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YouTube removes 150,000 videos and disables comments amid scandal
 YouTube has removed 150,000 videos and disabled comments on many more in response to the latest brand safety scandal to rock the online video platform.

Over the past week, huge brands including Amazon, eBay, Mars, Diageo, Adidas and Deutsche Bank stopped advertising on YouTube over concerns their ads are running against videos of children being targeted and exploited by paedophiles.

Media buyers have warned that YouTube is difficult to police and that there will always be an element of risk running ads on user generated content platforms due to the liberal nature of what is deemed acceptable content and the ease and speed it allows users to upload posts.

Since the scandal broke, calls to toughen the rules around publishing on user-generated platforms has intensified and YouTube has told AdNews it is strengthening its policies and enforcement processes around content that involves minors.

"In the past week, we’ve tightened up and strengthened the enforcement of our policies to terminate the accounts of users making predatory comments on videos featuring minors,” a YouTube spokesperson said.

“As a result, we terminated hundreds of accounts and removed over 150,000 videos from our platform. We also turned off comments on over 625,000 videos targeted by child predators. Finally, we removed ads from nearly two million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content.”

AdNews scoured YouTube to get a sense for how deep the problem runs. It is clear that YouTube has disabled comments and removed ads from videos containing children that most people would deem inappropriate, but there are still many videos on the platform that wouldn’t pass the parent test.

A 30-second search on YouTube pulls up far too much disturbing content.

More work needed

A simple search for ‘young girl on bed’ pulls up far too many videos containing content that would never be published on a professionally curated media website.

YouTube has told AdNews it unequivocally does not condone or accept content that endangers or sexualizes minors but the sheer volume of videos that are uploaded every second and the fact that many of these videos may not be illegal makes such policies very challenging to police.

“In recent months, we've noticed a growing trend around content on YouTube that attempts to pass as family-friendly, but is clearly not. While some of these videos may be suitable for adults, others are completely unacceptable, so we are working to remove them from YouTube," vice president of product management Johanna Wright said in a recent blog.

YouTube is taking five measures to address the problem including tougher enforcement of its community standards, age-restricting content, disabling comments and advertising on inappropriate content.

“In the last couple of weeks we expanded our enforcement guidelines around removing content featuring minors that may be endangering a child, even if that was not the uploader’s intent,” Wright added.

“In the last week we terminated over 50 channels and have removed thousands of videos under these guidelines, and we will continue to work quickly to remove more every day.”

Since June, YouTube says it has removed ads from three million videos and expects to remove a further 500,000 more videos in the wake of the fresh scandal.

Industry pressure mounts

Commentators across the media landscape are calling for tougher action on user-generated platforms to bring their publishing standards further in line with those that restrict professional media organisations.

In a comment piece in The Times, Sky Group chief executive Jeremy Darroch joined a growing chorus of media executives, calling for tech giants that make money from media to be placed on a level playing field with the rest of the media, a sentiment that AdNews has previously expressed.

“With every new exposé, these platforms promise to do more. They promise they will do better. Yet they continue to profit from what they publish and the cycle starts again…the tech companies grow in value. It is surely time we asked: why is there no regulation where there is the risk of such serious harm?,” Darroch wrote.

"I am not suggesting regulation of the internet, but establishing a set of principles of accountability that meet societal norms and can be put in place with oversight, in much the same way that Ofcom requires broadcasters to comply with principles governing the way that content is made available on TV. This would bring the same rigour to the internet that enables TV to be a safe and trusted space.”

What is this costing YouTube?

AdNews approached widely-respected US market analyst Brian Weiser of Pivotal Research Group to get his view on whether the brand safety issue would have a material effect on Google.

“While it does seem like there may be some impact on YouTube from large brands reducing their spending, we won’t likely see the impact in Google’s reported results,” Wieser said.

“YouTube is a relatively small share of Google’s total revenue base, and large brands are a sub-set of that figure.”

YouTube has had two major brand safety issues in the past year that have threatened its business model.

Some advertisers are clearly not impressed and are taking matters into their own hands, but AdNews understands this does not necessarily mean budgets are shifting into other digital advertising options.

Publicly, many are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to whether YouTube can resolve its brand safety issues.

Privately, AdNews understands some advertisers' patience is wearing pretty thin.

Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au

Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.

Output: YouTube said it has taken down more than 150,000 videos, and disabled comments on more than 625,000, in the wake of the latest scandal to plague the video sharing site. Advertisers including Mars and Adidas withdrew their ads amid concerns that their ads were playing alongside inappropriate content. A spokesperson for YouTube told AdNews that the sheer volume of content uploaded made the platform "very challenging to police". Media publishers have called for some form of regulation to bring accountability for such sites.


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ECB warns of volatility risks despite robust eurozone growth
 The European Central Bank (ECB) warned Wednesday that despite the improved economic growth in the euro area there are concerns related to a sudden increase in volatility.

"Systemic stress indicators for the euro area have remained low over the past six months," the ECB said in a statement on Wednesday, but added that "the risk of a rapid repricing in global markets nevertheless remains."

Markets have been on the bullish side throughout the year and many continue to push further into record territory. The is up by 16 percent since January and the pan-European Stoxx 600 is up by 7 percent. Some solid earnings and hopes of tax cuts in the U.S. and deregulation for the banking system have boosted equities.

The ECB believes there is the risk that this overall sense of optimism is miscalculated, which could end up shaking financial markets once money managers realize they took on more risk than they could handle.

"Continued compression of risk premia, subdued volatility and signs of increased risk-taking behavior in global financial markets are all sources of concern, as they may sow the seeds for large asset price corrections in the future," the ECB outlined in its Financial Stability Review report.

Output: Despite improved economic growth in the European Union, the bloc's central bank has warned that overoptimism in markets may be misplaced. The "risk of a rapid repricing in global markets ... remains", the European Central Bank warned, adding it had the potential to shake up the financial system.


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ETF fees set to drop as passive investment outstrips active
 As the cost of exchange-traded funds continues to plummet and becomes more affordable, there is still room for competition in the booming sector, latest EY research reveals.

Over the next three years, EY's ETF report shows the global market will reach US$7.6 trillion, and a substantial number (66%) of asset managers will offer ETF products in the near future.

The report, which surveyed 70 ETF providers, found price points and the ability to innovate are crucial for the sector to maintain its growth trajectory.

Despite ETF fees continuing to fall to an average of 27 basis points last year, 71% of respondents predict fees will decline even further as becoming a low-cost provider is a prerequisite to survival.

Zero-fee ETFs will not become the norm, the report noted, but in 10 years' time, passive funds' assets will exceed those in actively managed funds globally. ETFs consequently will benefit disproportionately from this shift as a result of low fees and intraday liquidity in volatile markets.

Forty-three per cent of respondents said there is insufficient competition among index providers and expect more players to enter the space, including more self-indexing.

Participating in stock lending programs, digital distribution and best execution are some ways to continue to reduce costs for investors, the report suggested.

In terms of demand, institutional investors will continue to dominate ETF investing over the next three years, and up to 25% of inflows will come from new investors.

Wealth managers, private banks and investment funds are showing promising interest in ETFs. Pension funds are likely to use ETFs to manage liquidity, while wealth managers are expected to look for core exposure through model portfolios.

EY warned that ETF providers will need to anticipate investor needs, incorporate macro trends in regulation and technology, and focus on educating investors - product development will involve launching new thematic ETFs, greater access to debt and investing in alternatives.

ETFs will help new entrants defend against declining mutual fund inflows and will form as part of a product range that include fixed income or smart beta products, the report said.

EY Oceania wealth and asset management leader Antoinette Elias said in the last 12 months, Australia's ETF market capitalisation increased by 39% to $33.3 billion.

"The local ETF market is taking a growing share of the traditional managed funds space and continues to be retail investor driven, rather than institutional. Access to broader asset classes and international exposure is making ETFs increasingly attractive to retail investors," Elias said.

Output: The cost of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is expected to fall over the next three years, according to a study by EY. The study predicts passive management, responsible for the majority of ETF assets, will have a greater share of the market than active funds within the next 10 years. Almost three-quarters of respondents surveyed for the study said they anticipated fees would continue to fall, with being a low-cost provider seen as a necessity for success in the ETF space. Average ETF fees fall by approximately 27 basis points each year.


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French rocket maker Arianespace at risk as SpaceX keeps costs low
 Rocket company Arianespace is the pride and joy of Europe’s space agencies, and in particular, the French government, which sees the Ariane rocket as a pinnacle of its engineering prowess.

