New York City on Tuesday declared a health emergency following a measles outbreak in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.CreditCreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times
New York City on Tuesday declared a public health emergencyfollowing a measles outbreak in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would require unvaccinated individuals living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to receive the measles vaccine as the city escalated its efforts to stem one of the largest measles outbreaks in decades.
The mayor said the city would issue violations and possibly fines of $1,000 for those who did not comply.
“This is the epicenter of a measles outbreak that is very, very troubling and must be dealt with immediately,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference in Williamsburg, adding: “The measles vaccine works. It is safe, it is effective, it is time-tested.”
The measure follows a spike in measles infections in New York City, where there have been 285 confirmed cases since the outbreak began in the fall; 21 of those cases led to hospitalizations, including five admissions to the intensive care unit.
The majority of the cases have been concentrated in Hasidic communities in Williamsburg and Borough Park, Brooklyn
Jere and Sara Ann Brady are against the mini-casino project, at the proposed site in Morgantown, Berks County. (DAVID SWANSON / The Philadelphia Inquirer)
By ANDREW MAYKUTH | PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER |APR 08, 2019
Penn National Gaming, which operates the Hollywood Casino near Hershey, saw an opening to place a new gaming hall at a Pennsylvania Turnpike exit just outside Chester County to attract gamblers from Philadelphia’s growing western suburbs. Caernarvon Township, which includes Morgantown, saw an opportunity to capture host-community tax benefits for its 4,000 residents that otherwise might go to a neighboring municipality.
But many residents in this politically conservative area, where it’s not unusual to see Amish families driving horse-drawn carriages down Route 23 to shop at the Morgantown Walmart, regard the casino project as a deal with the devil. They see the proposed casino as a threat, an insult to a deeply religious community that could lead to an increase in drinking, personal bankruptcy, broken families and general moral decay.
“In every way, it’s incongruent with this community,” said Sam Rohrer, a former state representative, who is president of the American Pastors Network, based in the Chester County borough of Elverson, bordering Caernarvon.
Some opponents painted lurid portraits of crime, sex-trafficking and predators that would be drawn to the casino, and they feared that unspeakable acts might spill over into a public swimming pool next to the proposed casino site.
“The kind of stuff they were bringing up is crazy,” said Allen Styer III, the chairman of the Caernarvon Township Board of Supervisors, which welcomes the casino project as a major boost to the town’s tax base. “I don’t foresee any additional human trafficking or murder-for-hire in our town.”
Styer said Caernarvon acted defensively out of fear that neighboring New Morgan borough, a former iron ore mine that was notoriously formed into a municipality three decades ago to host a landfill, would gladly accommodate a mini-casino. If New Morgan got a casino, Caernarvon would get stuck with all the problems without receiving any host benefits, he said.
“It was really a no-brainer if you’re looking out for what’s the best interests of the community, based on facts,” Styer said. Penn National estimates Caernarvon would get $1.6 million annually in new tax revenue, or about 62 percent of the town’s current $2.6 million budget.
State Sen. Diane Savino, D-North Shore/Brooklyn, touring DB Labs, the first cannabis lab certified to open for cannabis testing by the State of Nevada.
You’ve heard of C-3PO. But are you ready for Seedo-3PO?
With New Jersey on the cusp of legalizing weed as early as next month, cannabis is expected to bring massive changes to the Garden State economy. But just how it will be grown is changing, too, thanks to an Israeli tech start-up with its eyes on New Jersey’s $1 billion weed market: Seedo.
“Cannabis is a very smart plant, but it’s very complicated to handle and grow it,” says Zohar Levy, CEO of Seedo, an Israeli and Maryland-based startup that claims to be able to quadruple the yield of traditional cannabis grows using climate-controlled chambers run by robots.
You see, despite the old cliché of “growing like a weed,” cannabis has actually been something of a high-maintenance slacker when it comes to its cultivation. Sure, it thrives in warm, sunny climates, but what doesn’t? In shade, it provides far less seed and pollen. It’s not tolerant of the cold, and does not reproduce well in drought. It’s also very susceptible to fungal infections, so too much water leaves it vulnerable to pathogens.
If this conjures an image of it as the plant kingdom’s version of the Bubble Boy, you’re not far off — Seedo says it’s found a work-around to its fragility that may just revolutionize the cannabis industry.
For years, high price of fetched by traditionally farmed cannabis and low cost of human labor conspired to make robotic farming uneconomical.
“It’s extremely difficult to automate (the cultivation) of something with lots of permutations, and when you’re looking at a cannabis plant, there’s an awful lot of them,” explains Fergal Glynn, a vice president at 6 River Systems, a Waltham, Mass.-based robotics company founded by by former Amazon Robotics executives. “Plants are something where it’s very difficult to get a human completely out of the mix.”
NJ Advance Media for NJ.comHarmony Dispensary in Secaucus grows medical cannabis the traditional way, with humans. But robotics might soon be changing the way weed is grown. (NJ Cannabis Insider)
Levy acknowledges this, but says Seedo found a solution that involved literally watching grass grow.
