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Healthcare companies aim to convert partisan gridlock into progress
 Ceci Connolly, president of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, said there is a "real danger" in not addressing CSR payments. "If the CSRs go away and many of those working families decide they can't afford coverage without that help, that has real negative effects on the risk pool, which will in turn have negative effects on health plans, which will in turn have negative effects on the market. It is a fragile assembly of pieces that could fall apart very quickly."

Insurance companies also face the prospect that Trump may sign an executive order soon to allow cross-state insurance sales. Experts have long warned that such a policy would weaken consumer protections and further damage the individual market.

Michael Consedine, CEO of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said in a statement that the NAIC "has long been opposed to any attempt to reduce or pre-empt state authority or weaken consumer protections." He noted that insurers already are able to sell plans in multiple states.

Insurance companies are also pressing the Trump administration to continue enforcing the individual mandate, which requires most people to enroll in coverage, and reinstate funding for Obamacare marketing and outreach. HHS announced in August that it would slash the marketing budget, and many plans worry those cuts, coupled with a weakly enforced mandate, will lead to lower enrollment. Now, 10.3 million Americans are enrolled in ACA marketplace coverage.

Providers, insurers and state insurance departments are stepping up their outreach efforts in the wake of the loss of federal funding.

"We have the same mechanisms in place to support enrollment in exchange plans or Medicaid expansion and continue those efforts, notwithstanding the administration's efforts around decreasing funding for navigators," said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, CEO of Catholic-sponsored system Trinity Health, based in Livonia, Mich.

Not-for-profit safety net health plans in the Association for Community Affiliated Plans will also do their own marketing, according to association CEO Margaret Murray. She added that her organization is pushing for reducing the number of plans that don't comply with the ACA, such as grandfathered health plans, which she said help to destabilize the individual market and increase premiums.

Healthcare companies are hopeful a bipartisan solution to stabilize the ACA marketplace can be reached. They are urging Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to revisit their bipartisan talks to shore up the individual insurance marketplaces in time for open enrollment, which begins Nov. 1.

In September, the two senators held a series of hearings before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on how to stabilize the market, but the conversation was abandoned when Republicans returned their attention to repealing the ACA.

"I hope that there will be a more bipartisan approach to looking at the kinds of things that can improve market stability," UPMC's Holder said. "When insurance markets are stable or more stable, it allows (insurers) to plan more effectively."

Output: In a show of unprecedented unity, healthcare providers and payers banded together to defeat Senate Republicans' latest attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.


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Why Public Health Insurance Could Help, Even if You Don’t Want It
 It is anyone’s guess whether Democrats will unite around the goal of creating a single-payer health care system or even take a less ambitious approach — introducing a public health insurance option.

Adding public insurance as an option in the complex American health care system has been treated as a consolation prize for those who really favor single-payer health care, but the lighter approach might pack much more punch than you might think. What’s more, the best way to see that is by looking at the Indian labor market and the Mexican grocery market.

Why should jobs in India or food in Mexico have anything to do with health care in the United States? They are linked by the logic of supply and demand, which applies in the United States and in countries very different from it — countries that the United States doesn’t turn to often enough for policy lessons.

In fact, India’s and Mexico’s experiences offer some of the best evidence on what happens when we add a public option to a marketplace: The private sector is forced to improve its game to retain customers, so more people benefit than just those who directly use the public services.

Output: It is anyone’s guess whether Democrats will unite around the goal of creating a single-payer health care system or even take a less ambitious approach — introducing a public health insurance option.


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Trump couldn’t repeal Obamacare, so he’s trying to destroy it
 Here’s a thought exercise. Barack Obama never once considered repealing George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D law, even though it was a drag on the budget. But imagine if he had decided to try. Imagine, then, that this hypothetical repeal effort failed three times in a row, despite congressional majorities, and so instead Obama decided to issue executive orders aimed at making it really difficult for seniors to receive the prescription drug benefits in the law? I mean, radically undermining the law might have reduced the deficit and the long-term debt, especially if retirees were simply unaware of the program and didn’t enroll, right? But it would have been a horrifyingly crappy and inhumane thing to do, given that seniors would have been forced to go without life-saving medication or go bankrupt trying to pay for prescriptions.

In truth, Medicare Part D came equipped with a pretty significant problem. It turned out that many seniors were being screwed every year by something called the “doughnut hole.” Simply put, a flaw in Bush’s Medicare Part D manifested itself with a coverage gap, during which recipients had to pay for medicine out of pocket or go without their prescriptions for a period of time each year. Rather than maniacally demanding a repeal of the law, though, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress incorporated language in the health care law of 2009 that incrementally fixed the doughnut hole.

Why? Because that’s the grownup thing to do -- the human thing to do. (Incidentally, repealing Obamacare would’ve meant a re-opening of the doughnut hole. Bad news for all those seniors who inexplicably voted for Trump last year.) Nevertheless, the Affordable Care Act’s fix for Part D is how it’s supposed to work. If one president passes a beneficial law that improves people’s lives, the next president should endeavor to correct any glitches. That's how it went in that case, with a bipartisan effort linking two profoundly different administrations.

But it doesn’t work like that any more, apparently. Now, in the erratic and vulgar age of President Trump, the mission has never been to improve the ACA, which among many positive line items provided 20 million Americans withe affordable health insurance. The solution has been to simply kill it. The most brainless and simplistic solution for a brainless and simplistic regime. It reminds me of one of those viral videos in which a petulant kid starts relentlessly destroying his keyboard because of a computer glitch. Good job, kid.

Likewise, the Republicans got caught up in their own bogus hype from 2010, becoming unable to pull out of a nosedive commitment that they would repeal and replace the ACA. Because it tests well with the conservative base to promise a sucker punch to our first African-American ex-president, they couldn’t change course when it became clear most Americans beyond the loony fringe didn’t want anything to do with the slapdash Republican replacement bills. Hence, three failed attempts (at least) to repeal.

In the face of those failures, the Trump administration has engaged in a secret plan to sabotage the ACA. The goal? Make it really difficult for people to enroll and receive benefits from the law, while also jacking up premiums by resurrecting failed solutions. What exactly are they doing?

On Wednesday, we learned that Tom Price’s Department of Health and Human Services, which is tasked with implementing the ACA, sent word to all 10 of its regional directors to bail out of promoting this year’s open enrollment period. The goal, quite obviously, is to keep people from enrolling in order to facilitate a decline in participation, creating another excuse for another possible repeal, and perhaps triggering premium hikes to compensate for the lack of customers paying into the system.

Referring to the lack of promotion, the executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, Roy Mitchell, told Vox’s Dylan Scott, “It’s clearly sabotage.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer agreed: “The Trump administration is deliberately attempting to sabotage our health care system.”

If customers forget to enroll as a result of the sabotage, they’ll be forced to pay a penalty. Many of those lapsed customers will surely become opponents of the law. Mission accomplished. Trump already signed an executive order shortly after his inauguration ordering the IRS not enforce Obamacare's individual mandate -- another trick that is likely to trigger premiums. So far, at least, the administration has failed to implement the order.

Late last month, we also learned that Trump is slashing the ACA’s advertising budget by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million. TV ads are being scrapped altogether. The White House’s logic on this is predictably confounding. Officials told reporters that they shouldn’t be obligated to promote something which many Americans don’t know about. Isn’t that the point of advertising -- to inform the uninformed?

Likewise, the network of health care “navigators” tasked with helping Americans buy marketplace insurance plans is seeing its funding cut nearly in half, from $63 million to $36 million. Again, a valuable resource for making it easier to deal with complicated insurance parameters is being subverted. But I’m sure there won’t be any customers flummoxed by the process who will walk away hating the ACA.

Oh, and the open enrollment period has been reduced by six weeks, rolling back the deadline from Jan. 31 to Dec. 15, making the signup process even more harrowing.

The Trump administration has also threatened to stop paying cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments. Briefly put, CSRs are the subsidies that help low-income families pay their monthly insurance premiums. The mere threat of cutting these payments has precipitated a forthcoming 45 percent hike in premiums in Florida alone. Insurers are specifically citing the “political uncertainty” brought on by Trump’s incendiary language, and the looming concern about the possible elimination of CSR payments.

Finally, for some reason that defies explanation, HHS will be shutting down the Healthcare.gov website for 12 hours every Sunday, a day when most Americans are off work and might well have the free time to focus on signing up for insurance. Rather than conducting technical maintenance when it’s needed, HHS is establishing weekly shutdowns with the apparent goal of making sure that fewer people can sign up during the shortened enrollment period -- and that’s if they’re actually aware of open enrollment, given the reduction of the advertising budget.