But Arianespace is under severe threat from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and news that Germany’s DLR Aerospace Centre – a heavyweight contributor to the European Space Agency/ESA – is looking at switching launch commitments from Arianespace to SpaceX has caused consternation.

The worry is that without regular business from the scientific community, and in particular the ESA, could spell the end of life for Arianespace. Its CEO Stephane Israel, speaking on November 24th, admitted that if Europe switches its support for Arianespace then the rocket company is unlikely to make it through the next decade. Israel is looking for a guaranteed five large satellite launches a year for 2018 and the following years.

Set against these demands is SpaceX, with its lower costs and much more frequent access to space – SpaceX is talking about 18-20 launches per year.

The German Aerospace Centre says it wants to support Arianespace, “or else it will become like Nokia”, but argues that costs must come down and launch frequency improved.

Arianespace is developing its own reusable rocket (Ariane 6) which should be ready for business with a maiden flight in 2020-2021.

Output: The future of France-based Arianespace looks uncertain after it emerged that Germany’s DLR Aerospace Centre is considering switching its future launch commitments to Elon Musk's SpaceX. CEO Stephane Israel has acknowledged the company could fold if it loses the contract, yet Arianespace's ambition for five satellite launches in 2018 doesn't come close to SpaceX's stated goal of 18-20 annually. The German Aerospace Centre says it wishes to continue supporting Arianespace, but costs must decrease and launch frequencies increase “or else it will become like Nokia”.


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Apple customers discover major security flaw in latest Macs
 If you have an Apple computer running the latest version of the company’s software, macOS High Sierra, be warned: It might be possible for someone to quite easily get into your computer without your login credentials.

Without explaining what the actual bug is (we don’t want to make it any easier for potential hackers than this already is, and you can find it on Twitter pretty easily), someone can login to a Mac by typing a word in the login field, leaving the password field blank, and attempting to log in several times. Eventually the system will let you in with full access, according to security researchers.

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You can also use this same flaw to access System Preferences on a computer whose settings you don’t have access to. Quartz wasn’t able to recreate the login bug, but was able to edit who has access to a computer in System Preferences on a Mac running macOS High Sierra 10.13.1.

Apple is aware of the bug, and sent Quartz the following statement on how to patch the login flaw for now:

Output: Apple customers have found a major bug in the latest version of the company's operating system, macOS High Sierra, for their laptops and desktops. A Turkish developer discovered that anyone could gain administrator privileges on Macs running the operating system without a password, making private user data extremely vulnerable. Apple said in a statement to Quartz that it is currently working to fix the issue.


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Uber woes continue as 'bombshell' letter is revealed in trial
 The Uber-Waymo trial scheduled to begin Dec. 4 has been postponed, after a bombshell allegation that Uber operated a covert unit tasked with stealing code and trade secrets from its competitors.

Three Uber employees testified today (Nov. 28) in a tense, hours-long hearing that was supposed to be the final one before the case went to trial. US district judge William Alsup ordered them to appear after the US Justice Department informed the court that the company had withheld key evidence. The letter, from an attorney representing Richard Jacobs, a former Uber security analyst, alleged that Uber’s Market Analytics unit existed to acquire “trade secrets, code-based & competitive intelligence.”

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“I can no longer trust the words of the lawyers for Uber in this case,” the visibly angry judge said in court. “If even half of what is in that letter is true, it would be an injustice for Waymo to go to trial.” Alsup had referred the lawsuit for a criminal probe in May.

In a court filing on Nov. 27, Waymo alleged that Uber “intentionally withheld the Jacobs Letter and related materials to prevent Waymo from discovering material evidence in this case.” Waymo also asked to take a new deposition of Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, and of Angela Padilla, Uber’s deputy general counsel and recipient of the Jacobs letter.

According to tweets from James McPherson, a lawyer and autonomous driving analyst attending the pretrial hearing, Jacobs was terminated by Uber in the spring of 2017. His attorney then sent a letter to Uber making the allegations about the Market Analytics unit. Jacobs eventually settled out of court with Uber for $4.5 million, and is now cooperating with the company. That put him in the awkward position of disputing his own letter.

A Waymo attorney asked Jacobs under oath: “Your lawyer sent letter that you approved alleging that Market Analytics exists solely to acquire code and trade secrets from competitors, yes?” according to McPherson. Jacobs reportedly responded: “I disagree with this now. I have no firsthand knowledge. No knowledge at all.”

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Jacobs also described Uber’s deliberate efforts to “prevent sensitive info from legal discovery.” “There was legal training around the use of attorney client privilege markings on written materials, and the implementation of encrypted and ephemeral communications, intended to both protect and destroy communications that might be considered sensitive,” he said, according to the Financial Times. Employees were told to use phone or video calls for sensitive conversations, and use the messaging app Wickr, which has encrypted, self-destructing messages.

Alsup has asked Uber to provide a “complete list” of employees who had a Wickr account or used other self-deleting messaging apps. “Any company that would set up such a surreptitious system is as suspicious as can be, when the whole point to avoid leaving a paper trail,” he said, drawing air quotes with his fingers around the word “paper.”

The letter also reportedly claimed the company “had a sophisticated strategy to conceal, cover up or destroy documents with intent to impede government investigations.” In its Nov. 27 filing, Waymo said the Jacobs letter “indicates there may be a very good reason why the ‘14,000 files’ in question”—the ones former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski is accused of stealing—”were supposedly not found on Uber servers.”

“It turns out the server was for dummies and the real stuff goes on on the shadow system,” Alsup said.

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Uber is facing at least five federal probes in the US, several of them into dubious operational schemes. The company has drawn additional scrutiny from Congress and state attorney generals after last week disclosing that it had paid hackers $100,00o to stay silent about a massive data breach that occurred in October 2016, affecting 57 million riders and drivers.

This post was updated to include additional details of the Nov. 28 hearing.

Output: A letter revealing the existence of a division at Uber intended to steal trade secrets from rivals has derailed the Uber-Waymo trial. The letter also claimed the firm “had a sophisticated strategy to conceal, cover up or destroy documents with intent to impede government investigations”. Uber was accused of withholding evidence and the billion-dollar lawsuit, filed by Waymo over the alleged theft of auto-vehicle technology, was delayed. Uber is already facing at least five federal probes in the US, most of them over dubious operational schemes, and has disclosed losses of 40% in Q3 2017.


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NASA seeks to kickstart satellite-repair space-robot market
 Hundreds of millions of dollars can go into the school bus-sized satellites that blast into orbit above Earth and provide services including broadband internet, broadcasting or military surveillance.

But if a part breaks or a satellite runs out of fuel, there’s no way to send help.

Commercial industry and government agencies believe they’re getting close to having an answer: robot repairs.

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The idea is to extend the lives of satellites through on-orbit satellite servicing, in which robotic spacecraft essentially act as the AAA roadside service trucks of space, traveling from satellite to satellite to refuel them and fix problems.

On a spring day earlier this year in Greenbelt, Md., 30 companies gathered at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to learn about the technology and view hardware for on-orbit satellite servicing. They ranged from spacecraft makers to purveyors of robot arms and even insurance brokers. A second event is planned for January.

Industry watchers see the heightened activity as commercial validation for a 30-year-old idea that, until recently, attracted only government dollars.

“I think it could be a sustainable market,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of space analytic consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.

One of the first such commercial robot technicians is set to launch next year, but analysts say a mature market is still at least 10 years away. Not only do the spacecraft and capabilities still need to be fine-tuned, but the space industry, which is relatively conservative, will want to see several demonstrations before signing on.

“It’s an environment where you can’t make mistakes,” said Steve Oldham, senior vice president of strategic business development at SSL, a division of San Francisco-based Maxar Technologies that has such a project in the works.

Technology still needs to advance to the point where robots become capable service workers. Already, though, the number of satellites that will need servicing is rising rapidly.

In 2016, there were more than 1,400 operational satellites in orbit, compared to 994 in 2012, according to a June report commissioned by the Satellite Industry Assn. trade group and written by Bryce Space and Technology. Many are programmable, meaning their software can be updated throughout their lifespan, which can stretch to 10 or 15 years.

NASA has already started to develop some of the necessary technology. In February, the space agency launched a sensor called Raven during a cargo resupply launch for the International Space Station.

Raven can track vehicles approaching the space station, much like a baseball catcher keeps tabs on an incoming ball long before stretching out an arm to grab it.

“Satellites in low-Earth orbit are traveling anywhere between 15,000 and 18,000 mph,” said Ben Reed, deputy division director of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s satellite servicing projects division, which developed Raven. “We need to put our servicer underneath it with a robotic catcher’s mitt in the right place.”

