THETRIBUNE TRIBUNE THE
Wednesday, August 17th,17, 2016, PAGE A99 Wednesday, August 2016, PAGE
WHALES
TECHTALK
ON THE WEB WEBCAM VIEWERS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE HELP WITH RESEARCH A WEBCAM’S audience from around the globe is getting incredible views of 3,000 beluga whales that gather near that western part of Hudson Bay in Canada each summer. The white whales, which resemble oversized dolphins, nuzzle and clown for the camera. They feel the lens with their teeth and blow bubbles at it. Sometimes they swim upside down for a better view. That’s what Stephen Petersen, head of conservation and research for Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo, and his wife, biologist Meg Hainstock, are looking for. Only when the whales turn upside down can the researchers determine their sex, which they need as they study the animals’ social structure and behavior. The webcam’s viewers are helping, too. Its creators — Bozeman, Montana-based Polar Bears International and Explore. org, a project of the Annenberg Foundation — included a “snapshot” feature that allows viewers to take still
shots of the feed. Petersen and Hainstock hope the result will be a trove of photographs of individual whales that will help them catalog the population as they try to answer questions about the animals’ behaviour. For example, why do certain whales of a similar age and sex consistently gather at certain times or locations? What function do Hudson Bay’s estuaries serve for these animals? Do beluga whales have a matriarchal social structure? Do certain whale groups’ low numbers have a long-term effect on the rest of the population, such as the case with the population in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, which is struggling as compared to the healthy Hudson Bay population? “As far as I know, there’s no other investigation of beluga from under the water on this scale,” Petersen said. “A lot of the stuff that’s been done before is from observers on top of the water. It doesn’t really give us a good sense — belugas don’t spend a lot of time on top of the water.”
THIS photo provided by Explore.org shows the view of a beluga whale from a webcam gathered in the Churchill River in the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. (AP)
Explore.org and Polar Bears International have used similar crowdsourcing technology to monitor polar bears’ annual migration in Hudson Bay. Researchers hope years of viewers taking snapshots will provide them with images that can help assess the bears’ health and reproductive rates. Other scientists are increasingly using crowdsourcing to raise money for research or perform tasks that would be too costly or timeconsuming to be performed by a team of researchers. One of the most well-known projects is by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, whose software has been downloaded by millions of users and allows researchers to use the dataprocessing power of those computers in the institute’s
search for alien life in space. “In general, there is a growing interest in using citizen science projects to raise awareness and support scientific research,” said Krista Wright, executive director of Polar Bears International. For the beluga whale project, Petersen said viewers are instructed on how to identify males from females, and are then asked to take snapshots when the whales flip over and their sex is in view of the camera. The photographs are tagged male or female and uploaded to a database that will help identify individual whales and their locations. Operators switched on the cameras July 15 and have since averaged about 2,500 viewers a day, according to Explore.org spokesman Mike Gasbara.
The researchers hope that after this season ends in August, they will have a catalog of individual whales that can be tracked in subsequent years, along with the locations where different groups are gathering to find if any patterns emerge. Understanding the beluga whales is important because their ecosystem soon may be altered with the effects of climate change, Gasbara said. Less Arctic ice could bring threats to the beluga in the form of killer whales and increased boat traffic and pollution, he said. “I think because we’re right at the beginning of this, any information that we get on social structure is going to be informative for other locations,” Petersen said. Associated Press
FORD SAYS IT WILL HAVE FULLY AUTONOMOUS CAR BY 2021 GOOGLE’S video chatting app on mobile devices. The app, dubbed Duo, represents Google’s response to other popular video calling options, including Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype and Facebook’s Messenger app. (AP)
GOOGLE’S DUO APP JOINS THE CROWDED FIELD OF VIDEO CALLING
KNOCK, knock, Google’s video chatting app has arrived. The app, dubbed Duo, represents Google’s response to other popular video calling options, including Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype and Facebook’s Messenger app. Duo isn’t much different from the other video chatting services, except that it gives a glimpse at who is making the call, helping the recipient decide whether to answer. Google calls this feature, “Knock, knock.” The new app, announced in May, was released Tuesday as a free service for phones running on Google’s Android operating system as well as Apple’s iPhones. Like FaceTime for iPhones, Duo only requires a person’s phone number to connect. Many other
