This week, as the heads of four of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the world were called before a virtual congressional antitrust hearing to answer inquiries into how they built and run their respective behemoths, you could see that the bloom on the rose of Big Tech has faded.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, once the rascally college dropout boy genius you loved to hate, still doesn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the problem of globally destructive misinformation and hate speech on his platform. Tim Cook struggles to defend how Apple takes a 30% cut from some of its app store developers’ revenue — a policy he didn’t even establish that is a vestige of Apple’s mid-2000s vise grip on the mobile app market. The plucky young upstarts who founded Google are both middle-aged and have stepped down from executive roles, quietly fading away while Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai runs the show. And Jeff Bezos wears the untroubled visage of the world’s richest man.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google all created tech products and services that have undeniably changed the world, some in ways that are undeniably good. But as these tech titans moved fast and broke things, they also largely excused themselves from asking difficult ethical questions, from how they built their business empires to the impacts their products and services have on the people who use them.

Read more at: https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/31/ai-weekly-big-techs-antitrust-reckoning-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-ai-industry/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Roundup&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

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What do electro – and chemical sensitive, or health conscious people want for their homes and workplaces?

The survey is for people who encounter barriers in their lives due to environmental factors. Many of them have special sensitivities or allergies, intellectual giftedness or sensory processing skills that make them perceive stimuli from their environment in unusual ways. They often experience much higher intensity in perception to the outside world and its stimuli.

With the survey the team in Germany wants to take a first step in creating positive opportunities so that neurodiverse people e.g. with Electrosensitivity or MCS can live healthy, financially independent lives and take their space in the job market with joy.

The survey is meant for everybody who:

•offers housing or 

•is looking for housing, or who 

•offers jobs or 

•is looking for work in unusual environmental settings, e.g. no Wi-Fi, free of fragrance and the like. 

Accessibility for those with environmental illnesses:

Environmental illnesses are increasing rapidly and consequently the need arises for workplaces and living spaces to take into account sensitizing substances and physical agents.

In an interdisciplinary project of the DHBW Stuttgart, students of the computer science course in cooperation with the Center for Empirical Research (ZEF) are working on solutions for people who have environmental-related diseases such as multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) or electrosensitivity (EHS). It is all voluntary work without external funding, because of the urgency of the situation that MCS and EHS people face.

The mix of chemicals that people are exposed to today ranges from carpeting adhesives, disinfectants, wood preservatives and mold to evaporation from furniture, computers and printers. Sensitive people can get sick from these substances as well as from electrosmog.

The importance of the survey:

The purpose of the study is to listen to the people and to make them visible as a large group worldwide.

With results of the survey politicians, municipalities and social housing initiatives can be approached – providing an opportunity for all of us to publically discuss pollutant free housing and jobs.

The survey will provide valuable input for political work so that the group of EHS and MCS people become visible as a large group.

We need as many as possible to participate in the survey, it only takes 10 – 20 minutes. 

This is an international survey and is available in English and German. Please forward the information to others.

Link to survey:

https://ww3.unipark.de/uc/2020_PA_JHecke/e36e/ospe.php?qb

Info:

https://www.emfsa.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Survey_EHS_MCShousingWork-1.pdf

 The survey is supported by the Ecological-Democratic Party (ÖDP Brandenburg):

The environment can make you sick: Arranging housing needs and jobs for special needs. 

The ÖDP Brandenburg welcomes the IT initiative “Living, Leben, Vivre (LiLeVi) – unique together” at the Stuttgart Cooperative State University to develop an online placement platform for living spaces or workplaces with accessibility for people with environmental disorders. 

With a population of “allergy sufferers” at 30% already and increasing environmental illnesses, the need arises for safer workplaces and living spaces, not only questioning levels of “toxicity”, but also taking into account sensitizing substances in the sense of “accessibility for the environmentally ill”.

https://www.oedp-brandenburg.de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/nachrichtendetails/news/umwelt-kann-krank-machen-vermittlung-von-wohnbeda/?fbclid=IwAR3AhksRXNbKJl1uprYH8Ghhma0-XLWK4VDJc0LV7T7UPRriPjOY37Vd6hc

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A few days ago we were listening to a radio interview with a man who has devoted most of his life to helping shack dwellers improve their quality of life. He mentioned one lady who (after her shack which was destroyed by a storm and replaced by him) as saying: “This is the first time in my life I have had more than one room and a proper floor”. But not only did the shack have a floor but it also had openable windows and an insulated roof, rarities in the shack dwelling communities where conditions have hardly changed since 1994.

One thing we are sure of is that the owner of this new “luxurious” shack did not request was a garage to house her intended purchase of future technology such as an autonomous car. Nor would she have known that the industry hyped technology associated with the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will never come in its entirety to her township or to millions of other South Africans !

So how will South Africa cope with 5G and this 4th Industrial revolution? Not very well we think.

Firstly Eskom needs to be dealt with. We note that this is now a priority of the Government and we, the paying consumers, must fund the Eskom fiasco. Could it be that once 5G technology is in place the government will face the dilemma of introducing inevitable rolling blackouts only to urban and rural areas where there is insufficient profitability to warrant a 5G service?

5G Requires a Stable Electricity Supply

South Africa’s most recent effort to build a smart city did not go according to plan, and was eventually aborted.

Ramaphosa dreams of skyscrapers and bullet trains – here’s what happened to the last R84 billion smart city

While difficult to know how day-to-day life will change as a result of living in a “smart city,” the issues described below are certainly worth learning more about. What should residents expect as tangible benefits? What will be the costs? What blind spots may exist among well-intentioned leaders making decisions, and will there be unintended (or consciously dismissed) harms resulting from these initiatives?

