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Redrow Occupants to begin moving into Cardiff's garden city in autumn
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The first people are set to move into Cardiff’s new “garden city” this autumn.

Eventually there will be 7,000 homes included in the £2bn development, which is being created at land bordering Fairwater, St Fagans, Danescourt and Radyr.

It will take 15 years to complete the project, which is said will provide 30,000 jobs during its lifetime.

Work has started on the first phase of the Plasdŵr development and the first 126 homes of the 630 planned as part of the first phase are now being built.

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These homes are being built on land to the north of Llantrisant Road by lead developer Redrow Homes.

Developers say it will bring £73.58m in community benefits to the local area including four new primary schools and a secondary school within the development.

New health centres, shops, offices, pubs and restaurants, leisure centres, playing fields, parks and preserved woodland are all part of the plans.

The first primary school will be for 480 pupils and will be delivered as part of the first phase of the development. Money will also be spent creating roads, paths and cycleways to encourage residents to use public transport.

(Image: Richard Swingler)

As work progresses, different developers will be involved.

Of the 15 homes that have been released so far, nine have already been reserved.

The Mills family were one of the first to purchase a home on the development and will be among the founding members of the Plasdŵr community.

(Image: Richard Swingler)

Sian and her husband Michael, along with their two children Evan, eight, and Carys, five, will be some of the first residents.

They are due to move into their new three-bedroom home in October this year.

Project director Wayne Rees said: “At Plasdŵr we want to create a genuinely sustainable community where people can put down roots and begin establishing a home for future generations, set up businesses, work, go to school, play and enjoy their leisure time.

“The Mills family, and the other residents of this first phase of Plasdŵr, will be the founding members of a new community, helping to establish and shape it for future generations to come.

“While Plasdŵr will become a new community, we also want to ensure that it blends with the wider community surrounding it and provides additional facilities that are needed for the area as a whole to thrive.”

(Image: UGC MWL)

Mrs Mills said: “Before we heard about Plasdŵr we hadn’t really thought about purchasing a new build home.

“Housing developments can sometimes be a bit claustrophobic, but what really attracted us to Plasdŵr was the ‘garden city’ aspect.

“We love the idea of living somewhere with lots of space and green, open areas. As a young family, the parks, sports facilities and cycle paths are really appealing to us.

“It’s important to us to live somewhere that has a sense of community. In our old house, we would only see our neighbours briefly when getting in the car – it was a busy road so there wasn’t much opportunity to stop to talk.

“We know we’ll be part of a friendly community where we can build relationships with the people around us.”

The developers say that Plasdŵr is inspired by the garden city movement of the 19th century, founded on principles of “fresh air, sunlight, breathing room and playing room”.

Output: The first occupants of Redrow Homes's £2bn "garden city" development on land bordering St Fagans, Danescourt, Radyr and Fairwater in Cardiff are to move in this autumn. The first 126 homes of the 630 planned at the Plasdwr development are currently being built. The development will include pubs, restaurants, leisure centres, playing fields and preserved woodland. A school for 480 pupils will also be part of the first stage of the development. The whole project is expected to take 15 years to complete.


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Input:
Oil and Gas Authority lists recommendations for offshore projects
 The Oil & Gas Authority found that less than 25% of UKCS O&G projects have completed on schedule since 2011. Image courtesy of ConocoPhillips.

The oil and gas industry’s relentless pursuit of efficiency in the wake of the oil price crash appears to be paying off to some degree in the UK North Sea. There have undoubtedly been casualties of this push – primarily the hundreds of thousands of North Sea offshore workers laid off or dealing with significantly harsher working conditions – but there are clear signals that the pain is starting to pay dividends, from a macroeconomic perspective at least.

Unit operating costs on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) have almost halved, from nearly $30 a barrel in 2015 to around $17 today. The region’s steady production decline also shows signs of a gradual reversal, with output falling just 3% last year, compared to 12% in 2014.

Time and money: a focus on project delivery

But the focus isn’t just on streamlined operations and maximising hydrocarbon flow rates. A component of the UK’s general cross-sector objective to maximise economic recovery from the UKCS (MER UK) is improving the efficiency of project delivery.

A report published in March by the Oil & Gas Authority (OGA), which was established as an independent economic regulator in April 2015 in response to the recommendations of the Wood Review, studied 58 major projects undertaken on the UKCS from 2011 to 2016, and found significant room for improvement.

The OGA review team found that since 2011, less than 25% of oil and gas projects in the region were delivered on schedule, with an average delay of ten months. Cost overruns have been rife as well, with projects coming in at 35% over budget on average when compared to field development plan (FDP) estimates. One $500m unnamed project (all data presented in the report is anonymised) trebled its budget and is still incomplete, while nine of the 58 projects overran by more than two years. Capital expenditure, meanwhile, was at a record high during this period, averaging $15.4bn.

The report, entitled ‘Lessons learned from UKCS oil and gas projects 2011-2016’, attributed the main cause of the delays and budget blowouts not to the technical complexity of offshore projects but to flaws in organisation and project management.

“The lessons learned outlined in the report have been derived from extensive engagement with industry, with focus on how major projects are planned and executed, rather than technical scope,” said OGA operations director Gunther Newcombe in March. “One of the key findings was that there was no correlation found between the size and complexity of projects and delay, with the key factors being non-technical in nature.”

Delving into the five key lessons that were presented by the OGA – after analysing the data and conducting ‘lessons learned’ events with 13 operators and three tier one contractors – provides some insight into how oil and gas development projects are planned and executed, and where operators and contractors could improve the way they work. Outside of the specific lessons listed below, the report notes “a common necessity for more clearly defining the project scope prior to project sanction; keeping the project as simple as possible; increasing the accountability of project delivery; and improving the co-operation between companies/stakeholders”.

Organisation: bringing a project team together

Large-scale offshore projects in the oil and gas industry are a complex business, bringing together owners, operators, contractors of many stripes and a long supply chain. The OGA report acknowledges the virtual endless potential for miscommunication between these diverse partners, and notes a trend of growing costs and transitory labour that is more difficult to organise effectively.

“It was clear that there has been a trend toward increasing owner’s team costs over the last 10 years and an increasing reliance on temporary agency staff in both operator and engineering contractor workforce,” the report states.

Organisational strategies that could lead to more efficient project delivery include empowering delivery organisations with the authority they need to do their work properly, maintaining continuity of project teams between projects and early involvement of the supply chain.

“Time spent investing in aligning project team, partners, supply chain and regulators at the beginning is time well spent,” urges the report. “Don’t wait to develop and deepen relationships until after things go wrong.”

Project management

Given that the FDPs of so many UKCS projects have proven to be wildly accurate when it comes to expenditure and schedule estimates, it’s clear that project management – the ability to plan a project’s workload in detail and build a fairly accurate picture of the scope of the work – has been lacking.

“Despite an increase in processes, tools, project controls, supervision and engineering man-hours in oil and gas developments, there has been no visible improvement in the ability to predict outcomes,” says the report.

This lack of predictability may be partly attributed to the unreasonable expectations of some offshore clients and the writing-off of probabilistic planning, which can frustrate contractors. One anonymous participant quoted in the report made this clear: “Time and time again we are faced with clients driving unrealistic deterministic schedules. It has not been unusual for our customers to dismiss probabilistic schedule analysis and one instance of it being referred to as ‘mumbo jumbo’.”

The report states that realistic – “as opposed to aspirational” – schedules should be set at the outset of project planning, and project management expertise should be more proactively valued in the industry. The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board’s Offshore Project Management Steering Group could help point clients in the right direction in this area.

Front-end loading

Front-end loading (FEL) involves the pre-project planning phase, whereby a project is planned in concept, with an emphasis on analysing feasibility and evaluating risk before an investment decision is made. FEL can, the report notes, support the project management process by better predicting costs and providing benchmarking that can feed into a feasibility decision, especially for brownfield projects.

Problems arise when projects fail to plan ahead in enough detail, with the report finding that many schedule-driven projects – particularly those initiated in 2012-13 – kicked off without complete scope and with unclear objectives and priorities, and later paid for it in delays and budget issues.

The review team recommends confirming and tying down a project’s key resources – drilling rigs, long-lead materials, support vessels and the like – at the sanction stage. An unnamed contributor adds that due diligence on key contractors is a must:

“Ensure that there is the right level of due diligence when outsourcing key project management scopes to ensure that the resources provided have the right competencies and that the outsourcing company has robust delivery processes to support the scope – don’t assume.”