NASA’s satellite servicing projects division was born out of previous missions to maintain and service another expensive asset — the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle serviced the telescope five times, with the last mission in 2009 focused on replacing circuit boards and adding new sensors. When the shuttle program ended, NASA’s ability to access and service space assets disappeared, Reed said.

The division is also developing refueling technologies and is working to eventually launch a fully robotic spacecraft that will go to an existing satellite in orbit, autonomously capture and then refuel it.

The autonomous-capture aspect is important, Reed said, because waiting for a video signal to reach human operators on Earth would just be too slow. The round-trip delay between moving that spacecraft’s robotic arm and seeing the result on video can take about three seconds.

“We need rapid, rapid, rapid,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You don’t think when you reach out your hand to catch a set of car keys.”

Less time-sensitive tasks, such as cutting wires, will be done telerobotically via human operators.

NASA’s satellite servicing project division is not intended to compete with industry, but rather transfer the technology it develops to interested parties, Reed said.

Rocket and satellite maker Orbital ATK Inc., which was recently acquired by defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp., has begun assembling a service spacecraft known as the Mission Extension Vehicle-1. The craft is set for launch next year with service starting as soon as 2019.

Orbital ATK has already snagged satellite operator Intelsat as its first customer. The spacecraft’s structures, solar arrays and propellent tanks are being manufactured in San Diego and Goleta.

In June, satellite and spacecraft manufacturer SSL announced a new business venture focused specifically on on-orbit satellite servicing. SSL was selected in February by DARPA to be the agency’s commercial partner in a program to service satellites in geosynchronous orbit. SSL will build the spacecraft and the refueling capability while DARPA provides robotic tools and software.

The spacecraft will be test-launched in 2021. SSL is developing it at a satellite manufacturing facility in Palo Alto; two robotic arms are being built at a subdivision in Pasadena. SSL has already signed its first commercial customer, Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES.

Some analysts question whether this robot geek squad will be needed at all. A coming boom in small, cheap satellites could replace some more expensive, large satellites. Along with reduced launch costs, led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its reusable rockets, it could be cheaper to just launch several new small satellites than fix or refuel old ones.

But Christensen of Bryce Space and Technology is confident there will be a need for a high-and-low mix of satellites. And she points out that cheaper launch costs could drive more repairs.

“If you’ve got a quarter of a billion dollars of hardware on orbit, it seems like it would be useful to figure out an application for that,” Christensen said.

And industry officials believe orbiting robot service workers will be essential if and when humans begin assembling giant craft to explore the planets.

“Those far-reaching, species-changing discoveries is what gives us the passion to move forward every day with something that sounds mundane,” said NASA’s Reed.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

Twitter: @smasunaga

Output: NASA's satellite servicing projects division and private firms are among organisations seeking to develop robots that can refuel or repair satellites in space. There were more than 1,400 operational satellites in orbit around Earth last year, offering the potential for a fast-growing and lucrative market. A recent meeting between 30 firms took place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and another is scheduled for next year to explore potential technologies, while the first robot technicians are due to be sent into orbit next year.


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Halliburton develops electromagnetic pipe corrosion inspection
 Traditional methods of monitoring the integrity of wellbore tubulars have been able to inspect the first few concentric strings of pipe, but not the outer strings.

“All the strings should be important because we are concerned as much for the outside integrity as we are concerned about the inside integrity,” says Freeman Hill, product manager for well and reservoir surveillance at Halliburton. “Corrosion feeds on itself. Corrosion issues can decimate a well.”

But locating the outer corrosion before leaks occur used to be “fairly impossible,” Hill says. “No one was able to take a look at the outmost pipes because the technology wasn’t there.”

While government regulations dictate minimum inspection intervals in some areas, routinely monitoring the tubulars for integrity can help operators reduce non-productive time and save money by making it easier to plan repairs before a small issue spirals into a major leak.

In October, Halliburton launched the Electromagnetic Pipe Xaminer V (EPX V) service, which the company says can pinpoint casing defects and metal corrosion in up to five tubular strings throughout the well.

Thorough and frequent inspection can help determine if corrosion is taking place at an acceptable rate for the design life of the well or if intervention is called for, Hill says.

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“Is it meeting the corrosion rate the customer needs for the well so it can last the required life? Or is it corroding too fast? If it’s too fast, what measures can we put in place to correct it? We can monitor it more often, intervene,” he says. “We can help the customer beat the leak before it gets there.”

INSPECTION: The EPX V with high resolution array and full array sections. Photo: Halliburton

Hill says one of the first questions he hears from prospective clients is whether EPX V service can measure the collars in all the tubulars.

“We see the collars in all the strings. When we show them the fourth and fifth string collars, they know we can measure the metal on them. That tells them this really works,” he says.

Rated to 15,000 psi and 350 degrees Fahrenheit, with an outside diameter of 1-11/16 inches, the tool diagnoses each tubing string using high-definition frequency technology. The technology can run on mono-conductor wireline, Halliburton’s RELAY digital slickline, or on memory using standard slickline or coiled tubing.

Development on what became the EPX V started in 2015. The first deployment was onshore in the US in 2016.

“We had to find new technologies that would work together,” Hill says. “We truly had to innovate.”

The breakthrough came with high-definition frequency technology, Hill says.

“The EPX V uses an array and transmitters that continuously send out the electromagnetic wave in multiple frequencies at the same time. Because it is continuous and we can put power down there on it, we are able to put out the electromagnetic field further out than we were able to do before, so we get signals back from each pipe. It’s a very sophisticated process,” Hill says.

The omnidirectional tool provides more than 100 channels of information about the condition of the tubulars. The EPX V has two sections: a high-resolution shallow section that uses two receivers and one transmitter, and a full-resolution array section with six receivers and one transmitter.

The frequency phase shifts and magnitude of the signal indicate the integrity of the pipe.

“We have so much information on metals. We understand how the frequencies behave in different metal environments, so being able to control the frequencies and have this array is powerful,” Hill says.

The tool can also function in wellbores where the pipes aren’t perfectly aligned.

The 17.5-foot tool can provide details in real-time or run in memory mode. It can be used to monitor the condition of the well or diagnose existing problems. Halliburton can pair its Acoustic Conformation Xaminer (ACX) service, which identifies wellbore leaks, with the EPX V tool.

“If I have a leak on a well and it’s something I think is caused from corrosion, I’d want to run the EPX V so I could see the amount of corrosion,” Hill says. The ACX tool triangulates noise logs to identify the location of leaks.

The tool generates an analysis that summarises the well’s integrity, joint by joint for each tubular, and includes recommendations for remediation.

In one recent deployment, Halliburton ran the EPX V tool for a client and located a five-foot corrosion problem, along with a pair of similar corrosion problems further down the wellbore that might not have been identified using traditional inspection methods. The operator had the option to repair all three problems at once, saving a second intervention.

“Some operators want to know what’s coming and how long they have before it becomes a problem,” Hill says.

In at least one run, EPX V has allowed the operator to correct an existing schematic of the wellbore, Hill says.

“They can see everything now. They’ve been handicapped for a while. Things have changed,” Hill says.

Output: Halliburton has launched the Electromagnetic Pipe Xaminer V service, which it says can detect casing defects and metal corrosion in up to five wellbore tubulars throughout a well. Traditional ways of monitoring the integrity of wellbore tubulars have been able to inspect the first few concentric strings of pipe, but not the outer strings. Thorough and frequent inspection can help determine if corrosion is taking place at an acceptable rate for the design life of the well or if intervention is called for, Halliburton said.


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Siemens' Topsides 4.0 aims to cut offshore operating costs by $100m
 Siemens’ new Topside 4.0 initiative, which it describes as “a digital lifecycle solution,” targets the offshore production industry. The offering is centred around the “key modules” of compression, power generation, power distribution and automation, the company says.

Topsides 4.0 starts during an offshore project’s concept selection and design phase, when it’s possible to identify and avoid redundancies in processing systems and minimise interfacing risk.

It enables digital project management and manufacturing, virtual testing and commissioning, and delivers what Siemens calls an “intelligent digital twin” of the topsides — a digital replica of the plant, process and automation systems that shows how they interact. The technology reduces costs over a facility’s lifecycle through performance analytics and optimisation in the virtual environment.

“We say it’s an intelligent virtual twin because it knows how the equipment is going to behave,” says Thomas Sparks, vice president of Oil & Gas Strategy and Technology at Siemens.

“You can do improvements on the virtual twin, you can do training with the virtual twin, and that can have an impact on start-up.”