What Will Facebook Terragraph, 5G, and Being a “Smart City” Mean for San José Residents?

Cyberattacks:

Will South African municipalities have the finances to pay a ransom?

Overseas cities have increasingly faced cyberattacks, with hackers freezing systems and demanding ransom.

This is the latest in a string of cyberattacks that have frozen city systems. Baltimore recently refused to pay a $76,000 ransom to stop a malware attack, and similar cybercrimes have targeted Atlanta, Allentown, PA and Medford, OR. Hackers have also targeted hospitals and transportation hubs like the Port of San Diego.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the Florida village Palm Springs paid an undisclosed ransom in response to a 2018 attack, but still lost two years of data. https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/florida-city-agrees-to-pay-hackers-600k-after-malware-attack/557338/?fbclid=IwAR1m9XEPskjHfu-KBGwm2HbrWeuw7FcAru_-4mMd3MIFMjmaNhhwt_zkqiU

As for the industry promise of 5G and the 4IR assisting with the NHI rollout – should we not ensure that basic healthcare is accessible to everyone first? In other words properly functioning hospitals – where patients are not required to supply their own linen and food?

Schools:

-Infrastructure

In March this year, Equal Education called for the dismissal of Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga, citing the minister’s failure to deliver on the 2013 Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure law, which sets out deadlines for fixing infrastructure in schools. The organisation cited the tragic deaths of 5-year-olds Michael Komape and Lumka Mketwa — who both drowned in pit latrines while at school in 2014 and 2018 respectively — as evidence of the department’s, and by extension Motshekga’s, “broken promises” on the issue of school infrastructure.

-South Africa’s Literacy Crisis

Professor Mary Metcalfe, education expert, during her three-day lecture, “South Africa’s School Crisis”, at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) 2019 Summer School: “Lack of access to reading material and textbooks are two of the main reasons that 78% of South African children in grade 3 still can’t read for meaning.” And  Professor Mary Metcalfe says fixing this national literacy crisis will take time and hard work. “Ultimately, children need resources – textbooks for learning and other books for reading pleasure.”

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2019-01-11-solving-sas-literacy-crisis

A cautionary note about electronics in the classroom: New research reveals the drawbacks of electronic devices for learning.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/think-act-be/201808/does-technology-in-the-classroom-help-or-harm-students

-Crime:

The Menzi Primary, a “smart school” in the Tshwane township of Langaville, has a heavy reliance on electronic devices, and encourages pupils to study through e-learning resources. It was robbed less than a week after opening. Panyaza Lesufi , the Education MEC for Gauteng “It is sad to say currently the Grade 7 learners do not have any textbooks as their e-books are gone with the tablets. These are educational facilities, aimed at enhancing the quality of education, and life of children in the township.”

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/tshwane-smart-school-robbery-menzi/

Perhaps we should sort out the above issues  first before concentrating on coding and data analytics at a primary school level.

5G, 4IR, Employment, Public Servants

On 9 April 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the membership of the new 30-person Presidential Commission on the 4IR, which he himself will chair.

Mention is made of the introduction of automation and AI which “can perform routine, repetitive, dangerous or just plain dull tasks far faster and more efficiently than humans can.”

Also mentioned: reskilling, retraining, redeployment, restructuring and yes, possible retrenchments and “reshaping the South African public service”

South Africa’s massive jobs challenge: balancing automation and unemployment

Automation and what it means for jobs and new skills in SA

It is not surprising that the country’s previously disadvantaged population groups are more exposed to job losses due to automation than their white counterparts. Half of all black South Africa workers are in occupations with an 80% or greater probability of automation; so are 47% of coloured workers. For white employees, however, the proportion is only around 30%.

We will have to be very careful that well intended visions do not marginalize those very people that need to be protected in our democracy.

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Michael Bevington

Abstract
Some surveys have identified people who have restricted access to work in environments with man-made electromagnetic exposures. This study attempts to determine their prevalence, an aspect not previously investigated in its own right. It is based on analyses of the two different types of surveys of people with Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance attributed to Electromagnetic Fields (IEI-EMF), or Electromagnetic Hyper-Sensitivity (EHS), either of the general population or of people with IEI-EMF/EHS. In addition, there are different definitions of IEI-EMF/EHS, with a range of subconscious, mild, moderate or severe symptoms, potentially leading in three stages to hyper-sensitivity. The current evidence is assessed as indicating that, in addition to subconscious sensitivity, the prevalence of IEI-EMF/EHS is between about 5.0 and 30 per cent of the general population for mild cases, 1.5 and 5.0 per cent for moderate cases and < 1.5 per cent for severe cases. The prevalence of people restricted in their access to work in a man-made electromagnetic environment is estimated at 0.65 per cent of the general population, at about 18% of the general population with moderate IEI-EMF/EHS. The estimate of 0.65% equates to 435,500 people in the UK’s population of 67 million. Some reasons for possible under-reporting are discussed. Adjustments can enable some people with this disability to remain in employment, suggesting that rates of restriction in access to work may fall as employers become aware of what adjustments are needed.

Pdf: -16093-The- Prevalence- of- People- With- Restricted -Access- to- Work

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This document was updated on 4/28/15 and can be accessed here: Accommodation_and_Compliance_Series_Employees_with_Electrical_Sensitivity(1)

Also see:

Tip sheet for Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) – The City of Peterborough in Ontario, Canada

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