Execution: not just about contractors

The OGA recognises that blame for flaws in execution during the development and construction stage tends to fall on contracting and sub-contracting groups, which are primarily responsible for most of the major works. This is wrong, the report says, as failures in execution can be minimised or avoided “if the project is set up properly and all parties are clear on their responsibilities”. Execution flaws, in other words, are as much down to poor prior planning as to errors in the moment.

The report suggests that front-end engineering design (FEED), detailed design and construction are carried out in strict sequence to minimise confusion, and if not, aggressive risk management should be employed and contingencies should be developed based on those assessments.

Other challenges include transition management, with many projects underestimating offshore hook-up and commissioning effort in terms of time and cost. Subsea work programmes have tended to be more predictable, while drilling and facilities, especially floating production storage and offloading, “present a much larger spread of outcomes in projects”.

Winning behaviour

Behavioural factors governing the relationships between operators and contractors can have a significant influence on the success of a project, for better or worse. “Many behaviours continue to contribute to poorer project delivery, inflated budgets and schedule, or projects not even getting sanctioned,” the report warns.

Corporate behavioural issues identified by the report include excessive micro-management, lack of trust between stakeholders and over-optimistic reporting. “Many (but not all) operators issue too many specifications – many of which are not applicable or even contradictory,” says one contributor quoted by the report. “The larger the operator is, the more paper there is.”

Positive behaviours cited include agility and sense of urgency, devolved decision-making, respect and accountability, with smaller teams generally deemed more efficient and cohesive.

“Effective collaborative teams are smaller and, therefore, cheaper, and generally faster when everyone involved is seeking to deliver the end outcome in the minimum possible time,” according to the OGA report.

Lessons learned

Looking at the scope of projects between 2011 and 2016, the report noted that the industry’s ability to deliver projects seems to have improved over time. “Most of the significantly delayed projects were consented between 2011 and 2013,” it states.

The drive for efficiency across oil and gas operations prompted by the sustained oil price decline seems to be having a positive effect on project delivery as well as production efficiency, although the improvements made to project management have been less pronounced.

“There are also encouraging signs that the ability to deliver projects in line with cost and schedule commitments has been improving recently,” said Newcome after the report’s release. “This is aligned to the effort we have seen industry making in the areas of production efficiency and operating costs over the last 18 months.”

The challenge for the industry now will be to carry forward these hard-won lessons in leanness and not forget them if and when the oil price rallies to more profitable levels and the times of plenty return.

Output: The development of smaller teams and cultivation of relationships between project teams, partners, supply chain and regulators at the outset of a project have been included among the measures required to improve the efficiency of oil and gas operations in the UK North Sea, according to a report by the UK Oil and Gas Authority. It also stated that executing front-end engineering design in a strict sequence and setting out the essential resources and equipment for a project at the sanction stage would help improve the industry’s ability to deliver projects to schedule.


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Researchers hack entire wind farms to show their vulnerability
 On a sunny day last summer, in a vast cornfield somewhere in the large, windy middle of America, two researchers from the University of Tulsa stepped into an oven-hot, elevator-sized chamber within the base of a 300-foot-tall wind turbine. They’d picked the simple pin-and-tumbler lock on the turbine’s metal door in less than a minute and opened the unsecured server closet inside.

Jason Staggs, a tall 28-year-old Oklahoman, quickly unplugged a network cable and inserted it into a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, the size of a deck of cards, that had been fitted with a Wi-Fi antenna. He switched on the Pi and attached another Ethernet cable from the minicomputer into an open port on a programmable automation controller, a microwave-sized computer that controlled the turbine. The two men then closed the door behind them and walked back to the white van they’d driven down a gravel path that ran through the field.

Staggs sat in the front seat and opened a MacBook Pro while the researchers looked up at the towering machine. Like the dozens of other turbines in the field, its white blades---each longer than a wing of a Boeing 747---turned hypnotically. Staggs typed into his laptop's command line and soon saw a list of IP addresses representing every networked turbine in the field. A few minutes later he typed another command, and the hackers watched as the single turbine above them emitted a muted screech like the brakes of an aging 18-wheel truck, slowed, and came to a stop.

Jason Staggs. Ross Mantle for WIRED

'We Were Shocked'

For the past two years, Staggs and his fellow researchers at the University of Tulsa have been systematically hacking wind farms around the United States to demonstrate the little-known digital vulnerabilities of an increasingly popular form of American energy production. With the permission of wind energy companies, they’ve performed penetration tests on five different wind farms across the central US and West Coast that use the hardware of five wind power equipment manufacturers.

As part of the agreement that legally allowed them to access those facilities, the researchers say they can't name the wind farms’ owners, the locations they tested, or the companies that built the turbines and other hardware they attacked. But in interviews with WIRED and a presentation they plan to give at the Black Hat security conference next month, they're detailing the security vulnerabilities they uncovered. By physically accessing the internals of the turbines themselves---which often stood virtually unprotected in the middle of open fields---and planting $45 in commodity computing equipment, the researchers carried out an extended menu of attacks on not only the individual wind turbine they'd broken into but all of the others connected to it on the same wind farm's network. The results included paralyzing turbines, suddenly triggering their brakes to potentially damage them, and even relaying false feedback to their operators to prevent the sabotage from being detected.

“When we started poking around, we were shocked. A simple tumbler lock was all that stood between us and the wind farm control network,” says Staggs. “Once you have access to one of the turbines, it’s game over.”

In their attacks, the Tulsa researchers exploited an overarching security issue in the wind farms they infiltrated: While the turbines and control systems had limited or no connections to the internet, they also lacked almost any authentication or segmentation that would prevent a computer within the same network from sending valid commands. Two of the five facilities encrypted the connections from the operators’ computers to the wind turbines, making those communications far harder to spoof. But in every case the researchers could nonetheless send commands to the entire network of turbines by planting their radio-controlled Raspberry Pi in the server closet of just one of the machines in the field.

Output: Wind farm operators need to improve physical and digital security if they are to protect multi-million-dollar sites from criminals, according to researchers from the University of Tulsa who developed proof-of-concept attacks on wind infrastructure. In one of a series of authorised scenarios, the two researchers picked a simple lock to gain access to the microwave-sized computer that controlled a turbine – then, remotely, using a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, stopped not just one machine, but an entire fleet. The vulnerabilities of turbines expose wind farm operators to extortion or ransom attacks that could be financially catastrophic.


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How the Senate’s Health-Care Bill Threatens the Nation's Health
 To understand how the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill would affect people’s actual health, the first thing you have to understand is that incremental care—regular, ongoing care as opposed to heroic, emergency care—is the greatest source of value in modern medicine. There is clear evidence that people who get sufficient incremental care enjoy better prevention, earlier diagnosis and management of urgent conditions, better control of chronic illnesses, and longer life spans.

When more people get health-insurance coverage, as they did following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, they get more incremental care. This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper that I co-authored with Katherine Baicker and Ben Sommers, two health economists at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, in which we analyzed the health effects of insurance coverage. We looked at dozens of studies put out over the last decade, and found that insurance-coverage expansions—including not just the A.C.A but also past Medicaid expansions and the health-care reform that Massachusetts passed in 2006—have consistently and significantly increased the number of people who have a regular source of care and who can afford the care they need. Insurance expansions have made people more likely to get primary and preventive care, chronic-illness care, and needed medications—including cancer screenings, diabetes and blood-pressure medicines, depression treatment, and surgery for cancer before it is too late.

These improvements in care help explain why people who have health insurance are twenty-five per cent more likely to report being in good or excellent health. It also explains why they become less likely to die. Proper health care saves lives, and the magnitude of the reduction in deaths increases over time. The longest study we looked at analyzed Medicaid expansions that occurred in the early two-thousands in Arizona, Maine, and New York. Five years after the expansions, mortality rates for recipients had fallen by six per cent compared with matched populations in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. More broadly, when we looked at the data from all the large studies in our set, we found that, for every three hundred to eight hundred people who gained coverage, one life was ultimately saved per year. The biggest gains came, as would be expected, among patients with chronic or semi-chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer, H.I.V., and other infections.

Conservatives often take a narrow view of the value of health insurance: they focus on catastrophic events such as emergencies and sudden, high-cost illnesses. But the path of life isn’t one of steady health punctuated by brief crises. Most of us accumulate costly, often chronic health issues as we age. These issues can often be delayed, managed, and controlled if we have good health care—and can’t be if we don’t.

Conservatives also dismiss Medicaid by arguing that it provides inadequate or unsatisfactory coverage. The opposite is true, according to the evidence. Compared with private coverage, Medicaid produces at least as much improvement in access to care, measures of health, and mortality reduction. And polls indicate that recipients like Medicaid more than private coverage, even with the difficulties finding doctors who take Medicaid, because the program provides them with better financial protection.

