Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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IBM develops algorithm to diagnose schizophrenia from fMRI scans
 A scientific collaboration between researchers at IBM and the University of Alberta in Canada has come up with a software tool that analyzes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of patient brains and with 74% accuracy diagnoses schizophrenia. Moreover, the software’s algorithms were also able to reasonably estimate how bad the symptoms of the disease were in individual patients.

The team used fMRI data from the Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network that contains a large number and variety of imaging scans of brains of different patients. The investigators took 95 scans from a collection of schizophrenia patients and used them as input to a deep learning algorithm that found correlations in the scans to develop an understanding of what schizophrenia looks like. They then ran the algorithm against a set of scans of patients with the disease and without, demonstrating that the software is able to spot three quarters of the scans showing the disease.

The team published their findings in journal Schizophrenia Research. Here’s a bit from the abstract:

Whole-brain link-weight features achieved 74% accuracy in identifying patients and were more stable than voxel-wise node-degrees. Link-weight features predicted severity of several negative and positive symptom scales, including inattentiveness and bizarre behavior. The most-signiﬁcant, stable and discriminative functional connectivity changes involved increased correlations between thalamus and primary motor/primary sensory cortex, and between precuneus (BA7) and thalamus, putamen, and Brodmann areas BA9 and BA44. Precuneus, along with BA6 and primary sensory cortex, was also involved in predicting severity of several symptoms. Overall, the proposed multi-step methodology may help identify more reliable multivariate patterns allowing for accurate prediction of schizophrenia and its symptoms severity.

Image: Regions of the brain that showed a statistically significant difference between patients with schizophrenia and patients without it. For example, arrow 1 identifies the precentral gyrus, or the motor cortex, and arrow 5 marks the precuneus, which involves processing visual information.

Study in journal Schizophrenia Research: Learning stable and predictive network-based patterns ofschizophrenia and its clinical symptoms…

Via: IBM…

Output: IBM has collaborated with the University of Alberta to create a software tool to analyse functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to diagnose schizophrenia. The tool uses algorithms to examine patients’ brain scans and diagnose symptoms with a 74% accuracy rate, as well as determining their severity. Using 95 scans from diagnosed schizophrenia patients, the research team trained a deep learning algorithm to recognise connectivity changes and correlations in brain sectors to determine severity.


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Price Transparency In Medicine Faces Stiff Opposition — From Hospitals And Doctors
 COLUMBUS, Ohio — Two years after it passed unanimously in Ohio’s state Legislature, a law meant to inform patients what health care procedures will cost is in a state of suspended animation.

One of the most stringent in a group of similar state laws being proposed across the country, Ohio’s Healthcare Price Transparency Law stipulated that providers had to give patients a “good faith” estimate of what non-emergency services would cost individuals after insurance before they commenced treatment.

But the law didn’t go into force on Jan. 1 as scheduled. And its troubled odyssey illustrates the political and business forces opposing a common-sense but controversial solution to rein in high health care costs for patients: Let patients see prices.

Many patient advocates say such transparency would be helpful for patients, allowing them to shop around for some services to hold down out-of-pocket costs, as well as adjust their household budgets for upcoming health-related outlays at a time of high-deductible plans.

At the Ohio Statehouse, the law’s greatest champion in state government has been Rep. Jim Butler, a Republican and former Navy fighter pilot whose wife is a physician. He authored the legislation and has beat the drum for it since he got the idea in 2013, as he waited for a garage mechanic to repair his car and absorbed the shop’s posted rates for brake jobs, oil changes and tuneups.

Opposition has been formidable, led by the goliath Ohio Hospital Association. It has filed a court injunction that is currently delaying enactment, peppered local news media with editorials, and lobbied Republican Gov. John Kasich, who has eliminated funding that would allow implementation from the latest state budget.

Joining the hospital association in its legal action are a wide range of provider groups including the Ohio State Medical Association, the Ohio Psychological Association, the Ohio Physical Therapy Association, and the Ohio chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Osteopathic Association.

These groups say that the law, which applies only to elective procedures, is too broad and that forcing providers to create estimates before procedures would slow down patient care. “The only way to even try to comply with the law is to delay care to patients in order to track down information from insurance companies, who may or may not provide the requested information,” wrote Mike Abrams, the president and CEO of the Ohio Hospital Association, in an op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch in January.

But Jerry Friedman, a retired health policy adviser for the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said the opposition doesn’t stem from genuine concern about patients but from a desire to keep the secret rates that providers have negotiated with insurers under wraps. Transparency would mean explaining to consumers why the hospital charged them $1,000 for a test, he said, adding that providers “don’t want to expose this house of cards they’ve built between hospital physician industry and the insurance industry.”

Said Butler on his quest to see the law enacted: “The health care industry has a lot of political power and lots of money. It’s hard to fight on behalf of people against this kind of force.”

The law’s next test will come in August, when the first court hearing on the association’s lawsuit is scheduled. The Kasich administration said it couldn’t comment on the law because of the pending litigation.

Greater price transparency has been a popular policy prescription for America’s high health costs, especially at a time when many patients have high-deductible insurance plans and face larger copayments. Upfront estimates exist in other countries, such as Australia and, for patients facing out-of-pocket expenses, in France.

In Massachusetts, patients can get an estimate within two days of admission if they ask for it. Nebraska requires hospitals and surgical centers to provide a list of the average charges for services. New Hampshire has a website where consumers can compare costs.

Hospitals and doctors often oppose such measures. The American Hospital Association’s position is that health plans — not hospitals — are responsible for telling insured patients about their out-of-pocket costs, according to its website.

Aimee Winteregg, 35, of Troy, Ohio, said she would have liked such information before five miscarriages in four years left her buried in unexpected medical bills. She and her husband became first-time parents in November. Though they are well insured, tests and treatment cost the couple $4,000 out-of-pocket, demanded in bills that were sometimes no more descriptive than for “medical service.”

“We don’t want to deal with this, especially when the doctor tells you stress is bad for the pregnancy,” her husband, J.D., said. But imposing greater transparency has been controversial in both the medical industry and among some health care researchers, who say it puts patients in an untenable position.

The transparency law “was written by someone thinking about health care as a TV, and not as health care,” said Sandra Tanenbaum, a professor of health services management and policy at The Ohio State University College of Public Health.

She said people could not shop for procedures as they would for a TV or car repairs, since they often lack information on the quality of doctors and hospitals, and make health care decisions based on much more than cost.

Consumers are more likely to base their decisions on their doctors’ advice, not on cost alone, according to a report from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.

Only around 10 percent of health care costs are even “shoppable” expenses — procedures that can be scheduled in advance, like an MRI or elective surgery — according to the HPIO.

Regardless, Butler maintains, the health care industry can give consumers better information upfront. “If you really want patients to be empowered, they really need the information,” he said.

In support of such access, Butler has written letters to the Ohio Hospital Association, the Ohio attorney general and the Dayton Daily News, all in defense of the transparency law.

The Ohio Hospital Association, along with seven other Ohio health organizations, went to court last December to block the law, a month before it was supposed to take effect.

Butler said Gov. Kasich’s administration is helping the hospital association stall by not writing regulations, eliminating funding for the law in the state budget, and declining to meet with Butler to discuss it.

State Rep. Michael Henne, also a Republican, has worked with Butler in the Ohio General Assembly on the transparency law. He called Butler a “driver” on the law, noting: “It’s frustrating. You don’t realize how much [influence] special interests have in the process.”

Output: The Ohio Healthcare Price Transparency Law, despite being passed unanimously in the state’s legislature, has become trapped in a legal mire, with opposition from both hospitals and doctors. The law was intended to ensure that health care providers gave patients a “good faith” estimate of what the cost of non-emergency services would be for patients after insurance before the treatments were initiated. It was due to come into force on the 1st of January 2017, but it has encountered backlash as the opposition claims the law is too broad, and that making providers give estimates for elective procedures would only slow down the health care process, as hospitals would have to chase insurers for data. Led by the Ohio Hospital Association, the opposition also includes the Ohio Physical Therapy Association, the Ohio State Medical Association, the Ohio Psychological Association, the Ohio chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Surgeons, as well as the American Osteopathic Association. However, supporters say that the law would enable transparency for patients, which would allow them to search for better prices for out-of-pocket costs and adjust their spending for potential health-related costs. Healthy policy advisers have said the reluctance to accept the law may be due to the “secret rates” that hospitals have with insurers which bump up the price for tests and other procedures unnecessarily. The law will be considered again in August when the Ohio Hospital Association has its first court hearing for its lawsuit.


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Consultation over ban on leasehold new-build houses to begin
 Builders are to be banned by the government from selling houses as leasehold in England and ground rents on flats could be cut to zero following widespread outrage over exploitative contracts.

