Day: October 8, 2023

Tourists at the Acropolis this holiday season can witness the resolution of one of the world’s most heated debates on cultural heritage.

All they need is a smartphone.

Visitors can now pinch and zoom their way around the ancient Greek site, with a digital overlay showing how it once looked. That includes a collection of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon more than 200 years ago that are now on display at the British Museum in London. Greece has demanded they be returned.

For now, an app supported by Greece’s Culture Ministry allows visitors to point their phones at the Parthenon temple, and the sculptures housed in London appear back on the monument as archaeologists believe they looked 2,500 years ago.

Other, less widely known features also appear: Many of the sculptures on the Acropolis were painted in striking colors. A statue of goddess Athena in the main chamber of the Parthenon also stood over a shallow pool of water.

“That’s really impressive … the only time I’ve seen that kind of technology before is at the dentist,” Shriya Parsotam Chitnavis, a tourist from London, said after checking out the app on a hot afternoon at the hilltop Acropolis, Greece’s most popular archaeological site.

“I didn’t know much about the (Acropolis), and I had to be convinced to come up here. Seeing this has made it more interesting — seeing it in color,” she said. “I’m more of a visual person, so this being interactive really helped me appreciate it.”

The virtual restoration works anywhere and could spare some visitors the crowded uphill walk and long wait to see the iconic monuments up close. It might also help the country’s campaign to make Greek cities year-round destinations.

Tourism, vital for the Greek economy, has roared back since the COVID-19 pandemic, even as wildfires chased visitors from the island of Rhodes and affected other areas this summer. The number of inbound visitors from January through July was up 21.9% to 16.2 million compared with a year ago, according to the Bank of Greece. Revenue was up just over 20%, to 10.3 billion euros ($10.8 billion).

The app, called Chronos after the mythological king of the Titans and Greek word for “time,” uses augmented reality to place the ancient impression of the site onto the screen, matching the real-world view as you walk around.

AR is reaching consumers after a long wait and is set to affect a huge range of professional and leisure activities.

Medical surgery, military training and specialized machine repair as well as retail and live event experiences are all in the sights of big tech companies betting on a lucrative future in immersive services. Tech giant like Meta and Apple are pushing into VR headsets that can cost thousands of dollars.

The high price tag will keep the cellphone as the main AR delivery platform to consumers for some time, said Maria Engberg, co-author of the book “Reality Media” on augmented and virtual reality.

She says services for travelers will soon offer a better integrated experience, allowing for more sharing options on tours and overlaying archive photos and videos.

“AR and VR have been lagging behind other kinds of things like games and movies that we’re consuming digitally,” said Engberg, an associate professor of computer science and media technology at Malmo University in Sweden.

“I think we will see really interesting customer experiences in the next few years as more content from museums and archives becomes digitized,” she said.

Greece’s Culture Ministry and national tourism authority are late but enthusiastic converts to technology. The popular video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which allows players to roam ancient Athens, was used to attract young travelers from China to Greece with a state-organized photo contest.

Microsoft partnered with the Culture Ministry two years ago to launch an immersive digital tour at ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games in southern Greece.

Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said the innovations would boost accessibility to Greece’s ancient monuments, supplementing the recent installation of ramps and anti-slip pathways.

“Accessibility is extending to the digital space,” Mendoni said at a preview launch event for the Chronos app in May. “Real visitors and virtual visitors anywhere around the world can share historical knowledge.”

Developed by Greek telecoms provider Cosmote, the free app’s designers say they hope to build on existing features that include an artificial intelligence-powered virtual guide, Clio.

“As technologies and networks advance, with better bandwidth and lower latencies, mobile devices will be able to download even higher-quality content,” said Panayiotis Gabrielides, a senior official at the telecom company involved in the project.

Virtual reconstructions using Chronos also cover three other monuments at the Acropolis, an adjacent Roman theater and parts of the Acropolis Museum built at the foot of the rock.
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In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors.

That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media.

“My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas.

Many LGBTQ+ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere.

As lawmakers in some states limit what can be taught about sex and gender, it will be that much more difficult for those students to come by inclusive material in classrooms.

New laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ+ content from classrooms.

Sex education curriculum varies widely. Some groups including Planned Parenthood have called for sex education to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ students, but some states outright forbid such an approach.

The penal code in Texas, for one, still says curriculum developed by the Department of State Health Services must say homosexuality is not acceptable and is a criminal offense, even though such language was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. Attempts in the Legislature to remove that line from state law have failed.

In practice, LGBTQ+ students say they have looked elsewhere for sex education. Some described watching their peers turn to pornography, and others said they watched videos on YouTube about how to tell if someone is gay and how to flirt with people of the same sex.

Gage grew up in Oklahoma before her military family relocated and she spent her eighth and ninth grade years in a U.S. Department of Defense school in the Netherlands. She then finished high school in Kansas, where she began to recognize she wasn’t attracted only to men.

Not seeing a safe outlet at her high school to explore who she was, she went online to research for herself the history of the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S.

“I started to realize there is a huge portion of our history that is conveniently left out. But that history is important to queer youth,” she said. She never really questioned gender or social norms, she said, until she started to learn about discrimination others have faced throughout history. “We have such rigid boxes that we expect people to fit into. If you didn’t fit, you were called slurs. I wasn’t really aware that if you strayed from those norms that people would feel you were attacking their way of life.”

Still, the internet contains vast amounts of false information. Some advocates worry students turning to the internet to fill gaps in sex education will struggle to find their way through the morass.