Despite these facts, the Senate reform bill, like the bill that House Republicans passed earlier this year, would hollow out or terminate coverage for tens of millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid or the private-insurance exchanges set up by the A.C.A. These bills are, in many ways, Medicaid-repeal bills masquerading as Obamacare-repeal bills. And Medicaid, remember, is not a program that the public is complaining about. It is immensely popular and works well. It provides coverage for sixty per cent of disabled children, and maternity coverage for half of pregnant women. Two-thirds of nursing-home residents end up relying on Medicaid coverage after their savings are spent. Among adult Medicaid recipients, sixty per cent work, and eighty per cent are part of working families.

President Trump, who has expressed his support for the Senate bill, campaigned on a specific promise not to cut Medicaid, and the White House continues to peddle a claim that, as Sean Spicer put it on Friday, the President is “committed to making sure that no one who currently is in the Medicaid program is affected in any way, which is reflected in the Senate bill, and he’s pleased with that.” But this statement does not reflect reality—the Senate proposal would not only roll back the A.C.A.’s Medicaid expansion but go even further, capping Medicaid expenditures at levels even lower than those that would have been in place without the A.C.A.

The Senate bill would also ultimately make people who buy insurance on the A.C.A. exchanges—people without coverage from an employer or from Medicaid—pay far more money for far worse coverage, especially if they are age fifty or older. The standard “reference” plan on the exchanges would cover barely more than half of medical costs, while cost-sharing subsidies for working-class people would be eliminated, and the level of tax credits available to them would be cut, too. The result: the median deductible would jump from the current five hundred dollars to more than six thousand dollars. The annual premium for a sixty-year-old earning fifty thousand dollars in my home town of Athens, Ohio, would triple, to fourteen thousand dollars. In many parts of the country, things would be much worse. (In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, premiums would be thirty-six thousand dollars.) The bill, in other words, promises terrible coverage at unaffordable prices. Millions of people would have to give up insurance, leaving them without protection and the entire individual-insurance market at risk of collapse.

The trade-offs here are indefensible. The bill would take a trillion dollars away from health coverage for the bottom fifty per cent of the population to give a tax cut to the top two per cent. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did the math: one consequence of the legislation is that three-quarters of a million people would be thrown off of the Medicaid rolls to give the four hundred highest earners in the country a thirty-three-billion-dollar tax cut. The bill would put thousands of nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals into financial trouble. And for patients it would mean more medical debts, more untreated sickness, and more deaths. A basic test of government is its ability to prevent large-scale harm to its citizens’ health and survival. This bill, and this Administration, are failing that test.

Output: Incremental care, or the provision of regular ongoing care, has been proven to prevent healthcare issues, contribute to earlier diagnoses and control chronic illnesses. The new health care bill currently being considered by the Senate may adversely affect American’s health because the Affordable Care Act they hope to largely repeal increased incremental care. Expansions to Medicaid and other insurance options have increased the number of Americans that have access to regular care, and have opened the doors for better primary and preventive care, necessary medications, and chronic illness care. The improvements have led to lower mortality rates and better reports of health, particularly among those with semi-chronic or chronic problems such as cancer and heart disease. Health issues are costly in accumulation, with crises occurring occasionally, and health care should reflect this pattern to improve general healthcare and prognoses. Evidence and polls have shown that Medicaid is a popular program that actually provides the greatest amount of coverage. The Senate proposal, despite the Trump administration’s statements, will not preserve the current level of coverage given to Americans and will force those without coverage from employers or Medicaid to pay far more for far worse insurance coverage, particularly if they are above the age of 50. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has stated that the legislation will remove three-quarters of a million citizens from Medicaid, and give the four hundred highest earners in the US a $33bn tax cut, an exchange that will put many citizens’ health at risk.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes
 ORANGE, Va. — Alice Jacobs, 90, once owned a factory and horses. She has raised four children and buried two husbands.

But years in an assisted living center drained her savings, and now she relies on Medicaid to pay for her care at Dogwood Village, a nonprofit, county-owned nursing home here.

“You think you’ve got enough money to last all your life, and here I am,” Ms. Jacobs said.

Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million people in nursing homes, like Ms. Jacobs. It covers 20 percent of all Americans and 40 percent of poor adults.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in proposing steep cuts to Medicaid, part of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Conservatives hope to roll back what they see as an expanding and costly entitlement. But little has been said about what would happen to older Americans in nursing homes if the cuts took effect.

Output: Medicaid cuts could force retired Americans out of nursing homes, as the federal insurance pays for the majority of the 1.4 million citizens living in facilities. As the Senate debates serious cuts to Medicaid as part of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, states are considering how much they are willing to provide for nursing home coverage should their funding be more limited. States may permit nursing homes to require payment for part of the care provided or to limit the services and days on which care is provided. The Center for Medicare Advocacy is concerned that those wishing to utilize nursing home care may find it more difficult to qualify with the increased pressure on state funding. At present, 70m people are enrolled in Medicaid, with spending forecast to increase 6% annually on average to reach $650bn by 2027.


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Craft beer demand creates opportunities for specialist insurers
 Albany

Malt barley farmers in upstate New York can now receive insurance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The expansion comes amid a recent growth in the state's craft beverage industry, for which malt barley is a crucial ingredient. Brewers had previously said the lack of protections was preventing further expansion in the statewide industry,

New York currently has about 2,000 acres of the crop, a number far short of what experts say is necessary to meet production demands as more and more brewers open up across the state.

Output: The growing craft beer market is presenting specialist insurers with new opportunities. Nottingham-based Russell Scanlan, a broker that focuses on brewery insurance, has seen a boost in take-up for tailored Masterbrew insurance products from producers of craft beers and gins. "No two breweries are the same … which means ‘off the shelf’ insurance does not tick the box," said marketing director Mike Dickinson. The policies include coverage for beer festivals. In the US, demand for barley to supply new breweries has led the Department of Agriculture to offer New York state growers crop insurance.


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German challenger bank N26 expands into insurance with Clark API
 Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don't worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here.

European mobile-first bank N26 has announced that it is expanding into insurance in its latest move to reinvent banking.

Founded out of Germany in 2013, N26 offers bank accounts similar to those offered by BankMobile or Simple in the U.S., with a focus on speed and efficiency — an account can be opened within eight minutes of applying. Originally only available in Germany and Austria, the service has slowly been expanding across the Eurozone and now claims 300,000 customers in 17 countries. N26 has raised more than $50 million since its inception, with participation from notable backers such as Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, which led its Series A round back in 2015 and joined again for the $40 million Series B follow-up a year later.

Formerly known as Number26 — before a rebrand last summer— N26 has a long-stated mission to create a modern, mobile-first bank built from the various fintech technologies and services that have emerged from the internet age. Last February, for example, N26 partnered with peer-to–peer money-transfer firm TransferWise, giving Number26 customers in-app access to a cheaper money-transfer service.

“Our goal is to leverage the best banking products from around the world and make them accessible to customers with one tap, creating a fintech hub inside the Number26 app,” N26 cofounder and CEO Valentin Stalf explained at the time.

The TransferWise collaboration was followed by a new investment product in conjunction with Vaamo and a savings account in partnership with Raisin. And now the company is adding insurance to the mix thanks to a tie-up with German Insurance platform Clark. N26 calls this the “next step” in its strategy to become the one-stop app for its users’ every financial need.

“Digitalization in the insurance market is lagging behind,” said Tayenthal. “Customers are still facing offline structures and a lot of paperwork. It is therefore a huge opportunity for N26 to address these customer issues by leveraging digital innovation to make Insurance more user-friendly.”

Operating in a piecemeal way makes sense for a startup looking to expand in the finance realm. Given the regulatory, operational, and financial hurdles of expanding into multiple verticals, it’s much easier to tap existing players in their respective industries and package their services together in a single app.

Through N26, customers will be able to view all their insurance policies and initiate claims with a few taps. In the future, N26 said that it will also enable its users to “make smarter decisions” by helping them optimize their insurance plans, powered by Clark’s algorithmic robo-advisers.

A beta program for N26 insurance will be kicking off in July, with the first offering landing only in Germany initially.

“This partnership is the next step in our plan to partner with financial institutions and make our robo-adviser available to their customers,” added Clark CEO Dr. Christopher Oster. “Our API-based integration will deliver a fully digital insurance experience and ensure that customers have the right insurance at the best price available.”

