve of an election? What if false information about international armed attacks is shared from a supposedly reliable source such as a government defence department? The impacts of such events would be profound, and go far beyond financial loss.

This is the inherent danger of our growing reliance on social media platforms as authoritative sources of information. As media institutions decline in size, funding and impact, the public increasingly relies on social media platforms for news.

The Bitcoin scam is a reminder that any social media platform can be hacked, tampered with, or used to spread false information. Even gold-standard technical systems can be outwitted, perhaps by exploiting human vulnerabilities. A disgruntled employee, a careless password selection, or even a device used in a public space can pose grave risks.

Who’s in charge?

The question of who polices the vast power accrued by social media platforms is a crucial one. Twitter’s reaction to the hack – temporarily shutting down all accounts verified with the “blue tick” that connotes public interest – raised the ire of high-profile users (and prompted mirth among those not bestowed with Twitter’s mark of legitimacy). But the underlying question is: who decides what is censored or shut down, and under what circumstances? And should companies do this themselves, or do they need a regulatory framework to ensure fairness and transparency?

Broader questions have already been raised about when Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms should or should not censor content. Facebook was heavily criticised for not removing oppressive posts about Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and what the United Nations referred to as a genocide ensued. Twitter much later suspended some accounts that had been inciting violence, with some criticism.

What is the responsibility of such platforms, and who should govern them, as we become more heavily reliant on social media for our news? As the platforms’ power and influence continue to grow, we need rigorous frameworks to hold them accountable.

Last month, the Australian government pledged a A$1.3 billion funding increase and an extra 500 staff for the Australian Signals Directorate, to boost its ability to defend Australia from attacks. Australia’s forthcoming 2020 Cyber Security Strategy will hopefully also include strategies to proactively improve cyber security and digital literacy.

In an idea world, social media giants would regulate themselves. But here in the real world, the stakes are too high to let the platforms police themselves.

Kobi Leins, Senior Research Fellow in Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Lotti Tajouri, Bond University; Mariana Campos, Murdoch University; Rashed Alghafri, Bond University, and Simon McKirdy, Murdoch University

You may remember when US President Donald Trump suggested exposing coronavirus patients to UV (ultraviolet) light – or “just very powerful light” – to help treat them.

The use of UV light is not, in any way, a viable treatment for people infected with SARS-CoV-2. However, due to its powerful sterilisation abilities, this technology does have great potential for managing the COVID-19 pandemic in other ways.

What is UV light?

The visible light we see every day belongs in a unique region of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The full spectrum is composed of radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays – all emitting and carrying energy.

Of these, ultraviolet (UV), X-ray and gamma rays are high-frequency waves. These can have serious consequences for our health.

The Sun emits three types of UV radiation: UVA, UVB and UVC. Prolonged UV exposure is associated with skin cancer. Thankfully, our planet’s atmosphere shields us from the majority of the Sun’s UVB emissions and all UVC emissions.

Affordable and accessible

UVC has the ability to kill germs and is an alternative to chemical disinfection. UVC can be used to sterilise objects, water, surfaces and materials – whether it’s to clean your phone, a hospital floor, or an entire bus in China.

The technology needed to generate UVC is not new and there is no reason to suggest this technology could not be implemented cost-effectively. Several companies have developed an array of lamps, machines and even robots capable of sterilising a range of surfaces.

Isn’t is dangerous?

It’s well established UV radiation is carcinogenic (causes cancer) for humans.

Devices that emit UVC should be calibrated to ensure optimal microbial killing power and are more effective when placed close to the surface or object being treated. When turned off, UVC emission is halted, too.

As per the World Health Organisation’s advice, direct UVC exposure should not be used to disinfect any areas of the skin. Studies are under way to identify particular UVCs that are safe for human cells and still worthwhile as germicides.

Far-UVC (wavelengths between 207-222 nanometres) is promising as it can’t cross physiological barriers, such as the dead outer layer of our skin, or the eye’s outer (tear film) layer.

Nonetheless, UVC still poses risks to our health since our skin and eyes can have cuts and micro-lesions. This would expose susceptible cells in our body to the damaging radiation.

Can it kill COVID-19?

Our knowledge of what constitutes “suitable” UVC emission is growing. This includes knowledge of the proper germicidal UVC wavelength that can be applied to surfaces, the amount of light that reaches the surface, and the exposure time needed to completely sterilise the viral particles.

Research from 2002 confirmed UVC inactivated SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) after six minutes of exposure.

A more recent study (while not peer-reviewed) has shown UVC-based disinfection is helpful for stopping the SARS-CoV-2 virus from replicating. However, this depended on how much of the virus was present and how much UVC exposure it received.

The study centred on the efficiency of UVC to inactivate and inhibit the virus at low, medium and high concentrations. It found the highest viral concentrations required quite high UVC dosage.

Another study looking at a different type of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) provided further evidence of the utility of UVC disinfection. The authors of this work suggest UV technology may be the solution to filling gaps in the supply of personal protective equipment such as masks.

Overcoming major hurdles

Apart from being carcinogenic, another limitation on using UVC is its poor penetration. It only allows surface-level sterilisation of microbes (such as viruses, bacteria and fungi) by impacting their genetic material.

That said, as the pandemic continues, the deployment of UVC sanitising technology across sectors could greatly contribute to our awareness of the risks presented by microbial pathogens.

The safe implementation of UVC-based measures could undoubtedly enhance public health and even biosecurity. Beyond the novel coronavirus, this arsenal has great potential to prevent costly impacts of future pandemics, too.

But, while enthusiasm is high, there are obvious risks of direct exposure to humans, with consequences ranging from serious burns to cancer. These will need to be carefully managed.

Lotti Tajouri, Associate Professor, Biomedical Sciences, Bond University; Mariana Campos, Lecturer and Researcher, Harry Butler Institute, Murdoch University; Rashed Alghafri, Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor, Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University, and Simon McKirdy, Professor of Biosecurity, Murdoch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Damien Manuel, Deakin University

Prime Minister Scott Morrison revealed last month Australia is actively being attacked by hostile foreign governments.

An advisory note posted on the government’s Australian Cyber Security Centre website said the attackers were targeting various vulnerable networks and systems, potentially trying to damage or disable them.

Governments – along with individuals and the private sector – have an important role in addressing cyber risks that threaten our national security. At some point this year, the federal government’s new cybersecurity strategy is set to be announced.

Many in the industry hope it will be comprehensive and backed by significantly more investment than the previous one, to address what is a growing threat. Currently, a cybercrime incident is reported every ten minutes in Australia.

However, due to the unexpected budget impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, there may simply not be enough money to invest in the programs we need to stay protected from large-scale cyberattacks.

An underwhelming delivery

We know governments test each other’s cyber defences in the interest of their own national security.

Information warfare (such as through disinformation campaigns) between governments has taken place for many years.

In 2016, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull released Australia’s first cybersecurity strategy. It involved investments of more than A$230m across four years for five “themes of action” including including stronger cyber defences, and growth and innovation in the sector.

The strategy envisioned making Australia a “cyber smart nation”, by ensuring we had the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in the digital age, while staying cyber safe.

But overall, the strategy was poorly implemented.

For instance, improving cybersecurity requires close collaboration between government, industry, academia and community. To this end, Joint Cyber Security Centres were announced so various parties could share knowledge.

However, prior to COVID-19, plans were in motion to align these centres with the Australian Signals Directorate’s higher security classification. This would hinder a collaborative environment by restricting movement within, and access to, the centres.

Moreover, only 32% of cybersecurity professionals have visited a centre, highlighting the government’s failure to engage with the sector.

Four years on from the initial strategy’s release, the “smart nation” vision seems lost. The cybersecurity sector faces skills shortages, and the public and businesses remain largely unaware of how to protect themselves.

It’s clear a cybersecurity reset is required.

We need a targeted, forward-thinking strategy

The release of the Morrison government’s new strategy has been delayed due to COVID-19, but we have some idea of what to expect.

The government has announced it will redirect existing defence funding to the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to employ up to 500 additional staff to tackle cybercrime.

But how this will work in a market with skills shortages is unclear.

Also, redirecting existing funding into cybersecurity is positive, but it is only one part of the solution. What’s missing from the conversation is strategic, long-term investment.

A holistic, interdisciplinary approach

Effective cybersecurity is about more than technology – it’s about people (from a range of backgrounds), user behaviour, business processes, problem solving capability, regulations, industry standards and policy.

I’ve read 156 submissions to the upcoming cybersecurity strategy, which was open to public comment. I also have knowledge of confidential submissions not made public.

Drawing on these views, and my own expertise, here are five elements I believe the upcoming strategy should contain:

1. Educate to drive behavioural change

The “Slip, slop, slap” health awareness campaign was one of the most successful we’ve ever had.

It drove real social behavioural change in Australia. A similar change is required to help make Australians more knowledgeable about cybersecurity issues, and how technology can be exploited.

This isn’t a quick fix, and will likely be a long-term effort.

2. Build resilience in critical infrastructure

COVID-19 has demonstrated how easily societies can be disrupted, particularly key supply chains and systems.

We need improved processes, regulation and standards to ensure the infrastructure we rely on is cyber-resilient. When breaches occur, organisations must be prepared to resolve them and restore services.

Banks are a good example, as they rely on thousands of suppliers. On this front, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority last year introduced a prudential standard called CPS234, aimed at improving resilience against information security incidents (including cyberattacks).

3. Help small businesses

More grants and tax incentives for small businesses will enable them to access technology and talent to improve their cybersecurity capabilities.

A coordinated approach is needed through all levels of government to raise awareness of the adverse impacts cyberattacks have on businesses. This includes the consequences of customer data and privacy breaches.

It’s also crucial businesses know where to independently seek clear and concise advice when required.

4. Nurture the talent pipeline

Almost every day I hear about the industry’s cybersecurity skills shortage. I also hear from students how tough it can be to get a job in cybersecurity, even with any number of certifications.

It’s easy for businesses to poach existing talent from other organisation rather than hire graduates or interns. To break this cycle, we need improved educational courses focused on the skills employers want.

There should also be incentives for businesses to employ interns and graduates.

5. Cut the bureaucratic red tape

The federal government needs to do more to address Australia’s cybersecurity problem holistically – not just with additional legislation and funding for existing government agencies.

Hierarchies and dealings within the sector are currently overly complex.

Simplification and common sense are required.

Protecting Australians from outside parties intent on exploiting the technology we use isn’t something we can achieve overnight.

The digital cybersecurity strategy to be delivered by the Morrison Government needs to not only be impactful, but also built with future governments in mind. In such volatile times, it has never been more important to protect Australians.

Damien Manuel, Director, Centre for Cyber Security Research & Innovation (CSRI), Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alysson R. Muotri, University of California San Diego

Gravity can be a real downer when you are trying to grow organs.

That’s why experiments in space are so valuable. They have revealed a new perspective into biological sciences, including insights into making human tissues.

Gravity influences cellular behavior by impacting how protein and genes interact inside the cells, creating tissue that is polarized, a fundamental step for natural organ development. Unfortunately, gravity is against us when we try to reproduce complex three dimensional tissues in the lab for medical transplantation. This is difficult because of the intrinsic limitations of bio-reactors used on Earth.

I am a stem cell biologist and interested on brain health and evolution. My lab studies how the human brain is formed inside the womb and how alterations in this process might have lifelong consequences to human behavior, such as in autism or schizophrenia. Part of that work includes growing brain cells in space.

Growing tissue and organs in the lab

To build organized tissues in the lab, scientists use scaffolds to provide a surface for cells to attach based on a predetermined rigid shape. For example, an artificial kidney needs a structure, or scaffold, of a certain shape for kidney cells to grow on. Indeed, this strategy helps the tissue to organize in the early stages but creates problems in the long run, such as eventual immune reactions to these synthetic scaffolds or inaccurate structures.

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By contrast, in weightless conditions, cells can freely self-organize into their correct three-dimensional structure without the need for a scaffold substrate. By removing gravity from the equation, we researchers might learn new ways of building human tissues, such as cartilage and blood vessels that are scaffold-free, mimicking their natural cellular arrangement in an artificial setting. While this is not exactly what happens in the womb (after all the womb is also subject to gravity), weightless conditions does give us an advantage.

And this is precisely what is happening at the International Space Station.

These experiments help researchers optimize tissue growth for use in basic science, personalized medicine and organ transplantation.

But there are other reasons why we should manufacture organs in space. Long-term space missions create a series of physiological alterations in the body of astronauts. While some of these alterations are reversible with time, others are not, compromising future human spaceflights.

Studying astronauts’ bodies before and after their mission can reveal what goes wrong on their organs, but provides little insights on the mechanisms responsible for the observed alterations. Thus, growing human tissues in space can complement this type of investigation and reveal ways to counteract it.

Finally, all forms of life that we know about have evolved in the presence of microgravity. Without gravity, our brains might have evolved in a different trajectory, or our livers might not filter liquids as it does on Earth.

By recreating embryonic organ formation in space, we can anticipate how the human body in the womb would develop. There are several research initiatives going on in my lab with human brain organoids at ISS, designed to learn the impact of zero gravity on the developing human brain. These projects will have profound implications for future human colonization (can humans successfully reproduce in space?). These studies will also improve the generation of artificial organs that are used for testing drugs and treatments on Earth. Will better treatments for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative conditions that affects millions of people come from research in space?

Alysson R. Muotri, Professor of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of California San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology

Perhaps no single character has been as iconic a symbol of Twitter as the now-ubiquitous hashtag.

The syntax of the hashtag has a few simple rules: it consists of the hash symbol (#) immediately followed by a string of alphanumeric characters, with no spaces or punctuation.

It is used routinely in social media communication across a number of platforms including Tumblr, Instagram, and even Facebook, but its most important point of emergence and polarisation has been in Twitter.

The hashtag remains most comfortable in Twitter, and it was Twitter that turned it into a highly significant, multi-functional feature. The hashtag has made its way off the internet, appearing regularly on television, in advertising, on products and on protest signs around the world.

From its beginnings as a geeky tool designed to help individual users deal with an increasingly fragmented information stream, Twitter made the hashtag a new and powerful part of the world’s cultural, social and political vocabulary.

The @ feature helped people organise into pairs and create conversational streams. The hashtag, which organises tweets into topics, publics, and communities, goes to the heart of a crucial question: how is the internet organised and for whom?

Adding value

Although its use on Twitter was new, the # has a prehistory both as a punctuation mark and as part of internet communication. Imported from elsewhere, as was the @, the hashtag brought some of its prior conventional understandings with it.

Known as the “octothorpe” by typography experts, in early computer-mediated communication the hash or pound symbol was used to mark channels and roles in systems like Internet Relay Chat (real-time, online text messaging used as early as 1988). It therefore worked to both categorise topics and group users.

The # also became closely tied to crowd-sourced content tagging systems. On the music-streaming site Last.fm, users could tag artists and songs. The site used these tags as information to “learn” about music, fuelling recommendations and radio streams, and laying the groundwork for Spotify and other apps’ current recommendation algorithms.

User-contributed tags were important on the Flickr photosharing website, where they helped direct people to images and to one another — a practice that was carried over to Instagram. Crucially, users could add as many tags to their Flickr photographs as they liked, creating a system that was less a taxonomy (an expertly ordered system based on exclusive, hierarchical categories) and more a “folksonomy” (a crowd-sourced one, based on inclusive tags and aggregation).

