Virtual medicine, or medical extended reality, uses virtual reality headsets and imaging software to supplement conventional medical treatments. Practitioners from around the world shared best practices at a recent conference in Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports.
…
Day: April 18, 2023
Like most Facebook users, I am targeted by advertisements relating to my interests, particularly Native American.
So, when an ad popped up recently advertising a “Navajo Tufa Cast Corn Stalk Design Bracelet” cast from 55 grams of sterling silver, it got my attention, especially because its price was an implausible $6.48.
“Because of Black Friday, we produced … a lot of items, but we can’t sell them all … now we need to pay suppliers a lot of money,” is how the Cuterise website explained the low price.
The Scam Detector website rated Cuterise “Risky. Dubious. Perilous.” But curiosity got the best of me, so I accepted the risk and ordered the bracelet. While waiting for it to ship — if anything shipped at all — I decided to learn everything I could about it.
Tufa casting involves pouring molten silver into a mold carved out of soft volcanic stone found in New Mexico and Arizona. The Navajo have been using it to make jewelry since the mid-1800s.
Tufa is fragile and can crumble after a single casting. For this reason, artists often make a “master” using molten lead instead of silver that can be used to mold and cast multiple copies.
Genealogy of a bracelet
An image search on Google Lens turned up several matching bracelets, ranging in price from $300 to $900, but none were hallmarked by the maker.
I found the identical bracelet on the eBay auction site, which named the maker: Navajo Nation artist Eugene Mitchell. I tracked down his son Reggie Mitchell and sent him the photo of the bracelet I’d ordered. He confirmed that his father made that design in the 1970s.
“Our family has been making jewelry for a long time,” he said. “I’m the fifth generation, and my oldest son Bronson is the sixth.”
And for six generations, he added, his family has helped make Gallup, New Mexico, arts and crafts dealers rich.
“Back in the ‘70s, the FBI investigated Gallup because more 100-dollar bills were circulating there than in all of Las Vegas,” he said. “Gallup produced over 200 millionaires in that seven- to 10-year time period, and the source was Native American jewelry.”
I couldn’t find any data to confirm this, so I reached out to the Gallup McKinley County Chamber of Commerce.
“While the story has circulated in and around our community for years, it is more urban legend than truth,” Chamber of Commerce CEO Bill Lee responded via email. “What I will tell you is that even in today’s world of credit/debit cards, Gallup merchants still deal with very high volumes of cash.”
Reggie Mitchell remembers going with his father to Gallup, where he says a dealer “would always try to lowball the value” of his work.
“If it was two pieces of jewelry, they would give him money to make two more pieces and buy two meals,” he said. “And if they paid him, say, $100 for one piece, they’d turn around and sell it for six, seven, $800.”
It was on one of those trips to Gallup that Eugene Mitchell was robbed.
“My dad used to keep his lead masters in old coffee cans,” Mitchell said. “One day, he came out of a shop and discovered someone had broken his car window and taken the cans.”
Mitchell isn’t sure whether the master for the cornstalk bracelet was among the items stolen that day. He says his father found out later that New Mexico galleries were making rubber molds of the designs and selling copies “on the cheap.”
“And my dad would see them and say, ‘That’s my work, that’s my piece!’”
After that, the elder Mitchell cut out the middleman, and today, the family sells directly to their customers.
Bait and switch
I was surprised when Cuterise emailed me delivery tracking information. My order originated in Dongguan, China, a city dubbed “the world’s factory” and was now in transit to the U.S.
Clearly, I was going to receive something for my $6.48. But what? A plastic bracelet?
Ten days later, my order arrived. The package was flat and squishy. I tore it open and almost laughed. They’d sent me a pair of cheap stretch leggings printed to look like blue jeans – buttons, rivets and all.
My amusement faded as I thought about everything Reggie Mitchell told me. The family may not be using middlemen anymore, but Eugene Mitchell is still being exploited — this time by fraudsters halfway around the globe using photographs of a bracelet he made — and lost — 50 years ago.
…
Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, announced a provisional approval of the R21 vaccine during a media briefing on Monday.
The regulatory agency’s consent came days after Ghana approved the vaccine.
NAFDAC said the vaccine is 70 to 80 percent efficient in preventing the mosquito-borne disease and could protect millions of children.
The agency’s director general, Mojisola Adeyeye, spoke to journalists in Abuja.
“The vaccine is indicated for prevention of clinical malaria on children from five months to 36 months of age,” Adeyeye said.
NAFDAC did not say when the vaccine will be rolled out, but Adeyeye said Nigeria will conduct in-country clinical trials and pharmacovigilance study.