Output: Mobile bank N26 has added an API from insurtech firm Clark that enables customers of the German start-up to view insurance contract details directly from a dashboard in the bank's app and make claims with a few taps on their phones. Clark will search products from more than 160 German insurance providers to serve N26 customers the best deals, the company said. The partnership seeks to address the insurance industry's complexity, opaque cost structures and limited access to fair consulting, N26 said. The mobile bank has attracted more than $50m in investment from backers including PayPal founder Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures.


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Trend Micro to invest in IoT start-ups with $100m fund
 Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has announced the launch of a $100 million global venture targeting startups in emerging technology markets, such as the Internet of Things (IoT).

In addition to capital, portfolio startups will gain access to Trend Micro's technology and its channel of more than 28,000 partners.

Trend Micro admitted that working with startups will allow it to unearth insights into new business models, market gaps, and skill shortages.

"These learnings will influence Trend Micro's cybersecurity solution planning across the company," the cybersecurity firm said in an announcement.

Establishing a separate venture capital unit also provides Trend Micro "additional freedom" to explore new areas of technology "without disrupting core business resources", the company said.

After 72 quarters of consecutive profitability, Trend Micro said it is "well-positioned" to invest in research and make advancements that are consistent with its corporate strategy.

Eva Chen, founder and CEO of Trend Micro, said connected devices are changing how the world works, thinks, and acts, adding that there is work to be done "to ensure organisations and individuals can operate and live safely in this new reality".

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that enterprises are not managing the risks associated with the IoT well, with many relying on legacy technologies and governance practices to mitigate security threats.

Nearly three quarters, or 72 percent, of the organisations surveyed by the research firm said the pace at which IoT technology is advancing is making it difficult to keep up with evolving security requirements.

Additionally, 78 percent believe data loss or theft enabled by IoT devices will likely occur within the next two years, while 76 percent believe a DDoS attack involving an unsecured IoT device is imminent within the same timeframe. Either incident would be catastrophic, according to 94 percent of respondents.

In recent months, there has been a wave of $100 million-plus investments in security firms looking to expand their capabilities to address the risks associated with IoT. Security firms such as Cybereason, Cylance, Crowdstrike, Illumio, Netskope, and Tanium have all recently raised at least $100 million.

Output: Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has launched a $100m global venture fund to invest in internet of things (IoT) and other emerging technology start-ups. Working with start-ups will allow Trend Micro to get insights into new business models, skill shortages and market gaps to help it with developing cybersecurity software. In return, portfolio start-ups will get both capital and access to Trend Micro's technology and its channel of over 28,000 partners.


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Automation cuts energy use in US commercial properties
 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is studying how advanced building controls in energy-using equipment such as heating and cooling systems can decrease energy use and improve building operations. Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Like driving a car despite a glowing check-engine light, large buildings often chug along without maintenance being performed on the building controls designed to keep them running smoothly.

And sometimes those controls aren't used to their full potential, similar to a car at high speed in first gear. Instead of an expensive visit to the mechanic, the result for a commercial building is a high power bill.

A new report finds that if commercial buildings fully used controls nationwide, the U.S. could slash its energy consumption by the equivalent of what is currently used by 12 to 15 million Americans.

The report examines how 34 different energy efficiency measures, most of which rely on various building controls, could affect energy use in commercial buildings such as stores, offices and schools. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found the measures could cut annual commercial building energy use by an average of 29 percent. This would result in between 4 to 5 quadrillion British Thermal Units in national energy savings, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the energy consumed nationwide.

"Most large commercial buildings are already equipped with building automation systems that deploy controls to manage building energy use," said report co-author and PNNL engineer Srinivas Katipamula. "But those controls often aren't properly programmed and are allowed to deteriorate over time, creating unnecessarily large power bills.

"Our research found significant nationwide energy savings are possible if all U.S. commercial building owners periodically looked for and corrected operational problems such as air-conditioning systems running too long."

An easy, low-cost fix

The report offers the first detailed, national benefit analysis of multiple energy efficiency measures to address building operational problems. Many of these problems can be corrected with very little effort. Unlike other practices that require expensive new technologies, most of the measures evaluated improve energy efficiency by enabling already-installed equipment to work better.

Roughly 20 percent of America's total energy use goes toward powering commercial buildings. And about 15 percent of U.S. commercial buildings have building automation systems that deploy controls, such as sensors that turn on lights or heating a room only when it's occupied. As a result, helping commercial buildings better use their controls could profoundly slash America's overall energy consumption.

Katipamula and his colleagues examined the potential impact of 34 individual energy efficiency measures that can improve commercial building performance, including:

Fixing broken sensors that read temperatures and other measurements

Turning off power-using devices like printers and monitors when a room isn't occupied

Dimming lights in areas with natural lighting

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is studying how advanced building controls in energy-using equipment can reduce energy use and improve building operations. Shown here are PNNL researcher Srinivas Katipamula examining a control box for a commercial building's heating and cooling system. Credit: Andrea Starr / PNNL

Because combining individual measures can increase energy savings, the researchers also estimated the impacts of packaging energy efficiency measures together. PNNL designed packages of combined measures based on the needs of three different building conditions: buildings already efficient and with little room for improvement, inefficient buildings with a lot of room for improvement, and typical buildings in the middle.

PNNL used computer models of nine prototypical commercial buildings, and extrapolated them to represent five other, similar buildings so it could evaluate energy use in a total of 14 building types. The research team used these prototypical building models with DOE's EnergyPlus building software, which calculated potential energy use given local weather and whichever energy efficiency measures were applied.

Results oriented

Of the individual efficiency measures studied, those with the greatest energy-saving potential nationwide were:

Lowering daytime temperature setpoints for heating, increasing them for cooling, and lowering nighttime heating setpoints: about 8 percent reduction

Reducing the minimum rate for air to flow through a variable-air volume boxes: about 7 percent reduction

Limiting heating and cooling to when building is most likely to be occupied: about 6 percent reduction

Though the study found all commercial buildings across all climates could have an average total energy savings of 29 percent, some building types were found to have the potential to save more, such as:

Secondary schools: about 49 percent

Standalone retail stores & auto dealerships: about 41 percent

As expected, researchers found inefficient buildings have the greatest potential to save energy. After estimating how common each building condition is in the U.S., researchers found combined efficiency measure packages have the following potential national energy saving ranges:

Inefficient buildings: 30 to 59 percent

Typical buildings: 26 to 56 percent

Efficient buildings: 4 to 19 percent

More information: N. Fernandez, S. Katipamula, W. Wang, Y. Xie, M. Zhao, C. Corgin, "Impacts of Commercial Building Controls on Energy Savings and Peak Load Reduction," PNNL report to DOE, May 2017. buildingretuning.pnnl.gov/publ … tions/PNNL-25985.pdf

Output: US commercial property owners can cut energy use by an average of 29% through automation systems that deploy controls, according to researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By better controlling commercial buildings' energy use through sensors that turn on lights or heat a room only when it's occupied, 4% to 5% of energy consumed nationwide could be saved. While around 20% of energy consumed in the US is used to power commercial buildings, just 15% of commercial buildings have automation systems that deploy controls, the researchers found.


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Study finds genome sequencing to be of limited utility
 For all the promises of genomics ushering in a new era in medicine, with scientists regularly urging people to get their DNA sequenced, it appears that the revolution will be postponed: A first-of-its-kind study published Monday found that most of the adults who underwent genome sequencing and were told they had a disease-causing DNA variant did not in fact have that disease. And few of them got information that improved their health.

The pilot study, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 11 out of 50 volunteers (aged 41 to 68) who had their genome sequenced were told they had a mutation that definitely or possibly causes a particular disease, ranging from pituitary thyroid insufficiency to the rare cardiovascular disorder Romano-Ward syndrome. Yet only 2 of the 11 actually had the disease, which in every case should have appeared by adulthood.

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“We were surprised” by the high incidence of disease-causing mutations, said Dr. Jason Vassy, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the study’s lead author. “But we were surprised even more” by how few people with “disease-causing mutations” had the disease.

Whole genome sequencing reads the nearly 3 billion chemical “letters” — the A’s, T’s, C’s, and Gs — that constitute an individual’s DNA. Some geneticists envision genome sequencing as a way to identify everything from what drugs an individual should avoid (if he has the DNA variant that makes statins dangerous to him) to what diseases her doctor should screen for and possibly treat early.

The MedSeq study put that hope to the test in the first-ever randomized trial of whole genome sequencing in adults. Volunteers were assigned, essentially by the flip of a coin, to either have their genome sequenced (and analyzed for the presence of DNA variants in 4,631 genes) or to have their family medical history analyzed.