Folksonomical ordering, in the mid-2000s, was widely imagined as a more efficient, organic way of ordering content than categories or directories, and it was this model that underpinned the popular social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

The Flickr folksonomy of user-contributed tags was paradigmatic of the Web 2.0 ideology — marked by a shift from the web 1.0 idea that web development was about serving content to audiences to one where the goal was building architectures for participation of users (sometimes distinguished from passive website “visitors”) and the expectation that the user community’s activities would add further value.

Reddit’s systems for upvoting user-curated content, subreddits and modern Twitter’s aggregated trending topics are contemporary versions of this early tag-based co-curation model.

A #solution to a problem

As far as we know, the hashtag’s use in Twitter was first proposed in mid-2007 by Chris Messina in a series of blog posts.

In Messina’s view, the hashtag was a solution to a need. At this time, it was still possible to see a public feed of every single tweet from a public account. Topical conversations among people who did not follow one another were incoherent at best.

The users advocating for the hashtag were technically proficient (many of them also developers) with an active online presence, who positioned themselves as participants in a community of lead users.

While some users were experimenting with hashtags, Messina’s vision for them didn’t catch on widely until a particularly acute and sufficiently significant event — the San Diego brushfires in 2007.

With this event, Messina achieved wider take-up of the hashtag as a tool for coordinating crisis communication by actively lobbying other lead users and media organisations.

Although this rapidly unfolding disaster demonstrated a clear and legitimating use case, the broader meaning of the hashtag and its possible uses remained ambiguous. Despite this, Messina, as a tech-industry insider and lead user, continued to widely advocate for its use — even reportedly pitching it to the Twitter leadership.

Journalist Nick Bilton relates an encounter between Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams and Messina, at the Twitter offices, as follows:

‘I really think you should do something with hashtags on Twitter,’ Chris told them. ‘Hashtags are for nerds,’ Biz replied. Ev added that they were ‘too harsh and no one is ever going to understand them.’

Culture clash

Twitter had begun wrestling with the problem (which still haunts it) of conflict between the cultures of expert users that made the platform work for them and the new users they alienated but whom the company badly needed to sustain its growth. The hashtag provoked contestation between Twitter’s different cultures as it was taken up both for the serious uses – such as disaster and professional discussion Messina had envisioned – and to create sociable rituals and play.

From the beginning, there was debate around the right way to use hashtags.

As Messina’s historical documentation and that of others show, there were several competing models of how and why to coordinate Twitter activity as the flow of tweets started to grow beyond an easily manageable size.

Perhaps the # was a tag, designed to help organise collections of tweets on shared topics? Or was it a way to form channels, or groups of users interested in those topics?

Underlying these different models of what the hashtag could become were different models of Twitter: as an information network, a social networking site or online community, or a platform for discussion and the emergence of publics (organised communities).

Such ideas were still new and hotly contested at the time. Though the informational seems to have won out over the conversational model of Twitter, the hashtag remains, and is used for an astonishing array of social, cultural, and political purposes — some of them vitally useful, not all of them serious, and some of them downright toxic.

The website Hashtags.org was launched in December 2007, and provided a real-time tracking and indexing of hashtags before Twitter implemented search. Participants at an event, for instance, could visit the website to see other tweets from the same event.

The hashtags in the earliest archived version of the Hashtags.org homepage, from April 2008, include a number of academic and tech conferences (#EconSM, #netc08, #interact2008) and sporting and entertainment events (#idol, #yankees, #REDSOX), and tweet categories (#haiku). Hashtags were used for coordinating discussion topics and finding like-minded users (#seriousgames, #punknews, #college, #PHX), brands and products (#gmail, #firefox), and even people (such as Wired journalist #ChrisAnderson).

Back then, the most tweeted hashtags were represented as amassing tweets numbering in the tens or at most hundreds, a reminder of the modest scale of Twitter at the time. Uses of hashtags, such as for humour, activism or second-screen television viewing, had yet to emerge.

More than chatter

Ever since those early debates about whether Twitter needed “channels” (of topics) or “groups” (of users), hashtags have continued to play both structural and semantic roles: that is, they coordinate both communities and topics, helping users find each other and encounter a range of contributions to the discussion of issues and events.

The hashtag has fostered the rise of Twitter as a platform for news, information and professional promotion, yet the forces that allowed hashtags to become influential are deeply rooted in its conversational and sociable uses.

The capacity of the hashtag to help people navigate real-time events such as disasters, protests and conferences, and to expand and solidify social connections and community, proved particularly ideal for social movements and activism.

Such uses have in many ways come to define both the hashtag and, increasingly, Twitter itself. Perhaps the most notable confluence of hashtags and bodies-in-the-street activism has come from #Blacklivesmatter. As US academics Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark document:

The Twitter hashtag was created in July 2013 by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for second-degree murder of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin.

For more than a year, #Blacklivesmatter was only a hashtag, and not a very popular one: it was used in only 48 public tweets in June 2014 and in 398 tweets in July 2014. But by August 2014 that number had skyrocketed to 52,288, partly due to the slogan’s frequent use in the context of the Ferguson protests. Some time later, Garza, Cullors, Tometi, and others debuted Black Lives Matter as a chapter-based activist organization.

It’s easy to dismiss hashtag activism as a form of slacktivism rather than real political engagement. But the rise of #Blacklivesmatter and its ties to street protests and unjust policing serves as an important reminder of the embodiment and liveness of many events that might look merely like “data” or chatter when viewed as hashtags.

This is an edited extract from Twitter: A Biography by Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, published by NYU Press.

Nancy K. Baym is Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research and Research Affiliate in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts.

Jean Burgess, Professor and Director, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Rick Sarre, University of South Australia

Facial recognition technology is increasingly being trialled and deployed around Australia. Queensland and Western Australia are reportedly already using real-time facial recognition through CCTV cameras. 7-Eleven Australia is also deploying facial recognition technology in its 700 stores nationwide for what it says is customer feedback.

And Australian police are reportedly using a facial recognition system that allows them to identify members of the public from online photographs.

Facial recognition technology has a somewhat nefarious reputation in some police states and non-democratic countries. It has been used by the police in China to identify anti-Beijing protesters in Hong Kong and monitor members of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang.

With the spread of this technology in Australia and other democratic countries, there are important questions about the legal implications of scanning, storing and sharing facial images.

Use of technology by public entities

The use of facial recognition technology by immigration authorities (for example, in the channels at airports for people with electronic passports) and police departments is authorised by law and therefore subject to public scrutiny through parliamentary processes.

In a positive sign, the government’s proposed identity matching services laws are currently being scrutinised by a parliamentary committee, which will address concerns over data sharing and the potential for people to be incorrectly identified.

Indeed, Australian Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow recently sounded an alarm over the lack of regulation in this area.

At the moment, there are not strong and clear enough legal protections in place to prevent the misuse of facial recognition in high stakes areas like policing or law enforcement.

Another specific concern with the legislation is that people’s data could be shared between government agencies and private companies like telcos and banks.

How private operators work

Then there is the use of facial recognition technology by private companies, such as banks, telcos and even 7-Elevens.

Here, the first thing to determine is if the technology is being used on public or private land. A private landowner can do whatever it likes to protect itself, its wares and its occupants so long as it doesn’t break the law (for example, by unlawful restraint or a discriminatory practice).

This would include allowing for the installation and monitoring of staff and visitors through facial recognition cameras.

By contrast, on public land, any decision to deploy such tools must go through a more transparent decision-making process (say, a council meeting) where the public has an opportunity to respond.

This isn’t the case, however, for many “public” properties (such as sports fields, schools, universities, shopping centres and hospitals) that are privately owned or managed. As such, they can be privately secured through the use of guards monitoring CCTV cameras and other technologies.

Facial recognition is not the only surveillance tool available to these private operators. Others include iris and retina scanners, GIS profiling, internet data-mining (which includes “predictive analytics,” that is, building a customer database on the strength of online behaviours), and “neuromarketing” (the use of surveillance tools to capture a consumer’s attributes during purchases).

There’s more. Our technological wizardry also allows the private sector to store and retrieve huge amounts of customer data, including every purchase we make and the price we paid. And the major political parties have compiled extensive private databanks on the makeup of households and likely electoral preferences of their occupants.

Is it any wonder we have started to become a little alarmed by the reach of surveillance and data retention tools in our lives?

What’s currently allowed under the law

The law in this area is new and struggling to keep up with the pace of change. One thing is clear: the law does not prohibit even highly intrusive levels of surveillance by the private sector on private land in the absence of illegal conduct.

The most useful way of reviewing the legal principles in this space is to pose specific questions:

Can visitors be legally photographed and scanned when entering businesses?

The answer is yes where visitors have been warned of the presence of cameras and scanners by the use of signs. Remaining on the premises denotes implied consent to the conditions of entry.

Do people have any recourse if they don’t want their image taken?

No. The law does very little to protect those who may be upset by the obvious presence of a surveillance device on a door, ceiling or wall. The best option for anybody concerned about this is to leave the premises or not enter in the first place.

What about sharing images? Can private operators do whatever they like with them?

No. The sharing of electronic data is limited by what are referred to as the “privacy principles”, which govern the rights and obligations around the collection, use and sharing of personal information. These were extended to the private sector in 2001 by amendments to the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988.

These privacy principles would certainly prohibit the sharing of images except, for example, if a store was requested by police to hand them over for investigation purposes.

Can private businesses legally store your image?

Yes, private or commercial enterprises can store images of people captured on their cameras in their own databases. A person can ask for the image to be disclosed to them (that is, to confirm it is held by the store and to see it) under the “privacy principles”. Few people would bother, though, since it’s unlikely they would know it even exists.

The privacy principles do, however, require the business to take reasonable steps to destroy the data or image (or ensure there is de-identification) once it is no longer needed.

What if facial recognition technology is used without warnings like signs?

If there is a demonstrable public interest in any type of covert surveillance (for example, to ensure patrons in casino gaming rooms are not cheating, or to ensure public safety in crowded walkways), and there is no evidence of, or potential for, misuse, then the law permits it.

However, it is not legal to film someone covertly unless there is a public interest in doing so.

What does the future hold?

Any change to the laws in this area is a matter for our parliamentarians. They have been slow to respond given the difficulty of determining what is required.

It will not be easy to frame legislation that strikes the right balance between respecting individuals’ rights to privacy and the desires of commercial entities to keep their stock, patrons and staff secure.

In the meantime, there are steps we can all take to safeguard our privacy. If you want to protect your image completely, don’t select a phone that switches on when you look at it, and don’t get a passport.

And if certain businesses want to scan your face when you enter their premises, give them a wide berth, and your feedback.

Rick Sarre, Adjunct Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Lorenzo Capriotti, Università di Bologna and Harry Cliff, University of Cambridge

The LHCb collaboration at CERN has announced the discovery of a new exotic particle: a so-called “tetraquark”. The paper by more than 800 authors is yet to be evaluated by other scientists in a process called “peer review”, but has been presented at a seminar. It also meets the usual statistical threshold for claiming the discovery of a new particle.

The finding marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world.

To understand what a tetraquark is and why the discovery is important, we need to step back in time to 1964, when particle physics was in the midst of a revolution. Beatlemania had just exploded, the Vietnam war was raging and two young radio astronomers in New Jersey had just discovered the strongest evidence ever for the Big Bang theory.

On the other side of the US, at the California Institute of Technology, and on the other side of the Atlantic, at CERN in Switzerland, two particle physicists were publishing two independent papers on the same subject. Both were about how to make sense of the enormous number of new particles that had been discovered over the past two decades.

Many physicists struggled to accept that so many elementary particles could exist in the universe, in what had become known as the “particle zoo”. George Zweig from Caltech and Murray Gell-Mann from CERN had struck upon the same solution. What if all these different particles were really made of smaller, unknown building blocks, in the same way that the hundred-odd elements in the periodic table are made of protons, neutrons and electrons? Zweig called these building blocks “aces”, while Gell-Mann chose the term that we still use today: “quarks”.

We now know that there are six different kinds of quarks – up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. These particles also have respective antimatter companions with opposite charge, which can bind together according to simple rules based on symmetries. A particle made of a quark and an antiquark is called a “meson”; while three quarks bound together form “baryons”. The familiar protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus are examples of baryons.

This classification scheme beautifully described the particle zoo of the 1960s. However, even in his original paper, Gell-Mann realised that other combinations of quarks might be possible. For example, two quarks and two antiquarks might stick together to form a “tetraquark”, while four quarks and an antiquark would make a “pentaquark”.

Exotic particles

Fast-forward to 2003, when the Belle experiment at the KEK laboratory in Japan reported the observation of a new meson, called X(3872), which showed “exotic” properties quite different from ordinary mesons.

In the following years, several new exotic particles were discovered, and physicists started to realise that most of these particles could only be explained successfully if they were tetraquarks made of four quarks instead of two. Then, in 2015, the LHCb experiment at CERN discovered the first pentaquark particles made of five quarks.

All tetraquarks and pentaquarks that have been discovered so far contain two charm quarks, which are relatively heavy, and two or three light quarks – up, down or strange. This particular configuration is indeed the easiest to discover in experiments.

But the latest tetraquark discovered by LHCb, which has been dubbed X(6900), is composed of four charm quarks. Produced in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the new tetraquark was observed via its decay into pairs of well-known particles called J/psi mesons, each made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. This makes it particularly interesting as it is not only composed entirely of heavy quarks, but also four quarks of the same kind – making it a unique specimen to test our understanding on how quarks bind together.

For now, there are two different models that could explain how quarks bind together: it could be that they are strongly bound, creating what we refer to as a compact tetraquark. Or it could be that the quarks are arranged to form two mesons, which are stuck together loosely in a “molecule”.

Ordinary molecules are made from atoms bound together by the electromagnetic force, which acts between positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons. But the quarks in a meson or baryon are connected via a different force, the “strong force”. It is really fascinating that atoms and quarks, following very different rules, can both form very similar complex objects.

The new particle appears to be most consistent with being a compact tetraquark rather than a two-meson molecule, which was the best explanation for previous discoveries. This makes it unusual, as it will allow physicists to study this new binding mechanism in detail. It also implies the existence of other heavy compact tetraquarks.

Window into micro-cosmos

The strong force operating between quarks obeys very complicated rules – so complicated, in fact, that usually the only way to calculate its effects is to use approximations and supercomputers.

The unique nature of the X(6900) will help understand how to improve the accuracy of these approximations, so that in the future we will be able to describe other, more complex mechanisms in physics that are not within our reach today.

Since the discovery of the X(3872), the study of exotic particles has thrived, with hundreds of theoretical and experimental physicists working together to shed some light on this exciting new field. The discovery of the new tetraquark is a huge leap forward, and is an indication that there are still many new exotic particles out there, waiting for someone to unveil them.

Lorenzo Capriotti, Research fellow in Particle Physics, Università di Bologna and Harry Cliff, Particle physicist, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Paul Haskell-Dowland, Edith Cowan University and James Jin Kang, Edith Cowan University

In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party.

Earlier this week, the Herald Sun reported that an unnamed federal MP was pushing for the app to be banned.

Following suit, Liberal senator Jim Molan said TikTok was being “used and abused” by the Chinese government, while Labor senator Jenny McAllister called on TikTok’s representatives to face the Select Committee on Foreign Interference Through Social Media.

TikTok has denied the accusations and rebuffed suggestions it should be banned in Australia.

But why is the federal government examining this app so closely? And could it really be a tool used by the Chinese government to spy on us?