Ultimately, of course, we’ll continue to hear rhetoric from Trump about how the ACA is collapsing, forcing us to wonder whether his sneaky meddling with the law is causing the system to slowly unwind. The next time Trump screeches to his cosplaying superfans about rising premiums, it might be fair to point out that higher premiums next year and the year after that were essentially designed to happen and are his fault, not the fault of the underlying law. Not only will Democratic lawmakers be tasked with coming up with solutions for the existing glitches in the ACA, they’ll also have to contend with a White House that’s creating a long list of new ones -- deliberately and without remorse, effectively making health care terrible again and screwing over vulnerable Americans by the millions.

Output: Here’s a thought exercise. Barack Obama never once considered repealing George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D law, even though it was a drag on the budget. But imagine if he had decided to try.


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Nursing home use up with cognitive impairment category
 (HealthDay)—Nursing home (NH) use increases with increasing cognitive impairment category, according to a study published online Sept. 11 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Jane A. Emerson, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues estimated NH use among 3,545 Mayo Clinic Study of Aging participants (aged 70 to 89 years), assessed as cognitively normal (CN), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), previously unrecognized dementia, or prevalent dementia.

The researchers found that the percentages who died in the year after cognition was assessed were 1, 2.6, 4.2, and 21 percent among those categorized as CN, MCI, previously unrecognized dementia, and prevalent dementia, respectively. The percentages with any NH use were 3.8, 8.7, 19, and 40 percent, respectively, with 27, 38, 120, and 305 median NH days and 7.8, 12, 33, and 100 percent median percentages of NH days/days of observation, respectively. A significantly higher proportion had any NH use for each increase in cognitive impairment category. Individuals with prevalent dementia and any NH use had especially high one-year mortality (30 percent versus 13 percent for those with no NH use). Among those with prevalent dementia, 58 percent of all deaths occurred while an NH resident.

"Reductions in NH use could result from quality alternatives to NH admission, both among persons with MCI and persons with dementia, together with suitable options for end-of-life care among persons with prevalent dementia," the authors write.

Several authors disclosed financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, including AbbVie, which partially funded the study.

Copyright © 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Output: Nursing home (NH) use increases with increasing cognitive impairment category, according to a study published online Sept. 11 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.


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Brexit concern, tax increase take toll on UK luxury home values
 Some of Britain’s wealthiest homeowners have seen as much as £13m wiped off the value of their property in a year as Brexit uncertainty and tax changes continue to wreak havoc in the prime central London market.

According to new research, Kensington Palace Gardens in west London tops the list of the most expensive streets in Britain, with an average property value of £35.7m – although that is £2.5m less than this time last year, when the figure was £38.3m. In July 2015 a typical property in the street was worth £42.6m – which reflects a near-£7m decline in just over two years, said property website Zoopla in its annual Rich List of house prices.

Kensington Palace Gardens is reported to be home to Chelsea football club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, the Formula One heiress Tamara Ecclestone and the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah.

However, the ultra-wealthy owners of homes in the Boltons, two miles south, have had a much tougher time of it. Zoopla said the average value of a property on the street in South Kensington had plummeted from £33.3m this time last year to just under £20m now. Previous residents of the Boltons include Madonna and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The Boltons came third in the table of the top 10 most expensive streets, all of which are in London.

A house on the Boltons, where average values have plummeted from £33.3m last year to under £20m. Photograph: Rightmove

Other roads in the area, such as Manresa Road in Chelsea, had smaller falls, and a few increased in value over the year.

Other surveys have also reported sharp falls in some of the capital’s most expensive boroughs. Last month the property site Rightmove said the average asking price of a newly marketed home in Kensington and Chelsea fell by £308,000 between August and September. On Tuesday, upmarket estate agent Savills said prices in central London had fallen by 3.2% in the first nine months of this year, and were 15.2% below their peak three years ago.

On Friday, Nationwide said London house prices had fallen for the first time year on year since the height of the financial crisis eight years ago.

Rightmove described the slump in the high-end central London market as a “readjustment”, and quoted an estate agent saying that, since the introduction of the 3% surcharge on stamp duty paid by investors, along with the uncertainty over how Brexit would pan out, “investors have been standing on the sidelines”.

Zoopla said there were now 14,417 streets in Britain where the average property value is £1m or more – up from 12,418 in 2016. Of those, 5,899 are in Greater London. The Yorkshire and the Humber region has 77 £1m streets, north-east England has 45 and Wales has 11.

In line with this trend, 19 of the 20 towns with the highest number of £1m-plus streets are in southern England. Guildford in Surrey takes the top spot with 204, with Reading in Berkshire in second place with 187.

Zoopla says its website attracts more than 40m visits per month. Asked about the large fall recorded for the Boltons, a spokesman said: “The number of estimates on a given road can vary and can be subject to change throughout the year. In the case of the Boltons, it could be that several estimates have been newly added to listings which previously didn’t have a figure attached, and this may have had the knock-on impact on the street’s average value compared to last year.”

Output: Tax changes and uncertainty over Brexit have been blamed for wiping millions of pounds off the value of properties in some of the UK’s wealthiest streets, with overall house prices in London reported to have fallen for the first time in eight years. Estate agent Savills said that prime residential prices in central London were 15.2% below their peak three years ago, while Zoopla said homes in Kensington's The Boltons -- the third-most expensive street in the world -- had lost an average of £13m ($17.2m) in the past year. Property website Rightmove described the fall as a “readjustment”.


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Price of cyber attacks is $21.2m for US companies: Accenture
 Dive Brief:

Cybercrimes increased 62% in the last five years, and global malware attacks were the most expensive, costing companies up to $2.4 million per attack, according to the 2017 Accenture cybercrime cost report. The report surveyed almost 2,200 security and IT professionals in 254 international companies.

Cybercrimes cost businesses about $11.7 million per year, a 23% increase over 2016's $9.5 million. Security breaches increased 27% to 130 incidents annually. Ransomware attacks doubled in frequency and saw an average of 23 days dedicated to "resolve" each attack.

U.S. companies paid the highest cybercrime cost at about $21.22 million. The financial industry was hit the hardest, followed by the utility and energy, defense and technology industries, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

Cybersecurity made a huge impact in 2017. After back-to-back-cyberattacks occurred earlier this year many companies were forced to restructure security strategies. May's WannaCry malware attack infiltrated networks through an outdated software vulnerability, highlighting the need for more vigilant software updates and maintenance.

Nyetya struck soon after WannaCry, and although it was disguised as ransomware, Nyetya was a wiper that destroyed data even after a ransom was paid. Shipping giant Maersk's global operations were temporarily dismantled by the attack, and FedEx lost $300 million in operating income.

Lost information accounts for most costs companies face following a cybercrime or data breach and additional legal costs are also common. Equifax is facing numerous legal and financial ramifications following its data breach of 143 million U.S. consumers.

Savvy hackers are taking advantage of an understaffed security workforce and using trusted applications as an entry point into company networks. A lack of proper companywide security practices often results in phishing schemes and fake CEO emails — which cost companies about $5.3 million in the last three years.

It's up to companies to remain vigilant on cybersecurity efforts in infrastructure and software surveillance and maintenance. Federal agencies also need to reexamine patchwork efforts and potential gains hackers can receive from network intrusion.

Output: US businesses are paying a high price for the boom in cyber crime, according to a report by Accenture. Incidents have increased by 62% over the past five years, costing US companies around $21.2m last year, the report states. In a survey of security and IT employees across 254 global firms, Accenture found that each attack costs its target up to $2.4m. The financial sector saw the most frequent attacks. Security breaches rose by 27% to 130 per year, according to the study, which called on businesses to innovate to stay ahead of hackers.


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China's Geely buys controlling stakes in Saxo Bank and Lotus
 What we reported last October has become official today: Geely Holding has acquired a majority 51-percent stake in Lotus. With 49 percent remaining at Etika Automotive, the Malaysian group behind Proton, Mr. Jean-Marc Gales will continue in his role as Lotus CEO, a job he started three years ago.

This is indeed great news. The lack of investment from the Malaysian side held the brand back dearly over the past few years. Meanwhile, every car company recently purchased by Geely's Chairman Li has made an instant turn for the better. Now, Lotus gets its chance.

Lotus

Geely bought Volvo from Ford back in 2010. Not long after, the company evolved into a Swedish success story, with a fresh model line and a separate performance brand that's just about to develop its own electric sports car.

Related Story 2018 Volvo XC40: Here It Is

The Volvo XC40's compact platform is now shared with a new carmaker called Lynk & Co, which is trying to capture your imagination with a completely different sales model, bolder shapes and a lower price point than any Volvo. Lynk & Co might also become the first Chinese manufacturer to succeed in America—its models will be built to global standards, on what's essentially a proven Volvo platform.