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The 4,631 genes the researchers analyzed were those that, if mutated, are supposedly sufficient to cause a usually rare disease, such as ankyrin-B-related cardiac arrhythmia (caused by mutations in the gene ANK2). Such single-gene disorders are called Mendelian. The study did not include the thousands of genes that merely raise the chance of developing a disease to which many other genes contribute, such as the vast majority of cancers, heart disease, and psychiatric disorders. That should have stacked the odds so that an unearthed mutation really did cause disease.

The key finding — that few people with “disease-causing” mutations actually had a genetic disease — therefore raises questions about whether genome sequencing in generally healthy adults can be medically justified. Although the price (about $1,000 per person) of genome sequencing has fallen, Dr. Teri Manolio of the National Human Genome Research Institute wrote in an editorial, the “lack of evidence of utility will be one of the hardest [obstacles] to overcome” for proponents of genome sequencing in medical practice.

The problem of disease-causing variants not causing disease can be traced to genetic databases. They list mutations — an A instead of a T at one spot in the gene, for example, or a missing T — that are either benign or cause rare disorders. Much of that information comes from just a few families that might be unusual, including in the other genes they carry and the environment they live in, Vassy said.

Outside of those families, “people might have the variant but not the disease,” because other genes or the environment neutralize it, he said. “This shows how much further we need to go to make our databases reliable.”

The researchers said that none of the 11 patients benefitted from their “molecular diagnosis,” at least in the short term. That included the two who did have the disease their mutation is expected to cause but had not previously been diagnosed. One had the eye disease fundus albipunctatus, Vassy said, “so now he has a name for his condition,” which makes it difficult for his eyes to adapt to light and dark. There is no treatment, however.

The other, Irena Vodenska, 46, has a DNA variant that causes porphyria, a blood disease that causes extreme sensitivity to the sun, blistering, and other symptoms. Vodenska, a professor at Boston University, sometimes gets odd rashes but had never been diagnosed with porphyria and “didn’t think of [the rashes] as genetic,” she said. “It was just part of me.”

Knowing she has the mutation theoretically allows her physician to avoid prescribing medications that exacerbate it, and lets her avoid things that can stress her heart (an occasional consequence of porphyria). “So I think I did learn something from my genome,” Vodenska said.

Even K. Eric Paulson, who was told he has a mutation that causes a devastating skeletal disease called chondrodysplasia yet has no such ailment, is happy he was sequenced, saying he is in the “it’s better to know” camp. But he worries insurers might use the information against him. When he volunteered for the study, said Paulson, a biologist at Tufts University, he “thought there was no possibility such a thing could again happen in our country. Clearly, my assumption was wrong.”

Michael Watson, executive director of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, said whole genome sequencing in healthy individuals “likely does” have clinical value, “but the data by which we can predict who will express the disease for which there is a risk remain weak.”

Some of the study’s findings were reassuring. Volunteers who were sequenced, including those told they had a disease-causing mutation, did not flip out. Six months after receiving their results, they reported levels of depression or anxiety no different from (and on some measures less than) those levels before they got their results. On the other hand, participants were told they might receive unsettling information, so people who worried about that might have declined to join the study, leaving only the emotionally resilient (and perhaps unrepresentative).

A common worry about using genomics in medicine is that physicians won’t know what to make of DNA information. Here, too, the study was somewhat reassuring. The volunteers’ primary care doctors, who received six hours of training on how to interpret the one-page genome summary, handled 8 of the 11 findings of disease-causing genes appropriately, according to a panel of geneticists. They referred five patients to specialists or for tests, such as electrocardiograms, and simply educated others, telling them that the disease probably wasn’t present if it hadn’t shown up yet, and discussing whether their children might have inherited the mutation.

One problematic finding is that people who received genome sequencing underwent more medical tests and had an average of $350 more in health care costs in the six months after they got their DNA results. Medical costs for the 11 told they had a disease-causing mutation were double those of the 39 who didn’t.

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That difference could have been caused by chance alone, according to a statistical analysis of the data, but this finding raises the possibility that genome sequencing could inflate medical bills for no benefit. Two patients with variants associated with heart rhythm abnormalities had cardiology work-ups, for instance, but both were normal.

Outside experts urged caution in interpreting the new study, mostly because its size was too small to tell whether sequenced patients’ anxiety or depression was greater than non-sequenced patients, and because it followed them for only six months. Dr. Erick Scott of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine suggested the sequencing could have been more useful if the researchers had looked at more genes involved in metabolizing drugs, which can tell patients that they might be harmed by certain medications.

It’s also possible that whole genome sequencing might prove more helpful in younger people, who can use the information to make reproductive decisions.

As for Vassy, he has not had his genome sequenced, but says he might do so out of “curiosity.” “Nothing in this study has dissuaded me from doing it,” he said. “But I don’t think it will unlock the secrets of my health and disease, let alone make me run to my doctor with it to make a health plan.”

Output: A pilot study of genome sequencing found that the high incidence of disease-causing mutations did not correlate with the number of people with that disease, reported the Annals of Internal Medicine. The mismatch between disease-causing variants and instances of the disease can be linked back to genetic databases which catalogue mutations that cause benign or rare disorders within just a few families, said Dr Jason Vassy, the study's lead author. Lack of evidence supporting the value of genome sequencing will be difficult for advocates of genome sequencing to overcome, according to Dr Teri Manolio of the National Human Genome Research Institute.


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Chinese province uses 100% renewable energy in weeklong trial

 Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

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A Chinese province with a population of 5.8 million has run entirely on renewable energy for seven days in a row as part of a test to show if the electricity grid can cope without fossil fuels.

Hydro-electric schemes provided more than 72 per cent of the electricity in Qinghai between 17 and 23 June, with wind and solar supplying most of the rest, according to Climate Action, a group which works with the United Nations Environment Programme to share knowledge about new technologies that can help combat climate change.

Quan Shenming, general manager of the Qinghai Electric Power Corporation, said: “Being the first trial of this kind in the country and a major step in the transformation of energy supply, it will be of great importance in promoting the use of clean energy in China in a sustainable and effective way.”

The company said 1.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity was used during the period; about 535,000 tonnes of coal would be needed to generate the same amount.

In May, nearly 83 per cent of the province’s electricity came from solar, wind and hydro power.

The province’s power grid has a total installed capacity of about 23 million kilowatts, but there are plans to increase the combined solar and wind capacity to 35 million kilowatts by 2020.

There are plans to supply parts of central and eastern China with green electricity generated in the area.

Han Ti, vice general manager of the power company, told China’s state-run news agency Xinhua: “Clean energy is the ultimate way. We need to reduce reliance on fossil fuel, improve our energy structure, and reduce carbon emissions.”

China’s National Energy Administration plans to invest 2.5 trillion yuan (about £288bn) in renewable energy technology by 2020, Xinhua reported, saying this would create more than 13 million jobs.

Output: China's Qinghai province has been run entirely on renewable energy for one week to test if its electricity grid can cope without fossil fuels. Throughout the week, renewable energy supplied 1.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to the province of 5.8 million people. More than 72% of electricity was provided by hydro-electric schemes, while wind and solar supplied the rest, according to environmental body Climate Action. China's government has plans to supply central and eastern China with green electricity generated in Qinghai as it seeks to invest CNY2.5trn ($369bn) in renewable energy technology by 2020, reported state-run news agency Xinhua.


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Amazon opens home camera control to developers
 Amazon revealed the first batch of smart home cameras that will be compatible with the touchscreen Echo Show: Nest, August, Amcrest, EZViz, IC Realtime, Logitech Circle 2, Vivint, Ring, and Arlo.

With this compatibility, Alexa customers with these smart home cameras will be able to link their accounts and ask the Echo Show to display a live camera feed on the device's 7-inch screen. On devices without a screen, customers can still listen to the audio from a camera without the accompanying video feed.

Amazon is also making smart home camera control available to all developers via the Smart Home Skill API, which aims to simplify the way developers integrate connected cameras with Alexa. The API taps into Amazon's standardized Alexa language model, which means developers won't need to build the voice interaction model for their camera skill.

Unveiled last month, the Echo Show marks the first visually equipped Echo device in Amazon's voice-activated speaker lineup, which now includes the original Echo rolled out in 2014, the Echo Dot, and the Echo Look.

The Echo Show's key differentiators include a 7-inch touchscreen display and new video-calling features that let users make hands-free video calls to other Echo Show owners or users of the Alexa smartphone app.

Amazon introduced the Echo Look in April. The fashion-focused Echo version comes equipped with a depth-sensing camera and LED lighting. It has the ability to take pictures of a user's outfit via voice command, as well as offer fashion advice via machine learning algorithms.

The Amazon Echo Show is available for pre-order in black and white for $229.99, with shipping slated to begin June 28.