A growing following

With a reported two billion downloads worldwide, TikTok’s Australian market is also significant. It has an estimated 1.6 million Aussie users, mostly aged 16-24 but with a growing number of older users too.

Simply, users generate short videos that are shared in the app, with many celebrities also signing up. But although TikTok seems to offer carefree entertainment, is there a darker side?

What information is collected?

When installed, TikTok asks users to grant several permissions, including the use of the camera, microphone and contact list. However, it may also collect location data, along with information from other apps on the device.

Last year, a proposed class action lawsuit filed against TikTok in California claimed the company gathered users’ data, including phone numbers, emails, location, IP addresses, and social network contacts.

The lawsuit also stated TikTok concealed the transfer of data (including biometric data), and continued to harvest it even after the app was closed. This would mean when a user shoots a video and clicks the “next” button, the video could be automatically transferred to servers – without the user’s knowledge.

Where is the data stored?

While TikTok’s headquarters are in Beijing, Australian general manager Lee Hunter recently claimed Australian users’ data was stored in Singapore.

A major challenge in sorting the truth from fiction lies in how we define “data”. While TikTok users’ details and videos may be stored in Singapore, there’s still potential for data to be extracted from this video content and the device and sent to China’s servers (although this hasn’t been proven to have happened).

Hypothetically, it would then be possible for Chinese authorities to use biometric data to identify people using facial recognition. It would also be possible to map rooms and locations by using “feature extraction” (a machine learning method) on videos.

This could then aid the creation of new, advanced deepfake videos potentially targeting specific people.

While this may seem far-fetched, there have already been preemptive TikTok bans within major organisations to ensure sensitive information isn’t leaked.

For instance, the app has been banned from devices used by the Australian Defence Department, the US Department of Defence, and even entire countries – with the Indian government announcing a nationwide ban last month.

Privacy issues

ByteDance claims its data is stored in servers in the US and Singapore:

Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law.

TikTok’s privacy policy is ambiguous. As of January, it states:

You should understand that no data storage system or transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

From a user privacy perspective, TikTok has access to a device’s location and a user’s personal information. Although TikTok’s servers may be located outside China, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to confirm where this data could end up, or what it could be used for.

While the location of servers can be important, possession of data is more relevant. Once data is obtained, it can be used. If data is stored on a server in Australia, for instance, Australian jurisdiction applies. But once it is sent to another country, that country’s laws take precedent.

And if a TikTok user decides to delete their content from their device, or if there is a government-imposed ban, data can’t be retrospectively erased. Once information is transferred, it’s impossible to retract without the cooperation of the organisation or agency concerned (in this case, TikTok).

Can the government actually ban TikTok?

The fact is, enforcing an Australia-wide ban on TikTok isn’t a simple prospect. While the federal government could request the app’s removal from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, it could only do this for Australian regions and marketplaces.

Users in Australia would still be able to download TikTok from another region’s store, or via a third-party source. Also, banning the app won’t automatically remove it from devices on which it is already installed.

Blocking access to TikTok’s servers would be done in conjunction with internet service providers (such as Telstra and Optus), as they can block access to apps and websites. But users could still use proxies or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to circumvent these controls.

And even if TikTok was banned, citizen data already handed over would remain stored, and could be accessed for the foreseeable future.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University and James Jin Kang, Lecturer, Computing and Security, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bjorn Sturmberg, Australian National University

Electric vehicles can help keep the air clean in our cities – as we’ve seen recently with the reduction of traffic through COVID-19 lockdowns – but they face two obstacles.

In the short term they’re still expensive. In the long term charging millions of vehicles from the electricity grid presents challenges.

I’m part of a new project, launched today, that tackles both of these obstacles head-on, and it could mean owners earn more money than they’re likely to pay for charging their electric vehicles.

Paid for battery power

The Realising Electric Vehicle-to-grid Services project (REVS) will see owners paid to plug their electric vehicles into the national electricity grid.

In exchange, the vehicles will allow the national grid operator to draw upon their batteries in the rare moments that the grid is on the brink of a blackout.

The REVS trial project uses vehicles from the ACT government fleet. This is a big step towards making these services available to all Australians because fleets make up more than half of all new car sales in Australia.

To understand the importance of this work we need to imagine electrifying all of Australia’s 19 million vehicles.

The need for charge

If all Australia’s vehicles were electric they would use more than 60 terrawatt hours of electricity a year. That’s around 35% of Australia’s annual electricity consumption.

Still more imposing is the amount of power these vehicles could draw if they all charged at once.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there were 1 million, 7.7 kilowatt home chargers in Australia. That’s roughly one in ten properties. If all these cars charged at once, they would add 25% to the national load.

Adding public “fast chargers” and “ultra fast chargers”, say along highways and in car parks, would increase this further.

Flexibility is key

The first step in meeting these challenges is to utilise the flexibility of electric vehicle charging.

In reality, we won’t all charge our electric vehicles at the same time, just like we don’t all go to fill up at the petrol station at the same time. Even if we all plug in our electric vehicles overnight, our charging stations will manage their charging schedules for us.

And electricity is widely available, unlike petrol. This means electric vehicles can be topped up frequently instead of requiring a big charge from empty to full.

These smart charging strategies have been very effective in supporting electric vehicle power demand on the grid.

Power to the grid

While smart charging aims to reduce the stress on the grid, we can go further and use electric vehicles to support the grid in times of need.

The opportunities for this are tremendous. The battery capacity of 19 million vehicles would likely exceed 1,800 gigawatt hours. That’s equivalent to more than 10,000 “Tesla big batteries”, such as those used to help power South Australia, or five of the new Snowy 2.0 hydro-electric projects.

The key to unlocking this opportunity is “vehicle-to-grid” technology, which enables electric vehicles not only to charge but also to discharge power back into the grid.

The importance of these control options were demonstrated by Australia’s big batteries that help stabilise the grid when storms and fossil fuel generator outages create large mismatches in power supply and demand.

Vehicle-to-grid in Australia

Vehicle-to-grid technology has been in development for decades. It’s now available commercially in the Nissan LEAF vehicle and Wallbox Quasar chargers.

The technology was demonstrated in overseas trials but questions remain about customer uptake.

How attractive will vehicle-to-grid services be for customers? What business models will be viable for manufacturers and service providers? Our REVS project is addressing these questions.

We’re deploying 50 vehicle-to-grid-enabled electric vehicles into the ACT government fleet, and one into the fleet of electricity retailer ActewAGL.

The national electricity market will pay these vehicle owners whenever the vehicles are plugged in.

In exchange, the vehicles will automatically inject power into the grid (or absorb it) when unexpected events push the grid towards a blackout.

We expect each vehicle to earn more than A$1,000 a year. That’s almost three times what it costs in electricity to drive a Nissan LEAF 12,607km (the average annual distance driven by a passenger vehicle in Australia).

This should be attractive to owners because the vehicles will only be called upon to provide power during contingencies that occur a few dozen times a year.

These contingencies are typically corrected within 15 minutes, so the effect on an electric vehicle’s battery capacity will be less than 5%. That means a vehicle won’t be left drained, without any power.

REVS is putting this scenario to the test, tracking the costs and benefits for every customer and service provider.

The REVS journey is just beginning but its destination is clear: unleashing vehicle-to-grid to drive accelerated electric vehicle uptake across Australia.

Bjorn Sturmberg, Research Leader, Battery Storage & Grid Integration Program, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Lithium is used in everything from medication to mobile phone batteries, but where does it come from? We know it is mined here on Earth, but where it is created in the universe is less well understood.

We studied hundreds of thousands of stars like our own Sun and found they produce huge amounts of lithium late in their lives. This discovery, published today in Nature Astronomy, was not predicted by our best models of stars, indicating that some physical process must be missing from stellar theory.

A fragile element

Lithium is a special element – it was the only metal produced in the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago. While other elements have been produced in copious amounts by stars since then, the amount of lithium has increased relatively little.

The source of even this small amount of lithium is still a matter of scientific debate. About half is thought to come from high-energy cosmic rays hitting heavier elements like carbon and oxygen in interstellar space and breaking them up into lighter atoms.

Astronomers regard lithium as fragile, easily destroyed in the hot interiors of stars. By analysing starlight astronomers can determine how much of the various elements, including lithium, they contain. Observations of lithium on the surface of stars has confirmed that it is gradually destroyed as stars get older.

The enigmatic lithium-rich giant stars

However, there is one group of stars that is a notable exception to this rule of lithium destruction: the so-called “lithium-rich giants”. These stars, first discovered about 40 years ago, contain up to 1,000 times as much lithium as other giant stars.

Although not very common – only 1% of giant stars are very lithium-rich – just how they create their lithium remains a mystery.

One of the main problems astronomers have faced in identifying a way these stars could produce so much lithium was our lack of knowledge about exactly what type of red giant stars they were.

All Sun-like stars eventually become red giant stars when the have burned through all the hydrogen in their cores, becoming brighter and more red in colour. They expand their size by hundreds of times, often engulfing the planets orbiting them. (Don’t worry – the Sun won’t do this for another 5 billion years.)

When stars become giants they progress through three different giant phases (which all look quite similar in colour and brightness), so it is crucial to understand what phase lithium-rich stars are in when they produce lithium.

Of the many theories, one has now come to the fore. About ten years ago our group recognised that the lithium-rich giants were likely in the second giant phase (also known as the red clump stage). These giants burn helium in their cores for about 100 million years.

This theory was later confirmed by studying the oscillations of these stars to determine their exact point in their life cycles.

We now know for sure that the vast majority of very lithium-rich giants are red clump stars.

Investigating the red clump giants

In our new study, we used an Australian survey of one million stars called Galah and a European space telescope survey called Gaia to investigate the lithium-rich giants.

Our 200,000-strong sample of Sun-like stars (with mass and metallicity similar to the Sun) confirmed that lithium-rich stars are in the red clump phase.

We also detected the expected destruction of lithium in the “red giant branch” phase, which comes just before the red clump.

Sun-like stars become lithium factories later in life

But something strange stood out – other stars in the red clump, although not extremely lithium-rich, contained much more lithium than stars in the late stage of the red giant branch. As the red clump phase comes directly after the red giant branch phase, we concluded the stars must be producing lithium when moving from one phase to the next.

Importantly, it appeared that all of the red clump stars contained more lithium than those in the red giant branch phase. This implies the Sun itself will manufacture lithium in the future, as our study focused on Sun-like stars.

In effect, by studying only the extremely lithium-rich stars, representing just 1% of giants, astronomers had been focusing on just the tip of the “lithium iceberg”. It now appears all red clump stars have been enriched with lithium, and the extremely lithium-rich stars are only the tail end of the distribution.

In our paper we show that, on average, the stars increase their lithium content by a factor of 40. The amount of lithium produced in just one of these stars would be enough to make electric car batteries for 20,000 trillion cars.

Not predicted by theory

How this lithium enrichment comes about is unknown. It is not predicted by our best models of stars. Clearly there is some physical process missing in stellar theory.

What we can say with our data is how often it occurs – it appears to happen to all Sun-like stars. We can also say when it occurs – some time between the end of the red giant branch phase and the beginning of the red clump phase.

For our next study we will attempt to constrain the timing of the lithium-production phase more precisely. This information will help stellar theorists, including those in our group, to determine what physical process is behind the lithium production.

Finally, since at least some of the newly created lithium will end up being blown off the star in stellar winds, it will also help us understand how much these stars enrich our galaxy with lithium, and, ultimately, planets like Earth.

Simon Campbell, Senior research fellow and ARC Future Fellow, Monash University and Yerra Bharat Kumar, Postdoctoral fellow, Chinese Academy of Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Paul Cureton, Lancaster University

Drones, personal flying vehicles and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

An aerial age

Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.

These vehicles are familiar to sci-fi fans – the late Syd Mead’s illustrations of the Spinner VTOL craft in the film Blade Runner captured the popular imagination, and the screens for the Spinners in Blade Runner 2049 created by Territory Studio provided a careful design fiction of the experience of piloting these types of vehicle.

Now, though, these flying vehicles are reality. A number of companies are developing eVTOL with electric multi-rotor jets, and a whole new motorsport is being established around them.

These aircraft have the potential to change our cities. However, they need to be tested extensively in urban airspace. A study conducted by Airbus found that public concerns about VTOL use focused on the safety of those on the ground and noise emissions.

New cities

The widespread adoption of drones and VTOL will lead to new architecture and infrastructure. Existing buildings will require adaptations: landing pads, solar photovoltaic panels for energy efficiency, charging points for delivery drones, and landscaping to mitigate noise emissions.

A number of companies are already trialling drone delivery services. Existing buildings will need to be adapted to accommodate these new networks, and new design principles will have to be implemented in future ones.

The architect Saúl Ajuria Fernández has developed a design for a delivery drone port hub. This drone port acts like a beehive where drones recharge and collect parcels for distribution. Architectural firm Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2, a design for a modular apartment building of the future, includes a cantilevered drone port for delivery services.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a drone port for delivery of medical supplies and other items for rural communities in Rwanda. The structure is also intended to function as a space for the public to congregate, as well as to receive training in robotics.

Drones may also help the urban environment become more sustainable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed a re-configurable architectural roof canopy system deployed by drones. By adjusting to follow the direction of the sun, the canopy provides shade and reduces reliance on ventilation systems.

Demand for air taxis and personal flying vehicles will develop where failures in other transport systems take place. The Airbus research found that of the cities surveyed, highest demand for VTOLs was in Los Angeles and Mexico City, urban areas famous for traffic pollution. To accommodate these aerial vehicles, urban space will need to transform to include landing pads, airport-like infrastructure and recharge points.

Furthermore, this whole logistics system in lower airspace (below 500ft), or what I term “hover space”, will need an urban traffic management system. One great example of how this hover space could work can be seen in a speculative project from design studio Superflux in their Drone Aviary project. A number of drones with different functions move around an urban area in a network, following different paths at varying heights.

We are at a critical period in urban history, faced by climatic breakdown and pandemic. Drones and aerial vehicles can be part of a profound rethink of the urban environment.

Paul Cureton, Senior Lecturer in Design (People, Places, Products), Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Sonya Teich, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

When Star Wars was awarded the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1978 it marked the first time the visual component of effects was differentiated from sound.

Yet, even in this moment when visual effects (VFX) was first recognised by the Academy, it was already being pointed to as the destroyer of the auteur renaissance: an Hollywood era in which directors like Martin Scorcese, Stanley Kubrick and even George Lucas himself enjoyed unprecedented freedom to make the films they wanted to make with full studio backing.

The financial success of films like Star Wars turned studios towards a strategy of event films. These productions didn’t rely on specific directors, but on spectacle and the worldwide distribution only a prominent studio could mount. The high costs of event films ensured studios more tightly controlled production and the tension between director-driven film making and VFX was born.

As technology has progressed, VFX has only become more profitable, complex and difficult for directors to control. 2019’s Avengers: Endgame contains 2,500 VFX shots and is the highest grossing film of all time.

What exactly are VFX?

It is hard to land on an agreed upon definition for VFX and there are several terms to unpack before you get there.

Effects is the catchall term for the visual tricks in film and television.

Practical effects or special effects are solutions accomplished in camera using animatronics like E.T.; miniatures like the flying cars in Blade Runner; prosthetics like the hobbit feet in The Lord of the Rings; and pyrotechnics like the explosions in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Visual effects create the required imagery off-set using computers. VFX might be as simple as compositing one image onto another – like when an actor filmed in front of a green screen is placed into a different environment – or as complicated as creating a completely digital environment, like the world of Pandora in Avatar.