Then, there's The London Taxi Company, a factory just a stone's throw away from Lotus. After becoming part of the Geely empire, LTC came up with a brand new electric platform that used not only for the next London cab, but also a wide range of electric commercial vehicles aimed at the European market.

The London Taxi Company

Now, Lotus joins the team, and the brand is already off to a good start. In the first half of 2017, "Lotus has already entered into a positive cash flow situation" with sales rising by 10 percent.

On its quest to survive, the small British brand always knew how to keep up the interest with exciting products like the Evora GT430. But that certainly won't be enough to survive in the long run. So from now on, Lotus will use its engineering know-how to become a global player using Geely's investment. And while we wait for its wide range of authentic performance vehicles to appear, the new Elise can't be here soon enough.

An Elise that they will sell in America.

Output: China's Geely is raising its stake in Denmark's Saxo Bank to 51.5% in a deal worth more than $300m. The Chinese car maker believes that the bank's financial technology knowhow could help it expand in Asia. Saxo Bank's income mainly comes from its online trading platforms, which are used by foreign exchange dealers among others. At the same time, Geely has acquired a controlling 51% stake in the Lotus car company, leaving 49% with Malaysia's Etika Automotive. So far, every car firm that Geely has acquired has made a fast financial turnaround and it is hoped additional investment in Lotus will have the same effect.


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China's wealthy young buy up worldwide art
 CNN —

Michael Xufu Huang is hard to miss. In March of this year, the Chinese art collector turned heads at a Guggenheim party by showing up in a white leather jumpsuit. A week later, he swept through the VIP opening of Art Basel in Hong Kong in a powder-pink, pajama-style outfit. But it’s not just Huang’s clothes that have art world insiders talking – it’s his age.

At just 23, Huang is part of a new generation of Chinese art collectors. He began collecting art as a 16-year-old high school student in London and then returned home to Beijing, where he co-founded the contemporary arts museum, M Woods.

The gallery’s ambitious exhibitions of both Western and Chinese artists have attracted international attention. But while Huang and his contemporaries clearly have money to spend, their approach to collecting is vastly different from the Chinese billionaires who shook up the art world in the mid-2000s.

Changing tastes

Chinese collectors started making global headlines just over 10 years ago, and they quickly gained a reputation for buying big-ticket items by the best-known Western artists.

Aged just 23, Michael Xufu Huang is already a prominent collector and curator. He co-founded the not-for-profit contemporary art museum M Woods alongside fellow young collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei. Courtesy of Michael Xufu Huang

Among this early cohort were Joseph Lau, who bought one of Andy Warhol’s Mao Zedong portraits for $17.4 million in 2006, and Wang Jianlin, one of China’s richest men, who paid $28.2 million for a Picasso. Billionaire and former taxi driver Liu Yiqian famously paid $170.4 million for an Amedeo Modigliani painting – reportedly using his American Express card.

Western art is still a big draw for Chinese collectors like Huang.

“The younger generation of Chinese collectors have been educated around the world,” he said. “We are global citizens, so works by artists from abroad echo our interests.”

But China’s new collectors aren’t only looking for big names. Heir to a property and jewelry empire, Hong Kong-based Adrian Cheng says that he owns “hundreds” of works by both Chinese and Western artists – many of them up-and-coming.

Adrian Cheng, pictured here being interviewed by CNN Style's Derek Blasberg, is one of the world's youngest billionaires. Having founded the K11 Art Foundation, Cheng is also a prominent art collector. Courtesy of Adrian Cheng

“I travel across the world to view art – at art fairs, biennales, museums, exhibitions and more,” said Cheng, who founded the not-for-profit K11 Art Foundation. “I am fortunate to have come across art that may be of historical importance, representative of its time or simply moving. I am driven to collect these works, regardless of the where the artist comes from.”

Collectors’ understanding of art continues to grow, according to Lorenz Helbling, who founded ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai 21 years ago.

“(Chinese art collectors) have become more knowledgeable, sophisticated and ambitious,” he said.

On the block

Auctions are still the marketplace of choice among China’s art collectors. Nearly 70% of artworks purchased in the country in 2016 went through auction houses, according to a joint report by Art Basel and the banking giant UBS.

Alex Chang, Managing Director of Poly Auction in Hong Kong, thinks auctions provide a level of reassurance for emerging buyers in mainland China. “In an auction, the lots are selected by the specialists and an estimate is made after thorough research,” Chang said.

“Thus the collectors will have sufficient background information to make a decision on placing a reasonable bid.”

Inexperienced collectors might feel less confident in a gallery or at an art fair, where the process for determining prices tends to be more opaque.

But while older, headline-grabbing businessmen seemed to relish the buzz – and publicity – of public sales, younger collectors have good reason for keeping a low profile.

China’s so-called fuerdai (literally “second generation rich”) are regularly criticized in the media for their flashy spending. And with many young collectors at least partly funded by family money, they seem eager to prove that they’re interested in art as more than just a status symbol.

Auction houses are changing tack to cater to them. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Hong Kong’s Poly Auction all offer private sales that allow for discreet transactions. In the first half of 2017, Sotheby’s reported a significant rise in revenue from private sales – particularly in Asia.

“We have seen a strong upward trend in private sales with mainland Chinese clients in the past five years, and more than a three-fold increase in 2016 compared to the prior year,” a spokesperson said. “In China and Hong Kong, the increase has been more than four-fold.”

Some young collectors like Kylie Ying, co-founder of the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, eschew auction houses altogether.

Kylie Ying co-founded the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair with her husband in 2013. She is one of China's most prominent young collectors. Courtesy of Kylie Ying

“So far, I haven’t bought anything (that way),” she said. “I always buy through galleries – that’s my first priority.”

Other young collectors are turning to the Internet to scour the market. With auction houses like Christie’s now using social media to showcase items, Huang says that he can easily browse for international art on Instagram – despite the fact that the platform is technically blocked in Mainland China.

“I use Instagram more than auction catalogues to see what’s on the market,” said Huang, whose own account features pictures taken with the likes of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami and American curator Klaus Biesenbach.

This habit seems fitting for a collector whose portfolio is dominated by artists known for exploring the Internet’s impact on society. Huang’s collection includes digital art that would likely be of little interest to China’s older generation, like Instagram portraits from Amalia Ulman’s “Excellences & Perfections” series.

“The term ‘post-internet’ has almost become passé in the art world, but I think it still manages to encapsulate many of my interests,” Huang said. “I am fascinated with artists who respond to realities and social issues predicated by new technologies and mobile connectivity. I think these investigations reflect the language of today.”

Aspiring patrons

Works bought by China’s earliest band of collectors often remained hidden away their owners’ mansions. The wife of aforementioned billionaire Liu Yiqian admitted that some of the couple’s art was stored in warehouses before they opened a series of private museums around China.

But collectors like Huang, Cheng and Ying seem to be on a mission to share – or at least appear to be sharing – their art with as many people as possible. Through both the K11 Art Foundation and the exhibitions hosted in his family-owned shopping malls, Cheng frequently makes art available to the public.

“We have presented blockbuster shows, such as (our) Monet exhibition, that had audiences lining up around the block,” he claimed. “We have introduced mass audiences to modern and contemporary art, bridging the chasm between the wider public and art.”

Unlike the Cheng’s K11 Art Foundation and Huang’s M Woods, the ART021 fair is an explicitly for-profit business. But Ying also insists that she is motivated by the desire to make art more accessible.

“Public education is also the vision of our fair,” she said. “We have free art talks and speeches during the fair. We are hoping that ART021 can be the first window for art to Chinese public.”

Output: China's young, wealthy elites are increasingly buying artworks from around the world. This younger generation of collectors have been educated overseas, granting a globalised perspective on the art industry and its value, and encouraging them to give up-and-coming artists a chance alongside the classics. "(Chinese art collectors) have become more knowledgeable, sophisticated and ambitious", said Lorenz Helbling, founder of ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai. Auctions remain the marketplace of choice for collectors, prompting auction houses to alter their methods to appeal to Asian buyers.


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Coca-Cola’s single-use plastic bottles 110 billion pa: Greenpeace
 Coca-Cola increased its production of throwaway plastic bottles last year by well over a billion, according to analysis by Greenpeace.

The world’s biggest soft drinks company does not disclose how much plastic packaging it puts into the market. But analysis by the campaign group Greenpeace reveals what they say is an increase in production of single-use PET bottles from 2015-2016.

The increase puts Coke’s production at more than 110bn bottles each year, according to Greenpeace.

Coca-Cola has confirmed that single-use plastic bottles made up 59% of its global packaging in 2016 compared to 58% in the 12 months before.

The scale of production contributes to a plastic mountain which is growing vastly year on year. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that by 2021 the number of plastic drinks bottles produced globally will reach more than half a trillion.