In a blow for major housebuilders such as Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, will set out plans on Tuesday to “ban new-build houses being sold as leasehold as well as restricting ground rents to as low as zero”.

Flats can be continued to be sold as leasehold, but ground rents will be restricted to a “peppercorn” level and therefore be of little financial value to speculative buyers. The ban is expected to come into force after an eight-week consultation period.

The ban, while welcomed by campaigners, leaves the position of existing leasehold homeowners unclear. The DCLG is expected to consult on what it can do to support existing leaseholders with onerous charges, which could include tackling unreasonable rises – such as rents doubling every 10 years – and giving more powers to householders to fight unfair charges.

“Under government plans, [ground rents] could be reduced so that they relate to real costs incurred, and are fair and transparent to the consumer,” said the DCLG.

Tens of thousands of homebuyers have been caught in spiralling ground rents, which have in some cases left homes virtually unsaleable. Javid cited one family home that is now unsaleable because the ground rent is expected to hit £10,000 a year by 2060.

Over the past nine months a Guardian Money campaign has highlighted reports of buyers trapped in properties valued at zero just six years after being built, £2,500 fees demanded by freeholders for permission to build an extension, and quotes of £35,000 to buy freeholds on detached houses only just a few years old.

Javid said: “It’s clear that far too many new houses are being built and sold as leaseholds, exploiting home buyers with unfair agreements and spiralling ground rents.

“Enough is enough. These practices are unjust, unnecessary and need to stop. Our proposed changes will help make sure leasehold works in the best interests of homebuyers now and in the future.”

Javid told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that ground rent had been used by some housebuilders “as an unjustifiable way to print money”.

He said building firms should do more to compensate those affected by such problems: “If they are responsible, if they want to keep their business in the future, if they want to show that they really care about their customers, they should be seeing what they should do to right some of the wrongs of the past.”

However, Javid said there were not as yet any definite government plans to compel builders to take action to assist those already affected.

“It’s an eight-week period of consultation to look at what action can be taken,” he said.

“I don’t profess that I’ve got all the answers on this. I’ve identified a problem, we’ve come up with some potential solutions. We don’t pretend they’re easy, there are are complex matters here.”

New legislation will close legal loopholes to protect buyers, some of whom have faced repossession orders after failing to keep up with the ground rent. The government will also change the rules on help-to-buy equity loans so that the scheme “can only be used to support new build houses on acceptable terms”.

Sebastian O’Kelly, whose Leasehold Knowledge Partnership has been the sharpest critic of abusive practices, welcomed the ban. He said: “Leasehold houses are an absolute racket: a means by which developers have managed to turn ordinary people’s homes into long-term investment vehicles for shadowy investors, often based offshore. In short, plc housebuilders have been systematically cheating their own customers.”

The practice of selling houses as leasehold has been particularly prominent in the north-west of England.

DCLG statistics estimate there were 4m residential leasehold dwellings in England in the private sector in 2014-15 and of these 1.2m were leasehold houses.

Justin Madders, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, who has many constituents suffering from leasehold problems, said: “What has occurred in this sector should be regarded as a national scandal. Therefore, once we have taken action to drive out these rotten practices, the ultimate aim must be to hold to account the men and women who must have known that creating this second lucrative income stream for developers would ultimately be at the cost of their customers.”

Jo Darbyshire, whose Taylor Wimpey-built house has a clause where the ground rent doubles every 10 years and is part of the National Leasehold Campaign group on Facebook, said the ban was “fabulous news”.

“It’s great that others won’t be stuck in the nightmare we have been in,” she said. “But what are they really going to do for people in our position? There now needs to be a national review, like the review of endowment misselling, to review every case and put people back into the position they would have been without these onerous clauses.”

Earlier this year, Taylor Wimpey agreed a £130m deal to help distressed leasehold buyers. At the time, it said that the contracts where ground rents double every 10 years were legal but “not consistent with our high standards of customer service and we are sorry for the unintended financial consequence and concern that they are causing”.

Output: Housebuilders will be prevented from selling leasehold new-build houses in England, with ground rents also being banned on such properties, as the government tackles the exploitative contracts. Communities Secretary Sajid Javid will publish plans to ban new-build houses from being sold as leasehold next week, however, flats will not be included in any new legislation. The ban is due to be enforced after an eight-week consultation period and has garnered support from campaigners against unreasonable rises in ground rents. There is no information as yet about remedies or assistance for existing leasehold house owners.


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Purplebricks share price rises above £5 for first time
 Post navigation

Purplebricks’ share price smashed the £5 barrier on Friday to reach a new record high of 514p.

That would have brought in enormous profit to early investors back in December 2015 who paid £1 – and particularly to those who held off a few weeks, when the price went down to 75p.

Today, the shares resume trading at a touch under £5, at 498.5p, with the company valued at over £1.3bn.

Purplebricks is worth way over that of any other UK estate agency, although it is still trailing Rightmove which ended Friday valued at almost £4bn (£3.96bn). However, Purplebricks’ valuation is chasing that of ZPG, at £1.62bn, with ZPG’s offering to investors including far more than the Zoopla portal.

There were interesting posts on the London Stock Exchange website on Friday as the Purplebricks shares soared.

One said: “There is no doubt that PURP [its handle for trading purposes] have changed the home selling process in a significant way, allowing sellers the opportunity to sell their homes at a fraction of high street agent charges. The issue here is will the company ever make the profits necessary to justify the current SP?”

Another remarked: “I always knew there would be some magic about it . . . Hope is that PURP will completely change the way we buy and sell houses, make it cheaper and easier. High street agents will be victims of the change, of course.”

By contrast, shares in Countrywide dipped 1.49% on Friday, finishing at 164.75p and valuing the UK’s largest estate agent at £357.39m – trailing heavily in Purplebricks’ wake.

Countrywide reported a pre-tax profit of £19.5m for 2016 after closing 200 branches – about one-fifth of its network.

Purplebricks, with its much higher market valuation, has reported a £200,000 profit in the UK for its last financial year, but reported losses overall given its launch in Australia.

There appeared to be no reason for its latest bounce on Friday – other than that investors simply seem to like it.

Meanwhile Purplebricks is recruiting hundreds more Local Property Experts, with the Sun reporting on the vacancies, saying new recruits can expect to earn £45,000 and that “applicants will ideally have experience in an estate agency or a property company but will also receive plenty of on-the-job training”.

Purplebricks has said its ambition is to the the UK’s biggest agent for both listings and sales.

Output: Online estate agents Purplebricks has seen its share prices rise above the £5 ($6) barrier to reach £5.14, with the company’s value reaching over £1.3bn. The value of the agency is higher than any other UK estate agency, but it has yet to surpass Rightmove, which is worth £3.96bn, and Zoopla, which is worth £1.6bn. The largest bricks-and-mortar estate agent in the UK, Countrywide, is currently worth £357.39m.


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Publishers use Facebook Shop platform to reduce consumer clicks
 With more publishers trying to prove their worth as commerce and affiliate partners, a growing number of them have dusted off an old Facebook feature. In the past couple months, several publishers have quietly begun testing Facebook Shop, which the platform first rolled out to Facebook pages in 2015.

Instead of simply trying to drive readers to commerce-focused content outside Facebook with text posts or videos, numerous publishers, including the Axel Springer’s Bild and Insider Picks and Hearst Magazines’ Best Products, are now attaching separate product listings to posts that are driving readers directly to storefronts from the platform.

Theoretically, this new approach shortens the distance between a publisher showing a reader a product and that reader buying said product based on that recommendation. It’s also publishers’ latest bid to show they can drive revenue for brands using their audience, one of the key motivations for many publishers investigating e-commerce.

“I think publishers are responding [to Facebook Shop] because delivering ROI on advertising is about delivering revenue, and commerce does just that,” James Kim, the chief strategy officer of the commerce strategy consultancy Smith, wrote in an email.

All but one of the publishers using Facebook Shop declined comment for this story, saying only that they were in an early testing phase.

An examination of their efforts so far bears that out: The items on display inside these publisher-run Shops run the gamut, from antimicrobial toothbrushes to dress shirts to a chocolate fountain that costs $110. They drive readers to a host of different sites, from e-commerce mainstays like Amazon, Walmart and Etsy to independent individual brand storefronts. They also use a number of different affiliate partners, including Skimlinks and Pepperjam.

“They’re clearly in testing mode right now,” said Bart Mroz, the CEO of e-commerce consultancy Sumo Heavy. “I think they’re trying to figure out what brands want to do with it.”

What they’re all looking for is a way to fit Facebook into their commerce strategies. While affiliate commerce has become a sizable source of revenue for some publishers, search traffic, rather than social, has powered most of that revenue growth. Publishers have tried to change that balance in several ways, including content about products that Facebook’s users might share with their friends or making video content about products they sell on their sites.