DIGITAL DOUBLE: An illustration of a Topside 4.0 virtual twin. Photo: Siemens

Sparks says the Topsides 4.0 service can reduce a project’s lead time by as much as nine months, cut capital expenditures by $10 million and operating costs over 10 years by as much as $100 million.

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The numbers are significant in a lower-margin offshore climate.

“How can we bring the overall value proposition to the oil and gas industry? That is our role in the technology department — to understand the customer’s needs, look in the Siemens portfolio of solutions and bring them into the industry,” Sparks says.

“Those customer needs have changed a bit in the low oil price environment. Everybody is focussed on lower capex and operating costs, much more than they have been in the past.”

The new initiative is part of an overall push to bring down costs, he says.

“It’s about leveraging new technology to get there. Digitalisation is one effort, but not the only one.”

Two recent Siemens acquisitions have significantly enhanced the company’s oil and gas capacity. In 2014, Siemens acquired Rolls-Royce’s gas turbine and compressor business along with access to its aero-derivative technology.

The purchase of Dresser-Rand the following year expanded the rotating equipment catalogue as well as Siemens’ reach in the oil and gas industry.

The acquired technologies are integral to the Topside 4.0 service, which is complemented by Siemens’ expertise in electrical systems and automation, Sparks says.

The company is also drawing on its track record in digital technology, for example its work with the Barcelona rail network to ensure on-time train service and the imaging techniques developed within the Siemens health care division. Those technologies have applications in the upstream business, he says.

Thomas Sparks, Siemens (Photo: Siemens) Photo: Siemens

We can take a much greater scope on a vessel such as an FPSO and apply the existing solutions from other industries, integrating them and bringing in digitalisation. Thomas Sparks, Siemens

“This is the package we are providing to the oil and gas industry,” he explains. “We can take a much greater scope on a vessel such as an FPSO and apply the existing solutions from other industries, integrating them and bringing in digitalisation.”

Project design “in a virtual environment” avoids redundancies by allowing engineers to predict how systems will work together, make necessary adjustments and determine the optimal topside design.

“We have, to a certain extent, already applied these technologies to existing platforms,” Sparks says, citing Aker BP’s Ivar Aasen platform on the Norwegian continental shelf.

The fixed platform, which came on stream at the end of 2016, is monitored and controlled remotely from an operation centre in Trondheim.

“De-manning the platform has had a huge impact,” he says. “If you can de-man the platform you don’t need living quarters, you don’t have to fly people out there, and there are huge savings. Offshore platforms are the most expensive hotels on earth.”

Taking full advantage of the Topsides 4.0 offering requires collaboration from the outset, he says.

“It starts at the design phase. You can’t really do it on a brownfield, just elements of it,” he says. “We really need to be involved in the beginning.”

Siemens is targeting the FPSO market for an opportunity to prove the Topsides 4.0 concept and the benefits of greater digitalisation.

“It’s a journey,” he says of the digital revolution. “Some companies have adapted to it.”

Output: Siemens has developed Topsides 4.0, which it says can reduce a project’s lead time by as much as nine months, cut capital expenditures by $10m and operating costs over 10 years by as much as $100 million. The "digital lifecycle solution" is centred around the “key modules” of compression, power generation, power distribution and automation. It enables digital project management and manufacturing, virtual testing and commissioning, and delivers what Siemens calls an “intelligent digital twin” of the topsides — a digital replica of the plant, process and automation systems that shows how they interact.


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Workers entitled to paid leave, rules European Court of Justice
 Workers are entitled to paid leave and can claim compensation if they are not allowed to take their holidays, the EU’s highest court has ruled.

In a case involving a UK window salesman, the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg – whose continuing jurisdiction is vehemently opposed by Brexiters – has reinforced employees’ rights.

The long-running legal challenge concerned a claim brought by the salesman, identified as Mr King, against The Sash Window Workshop Limited. The dispute was over his employment contract, which did not specify if he was entitled to paid leave.

The salesman had been paid entirely on commission and his contract described him as self-employed. A UK employment tribunal subsequently found he should have been treated as a full-time worker.

The case is one of a series that have gone to the Luxembourg court to establish whether businesses operating in the “gig economy” are depriving employees of benefits to which they should be entitled by reclassifying workers as self-employed.

In its judgment on Wednesday morning, the ECJ said: “A worker must be able to carry over and accumulate unexercised rights to paid annual leave when an employer does not put that worker in a position in which he is able to exercise his right to paid annual leave.

“The employer was able to benefit from the fact that Mr King did not interrupt his professional activity … It is for the employer to seek all information regarding his obligations in regard to paid annual leave.

“In the absence of any national statutory provision establishing a limit to the carryover of leave in accordance with the requirements of EU law, to accept that the worker’s acquired entitlement to paid annual leave could be extinguished would amount to validating conduct by which an employer was unjustly enriched to the detriment of the purpose of that directive, which is that there should be due regard for workers’ health.”

Claire Gilroy-Scott, a partner at Goodman Derrick, who represented King, said: “This case is of importance in clarifying that workers who are denied their entitlement under the working time regulations to paid annual leave do not have to take a period of unpaid leave first before taking legal action to receive pay for that leave.

“This would otherwise have left a worker (who was without protection from unfair dismissal and reliant upon continued work) with the unattractive prospect of having to suffer a detrimental impact on his remuneration by taking unpaid leave. The court has confirmed that a worker may carry over and make a claim for untaken leave entitlement on the termination of the engagement in these circumstances.”

James Potts, the head of legal at the law firm Peninsula, which represented The Sash Window Company, said: “Employers with self-employed individuals, whether these number in single figures or the thousands, need to seek advice on the real status of their workforce.

“This European decision binds UK tribunals when deciding similar cases. In its current form, the Brexit withdrawal bill maintains European judgments made before the UK’s exit from the EU. However, it does give the supreme court the right to depart from these decisions where it is right to do so. As such, this decision will remain binding post-exit unless a future case proceeds through the domestic courts to the supreme court, where this decision could be departed from.”

Dr Jason Moyer-Lee, the general secretary of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, said: “Today’s bombshell judgment from the court of justice of the European Union is a game changer for the so-called gig economy. The law is now recognising the massive unpaid debt of gig economy companies to their workers and IWGB members will be coming to collect.

“Today’s judgment is also a striking reminder of the impending disaster that is Brexit for worker rights. It’s cases like this one, where the Tories are told that their manoeuvres to protect big business to the detriment of workers are a step too far, that help one understand why they have such an obsessive hatred for the [ECJ]”

Output: Workers are entitled to holiday pay and can claim compensation if denied leave, according to a ruling on 29 November by the European Court of Justice. The judgment came in an case involving a Mr King, a UK window salesman, and his employer, the Sash Window Workshop. The case involved a dispute over King’s contract, which failed to specify whether he was entitled to paid leave and which described him as self-employed. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain claimed the case was a “game changer” for the gig economy.


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US could lose 14,000 historic sites to rising sea level
 Abstract The impact of changing climate on terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes can be examined through quantitatively-based analyses encompassing large data samples and broad geographic and temporal scales. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a multi-institutional collaboration that allows researchers online access to linked heritage data from multiple sources and data sets. The effects of sea-level rise and concomitant human population relocation is examined using a sample from nine states encompassing much of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the southeastern United States. A 1 m rise in sea-level will result in the loss of over >13,000 recorded historic and prehistoric archaeological sites, as well as over 1000 locations currently eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), encompassing archaeological sites, standing structures, and other cultural properties. These numbers increase substantially with each additional 1 m rise in sea level, with >32,000 archaeological sites and >2400 NRHP properties lost should a 5 m rise occur. Many more unrecorded archaeological and historic sites will also be lost as large areas of the landscape are flooded. The displacement of millions of people due to rising seas will cause additional impacts where these populations resettle. Sea level rise will thus result in the loss of much of the record of human habitation of the coastal margin in the Southeast within the next one to two centuries, and the numbers indicate the magnitude of the impact on the archaeological record globally. Construction of large linked data sets is essential to developing procedures for sampling, triage, and mitigation of these impacts.