A dozen or more artists with individualised skill sets might touch a complex shot. Different kinds of artists create geometric models of characters or props, create the textures for those models, place those models in the scene, animate the characters, simulate the costumes, and render the final images.

VFX production generally takes place at independent studios, with studios like Disney or Universal acting as clients.

This creates a paradigm in which the client studio serves as an intermediary between the director and the VFX artists. The director rarely talks to or even sees the hundreds of artists producing this critical part of the film.

To further complicate things, the number of VFX shots in a blockbuster is often so large a single vendor cannot take on all of them. It is common practice to spread VFX sequences between multiple vendors in multiple countries.

An invisible job

For directors, VFX become ephemeral and hard to pin down.

These created worlds do not exist until they do, and the processes by which they materialise relies on massive distributed systems of highly specialised and anonymous artists in concert with complex computer processes.

It is no wonder filmmakers go on to speak about this essential aspect of their productions in a way that reflects their alienation.

Popular directors like Chrisopher Nolan and JJ Abrams have extensively used VFX while decrying them as inferior to in-camera effects. While Abrams touted 2015’s Star Wars:The Force Awakens as a return to the practical aesthetic of the original trilogy, roughly 2,100 shots in the film used VFX.

In reference to 2017’s Dunkirk, Nolan said: “The older techniques are working better. With visual effects, after a while the contemporary tricks look cheaper.”

While Dunkirk did use practical effects, the film relied heavily on visual effects to augment and enhance the action.

Influenced by the language from directors, critics often cite bad effects as how Hollywood is ruining movies. Writing for Variety on Avengers and “the age of CGI overkill”, Brian Lowley said:

While the results can be visually astounding, the movies regularly feel as lifeless and mechanized as the technology responsible.

Yet when effects are good, they can be virtually undetectable. When a medium’s success is predicated on its self-erasure, we are left with a discourse which only ever identifies it as a problem – or never acknowledges it at all.

Worth doing well

There is no disputing VFX are often used in the service of what critic Johnathan Romney calls “the permanent apocalypse” of blockbuster films: an unending cycle of computer-generated mayhem.

But if these movies are bad, it’s not because they use VFX. It’s because they didn’t know how to.

While 2019’s Cats was definitely disturbing, “bad VFX” are the not the reason the film bombed, nor were the VFX “bad” because of the skill of the artists who made them. As the Visual Effects Society said: “the best visual effects in the world will not compensate for a story told badly.”

VFX is a powerful medium. It can be used in ways that are predictable, or in ways that expand the boundaries of our collective imagination.

But until VFX production becomes a better integrated part of the creative process, it will rarely be used in the service of a better kind of film.

Sonya Teich, Lecturer in Design, Visual Effects Projects, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Anna Moore, Australian National University

With all of the immense challenges we face on Earth this year, space can feel like an afterthought.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the hope of a growing space industry was palpable. Ribbons were cut, buildings were dedicated and Australia’s space industry was going to triple in size in just ten years. But a few weeks into March, Europe and then Australia were slowly grinding to a halt as the reality of COVID-19 set in.

Satellite images from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission in space showed the extent to which the virus lockdown was affecting major cities.

Next came the dramatic global economic downturn that seemed certain to crush Australia’s space ambitions. Consultants began sending a flurry of email surveys to see how everyone in the industry was coping. How would this change the future of our nation’s newest dream?

Suddenly, space is everywhere

Work in the space industry has always continued even under the most difficult circumstances. Missions take years to plan and launch. The global space industry has, out of necessity, always embraced uncertainty. Innovation will not stop. International cooperation is still strong. Missions are continuing.

It was just announced that the European Union is signing a billion-euro agreement with French global launch services company Arianespace, with the hope of injecting another 16 billion euros into the European space industry by 2027. This is big news for Australia’s space industry too. Our history with Arianespace goes back to its predecessor, which launched the Europa rocket for the first time ever in South Australia in 1964.

NASA and SpaceX are making headlines for the first trip to the International Space Station in a commercially built and operated American spacecraft with astronauts on board. China’s space program is rapidly developing and an upcoming mission could make it the second country to land and operate a spacecraft on Mars.

Australia’s space capabilities

In this multinational mix, Australia has much to offer. We are currently leaders in advanced and quantum communication that would make deep space communication possible, as well as creating unhackable communications on Earth.

Our government has taken steps to realise these opportunities through its first round of funding to accelerate the industry and galvanise the future of our space agency.

Ten strategic space projects just received government funding to help Australia build relationships with other international space agencies. In defence funding announcements last week, space was highlighted as one of the five defence domains for a strong Australian Defence Force.

A quick recovery

We are now seeing some amazing post-COVID wins for Australia. Planet Innovation, a Melbourne-based company, was the only Australian manufacturer to be chosen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make an innovative COVID ventilator. More than 300 companies around the world applied for the opportunity.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk suggested Hobart-based boat builder, Incat, could help build “floating, superheavy-class space ports for Mars, Moon and hypersonic travel around the Earth.” Fleet Space Technologies and Oz Minerals were just awarded a grant to use space technology in mineral exploration.

A few weeks ago, the Australian National University National Space Test Facility (NSTF) was the first non-COVID research facility at the university to reopen. Its first project was testing a piece of space equipment created by Australian company Gilmour Space Technologies that will fly on an Australian space mission in 2022.

Next, the NSTF team performed testing for Fleet Space Technologies, who drove their components from Adelaide to Canberra as there were no connecting flights. The NSTF has been continuously testing other space components for Australian missions since it reopened.

These are all hard-won successes in the face of COVID, and they speak volumes about the promise of Australia’s space industry.

Space will help Australia recover

Our space industry also enables others. Space technologies are transferrable to Earth-bound sectors such as health and mining, and the industry helps economic recovery because it operates at many scales from small research projects to large multi-disciplinary initiatives.

Our nation is set to give rise to bespoke satellites that are proprietary to Australia. We will have our own satellite constellations to address critical issues like drought, water quality management and bushfires.

Our innovation will protect our sovereignty, and global space industry titans like NASA can see our promise with missions like Artemis: Moon to Mars.

Australia’s space industry began in uncertainty, and – despite bushfires, pandemics and massive change – it will succeed under uncertainty.

Anna Moore, Director of The Australian National University Institute for Space and the Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Jacopo Torriti, University of Reading; Jose Luis Ramirez-Mendiola, University of Reading, and Timur Yunusov, University of Reading

Britain generated nearly half of its electricity from renewable sources in the first three months of 2020. And then the pandemic happened, and all of a sudden, energy demand dropped dramatically as offices, shops and restaurants closed and people stayed home.

Energy demand patterns are largely driven by our activities. Peaks in demand exist simply because, at certain times of day, there are a lot of people doing a lot of things that all require electricity.

Not all days are the same, hard though that may have been to believe during the monotony of lockdown. During “normal” times, peaks are higher on weekdays than weekends because there is more activity, with factories and shops open longer. During the lockdown, energy demand on weekdays was so much lower that it looked more like it usually does on weekends.

We wanted to know how that might have affected the amount of Britain’s electricity demand that was met by renewable energy, so we took a closer look at days during lockdown and compared them with the same period in 2019.

Lower demand, cleaner power

Weekday evening peaks (between 4pm and 8pm) occur because people tend to return home around the same time and switch lights on, prepare dinner and watch TV. But these evening peaks often don’t align with the times when energy from renewables – particular solar, but also wind and hydroelectric – is abundant. To meet demand at that time of day, extra power generation is needed, which is mainly supplied from fossil fuels. Using this extra generation to match peak demand results in higher carbon emissions and higher costs, which are reflected in consumer bills.

But for weekdays during lockdown, evening peaks were much lower. And the overall decrease in demand in turn reduced the need for this extra generation, meaning that the energy we consumed was cleaner, compared with pre-lockdown peaks. The larger the share of renewable energy in the supply mix, the lower the overall carbon intensity (how much CO₂ is emitted to generate a particular amount of energy) of power generation.

Thanks to lower demand during lockdown, Britain’s national grid was coal-free for almost 68 days – the longest time since 1882, when the world’s first coal-fired power station opened on Holborn Viaduct in central London.

This is great news, of course, but while evening peaks were lower than during normal times, they were still present. In an ideal scenario where CO₂ emissions are close to zero, demand wouldn’t overload the grid at certain times of day, prompting back-up generation by fossil fuels to cover the shortfall. Instead, energy demand would be flexible and adapt in real time to the levels of clean power available. But how is it possible to match demand to renewable energy supply?

The best time to bake

The first (and perhaps the simplest) way to make demand more flexible is through price incentives.

Typically, our bills are based on flat tariffs, meaning we’re charged a price that averages out our use when the prices of electricity are higher at peak times and when they’re lower during off-peak periods.

But some suppliers offer flexible tariffs based on the actual cost of generating electricity at different times of day. And in some cases, this means that customers are reimbursed when prices turn negative, which usually happens when demand is low and generation by renewables is high.

Another way to increase the flexibility of energy demand is through a voluntary shift by consumers. If more of us can time our activities to moments in the day when electricity generation by renewables is highest, we can contribute to reducing emissions from the energy sector.

The shortage of flour in supermarkets during lockdown was almost certainly due to an increase in the number of people baking. What if they could choose the best time of their day to bake, based on when renewable energy generation was at its daily peak – and the carbon intensity of the grid is at its corresponding nadir?

One website is trying to help people do just that, offering suggestions each day for the best times to bake.

Typically, the best times for green baking are when more than one-third of the electricity we use is being generated by renewables, which normally occurs around the middle of the day when there is plenty of sunshine and wind. But on very sunny or windy days, these greener periods in Britain’s electricity generation can extend much longer, making it even easier to be environmentally friendly, while still enjoying the conveniences that electricity offers, such as baking tasty bread, preparing a meal in a slow cooker or charging an electric car.

Every little helps, and being mindful of when green energy generation is at its daily peak could lead to bigger reductions in carbon emission in a shorter time than governments and utilities are currently working towards. So long as we don’t run out of flour, that is.

Jacopo Torriti, Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, University of Reading; Jose Luis Ramirez-Mendiola, Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Flexibility in Energy Demand, University of Reading, and Timur Yunusov, Postdoctoral Researcher on Flexibility in Energy Demand, University of Reading

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Dominic Watt, University of York

The great face mask debate has been had, and most people agree that it’s a good idea to wear one to prevent the spread of COVID-19. And for as long as we do not have a vaccine, we can foresee that advice from national governments and the World Health Organization to wear one will be in place for some time.

This means we might communicate very differently with each other for months or even years to come. Having a conversation with a mask on can be awkward – it’s often harder to read a mask wearer’s attitudes and emotions, and difficulties faced by deaf people who cannot lipread from a masked talker’s mouth have been well documented.

But we should also remember there’s a third source of potential miscommunication when listening to speech through facewear: the muffling effect masks can have on the sound signal itself. In recent years, our research team of forensic speech scientists has studied the different ways facewear might affect speech clarity. Here’s what we found.

What we needed to know

In a 2013 study, we tested a range of different mouth coverings to compare the effects of speaking while wearing a paper surgical mask to those of speaking while wearing a motorbike helmet, two types of balaclava (one with a mouth hole, the other without), a niqab, a scarf-hoodie combination, and a whole-head rubber mask of the kind occasionally favoured by armed robbers.

We focused on the speaker’s articulation of sounds. We theorised that masks might interfere with the motions of the wearer’s mouth: lip movements needed for the “labial” consonants – p, b, w, f, v, m – and the “rounded” vowels that we find in words like sue or saw could be restricted. Freedom to lower the jaw when producing “open” vowels like those in cat or calm might also be more limited.

We then looked at how different types of facewear material might impede the stream of air emanating from the speaker’s mouth during speech. Thicker, less porous fabrics can significantly block the airstream, diminishing the acoustic energy – which includes the loudness of a sound – that is transmitted through the air to the listener’s ear. We measured the “transmission loss” properties of facewear fabrics separately, by placing a loudspeaker and a precisely calibrated microphone on either side of our fabric samples.

Lastly, we needed to consider the mask’s influence on how listeners perceive speech. The combined effect of masks affecting articulation, impeding the airstream, and the sound absorption by fabric was one thing, but at the end of what linguists call the “speech chain” is the listener. We know that even for people who are not deaf or hard of hearing, it helps to see the person who is talking. If we are not blind or partially sighted, we’re all lipreaders, to some extent.

But is masking the speaker’s mouth the same as being unable to see the speaker at all? To test this question, we presented our participants with video footage of masked speakers talking, as well as the audio soundtrack on its own.

What we found

Our results contained some surprises. Of all the different types of facewear we tested, none interfered very much with articulation, and the effects on the airstream seemed mostly quite minor.

Some fabrics absorbed more sound energy than others. Although with surgical masks, portions of the sound frequency spectrum were actually amplified. It’s possible our speakers were unconsciously compensating for the masks they wore by talking more loudly or articulating more carefully, but we don’t know for sure.

We also found that our participants could identify speech sounds more accurately simply by being able to see the video image of the talker, even when the mouth is effectively invisible and no lip or jaw movements could be seen, as in the case of the surgical mask and the eyehole-only balaclava.

The facewear we tested therefore had surprisingly small effects on speech clarity.

The masks people wear during the current pandemic are often homemade from cloth rather than off-the-shelf products. Many are made of multiple layers of thick and stiff fabrics, and may muffle the wearer’s speech more strongly than the garments we tested.

Our research, though it is ongoing, will struggle to keep pace with this explosion in facewear diversity. More than ever before, however, this work will help us to understand any source of potential misunderstandings that stem from wearing masks.

And for now the news is good – if you’re speaking through any sort of facewear, you are likely to be understood.

Dominic Watt, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Jonathan Benjamin, Flinders University; Geoff Bailey, University of York; Jo McDonald, University of Western Australia; Michael O’Leary, University of Western Australia, and Sean Ulm, James Cook University

For most of the human history of Australia, sea levels were much lower than they are today, and there was extra dry land where people lived.

Archaeologists could only speculate about how people used those now-submerged lands, and whether any traces remain today.

But in a study published today in PLOS ONE, we report the first submerged ancient Aboriginal archaeological sites found on the seabed, in waters off Western Australia.

The great flood

When people first arrived in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago, sea levels were around 80m lower than today.

Sea levels fluctuated but continued to fall as the global climate cooled. As the world plunged into the last ice age, which peaked around 20,000 years ago, sea levels dropped to 130m lower than they are now.

Between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago the world warmed up. Melting ice sheets caused sea levels to rise. Tasmania was cut off from the mainland around 11,000 years ago. New Guinea separated from Australia around 8,000 years ago.

The sea-level rise flooded 2.12 million square kilometres of land on the continental shelf surrounding Australia. Thousands of generations of people would have lived out their lives on these landscapes now under water.

Landscapes under water

For the past four years a team of archaeologists, rock art specialists, geomorphologists, geologists, specialist pilots and scientific divers on the Australian Research Council-funded Deep History of Sea Country Project have collaborated with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation to find and record submerged archaeological sites off the Pilbara coast in WA.

We studied navigation charts, geological maps and archaeological sites located on the land to narrow down prospective areas before surveying the seabed using laser scanners mounted on small planes and high-resolution sonar towed behind boats.

In the final phase of the research, our team of scientific divers carried out underwater archaeological surveys to physically examine, record and sample the seabed.