But Facebook hasn’t given much priority to commerce-related posts so far. While it will still give priority to video content or content uploaded directly to its platform, Facebook would prefer brands to pay for the privilege of hawking products directly to its audience.

And so even though a large number of brands – 3 million, according to a Facebook spokesperson –adopted Shops after its rollout, brands have changed their Facebook strategies accordingly; the same spokesperson declined to share information about how many of them were in use. “I think most brands still think of Facebook as a social marketing channel,” Mroz said. “I don’t think they’ve fully figured out how to sell to audiences on there.”

That’s not going to dissuade publishers from trying, in large part because their brand partners are curious. “We have certainly seen interest in the market to find ways to include this and other commerce-driven products into our 360 branded content programs across Hearst titles,” Kelly Hushin, the director of content marketing for Hearst Magazines Digital Media, wrote in an email.

But even if brand interest keeps growing, publishers are likely going to run into the same structural challenges brands face on the platform. “This is e-commerce,”Kim wrote. “Attention spans are short, unless people are in search mode and are seeking out a specific product or are willing to try a new product. Facebook is going to need to beat out the convenience, simplicity and speed that Amazon has trained us to expect.”

Output: Publishers are using Facebook’s Shop feature, originally aimed at brands, to shorten the number of clicks a consumer has to make before purchasing a product. The commerce option is preferable to trying to encourage Facebook users to experience content before moving on to purchase items, with many publishers experimenting with the feature to test its efficacy. Publishers are looking to sell their audiences to advertisers, and the Shop feature could be the best way of evolving Facebook from being a social marketing channel to a commerce platform.


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Australian ad industry can now access daily audience data
 Publishers, agencies and marketers in Australia can now access daily digital audience data after the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia and Nielsen Digital announced that they are switching on Digital Content Ratings (DCR).

Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia and Nielsen Digital announced that they would switch on Content Ratings (DCR) today

The Nielsen DCR provides the media industry in Australia a daily view of how many people are consuming content across all key digital devices and complements Nielsen’s existing Digital Ratings (Monthly) measurement solution.

The DCR also provides media buyers and owners a daily view of how people engage with text, video and audio content across all key digital devices, as well as ensuring consistency between the measurement of digital content and advertising performance with Digital Ad Ratings measurement solution.

IAB Australia and Nielsen Digital’s decision to switch on DCR is the third of three planned major upgrades to the digital audience measurement system in Australia.

The first stage saw both organisations releasing the Australian market’s first view of mobile and tablet audience data, while stage two delivered Digital Ratings (Monthly), giving the market its first view of their total audiences across key digital devices.

“The Australian digital industry - which now accounts for half of all advertising spend – has always been world leading in the area of digital measurement,” said Vijay Solanki, chief executive officer of IAB Australia.

“DCR is a game changer for the industry because it is daily, people-based and independent.

“It’s good for publishers and gives more precision to advertisers. It also helps create more transparency and more confidence for digital.”

Added Alex Smith, Nielsen’s head of digital product: "We set out to measure Australians and the way they engage with different content types across different devices.

“This has been a complex environment to measure but an incredible opportunity to deliver the first and only daily, independent, people-based digital measurement solution.

“We are delivering daily audience data for both big and small sites, including on and off platform which will see us support the diverse and vibrant publisher portfolio in Australia."

Output: The Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia and Nielsen Digital are offering Digital Content Ratings to provide publishers, marketers and agencies the ability to view daily data on the consumption of content. The service covers video, text and audio content across all digital devices, being designed to ensure that digital content and advertising performance is consistent and adhering to Digital Ad Ratings measurements. The move is part of a three-stage upgrade to digital audience measurement in Australia, including mobile and tablet audience data releases and monthly digital ratings.


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DARPA invests $65m to develop gene editing technology
 The JASONs, a group of elite scientists that advises the US government on national security, has weighed in on issues ranging from cyber security to renewing America’s nuclear arsenal. But at a meeting in June, the secretive group took stock of a new threat: gene drives, a genetic-engineering technology that can swiftly spread modifications through entire populations and could help vanquish malaria-spreading mosquitoes.

That meeting forms part of a broader US national security effort this year to grapple with the possible risks and benefits of a technology that could drive species extinct and alter whole ecosystems. On July 19, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced US$65 million in funding to scientists studying gene-editing technologies; most of the money will be for work on gene drives. And a US intelligence counterpart to DARPA is planning to fund research into detecting organisms containing gene drives and other modifications.

“Every powerful technology is a national security issue,” says Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who won DARPA funding to limit the spread of gene drives. Esvelt says he also attended last month’s JASON meeting in San Diego, California, where he outlined how would-be bioterrorists might weaponize gene drives. But he is far more concerned about the potential for accidental release of gene-drive organisms by scientists, he says. “Bio-error is what I’m worried about.”

So, too, is the US military, according to Renee Wegrzyn, the DARPA programme officer leading its ‘Safe Genes’ initiative, which supports research on restraining gene drives. The technology has been developed in recent years in fruit flies, mosquitoes and other organisms, using CRISPR gene editing. A UK-based team hopes to begin field tests of gene drives in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the main carrier of malaria in Africa, as soon as 2024. “I’ve been very excited to watch the advances, but I’ve noted with increasing concern that the advances are outpacing biosecurity,” Wegrzyn says.

The JASONs' gene-drive discussion involved around 20 scientists, according to Philipp Messer, a population geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who attended the meeting. (As a German citizen, he was identified as a foreign national and accompanied by an escort.)

“I’m not used to that kind of conference,” says Messer, who says he told the group about his lab’s efforts to study the evolution of resistance to CRISPR gene drives in fruit flies. “We just had open discussions about this technology and what we think the current state of the field was and what we think the problems are.” Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and a JASON member who Messer says co-organized the meeting, declined to comment on the meeting, which is likely to lead to a classified report.

Gene drive countermeasures

Under the DARPA programme, seven teams won four-year contracts. Esvelt plans to develop CRISPR gene drives in nematode worms — a fast-reproducing model organism — that are designed to spread a genetic modification in a local setting and then fizzle out, a concept that other scientists are pursuing. He and the other teams receiving military funding also plan to develop tools to counter rogue gene drives that spread out of control. Such methods include chemicals that block gene-editing or ‘anti-gene drives’ that can reverse a genetic modification or immunize unaltered wild organisms so they are resistant to a gene drive.

These tools could combat a gene drive deployed to do harm, such as those that engineer insects to transmit diseases more effectively or deliver toxins. But such countermeasures are far more likely to be deployed against accidental gene-drive releases from research labs, says Esvelt. Lax or non-existent biosafety guidelines for working on gene-drive organisms increase the odds of a release, he says.

Other efforts are afoot to fund work studying the national security implications of gene drives. Next week, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), which is part of the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence, will hold a meeting about a planned funding programme for detecting genetically modified organisms that are potentially harmful, including ones that contain gene drives.

Todd Kuiken, who studies policy relating to synthetic biology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, is glad to see gene-drive research receive more funding. But he has qualms about the US military’s interest in the field; with Safe Genes, DARPA has become the world’s largest government funder of gene-drive research. Kuiken worries that this could sow suspicions about gene drives in parts of the world that view the US military in a less-than-favourable light, including countries that stand to benefit from the elimination of disease carriers such as mosquitoes.

Esvelt shares those concerns but sees military support as the only way, for the time being, to advance gene-drive technology, while making it safer for eventual deployment. Private funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, Washington, and the Tata Trusts, a Mumbai-based charity, have spent tens of millions on gene-drive research, but this funding has been directed to specific projects or institutions; other government funders have not yet made large contributions to the field. “No one else is offering us large amounts of money,” Esvelt says.

The DARPA programme explicitly prevents the release of gene-drive organisms and requires contract winners to work under stringent biosafety conditions and to disclose their planned experiments to the public — measures that should reduce the risk of any accidental release, Esvelt adds. “If what you’re worried about is your cowboys running amok and causing trouble, then what you really want to do is employ the cowboys to make sure they stay out of trouble.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 21, 2017.

Output: The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has committed $65m in funding to scientists working on gene-editing technologies. The primary focus of the research will be gene drives, a technique capable of quickly spreading genetic modifications through populations of organisms. Gene drives could be used to fight malaria, for instance, by eradicating a specific kind of mosquito. There are, however, concerns over errors, or the accidental release of gene-drive organisms. DARPA has a Safe Genes initiative designed to temper the research on gene drives, but biosecurity is fast being outpaced by progress, according to Renee Wegrzyn, head of the initiative.


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Trade insurance could become pay-as-you-go
 Recently, Euler’s Digital Agency announced a partnership with Flowcast to deliver a new single invoice cover insurance product to protect B2B companies from non-payment, transaction by transaction.