Output: Amazon has revealed it will open up control of its visually-equipped smart home speaker, Echo Show, to all technology developers through its Smart Home Skill application programming interface (API). Amazon has already unveiled a list of cameras compatible with its touchscreen, voice-activated Echo Show, including the Nest, Amcrest and Logitech Circle 2. Customers with compatible devices will be able to ask the Echo Show to display a live camera feed. The API taps into Amazon's Alexa language model so developers do not need to build voice interaction for their camera skill.


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Scotland’s coast damaged by plastic waste: Greenpeace
 Scotland is the envy of the world with its rich waters teeming with wildlife and spectacular coastlines and beaches. But it’s increasingly at threat from the scourge of marine plastic pollution.

We’re halfway through our scientific voyage around the shores of Scotland to document and investigate the impacts of plastic pollution on Scotland’s iconic wildlife. It’s incredibly shocking that up to 12 million tonnes of plastic pollution enter our oceans every year. And once it’s there it can have a devastating effect on wildlife. Animals can become entangled in it or mistake it for food and ingest it. Studies show that 90% of seabirds and 1 in 3 turtles have eaten plastic, with gruesome consequences.

On our voyage, we’ve seen evidence of plastic pollution on remote Scottish beaches, in seawater samples we have collected and in seabird nests. It really brings home the scale of the plastic pollution threat on our oceans and wildlife. But as horrible as the images of wildlife living with the scourge of plastic pollution are, it is also important to remember what we are fighting to protect.

Scotland is home to over 40,000 marine species and a key part of the trip has been to visit the sites that they call home and bear witness to the impacts plastic pollution is having on them.

Gannets and puffins

At the beginning of our expedition, we had the pleasure of visiting various seabird nesting areas. The Bass Rock is host to the world’s largest colony of Northern gannets with more than 150,000 calling it their home. Northern gannets are the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic with a wingspan of up to 2 meters.

We discovered a high level of plastic pollution threatening this iconic colony, with plastic bags, packaging, bits of old fishing gear and even crisp packets strewn across the island and surrounding eggs in nests.

Puffins are one of the most distinctive seabirds with their brightly coloured bills. We visited the largest colony on the UK’s eastern coast on the Isle of May. Puffins are not only very cute but have really interesting breeding habits.

Unlike most seabirds, puffins live in burrows in short grass at the top of cliffs. During the breeding season,they lay an egg at the end of the burrow. The chick remains in the burrow until it is independent and ready to go in the sea.

Dolphins, seals and porpoises

It’s not just seabirds that we’ve encountered on our expedition. We’ve also seen seals, dolphins and porpoises. This should come as no surprise as Scotland’s seas are home to the world’s most northern pod of bottlenose dolphins, as well as a third of the world’s grey seal population. In fact the Isle of May has one of the largest grey seal breeding colonies in the UK. The nursery is so large that the island is closed to visitors from 1 October until Easter to prevent disturbance of the 2,000 grey seal pups born there.

Harbour porpoises are one of the smallest marine animals. They are nicknamed the “puffling pig” because of the puffing sound they make when they surface from under the water. Scotland’s Hebridean waters hold the highest number of harbour porpoises in Europe.

Harbour seals are found in various parts of Scotland including the Isle of May. Their babies are referred to as pups and can weigh up to 35lb at birth! They also are able to swim and dive shortly after their birth. We found seals whilst on the Isle of May but also ran into some more near Mull.

Seals are sadly at the front line of the marine plastic pollution danger. They can get snared and tangled in plastic causing starvation, laceration, infection and suffocation.

Basking sharks

Scotland is probably the best place in the world to see basking sharks. These prehistoric marine animals are the second largest fish in the world. They feed by opening their mouths and filtering water through their teeth, at a rate of 1000-2000 tonnes of water per hour - to ingest the plankton they feed on. We’ve collected dozens of sea surface water samples to analyse for the presence of microplastics. If we find them, it means it’s likely that basking sharks and other filter feeders will be ingesting them too.

To some, they are quite frightening as they slowly swim through the water, mouth wide open as they filter feed. But they are actually very docile creatures and are not harmful to humans.

They also can be very difficult to spot! But we were lucky enough to find some after a three day search. Basking sharks are in incredible sight to behold and really bring home the reason that we are on this expedition - to protect marine life and our oceans from plastic pollution.

And there’s so much more

Scottish waters are also home to a third of the world's whale and dolphin species, and have some of the finest marine habitats in Europe, which include rocky reefs, soft corals, sea fans and sponges, sea grass, flameshell and horsemussel. They all provide refuge for young fish and shellfish, as well as spectacular coldwater coral reefs.

Plastic pollution threatens this all, and this expedition is revealing that it’s already harming the oceans and iconic wildlife on our own doorstep.

What you can do

The solution is to prevent the problem at source, and stop the flow of plastic into the oceans in the first place. With 16 million plastic bottles being dumped into our environment in the UK every day, soft drinks companies, governments and individuals can make real progress to tackle the crisis - if we demand it!

Output: Plastic is endangering wildlife and littering beaches in the UK, according to research by Greenpeace, which has spent two months monitoring the presence of plastic waste on Scotland’s coast. Initial findings from the project indicate that waste, including bottles, bags and packaging, was discovered on every beach studied. Plastic fragments, including microplastics, were found in feeding areas used by seals, sharks and whales, whilst plastic was also discovered in birds’ nests in globally significant seabird colonies. Campaigners will deliver a petition to the Scottish environment secretary, Roseanna Cunningham, on Tuesday, demanding the introduction of deposit return schemes for drinks containers.


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Scotland’s coast damaged by plastic waste: Greenpeace
 Plastic bottles and packaging are overrunning some of the UK’s most beautiful beaches and remote coastline, endangering wildlife from basking sharks to puffins.

A Greenpeace research ship has spent the past two months touring the Scottish coast and islands assessing the impact of plastic waste.

Marine scientists on the Greenpeace ship Beluga II will undertake a detailed analysis of the results over the next two months. But the initial findings from the voyage paint a bleak picture:

Plastic waste, from bottles to bags and packaging, was found on every beach surveyed.

Microplastic and other plastic fragments were found in the feeding grounds of basking sharks, seals and whales.

Plastic bottles, bags and packaging were found in birds’ nests at internationally significant seabird colonies, in areas such as the Bass Rock, Isle of May and the Shiant Isles.

The findings follow a series of recent reports that highlight the growing problem of plastics pollution in oceans around the world.

Last month scientists found nearly 18 tonnes of plastic on one of the world’s most remote islands, an uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific.

The tiny landmass in the eastern South Pacific, was found to have the highest density of anthropogenic debris recorded anywhere in the world, with 99.8% of the pollution plastic.

Another study of remote Arctic beaches found they were also heavily polluted with plastic, despite small local populations.

On Tuesday the Beluga II is due to arrive in Edinburgh. Tisha Brown, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, described the initial findings as shocking.

“It cannot be right that our beaches, seas and the stunning wildlife they are home to should become the final dumping ground for throwaway plastic bottles and other plastic trash.”

She said “a truckload” of plastic was entering the world’s oceans every minute.

“We need urgent action from governments and from major soft drinks companies which produce billions of single-use plastic bottles every year, like Coca-Cola, to stop the flow of plastic into the sea.”

Campaigners in Scotland will deliver a petition to Scotland’s environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham on Tuesday calling for the introduction of a deposit return scheme for drinks containers in Scotland. Similar schemes have been shown to increase collection rates of plastic bottles to as much as 95% in other countries, drastically reducing the number ending up in the environment.

The Greenpeace expedition assessed plastic pollution in sites of scientific importance and biodiversity, including Bass Rock, Gunna Sound, Mull, Rùm, Eigg, Skye, and the Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides.

The charity said the extent of the plastic pollution they found was “a shocking testament to our throwaway culture”.

Brown added: “We ... witnessed plastic pollution in the beaks of puffins, in the waters where basking sharks feed, and even wrapped around the beak of an emaciated gannet. We found plastic bottle tops, bags, packaging, bits of old fishing gear and even crisp packets strewn across the island and surrounding eggs in nests. It’s no wonder that studies have shown that 90% of seabirds have eaten plastic.”

But she said it was not too late to “preserve these remote shores and the wildlife they are home to”.

“We need urgent action from governments and from major soft drinks companies which produce billions of single-use plastic bottles every year.”