But only a tiny fraction of these bottles are recycled. Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead, most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Louise Edge, oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, said: “Coca-Cola talks the talk on sustainability but the astonishing rate at which it is pumping out single-use plastic bottles is still growing.

“We have calculated it produced over 110bn throwaway plastic bottles every year – an astounding 3,400 a second – while refusing to take responsibility for its role in the plastic pollution crisis facing our oceans.

“We would love Coke to provide detailed breakdowns of what it produces – so we would welcome any clarifications they have to offer on our estimates.”

Amid growing concern about marine pollution and increasing evidence that plastic is finding its way into the food chain of fish and humans, Coca-Cola European Partners announced it had changed its mind about plastic bottle deposit schemes.

The company has expressed support for a deposit scheme and told Westminster MPs a new approach was needed to improve the stalled recycling rates in the UK of 57% for PET bottles, and is calling for collaborative efforts from government and industry to improve recycling rates.

Coca-Cola, which operates in more than 200 countries, has said disclosing the volume of plastic packaging it puts on the market annually is “commercially sensitive”.

In July Coca-Cola European Partners announced it would increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50% by 2020.

Greenpeace Canada Oceans campaigner Sarah King with a collection of Coca-Cola bottles and caps found on Freedom Island, Philippines. Photograph: Daniel Müller/Greenpeace

But plastic drinking bottles could be made out of 100% recycled plastic, known as RPet – and campaigners are pressing big drinks companies to radically increase the amount of recycled plastic in their bottles.

A spokesperson from Coca-Cola Great Britain said: “Our global PET bottle usage number for 2016 is 59%, an increase of 1% from 58% in 2015. We continue to review and adjust our packaging strategy as part of our overall business plan.

“In the UK, all of our bottles and cans are 100% recyclable and have been since 2012. Our plastic bottles contain 25% recycled material and we have recently pledged to double this amount to 50% by 2020.”

Output: Coca-Cola, the world’s largest soft drinks company, increased production of single-use plastic bottles by over a billion from 2015-2016, according to Greenpeace. Although Coca-Cola does not disclose its plastic packaging output, Greenpeace estimates that the increase means that this now stands at over 110 billion bottles per year. Coca-Cola has confirmed that such bottles constituted 59% of the firm’s global packaging in 2016, up from 58% in the previous year. According to The Guardian, the number of plastic bottles produced globally will reach over half a trillion by 2021. Only a tiny proportion of such bottles are currently recycled.


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3D printing used to produce prosthetics at 10% of original cost
 Oct 2, 2017 | By Tess

A mechanical engineering student at the University of Colorado Boulder is putting his knowledge to use through the development of functional and low-cost prosthetics made with the help of 3D printing technology.

What started off as an eighth-grade science project for Peter “Max” Armstrong, the student in question, has grown into a highly promising initiative called Go Prosthetics. After years of research, prototypes, and tinkering, Armstrong believes he has developed a low-cost and customizable prosthetic that could be deployed in parts of the world where medical aids and prosthetics are hard to come by.

On a personal level, Armstrong was inspired to pursue the project by a family friend who suffered a double amputation. After learning how much lower limb prosthetics can cost (upwards of $3,000), the student decided to see if he could do something to make a difference.

Of course, at the time Armstrong was not using 3D printing to make prosthetics, but the interest in developing accessible artificial limbs certainly grew from that point. Impressively, by the time he was in high school, Armstrong had conceived of the prosthetic design he has now printed, tested, and patented.

Armstrong’s Go Prosthetics technology basically consists of a “general shaped” 3D printed prosthetic socket (which come in a variety of sizes), which can be customized to the wearer by injecting expandable foam into the socket until it is a perfect fit.

According to the Go Prosthetics website, a socket fitting only takes about 30 minutes to complete and the prosthetics themselves only cost about $300 to produce—a price that Armstrong says will drop once production increases.

To test his 3D printed prosthetic limb system, Armstrong has worked closely with Brian Sherman, who had his left leg amputated below the knee in 2013. Sherman heard about the CU Boulder student’s work via an amputee support group in Oregon, and quickly got in contact.

Brian Sherman wearing the Go Prosthetics 3D printed limb

"I think it's phenomenal he's had such dedication," Sherman told CU News. "He's had a great idea, and he's run with it.”

Working together, Sherman has given Armstrong vital feedback on his prosthetic design, telling him if and when the socket was uncomfortable and whether it was easy to move with. "The first one he did—it hurt," he explained. "I told him if it hurts, people aren't going to use it. The second one he did is much better. I walked around the room. I had control. I had balance.”

(Images: Go Prosthetics)

Since then, Armstrong says he has tested his design with three below-the-knee amputees and received positive reviews of his 3D printed prosthetic. Currently, the engineering student is trying to find an NGO or nonprofit organization to collaborate with to deploy his 3D printed prosthetics.

Ultimately, the goal of Go Prosthetics is to offer amputees in developing regions of the world better access to prosthetics, effectively giving them their mobility back. Armstrong will also keep working on his design to make it suitable for upper-limp amputees as well.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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James McCrory wrote at 5/16/2019 10:46:17 AM:HI I am a below knee amputee with a back ground in electronics I was an electricain but had to give up work done a degree in electronic, build my own acouistic guitars and mandolins. I have been having trouble getting my prosthesis ,socket to fit. I have had several made and they have all been to small ot to big. I live in Ireland and wonder did you every get your project of the ground. my email is jimmccy@gmail,com I have giben a lot of though about the design the socket and how it could be manufactured I find this web site and realise other out there are not only thinking about it but doning it llets know how you are getting onGilbert Cameron wrote at 11/21/2017 8:08:18 PM:Hi. Would be good to chat. We are running a 3 year project in 3d printing prosthetics in LVDC Musoma, Tanzania. In our 3rd year, starting April 2019 we hope to be printing lower limb sockets.

Output: An engineering student at the University of Colorado in Boulder has developed a low-cost, customisable prosthetic using 3D printing. Peter Armstrong's Go Prosthetics initiative uses expanding foam to ensure that its 3D-printed prosthetics fit their wearers perfectly. The socket for the limb can be made in around 30 minutes and costs $300, compared to the usual minimum price of $3,000, according to the company. The technology could see use in regions where artificial limbs are in short supply, said Armstrong.


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Huawei overtakes Apple as the smartphone of choice in China
 Some 31.4% of respondents to a poll last month in China said they intended to buy a Huawei model for their next smartphone, compared with 24.2% who said they wanted an iPhone. Photo: IC

Surging smartphone maker Huawei Technologies has for the first time surpassed Apple Inc. as the brand of choice for Chinese smartphone buyers, in the latest sign the U.S. giant is losing its luster in the world’s largest market, according to a new survey.

Some 31.4% of respondents to a September poll by FT Confidential Research, a unit of the Financial Times, said they intended to buy a Huawei model for their next smartphone. By comparison, only 24.2% of the 1,000 consumers surveyed said they would buy an iPhone for their next smartphone, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The timing is significant because Apple unveiled its latest models, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, in September and generally gets a boost from excitement around its new launches. The iPhone 8 went on sale in late September, but has failed to attract the usual buzz of previous launches.

The iPhone's 24.2% September showing in terms of consumer preference is down from 25.8% at the time of the iPhone 7 launch last year, the Financial Times said. Among people who said they planned to buy an iPhone in the latest survey, 65.1% said they wanted one of the latest three models. That was down sharply from the 75.7% who said they planned to buy the latest models from the iPhone 7 series around the time of the last product launches.

The survey results mirror a larger trend that has seen Apple steadily lose share in the world's largest smartphone market, as it comes under assault from Huawei and a group of other homegrown brands including Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

In this year’s second quarter, Apple’s China sales fell 7.6%, as its share of the market dipped 0.6 percentage points to 7.1%, making it the No. 5 player, according to data tracking firm IDC. At the same time, Huawei’s sales surged 22.6% to make it the clear market leader with 21% share, as Chinese consumers increasingly see the brand as offering comparable quality to Apple at far lower prices.

Contact reporter Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com)

Output: China's Huawei has taken over from Apple as the smartphone of choice for Chinese consumers, revealing again how Apple is losing ground in the world's biggest market, according an FT Confidential Research poll. The survey found 31.4% of respondents intend to buy a Huawei as their next smartphone, compared with 24.2% choosing Apple's iPhone. When the survey was done for the iPhone 7, 25.8% said it would be their next phone. The survey came as Apple unveiled its iPhone 8 range. So far the products have failed to attract the usual global buzz that follows an iPhone launch.