Flowcast is in the emerging Analytics-as-a- Service space, helping all types of banks and specialty lenders improve their underwriting. In this particular case, based on invoice-level data, Flowcast has developed smart algorithms that predict a range of risk parameters, such as the probabilities of default or expected timing of invoice payment – critical factors for business.

I have found in the past there are several reasons for using traditional trade credit insurance, from enhancing receivables to enable better financing advances and rates to the risk mitigation (typically the primary reason for using trade credit insurance is for peace of mind against customer insolvency). Credit insurance represents an opportunity to enhance overall quality of receivables portfolio (eg. say from ‘B’ to B+ rated).

But will this work?

I have to say, I am a bit skeptical. Yes, it’s nice that we have data and we can do all kinds of risk scoring, but lets not forget the fundamentals of trade credit insurance.

Insurers provide both portfolio and transactional credit insurance based on the credit to cover the event of “insolvency", which means a buyer is unable to pay debts. But insurers, particularly private insurers not backed by taxpayers, don’t want to lose money so they issue insurance to large recognized names. In talking with many financial lenders in the invoice finance space, they say 99.9% of defaults around invoice finance are due to disputes, not credit. To predict insolvency for large corporates over the next 60 or 90 days when invoices will be paid is not a big deal.

A second issue is just claims and private insurers recognizing claims. In general, private insurers don’t want to pay claims. As I said in the post -Why Some Lenders Find No Value in Trade Credit insurance, trade credit insurance only provides protection for bankruptcy of obligor. And becoming insolvent can be very different than “failure to pay”. Most trade credit claims are filed 90 days after an overdue date, but funding providers who provide some form of short term liquidity on average are funding an invoice for 60 days or less.

Also, credit insurance adds a cost to the equation.

So will Pay as you Go insurance be successful? Look, my personal view is even with mid market size companies, dispute is what causes late payment, short pays, and no pays.

I believe there is a sweet spot in this space for B2B Marketplace transactions where buyer and sellers are relatively unknown to each other. Euler has a rich data set of buyer and payment term data extension which sellers can use to decide on if and how to extend credit and terms to buyers.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to one of the latest and newest InsurTech products.

Don't forget to sign up for TFMs weekly digest delivered to your inbox every Monday here

Output: A tie-up between Euler's Digital Agency and Flowcast has created pay-as-you-go trade credit insurance that deploys algorithms to calculate risks, such as invoice non-payment, on a transaction-by-tranasaction basis. This may not be such a good thing, according to David Gustin, founder of Global Business Intelligence, who argues that a model based on the insolvency risk of a buyer is flawed because most invoice defaults happen as a result of disputes, not credit. That's not to say the use of data can't be of great help to sellers, he said.


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Health record tool allows early detection of kidney disease risk
 Credit: CC0 Public Domain

More than 26 million Americans have chronic kidney disease (CKD). Primary care physicians who take care of these patients can help reduce the risk of complications and death if they recognize the progression of kidney failure early, but this is often difficult to do - deterioration can be rapid and more than one laboratory test may be needed to accurately predict a patient's risk. A new electronic health record (EHR) tool could help physicians quickly and accurately flag patients that should be referred to a nephrologist. Designed by Brigham and Women's Hospital investigators, this tool draws upon recent research that has identified several tests that can be used to calculate an individual's risk score.

Now, an automatic calculator can be built into EHRs and displayed prominently for a physician to see when they open a patient's record. The tool was piloted at ten North Shore Physicians Group clinics this year, and a paper detailing the design and implementation of the application appear online this week in The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

"Retrospective studies of patients who have had to go on dialysis show that being referred to a nephrologist just a few months earlier can have major benefits," said corresponding author Lipika Samal, MD, MPH, a clinician investigator in the Division of General Internal Medicine. "We want to make it as easy as possible for a physician to quickly access and track a patient's risk. This tool automatically calculates and displays a risk score within the health record, making it easier for a physician to spot disease progression and take action."

The new clinical decision support tool calculates and displays kidney failure risk based on criteria identified from a large cohort study conducted by Canadian researchers (Tangri et al., 2011). Predictive risk factors that go into the calculation include serum and urine tests that collected during routine care. If test results for any of these predictive measures have not been collected and are not in a patient's record at the time of a visit, the tool will display a recommendation to order the tests. Otherwise, the tool will display a five-year kidney disease risk score, and if the risk is high, a recommendation for a referral to a nephrologist.

The tool was deployed outside of the EHR in a way that would allow it to be used with different EHRs by utilizing interoperability standards called continuity of care documents (CCDs). The tool extracted the necessary tests from this interoperable document.

The research team validated the tool in 255 patients and subsequently deployed it to 10 primary care clinics. The team made improvements and updates to the tool based on feedback from physicians. In the course of the pilot, they processed more than half a million CCDs to diagnose CKD and to generate risk scores for patients with CKD.

Because of the interoperable nature of the tool, the team sees an opportunity to deploy this single application across multiple EHRs. They plan to implement it in eCare at BWH later this year. Samal also envisions applications for clinical decision support tools beyond CKD.

"One of the positive things about EHRs is that there is now a wealth of data that can be used to help us better predict an individual's risk, especially for chronic and progressive diseases, like CKD," said Samal. "We have the opportunity to use EHRs to improve patient care- tools like this one can help us seize that opportunity."

More information: Lipika Samal et al. Implementation of a scalable, web-based, automated clinical decision support risk-prediction tool for chronic kidney disease using C-CDA and application programming interfaces, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (2017). DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocx065 Journal information: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Output: A new electronic health record (EHR) tool designed by investigators from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital could help to reduce complications and death from chronic kidney disease. Over 26 million Americans suffer from the disease, with rapid deterioration a common issue. The EHR can automatically calculate patients’ risk of encountering kidney problems and displays it as a score, providing doctors with a useful early-warning tool to detect the disease’s incidence and progression. The tool was tested on 255 patients before being extended to 10 primary care clinics with success.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Telegraph to strengthen ad partnerships with benchmark tools
 The Telegraph has introduced guarantees around campaign awareness, propensity to purchase and advocacy for its commercial content campaigns with the hope they will drive longer, more strategic partnerships with clients.

By drawing on data from thousands of campaigns and their pre- and post-analyses over the last seven years, The Telegraph has set benchmarks that will inform how well campaigns should perform against brand uplift measures across categories. For instance, the publisher could set the benchmark that a dozen articles on travel content should increase the propensity to purchase for an airline brand by a certain percentage. If post-campaign research shows the content hasn’t lived up to those expectations, then the client gets the media value. Rather than charging extra, this is included in the service price.

“If you control the content and the distribution of that content, then you are the only one responsible for how much impact it has on the brand,” said Matt Cory, managing director at The Telegraph’s commercial content division, Spark. “This is more like the old full-service agencies: media and creative agency rolled into one.”

Most campaigns Spark runs last for 12 weeks. With guarantees, Cory hopes to extend flight time, bring in new business and book more repeat business. In the last four years, since Spark introduced post-campaign analysis and live campaign reporting on media metrics like dwell time and unique users, the growth in the number of clients booking again with Spark has increased by roughly 40 percent, although Cory was unable to give out exact numbers.

Spark has offered guarantees since July 1, but it’s too early to judge how much new business they’re bringing in — it could take six weeks before the company books a new campaign. It is one value add that will make Spark stand out against competitors.

To meet this need, Spark hired Simon Peaple, who previously worked at Sky and Discovery, to head up commercial insight three months ago. Spark, which employs 105 people, also doubled the optimization team from two to four people, shifting its focus to measuring performance against awareness rather than unique users and scale.

As more money flows into branded content, proving it moves the needle is becoming more important, so it’s no surprise advertisers are looking for more effective ways to measure their branded-content campaigns. The primary success metric for branded content is pageviews 95 percent of the time, according to branded-content platform Polar. Almost half of all publishers use time spent with content and social actions for their clients’ campaign reports.

The same Polar research found 29 percent of publishers use third-party tools like Nielsen’s audience-measurement solution and Millward Brown to run post-campaign analysis on effectiveness. This is the route Bloomberg has taken in the U.K., shouldering the cost for now. The trouble is that with the lack of standard benchmarks, this isn’t cheap or easy.

Cory said it’s not the price tag preventing other branded-content studios from deploying similar guarantees. “It takes effort, and it takes the mindset of being prepared to put your neck on the line; people don’t always have the confidence in their content or of their audience,” he said. “It’s about time publishers put more skin in the game.”

For the most part, Cory said briefs still measure success on average unique users. “If the content is no good, it doesn’t matter how much scale you have,” he said. “Branded content is evolving rapidly, but if you’re going to do this properly, you need to talk about the measures that are important to clients.”