Output: Plastic is endangering wildlife and littering beaches in the UK, according to research by Greenpeace, which has spent two months monitoring the presence of plastic waste on Scotland’s coast. Initial findings from the project indicate that waste, including bottles, bags and packaging, was discovered on every beach studied. Plastic fragments, including microplastics, were found in feeding areas used by seals, sharks and whales, whilst plastic was also discovered in birds’ nests in globally significant seabird colonies. Campaigners will deliver a petition to the Scottish environment secretary, Roseanna Cunningham, on Tuesday, demanding the introduction of deposit return schemes for drinks containers.


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Job losses, IRP growth loom as banks cut research costs
 An increase in independent equity research providers will be one of the main results of MiFID II rules that will require unbundling of research costs from execution, putting those firms in a unique position to establish what those once-opaque costs will be across the investment banking industry going forward, according to a McKinsey & Co. report released Wednesday.

The report, “Reinventing Equity Research as a Profit-Making Business,” listed the increase in research-only providers as one of five business models the sell-side will adopt because of the Markets in Financial Institutions Directive II, which takes effect at the start of 2018. The regulations will require all financial firms that do business in the European Union or have clients in the EU to disclose research costs as a distinct line item, rather than in bundled commissions with executions.

The rise in independent research-only providers will have several benefits that will be passed on to money managers, said report co-author Roger Rudisuli, senior partner at McKinsey, in an interview. They are a lower cost base vs. large investment banks; a more niche focus on investing that can generate greater alpha for managers than broad-based equity research from bulge-bracket firms; and size that makes them better able to provide research to smaller managers that can't afford the larger banks.

“Hundreds of these research firms exist already,” Mr. Rudisuli said. “The bulk of them charge specifically less than the commissions charged by investment banks. Under MiFID II, this will make them more attractive to asset managers and asset owners.”

By contrast, Mr. Rudisuli said, larger investment banks have difficulty pricing research since that's historically been part of their bundled commissions. “The top 10 banks spend $400 million to $500 million on equity research each year,” Mr. Rudisuli said. “They only know the cost of research to them. They don't know the real cost to clients or the revenue banks get from research. Unbundling will mean they will need to determine whether they can provide research at a value to clients and to their business.”

Mr. Rudisuli said several recent surveys of money managers have shown that about half of them expect to pass on the cost of research to assets owners, while the remaining firms will take on the costs themselves. “That means banks and research providers will have to show the value of research,” he said. “Right now, there's a lot of me-too research. There are 50 to 60 analysts covering Apple. Do that many provide value?”

The other business models cited by McKinsey are:

Output: The fallout from regulations that force sell-side companies to charge separately for research will result in job losses and reductions in analysis spending at banks, according to a report by McKinsey. However, such regulations will also usher in an era of growth for independent research providers (IRPs). The arrival of the European Union's MiFID II rules in January will result in banks slashing $1.2bn of investment in research, McKinsey said. IRPs are likely to help fill the void, according to McKinsey Senior Partner Roger Rudisuli, who explained they'd benefit because they have a lower cost base and can generate higher returns by having a niche focus.


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JustGiving bought by non-profit software giant Blackbaud for £95m
 Blackbaud takes over JustGiving in a bid to enhance world-wide out peer-to-peer fundraising offering

Blackbaud, the world’s largest non-profit cloud software company, is to buy UK fundraising platform JustGiving for £95m.

The US company said the acquisition of JustGiving will enhance its capabilities to serve both individual donors and nonprofits, expanding the peer-to-peer fundraising capabilities it offers through existing products TeamRaiser and everydayhero.

Anne-Marie Huby and Zarine Kharas co-founded JustGiving in 2001. It has grown into the world’s most trusted social platform for giving, enabling 22 million people to raise over $4.5 billion (£3bn) in 164 countries for more than 26,000 charities

Bringing JustGiving into the Blackbaud family reinforces our strong commitment to catalyzing the impact of individual change agents - Jerry Needel, president and general manager of Blackbaud Consumer Solutions

JustGiving had a turnover of £24.9m last year, making a profit of £821,000 in 2016.

In 2013 it launched the crowdfunding platform Yimby.com, which has since rebranded as JustGiving Crowdfunding.

Blackbaud said the acquisition comes as social and mobile giving continues to grow and fundraising driven by individual supporters rallying others in their networks (referred to as peer-to-peer fundraising) plays a significant and growing role in charitable giving.

The acquisition will enable Blackbuad to role out the personal crowdfunding platform in the United States and elsewhere, as well as position Blackbaud to better serve the UK market, where it has operated for more than two decades.

“Today, people are willing to do more than ever before to support causes they care about, but they want to do it on their own terms,” said Jerry Needel, president and general manager of Blackbaud Consumer Solutions.

“To put their passion into action, they need technology that gives them the power to connect with other change agents and organizations. Bringing JustGiving into the Blackbaud family reinforces our strong commitment to catalyzing the impact of individual change agents. It’s also part of our commitment to helping social good organizations navigate and respond to key shifts in giving behavior.”

Anne-Marie Huby, co-founder and managing director of JustGiving, said: “Social, mobile and the rise of crowdfunding combined are transforming the way people give, and the pace of change is unprecedented. By bringing together JustGiving’s community and social platform with Blackbaud’s unrivalled expertise and capabilities, we will be better able to help great causes reach more people and raise more money, more effectively and intelligently than ever before.”

The financial accounts for Blackbaud in the year to 31 December 2016 revealed revenues of $730.8m (£574m) and a gross profit of $391.6m (£307.6m). Blackbaud will finance the acquisition using cash in its reserves and borrowings under its existing credit facility.

JustGiving is headquartered in London while Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina with operations around the globe, including in London.

JustGiving staff are expected to transition to Blackbaud following the completion of the customary regulatory review and become part of Blackbaud’s London-based International Markets Group, led by Jerome Moisan, senior vice president and president of Blackbaud’s International Markets Group.

Output: The world's largest non-profit cloud software firm, Blackbaud, has acquired UK fundraising platform JustGiving for £95m. The move is expected to help Blackbaud extend its peer-to-peer fundraising offering, which it runs through TeamRaiser and everydayhero, and better serve the UK market, whilst JustGiving's personal crowdfunding platform can be rolled out in the US and elsewhere. Blackbaud's financial accounts showed gross profit of $391.6m for the year to 31 December 2016. JustGiving made a profit of £821,000 ($1.05m) in 2016 with a turnover of £24.9m. Cash reserves and credit will be used to fund the acquisition.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Rural hosts in US earn up to 20% of income from Airbnb guests
 Nancy Trejos

USA TODAY

Airbnb, which facilitates short-term home rentals, says it is seeing a spike in the number of reservations in rural areas.

In a new report released today, the home-sharing website says that 3.3 million guest arrivals occurred at rural listings in the USA over the last year. That’s a year-over-year increase of 138%.

In every U.S. state, the earnings of Airbnb hosts in rural areas represented a large percentage of household income, ranging from 5% to 20%. In Hawaii, it made up 20.3% of household income. In California, it was 20.1%.

According to Airbnb’s research, there are more Airbnb hosts than corporate hotel chains in many rural communities in the USA.

In West Virginia, 75% of active Airbnb listings are located in rural areas, compared with 32.7% of hotels rooms that are. In New Hampshire, 71.9% of active Airbnb listings are located in rural areas, while 33.1% of hotel rooms are. In Montana, the Airbnb to hotel room percentages in rural areas are 64.1% vs. 28.1% . In Wyoming, there are 65.9% rural Airbnb listings compared with 31.5% hotel rooms.

Chris Lehane, head of global policy for Airbnb, says many of the most popular rural destinations are near national and state parks or places that play host to youth sports tournaments.

“The Airbnb platform is a platform that is supporting the middle class,” Lehane says. “It democratizes tourism, brings tourism to places that haven’t benefited from it.”

Study: Airbnb poses threat to hotel industry

Rural Airbnb’s are particularly popular among families and young travelers in their 20s and early 30s — known as Millennials — who are searching for more authentic local experiences, Lehane says.

The rural Airbnb’s are among the company’s fastest growing segments, he says. It has also helped female Airbnb hosts. The majority of Airbnb rural hosts in almost every country studied for the report are women.

“I’m not saying we’re the solution for all the challenges rural communities are facing but I think we are a part of a broader formula to create economic opportunities,” Lehane says.

The report also shows the general growth of Airbnb across the USA. Many cities have moved to try to stem Airbnb's growth at the behest of the hotel industry. Still, 46 of the 50 U.S. states have seen at least 100% year-over-year growth.

The states seeing the fastest year-over-year growth are in the Midwest and South, including Oklahoma, Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri and Alabama.