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Australian start-up pilots financial 'personal assistant'
 San Francisco-based Douugh (the extra "u" was to help it secure a domain name) would also be competing with banks, though it will not actually hold a banking licence in Australia. Instead, it aims to team up with an already-licensed bank, to provide a "white label" transaction account to be offered under the fintech's branding.

Output: Australian fintech Douugh is launching a pilot programme this month aimed at advising clients on their personal finances using a virtual assistant. The assistant, named "Sophie", is expected to provide clients with advice on issues such as credit card debt and bill payments. The firm says its plan is to launch a platform allowing customers access to transaction accounts, debit cards and loans supplied by a licensed bank based on interactions with the virtual assistant. Douugh is hoping to act as a "financial control centre" and provide consumers with loans that are cheaper than credit card debt they may currently be taking on.


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US-based robo-adviser Blooom hits $1bn in AUM
 Robo-Advisor Blooom now manages over $1 billion of retirement accounts for their clients, according to the company blog. Blooom was started in 2013 to “help the traditionally un-helped”. The platform explains that “Wall Street has made a habit of running in the opposite direction of investors with small accounts…maybe we should build something and run towards them.”

Bloom notes their platform has grown faster than virtually any other Robo-Advisor.

Blooom stated;

“We also take pride that this Kansas-based company reached the milestone faster than both Betterment or Wealthfront – while doing so on a fraction of the capital. They’re peers not so much from a comparable service offering but in that they’re a benchmark for other Robo-advisors. In other words, out of the gates, we have grown faster on fewer resources, as one should expect from someone managing their money.”

Today, thousands of people trust Blooom with their 401ks/403bs, thus representing a shift away from costly active management schemes that deliver too little yet cost much more. Blooom thanked their customers for believing in them.

Blooom last raised money in February of 2017 in a $9.15 million Series B financing round. At that time, Blooom held $500 million in assets under management so it would appear the funding has been put to good use as exemplified by this dramatic growth.

Kansas based Blooom charges customers $10 per month, for anyone in the US who has a 401k and 403b and needs help with it — regardless of account balance. Think about it. That is about the same cost of Netflix.

Blooom believes traditional industry participants seek out wealthy investors with multiple tiers of percentage pricing and complicated different service levels. Blooom wants to keep things clear and straightforward and deliver fiduciary advice to millions of hard working Americans who have never had access to help before, at an affordable price. Their recent performance indicates this goal is being met.

[Editors Note: Wealthfront has pointed out that their platform took 2.5 years to reach $1 billion in assets under management]

Output: US-based robo-adviser Blooom now has more than $1bn in assets under management (AUM). Launched in 2013, the robo-adviser is claiming faster growth than rivals such as Betterment and Wealthfront. At the time of its last funding round, in February this year, the firm had $500m AUM. The firm has a particular focus on the US' 401(k) and 403(b) retirement plan markets.


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BlackRock introduces exponential technology ETF offering
 About BlackRock

BlackRock’s purpose is to help more and more people experience financial well-being. As a fiduciary to investors and a leading provider of financial technology, we help millions of people build savings that serve them throughout their lives by making investing easier and more affordable. For additional information on BlackRock, please visit www.blackrock.com/corporate

Output: BlackRock's iShares exchange-traded fund division has introduced an offering focusing on exponential technology. The offering will track an index provided by Morningstar and has been developed in partnership with independent financial advisory firm Edelman Financial Services. The ETF invests in global companies seen to be determining trends in technology development. Such themes the fund may invest in include big data and analytics, nanotechnology and bioinformatics.


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Instagram users are rushing to connect with brands: COO Levine
 Instagram may just be seven years old but the platform is helping to redefine what it means to launch a business and what relationships with consumers look like.

In fact, 80 percent of people on the platform (there are 800 million monthly users) connect to a business voluntarily, according to Instagram’s COO Marne Levine.

“Shrinking the distance between businesses and customers and bringing you closer to the things that matter to you is really something that we’re focused on,” said Levine at Advertising Week in New York on Wednesday.

Output: Instagram users are reaching out to advertisers, according COO Marne Levine, who said 80% of consumers have voluntarily connected with brands on the platform. Nevertheless, Levine cautioned that the company has a long way to go to make the shopping experience more accessible. Speaking at New York's Advertising Week event, Levine said Instagram was trying to learn and understand "how people shop on the platform", and added that in the past month, the site had seen 180 million interactions between consumers and businesses. "I think there’s so much more that we can do in this area," she said.


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Defaults on US student loans rise for first time in four years
 The three-year student loan default rate rose in 2017 for the first time in four years, the Education Department said Wednesday, a slight uptick that raised alarm bells about whether the country is doing enough to help student loan borrowers on the margins.

A record 8.5 million people are now in default on their loans, department data showed. More than half a million people defaulted in the first half of this year alone.

The cohort default rate — a measure of how many students default on their student loans within three years of leaving school — rose overall to 11.5% for those leaving school in 2014, up from 11.3% the year before. Though it captures only a small slice of defaulters, the rate is considered the best approximation of how colleges and borrowers are faring on this front.

The government has been pushing plans meant to help student loan borrowers stave off default, like income-based repayment, which allows people to pay 10% of their income toward their loans. On the lowest end of the income scale, borrowers can pay as little as $0 a month and have the balance of their loans forgiven after 20 years; a Trump proposal would move that bar even lower, to 15 years.

That's what makes the default numbers "particularly disheartening," said Debbie Cochrane, the vice president of the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit in Washington, DC. "Borrowers have other options besides just defaulting."

The department's data show that income-based repayment hasn't done enough to stave off defaults, Cochrane said, despite increases in people who are enrolled in income-based plans.

Many borrowers simply don't know that income-based repayment plans exist, said Cochrane, either because the companies that service their student loans aren't doing enough to inform them, or because they've lost contact with servicing companies altogether.

"It's really a matter of awareness," she said.

More troublingly, income-based repayment has done little to help borrowers who are already in default, including those who defaulted outside of the three-year window captured by the default rate. The number of borrowers who are stuck in default — which can have devastating consequences on someone's credit, and lead to wages and taxes being garnished — has continued to climb.

For-profit college students made up a disproportionate number of those who had defaulted since 2014, department data showed. A third of defaulting borrowers had attended for-profits, though those colleges enrolled just 9% of all students.

But students at community colleges defaulted at an even higher rate than for-profits. Ten colleges performed so badly — with default rates above 30% — that they were in danger of losing access to federal financial aid money.

Output: The number of people in the US defaulting on their student loans rose this year for the first time in four years, according to the Education Department, raising concerns about whether the country is doing enough to help students who are near to defaulting. Over 8.5 million people are now in default, the highest amount ever, with over half a million defaulting in the first half of 2017 alone.


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Apple achieves Chinese handwritten symbols recognition in-device
 Handwriting recognition is more important than ever given the prevalence of mobile phones, tablets, and wearable gear like smartwatches. The large symbol inventory required to support Chinese handwriting recognition on such mobile devices poses unique challenges. This article describes how we met those challenges to achieve real-time performance on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch (in Scribble mode). Our recognition system, based on deep learning, accurately handles a set of up to 30,000 characters. To achieve acceptable accuracy, we paid particular attention to data collection conditions, representativeness of writing styles, and training regimen. We found that, with proper care, even larger inventories are within reach. Our experiments show that accuracy only degrades slowly as the inventory increases, as long as we use training data of sufficient quality and in sufficient quantity.

Introduction

Handwriting recognition can enhance user experience on mobile devices, particularly for Chinese input given the relative complexity of keyboard methods. Chinese handwriting recognition is uniquely challenging, due to the large size of the underlying character inventory. Unlike alphabet-based writing, which typically involves on the order of 100 symbols, the set of Hànzì characters in Chinese National Standard GB18030-2005 contains 27,533 entries, and many additional logographic characters are in use throughout Greater China.

For computational tractability, it is usual to focus on a restricted number of characters, deemed most representative of usage in daily life. Thus, the standard GB2312-80 set includes only 6,763 entries (3,755 and 3,008 characters in the level-1 and level-2 sets, respectively). The closely aligned character set used in the popular CASIA databases, built by the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, comprises a total of 7,356 entries [6]. The SCUT-COUCH database has similar coverage [8].

These sets tend to reflect commonly used characters across the entire population of Chinese writers. At the individual user level, however, what is “commonly used” typically varies from one person to the next. Most people need at least a handful of characters deemed “infrequently written,” as they occur in, e.g., proper names relevant to them. Thus ideally Chinese handwriting recognition algorithms need to scale up to at least the level of GB18030-2005.

While early recognition algorithms mainly relied on structural methods based on individual stroke analysis, the need to achieve stroke-order independence later sparked interest into statistical methods using holistic shape information [5]. This obviously complicates large-inventory recognition, as correct character classification tends to get harder with the number of categories to disambiguate [3].

