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Back to school means back to the spotlight for Big Tech

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Back to school could mean back to the hot seat for Big Tech.

Social media platforms TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat spent last school year embroiled in alawsuitaccusing them of disrupting learning, contributing to a mental health crisis among youth and leaving teachers to manage the fallout.

When students return to class this September, experts say the clash between tech and textbooks will be reignited — and perhaps even ratcheted up — as schools and parents reckon with the impacts social media is having on education.

“Back to school is happening at a different time this year than was true two years ago, three years ago, four years ago,” said Richard Lachman, a digital media professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“It absolutely seems like as a society, we’re having more conversations about the harms of social media, but the companies themselves are in a position where they’re not necessarily doing more.”

Brett Caraway, a professor of media economics at the University of Toronto, said the situation the education system finds itself in this year is a consequence of the proliferation of mobile devices that began in 2007 with the advent of the iPhone. It has been exacerbated by camera capabilities, apps and social networks.

“I fully expect that this issue is going to persist because smartphone penetration among adolescents has not tapered off,” he said.

Just shy of 40 per cent of Canadian children between the ages of two and six used a mobile phone in April 2022, Statista data shows. That figure rose to 50 per cent for kids between seven and 11 years old and was even higher for those between 12 and 17 — at 87 per cent.

That same year, 42 per cent of those between the ages of 15 and 24 reported to Statistics Canada that they were spending 20 hours or more per week using the internet for “general purposes,” which includes using social media, browsing the web, online shopping and reading the news.

Much of those 20 hours are dedicated to the endless scroll of buzzy videos, posts and photos that come from the smattering of social media networks that have become household names in recent years.

Caraway recently heard from a family friend about a 14-year-old who averages six hours per day on TikTok. He found it “mindboggling.”

“I don’t understand how anybody has six hours a day to be on a smartphone like that, but this is what the platforms are designed to do,” he said.

“They make money by demonstrating to potential advertisers that they have high levels of user engagement … The platform is designed to literally capture the attention of the user and hold it for as long as possible.”

That can spell trouble for teachers just trying to get through a lesson or students needing to study but constantly being drawn in by the allure of social media.

Studies have linked more time on social media to lower self-esteem and academic performance as well as more exposure to hateful, violent and mature content.

A 2018 study by the World Health Organization concluded 6.85 per cent of students were classified as having problematic social media use, which is considered to be when behavioural and psychological symptoms of addiction to social media manifest. Some 33.14 per cent of students were at moderate risk for problematic social media use and another 60 per cent faced low risk, the study found.

Four Ontario school boards decided to take the matter to court last March, suing TikTok, Snap and Instagram and Facebook-owner Meta for $4.5 billion. The suit accused them of negligently designing their products for compulsive use and rewiring the way children think, behave and learn.

By August, the group taking action against the tech giants had grown to 12 boards and two private schools seeking more than $8 billion, lawsuit organizers School Boards for Change said.

The allegations in the lawsuits have not been proven in court.

“Our children are literally falling apart and we have to spend extra resources in order to keep up with our obligation, which is to provide education,” Caraway said. “So this lawsuit is an attempt to make someone pay for this.”

Asked about the lawsuit and suggestions that the social media companies aren’t doing enough to protect kids online, Snapchat spokesperson Tonya Johnson said her company’s app was designed to be different from other platforms because it tries not to put pressure on users to be perfect or popular.

“We care deeply about the mental health of young people, and while we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, happy and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence,” she said in an email.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. TikTok declined to share a statement.

However, at a July safety session TikTok hosted for media, it described several actions it has taken to protect young users. They include family pairing, which allows parents to link their accounts directly with their teens’ and ensure their kids’ TikTok settings are agreed upon as a family, and one-hour screen time limits for users under 18 that can only be bypassed with a code.

Because students remain distracted despite the features, some provinces, including Ontario, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Alberta, will ban cellphones from classes this year.

But many say it’s not a panacea. Even if students can’t use phones in class, they are sneaking the use of them into “every nook and cranny” in their schedule, Caraway said.

They power them up as soon as they awake, check them between classes and then head back to them at home until bedtime.

Some teachers bristle at the idea of them being kept out of class, too.

“Banning phones and banning technology for me has never been the answer because you’re banning the discussion then in the classroom,” said Joanna Johnson, the Ontario educator behind the popular @unlearn16 account, at the TikTok safety session.

Lachman doesn’t like the “abstinence” approach provinces with bans have taken, but says the real issue is that social media companies have a “business model … to make us desire to be on as long as possible.”

“If you really cared to make something less addictive … are you going to give young people a different interface? Are you going to give them a completely different algorithm?” he questioned.

“Are you going to give them something that is designed to be less appealing, less one click, less infinite scroll?”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 18, 2024.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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