Output: The Telegraph is offering guarantees for its advertising clients, setting benchmarks based on seven years’ worth of data to offer determine how well a given campaign should perform. Clients will be offered post-campaign analysis that will evaluate if benchmarks have been reached. If they have not, the clients are reimbursed with the full media value of their campaign. The move is designed to strengthen relationships between publishers and advertisers.


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Google working with major publishers to reduce ad space fraud
 The ad industry is trying to root out fraudulent digital ads.

Google has quietly been running tests with media companies such as CBS to gauge how bad the problem is.

Industry leaders are banking on a new technical solution, ads.txt, to tackle the issue.

The digital-advertising industry is looking to stamp out bogus ad inventory, like websites that claim to be premium brands but are actually sites the average person hardly ever visits.

Google, with help from some media giants, is taking the lead. The company is pushing an industry initiative called ads.txt that's aimed at wiping out fraud that's dubbed 'spoofing' by the industry. Spoofing encompasses the variety of ways ad buyers can be tricked into paying for space they're not getting. For example, spoofers can buy cheap ad space, from a low-quality site, on an exchange and then falsely list it as space on a premium site — like, say, CNN.com— at a higher price. The ad in question will never run on CNN.com, though.

It's all enabled by the prevalence of programmatic ads, which are placed by algorithms and purchased on exchanges, rather than through direct negotiation with a publisher.

Yet spoofing is even starting to affect publishers that don't even sell ads via programmatic channels. Several publishers say they've been hearing from ad buyers that their ads are for sale on various ad exchanges, even though these companies didn't work with any ad exchanges to sell advertising.

The Google tests

To get a sense of the scope of this problem, Google has been quietly conducting tests with a handful of major media properties, including NBCU, CBS, and The New York Times, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

During these tests, Google and the partners shut off all of their programmatic ad inventory for brief periods, say, 10 to 15 minutes, and then scour the ad exchanges to see what's listed. Google and its partners found thousands if not millions of video and display ad spots still available on multiple ad exchanges, despite no ads actually being for sale at that time, the people said, asking not to be identified because the results haven't been publicly released.

These include Google's own AdEx exchange, as well as AppNexus, Oath's BrightRoll, and PubMatic. Google also discovered fraudsters claiming to be able to sell YouTube ad inventory on various exchanges, one of the people said.

Google's not alone in these findings. An ad-tech executive from a different company went looking for some spoofed ads on exchanges and said they easily found thousands of such misrepresented ads for sale. And below are the results of another search by the Marketing Science Consulting Group, a company that specializes in researching ad fraud, which found a significant amount of inventory available on a given day last April from an unnamed publisher. That publisher does not actually sell ads on any exchanges.

Business Insider reached out to all the exchanges mentioned and included their comments below, if they responded.

There is lots of bogus ad inventory available on ad exchanges. Marketing Science Consulting Group

The ad exchanges responded to details of the results by pointing to their efforts to stamp out the kind of fraud Google found.

"We’re unaware of major publishers running such tests and finding problematic selling on our marketplace," a representative for AppNexus said. "We do work proactively to avoid this type of problem. We are strong proponents of ads.txt, which we view as reinforcement of our longstanding policies and practices. We’ve created strong domain detection technology."

"Oath has invested in proprietary technology on our buying platforms, including BrightRoll and ONE by AOL, that aims to enforce supply transparency and prevent domain spoofing across the majority of supply partners," said a representative for Oath, which is owned by Verizon. "In fact, our technology blocks hundreds of millions of spoofed bid requests on a daily basis. Combined with our longtime partnership with the IAB, industry-leading third-party fraud measurement across our platforms and human review safeguards, we're fully committed to a safe, transparent supply chain for our advertiser partners."

"At PubMatic we work directly with our publisher clients to help them manage their digital inventory, and, as such, we are not aware of the issues," said PubMatic's chief marketing officer Jeff Hirsch.

“We take quality very seriously and view it as an issue for the entire ad tech industry,” said Smart AdServer chief marketing officer Michael Nevins. “We’re also enthusiastic supporters of the Ads.txt initiative and are actively working with our publishers to help them implement it. Our Chief Quality Officer, Gorka Zarauz, leads a dedicated department that works closely with leading external brand-safety firms such as Integral Ad Science and FraudLogix both pre-and post-auction to detect, block and remove bot-generated traffic and spoofed domains. We continue to commit permanent R&D in this area for the benefit of our partners and the ecosystem as a whole.”

The fake-Rolex problem

Marketers are expected to shell out $83 billion on digital ads in the US in 2017, according to eMarketer. And the more that advertisers spend, the bigger the opportunity for fraudsters. By some estimates, sophisticated ad-fraud perpetrators could cost the ad business over $16 billion globally this year.

There are lots of ways that ad fraud can happen. Often hackers from outside the US sell ads on fake websites using computer programs called "bots" that can mimic human behavior — making it look as though real people are visiting websites or clicking on ads.

Then, there's spoofing, which has been around for years. Companies like ESPN have frequently encountered people claiming to have their right to sell their ads when they don't. But as more big marketers push for better transparency in their digital-ad buying, following a string of recent reports of ads ending up in dicey corners of the web, there's more awareness of how common spoofing is.

"There’s quite a bit of mislabeling of traffic," said Mike Baker, CEO of the ad-tech firm DataXu. "It's become somewhat pervasive over the last few years. It could account for 20 to 30% of the traffic on some secondary and tertiary [ad exchanges]."

Digital ad spending is growing, as is fraud. eMarketer

Ads.txt solution

Google has also hosted CEOs of several top ad-buying tech companies — "demand-side platforms" that act as major buyers on ad exchanges — including MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, DataXu's Baker, and Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green. The meetings were said to be constructive as the industry looks to embrace ads.txt as a solution.

Ads.txt was borne out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab with support from the trade group TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group). It's a technical solution designed to protect web publishers from any unauthorized companies selling their ads via programmatic ad exchanges.

Here's how it works. By inserting a text file on their sites, web publishers can make it clear who is allowed to sell their ad space and who isn't. Assuming enough publishers implement the ads.txt solution — and enough ad buyers make an effort to purchase ads only from authorized sellers — this could go a long way toward weeding out spoofing.

"There’s always been spoofing in the market, and with video it is [more prevalent]," said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab. "Now there is more scrutiny in the market. It wasn’t top of mind before. Now, everyone understands it; it's mainstream. And fraudsters are looking for known names that are on 'white lists' for advertisers. So this has opened up a conversation where ad buyers are telling sellers, 'I'm seeing you here,' and they are digging down and saying 'Oh crap.'"

Brands get woke

A number of major developments have combined to dial up the scrutiny on the online-advertising business, causing marketers to scrutinize where their ads run to how they pay for them and who gets a piece of every dollar they spend on the web. First, about a year ago, the Association of National Advertisers released a damning report detailing a glaring lack of transparency in the ad-buying world.

Over the past six months, Facebook has revealed a string of measurement screw-ups, while Google has faced multiple advertisers pulling out of YouTube after ads were found alongside hate videos.

Procter and Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard. Getty/Phil Cole

And since the start of this year, Procter and Gamble's chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, has been on a crusade, delivering a series of speeches in which he clamored for the ad industry to demand more clarity from digital media and the need to clean up the "crappy media supply chain," as CNBC reported.

All of this has brought the issue of ad fraud to the forefront. "Brands are woke," joked one ad-tech executive. "There's suddenly a lot of attention on supply-chain hygiene," he said. And hopefully ads.txt is the soap.

Some see the initiative as part of a larger set of antifraud tactics. Others are more bullish. "This will wipe spoofing out," said Andrew Casale, CEO of the ad-tech firm Index Exchange.

Who's responsible?

When it comes to supply-chain hygiene, there's plenty of blame laid on the ad-tech companies — especially since so many programmatic exchanges have made big public pledges to keep out bad sellers. But as one ad-tech insider said, big media companies often don't even know who is and isn't allowed to sell their ads on the web.

'They should take responsibility," he said. For example, one publisher said it was working with just three exchanges, but they were really running ads on 17.

So it's up to media companies to make the most out of ads.txt.

"Initially, this is putting the first implementation requirements on publishers," said Art Muldoon, co-CEO of the programmatic ad buying firm Amnet. "It's a burden and an opportunity."

Media sellers "are being directly harmed," said Mike Zaneis, president and CEO for TAG, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, an organization that was put together to tackle the ad-fraud problem.

"When there is twice as much inventory being sold out there than actually exists, that leads to deals you never get, bad prices, and the watering down of your brand," Zaneis said. "That has a direct financial impact."

Output: Google has launched an industry initiative named ads.txt to eradicate "spoofing", a kind of ad space fraud. Those who engage in spoofing buy ad space for an inexpensive amount on a low-quality site and list it as premium ad space, fooling advertisers into paying more. The practice has become prevalent with programmatic advertising, as it involves purchasing space from exchanges, rather than human publishers. Google’s system has tested major media properties to see if fake listings have been created, and plans to eliminate the fraud by carrying out checks.