“The algorithm knows to manage the process from A to Z, because inside there’s a camera that scans the plant every few hours,” said Levy.
Eadaoin Quinn, director of business development and procurement for the Canadian firm, EFS Plastics, addressed municipal and county recyclers on April 3, 2019, at the Spring Meeting of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers.
She reviewed the types of household plastic waste that her firm would like to process into plastic resins for new uses.
But there are significant problems in capturing the materials from the waste stream because of China and mixed paper.
Also, In some cases, plastic bag bans are a problem for her company. In other cases, they help.
Sound confusing? Watch the video and all will be revealed.
By Guest Blogger Peter Georgiev, a graduate research assistant at Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and foreign correspondent for the Bulgarian National Television.
“I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my system uninterrupted.”
This is how Xinhua News’ artificial intelligence presenter announced itself to the global audience at the World Internet Conference in November. Modeled on a real anchor Zhang Zhow, the virtual newsreader is said to be the first of its kind, according to China’s state news agency. But signs that automated journalism will soon play a central role in the news media industry have long been there.
For news organizations, algorithms generating compelling narratives are an exciting prospect. Many would have raised an eyebrow when the Associated Press started relying on automation to cover minor league baseball and transform corporate earnings into publishable stories. Fast forward a couple of years and now it seems almost impossible to find a major news outlet that is not experimenting with their own robot reporter.
From a business perspective, that makes complete sense. News bots are convenient, cheap and don’t complain when asked to produce an article at 3 a.m. on a Saturday. Most of all, they are quick. In 2015, NPR’s Planet Money podcast set up a writing contest between one of its journalists and an algorithm. Spoiler alert: the algorithm won. It wasn’t even close.
Yet, for all their apparent infallibility, bots, like their human predecessors, are also vulnerable to mistakes. In the news business, one of the worst mistakes is committing libel. So, how should courts treat cases in which a robot generates a defamatory statement? Legal and tech experts believe now is the time to decide.
Thanks to a series of landmark rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the second half of the previous century, the First Amendment provides strong protection to journalists in defamation lawsuits. Public officials can’t recover damages for libel without first proving that the defendant had acted with “actual malice” — knowing that a statement was false or demonstrating reckless disregard for the truth.
“That just doesn’t work very well with an algorithm,” says Lyrissa Lidsky, dean of University of Missouri’s School of Law and an expert in First Amendment law. “It’s hard to talk about the knowledge that an algorithm has or whether an algorithm acted recklessly.”
Bots don’t make conscious choices when producing content. They behave on the basis of human-written code. Yet, programmers may not always be able to predict every single word of a story or its connotation, especially when machine learning is involved.
“As these cases start to arise and be litigated, there’s going to be a lot of education of the public about how algorithms work and what choices are made in designing algorithms,” Lidsky says.
While a bot cannot act with actual malice, its designer can. Robot reporting may appear to be impartial and objective, but humans often build their own biases into automated systems. This poses potential risks to publishers.
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg answers questions during a sold-out fundraising event at Bar Lubitsch in West Hollywood, Calif., last month. (Allison Zaucha/For The Washington Post)
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Pete Buttigieg was sitting in the back of a black SUV with a couple of staffers, sipping a still-steeping cup of tea to ease the fatigue from his suddenly frenetic schedule, when he looked out the window and interrupted himself.
“Man,” said Buttigieg, taking in the rainbow-hued signs and colorfully dressed passersby that signaled he had entered West Hollywood, Los Angeles’s de facto gay neighborhood. “It got real gay real quick out there.”
Few Democratic presidential candidates could assess their surroundings so bluntly without seeming painfully out of line. But Buttigieg is not like any other Democratic presidential candidate — in part, if not exclusively, because he is gay.
He was also a Rhodes scholar, a McKinsey & Co. consultant who pored over grocery prices and a military officer in Afghanistan. He was a mayor at 29 and reelected at 33. All of those experiences, he says, have chiseled him into the surprising presidential candidate he is at 37, barely beyond the constitutional age requirement for the job.
So has the fact, Buttigieg says, that he needed the Supreme Court to give him the freedom to marry his partner, Chasten Glezman. Same-sex marriage was illegal in Indiana until 2014, and he cites that to illustrate how government alters lives; his marriage exists, he tells voters at every stop, “by the grace of one vote on the Supreme Court.”
Buttigieg’s emergence gives Americans their second openly gay presidential candidate — activist Fred Karger sought the GOP nomination in 2012 — but the first, by far, to earn so much attention. Many gay Americans are celebrating Buttigieg’s quick climb as a sign of tangible progress. Others, mainly outside that community, wonder whether talking about Buttigieg’s candidacy as historic means undermining the notion that sexuality doesn’t matter.
“I don’t know which response I like more — the response that talks about how much it means to people or the response that people don’t care,” Buttigieg said. “I think it’s most significant for people who have a problem with it, or for people who are in the same boat and are struggling with it.”