The WHO says some 600,000 people die of malaria every year, most of them in Africa, many of them young children.
Nigeria accounts for the highest numbers of cases and deaths from malaria globally. Health experts say the vaccine could be a game changer.
Kunle Olobayo is a lead researcher at the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development.
“A proactive, preemptive intervention will definitely be most useful especially in countries like Nigeria,” said Olobayo. “Many interventions and steps that have been taken to reduce transmission have not been very successful because of our level of development, poverty. So, it will definitely change the dynamics.
The WHO has yet to approve the vaccine. The WHO Nigeria malaria program head, Lynda Ozor, said authorities are still reviewing the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
“The WHO is reviewing the R21 data, and it’s being supported by an independent global advisory group on immunization and malaria experts.,” said Ozor. “This group will advise the WHO on whether to recommend the R21 vaccines for use. It has to be approved by the WHO to compliment the rollout of the first vaccine.”
Last year, the WHO consented to the world’s first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix.
Olobayo said that, without donor support, African countries could struggle to acquire the vaccines.
“Vaccines in Nigeria historically tend to be dependent on donor funding,” said Olobayo. “I have a feeling there might be some substantial international funding to get these products widely used.”
Oxford University is working with the Serum Institute of India to produce up to 200 million doses of R21 every year.
…
Mozambique has asked the World Health Organization to supply an additional 2 million doses of a cholera vaccine as the country struggles to control a spreading outbreak.
The head of the Department of National Health Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Domingos Guihole, told VOA that the government awaits the WHO’s response to the cholera vaccine request, admitting difficulties due to the high global demand for vaccines.
“At this moment in Mozambique, the cholera situation is not good,” Guihole said. “It is not good because we have 10 provinces affected by cholera. We have 53 districts in the whole country, 45 of which have active cholera disease.”
The official said the intent is to vaccinate the population in high-risk areas, such as the northern province of Nampula and Zambezia in the central part of the country.
Both provinces were hit hard by Cyclone Freddy, which tore across Mozambique twice inside two weeks last month.
All five provinces impacted by Freddy on its first and second passes have witnessed cholera outbreaks.
In addition to the risk of cholera, the government is concerned about a potential increase in cases of other waterborne diseases such as dysentery. Malaria is a concern, too; both are among the leading causes of mortality in Mozambique.
“During almost seven months from October to April 16, we have notified 27,000 cases of cholera with 124 deaths, so the situation is not good,” said Guihole. “We have to say to all Mozambicans that we must follow the recommendations from the Ministry of Health related to the hygiene of water, hygiene of food, and even the collective hygiene as well.”
In many parts of Mozambique, health workers are struggling to treat infected citizens at clinics and hospitals that were badly damaged by Cyclone Freddy.
The record-breaking storm, which lasted for several weeks, killed dozens of people in Mozambique and Malawi and destroyed many roads and bridges in addition to hospitals.
…
A growing number of startups are using artificial intelligence to replicate human voices. A company is creating synthetic voices for organizations to use for advertising, marketing and training. Phil Dierking reports.
…
Apple Inc. opened its first flagship store in India in a much-anticipated launch Tuesday that highlights the company’s growing aspirations to expand in the country it also hopes to turn into a potential manufacturing hub.
The company’s CEO Tim Cook posed for photos with a few of the 100 or so Apple fans who had lined up outside the sprawling 20,000-square-foot store in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, its design inspired by the iconic black-and-yellow cabs unique to the city. A second store will open Thursday in the national capital, New Delhi.
“India has such a beautiful culture and an incredible energy, and we’re excited to build on our long-standing history,” Cook said in a statement earlier.
The tech giant has been operating in India for more than 25 years, selling its products through authorized retailers and the website it launched a few years ago. But regulatory hurdles and the pandemic delayed its plans to open a flagship store.
The new stores are a clear signal of the company’s commitment to invest in India, the second-largest smartphone market in the world where iPhone sales have been ticking up steadily, said Jayanth Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy. The stores show “how much India matters to the present and the future of the company,” he added.
For the Cupertino, California-based company, India’s sheer size makes the market especially encouraging.
About 600 million of India’s 1.4 billion people have smartphones, “which means the market is still under-penetrated and the growth prospect is huge,” said Neil Shah, vice president of research at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.
Between 2020 and 2022, the Silicon Valley company has gained some ground in the smartphone market in the country, going from just about 2% to capturing 6%, according to Counterpoint data.
Still, the iPhone’s hefty price tag puts it out of reach for the majority of Indians.