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Brexit threatens UK animal welfare standards: House of Lords
 “Overwhelming” support in the UK for high animal welfare standards is under threat from Brexit, an influential parliamentary committee has said.

The report from the House of Lords warns the standards of UK producers could be put under pressure by demands from other countries to allow an influx of cheap and lower-standard food as part of trade deals. It was published as the prime minister’s spokesperson said that allowing imports of US products such as chicken meat washed with chlorine would not be ruled out in trade deals. This came from No 10, despite assurances to the Guardian last week from the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) that any trade deal would maintain or raise food standards.

Preserving food standards would be “of the highest priority” Defra told the Guardian, and trade deals in agriculture would not be “a race to the bottom”.

Livestock welfare and crop-growing standards in the UK are among the world’s highest, but that could be subject to sudden change if farmers are challenged by imports from countries that produce meat and other food with much lower standards. Without firm and explicit support for agricultural standards in any post-Brexit trade agreements, the UK’s high standards would be at risk.

The government’s wish for the UK to become a global leader in free trade is not necessarily compatible with its desire to maintain high animal welfare standards

The House of Lords subcommittee on EU Energy and Environment found that if imports from other countries were allowed without the current EU safeguards, then the standards of UK producers would come under pressure.

“The government’s wish for the UK to become a global leader in free trade is not necessarily compatible with its desire to maintain high animal welfare standards,” the committee found.

Liam Fox, one of the ministers leading the government’s Brexit strategy, is in the US for talks on a new trade agreement that is almost certain to include agricultural products, including meat and genetically modified vegetables.

At present, the UK is protected from controversial US-produced agricultural goods, by EU standards that deter imports of products such as meat that has been washed in chlorine, which has a high bacterial content related to low animal welfare standards. EU rules also barmeat that has been fed with hormones and growth-promoting antibiotics.

Such products are allowed for sale in the US and attempts by the UK to impose higher standards on any imports would be a difficult part of trade deal negotiations.

Lord Teverson, chairman of the sub-committee that wrote the House of Lords report, said Brexit would threaten the UK’s high standards of food for human consumption.

“We heard overwhelming support for farm animal welfare standards to be maintained or improved. We urge the government to secure the inclusion of high farm animal welfare standards in any free trade agreements it negotiates after Brexit.”

But he warned: “The government will need to consider the effect of increasing standards on the competitiveness of UK producers as well as the future trading relationship with the EU.”

The committee said that while consumers are currently protected by the high welfare standards required by the EU, which are much more stringent than those in countries such as the US and China, most people buying food are unaware of this.

Food labelling standards may also confuse consumers, the committee said, as they do not make it clear where and to what standards meat and vegetables have been produced.

Keith Taylor, an MEP and spokesman for the Green party, said: “Fox is promising to discard the vital precautionary principle that guides EU policy-making and protects citizens from any process, procedure or product that carries with it a plausible risk of harm.”

He pointed to the example of pesticides, dozens of which are permitted in the US but banned in the EU on health and environmental grounds.

In the US,antibiotics are routinely used to improve animals’ growth, sparking fears that meat consumption could increase human resistance to antibiotics. They are also used to limit diseases that could otherwise spread in the megafarms, holding tens of thousands of animals, that are commonplace in US farming.

Output: High animal welfare standards within the UK could be threatened by Brexit, according to a report by the House of Lords subcommittee on EU Energy and Environment. The study, which warns that trade deals could allow an influx of cheap, low-standard food, came as a spokesperson for the Prime Minister indicated that the import of products like chlorine-washed chicken could not be ruled out.


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Redrow Model railway to be moved as Redrow looks to build 50 homes
 But critics of Redrow scheme say council is jumping the gun

A timetable has been drawn up for a new miniature railway and station in Liverpool’s Calderstones Park.

It comes after a Beeching-style axe was placed on the existing 75-year-old railway, a magical, meandering woodland route, close to the Harthill Road entrance to the park.

House builder Redrow wants to build more than 50 luxury homes on the land, a slice of the Calderstones Harthill Estate which Liverpool City Council insists is not part of the park.

REVEALED: Calderstones railway faces axe in luxury housing plan

The council has now announced the anticipated opening date of the relocated railway, expected before the end of this year, ahead of the application coming before the city council’s planning committee today.

It says the proposed relocation, to an area facing Menlove Avenue, will allow more families the opportunity to enjoy a ride on one of two battery electric locomotives.

But critics of the plan for a major housing estate at Calderstones see it as premature as they continue their fight against the Redrow proposals.

The move, says the council, would see the Merseyside Live Steam and Model Engineers club gain a significantly improved track and brand new clubhouse facilities.

The proposed site in the park is currently used for informal recreation and lies adjacent to an area that was previously used for the International Tennis Tournament.

The Redrow scheme has many critics

Deputy Mayor Councillor Ann O’Byrne said: “The Miniature Railway is a much-loved facility which has been used by generations of local families. This proposal would see it moved to a more prominent location giving them improved and enhanced facilities and enabling even more people to enjoy it in the future.”

In line with its policy of denying that plots of greenspace it wants for housing aren’t actually within parks (e.g. Sefton Park Meadows), the council says the proposed move is linked to wider plans to redevelop several parcels of land off Harthill Road to create 51 new homes under the umbrella of the Liverpool Housing Partnership.

“Relocating the popular miniature railway is the first element in a scheme that would also see Beechley Riding Stables – part of the Riding for the Disabled Association – receive help to relocate and develop new, improved facilities at Clarke Gardens, in Allerton; while the CalderKids Adventure Playground, whose existing premises have already been deemed unfit for purpose, will be able to fulfil relocation plans to much better facilities,” says the council.

Relocation of the riding stables is currently the subject of a feasibility study by the city council, while an appropriate venue has been identified for Calderkids and discussions with the landowner are ongoing.

Redrow Homes’ plans include “sensitive restoration of the Grade II listed Beechley House” to create six apartments and two duplex units, with its summer house converted to one self-contained property. The stables would be converted into three mews properties and there would be four new-build mews adjacent to Beechley House.

Thirty five brand new detached family homes would make up the remainder.

The wider scheme is being put forward by the Liverpool Housing Partnership, a collaboration between Liverpool City Council, Redrow Homes and Liverpool Mutual Homes to provide 1,500 new homes across the city over a five year period.

Capital receipts to the city council from the sale of the land would support the relocation of the stakeholders, as well as off-site affordable housing and a fund for improvements within Calderstones Park itself.

At least a new railway in Calderstones might be seen as some small consolation for Liverpool missing out on HS2 coming into the city, and instead terminating at Wigan.

Output: Liverpool city council has announced a timetable for a new miniature railway and station in Calderstones Park following plans by Redrow Homes to build at least 50 luxury homes on land where a popular model railway has been for 75 years.


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Global warming will intensify invasive species damage
 Invasions by alien species and global warming form a “deadly duo”, scientists have warned, with the march of Argentine ants in the UK a new example. The public are being asked to be on alert for invaders such as the raccoon dog and Asian hornet, as eradication can be near impossible after a species becomes established.

As trade and human travel has become globalised many thousands of species have crossed oceans or mountain ranges and become established in new regions, with some causing “invasional meltdown” and over a trillion of dollars of damage a year.

Recent research shows that ever more animals and plants are finding their way to foreign lands and that invasive species are a “primary threat” to economies, human wellbeing and wildlife.

Scientists from around the world are gathering this week in Durham, UK, to assess the issue. Prof Rob Colautti of Queens University in Canada warned: “There are very clear economic and human health consequences.”

The combination of invasive alien species and climate change was a “deadly duo”, said Prof Helen Roy, at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology: “Changing climate might facilitate the establishment of some species that otherwise might not have been able to establish.”

“For example, the Argentine ant is a species that we know has some indoor populations in London [and elsewhere], but in the last couple of years we have seen those indoor populations spread outdoors,” she said. “A little bit more climate warming for the UK and we could see the Argentine ant settling in very well.”

“Of all the non-native species, than ants are concerning,” Roy said. “We describe the Argentine ant as an ‘ecosystem engineer’, because it has quite far-reaching, cascading impacts.” Displacing native ants can upset delicate ecosystems of plants and insects, while the Argentine ants themselves are attracted to warm places and can interfere with electrical wiring.

Furthermore, Roy said, Argentine ants can form “super colonies” in invaded regions, as they are not kept in check by the neighbouring colonies that are present in its native south America: “That seems to have broken down in the invaded range. You get these much larger populations of these ants than you would in other places.”