On Latin script tasks such as MNIST [4], convolutional neural networks (CNNs) soon emerged as the way to go [11]. Given a sufficient amount of training data, supplemented with synthesized samples as necessary, CNNs decidedly achieved state-of-the-art results [1], [10]. The number of categories in those studies, however, was very small (10).

When we started looking into the large-scale recognition of Chinese characters some time ago, CNNs seemed to be the obvious choice. But that approach required scaling up CNNs to a set of approximately 30,000 characters, while simultaneously maintaining real-time performance on embedded devices. This article focuses on the challenges involved in meeting expectations in terms of accuracy, character coverage, and robustness to writing styles.

System Configuration

We adopt in this work a general CNN architecture similar to that used in previous handwriting recognition experiments on the MNIST task (see, e.g., [1], [10]). The configuration of the overall system is illustrated in Fig. 1.

Figure 1. Typical CNN Architecture (With 2 Consecutive Stages of Convolution and Subsampling)

The input is a medium-resolution image (for performance reasons) of 48x48 pixels representing a Chinese handwritten character. We fed this input to a number of feature extraction layers alternating convolution and subsampling. The last feature extraction layer is connected to the output via a fully connected layer.

From one convolution layer to the next, we chose the size of the kernels and the number of feature maps so as to derive features of increasingly coarser granularity. We subsampled through a max-pooling layer [9] using a 2x2 kernel. The last feature layer typically comprises on the order of 1,000 small feature maps. Finally, the output layer has one node per class, e.g., 3,755 for the Hànzì level-1 subset of GB2312-80, and close to 30,000 when scaled up to the full inventory.

As baseline, we evaluated the previously described CNN implementation on the CASIA benchmark task [6]. While this task only covers Hànzì level-1 characters, there exist numerous reference results for character accuracy in the literature (e.g., in [7] and [14]). We used the same setup based on CASIA-OLHWDB, DB1.0-1.2, split in training and testing datasets [6], [7], yielding about one million training exemplars.

Note that, given our product focus, the goal was not to tune our system for the highest possible accuracy on CASIA. Instead our priorities were model size, evaluation speed, and user experience. We thus opted for a compact system that works real-time, across a wide variety of styles, and with high robustness towards non-standard stroke order. This led to an image-based recognition approach even though we evaluate on online datasets. As in [10], [11], we supplemented actual observations with suitable elastic deformations.

Table 1 shows the results using the CNN of Figure 1, where the abbreviation “Hz-1” refers to the Hànzì level-1 inventory (3,755 characters), and “CR(n)” denotes top-n character recognition accuracy. In addition to the commonly reported top-1 and top-10 accuracies, we also mention top-4 accuracy because, as our user interface was designed to show 4 character candidates, the top-4 accuracy is an important predictor of user experience in our system.

Table 1. Results on CASIA On-line Database, 3,755 Characters. Standard Training, Associated Model Size = 1MB

Inventory Training CR(1) CR(4) CR(10) Hz-1 CASIA 87.4% 94.5% 98.1%

The figures in Table 1 compare with online results in [7] and [14] averaging roughly 93% for top-1 and 98% for top-10 accuracy. Thus, while our top-10 accuracy is in line with the literature, our top-1 accuracy is slightly lower. This has to be balanced, however, against a satisfactory top-4 accuracy, and perhaps even more importantly, a model size (1 MB) smaller than any comparable system in [7] and [14].

The system in Table 1 is trained only on CASIA data, and does not include any other training data. We were also interested in folding in additional training data collected in-house on iOS devices. This data covers a larger variety of styles (cf. next section) and comprises a lot more training instances per character. Table 2 reports our results, on the same test set with a 3,755-character inventory.

Table 2. Results on CASIA On-line Database, 3,755 Characters. Augmented Training, Associated Model Size = 15MB

Inventory Training CR(1) CR(4) CR(10) Hz-1 Augmented 88.4% 96.5% 98.3%

Though the resulting system has a much greater footprint (15 MB), accuracy only improves slightly (about 2% absolute for top-4 accuracy). This suggests that, by and large, most styles of characters appearing in the test set were already well-covered in the CASIA training set. It also indicates that there is no downside in folding more training data: the presence of additional styles is not deleterious to the underlying model.

Scaling Up to 30K Characters

Since the ideal set of “frequently written” characters varies from one user to the next, a large population of users requires an inventory of characters much larger than 3,755. Exactly which ones to select, however, is not entirely straightforward. Simplified Chinese characters defined with GB2312-80 and traditional Chinese characters defined with Big5, Big5E, and CNS 11643-92 cover a wide range (from 3,755 to 48,027 Hànzì characters). More recently came HKSCS-2008 with 4,568 extra characters, and even more with GB18030-2000.

We wanted to make sure that users are able to write their daily correspondence, in both simplified and traditional Chinese, as well as names, poems and other common markings, visual symbols, and emojis. We also wanted to support the Latin script for the occasional product or trade name with no transliteration. We followed Unicode as the prevailing international standard of character encoding, as it encapsulates almost all of the above mentioned standards. (Note that Unicode 7.0 can specify over 70,000 characters in its extensions B-D, with more being considered for inclusion). Our character recognition system thus focused on the Hànzì part of GB18030-2005, HKSCS-2008, Big5E, a core ASCII set, and a set of visual symbols and emojis, for a total of approximately 30,000 characters, which we felt represented the best compromise for most Chinese users.

After selecting the underlying character inventory, it is critical to sample the writing styles that users actually use. While there are formal clues as to what styles to expect (cf. [13]), there exist many regional variations, e.g., (i) the use of the U+2EBF (艹) radical, or (ii) the cursive U+56DB (四) vs. U+306E (の). Rendered fonts can also contribute to confusion as some users expect specific characters to be presented in a specific style. As a speedy input tends to drive toward cursive styles, it tends to increase ambiguity, e.g. between U+738B (王) and U+4E94 (五). Finally, increased internationalization sometimes introduces unexpected collisions: for example, U+4E8C (二), when cursively written, may conflict with the Latin characters “2” and “Z”.

Our rationale was to offer users the whole spectrum of possible input from printed to cursive to unconstrained writing [5]. To cover as many variants as possible, we sought data from writers from several regions in Greater China. We were surprised to find that most users have never seen many of the rarer characters. This unfamiliarity results in hesitations, stroke-order errors, and other distortions which we needed to take into account. We collected data from paid participants across various age groups, gender, and with a variety of educational backgrounds. The resulting handwritten data is unique in many ways: comprising several thousands users, written with a finger, not a stylus, on iOS devices, in small batches of data. One advantage is that the sampling of iOS devices results in a very clear handwritten signal.

We found a wide variety of writing styles. Figures 2-4 show some examples of the “flower” character U+82B1 (花), in printed, cursive, and unconstrained styles.

Figure 2. Printed radical variations of U+82B1 (花)

Figure 3. Cursive radical variations of U+82B1 (花)

Figure 4. Unconstrained variations of U+82B1 (花)

The fact that, in daily life, users often write quickly and unconstrained can lead to cursive variations that have a very dissimilar appearance. Conversely, sometimes it also leads to confusability between different characters. Figures 5-7 show some of the concrete examples we observe in our data. Note that it is especially important to have enough training material to distinguish cursive variations such as in Figure 7.

Figure 5. Variations of U+7684 (的)

Figure 6. Variations of U+4EE5 (以)

Figure 7. Similar shapes of U+738 (王) and U+4E94 (五)

With the guiding principles discussed previously, we were able to collect tens of millions of character instances for our training data. Compare the 3,755-character system in the previous section with the results shows in Table 3, on the same test set, after increasing the number of recognizable characters from 3,755 to approximately 30,000.

Table 3. Results on CASIA On-line Database, 30K Characters

Inventory CR(1) CR(4) CR(10) Model Size 30K 85.6% 95.2% 97.5% 15 MB

Note that the model size remains the same, as the system of Table 2 was simply restricted to the “Hz-1” set of characters, but was otherwise identical. Accuracy drops marginally, which is to be expected, since the vastly increased coverage creates additional confusability of the kind mentioned earlier, for example “二” vs. “Z”.

Compare Tables 1-3 and you’ll see that multiplying coverage by a factor of 10 does not entail 10 times more errors, or 10 times more storage. In fact, as the model size goes up, the number of errors increases much more slowly. Thus, building a high-accuracy Chinese character recognition that covers 30,000 characters, instead of only 3,755, is possible and practical.

To get an idea of how the system performs across the entire set of 30,000 characters, we also evaluated it on a number of different test sets comprising all supported characters written in various styles. Table 4 lists the average results.