services require both participants to have account logins to use their video calling options. Google has been offering video calling through its Hangout feature for several years, but the internet company is now tailoring that service for business meetings. Duo is being billed as a simpler, more reliable way to see friends and family as you talk to them. It is the first of two new mobile apps that Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., has planned for this summer. The Mountain View, California, company also is preparing to unveil a new messaging app called Allo featuring a robotic assistant that will suggest automated responses to texts. Associated Press
FORD Motor Co. intends to have a fully driverless vehicle — no steering wheel, no pedals — on the road within five years. The car will initially be used for commercial ride-hailing or ridesharing services; sales to consumers will come later. Ford CEO Mark Fields announced the new goal Tuesday at the company’s Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California. “This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company,” Fields said. Ford’s approach to the autonomous car breaks from many other companies, like Mercedes-Benz and Tesla Motors, which plan to gradually add selfdriving capability to traditional cars. Instead, Ford is taking the same approach as Google, which supports moving directly to selfdriving cars once the technology is perfected. “We abandoned the steppingstone approach of driver-assist technologies and decided we were going to take the full leap,” said Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer, Nair says Ford will continue developing driver-assist systems, like automatic emergency braking or lane departure warning. But making personal cars more autonomous is dangerous, he said, because Ford hasn’t figured out how to make sure drivers stay
engaged and ready to take back the wheel when the car encounters an obstacle. Removing the driver solves that problem. Ford’s vehicle will be specifically designed for commercial mobility services, like taxi companies, and will be available in high volumes. Ford says personal ownership of self-driving cars will come later. The Dearborn, Michiganbased company also says it plans to double the staff at its Palo Alto research centre by the end of next year to nearly 300 people. It will buy two more buildings next to its current building in order to expand its campus, Fields said. Ford said it will make several investments and partnerships to speed its development of autonomous vehicles. Ford and Chinese search engine company Baidu will each invest $75 million in Velodyne, a company that makes laser sensors that help guide self-driving cars. Velodyne, based in Morgan Hill, California, says it will use the $150 million investment to expand design and production and reduce the cost of its sensors. Laser sensors — called Lidar, which stands for light, detection and ranging — can also be used in conventional vehicles as part of driver assist systems such as automatic emergency braking. Associated Press
• A TESLA electric car caught fire during a promotional tour in southwest France, but those aboard escaped unharmed. Tesla said in a statement that it is “working with the authorities to establish the facts” about Monday’s fire in Bayonne. The driver was quoted in local newspaper Sud Ouest as saying he answered a Facebook ad offering test drives of the Model S sedan. The driver said he saw smoke, and the three people aboard got out before seeing it catch fire. Regional administration spokesman Patrice Abbadie said Tuesday that nobody was hurt and no property was damaged. The U.S. government investigated Tesla in 2013 after two fires in Model S sedans, but closed the investigation after Tesla raised the cars’ suspensions and added a titanium shield to protect their batteries. • A FRENCH mayor has denounced the “anarchical settlement” of “Pokemon Go” characters on the “territory” of his eastern village and has ordered the game’s creator to remove the virtual creatures. Bressolles Mayor Fabrice Beauvois said Tuesday that he has mailed a decree to California-based Niantic Inc. and The Pokemon Company to make sure they stop setting up Pokemons in the village of about 800 inhabitants northeast of Lyon. In his decree, the mayor says the search for Pokemons puts pedestrians and drivers at risk because players get inattentive while watching their smartphones and that it may also result in groups of people forming at night. The game, increasingly popular around the world, sends players into the real world to search for digital monsters known as Pokemons, which appear on their smartphone screens. • CONSUMERS think smartphone makers are releasing too many new models each year, a survey showed this week. The survey conducted in six countries, commissioned by the environmental group Greenpeace, showed that more than half of those who responded would prefer to change their phones less frequently. Handset devices are one of the most frequently replaced electronics products. The top cellphone companies, Samsung and Apple, launch new flagship phone models at least once every year, showing off the latest display and mobile processor technologies. Phone makers typically upgrade their cheaper lineups as well. “Over half of respondents across the countries surveyed agree that manufacturers are releasing too many new models, many designed to only last a few years,” said Chih An Lee, global IT campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia. “In fact, most users actually want their phones to be more easily dismantled, repaired and recycled.”