Citation: Anderson DG, Bissett TG, Yerka SJ, Wells JJ, Kansa EC, Kansa SW, et al. (2017) Sea-level rise and archaeological site destruction: An example from the southeastern United States using DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology). PLoS ONE 12(11): e0188142. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188142 Editor: Peter F. Biehl, University at Buffalo - The State University of New York, UNITED STATES Received: July 28, 2017; Accepted: November 1, 2017; Published: November 29, 2017 This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. Data Availability: Primary locational data for the archaeological sites used in this study is available from the site file managers of the states examined herein. These include: Georgia SHPO; Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VA-DHR); Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources (FDOS-DHR); South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA); University of Alabama’s Office of Archaeological Research (OAR); Louisiana Office of Cultural Development, Division of Archaeology; Maryland Historical Trust; and the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology (OSA). The Coastal State Site Data for Sea-Level Rise Modeling. 2017 From Georgia Archaeological Site File (GASF), Virginia Site Files, Florida Site Files, South Carolina SHPO, Alabama Site Files, Louisiana Site Files, Maryland Site Files, North Carolina Site Files. Edited or directed by: David G. Anderson, Joshua Wells, Stephen Yerka, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric C. Kansa. Released: 2017-03-01. Open Context. Available from: http://opencontext.org/tables/0c14c4ad-fce9-4291-a605-8c065d347c5d DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6078/M7ST7MRR. Funding: The development of DINAA is funded by the National Science Foundation (Awards Numbers NSF 1217240, 1623621, 1216810, 1623644), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Award #LG-70-16-0056-16). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction In recent years, concerns about the damaging effects of anthropogenic global climate change have been amplified by the increasing frequency of destructive weather events, large-scale wildfires and droughts, and a growing body of evidence indicating sea levels will rise appreciably over the next several centuries, from 1 m in the next century to 5 m or more in the centuries thereafter ([1–4]). The effects of such increases in sea level will be severe and long-lasting. At present, over 40% of all people worldwide live within a 100 km distance from the nearest coastline, many in low lying areas vulnerable to sea level rise [5–11]. Should projected rises occur, the effect on humans living on and near the coast, including the loss of infrastructure is nearly incalculable, and will require population movement and resettlement on scales unprecedented in human history. Here we demonstrate, using examples from the southeastern United States, that not only modern populations and properties, but also irreplaceable heritage in the form of the physical record of past human settlements, are currently vulnerable to projected sea level rise as a destructive agent. We argue that archaeologists and society at large should direct increased attention to planning for and mitigating these losses to heritage resources. The worldwide historic preservation community has begun to express serious concerns over the threat of global climate change to the archaeological and historic record, especially with respect to the potential loss of data that will occur as coastal zones are subjected to increased erosional forces and inundation from rising sea levels [12–35]). Analyses have been directed to determining how rising or fluctuating sea levels damage archaeological and historical resources, sacred and traditional sites, as well as submerged resources like former terrestrial archaeological sites, buildings, and shipwrecks [36–45]. Threats to coastal and near-coastal cultural resources will also come from activities undertaken to resist rising waters. Sea walls and other barriers may provide protection to critical coastlines at favorable cost benefit tradeoffs [46], but their construction will potentially impact large numbers of existing and undocumented cultural resources, far exceeding work conducted as a result of recent oil spills like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and Deepwater Horizon along the southeastern Gulf coast [47–50]. Far less consideration has been given to the damage or loss of cultural resources that will occur as populations residing in coastal areas are displaced inland, building new communities or expanding existing ones. In previously less-developed regions, where little prior archaeological work has occurred, innumerable unrecorded archaeological and historical sites will also be threatened. The salvaging of valuable materials from threatened infrastructure itself will likely take a toll on historic properties, although some of the more iconic buildings may themselves be relocated to higher ground. For example, the White House or the Lincoln Memorial may be moved from Washington, D.C., much like the Egyptian New Kingdom era temple of Abu Simbel was moved before the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam submerged the area in the 1960s, and the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was relocated 2,900 feet to protect it from encroaching seas in 1999 [32, 51, 52]. Damage from shoreline erosion represents a significant concern to preservationists, with appreciable research globally now being directed to well-known archaeological and historical resources threatened by such processes [19, 24, 25, 27–45]. Important research is addressing the threat of global climate change, particularly sea level rise, to national landmarks or national parks in the United States [19, 21, 28, 29, 32, 53, 54]. However, more inclusive and geographically broad-based analyses are rare, because comprehensive data sets encompassing all known archaeological and historical resources at regional or continental scales have not previously been available. In the United States, cultural resource data are managed at the state rather than the national level, or within specific federal agencies, making such database development and large-scale analyses challenging. Integrating these data together is crucial to determining how climate change, including fluctuations in sea-level, will impact heritage resources at regional and continental scales. Calls for such syntheses have recently appeared [55, 56], and fostering research on this scale is widely heralded as a grand challenge facing the archaeological profession in the United States [57, 58], essential to exploring questions about changes over time in organizational complexity, human responses to climate change, and long-term settlement dynamics [31, 59–70].

Linked database development: The DINAA project The Digital Index of North American Archaeology [71–73], or DINAA, permits the examination of relationships between environmental and cultural resources over large areas, by rendering diverse heritage data sets interoperable, and linking them with natural systems data sets encompassing physiography, biota, and climate in the past, present, and projected into the future. A multi-institutional collaboration, DINAA consists of an online, integrated open-source database of archaeological and other kinds of evidence for North America’s human settlement. Since 2012, DINAA has compiled and rendered interoperable archaeological site file data from 15 states in Eastern North America (N = 505,056 sites). This work has been done in consultation and cooperation with government, academic, and tribal stakeholders, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and support from the leadership of archaeological professional organizations, including the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology, and the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association [73] (Fig 1). As of October 2017, personnel from 21 states are actively participating in DINAA development, and the project has initiated discussions with site file managers and governing authorities in the remaining 28 states in continental North America, and in other countries, with the goal of developing a truly continental database. Information rendered accessible through DINAA is seeing increasing attention and use by researchers and resource managers, enhancing public awareness, education, and appreciation for scientific research in general and archaeology in particular [74–86]. PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. DINAA partnerships as of July 2017 with dot density plot showing distribution of cultural resources at low resolution within states whose data have been received thus far. Data: [73]. Ohio and most Pennsylvania site data is at county-level resolution. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188142.g001 DINAA is a publicly accessible compilation of existing archaeological site file, collection, and report data from multiple regional, state, and local repositories, linked with other archaeological databases as well as modern and paleoenvironmental data sets, with site numbers serving as the basic identifier and standardized temporal metadata as a relational control between data sets, to permit analyses by selected time periods. Archaeological site files contain data and metadata about the chronology, location, and function of sites, in combination with other information that can include diagnostic artifact descriptions, radiocarbon and other absolute dating determinations, and bibliographic citations. While each state and agency uses somewhat different systems, they are rendered interoperable through DINAA. Through deployment on Open Context [73], an open data publishing service for archaeology, DINAA embraces current best practices in scientific data-management including open standards and open licensing, transparent version control of both data and source code, Linked Data, and iterative development. Through aggregation and human editorial processes to align data set schemas and controlled vocabularies, DINAA provides some of the benefits of centralization without requiring different (and typically financially constrained) state agencies to change their own systems. Thus, DINAA fosters independent development and experimentation through integration of distributed systems managed by a host of institutions. This approach enables community-wide participation and investment in archaeological informatics, making the resulting cyberinfrastructure products shared and useful for all. DINAA also strictly conforms to legal requirements regarding the maintenance and use of cultural resources data. While analyses like those reported herein can occur making use of records with specific geospatial data, the data itself and permission to use it must be obtained from the agencies maintaining the information. DINAA, accordingly, does not publish or store precise site coordinates online, and the project redacts other sensitive attributes, particularly property ownership, from state site file repositories, in consultation with agency and other interested parties, including tribal nations. Directions to offices to contact to obtain such information for each site are provided with analytical output, but DINAA itself does not maintain or release such data. For public display purposes DINAA site data is aggregated within a tiled web map in Open Context, where a map-tiling algorithm allocates each site record to a 0.176 degree grid cell in the WGS Web Mercator projection (roughly 20x20 km at the equator). The Open Context platform provides publicly accessible online map interfaces for visualization and queries at a low level of spatial resolution that still has great utility when examining distributions encompassing large areas or time periods. DINAA digital data are archived with the California Digital Library, and mirrored in repositories in other countries to ensure long term survival [71, 72]. Indexing, or linking to and rendering interoperable data from many sources and across disciplines is a major function of DINAA, increasing its utility for resource management, research, and public education (Fig 2). By cross-referencing distributed collections on the Web, DINAA enables users to find and access relevant content in archaeological systems like Archaeology Southwest [87], the Paleoindian Database of the Americas [88, 89], the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Database Project [90], the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database [91], the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery [92], the Chaco Research Archive [93], PeriodO [94], and The Digital Archaeological Record [95]. Aggregators such as Pelagios [96], a collaborator with DINAA, can then “harvest” cross-references between different systems to present users with services, maps, and visualization tools to discover related data and other media that relate to DINAA curated site files. DINAA can serve as a key node in connecting North American archaeological data, allowing, for the first time, its linkage across multiple time periods and geographic regions, and using an array of environmental data sets to explore fundamental issues such as changes in human land use over time; the nature of the archaeological record collected over the past century, including the identification of research strengths and gaps; and, as we show here, how future changes in climate will affect site preservation and heritage management. PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Fig 2. DINAA links information in a wide range of online data repositories, using archaeological site numbers as the common referent. DINAA directs users to these outlets, but access and content control remains on their systems (black arrows indicate existing linkages, white arrows indicate linkages under development). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188142.g002