Table 4. Average Results on Multiple In-House Test Sets Comprising All Writing Styles, 30,000 Characters

Inventory CR(1) CR(4) Model Size 30K 88.1% 95.1% 15 MB

Of course, the results in Tables 3-4 are not directly comparable, since they were obtained on different test sets. Nonetheless, they show that top-1 and top-4 accuracies are in the same ballpark across the entire inventory of characters. This is a result of the largely balanced training regimen.

Discussion

The total set of CJK characters in Unicode (currently around 75,000 [12]) could increase in the future, as the ideographic rapporteur group (IRG) keeps on suggesting new additions from a variety of sources. Admittedly, these character variants will be rare (e.g., used in historical names or poetry). Nevertheless, this is of high interest to every person whose name happens to contain one of those rare characters.

So, how well do we expect to handle larger inventories of characters in the future? The experiments discussed in this article support learning curves [2] based on training and test error rates with a varying amount of training data. We can therefore extrapolate asymptotic values, regarding both what our accuracy would look like with more training data, and how it would change with more characters to recognize.

For example, given the 10-times larger inventory and corresponding (less than) 2% drop in accuracy between Tables 1 and 3, we can extrapolate that with an inventory of 100,000 characters and a corresponding increase in training data, it would be realistic to achieve top-1 accuracies around 84%, and top-10 accuracies around 97% (with the same type of architecture).

In summary, building a high-accuracy handwriting recognition system which covers a large set of 30,000 Chinese characters is practical even on embedded devices. Furthermore, accuracy only degrades slowly as the inventory goes up, as long as training data of sufficient quality is available in sufficient quantity. This bodes well for the recognition of even larger character inventories in the future.

References

[1] D.C. Ciresan, U. Meier, L.M. Gambardella, and J. Schmidhuber, Convolutional Neural Network Committees For Handwritten Character Classification, in 11th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2011), Beijing, China, Sept. 2011.

[2] C. Cortes, L.D. Jackel, S.A. Jolla, V. Vapnik, and J.S. Denker, Learning Curves: Asymptotic Values and Rate of Convergence, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 1993), Denver, pp. 327–334, Dec. 1993.

[3] G.E. Hinton and K.J. Lang, Shape Recognition and Illusory Conjunctions, in Proc. 9th Int. Joint Conf. Artificial Intelligence, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 252–259, 1985.

[4] Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner, Gradient– based Learning Applied to Document Recognition, Proc. IEEE, Vol. 86, No. 11, pp. 2278–2324, Nov. 1998.

[5] C.-L. Liu, S. Jaeger, and M. Nakagawa, Online Recognition of Chinese Characters: The State-of-the-Art, IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis Machine Intelligence, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 198–213, Feb. 2004.

[6] C.-L. Liu, F. Yin, D.-H. Wang, and Q.-F. Wang, CASIA Online and Offline Chinese Handwriting Databases, in Proc. 11th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2011), Beijing, China, Sept. 2011.

[7] C.-L. Liu, F. Yin, Q.-F. Wang, and D.-H.Wang, ICDAR 2011 Chinese Handwriting Recognition Competition,in 11th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2011), Beijing, China, Sept. 2011.

[8] Y. Li, L. Jin , X. Zhu, T. Long, SCUT-COUCH2008: A Comprehensive Online Unconstrained Chinese Handwriting Dataset (ICFHR 2008), Montreal, pp. 165–170, Aug. 2008.

[9] K. Jarrett, K. Kavukcuoglu, M. Ranzato, and Y. LeCun, What is the Best Multi-stage Architecture for Object Recognition?, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision (ICCV09), Kyoto, Japan, Sept. 2009.

[10] U. Meier, D.C. Ciresan, L.M. Gambardella, and J. Schmidhuber, Better Digit Recognition with a Committee of Simple Neural Nets, in 11th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2011), Beijing, China, Sept. 2011.

[11] P.Y. Simard, D. Steinkraus, and J.C. Platt, Best Practices for Convolutional Neural Networks Applied to Visual Document Analysis, in 7th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2003), Edinburgh, Scotland, Aug. 2003.

[12] Unicode, Chinese and Japanese, http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html, 2015.

[13] F.F. Wang, Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese, Far Eastern Publications Series, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958.

[14] F. Yin, Q.-F. Wang, X.-Y. Xhang, and C.-L. Liu, ICDAR2013 Chinese Handwriting Recognition Competition, in 11th Int. Conf. Document Analysis Recognition (ICDAR 2013), Washington DC, USA, Sept. 2013.

Output: Apple's machine learning research team has announced a system that successfully recognises a set of more than 30,000 handwritten Chinese characters. The deep learning system it used recognises characters in real-time and operates in-device on an iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch (the last in scribble mode). Handwriting recognition would give Chinese mobile users a significantly improved experience.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Hyundai opens first overseas data centre in China
 Korean car giant Hyundai Motor has opened its first overseas big data center in the upcoming tech hub of Gui'an New Area, in southwest China's Guizhou Province, as the company looks to move past a year of poor sales figures and regain its crown as one of China's bestselling car brands.

Hyundai has already established its own "car cloud" in South Korea, as it looks to utilize self-driving technology and the Internet of Things to build an interconnected network of vehicles of the future.

According to Xinhua, citing the provincial commerce bureau, the center will provide data support for self-driving cars. The center will also work with China Unicom, one of China's largest telecom operators, to develop Internet-based, intelligent data exchange services tailored to the needs of Chinese customers.

Hyundai in 2016 established its roadmap for the future of car connectivity, with long-term plans that include boosting connectivity between various systems within vehicles, linking those systems to windshields to display information to the driver and eventually to enable high-speed communication between vehicles and their immediate surroundings �C an important step in developing driverless vehicles.

Hyundai is also looking to use big data to allow remote maintenance of its vehicles via software updates, and is working with companies like Apple and Google to develop smartphone technology within its vehicles, moving on from Bluetooth technology to advances like projecting phone screens onto car windshields.

Hyundai's first big data center opened in Uiwang, South Korea, in 2013. But the decision to open its first overseas big data center in China �C part of a planned future global network of centers around the world �C is interesting for several reasons.

Moving beyond THAAD and 2017 struggles

A move to China is in many ways a no-brainer �C the country is one of the world leaders in big data technology, and Hyundai's partnerships with China Unicom as well as Baidu (on in-car navigation and voice recognition technology) put it in good stead to spread its "computer-on-wheels" ethos across its biggest market.

However, Hyundai has struggled in China in 2017, with the effects of South Korea's decision to deploy the controversial THAAD missile system damaging sales for many Korean companies in the country.

Hyundai sales slumped by 65 percent in the second quarter, with the company forced to cut its targets for the year by almost 25 percent. A factory line halt earlier this month came after all four of Beijing Hyundai's production lines stopped operations for several days in late August, after suppliers claimed they had not been paid. Bloomberg also cited Hyundai's "sedan-heavy lineup" in the country and failure to adapt to the popularity of SUVs in the country as another reason for an alarming sales slide.

Men cylce past an advertising billboard for Hyundai cars opposite the plant of Hyundai Motor Co. in Beijing, China, August 30, 2017. /Reuters Photo

The move to modernize via big data in China by establishing a center in Gui'an can be seen as a move to regain Hyundai's previous foothold in the Chinese market �C in 2016, it was the third-biggest car brand in the country.

Output: South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai has opened a big data centre in China's Gui'an New Area. The centre will process data from self-driving vehicles, aiming to increase connectivity and communications capabilities between systems, cars, and drivers. Hyundai follows in the footsteps of Apple, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba by locating its data centre in Gui'an, which is fast becoming a technology hub. The data centre is Hyundai's first on foreign soil, and forms part of a planned network of centres worlwide.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Google ends controversial First Click Free policy
 Google is ending its controversial First Click Free (FCF) policy that publishers loathed because it required them to allow Google search results access to news articles hidden behind a paywall. The company is replacing the decade-old FCF with Flexible Sampling, which allows publishers instead to decide how many (if any) articles they want to allow potential subscribers to access. Google says it’s also working on a suite of new tools to help publishers reach new audiences and grow revenue.

Via FCF, users could access an article for free but would be prompted to log-in or subscribe if they clicked anywhere else on the page. Publishers were required to allow three free articles per day which Google indexed so that they appeared in searches for a particular topic or keyword. Opting out of the FCF feature was detrimental because it demoted a publisher’s ranking on Google Search and Google News. Google said articles from those publishers were demoted because its search engine didn’t index stories that were locked behind paywalls.

The Wall Street Journal notes that when News Corp (which owns the WSJ) diasabled free access to its articles via Google Search earlier in 2017, its stories were heavily demoted in search rankings. The WSJ says it experienced a 38 percent reduction in traffic from Google Search, and a loss of 89 percent from Google News in August compared to a year earlier. Now, publishers that decide to opt out of Flexible Sampling won’t be demoted in Google search rankings. Google is recommending publishers allow 10 free articles per month as “a good starting point.”