The UK, like other islands including New Zealand and Japan, is a hotspot for invasive species. Prof Mark van Kleunen, at Konstanz University in Germany, said. “For islands, the hypothesis is that islands have fewer native species than mainland regions, which means there is more ecological space that can be filled by newcomers.” But he noted many UK alien species have been present since the middle ages: “Your rabbit came from the Iberian peninsula.”

The UK suffers billions of pounds in economic damage every year from well established invaders, such as Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed and mink. The harlequin ladybird is a newer invader, first seen in 2004, but now makes up 80-90% of all ladybirds seen in England and seven of the eight native species have declined since it arrived.

“We know that the harlequin ladybird is fantastic at eating aphids, so we might imagine it is going to be fantastic at pest control for farmers,” said Roy. But she said native ladybirds had their own roles and that variety is crucial to a resilient ecosystem: “Some [natives] emerge earlier in the spring, others get up earlier in the morning.”

Defra is asking people to report sightings Asian hornets in the UK. Photograph: Jean Haxaire/Defra/PA

The arrival of the quagga mussel in the UK in 2014 prompted warnings of the “invasional meltdown” seen elsewhere, where entire ecosystems are transformed. “It changes the whole chemistry and physical nature of a water body,” said Roy. In North America, the spread of the zebra mussel has caused enormous damage.

The quagga mussel was the number one threat on a list compiled by Roy and colleagues. Also high on the list are the Asian longhorn beetle, American lobster, African sacred ibis and the Emerald ash borer beetle, as well as the Argentine ant. The Asian hornet was first spotted in the UK in September, but was eradicated.

However, Roy said people should remain on the lookout and could report sightings using an app: “We know there are high numbers in France and that is not far away.” She also said raccoons have been sighted in the UK, and should also be reported, along with any sighting of raccoon dogs, an unrelated species from Asia that were once sold as pets.

The scientists said it was often impossible to get rid of an invader once established, like the grey squirrel, making prevention using checks and information provision at borders even more important.

“There are some very simple measures that can be put in place to provide biosecurity to prevent the arrival of the most damaging species,” said Roy. “It is not about stopping people moving or trading.”

Output: Alien species invasions will be exacerbated by global warming, according to scientists. Increased globalisation has enabled thousands of species to cross oceans and mountains and to establish themselves in new regions. Some species have caused over a trillion dollars a year in damages. Over the past two years, the UK, which suffers billions of pounds worth of annual damage from invaders, has seen the spread of the Argentine ant, a trend that could be intensified with climate change. The displacement of native ants can undermine ecosystems, and the Argentinian invaders often interfere with electrical wiring.


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US university launches $10m refugee education initiative
 Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) has launched a major initiative to bring university degrees to refugees in the U.S. and around the world.

Over the last decade, the refugee crisis has dramatically accelerated with 65.3 million displaced worldwide, and globally, less than one percent of refugees have access to higher education. This will be the first large-scale initiative to bring American accredited university degrees to the most marginalized population in the world with a goal of educating 50,000 refugees in 20 locations by 2022.

Phase one of the initiative, a $10-million-dollar effort to bring SNHU’s online, competency-based bachelor’s and associate degrees to refugees and others affected by displacement, was made possible by a group of anonymous donors.

“The refugee crisis will require concerted social, legal, and political action, but education holds the key to an alternative future of possibility,” said Paul LeBlanc, president, SNHU. “At SNHU, we believe education is a fundamental human right, that’s why we want to bring our degrees to some of the most underserved populations in the world.”

SNHU has piloted its work with refugees in Rwanda, nearly 7,000 miles away from its Manchester, New Hampshire, campus. The program is offered at two sites in Rwanda, one in the Kiziba Refugee Camp where all students are refugee learners, and one in the capital city Kigali, where a substantial number of students are refugees.

Collectively, the campuses enroll more than 500 students. This summer the first cohort of refugee students graduated with associate degrees from the Kiziba campus. All of the graduates are engaged in internships outside of the camp and are now working on their bachelor’s degrees.

“We’re giving refugees hope for the future, the tools to rebuild their lives, and a transformational opportunity,” said Chrystina Russell, who leads the refugee learning initiative at SNHU. “Over the next five years, we will scale our work to many other locations, many of which are ready and eager to begin tomorrow.”

In Rwanda, SNHU partners with Kepler, a nonprofit organization, to deliver competency-based degrees through a blended learning delivery model that offers in-person instruction and academic and employment support. The University will form similar partnerships with other organizations as it looks to expand into other countries. Phase one of the project will include sites in East Africa and the Middle East. SNHU will partner with the UN High Commission on Refugees, the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium, SOLVE at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American University of Beirut.

The initiative will also be guided by an advisory board with diverse backgrounds and experiences, including former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Deborah Berke; and Director of Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford, Alexander Betts.

“Education remains the greatest source of hope and opportunity for people on the far margins of society,” said Arne Duncan, advisory board member of the SNHU refugee initiative, and former U.S. Secretary of Education. “SNHU’s work in the camps brings education to some of the most desperate and poorly served people in the world today.”

Over the next two years, SNHU will begin programming at four new sites around the world. SNHU is also exploring ways to support the refugee population in Manchester, and is partnering with the YWCA NH to expand services locally.

Material from a press release was used in this report.

Output: Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) will invest $10m in providing online bachelor's and associate degrees to refugees around the world. Funded by anonymous donors, the initiative aims to provide education to 50,000 refugees in 20 locations by 2022. SNHU has piloted its programme with more than 500 refugees in Rwanda and plans to offer it to four new sites over the next two years.


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Input:
England’s 8% rise in takeaway food outlets reflects inequality
 The total number of takeaway food shops in England has risen by 4,000 in the past three years, an increase of 8%, sparking fears that councils are losing the battle to limit obesity levels via planning rules that restrict new fast food outlets.

According to new figures provided to the Guardian by Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research (Cedar), there are now 56,638 takeaways in England – more than a quarter of all the country’s food outlets – with some of the heaviest concentrations of fast food found in England’s poorest and most deprived neighbourhoods.

“The junk food and sugary drinks sold by these outlets make an important contribution to the UK epidemic of obesity and diabetes,” said Professor Simon Capewell, vice-president for policy at the UK’s Faculty of Public Health. “Furthermore, the much greater density of fast food outlets in deprived neighbourhoods exacerbates existing, substantial inequalities in health. These trends are very worrying.”

The data also indicates a possible north-south divide in takeaway access. Of the 30 council areas where takeaways are the predominant kind of food outlet, 25 are in economically deprived areas of the north, with notable clusters in the north-west.

In Blackburn with Darwen, 38% of all food retail outlets are given over to fast food – the highest proportion in England – against a national average of 26%. Blackburn has 236 takeaways in all, an increase of 24% since 2014, and equivalent to one takeaway shop for every 625 people.

The figures will alarm policymakers concerned about rising levels of obesity and related illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes. Researchers have shown a link between increased exposure to fast food outlets, increased consumption of high-fat nutrient-poor food, higher body weight and greater risk of obesity.

“Despite the health impact of the obesity epidemic being well known, it is shocking that the number of fast food takeaways is increasing,” said Caroline Cerny, of the Obesity Health Alliance. “Whether it’s the marketing of junk food on billboards and TV, or the proximity of junk food outlets to schools, we know our environment has a huge impact on levels of overweightness and obesity.”

Nearly two-thirds of adults (63%) and a third of children aged two to 15 are obese or overweight, according to Public Health England. Obesity causes more than 30,000 deaths a year, and increases the risk of health conditions such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Treating obesity costs the NHS £6bn a year, a figure expected to rise £10bn by 2050.

“Our high streets are increasingly saturated with takeaways and food on the go, causing an over-consumption of cheap, unhealthy food and drinks,” said Dr Alison Tedstone, Public Health England’s chief nutritionist. “Local authorities and the food and drink industry all have a role to play in creating an environment that encourages healthier options – including tackling the number of takeaways and the quality of food they sell, especially among our most disadvantaged communities.”

The takeaway figures are drawn from Cedar’s new Food Environment Assessment Tool (Feat). Based on Ordnance Survey data, for the first time it enables users to map, measure and monitor access to a range of different types of food outlet – including takeaways, supermarkets and cafes – across the whole of England, at local authority, council ward and postcode level.

“The data show stark differences in access to takeaway food outlets, not only across the country and between local authorities, but even within individual towns and cities,” said Tom Burgoine, a researcher at Cedar. “Feat’s detailed maps reveal for the first time these differences in food access, which research indicates are related to diet and health.”

Takeaways are defined by Feat as food outlets where hot food is ordered and paid for at the till, with no waiter service and limited or no sit-in option. It includes bakeries, such as Greggs, as well as well-known brands more obviously associated with fast food, such as KFC and McDonald’s, and local independent takeaways.