Strategies for mitigating losses due to sea-level rise At present, the effects of sea level rise on past cultural resources can be directly observed in the sparsity of the coastal archaeological record for the late Pleistocene and early Holocene period, during which time humans living in the Americas occupied vast areas of the continental shelf that were exposed by sea levels as much as 120 m lower than today [37–39, 61, 62]. Following a period of rapidly rising sea levels in the late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, the coastlines of the eastern United States reached near modern locations about 6000 years ago, but have still experienced fluctuations of 1 to 2 m vertically and up to several kilometers horizontally in recent millennia, with significant impacts on coastal populations [97–99, 101–102]. These regions are now directly threatened by rising waters, and the potential for the loss of thousands of years of accumulated information is significant. Given the large numbers of cultural resources threatened by sea level rise, planning possible protection and mitigation strategies should proceed with an increased sense of urgency. Many researchers and government agencies within the United States and beyond, in fact, have initiated or been developing both broad based and focused, site-specific studies on the effect of sea level rise [21–23, 25–35, 129]. One way to proceed is to use the entire known sample of cultural resources to document the numbers of properties that will be lost, by specific time period and within specific areas. Developing such a comprehensive database, of course, will be necessary, and include site records maintained by disparate state, federal, tribal, and local government agencies. This information can help to develop a triage system for cultural resources in coastal and near-coastal regions [130]. At the same time, efforts should be directed toward identifying and evaluating areas and site types currently under- or unexamined. The goal of such efforts should be to assist in the development of programs directed to the excavation, removal or relocation, and architectural documentation of critical cultural resources and resource areas. In the Southeast such efforts are appearing at the state level, including studies of significant sites or areas in Georgia [25, 131]) and Florida ([41, 66–70, 132], and collectively over large areas by federal agencies like the National Park Service [21, 28, 32]. DINAA offers a means to augment these studies by updating inventories with robust data linked to many other data sets and analytical platforms, facilitating effective resource management planning. Data on the number of components by major temporal period located at archaeological sites within 200 km of the coast, by elevation above modern sea level, are given for the state of South Carolina in Table 5. The numbers of sites in each elevation interval correspond to the state totals, since they are derived from the same site file data set in DINAA (Table 1), but the numbers of components are invariably higher, in some cases much higher, because some sites were repeatedly visited and are multicomponent. In some cases individual occupations can be quite specifically identified to temporal period while others can be only generally identified to age, perhaps no more specifically than to a categorization as precontact or historic. It should be noted that comparable tables can be generated for each state in the region; South Carolina was chosen as an example for illustrative purposes, and to show the potential of DINAA. PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Table 5. Archaeological site and component loss in South Carolina due to sea level rise within 200 km of the coast. Data: [73]. PI = Paleoindian. EA = Early Archaic, MA = Middle Archaic, LA = Late Archaic, AA = Any Archaic, EW = Early Woodland, MW = Middle Woodland, LW = Late Woodland, AW = Any Woodland, M = Mississippian, LP = Late Prehistoric, UP = Unknown Prehistoric, CEP = Contact Era/Protohistoric, 16th = 16th Century Historic, 17th = 17th Century Historic, 18th = 18th Century Historic, 19th = 19th Century Historic, 20th = 20th Century Historic, UH = Unidentified Historic. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188142.t005 Land use patterns are highlighted when examining individual state data by time period, and help to determine if survey coverage or research biases have affected the estimated number of existing sites in coastal areas. Few early prehistoric Paleoindian through Middle Archaic period components, for example, are found in coastal (i.e., low elevation) areas in South Carolina, compared to the much larger number of later precontact and historic components. With greatly lowered sea levels during these earlier periods, the coast would have been much farther away, perhaps making these areas less attractive for settlement. Likewise, given the intense occupation in coastal areas after sea levels largely stabilized in the region during the later Mid-Holocene [133–136], it is not surprising that large numbers of components are found in close proximity to modern sea level. Even in this area, appreciable variability in location exists, due to the effects of ca. 1–2 m fluctuations in sea level in recent millennia ([97–99, 101, 102]. Interestingly, within the South Carolina sample the larger regional pattern holds, in that that large number of components are found within 1 m of modern sea level, and far fewer above 3 m in elevation, reinforcing the conclusion that people over the last several thousand years lived in close proximity to the coast, albeit shifting location as needed to accommodate the fluctuations in sea level of plus or minus 2 m or so that have occurred. Resource managers will need to evaluate sites in large numbers to determine which ones to preserve, protect, or mitigate. This is no different than what modern cultural resources management deals with on a regular basis, only here we call for consideration of the entirety of the coastal record as one data set, rather than on an individual case-by-case basis. Effective systems of management, including triage and mitigation, can only be developed when we have an accurate understanding of the cultural resources in an area, and where critical gaps in that knowledge exist. Existing databases need to be completed or developed and subsequently linked to systems like DINAA, while strict protections for sensitive location and other information are maintained. Many cultural resource databases reflect incomplete coverage of a geographic area or contain only particular kinds of data. A recent exemplary study of the effects of sea level rise on National Park Service coastal parks, for example, excluded most known archaeological resources because they were not part of the Facilities Management Software System database listing assets requiring routine maintenance within each NSP unit [21]. Improving and linking dispersed databases, and rendering them interoperable for research and management purposes, will allow management decisions to proceed with much larger and more representative samples. Archaeologists and land managers need to be aware that cultural resources face specific threats, and that sea level rise will impact resources differently in different areas, depending on geomorphological factors like shoreline shape and slope, the underlying matrix, the nature of the archeological deposits, and a range of other variable associated with the cultural properties [22–26, 28–30, 123, 137]. For example, some shell middens dating to the Mid-Holocene have already witnessed episodes of submergence and exposure, but remain at partially intact in coastal marshlands of the Southeast (e.g., [97, 98, 136], suggesting sea level rise does not necessary always equate with the total destruction of all types of resources. The circumstances favoring preservation or loss of coastal sites will need to be carefully evaluated on an individual or class basis [22, 130]. Resources directed to cultural resources will undoubtedly change as environmental conditions change, and historic preservation specialists will continue to have a major role in preserving our cultural heritage [26, 114–115, 129, 138]. Guidance for resource managers on how to deal with the impacts of climate change is clearly needed, and action directed to these ends is underway in federal agencies like the US National Park Service [21, 28, 29, 139, 140] as well as international governing bodies like the United Nations [141, 142]. Effort should be directed to making sure our inventories of cultural resources are accurate, adequate, as complete as possible, and linked together with interoperable data elements, so the information can be utilized to prioritize preservation projects and research problems by site type and risk level, allowing the most pressing needs in resource preservation to be addressed effectively. More sites should be evaluated for placement on the NRHP; at present, in some circumstances only formal listing offers any hope of preservation or mitigation. Resources should be directed to evaluating sites in large numbers, as has happened with southeastern coastal shell ring and midden sites [132, 135, 136]. The economic costs of mitigating cultural resource loss through excavation, relocation, or architectural documentation should be considered thoroughly and incurred conscientiously, as it is well known that public funding for historic preservation efforts is often difficult to acquire, limited in quantity, and requires a high level of justification. Ultimately, what will be needed is a commitment, like that last seen in the Great Depression, to document that which will be lost if the effects of sea level rise are not mitigated. This time, instead of rescuing information from sites in reservoir floodpools as was done by the Tennessee Valley Authority [143], or deliberate economic recovery or tourist-industry focused make-work projects like those in the Macon, Georgia area [144], much of the work will need to occur in coastal areas or where the resettlement of displaced populations will occur. The Cape Hatteras lighthouse relocation was expensive and technically challenging, but offers an excellent example of what can be done when resources are made available [51]). Consideration may have to be given to relocating or constructing protective barriers for other such monuments, like the Castillo de San Marcos and Ft. Matanzas in St. Augustine, for example, or the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials [21, 28]. The solution to addressing the effect of sea level rise on major centers of heritage, like the nations’ capitol, Boston, New York, or Washington, to list just a few of the threatened cities that will receive consideration ([119]), would probably be the construction of sea walls and similar projects, whose cost is projected to be far less than the damage caused by flooding [46]. While these kinds of projects would cause massive damage to cultural resources in the construction zone, including where fill/retaining wall materials came from, their loss could be better accepted given an effective assessment of the totality of the resources affected by sea level rise. Sites in heavily developed, low lying areas may in fact be at less risk, because there will be added effort taken to protect those areas. An NRHP eligible site or structure in central New Orleans is probably more likely to be protected by new sea walls or levees than a shell ring on a low, relatively undeveloped southeastern coastline. This analysis assumes sea level rise will destroy cultural resources. Of course, depending on the rate and rapidity of rise, it may only submerge these resources, with the extent of damage or loss uncertain. Some studies have shown that sea level fluctuations may not totally destroy cultural resources; much depends on the rapidity and frequency with which submergence or exposure may occur (e.g., [37, 38, 127, 136]. More such studies are critically needed, since preservation in place may be our only option for most sites, unfortunately by default. What will be preserved is important to determine, because it will mean resources can be directed to other, more vulnerable site types. Some of these sites may be accessible using underwater archaeological methods in the future, meaning mitigation should be directed to site types unlikely to survive sea level rise or storm surges. Finally, we need to be thinking not just about sites and architecture, but also about the long term curation of physical collections and records. Storing the archival records and collections within one or even several meters vertical elevation above modern sea level will need to be rethought, since such actions can no longer be considered a viable means of ensuring effective curation in perpetuity.