Instead, iPhone sales in the country have thrived among the sliver of upper-middle-class and rich Indians with disposable incomes, a segment of buyers that Shah says is rising. According to Counterpoint data, Apple has captured 65% of the “premium” smartphone market, where prices range up from 30,000 rupees ($360).
In September, Apple announced it would start making its iPhone 14 in India. The news was hailed as a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has pushed for ramping up local manufacturing ever since he came to power in 2014.
Apple first began manufacturing from India in 2017 with its iPhone SE and has since continued to assemble a number of iPhone models from the country.
Most of Apple’s smartphones and tablets are assembled by contractors with factories in China, but the company started looking at potentially moving some production to Southeast Asia or other places after repeated shutdowns to fight COVID-19 disrupted its global flow of products.
“Big companies got a jolt, they realized they needed a backup strategy outside of China — they couldn’t risk another lockdown or any geopolitical rift affecting their business,” said Kolla.
Currently, India makes close to 13 million iPhones every year, up from less than 5 million three years ago, according to Counterpoint Research. This is about 6% of iPhones made globally — and only a small slice in comparison to China, which still produces around 90% of them.
Last week, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the government was in regular touch with Apple to support their business here and that the company had plans to have 25% of their global production come out of India in the next five years.
The challenge for Apple, according to Shah of Counterpoint, is that the raw materials are still coming from outside India so the tech company will need to either find a local supplier or bring their suppliers, based in countries like China, Japan and Taiwan, closer to drive up production.
Still, he’s optimistic this target could be met, especially with labor costs being lower in India and the government wooing companies with attractive subsidies to boost local manufacturing.
“For Apple, everything is about timing. They don’t enter a market with full flow until they feel confident about their prospects. They can see the opportunity here today — it’s a win-win situation,” Shah said.
…
Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google.
He criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.”
He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.
“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday.
He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.”
“It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.
Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm listed Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
‘Civilizational destruction’
The move came even after Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.
Musk also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production” according to the excerpts.
“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said.
He said, for example, that a super intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.
He tweeted over the weekend that he had met with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.
He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.
In the interview with Fox News, Musk said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.
In January, Microsoft Corp announced a further multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
…
The share of Americans who volunteer their time to help charities build houses, serve food, do environmental cleanup, and much else has been on the decline nationwide but nowhere as sharply as in Florida, where only 16% of residents donate their free hours to local organizations, according to the latest available statistics.
That’s a drop from the nearly 23% of residents who volunteered in 2017.
Florida’s volunteer rate slumped in large part because of the pandemic, which made it especially risky for older Americans — who are among the most loyal and regular part of the volunteer population in Florida and elsewhere — to interact in public settings.
The loss of those volunteers is painful for many nonprofits, which are stretched to provide needed services and programs because they face a tight job market for paid workers and increased demands for help.
“What’s happening now is actually the staff is wearing multiple hats, as many nonprofit staff members do, to make up for the gap of volunteers,” says Sabeen Perwaiz Syed, CEO of the Florida Nonprofit Alliance, which represents charitable organizations across the state.
Meanwhile, Wyoming was the only state in the country to chalk up an increase in volunteering. Nearly 40% of residents volunteer, according to the latest figures available, compared with slightly less than 33% in 2017. The growth is in part because its open spaces made it easier for volunteers to keep working safely during the pandemic, and now nonprofits are seeking to capitalize on people’s growing interest in giving their time.
Those figures are part of an AmeriCorps analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data for 2017, 2019, and 2021, the latest year available.
The challenge of finding ways to attract and keep volunteers is not a new issue facing nonprofits, although it has been worsened by the pandemic.
Nathan Dietz, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, says charities that didn’t focus on retaining volunteers during the pandemic may find it difficult to get them back.
“There were some organizations who, during the pandemic, they just said, ‘We don’t know how we’re going to do volunteer management or volunteer engagement, and we don’t really have time to figure it out because we have bigger problems,'” Dietz said. “When people disengage from that kind of regular activity, it’s hard to re-engage them even if you’re trying to actively do that.”
Wyoming, known for wide-open spaces, including Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, had fewer restrictions and closings than many states throughout Covid-19. That kept more volunteer opportunities open and minimized disruptions to volunteers’ routines.
The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, a conservation nonprofit near Grand Teton National Park, relies on volunteers to collect local wildlife data and remove fencing that’s harmful to animals. The organization says more people wanted to volunteer during the pandemic than in past years.
Steve Morriss, a longtime volunteer with the foundation and other local nonprofits, says volunteer work in the outdoors was especially appealing for retirees like him during the pandemic because it allowed them to socially distance but still interact with others and do good.