We discovered two underwater archaeological sites in the Dampier Archipelago.

The first, at Cape Bruguieres, comprises hundreds of stone artefacts – including mullers and grinding stones – on the seabed at depths down to 2.4m.

At the second site, in Flying Foam Passage, we discovered traces of human activity associated with a submerged freshwater spring, 14m below sea level, including at least one confirmed stone cutting tool made out of locally sourced material.

Environmental data and radiocarbon dates show these sites must have been older than 7,000 years when they were submerged by rising seas.

Our study shows archaeological sites exist on the seabed in Australia with items belonging to ancient peoples undisturbed for thousands of years.

In Murujuga (also known as the Burrup Peninsula) this adds substantially to the evidence we already have of human activity and rock art production in this important National Heritage Listed place.

Underwater archaeology matters

The submerged stone tools discovered at Murujuga make us rethink what we know about the past.

Our knowledge of ancient times in Australia comes from archaeological sites on land and from Indigenous oral histories. But the first people to come to Australian shores were coastal people who voyaged in boats across the islands of eastern Indonesia.

The early peopling of Australia took place on land that is now under water. To fully understand key questions in human history, as ancient as they are, researchers must turn to both archaeology and marine science.

Protecting a priceless submerged heritage

Submerged archaeological sites are in danger of destruction by erosion and from development activities, such as oil and gas installations, pipelines, port developments, dredging, spoil dumping and industrialised fishing.

Protection of underwater cultural sites more than 100 years old is enshrined by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (2001), adopted as law by more than 60 countries but not ratified by Australia.

In Australia, the federal laws that protect underwater cultural heritage in Commonwealth waters have been modernised recently with the Historic Shipwrecks Act (1976) reviewed and re-badged as Australia’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act (2018), which came into effect in July 2019.

This new Act fails to automatically protect all types of sites and it privileges protection of non-Indigenous submerged heritage. For example, all shipwrecks older than 75 years and sunken aircraft found in Australia’s Commonwealth waters are given automatic protection.

Other types of site, regardless of age and including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sites, can be protected but only with ministerial approval.

There is scope for states and territories to protect submerged Indigenous heritage based on existing laws, but regulators have conventionally only managed the underwater heritage of more recent historical periods.

With our find confirming ancient Indigenous sites can be preserved under water, we need policy makers to reconsider approaches to protecting underwater cultural heritage in Australia.

We are confident many other submerged sites will be found in the years to come. These will challenge our current understandings and lead to a more complete account of our human past, so they need our protection now.

Jonathan Benjamin, Associate Professor in Maritime Archaeology, Flinders University and ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University; Geoff Bailey, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, University of York; Jo McDonald, Director, Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia; Michael O’Leary, Senior Lecturer in Climate Geoscience, University of Western Australia, and Sean Ulm, Deputy Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Hessy Elliott, Nesta

China announced in 2017 its ambition to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. While the US still leads in absolute terms, China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the US or the EU, and central and local government spending on AI in China is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state. But treating China as a “villain” in this way is both overly simplistic and potentially costly. While there are undoubtedly aspects of the Chinese government’s approach to AI that are highly concerning and rightly should be condemned, it’s important that this does not cloud all analysis of China’s AI innovation.

The world needs to engage seriously with China’s AI development and take a closer look at what’s really going on. The story is complex and it’s important to highlight where China is making promising advances in useful AI applications and to challenge common misconceptions, as well as to caution against problematic uses.

Nesta has explored the broad spectrum of AI activity in China – the good, the bad and the unexpected.

The good

China’s approach to AI development and implementation is fast-paced and pragmatic, oriented towards finding applications which can help solve real-world problems. Rapid progress is being made in the field of healthcare, for example, as China grapples with providing easy access to affordable and high-quality services for its ageing population.

Applications include “AI doctor” chatbots, which help to connect communities in remote areas with experienced consultants via telemedicine; machine learning to speed up pharmaceutical research; and the use of deep learning for medical image processing, which can help with the early detection of cancer and other diseases.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, medical AI applications have surged as Chinese researchers and tech companies have rushed to try and combat the virus by speeding up screening, diagnosis and new drug development. AI tools used in Wuhan, China, to tackle COVID-19 – by helping accelerate CT scan diagnosis – are now being used in Italy and have been also offered to the NHS in the UK.

The bad

But there are also elements of China’s use of AI which are seriously concerning. Positive advances in practical AI applications which are benefiting citizens and society don’t detract from the fact that China’s authoritarian government is also using AI and citizens’ data in ways that violate privacy and civil liberties.

Most disturbingly, reports and leaked documents have revealed the government’s use of facial recognition technologies to enable the surveillance and detention of Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang province.

The emergence of opaque social governance systems which lack accountability mechanisms are also a cause for concern.

In Shanghai’s “smart court” system, for example, AI-generated assessments are used to help with sentencing decisions. But it is difficult for defendants to assess the tool’s potential biases, the quality of the data and the soundness of the algorithm, making it hard for them to challenge the decisions made.

China’s experience reminds us of the need for transparency and accountability when it comes to AI in public services. Systems must be designed and implemented in ways that are inclusive and protect citizens’ digital rights.

The unexpected

Commentators have often interpreted the State Council’s 2017 Artificial Intelligence Development Plan as an indication that China’s AI mobilisation is a top-down, centrally planned strategy.

But a closer look at the dynamics of China’s AI development reveals the importance of local government in implementing innovation policy. Municipal and provincial governments across China are establishing cross-sector partnerships with research institutions and tech companies to create local AI innovation ecosystems and drive rapid research and development.

Beyond the thriving major cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, efforts to develop successful innovation hubs are also underway in other regions. A promising example is the city of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province, which has established an “AI Town”, clustering together the tech company Alibaba, Zhejiang University and local businesses to work collaboratively on AI development. China’s local ecosystem approach could offer interesting insights to policymakers in the UK aiming to boost research and innovation outside the capital and tackle longstanding regional economic imbalances.

China’s accelerating AI innovation deserves the world’s full attention, but it is unhelpful to reduce all the many developments into a simplistic narrative about China as a threat or a villain. Observers outside China need to engage seriously with the debate and make more of an effort to understand – and learn from – the nuances of what’s really happening.

Hessy Elliott, Researcher, Nesta

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Heather R. Stevens, Macquarie University; Ivan Charles Hanigan, University of Sydney; Paul Beggs, Macquarie University, and Petra Graham, Macquarie University

The link between hot weather and aggressive crime is well established. But can the same be said for online aggression, such as angry tweets? And is online anger a predictor of assaults?

Our study just published suggests the answer is a clear “no”. We found angry tweet counts actually increased in cooler weather. And as daily maximum temperatures rose, angry tweet counts decreased.

We also found the incidence of angry tweets is highest on Mondays, and perhaps unsurprisingly, angry Twitter posts are most prevalent after big news events such as a leadership spill.

This is the first study to compare patterns of assault and social media anger with temperature. Given anger spreads through online communities faster than any other emotion, the findings have broad implications – especially under climate change.

Algorithms are watching you

Of Australia’s 24.6 million people, 18 million, or 73%, are active social media users. Some 4.7 million Australians, or 19%, use Twitter. This widespread social media use provides researchers with valuable opportunities to gather information.

When you publicly post, comment or even upload a selfie, an algorithm can scan it to estimate your mood (positive or negative) or your emotion (such as anger, joy, fear or surprise).

This information can be linked with the date, time of day, location or even your age and sex, to determine the “mood” of a city or country in near real time.

Our study involved 74.2 million English-language Twitter posts – or tweets – from 2015 to 2017 in New South Wales.

We analysed them using the publicly available We Feel tool, developed by the CSIRO and the Black Dog Institute, to see if social media can accurately map our emotions.

Some 2.87 million tweets (or 3.87%) contained words or phrases considered angry, such as “vicious”, “hated”, “irritated”, “disgusted” and the very popular “f*cked”.

Hot-headed when it’s cold outside

On average, the number of angry tweets were highest when the temperature was below 15℃, and lowest in warm temperatures (25-30℃).

The number of angry tweets slightly increased again in very high temperatures (above 35℃), although with fewer days in that range there was less certainty about the trend.

On the ten days with the highest daily maximum temperatures, the average angry tweet count was 2,482 per day. Of the ten coldest days, the average angry tweet count was higher at 3,354 per day.

The pattern of angry tweets was opposite to that of physical assaults, which are more prevalent in hotter weather – with some evidence of a decline in extreme heat.

So why the opposite patterns? We propose two possible explanations.

First, hot and cold weather triggers a physiological response in humans. Temperature affects our heart rate, the amount of oxygen to our brain, hormone regulation (including testosterone) and our ability to sleep. In some people, this in turn affects physical aggression levels.

Second, weather triggers changes to our routine. Research suggests aggressive crimes increase because warmer weather encourages behaviour that fosters assaults. This includes more time outdoors, increased socialising and drinking alcohol.

Those same factors – time outdoors and more socialising – may reduce the opportunity or motivation to tweet. And the effects of alcohol (such as reduced mental clarity and physical precicion) make composing a tweet harder, and therefore less likely.

This theory is supported by our finding that both angry tweet counts, as well as overall tweet counts, were lowest on weekends, holidays and the hottest days,

It’s possible that as people vent their frustrations online, they feel better and are then less inclined to commit an assault. However, this theory isn’t well supported.

The relationship is more likely due to the vastly different demographics of Twitter users and assault offenders.

Assault offenders are most likely to be young men from low socio-economic backgrounds. In contrast, about half of Twitter users are female, and they’re more likely to be middle-aged and in a higher income bracket compared with other social media users.

Our study did not consider why these two groups differ in response to temperature. However, we are currently researching how age, sex and other social and demographic factors influence the relationships between temperature and aggression.

The Monday blues

Our study primarily set out to see whether temperatures and angry tweet counts were related. But we also uncovered other interesting trends.

Average angry tweet counts were highest on a Monday (2,759 per day) and lowest on weekends (Saturdays, 2,373; Sundays, 2,499). This supports research that found an online mood slump on weekdays.

We determined that major news events correlated with the ten days where the angry tweet count was highest. These events included:

• the federal leadership spill in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as prime minister
• a severe storm front in NSW in 2015, then a major cold front a few months later
• two mass shootings in the United States: Orlando in 2016 and Las Vegas in 2017
• sporting events including the Cricket World Cup in 2015.

Twitter in a warming world

Our study was limited in that Twitter users are not necessarily representative of the broader population. For example, Twitter is a preferred medium for politicians, academics and journalists. These users may express different emotions, or less emotion, in their posts than other social media users.

However, the influence of temperature on social media anger has broad implications. Of all the emotions, anger spreads through online communities the fastest. So temperature changes and corresponding social media anger can affect the wider population.

We hope our research helps health and justice services develop more targeted measures based on temperature.

And with climate change likely to affect assault rates and mood, more research in this field is needed.

Heather R. Stevens, Doctoral student in Environmental Sciences, Macquarie University; Ivan Charles Hanigan, Data Scientist (Epidemiology), University of Sydney; Paul Beggs, Associate Professor and Environmental Health Scientist, Macquarie University, and Petra Graham, Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Mahmoud Elkhodr, CQUniversity Australia

While lockdown restrictions have eased in many places, the coronavirus threat isn’t over yet. The number of cases globally has surpassed 9 million, and infections have slowly crept back for Victoria.

Restaurants, pubs and cafes have been among the first places to which people have flocked for some respite from social isolation. In many cases, diners must provide their personal details to these venues for potential contact tracing later on.

Unfortunately, there’s a lack of clarity regarding what the best options are for businesses, and many aren’t following official guidelines.

Keeping records

In the rush to reopen while also abiding by government requirements, many businesses are resorting to collecting customer information using pen and paper.

This entails sharing the stationery, which goes against the basic principles of social distancing. Your written details can also be seen by other diners and staff, triggering privacy concerns.

You wouldn’t normally leave your name, phone number, email, address or any combination of these on a piece of paper in public – so why now?

Businesses collecting personal information from customers must abide by the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988. This requires they “take reasonable steps to protect the personal information collected or held”.

The federal government has also released an updated guide to collecting personal information for contact tracing purposes. Establishments must use this guide in conjunction with individual directions or orders from certain states and territories. See some below.

The guide also outlines how businesses should handle customers’ contact information. The relevant parts are:

1. you should only collect the personal information required under the direction or order
2. you should notify individuals before you collect personal information
3. you should securely store this information once you have collected it.

One point specifically notes:

Do not place the names and phone numbers or other details in a book or on a notepad or computer screen where customers may see it.

Thus, many establishments are clearly not sticking to official guidance. So could you refuse to give your details in such cases?

Venues are required by law to collect the necessary details as per their state or territory’s order. Venues can deny entry to people who refuse.

What would a comprehensive solution look like?

For contact tracing to work effectively, it should be implemented systematically, not in a piecemeal way. This means there should be a system that securely collects, compiles, and analyses people’s data in real time, without impinging on their privacy.

It’s perhaps too much to ask hospitality businesses to take the lead on this. Ideally, government agencies should have done it already.

The COVIDSafe app could have provided this service, but with it being optional — and contact tracing by businesses being mandatory — it’s not a viable option. That’s not to mention the issues with the running of the app, including Bluetooth requirements, battery life drainage, and history of problems with iPhones.

Nonetheless, there are some free technologies that can offer better alternatives to the manual collection of customers’ details. These include:

• Google Forms
• Microsoft Forms
• Cognito Forms and
• Survey Monkey.

All these tools have a similar set up process, and provide similar services. Let’s take a look at one of the most popular ones, Google Forms.

Using Google Forms

Google Forms is a tool that comes free with a Google account. The “contact information template” is a good starting point for businesses wanting to make a secure log of visitor details.

Once you create a form to collect customers’ information, you just have to share a URL, and customers can fill the form on their own device.

Data gathered via Google Forms is stored securely on the Google Drive account and can only be accessed through the same login that was used to create the form. The transmission of data from the customer’s device to Google Drive (where the data is then stored) is also secure.

Or use a QR code

If you want to make the whole process even easier, and not use a clunky URL, then using a QR code (linked to the URL of your Google form) is a great option. For this, you can use any free external QR code generator. These will generate a QR code which, when scanned by a smartphone, will direct the user to your URL.

This code can also be printed and hung on a wall, or stuck to tables where it’s easy to access without any human-to-human contact. A comprehensive guide to creating and accessing Google Forms can be found here.

That said, although the process of setting up and using such tools is very simple, there may still be people who are too mistrusting of the way their data is used, and may refuse to hand it over.

Mahmoud Elkhodr, Lecturer in Information and Communication Technologies, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Mojtaba Mahmoodian, RMIT University; Kevin Zhang, RMIT University, and Sujeeva Setunge, RMIT University

Urban infrastructure – bridges, roads, railways, pipelines, power transmission towers and so on – must be inspected regularly to operate safely. Imagine if we used advanced technologies available to us, such as wireless sensors, mobile apps and machine learning, to remotely inspect and maintain this infrastructure. This could eliminate the need for regular daily inspections, save time and money for engineers and asset owners, and reduce the risks of working on job sites.

Everyone has experience of working with smart devices such as mobile phones and iPads. Using these technologies to perform technical and engineering work is a game changer. We have been developing “digital twins” – 3D-visualisation of in-service infrastructure – to monitor infrastructure performance under various service conditions and make intelligent maintenance decisions.