Conclusions Although the scientific community recognizes the profound impact of humans on the natural environment in recent centuries, few institutions fund the investigation of long-term human-environmental interactions through database development like DINAA. The initial data collection and integration phase of DINAA has been undertaken largely voluntarily by project team members at several institutions, together with limited funding from the Archaeology Program of the National Science Foundation. This has allowed us to develop a proof-of-concept framework integrating archaeological data from 15 states [72, 73], for linkage to environmental and collections data sets. DINAA demonstrates how a truly continental archaeological database useful for research, resource management, and public education can be developed, and how it can be maintained and updated on a regular schedule by a sustainable community of scholars and stakeholders. Linking archaeological site files and other data sets at broad scales catalyzes research across disciplines, promoting more holistic understanding of both human adaptation and environmental impacts. As multidisciplinary databases addressing sea level and other forms of global change are developed, the role of cultural resources are increasingly coming to be regarded as a critical factor when planning mitigation strategies [19, 27, 148, 149]. DINAA, through its adoption of an open data policy (within limitations regarding sensitive information), promotes information sharing and integration, not only of archaeological but paleoenvironmental, biogeographical, physiographic, and other data characterizing our environment. Within archaeology such approaches to data management are increasingly viewed as not only good science, but an ethical obligation [150]. DINAA has open-ended applications allowing researchers, land managers, and interested members of the public to examine the nature and scale of human responses to the dramatic fluctuations in temperature, biota, and sea level that have occurred over the ca. 15,000+ years people have lived in the Americas, and help inform our understanding of possible human responses to similar changes predicted for the future, questions of critical importance. Hopefully there will be time to implement these suggestions. However, changes in sea level may be far greater and occur far faster than currently predicted. Delay in thinking about these matters and in seeking solutions accomplishes nothing. Developing data infrastructure like DINAA is crucial to multidisciplinary analyses linking differing kinds and sources of data together and rendering them interoperable. By facilitating the mapping of archaeological sites over time and at varying geographic scales, showing where people were on the landscape and how they reacted to changes in climate and biota, tools like DINAA are useful to addressing research and management concerns. These include helping people gain a much greater appreciation for American history and culture, and protecting the vulnerable heritage of indigenous communities. Linked data can be used to explore the impact of sea level rise on cultural and historical resources. The effects of sea level rise on cultural resources is intimately linked to the humanitarian and economic issues that need to be faced in all crises [44, 145]. Cultural resources, promoting an awareness of and appreciation for our heritage, are essential to our well-being, and a continuing source inspiration [26, 146, 147]. Population relocation and new infrastructure required to cope with sea level rise, we have seen, will have severe negative impacts on coastal and near-coastal cultural resources. Given the investment humanity has made in these areas, efforts should be directed to preventing and, if this is not possible, managing potential losses. Cyberinfrastructure development is a critical part of 21st century archaeology, and projects like DINAA will make archaeological data increasingly useful and relevant to research, management, and public educational efforts. Data-driven archaeology can provide unparalleled insights into long-term human-environmental interactions, enabling archaeology to more fully participate in the efforts directed to understanding the impacts of climate change. Such knowledge is critical to making well informed forecasts and policy decisions about the consequences of rapid climate change, extreme weather events, and burgeoning populations, factors that will shape our civilization profoundly in the coming decades. While legal and ethical restrictions require that we safe-guard the precise location data behind this study (which is available from the agencies maintaining it [151]), DINAA makes data openly available with a lower level of spatial resolution to enable at least partial replication of these analyses, and most critically, to enable researchers in many fields of study to try other applications, using a framework built on information from the past to project trends forward in time. Our species has witnessed comparable periods of dramatic climate change in the past, and understanding how we responded can provide valuable lessons, and hope, for the future. Indeed, these are some of the greatest lessens archaeology can teach us, by providing information about how past human response, and resilience, as we move forward into an increasingly uncertain world.

Acknowledgments Primary locational data for the archaeological sites used in this study is available from the site file managers of the states examined herein [151]. No permits were required for the described study, which complies with all relevant regulations. The authors express our deepest thanks to the SHPOs and site file managers in the states partnered with DINAA. Without their help, the analyses reported here would not have been possible. Thomas H. McGovern, Marcy Rockman, Kenneth E. Sassaman, and Martin P. Walker are also to be thanked for their advice and detailed comments, and the PLOS ONE reviewers and editors, as well as Stephen J. Yerka for preparing the graphics. The population data summarized in Table 3 was made utilizing the LandScan (2013)™ High Resolution global Population Data Set copyrighted by UT-Battelle, LLC, operator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the United States Department of Energy. The United States Government has certain rights in this Data Set. Neither UT-Battelle, LLC nor the United States Department of Energy, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of the data set.

Output: Climate change-related rises in sea levels could cause the loss of nearly 14,000 national monuments and archaeological sites in the US by the year 2100, according to scientists. Sea levels are expected to rise by an average of one metre across the world by that date. The research, the first of its kind, combined site elevations on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts with predictions about rising sea levels. The researchers said that climate change presented dangers for “the archaeological and historic record” and called for discussion of the need for relocation and documentation.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Sexual harassment has economic as well as personal cost
 Up to 85% of women report that they have been sexually harassed at work, and 80% of them leave their firms within two years. Many even change industries. We know this imposes an economic cost on them, but what’s the larger cost to all of us? As talented women are pushed into starting over again, industries lose their ideas and expertise. And ideas are what drives today’s economy. The Economist has said that “new ideas are getting hard to find.” But what if actually, we’re just limiting who gets to have ideas? Systemic sexual harassment mean that women and their ideas are disproportionately chased away. That’s not something that companies — or countries — can afford.

Up to 85% of women report that they have been sexually harassed at work, according to a 2016 report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. What happens next is often not captured in numbers, but in the fine-print details of recent media reports. Whether the industry is media, entertainment, politics, technology, or something else, these women say things like: “I quit.” Or, “I left that place.” Or “maybe I shouldn’t be in [this industry]”. Some women scaled back on their ambitions, while others left companies or their chosen industry altogether.

Reading these many stories, over the last few months, made me reflect on my own exits. After a senior law enforcement official chased me around a hotel room while we both served on a statewide board for community colleges, I left the education field. I went into the tech industry, where I saw firsthand that male executives preferred to promote the ideas and innovations proposed by the female colleagues they happened to be having sex with. (And, moreover, having sex with in the office – I saw that firsthand, too, though I wish I could unsee it). I left that industry, too, becoming an independent consultant and advisor. Then, after hearing too many young women’s stories of venture capitalists who asked for sex in return for funding, I stepped back from participating in the startup ecosystem, the driving economy of Silicon Valley. I had never thought of sexual harassment as affecting my career arc, and yet I can now see how its friction surely influenced it.

While each woman’s harassment story is different in particulars, together the vignettes add up.

Obviously, each individual diminishes her earning power as she starts over. And collectively, this rash of exits is one reason that women as a group haven’t advanced to the highest levels of power in any industry. Research supports what these anecdotes suggest: according to data collected by sociologist Heather McLaughlin and others, about 80% of women who’ve been harassed leave their jobs within two years.