Many of the 326 local authorities mapped have seen striking increases in the number of takeaways between 2014-17, with 20 recording rises of more than 20%. Only 40 councils (12%) have seen the number of fast food outlets fall or stay the same.

Although the north has heavy concentrations of fast food, Feat shows that some of the most rapid takeaway growth over the past three years was in relatively affluent home county areas in the south east. South Cambridgeshire, which also has pockets of deprivation, has recorded the biggest percentage increase in takeaways, up 31% to 50 outlets, and has seen the biggest growth in takeaways as a percentage of all food shops.

High-profile battles

Since 2010, more than 20 councils in England have introduced planning regulations aimed at limiting the expansion of the takeaway sector locally on health grounds, including the imposition of 400m fast food exclusion zones around schools. NHS public health officials have recommended all councils consider adopting similar rules as a part of local obesity reduction initiatives.

But according to Professor Capewell: “Though many councils might wish to exercise planning restrictions on health grounds, they are constrained by the major, ongoing budget cuts imposed by central government. Councils are then put in an impossible position by being expected to maximise income from business rates, including promoting businesses that sell unhealthy commodities.”

McDonald’s have been involved in two recent high-profile planning disputes with local councils. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

The new planning regulations have been central to several high-profile battles to block fast food chains opening new outlets. In 2016, McDonald’s withdrew controversial plans to open a new drive-through branch in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, when it became clear it would fall foul of planning rules drawn up by the city council preventing new takeaways opening near schools.

In June, the burger chain successfully overturned a decision by Bristol City council to block a new drive-through in the Fishponds area of the city, despite a fierce campaign by local residents. Although the proposed new outlet was near a school, it was deemed to be a few metres outside the 400m fast food exclusion zone imposed by city planners.

Across the country, Feat suggests many of the councils that have introduced planning restrictions have struggled to limit the growth of fast food outlets. Bradford City council, which imposed planning restrictions in 2014, has seen takeaway numbers leap from 606 to 733 in three years, a 20% increase. Some 36% of food retail outlets in the borough are occupied by fast food, up three percentage points in three years.

A spokesperson for Bradford council said: “Since the local authority brought in a planning restriction of no takeaways within 400m of a school in November 2014, the council has refused over 40 applications for takeaways that would have flouted this restriction.

“We are mindful of balancing the need for businesses to thrive with the drive to promote healthy eating, which is why we have worked over the last three years with takeaway outlets to reduce the salt, fat and calorie content in their meals. We have also suggested they offer smaller portions alongside the standard portions, and to offer water as an alternative to sugary drinks.”

Warrington, Birmingham and Gateshead, which also have planning regulations in place, have all seen double-digit increases in takeaway numbers – whereas Islington and Medway have successfully kept a lid on fast food outlets, according to the data.

Gateshead council said there have been no new hot food takeaways in the borough since it introduced planning rules limiting them in 2015, and that it had subsequently refused four applications. This policy applies only to takeaways with a planning classification of “A5”, however – which does not, unlike the wider Feat definition, cover Greggs bakeries (classed as A1), or McDonald’s and KFC, which as restaurants with takeaway capacity are classified as A3.

Such variation in classifications has prompted calls for more all-encompassing planning definitions. According to Martin Caraher, professor of food policy at City, University of London: “There needs to be a more dynamic public health presence in the planning system, to take into account all kinds of ‘food on the go’ in our towns and cities – not just narrowly-defined, planning-usage definitions of ‘fast food’.”

Typical takeaway foods are high in calories, fat and saturated fat. A single portion of fried chicken and chips, fish and chips or pizza might contain 900-1,200 calories, with significant variations in calorie content between outlets. Studies have shown that customers significantly underestimate the calorific content of takeaway meals; the recommended daily intake of an adult male is around 2,500 calories, and 2,000 for an adult female.

Are you worried about the large number of fast food outlets in your area? Take our fast food survey, or email us at inequality.project@theguardian.com

Output: England has seen an 8% rise in the total number of takeaway food shops. 4,000 new outlets have opened in the past three years, according to Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research. The rise comes despite planning rules designed to restrict such shops which now number 56,638 in England, over 25% of all the country’s food outlets. The country’s poorest neighbourhoods have some of the highest concentrations of takeaways, with particular clusters in the north-west. Professor Simon Capewell, of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health, stated that such takeaways contributed to the country's ongoing epidemic of obesity and diabetes.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Researchers develop demand response for better solar integration
 Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Solar power has been established as a source of mainstream power generation across the globe. With numerous installations of photovoltaic (PV) systems for residential homes at or near the distribution site, there is a challenge to balance supply and demand to make these intermittent energy sources reliable. Too little sun means low solar generation and poor PV system efficiency. Excessive generation can jeopardize normal operation of electricity networks.

Demand response (DR) is one promising way to increase operational flexibility and energy efficiency. However, little research has been conducted on a large scale to quantify the benefits of DR in residential communities.

To fill this gap, researchers at the Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) in Malaysia incorporated DR scenarios in simulated comprehensive network case studies based on 100 urban low-voltage network samples. Their research showed the significance that DR can have on network operations with different levels of PV penetration. The researchers report their findings this week in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

"We highlight [the] importance of the paradigm shift from the traditional 'generation to follow demand' to 'demand to follow generation' in renewable-rich energy mix scenarios," said Chin Kim Gan, UTeM associate professor and co-author of the paper.

DR initiatives, through the use of advanced building controls or manually reducing power during hours of peak demand, encourage consumers to reduce their electricity use in exchange for lower electric bills and other incentives.

Three case studies were developed to investigate how various DR scenarios would affect network performance. Malaysia was chosen as the location because of its consistent tropical weather pattern, with sunny days about 50 percent of the time. Different degrees of DR participation at varying levels of PV penetrations were considered for each case study for a total of 10,000 network analyses performed for each case study.

In the first case study, consumers responded to their own demand profile without PV generation (e.g., they delayed using their washing machine until later in the evening). In the second, participants responded to their own PV-generation profiles. For them, DR consisted of load shifting (e.g., taking a hot shower in the morning when local solar power is available).

In the last case study, consumers considered both their own demand and PV generation profiles simultaneously (e.g., they decreased their use of air conditioning after receiving a signal from a central DR optimizer).

DR applications with 100 percent PV penetration (in the third case study) provided the best use of solar energy and influenced network performance the most, reducing energy consumption at peak demand by 32 percent, reducing network losses by 42 percent and improving network utilization by 12 percent.

Gan said that these benefits would be even greater with the integration of energy storage systems and other smart-grid technologies, such as building sensors and smart meters.

"Although demand response provides notable benefits to the network, it cannot by itself fully unleash benefits of intermittent renewable energy, particularly when the output of generation is higher than the demand," Gan said. "Demand response, therefore, coupled with the integration of energy storage and energy management systems would likely maximize the benefits of renewable energy in future energy systems."

More information: "Assessment of distribution networks performance considering residential photovoltaic systems with demand response applications," Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2017). DOI: 10.1063/1.4993048 Journal information: Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy

Output: Demand response (DR), a system which allows for changes in energy cost as a reaction to nationwide energy usage, can reduce peak energy demand by almost a third, according to researchers at the Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka. In an article published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, the team detailed three case studies based on 100 urban low-voltage network samples. DR was used in one trial by customers adapting their energy use to their own needs, in the second by those using load shifting, and in the third, the most successful trial, with 100% photovoltaic penetration.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Verily invests in cancer detection firm Freenome's $65m round
 Verily, the life sciences arm of Google's parent company Alphabet , has invested in Freenome, an ambitious start-up that's building technology to detect early-stage cancer, and built a dedicated lab for the start-up.

Verily invested in Freenome as part of its most recent round of financing, which totaled $65 million, in March 2017, a person familiar with the investment tells CNBC. This was separate from an investment made by Alphabet's venture arm, GV (formerly Google Ventures), which has been previously reported.

"We are providing office space to Freenome in order to foster collaboration between the two companies," a Verily spokesperson confirmed. The companies did not comment on the investment.

The funding represents a deviation in strategy for Verily, which typically forms partnerships with life sciences companies to jointly develop companies or products.

To sweeten the deal, Verily built Freenome's clinical team a lab to their specifications, the person said. Freenome's team, which amounts to about 40 people, has now moved in.

The lab is the first on Verily's South San Francisco premises, the person said, although Verily said that there are other labs on campus as well.

Freenome is using machine learning to root out biological signals of cancer from DNA fragments in the blood. It's most recent funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from GV, Alphabet's venture unit, among other investors.

Output: Verily Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, has invested in Freenome, a start-up that uses machine learning to detect early-stage cancer. As part of the deal, Verily has built a dedicated lab for the start-up in San Francisco. The life sciences company invested as part of Freenome's recent $65m funding round. Alphabet's venture arm, GV, has also previously invested in Freenome.