The digital model is the twin of the real infrastructure. Wireless sensors on the structure transfer performance data to our computer. We can see the performance of the infrastructure in real time online.

This is extremely useful for engineers who need to regularly monitor the performance of infrastructure. They make critical maintenance decisions about which structural elements need to be repaired or replaced, and when this must be done, to ensure the infrastructure is safe.

How are digital twins created?

Digital twins are essentially a digital replica or a virtual model of a process, product or service. The concept of creating digital twins is still relatively new for civil and infrastructure engineers.

In the Netherlands, digital twins are being developed for operation at the Port of Rotterdam. A team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is working on a digital model of an operating crane.

To develop digital twins for intelligent infrastructure maintenance we must integrate a variety of disciplines. These include 3D visualisation, wireless technology, structural engineering and Internet of Things. The output is a digital model of the physical infrastructure, which can be seen on a PC, tablet or mobile phone.

Looking at their smart device at home or in the office, an engineer can observe all deformations, deflections, cracks or even stresses due to various loads (such as traffic or wind). The intelligent digital twin model can also suggest appropriate maintenance decisions.

Cost benefits add up to billions

We have more than 7,000 bridges in Victoria alone that need regular inspection. Add all the pipelines, highways, railways and so on, and that’s a huge maintenance program.

Trillions of dollars are spent each year on inspecting, monitoring and maintaining infrastructure around the world. The non-profit Volcker Alliance recently warned repair costs of deferred maintenance of the United States’ ageing infrastructure could exceed US$1 trillion, or 5% of the country’s gross domestic product. For local roads across Australia, maintenance and renewal costs between 2010 and 2024 total an estimated A$45 billion.

Digitalising the way we look after our infrastructure can make the process more accurate and less costly in the long term than traditional labour-intensive practices. Using a digital twin is expected to produce cost savings of 20-30%. Given the huge costs of monitoring infrastructure – in the US, bridge inspections alone cost US$1.35 billion a year – the potential savings are huge.

There are also several indirect benefits for the nation.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the importance of reducing crowds in public places. Considering the huge workload on transport infrastructure like highways, buses and rail, any concept that can reduce daily travel is important. Digitalising infrastructure management and maintenance can help by reducing the need for inspectors and technicians to travel to projects.

Reduced travel, by reducing emissions, benefits public health and the environment.

What is being done in Australia?

In Australia, researchers from the School of Engineering at RMIT are developing digital twins for use in intelligent maintenance of almost all infrastructure across the nation.

Our current focus is on bridge and port infrastructure. However, soon we’ll be able to use the developed models for railways, water and wastewater pipelines, LNG, oil and gas pipelines, offshore platforms, wind turbines and power transmission towers.

RMIT researchers have also developed a cloud-hosted asset management platform, Central Asset Management System (CAMS). It uses discrete condition ratings given to components of infrastructure through inspections. We can use these ratings to develop predictive models to aid proactive planning and decision-making on civil infrastructure.

The system is being used commercially for property assets. Many public-private partnership clients are using the system for life-cycle modelling of buildings.

Proofs of concept have been completed for bridges, drainage and local council infrastructure. Funded research is in progress for road pavements and rail.

We are working on integrating live monitoring of infrastructure to progress the platform towards creation of digital twins. The system is available for trial by any interested infrastructure owners who wish to contact us.

This work represents a significant step in developing smart cities. It will help create a safer and healthier community.

Mojtaba Mahmoodian, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, RMIT University; Kevin Zhang, Professor of Construction Engineering and Management, Associate Dean, School of Engineering, RMIT University, and Sujeeva Setunge, Professor of Civil Engineering and Deputy Dean, Research and Innovation, School of Engineering, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Margarietha de Villiers Scheepers, University of the Sunshine Coast and Martie-Louise Verreynne, RMIT University

Market commentators view Apple’s announcements at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2020 (WWDC) as one of the company’s most important strategic moves of the past decade.

Among the key announcements were details of the watchOS 7 – with a pandemic-inspired handwashing detection feature – and plans to end Apple’s reliance on Intel for Mac processing chips.

While Apple still views itself as an innovator, critics point out many of its product innovations in recent years have been incremental – with calls for an entire new product category. And consumers have been finding it increasingly hard to distinguish between Apple and competitors like Samsung.

Will we ever again see something from Apple that truly changes the market?

We think Apple’s newest updates may be early signs it is, in fact, looking to get back on the map as a “business model innovator”. This describes how an organisation creates, delivers and captures value through business activities.

As University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School professor Raffi Amit explains, Apple has renewed its business model many times – from changing the music industry with Apple Music, to creating a community of independent app providers through the App Store.

A pro-hygiene smartwatch

In today’s COVID-19 world, Apple’s new watch OS7 (expected to be released later this year) will offer automatic handwashing detection.

Motion sensors, the microphone (which will listen for water sounds) and on-device machine learning will detect when a user is washing their hands. The watch will then start a 20-second timer.

By monitoring the frequency and duration of handwashing, preventative health care will be in the hands of users.

Apple uses its wealth of consumer trend data, combined with advances in machine learning, data and analytics to offer an intensely human experience to suit users’ lifestyles. By focusing on the customer’s journey, Apple is in a unique position to create products with superior customer value.

For the WatchOS 7’s handwashing feature, the customer journey starts by reminding users to wash their hands when they get home. The health app monitors the process, even detecting if a user stops prematurely. By focusing on each step of this “journey”, Apple aims to provide peace of mind and address customer anxieties during the pandemic.

In the market of fashionable wearables, Apple’s smartwatch dominates. Last year, the Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch industry.

In line with a strong trend towards personalisation, Apple’s WatchOS 7 also offers customisable watch faces, sleep tracking, improved workout apps with dancing and several built-in acoustic health features such as monitoring ambient sound levels.

Breaking up with Intel

Apple’s long-awaited breakup with Intel was confirmed at the WWDC 2020. Chief executive Tim Cook announced the company’s plans to transition to using its own Apple silicon processors for Macs.

Currently, Mac computers operate with Intel’s x86 desktop chips. By 2021, these will be replaced with the custom-designed processors Apple has already been using in newer iPhones and iPads – spelling the end of a 15-year partnership between Apple and Intel.

The move is part of Apple’s continued strategy to gain as much control as possible over its product ecosystem and development processes. It could also be seen as a reaction to Intel’s hesitance to meet its requirements.

Intel has fallen behind in the industry’s race to miniaturise and has experienced production delays and shortages. Apple’s new processors promise more power efficiency, are lighter and have superior performance for 3D graphics and for apps using artificial intelligence.

Similar to other tech giants, Apple is expanding its capabilities not just through acquisition, but also by developing its inhouse capabilities.

And while the Apple-Intel partnership only amounted to 5% of Intel’s overall sales, the breakup will still impact Intel’s image as a market leader in chip manufacturing.

An insulated ecosystem

It’s likely the decision from Apple signals their intent to exert more control over developers, suppliers and customers through the Apple product ecosystem. Indeed, Apple’s tendency to entrench its customers in this ecosystem has raised concerns.

For instance, larger players like Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Kindle have been fighting back against Apple’s policy of forcing users to use Apple pay to purchase their apps, which sees Apple collect up to 30% of the revenue up front.

While companies such as Netflix can reach users independently through online marketing, smaller app developers are forced to pay the Apple tax of 15-30%.

Still a leading innovator?

At the WWDC, Cook framed the newest announcements as evidence of Apple’s ongoing commitment to innovation.

For many consumers, the most exciting updates will be Apple’s new internet-based technologies. These include spatial audio for AirPods Pro, a feature that creates a more realistic surround sound experience and the new CarKey function which will be compatible with 2021 BMW 5 Series. This will let drivers unlock and drive their car using their iPhone, thanks to a specialisied NCP (network co-processor) chip inside the phone.

It seems Apple does want to excel as a business model innovator. The company’s innovations – even when incremental – still drive product value. And this is used to turn profits which can then be reinvested into broader business model innovation.

This may be why shareholders and enthusiasts remain confident about Apple’s future.

Margarietha de Villiers Scheepers, Senior Lecturer Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of the Sunshine Coast and Martie-Louise Verreynne, Professor in Innovation and Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Centaine Snoswell, The University of Queensland; Anthony Smith, The University of Queensland, and Liam Caffery, The University of Queensland

The expansion of telehealth services was a deliberate strategy to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission between practitioners and patients, so is it working?

According to our analysis, the answer is that telehealth is indeed reducing the risk. Since March 2020, more than 7 million MBS-funded telehealth consultations have been reported, with the vast majority (91%) being done by telephone.

On March 13, the federal government added new telehealth items to the Medicare Benefits Schedule, to allow health-care providers to offer both telephone and video consultations.

Before then, only Australians living outside major cities were eligible for Medicare-funded telehealth consultations, via video only. This was limited largely to medical specialist services and a very small number of GP and allied health services.

In response to COVID-19, the federal government increased Medicare-funded telehealth services, including making telephone consultations available for the first time. They removed geographical constraints and increased the range of telehealth services available.

At first these expanded services were only open to vulnerable patients, such as older Australians and those with a chronic illness. But by early April, these restrictions were lifted, meaning all Australians could access Medicare-funded telehealth.

Tracking telehealth

We have been tracking the increased uptake of Medicare-funded telehealth during COVID-19. We have collected information on six different health-care discipline groups, and also compared the rates of telephone versus video consultations.

During the first six weeks after access to telehealth was expanded on March 13, 7 million consultations – or 22% of the services we examined – were delivered by telehealth.

This represents 7 million avoided face-to-face interactions between patients and health service providers, thus reducing the risk of transmission and infection.

We also found:

• GP appointments accounted for 80% of all consultations examined. During April, GP telehealth activity was largely done by telephone but accounted for 36% of all GP consultations. This was associated with a slight reduction in face-to-face consultations – from an average of 10.5 million consultations per month before the outbreak, to 8.3 million consults in April.
• The proportion of specialist consultations delivered via telehealth increased tenfold in March, from 0.7% in February to 7% in March. When all eligibility criteria were lifted in April, this proportion rose to 37%.
• Although psychiatrists have provided videoconference consultations to Australians since 2002, the coronavirus outbreak prompted a steep decline in face-to-face consultations and an increase in telehealth consultations. Prior to coronavirus, around 4.5% of all consultations each month were via telehealth, this rose to 26% in April this year.
• Mental health services provided by non-psychiatrists (including sessions provided by psychologists) showed an increase in telehealth (50% phone, 50% videoconference), and a 50% reduction in face-to-face consultations.
• Telehealth consultations for allied health services and nurse practitioners were very limited before the pandemic. But in the six weeks from March 13, roughly 29,000 allied health and nursing telehealth consultations were reported through Medicare. Most allied health services involved video consultations, whereas nursing consultations were mainly by telephone.

Are Australians using health care more?

Is the rise in telehealth the result of patients switching from face-to-face consultations to telehealth, or are people simply accessing health care in greater numbers amid the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer varies between different parts of the health system.

Our data suggest the total number of specialist, allied heath, psychiatric and mental health consultations has stayed roughly the same. This suggests face-to-face consultations were simply being replaced by telehealth.

But for GPs and nurse practitioners, the total number of consultations rose significantly, from 10.8 million in February to 12.9 million in April. Around 90% of these telehealth consultations were delivered by phone, so the increase in activity may partly be due to the ease and simplicity of using the telephone. Alternatively, the increase may have been due to more people having health concerns amid the pandemic.

It remains to be seen whether the increase in GP and nursing consultations will continue after the pandemic, or whether it is purely related to COVID-19.

Are phone consultations adequate?

According to Medicare guidelines, telephone consultations should be offered only when video conferencing is not available. There is little doubt telephone consultations are effective in some scenarios, but we don’t yet know if they are as effective as video consultations. For this reason it has been suggested phone consultations be limited to no more than half of a practice’s telehealth provisions. This issue is one we are keen to research further.

A small survey conducted by the Consumer Health Forum found 80% of patients offered a telehealth option accepted, and 68% of patients found it better or equivalent to an in-person consultation. Public awareness of telehealth has increased rapidly, and it is likely that this awareness will help drive the continuation of telehealth.

Telehealth is not new, but its uptake had been slow and fragmented until COVID-19 came along. The sudden telehealth switch has prompted an overnight shift in the way health care is delivered in Australia, and shown (again) that telehealth is feasible and relevant to patients’ needs. The challenge now is to make it a sustainable and routine part of health care into the future.

This is a complex task. The health workforce will need telehealth training and education; the health system will need systems to promote, refer, document and remunerate telehealth appropriately; and everyone, including patients, will need to be encouraged to view telehealth not as a stopgap or emergency option, but as an integral part of health care.

Centaine Snoswell, Research Fellow Health Economics, The University of Queensland; Anthony Smith, Professor of Telehealth; and Director of the Centre for Online Health, The University of Queensland, and Liam Caffery, Associate Professor in Telehealth and Director of Telehealth Technology, Centre for Online Health, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Marcus Carter, University of Sydney and Ben Egliston, University of Sydney

In 2016, the mobile game Pokémon Go sent hundreds of millions of players wandering the streets in search of virtual monsters. In the process it helped popularise augmented reality (AR) technology, which overlays computer-generated imagery on real-world environments.

Now Pokémon Go is set to take AR to a new level. A new feature within the game will encourage players to create and upload 3D scans of real-world locations.

The game’s developer Niantic also just acquired the AR maps start-up 6D.ai for an undisclosed sum. Chief executive Jon Hanke announced the companies’ ambitions:

Together, we’re building a dynamic, 3D map of the world so we can enable new kinds of planet-scale AR experiences.

And it’s not just Niantic. In February, Facebook acquired Scape Technologies, an AR start-up that was creating a 3D map of the entire world, and Microsoft’s Minecraft Earth AR mobile game touts the same kind of planet-scale AR play.

These scans, and this type of data collection, will likely affect all of us in the near future.

Turning data collection into a game

One reason for Niantic’s huge success has been how it uses digital games to collect data about the world.

Niantic was initially formed as Keyhole Inc by John Hanke in 2001 with backing from the CIA’s tech venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. The company developed mapping technologies used by the US military in the early 2000s.

Keyhole Inc was acquired by Google in 2004, and was instrumental the development of Google Maps. In 2010, Keyhole was rebranded as Niantic and focused on games. It stayed part of Google until 2015, when it became an independent company again.

In 2012 Niantic launched a game called Ingress, which saw players photograph and upload millions of locations of interest that became “portals” within the game.

These portals became the underlying infrastructure that powers Pokémon Go and other games, but just as valuable was the data collected about how players moved around the world while playing.

Niantic’s latest game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, collects each player’s location every five seconds or so, which is often enough to recognise individual behaviour patterns and detect intimate details of their life.

Tech companies and investors think this kind of data is immensely valuable. In December 2019, Niantic raised funds at a valuation of USD$3.9 billion.

The future of reality is augmented

The 3D scans Pokémon Go players are collecting are intended to create new possibilities in the game, but they will also give Niantic’s platform for AR developers an advantage over competitors.

Having a system that can recognise 3D environments around the world makes it easier for developers to make shared AR experiences and environments that “exist” even when the user logs off.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google are all developing AR products that are likely to depend on a technique called simultaneous localisation and mapping or SLAM to continuously scan – and collect data about – the users’s physical environment.

The next iPhone is rumored to have a powerful LiDAR scanner to create more detailed 3D scans, and better support Apple’s AR ecosystem.