But it’s only when we squint at the stories, the more insidious economic story becomes visible. Which is this: as people drop out, opt out, and tune out of their chosen fields, it affects the whole economy. It’s the missing female Harvey Weinstein who never got a chance to shape the full range of stories of our society. It’s the female Charlie Rose who never got a chance to earn the power and influence associated with that role. And moving away from the hypothetical, it’s the Susan Fowlers and Ellen Paos who didn’t get to build the companies or make the investments that offered the new solutions that society most desperately needs.

The development of new ideas is what allows economies to grow richer year after year. This is especially true in the modern, digital, social economy: ideas are essential for growth, innovation, and ultimately prosperity. Power can either liberate or limit ideas. Too often, ideas are considered or dismissed based on who contributes them, and how powerful the person—not the ideas themselves—are.

Just as recently as September, The Economist reported that “new ideas are getting hard to find.” Robert Gordon and other notable economists’ quotes show that America’s economic boom is now behind us, as the productivity of new innovators and innovations to market have tumbled.

Those economists seem to think we’ve run out of ideas, but I’m wondering if it’s something else. Could it be that institutionalized patriarchy – the system in which men predominantly hold the power and women are largely excluded from it – is itself the key turnstiles, slowing economic progress? Could it be that many women’s contributions are blocked by those currently are in charge? Could it be that women are gaslighted into believing their ideas aren’t as worthy? And that men’s mediocre ideas are artificially elevated, rewarded and celebrated? Surely there’s an economic impact in all of that. While researchers have attempted to quantify the economic cost to individual women of being harassed, we may never be able to fully quantify the total economic cost to all of us – just as we can’t quantify the total costs to human prosperity of racism or other systemic discrimination.

But it’s only logical that as sexually predatory behavior goes on and is covered up, some people get to contribute their ideas, while others don’t. And we all pay the price. Because the key inference here is not about how one person feels or that people are being treated wrongly – important issues, surely — but that the system itself is the limiting gateway for our ideas, growth, and prosperity.

In the coming months, I predict that there will be a discussion on how “fair” it is that men lose their jobs for this conduct. The headline will likely read, “Claims of sexual harassment have gone too far”. After all, that person will argue, the harassers are (overall) good people who do (generally) good and valuable work. As you hear those backlash arguments, I want you to stop and ask yourself something: how “fair” it is that women have been essentially (and sometimes quite literally) chased out of their ability to contribute? We can see the effect of men losing their jobs, but that’s only because women have already been rendered invisible, before their ideas even had a shot. Just because you can’t see that, doesn’t make the loss to society and our economy any less real.

Seeing this bigger picture changes the call to action.

Instead of thinking of sexually predatory behavior as a few (or many) bad seeds, we ask, instead… how do we change our organizations to rebalance power? In the near-term, companies could improve reporting procedures so transparency and crowdsourced data could make the “whisper network” visible. A change in legal defaults to make settlements public would make it possible to see patterns. This, in turn, would make companies and their boards more accountable to the marketplace.

This is a bottom-line issue, in addition to being a human dignity issue. If only a few ideas are seen and valued, the wealth of a broader set of ideas is lost. While there’s a lot of attention economically on “the race against the machine”, we’re only now paying attention to the more enduring race affecting our economy in parallel: the skirt chase around the conference table. The question of what is created depends on who has a place at that table. And that is the problem, and the opportunity, that needs to be acted on.

Output: Sexual harassment has an economic cost, according to an opinion piece by Nilofer Merchant in the Harvard Business Review. The Economist reported in September that the increasing difficulty of finding new ideas is damaging economic prosperity in the US. Merchant argues that institutionalized patriarchy is slowing economic development by blocking women’s contributions and promoting mediocre men. Power needs to be rebalanced within organizations to preserve human dignity and to counter the economic cost of harassment.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Sexual harassment has economic as well as personal cost
 WERE there far fewer undiscovered ideas out there than in our more primitive past, how would people know? This is not an idle question; decoding the mysteries of nature, from atmospheric pressure to electricity to DNA, allowed people to bend the natural world to their will, and to grow richer in the process. A dwindling stock of discoverable insights would mean correspondingly less scope for progress in the future—a dismal prospect. And some signs suggest that the well of our imagination has run dry. Though ever more researchers are digging for insights, according to new research, the flow of new ideas is flagging. But that uncovering new ideas is a struggle does not mean that humanity is near the limits of its understanding.

The development of new ideas—meaning scientific truths or clever inventions—allows economies to grow richer year after year. Adding more workers or machinery to an economy boosts GDP, but only for a while. Applying ever more men with hoes to the cultivation of a field will generate diminishing returns in terms of crop yields, for instance; wringing more from the soil eventually requires the use of better seed-stock or fertiliser. Unless humanity finds new ways to do more with the same amount of labour and capital, growth in incomes peters out to nothing.

Dwindling growth in incomes is not a bad description of what has happened in much of the industrialised world in recent decades. Meagre rises, in turn, lead some to conclude that there are simply not many breakthroughs left to be uncovered, of the sort that lifted living standards during the Industrial Revolution. That, for instance, is the view of Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, whose bleak book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, reckons that the era of economic revolution is behind us.

Is it? A recent paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford University, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides relevant evidence. Though striking an agnostic position as to whether humanity has used up all its eureka moments, they nonetheless conclude that new ideas are getting more expensive to find. The authors consider four different case studies, within which they compare research “inputs” (such as the money spent on researchers and lab equipment) and outputs. The number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip has doubled with reassuring regularity for half a century, every two years or so—a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law (after Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel). Yet this success has been achieved by pouring more and more resources into the effort over time. The research productivity of each scientist participating in the battle to cram in transistors has correspondingly tumbled.

Much the same is true in other fields of inquiry, such as efforts to raise crop yields and extend life. As the authors acknowledge, squeezing oranges dry is not a problem if new oranges keep arriving: ie, if new lines of research appear even as others are exhausted. Yet they reckon that, across the economy as a whole, the notion that the cost of ideas is rising holds true. Since the 1930s, the effective number of researchers at work has increased by a factor of 23. But annual growth in productivity has declined (see chart).

Not the only fruit

Despair is premature, however. The effort to find new, growth-boosting ideas is not necessarily hopeless, just complicated. Whether herding more researchers into the laboratory raises growth might depend on how intensively the resulting brainstorms are used, for example. Across the global economy, many countries have yet fully to exploit ideas already in use by firms at the frontier of scientific knowledge. The problem, in other words, is not that oranges are in short supply or are already squeezed dry, but rather that of the ten workers at the juice bar, only one has learned to do the squeezing. Investments in education and training, to expand the share of workers that can use new ideas, or in the quality of management, to improve how effectively ideas are applied within firms, would do wonders for growth, even if the world’s scientists are idly scratching their heads.

Analysing the supply side of the innovation equation in isolation can also be misleading. The demand for new ideas, and, correspondingly, the incentive to tackle difficult questions, also matters. In his analysis of the Industrial Revolution, Robert Allen, an economic historian then at Oxford, sought to explain why it started in Britain rather than anywhere else. Supply-side factors, such as improved literacy and stronger property rights, certainly played a part. But it was the demand for labour-saving innovation, prompted by Britain’s relatively high wages at the time, which gave tinkerers a strong incentive to develop and hone the steam engine and its applications.

Put differently, researchers are often like the drunken man searching for his keys under the streetlight, because that is where the light is. Until some pressure is applied to encourage him to look elsewhere, the search will often prove fruitless. It is easy to see why firms might take a lackadaisical approach to some research questions. Disappointing wage growth across advanced economies is a deterrent to the invention and use of labour-saving innovations. Persistently high rates of profit give big firms plenty of money to plough into fancy research labs, but also suggest that the competitive pressures which might prompt them to exploit the resulting discoveries are weak.

The accumulation of knowledge is in some ways a burden. The more is known, the more researchers must absorb before they can add to the stock of human knowledge—or the more they must collaborate with other researchers to combine their areas of expertise. But the incomplete exploitation of currently available knowledge is in some way reassuring. It suggests that people are underperforming relative to their potential: both in how they use available ideas and in how they uncover new ones.

Output: Sexual harassment has an economic cost, according to an opinion piece by Nilofer Merchant in the Harvard Business Review. The Economist reported in September that the increasing difficulty of finding new ideas is damaging economic prosperity in the US. Merchant argues that institutionalized patriarchy is slowing economic development by blocking women’s contributions and promoting mediocre men. Power needs to be rebalanced within organizations to preserve human dignity and to counter the economic cost of harassment.