The Heart of Wyoming Habitat for Humanity chapter, which relies on volunteers to build homes in Natrona County, saw an uptick in volunteering interest after re-opening its construction sites during the pandemic. Companies that previously provided financial support, in particular, began to give their employees time off to volunteer at Habitat.
The Wyoming Community Development Authority, a housing lender, is one financial supporter whose employees spent two days last year working on a Habitat construction site.
“Now it was no longer enough to make a gift, which we very much appreciate,” says Tess Mittelstadt, the nonprofit’s executive director. “But they wanted to see what that gift meant, and they wanted to see what that meant for people in our community.”
Jody Shields of the Wyoming Nonprofit Network says since the pandemic, she’s noticed increased interest from companies looking for volunteer opportunities because they allow employees both to bond with one another and to support local causes.
Mittelstadt says the organization is seeking to keep volunteerism high by providing volunteers with information about the specific families they’re helping by building houses. Habitat also invites volunteers to events celebrating completed homes.
Data suggests all the effort is paying off. Volunteers spent 57% more hours building new homes during the nonprofit’s last fiscal year compared with the previous year, according to Mittelstadt.
“Everybody knows somebody in our community, and everybody’s willing to lend that helping hand,” she says.
Even as the pandemic has receded, volunteerism is not rebounding in Florida, says Perwaiz Syed of the Florida Nonprofit Alliance.
“Nonprofits have had a lot of volunteers stop,” she says. “They have not returned. Many of them are seniors. They’re putting their health first and have not re-engaged in person.”
A study of 2,300 nonprofits by the alliance found that 40% of nonprofits reported they needed more volunteers and 25% of nonprofit employees said they were feeling overworked as they took on tasks previously done by volunteers.
The Manatee Literacy Council, which provides adult literacy tutoring, employs three part-time staff members and has 60 volunteer tutors, mostly retirees, available year-round. It lost 75% of its volunteers during the height of the pandemic. The program was able to move some of its work online, but it still can’t meet demand. The center currently has a waiting list of 100 people in need of tutoring.
To recruit more volunteers, the group sends representatives to community events to talk about its work, says Michelle Deveaux McLean, the council’s CEO.
She also says she is working hard to keep volunteers returning by organizing monthly meet-ups and creating a supportive environment. It continues to be a struggle.
“I’m lucky if I have five volunteers every month. We’re just perpetually upside down,” McLean says.
Other Florida nonprofits are turning more to online volunteering and enlisting companies to urge employees to volunteer.
For instance, Office Depot, based in South Florida, includes volunteerism as part of its professional development for employees. Since 2017, the company has sent workers to help charities do landscaping, paint murals, prepare meals for youths in Florida, and more.
Even as nonprofits work on a variety of ways to try to expand the number of volunteers, doing so may take time.
“I do think that Florida’s numbers will increase over time as we stabilize a bit from the pandemic,” Perwaiz Syed says. “I don’t think you’re going to see us in the top 10 because that’s just not possible to go that far that quickly. But I do think it will increase a little bit.”
…
Senegalese singer-songwriter Baaba Maal on Monday was named a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification.
Maal has long been an activist on climate change and refugees. Since 2003, he has been committed to various development challenges in Africa, working with different U.N. family organizations.
His NANN-K Trust recently opened a solar-powered irrigation project in Senegal to fight desertification, which is one of the main drivers of people leaving the country on dangerous migration routes. The project will train people to start similar projects in their own communities.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Maal said he is a believer in putting power in the hands of young people and women.
“We are tackling climate change impact, but also fighting desertification on the African continent, especially in my region where we are just not far away from the desert and we see it coming to us,” he said.
“And it had an impact because people who don’t get more opportunities to do agriculture, fishing and many more will have to run away from their places, go to the big cities where nothing is planned for them there, and then later on, some of the young ones will just take the boats to go to Spain or some of these places or just try to cross the desert and it’s really dangerous. We did lose a lot of lives.”
Brought up in the small town of Podor in north Senegal, which has a fishing community at its heart, Maal was born into a fisherman caste and was expected to follow that career path, but he befriended storyteller and musician Mansour Seck, and has spent his life performing, traveling and raising awareness about the issues his homeland faces.
“Our role is first to give news about what’s going on, because sometimes the local people, they don’t know what’s happening to them is the impact of climate change. They don’t know how to stand up against that. But at the same time, when they know about it, they will say what to do,” he said.
The veteran musician released his first album in seven years, “Being,” on March 31 and will headline the Barbican in London for the first time in 20 years on May 30.
…