Facebook acquired the virtual reality (VR) company Oculus in 2014 for USD$2.3 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg frames success with VR as being key to the company’s AR ambitions.

This is well exemplified in LiveMaps, a technology demonstrated by Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth at the 2016 Oculus Connect developer conference.

Any system like LiveMaps will demand constant collection of finely detailed data about the users’ home and everything in it:

AR glasses will scan the surroundings to create a live dynamic index amplified by crowd-sourced data, allowing the maps to recognise when things have changed and update automatically.

The implications of augmented reality

What will pervasive augmented reality mean? Beyond relatively benign possibilities such as more targeted advertisements, we need to think critically about the consequences of technologies like these before they are firmly entrenched.

As the Australian futurist Mark Pesce has argued;

“by virtue of the way they operate, augmented reality systems must simultaneously act as very sophisticated surveillance systems”.

Ever-growing unregulated collection of spatial data across the globe has the potential to create powerful systems of surveillance, control, and influence. We have examined this potential in detail in a recent report on the ethical implications of emerging mixed reality technologies.

Better to prevent than to cure

Like technologies such as facial recognition, granular spatial data might be used in order to dominate, oppress and discipline populations, and particularly the most marginalised in society. As awareness grows of the problems with facial recognition, companies such as IBM and Amazon have recently begun to distance themselves from the technology.

We are also already seeing the rapid growth of an AR industry which doesn’t (at least solely) sell to the commercial market, instead selling to workplaces, law enforcement, security agencies and the military.

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, the dangerous impact of emerging technologies is often only realised once they have done some damage.

If what we share on social media can be used to influence elections, what might the data about the contents of our home be used for? Or everything we encounter in a given day?

Let’s take these technologies for what they really are: not just for entertainment, but apparatuses for extracting data and accumulating power and profit.

Marcus Carter, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney and Ben Egliston, Research associate in Media and Communications, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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MagniX is an electric propulsion technology company that aims to disrupt the aerospace and defence industry with advanced electric engines.

If the technology tested in the skies above Washington State in the US can be perfected and scaled up, it could revolutionise commercial aviation by making it notably cheaper and greener than it is now.  

Electric Cessna flew for 30 minutes

The aircraft, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan capable of carrying 4-5 passengers, climbed to 2 500 feet and flew for 30 minutes in what was described as a successful test of the biggest aircraft yet to fly under electric power. If the aircraft is powered by a normal combustion engine it can carry nine passengers.

It performed “flawlessly,” according to Steve Crane, chief test pilot for AeroTEC, an aerospace technology company that works with MagniX.

You can view video of the test flight here: xxx

Company started on the Gold Coast in 2009

MagniX was founded in 2009 on the Gold Coast by Ante (Tony) Guina, a Croatian born scientist who wanted to transform the way mankind thinks about powering machines.

In 2017, it developed a motor that became its prototype and led the company to focus on electric aviation. It moved its headquarters to Redmond in the US state of Washington, but its engineering centre continues to be based on the Gold Coast.

Guina left the company in 2014 and it is now wholly owned by Singapore investor, the Clermont Group.

Much of the development work done in Qld

Much of the development work for the electric test aircraft, dubbed the eCaravan, was done in Queensland.

The choice of the Caravan was intentional, MagniX CEO Roei Ganzarski told the media. It is a widely-used airframe for both passenger and cargo flights and has logged more than 20-million flight hours worldwide.

When it landed after the test flight, the 560kW (750-horsepower) Magni500 propulsion system still had 10% more energy capacity than MagniX and AeroTEC expected it would, which is a big positive.

Flying costs can be cut by a massive 40-80%

Ganzarski says a production version of the aircraft would reduce operating costs by 40-80% per flight hour, significantly changing the routes operators are able to fly with it and the cost of flying in general.

The 30-minute test flight, which would normally consume more than US$300-worth of jet fuel, used less than US$6 of electricity.

“Imagine what that does … to the bottom line or profitability of an airline,” Ganzarski said. “Now they can fly from and to airports and on schedules that they couldn’t have imagined before. Now, they don’t have to justify filling 70% of their seats flying into a major airport because that’s the only way to make a few percentage points in earnings.”

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Zac Rogers, Flinders University

The coronavirus pandemic has sped up changes that were already happening across society, from remote learning and work to e-health, supply chains and logistics, policing, welfare and beyond. Big tech companies have not hesitated to make the most of the crisis.

In New York for example, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is leading a panel tasked with transforming the city after the pandemic, “focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband”. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also been called in, to help create “a smarter education system”.

The government, health, education and defence sectors have long been prime targets for “digital disruption”. The American business expert Scott Galloway and others have argued they are irresistible pools of demand for the big tech firms.

As author and activist Naomi Klein writes, changes in these and other areas of our lives are about to see “a warp-speed acceleration”.

All these transformations will follow a similar model: using automated platforms to gather and analyse data via online surveillance, then using it to predict and intervene in human behaviour.

The control revolution

The changes now under way are the latest phase of a socio-technical transformation that sociologist James Beniger, writing in the 1980s, called a “control revolution”. This revolution began with the use of electronic systems for information gathering and communication to facilitate mass production and distribution of goods in the 19th century.

After World War II the revolution accelerated as governments and industry began to embrace cybernetics, the scientific study of control and communication. Even before COVID-19, we were already in the “reflexive phase” of the control revolution, in which big data and predictive technologies have been turned to the goal of automating human behaviour.

The next phase is what we might call the “uberisation of everything”: replacing existing institutions and processes of government with computational code, in the same way Uber replaced government-regulated taxi systems with a smartphone app.

Information economics

Beginning in the 1940s, the work of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon had a deep effect on economists, who saw analogies between signals in electrical circuits and many systems in society. Chief among these new information economists was Leonid Hurwicz, winner of a 2007 Nobel Prize for his work on “mechanism design theory”.

Economists have pursued analogies between human and mechanical systems ever since, in part because they lend themselves to modelling, calculation and prediction.

These analogies helped usher in a new economic orthodoxy formed around the ideas of F.A. Hayek, who believed the problem of allocating resources in society was best understood in terms of information processing.

By the 1960s, Hayek had come to view thinking individuals as almost superfluous to the operation of the economy. A better way to allocate resources was to leave decisions to “the market”, which he saw as an omniscient information processor.

Putting information-processing first turned economics on its head. The economic historians Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah argue economists moved from “ensuring markets give people what they want” to insisting they can make markets produce “any desired outcome regardless of what people want”.

By the 1990s this orthodoxy was triumphant across much of the world. By the late 2000s it was so deeply enmeshed that even the global financial crisis – a market failure of catastrophic proportions – could not dislodge it.

Market society

This orthodoxy holds that if information markets make for efficient resource allocation, it makes sense to put them in charge. We’ve seen many kinds of decisions turned over to automated data-driven markets, designed as auctions.

Online advertising illustrates how this works. First, the data generated by each visitor to a page is gathered, analysed and categorised, with each category acquiring a predictive probability of a given behaviour: buying a given product or service.

Then an automated auction occurs at speed as a web page is loading, matching these behavioural probabilities with clients’ products and services. The goal is to “nudge” the user’s behaviour. As Douglas Rushkoff explains, someone in a category that is 80% likely to do a certain thing might be manipulated up to 85% or 90% if they are shown the right ad.

This model is being scaled up to treat society as a whole as a vast signalling device. All human behaviour can be taken as a bid in an invisible auction that aims to optimise resource allocation.

To gather the bids, however, the market needs ever greater awareness of human behaviour. That means total surveillance is here to stay, and will get more intense and pervasive.

Growing surveillance combined with algorithmic interventions in human behaviour constrain our choices to an ever greater extent. Being nudged from an 80% to an 85% chance of doing something might seem innocuous, but that diminishing 20% of unpredictability is the site of human creativity, learning, discovery and choice. Becoming more predictable also means becoming more fragile.

In praise of obscurity

The pandemic has pushed many of us into doing even more by digital means, hitting fast-forward on the growth of surveillance and algorithmic influence, bringing more and more human behaviour into the realm of statistical probability and manipulation.

Concerns about total surveillance are often couched as discussions of privacy, but now is the time to think about the importance of obscurity. Obscurity moves beyond questions of privacy and anonymity to the issue, as Matthew Crawford identifies, of our “qualitative experience of institutional authority”. Obscurity is a buffer zone – a space to be an unobserved, uncategorised, unoptimised human – from which a citizen can enact her democratic rights.

The onrush of digitisation caused by the pandemic may have a positive effect, if the body politic senses the urgency of coming to terms with the widening gap between fast-moving technology and its institutions.

The algorithmic market, left to its optimisation function, may well eventually come to see obscurity an act of economic terrorism. Such an approach cannot form the basis of institutional authority in a democracy. It’s time to address the real implications of digital technology.

Zac Rogers, Research Lead, Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and Governance, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bill Corcoran, Monash University

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made remote working, remote socialisation, and online entertainment the norm, we have seen an unprecedented spike in society’s demand for data.

Singapore’s prime minister declared broadband to be essential infrastructure. The European Union asked streaming services to limit their traffic. Video conferencing service Zoom was suddenly unavoidable. Even my parents have grown used to reading to my four-year-old over Skype.

In Australia telecommunications companies have supported this growth, with Telstra removing data caps on users and the National Broadband Network (NBN) enabling ISPs to expand their network capacity. In fact, the NBN saw its highest ever peak capacity of 13.8 terabits per second (or Tbps) on April 8 this year. A terabit is one trillion bits, and 1 Tbps is the equivalent of about 40,000 standard NBN connections.

This has given us a glimpse of the capacity crunch we could be facing in the near future, as high-speed 5G wireless connections, self-driving cars and the internet of things put more stress on our networks. Internet traffic is growing by 25% each year as society becomes increasingly connected.

We need new technological solutions to expand data infrastructure, without breaking the bank. The key to this is making devices that can transmit and receive massive amounts of data using the optical fibre infrastructure we have already spent time and money putting into the ground.

A high-speed rainbow

Fortunately, such a device is at hand. My colleagues and I have demonstrated a new fingernail-sized chip that can transmit data at 40 Tbps through a single optical fibre connection of the same kind used in the NBN. That’s about three times the record data rate for the entire NBN network and about 100 times the speed of any single device currently used in Australian fibre networks.

The chip uses an “optical micro-comb” to create a rainbow of infrared light that allows data to be transmitted with many frequencies of light at the same time. Our results are published in Nature Communications today.

This collaboration, between Monash, RMIT and Swinburne universities in Melbourne, and international partners (INRS, CIOPM Xi’an, CityU Hong Kong), is the first “field-trial” of an optical micro-comb system, and a record capacity for such a device.

The internet runs on light

Optical fibres have formed the backbone of our communication systems since the late 1980s. The fibres that link the world together carry light signals that are periodically boosted by optical amplifiers which can transmit light with a huge range of wavelengths.

To make the most of this range of wavelengths, different information is sent using signals of different infrared “colours” of light. If you’ve ever seen a prism split up white light into separate colours, you’ve got an insight into how this works – we can add a bunch of these colours together, send the combined signal through a single optical fibre, then split it back up again into the original colours at the other end.

Making powerful rainbows from tiny chips

Optical micro-combs are tiny gadgets that in essence use a single laser, a temperature-controlled chip, and a tiny ring called an optical resonator to send out signals using many different wavelengths of light.

Optical combs have had a major impact on a massive range of research in optics and photonics. Optical micro–combs are miniature devices that can produce optical combs, and have been used in a wide range of exciting demonstrations, including optical communications.

The key to micro-combs are optical resonator structures, tiny rings (see picture above) that when hit with enough light convert the incoming single wavelength into a precise rainbow of wavelengths.

The demonstration

For our demonstration transmitting data at 40 Tbps, we used a novel kind of micro-comb called a “soliton crystal” that produces 80 separate wavelengths of light that can carry different signals at the same time. To prove the micro-comb could be used in a real-world environment, we transmitted the data through installed optical fibres in Melbourne (provided by AARNet) between RMIT’s City campus and Monash’s Clayton campus and back, for a round trip of 75 kilometres.

This shows that the optical fibres we have in the ground today can handle huge capacity growth, simply by changing what we plug into those fibres.

What’s next?

There is more work to do! Monash and RMIT are working together to make the micro-comb devices more flexible and simpler to run.

Putting not only the micro-comb, but also the modulators that turn an electrical signal into an optical signal, on a single chip is a tremendous technical challenge.

There are new frontiers of optical communications to explore with these micro-combs, looking at using parallel paths in space, improving data rates for satellite communications, and in making “light that thinks”: artificial optical neural networks. The future is bright for these tiny rainbows.

We gratefully acknowledge support from Australia’s Academic Research Network (AARNet) for supporting our access to the field-trial cabling through the Australian Lightwave Infrastructure Research Testbed (ALIRT), and in particular Tim Rayner, John Nicholls, Anna Van, Jodie O’Donohoe and Stuart Robinson.

Bill Corcoran, Lecturer & Research Fellow, Monash Photonic Communications Lab & InPAC, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Cathy Foley, CSIRO and Dominic Banfield, CSIRO

Australia’s quantum technology research has been breaking new ground for almost 30 years. Governments, universities and more recently multinationals have all invested in this research.

Quantum technology is set to transform electronics, communications, computation, sensing and other fields. In the process it can create new markets, new applications and new jobs in Australia.

So, what is quantum technology?

Quantum physics explains the behaviour of the world at the smallest scale. Scientists can now isolate individual quantum particles (such as electrons and photons) and detect and control their behaviour.

This opens the door to creating new types of quantum electronic devices. The possibilities range from precision sensors and secure communication networks to incredibly powerful computers to tackle problems that can’t be solved today.

Commercial applications of these technologies are emerging, and Australia is one of the leaders.

In the 1990s CSIRO led research into one of the first commercial applications of quantum research: using superconducting quantum interference devices to detect mineral deposits deep underground.

More recently the University of Adelaide developed a way to produce one billion electrons per second and use quantum mechanics to control them one-by-one. Advances like these are paving the way for quantum information processing in defence, cybersecurity and big data analysis.

Australia is also home to some of the top quantum technology companies in the world. They are working on advanced quantum control solutions (Q-CTRL), unique quantum computing hardware (Silicon Quantum Computing), and quantum-enhanced cybersecurity tools (Quintessence Labs).

Multinationals like Microsoft and Rigetti Computing have also set up shop in Australia to work with our quantum experts.

A multi-billion-dollar opportunity

Australia has a strong research base in quantum technology. With the right approach, we at CSIRO believe this could become a A$4 billion dollar industry for Australia by 2040 and create around 16,000 new, high-value jobs.

This is a competitive area, and the world is racing. Since 2019, the UK, US, European Union, India, Germany and Russia have established multibillion-dollar quantum technology initiatives. Reports also suggest China has committed around US$10 billion to quantum research and development.

To maintain our leadership and capture this opportunity, Australia needs a coordinated, collaborative approach to growing our domestic quantum economy.

A roadmap to 2040

CSIRO has collaborated with industry, research and government to produce a roadmap to help position Australia for success. We have together defined the opportunities and what we need to do to turn this significant investment into a high technology industry for Australia.

The big opportunities are around advanced sensors, secure communication networks and quantum computing. Quantum computing presents the largest long-term opportunity, with potential to create 10,000 jobs and A$2.5 billion in annual revenue by 2040, while spurring breakthroughs in drug development, industrial processes and machine learning.