“Any time you have a political controversy, there is a greater potential for a lot more disinformation to be generated,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project.

When schools address sexuality, it is often in the context of disease prevention or anti-bullying programs. School can be a difficult place if your identity is seen only in such negative ways, said Tim’m West, a former teacher and now executive director of the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. West can relate: He grew up in Arkansas as a queer Black kid and preacher’s son and was constantly made to feel ashamed.

“What if you are a boy in high school that knows you like boys, and you sit in a divided room and listen to a teacher explain how not to have sex with girls. You would be sitting there rolling your eyes, because that is not your issue. But you also haven’t been given any instructions on how to protect yourself should you experiment with a person of the same gender,” West said.

Students need more applicable sex education regardless of their gender identity or expression, said Gage, who volunteers with a youth justice advocacy group and is also president of the Planned Parenthood Generation Action Chapter at Wichita State.

“We all have to make large decisions for ourselves about our sexuality and reproductive health. Those decisions should be grounded in knowledge,” she said.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ashton Gerber had more sex education classes than most. But Gerber, who is transgender, said the lessons weren’t all that applicable to their experience.

“Even if you can have sex education every day of the year, there is always going to be something that gets left out,” said Gerber, who is a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Gerber said educators should point students to trusted online resources so they can do their own research.

Not knowing who you are is a horrible feeling many LGBTQ+ students wrestle with, Gage said. But equally horrible is not feeling accepted once you do understand your sexual identity.

“Had I known then what I know now, I would have felt safe and confident coming out sooner,” Gage said. “No one should feel like they don’t understand themselves because we are forced to conformity in a world that doesn’t care. We can all be inclusive.” 
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A dose of patience may come in handy at the pharmacy counter this fall.

Drug and staffing shortages haven’t gone away. Stores are starting their busiest time of year as customers look for help with colds and the flu. And this fall, pharmacists are dealing with a new vaccine and the start of insurance coverage for COVID-19 shots.

Some drugstores have addressed their challenges by adding employees at busy hours. But experts say many pharmacies, particularly the big chains, still don’t have enough workers behind the counter.

Chris Adkins said he left his job as a pharmacist with a major drugstore chain a couple years ago because of the stress. Aside from filling and checking prescriptions, Adkins routinely answered the phone, ran the register and stocked pharmacy shelves.

“I just didn’t have time for the patients,” he said. “I am OK working hard and working long hours, but I just felt like I was not doing a good job as a pharmacist.”

In recent years, drugstores have struggled to fill open pharmacist and pharmacy technician positions, even as many have raised pay and dangled signing bonuses.

Larger drugstore chains often operate stores with only one pharmacist on duty per shift, said Richard Dang, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California. That kind of thin staffing can make it hard to recruit employees.

“I think that many pharmacists in the profession are hesitant to work for a company where they don’t feel supported,” said Dang, a former president of the California Pharmacists Association.

Customers have noticed.

John Staed, of Pelham, Alabama, said a CVS pharmacist gave him the wrong prescription about a decade ago: the pills were a different color than usual. He worries the chances for another mistake could increase as pharmacists take on more work.

“These pharmacists always look stressed,” he said.

A CVS spokeswoman said the company is focused on addressing concerns raised by its pharmacists and has taken several actions, including “providing additional pharmacy resources” in markets that need support. She declined to say how many pharmacists or technicians the company has hired.

Former Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer said in late June that the company had added more than 1,000 pharmacists in the second quarter, but was running into a shortage of job candidates. Walgreens is adding processing centers around the country to ease some of the prescription workload for its stores.

Brewer, who left in late August, also said the company was limiting hours at 1,100 pharmacies, or about 12% of its U.S. locations. That was down from 1,600 earlier this year, but a company executive has said it doesn’t expect to return all pharmacies to normal operating hours by year’s end.

Labor strife and staffing shortages in health care are not isolated to drugstores, as the recent Kaiser Permanente strike shows.

But drugstores have some additional challenges in the fall. Many customers come to them for vaccines for COVID-19, flu and pneumonia. Plus, federal officials have approved a new shot for people ages 60 and older for a virus called RSV.

All told, CVS touts in a pharmacy counter brochure that the company can offer more than 15 vaccines to customers.

Ongoing drug shortages also have kept pharmacy workers on the phone more.

Jonathan Marquess said one of his drugstores fielded 100 questions one day last fall about the antibiotic amoxicillin and the attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder treatment Adderall, two drugs in short supply.

Marquess runs several independent pharmacies in Georgia and serves on the National Community Pharmacists Association board. He has done a few things to help his stores adapt to the extra workload, he said, including training all employees to answer basic questions about vaccines.

Marquess also adds extra staff when he knows they will have an influx of customers, like when a nearby company sends its employees over for vaccines.

“We learned from our experiences,” he said. “Training your entire staff is very, very important.”

Pharmacists say customers aren’t powerless and can help things run smoothly.

People should bring all their insurance cards to vaccine appointments, especially since insurance coverage is new for the COVID-19 shots, Marquess said.

Dang said customers should avoid showing up right after pharmacies reopen from a lunch break or just before they close, times when pharmacists and technicians are especially busy.

Making appointments for vaccines gives pharmacy workers a better sense for their workload. Calling several days in advance for a prescription refill also helps, said Jen Cocohoba, a pharmacy professor at University of California San Francisco.

“That tiny piece of control can help, because there’s so many things you cannot predict when you’re inside the community pharmacy,” Cocohoba said.
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