As part of its push, Google is working to make subscibing to publishers easier like single-click sign-ups through Android devices and Google services. It’s also working to allow seamless access to subscriber content across publisher sites, Google Newsstand, Google Search, and Google News. Google also is looking into giving publishers its user data to target potential subscribers.

Google drives 10 billion clicks to publishers’ websites each month. Today’s change comes as a way to bolster Google’s position — the company can’t sell ads if print media fails to move online, so it has to promote the move to digital, not usurp it. “We really recognize the transition to digital for publishers hasn’t been easy,” Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler told the WSJ. "The economics are pretty clear: If publishers aren’t successful, we can’t be successful.”

Output: Google is abandoning its First Click Free (FCF) policy and replacing it with Flexible Sampling, a model that puts the power to allow free access to paywalled content back in publishers' hands. The move has been welcomed by publishers, who saw their Google Search rankings tumble if they opted out of FCF. Google is also looking to offer "seamless" access to subscriber content across its Newsstand, Search and News tools, and may release user data to help publishers target readers.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
An independent Catalan may be bigger headache for EU than Brexit
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It is essentially a political story, but with an economic twist. On Sunday the Catalan people vote on independence from Spain, despite the referendum being ruled illegal by the Spanish courts and despite practical efforts by the authorities to block entry to the polling stations. We don’t know how the day will pan out but we do know that whatever happens there will be consequences not just for Spain but for the European Union.

For most of us, Catalonia is Barcelona, the glittering planned capital, host of the Olympics in 1992, the event that brought the city to the world stage, and home to the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi’s huge and still unfinished cathedral.

Actually it is much more. The region is an economic powerhouse, in effect subsidising the rest of the country. Its 7.5 million people, some 16 per cent of the population of Spain, generate nearly 20 per cent of the country’s GDP. Were it a country it would rank in economic size somewhere between Denmark and Finland. As for Barcelona itself, its port is the biggest in the Mediterranean, and the fourth largest cruise ship destination in the world. It also has two of the top business schools in the world, ESADE and IESE, and a tradition of business competence.

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PA UK news in pictures 29 April 2023 England’s flanker Marlie Packer celebrates with the trophy and teammates after winning the Women’s Six Nations Grand Slam at the end of the Six Nations international women’s rugby union match between England and France at Twickenham in south-west London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 28 April 2023 Lucy Williams, from Aberfan, holds her son Daniel Williams, one, as he takes the handbag of the Princess of Wales, during her visit with her husband the Prince of Wales, to the Aberfan memorial garden, to pay their respects to those who lost their lives during the Aberfan disaster on October 21st 1966 PA UK news in pictures 27 April 2023 Teachers on the picket line outside Bristol Cathedral School, College Square, Bristol, as they take strike action in a dispute over pay PA UK news in pictures 26 April 2023 Protesters wait for the arrival of King Charles III and the Queen Consort for their visit to Liverpool Central Library PA UK news in pictures 25 April 2023 Wreaths are laid at the Cenotaph in central London, in commemoration for Anzac Day PA UK news in pictures 24 April 2023 Waves crash over Tynemouth pier on the North East coast of England PA UK news in pictures 23 April 2023 People cross the finish line at the 2023 London Marathon Getty UK news in pictures 22 April 2023 A Wrexham fan in a Deadpool costume ahead of the Vanarama National League match at The Racecourse Ground, Wrexham PA UK news in pictures 21 April 2023 A demonstrator wears a costume as people protest during the Extinction Rebellion's 'The Big One' event, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 20 April 2023 The funeral cortege of Paul O’Grady travels through the village of Aldington, Kent ahead of his funeral at St Rumwold’s Church PA UK news in pictures 19 April 2023 Georgia Harrison, who was a victim of revenge porn, at a demonstration organised by Refuge outside the Houses of Parliament, calling for a violence against women and girls code of practice to be added to the ‘Online safety bill’ PA

Catalonia attracts one third of inward investment into Spain, and produces one third of Spain’s exports.

Without Catalonia, Spain would continue to be the fourth largest economy in the eurozone, after Germany, France and Italy, but it would be much weakened. By contrast Scotland’s share of UK GDP is 7.5 per cent, so in economic terms this is a much bigger deal for Spain than Scottish independence would be for the UK. You can see why they oppose a referendum.

But what about the EU? Here the Spanish government has made it clear that were Catalonia to become independent, it would resist it remaining a member of the EU. This would be most unpopular in Catalonia, which would want, among other things, to retain the euro.

Queen welcomes Spain's King Felipe VI to UK

Legally, Spain would be able to push an independent Catalonia out, but in the real world of European politics it would be hard for the rest of Europe to exclude a country that wanted to remain a member – or to be technically more correct, to rejoin. In economic terms Catalonia will be fully viable and there is no practical reason why it should not continue to use the euro, even if technically it were for a time outside the EU.

The obvious big question really is not so much the outcome of the referendum but whether Spain and Catalonia can rebuild their relationship. If they cannot do so, then Catalonia becomes a threat not just to Spain but to the EU as a whole, in some ways a greater threat than the departure of the UK. One of the lessons of the past couple of years is not just that politics have become unpredictable; it is also the economic consequences of a political event are unpredictable too. By rights the decision or non-decision of 7.5 million people ought not to unsettle Europe. But a week from now it may look very different.

Output: The recent independence referendum in Catalonia could prove to be a bigger headache for the European Union than the UK's withdrawal from the bloc. The Spanish government said the recent vote was illegal and has previously stated that, should the region achieve independence, it would lobby for it to be refused entry to the EU - leaving the European community on the horns of a political and economic dilemma.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Iranian renewables market attracts foreign investment
 Clean energy is under the spotlight in Iran as the oil and gas rich country also enjoys some advantageous geographical and climate condition to benefit from renewable sources of energy.

Iran’s power generation capacity is currently 77,000 megawatts (MW), of which renewables account for just 420 MW and according to the former Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian the figure is planned to reach 600 MW by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2018).

Also, Deputy Energy Minister Houshang Falahatian has announced in late September that the country plans to add 1,000 MW of new renewable power capacity every year over the next five years.

Based on the country’s Sixth Five-Year National Development Plan (2016-2021), Iran is aiming to increase its capacity of power generation from renewable sources by 5,000 MW per annum to meet growing domestic demand and also increase its electricity exports.

To meet the set target, the Energy Ministry has taken a new approach toward development of renewable sector and has been offering incentives to both Iranian and foreign investors for cooperation in renewable projects inside the country.

It has led to more contribution of private sector to this industry, and also attraction of foreign investors appreciating Iran’s noticeable resources of solar energy and wind power in addition to its special geopolitical location which makes it one of the best areas for investment in renewables.

Investing $27 million, Switzerland’s DURION AG Company was the main investor of the project to build Iran’s largest solar farm. The 20-MW Mokran Solar Farm in Mahan County in the southeastern Kerman Province was inaugurated on July 27.

In late August, Seyed Moslem Mousavi, the managing director of Iran Renewable Energy Association, announced that foreign companies have submitted proposals for a total of $3.6 billion investment to implement renewable energy projects in Iran.

Companies from Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, China and India have already visited the country to investigate the investment condition in renewable sector.

Raymond Carlsen, the chief executive of Norway’s Scatec Solar, which builds and operates solar farms worldwide, told Reuters on September 15 that his company is in talks to build its first solar farm in Iran. He said that the initial project under discussion would cost $120 million per 100 MW installed which would rise to 500 MW later.

Also on September 20, Financial Times reported that Quercus, a UK green investment company, said it had reached agreement with Iran’s Energy Ministry on plans for a 600 MW solar farm in central Iran that would rival the largest solar projects so far built in China, India and the U.S.

Diego Biasi, Quercus chief executive, said the €500-million deal showed Iran was “open for business” and represented a “huge opportunity” for investors in renewable energy.

All these opportunities to attract foreign investment, not only can help Iran, which is struggling with air pollution in its major cities especially the capital Tehran, reach sustainable clean energy, but can also save the fuels consumed domestically to boost the country’s fuel exports in one way and with a long-term view to conserve fossil fuels for the future generation.

Output: Iran is offering incentives to attract investment into the country's growing renewable power market. Iran currently produces just 420 MW of its 77,000 MW total power generation capacity from renewables, but said it plans to add an additional 1,000 MW each year until at least 2021. Investors include Swiss firm Durion, which recently put $27m into a 20 MW solar farm, and UK company Quercus, which has reportedly signed a deal with Iran's energy ministry for a colossal 600 MW solar plant in the country.