While quantum computing is the big one, it may take a while to deliver benefits. We’re likely to see applications of quantum sensors and communication networks much sooner in defence, mineral exploration, water resource management and secure communication. These applications in turn could enhance productivity in Australian industries and help ensure our national security.

The roadmap identifies areas where Australia needs to act to make the most of the quantum opportunity, including continued investment in research and development and changes to support translating research into commercial products.

Crossing the “valley of death”

It’s a long way from a technically proven technology to a successful commercial application. The gap between the two is often referred to as the “valley of death”.

Australia often has trouble crossing this valley, where many of our innovations seem to wither. We need a concentrated effort to help our research make it through.

We need new ways to help universities and researchers navigate the valley, and support the prototypes, testing and marketing needed to get ideas off the bench. Investment in purpose-built facilities to help this process will help create the new markets and new jobs we need.

This system needs to be designed and developed jointly by federal and state governments, as well as industry and researchers. Success will only come from collective efforts and the collaboration of a strong network.

Cathy Foley, Chief Scientist, CSIRO and Dominic Banfield, Science and Technology Consultant, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In these strange Covid-19 times in the face of lockdowns we’ve all had to become masters of video meetings. Well, some more than others, right?

It’s been an en-mass global crash-course in the likes of Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams, especially for work. Those multi-person hook-ups have been a wonder of modern technology on the one hand, and the source of fantastic isolation amusement on the other when a family, friend or workmate Zoom fails.

Most of us have guffawed at a colleague switching work, teacher and parent hats all in the space of a single home office invasion, or winced at our manager’s David Brent-like attempt at humour via fake backgrounds. But let’s go next level: how about the boss who is always a potato, or the student who broadcast her toilet break to the class?

Here are a few epic Teams and Zoom fails that remind us that even though we have been isolated and separated during coronavirus lockdown, and some of our relationships have degenerated into packets of screen time, occasionally we have been more human than ever before.

Epic Teams and Zoom fails during coronavirus lockdowns

Let’s start with the classic: “OMG he’s only wearing undies and forgot to turn the meeting off.”

Ms Potatohead, is that you?

This compilation includes the college student toilet break.

And here we have The Office’s David Brent-like background behaviour and, it seems, someone who thinks it’s real. Plus, the kid who scolds his nagging mother while speaking with the professor.

Was work life more productive before we all came home for Covid-19? Maybe. Have Zoom fails given us a welcome glimpse into the humanity of our fellow students and workers? For sure!

The post Zoom fails in times of coronavirus appeared first on Australian Times News.

If the UK goes ahead with the plan, they’ll join countries like South Korea and Singapore who have used mobile apps to aid the efforts to slow the rate of infection.

Its believed that NHSX, the innovation arm of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is partnering with Pivotal, which is a US-based company, to develop a tracking app.

Privacy concerns

The app could be released once the UK relaxes the current lockdown restrictions. Many countries have had to make a significant concession on personal freedoms by limiting citizens movement.

However, using cellphone apps to track citizens opens up another can of worms where privacy is concerned.

As much as we all want to do our part to flatten the curve of new infections letting the government track our every move sounds far too much like the start of almost every dystopian sci-fi film.

In order to combat the apparent privacy concerns, the app is said to be opt-in. That means participation will be voluntary. It is hoped however that at least 50% of the country’s population will, in fact, opt-in.

Bluetooth instead of GPS

According to reports, the UK are also considering using Bluetooth technology to help track and trace efforts for people who have been in contact with someone who tests positive for the virus.

Using Bluetooth instead of GPS data would help resolve at least some of the privacy concerns. With Bluetooth, the app would be able to keep track of which phones also running the app have been in close proximity.

This will make it a lot easier to inform people who may unwittingly have interacted with someone who later tests positive for the coronavirus. This will also mean that the government will not have a complete record of your comings and goings.

Tracking of phones in South Africa

Over in South Africa, the government has, according to their statements, been using information from cellphone companies to try and do similar contact tracing.

They have specifically mentioned this kind of contact tracing in cases like that of a resident who fled a province after testing positive.

The government have not been very transparent about what this entails and exactly what data they would use.

An app too far?

Getting a knock on the door by government employees because my cellphone data placed me in the same area as someone who tested positive for coronavirus, while helpful, seems overly invasive from a personal privacy point of view.

With TheSouthAfrican.com

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Just a few years ago, your cellphone was only used to send and receive text messages and calls. Today, it’s a mini-computer capable of navigating you around the globe, while taking high-quality photos and keeping in touch with your friends.

There are many ways mobile technology can enhance your travels. Here are a few suggestions.

How to use mobile technology during your travels

Browse, research, book

From finding the best flight deals to booking accommodation and learning about the best tourist attractions, you can be sure that there’s an app for everything.

You can monitor your bookings, make amendments or cancellations online and on the go. In addition, many hotels and airlines now offer messaging options and chatbots, making communication so much easier.

AI ChatBots can answer the most commonly-asked questions without a hitch, and can assist travellers in checking rates and managing their bookings easily.

Language and translation apps

From language and translation app to Google Translate’s new point-and-translate service, making your way around the globe has never been this easy.

The apps are easy to use, and you don’t have to carry a heavy phrase book with the common tourist phrases around anymore. Simply use the app, or even easier, point your phone’s camera at the text and wait for the magic to happen.

Watch: How Augmented Reality (AR) and mobile technology is revolutionising translating

Navigation and wayfinding apps

You can use Google Maps to navigate, well, pretty much everywhere on Earth. There are apps to help you around malls, parking lot and airports as well. Additionally, share your live location with a friend as a safety precaution.

Furthermore, Google Maps allows you to save any location to a list for future reference. It’s the ideal way to keep track of all the places you want to visit at some point.

Simply click on the location and save it. You’ll be able to see the saved locations (green flags) on your map. If you’re ever in the area, you’d be able to spot it easily as you navigate around.

This is a screenshot of my personal Google Maps account. I’ve saved all the places I want to visit to the ‘Want to go’ list, and have other lists too: favourite places, friends to visit, etc.

Priority Pass’ in-app airport maps, for example, assist travellers to easily locate available lounges and other airport amenities, taking the guess work out of navigating around a strange airport. Never miss a flight again!

Also read – Google Maps rolls out AR walking directions on Android and iOS

Save on packing space

Gone are the days when you had to fill your suitcase with unnecessary junk. Now you can listen to thousands of hours of music on an iPod, Spotify, Google Music or iTunes.

If you’re a lover of books, you can now carry an entire library with you on a Kindle or your e-reader of choice, and save a ton of space in your luggage.

If you want to snap a few holiday photos, your phone doubles as a camera and video recorder. Remote worker? Sure, just pack your tablet or laptop. Or, as I like to refer to it, ‘my entire office.’

Boarding passes and loyalty passes

Mobile boarding passes have revolutionised the way travel. It has cut down on the amount of paper used by airlines, as well as the time it takes travellers to get through the check-in process.

“Tech-savvy travellers can simply breeze through boarding gates with a turn of the wrist. Advances in technology mean that biometrics could soon do away with the traditional boarding pass entirely, with passengers’ faces becoming their ticket to travel. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security says it expects to use facial recognition technology on 97% of departing passengers within the next four years.”

 Phil Seward, Destination CRM.

Electronic payments

Gone are the days when travellers needed to do an electronic transfer (EFT) or swipe your credit card. While there’s nothing wrong with those methods, we now have many more options.

From Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and Google Wallet, to PayPal Here (thanks, Elon Musk!), ROAM Pay and GlobalVCard, going cashless has never been easier.

Not also does it ensure your safety – not having to carry cash your person – but it saves you time. No more standing in ATM queues or carrying a bulky wallet. And then there are also currency apps.

Exchange rates constantly fluctuate and working our foreign currency can often just lead to a nasty headache. With currency apps like XE Currency or CalConvert, you’d be able to calculate the cost of the coffee in a jiffy.

Watch: Autonomous travel will rely on people and computers working together

With TSA

The post Here’s how mobile technology can enhance your travel experience appeared first on Australian Times News.

In simplistic terms, if your phone was your house, the sets of permissions would be the rooms in your house. So, you may invite a handyman into your home and be happy for them to access the rooms they need to work in.

But you’d want to make sure they stayed out of your bedroom and your study. Or your vault full of gold coins that you sometimes swim through.

Similarly, when you invite an app onto your phone, you want it to have the correct permissions for the work it needs to do and no more.

App developers found loopholes

However, according to a study presented at PrivacyCon 2019, app makers making use of certain Source Development Kits (SDK) are finding ways around the permissions system.

In general terms, an SDK is a framework for creating applications on an environment, namely android in this case.

It’s a way of documenting and distributing development tools for specific environments.

In this case, SDKs built by Baidu and Salmonads, both Chinese firms, could allow Android apps using the same SDK to pass data to each other and then to their servers.

Using the house analogy, this is essentially like the handyman letting Mickey Mouse into your kitchen even though you only gave Mickey permission to jump around on the trampoline in the yard.

Big-brand apps are culprits too

Alarmingly, the threat isn’t just from shady Android apps from small developers. The report identifies apps from Samsung and Disney that have hundreds of millions of downloads.

Additionally, the study focused on Shutterfly. Shutterfly is an Android photo app which does not ask permission to track your location.

However, the developers have worked around this by extracting your GPS information from the EXIF metadata in your photos; and sending actual GPS coordinates back to its servers.

Android will address the problem

Android has promised fixes for many of these vulnerabilities – some of which they’ve known about for a while – with the launch of Android Q. However Security experts are rightly warning that that’s too little late.

Adoption of the latest Android version is notoriously slow. By May this year, just 10.4% of Android phones were running Android P. With Android Q almost upon us, over 60% of Android users are still running the 4-year-old Android N.

The post Thousands of Android apps track your phone without permission appeared first on Australian Times News.

The importance of securing your data

The need to be aware of cybersecurity threats have become quite significant in recent years according to VPNRanks. Due to Net Neutrality rules being repealed, increasing cybersecurity threats, strict internet censorship, and geo-restriction laws, the online world is no longer a safe space to be. 

Data security has become critically important for individuals but more so for corporates. It’s now more important than ever to read up on a few travel safety tips.

The constant threat of hackers trying to get hold of your banking and other account information is probably enough to make you want to work from home until you get invited to come in for your retirement party.

According to Locomote, identity theft amongst business travellers was two to four times more likely. Rest assured, there are a few relatively easy steps you can take to reduce the risk to the data you carry around on your devices.

Secure your device

While making your way through airports, coffee shops and hotels your phone is probably the device you’re most likely to lose. If your phone is running Android or iOS, switch on the Find My Phone feature.

Whether it’s forgetting it on your seat in the plane or setting it down while retrieving your travel documents, your phone is going to be the number one candidate for loss or theft.

But the find your phone feature will give you a chance to recover your device, as long as it’s switched on. Some operating systems and third party software will even allow you to wipe your phone if necessary.

Keep track of your devices

You’ll want to keep your devices with you all the time. Don’t let your phone, tablet or laptop leave your sight. And apart from the obvious risk of theft, it’s not impossible that someone could hack your machine and install malware on it.

In the same vein, don’t leave your devices in your hotel room. If you really have to, consider using the safe. However, first prize would still be to keep your devices on or around your person at all times.

Secure your hard drives

Your hard drive should be encrypted. If it’s encrypted already, run as fast as you can and go encrypt it. Now.

You have a password on your laptop, phone and tablet. But in reality, if you haven’t encrypted your data then nothing really stops someone from taking your hard drive or SD card out of your machine and plugging it into theirs.

They will then be able to view the contents of your drive quite easily. Encryption ensures that your data is only accessible when you or your operating system gives it the correct security key.

Secured over public networks

Secure public Wi-Fi doesn’t exist, as simply as that. Treat every public Wi-Fi hotspot like a firearm and proceed with extreme caution. Always assume it’s loaded and able to do you severe damage.

Hackers will commonly try and intercept your data between your devices and the hotspot. If you absolutely have to connect to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, then you need to use a virtual private network (VPN).

This will encrypt everything you send or receive from your machine. You can also set up a VPN on your phone, tablet and laptop.

Be alert, think ahead

The easiest way to mitigate your risk when it comes to data security is to make sure that you never have to carry any sensitive information you don’t need on your devices.

If your work involves sensitive data, get in the habit of only keeping information that you need for your trip on your machines while travelling.

This will limit the risk, should your computer be lost, stolen or your security breached.

With TheSouthAfrican.com

The post Tech travel safety tips: How to protect your devices and data while on the go appeared first on Australian Times News.

The US study found that Twitter users are younger, highly educated, and earning higher incomes when compared to the general US population. Twitter’s netizens were more likely to identify as Democrats.

About 36% of the Twitter users interviewed identified as Democrat, compared to the 26% of adults from the general public who identify as Republican.

Different sets of values

The two groups also differed in their opinions on political values with regards to race, gender and immigration. According to research conducted by Pew, 66% believed that immigrants would strengthen the US. About 62% said existing barriers in society make it harder for women to get ahead.

Compared to the general public, only 57% believed in the benefits of immigration. Moreover, 56% felt that societal barriers are holding women back.

The research shows that only 64% of the focus group believed that white people were treated more fairly than other sectors of the population. That is compared to the 54% of the general public who agreed with that statement.

In addition, the study found that the median user in the top 10% by tweet volume created more than 130 tweets per month, “favourites” 70 posts per month, follows approximately 456 accounts and has on average 387 followers.

With TheSouthAfrican.com

TOP IMAGE: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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Airbnb

With Airbnb, you can either rent individual rooms in someone’s house or an entire apartment. The platform puts you in touch with locals who rent out rooms, apartments – even couches – and you can get amazing deals and hidden gems if you tweak the search filters a little bit.

The app handles everything pertaining to the transaction for you, from finding the host, to paying for your stay. Protip: When you connect your Gmail account to Airbnb, they will get access to your contact list. If you don’t want that to happen, sign up with an email specifically set aside for newsletters and junk mail.

Hostelworld

Much like Airbnb, Hostelworld sorts out your accommodation crises for you. Search for accommodation using an interactive map, get all the information you need and read reviews from other travellers.

With Hostelworld you’ll save on accommodation costs, and it will also suggest activities and tourist attractions in the area which might be of interest. Add different filters to your searches to find the perfect accommodation for you.

Trail Wallet

When you set out on your travels, money might be the last thing you want to worry about. We know, you just want to enjoy your time away from away, chase adventures and experience new things. But the entire trips could go very sour very quickly if you’re not clever with your financials.

With Trail Wallet, you can keep track of your expenses. It allows you to organise by trip or by or by month. Set a daily budget to ensure you don’t overspend and it is straightforward to update the app and add new transactions.

Skyscanner

The easiest way, by far, to find cheap flights. The app collects data from more than 1,200 sources to ensure you get the best options available. It will also compare flights for the most affordable and most accessible routes.

A particularly useful feature is the chart that allows you to see which days of the months to get the best deals. Fly to anywhere in the world and use Skyscanner to get your say. More than 60 million people use Skyscanner.

Roadtrippers

Last but not least, Roadtrippers. It lets you build custom travel itineraries. You can plot your route directly from the app, or via their website. The app will then show you exciting attractions along the way, scenic locations and where to get a meal.

You can set up your interests in advance so that the app will show you what you want to see. Then, share the route with your friends or travel buddies. It’s flexible to use, and you can change or add more stops as you go.

TOP IMAGE: Pixabay/FunkyFocus

The post Five must-have travel apps for your next trip appeared first on Australian Times News.