Output: About 3.3 million people stayed in Airbnb-listed accommodation in rural areas of the US in the past year, a year on year increase of 138%, according to a company report. The study found rural hosts earned between 5% and 20% of their income from short-term renting, and also revealed Airbnb listings vastly outnumbered corporate hotel chains in rural areas. Chris Lehane, head of global policy for Airbnb, said: "I’m not saying we’re the solution for all the challenges rural communities are facing but I think we are a part of a broader formula to create economic opportunities."


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Machine transcription service outperforms humans (sometimes)
 What is the best way to describe Rupert Murdoch having a foam pie thrown at his face? This wasn’t much of a problem for the world’s press, who were content to run articles depicting the incident during the media mogul’s testimony at a 2011 parliamentary committee hearing as everything from high drama to low comedy. It was another matter for the hearing’s official transcriptionist. Typically, a transcriptionist’s job only involves typing out the words as they were actually said. After the pie attack—either by choice or hemmed in by the conventions of house style—the transcriptionist decided to go the simplest route by marking it as an “[interruption].”

Across professional fields, a whole multitude of conversations—meetings, interviews, and conference calls—need to be transcribed and recorded for future reference. This can be a daily, onerous task, but for those willing to pay, the job can be outsourced to a professional transcription service. The service, in turn, will employ staff to transcribe audio files remotely or, as in my own couple of months in the profession, attend meetings to type out what is said in real time.

Despite the recent emergence of browser-based transcription aids, transcription’s an area of drudgery in the modern Western economy where machines can’t quite squeeze human beings out of the equation. That is until last year, when Microsoft built one that could.

Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is an area that has gripped the firm’s chief speech scientist, Xuedong Huang, since he entered a doctoral program at Scotland’s Edinburgh University. “I’d just left China,” he says, remembering the difficulty he had in using his undergraduate knowledge of the American English to parse the Scottish brogue of his lecturers. “I wished every lecturer and every professor, when they talked in the classroom, could have subtitles.”

In order to reach that kind of real-time service, Huang and his team would first have to create a program capable of retrospective transcription. Advances in artificial intelligence allowed them to employ a technique called deep learning, wherein a program is trained to recognize patterns from vast amounts of data. Huang and his colleagues used their software to transcribe the NIST 2000 CTS test set, a bundle of recorded conversations that’s served as the benchmark for speech recognition work for more than 20 years. The error rates of professional transcriptionists in reproducing two different portions of the test are 5.9 and 11.3 percent. The system built by the team at Microsoft edged past both.

“It wasn’t a real-time system,” acknowledges Huang. “It was very much like we wanted to see, with all the horsepower we have, what is the limit. But the real-time system is not that far off.”

Indeed, the promise of ASR programs capable of accurately transcribing interviews or meetings as they happen no longer seems so outlandish. At Microsoft’s Build conference last month, the company’s vice-president, Harry Shum, demonstrated a PowerPoint transcription service that would allow the spoken words of the presentation to be tied to individual slides. The firm is also in a close race with the likes of Apple and Google to perfect the transcripts produced by its real-time mobile translation app.

Huang believes the point at which transcription software will overtake human capabilities is open to interpretation. “The definition of a perfect result would be controversial,” he says, citing the error rates among human transcriptionists. “How ‘perfect’ this is depends on the scenario and the application.”

An ASR system tasked with transcribing speech in real time is only deemed successful if every word is interpreted correctly, something that largely has been achieved with mobile assistants like Cortana and Siri, but has yet to be mastered in real-time translation apps. However, a growing number of computer scientists are realizing that standards do not need to be as high when it comes to the automatic transcription of recorded audio, where any mistakes in the text can be amended after the fact.

“We don’t claim ... this is perfect. But, with good audio, it can be close to perfect.”

Two companies—Trint, a start-up in London, and Baidu, the Chinese internet giant with an application called SwiftScribe—have begun to offer browser-based tools that can convert recordings of up to an hour into text with a word-error rate of 5 percent or less.* On the page, their output looks very similar to the raw documents I typed out in real-time during the many meetings I attended as a freelance transcriptionist: at best, a Joycean stream-of-consciousness marvel, and at worst, gobbledygook. But by turning the user from a scribe into an editor, both programs can shave hours off an onerous and distracting task.

The amount of time saved, of course, is contingent on the quality of the audio. Trint and SwiftScribe tend to make short work of face-to-face interviews with the bare minimum of ambient noise, but struggle to transcribe recordings of crowded rooms, telephone interviews with bad reception, or anyone who speaks with an accent that isn’t American or British English. My attempt to run a recording of a German-accented speaker through Trint, for example, saw the engine interpret “it was rather cold, but the atmosphere was great” as “That heart is also all barf. Yes. His first face.”

“We don’t claim that this turnaround in a couple of minutes of an interview like this is perfect,” says Jeff Kofman, Trint’s CEO. “But, with good audio, it can be close to perfect. You can search it, you can hear it, you [can] find the errors, and you know within seconds what was actually said.”

According to Kofman, most of the people using Trint are journalists, followed by academics doing qualitative research and clients in business and healthcare—in other words, professions expected to transcribe a large volume of audio on tight deadlines. That’s in keeping with the anonymized data on user behavior being collected by the developer Ryan Prenger and his colleagues at SwiftScribe. While there is a long tail of users who Prenger speculates are simply AI enthusiasts eager to test out SwiftScribe’s capabilities, he’s also spotted several “power users” that are running audio through the program on almost a daily basis. It’s left him optimistic about the range of people the tool could attract as ASR technology continues to improve.

“That’s the thing with transcription technology in general,” says Prenger. “Once the accuracy gets above a certain bar, everyone will probably start doing their transcriptions that way, at least for the first several rounds.” He predicts that, ultimately, automated transcription tools will increase both the supply of and the demand for transcripts. “There could be a virtuous circle where more people expect more of their audio that they produce to be transcribed, because it’s now cheaper and easier to get things transcribed quickly. And so, it becomes the standard to transcribe everything.”

It’s a future that Trint is consciously maneuvering itself to exploit. The company just raised $3.1 million in seed money to fund its next round of expansion. Kofman and his team plan to demonstrate its capabilities later this month at the Global Editors Network in Vienna. Their aim is to have the transcription of the event’s keynote address up on the Washington Post’s website within the hour.

It’s difficult to predict precisely what this new order could look like, although casualties are expected. The stenographer would likely join the ranks of the costermonger and the iceman in the list of forgotten professions. Journalists could spend more time reporting and writing, aided by a plethora of assistive writing tools, while detectives could analyze the contradictions in suspect testimony earlier. Captioning on YouTube videos could be standard, while radio shows and podcasts could become accessible to the hard of hearing on a mass scale. Calls to acquaintances, friends, and old flames could be archived and searched in the same way that social-media messages and emails are, or intercepted and hoarded by law-enforcement agencies.

For Huang, transcription is just one of a whole range of changes ASR is set to provide that will fundamentally change society itself, one that can already be glimpsed in voice assistants like Cortana, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa. “The next wave, clearly, is beyond the devices that you have to touch,” he says, envisioning computing technology discreetly woven into a range of working environments. “UI technology that can free people from being tethered to the device will be in the front and center.”

For the moment, however, the engineers behind automated transcribers will have to content themselves with more germane users: the journalist sweating a deadline, or the transcriptionist working out the right way to describe a man being pied in a parliamentary select committee.

Output: London-based start-up Trint and Baidu application SwiftScribe are both offering AI-powered online voice transcription services that for clear voice recordings with little background noise can produce voice-to-text transcription with error rates of less than 5%. This improves on the error rates of professional transcriptionists, although the systems struggle with crowd noise, phone hiss, and non-native English accents.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Google's drawing neural net can now finish people's drawings
 tech2 News Staff

Google Brain, the research side of Google, which had come up with Sketch-RNN, a software that uses a neural network to draw and create images, has added another feather to its hat. Now, the software will autocomplete the image by taking inputs from the user's previous methods of drawing.

Sketch-RNN was first released on 13 April. Initially, Sketch-RNN was used on other AI experiments like Quick Draw! This AI experiment used to give text prompt while creating an image. For instance, if the user wanted to make a cat, the software would give text prompts on what those images could have been. After Quick Draw came Auto draw. It is especially useful when poorly drawn pictures are replaced by better-drawn ones. Sketch-RNN, is a new experiment from Google's AI experiment series.

Through Sketch-RNN, the moment the user starts drawing, the software prompts a number of pictures that can come up to form that image. For instance, if there is a cat, it will give different pictorial representations of the cat. These representations come from already existing images in the software. At the same time, it can create another image from a different one.

The alternative images have their own tweaks which may be slightly different from the other alternatives present. Moreover, Sketch-RNN takes inputs from users and give different outputs. It not only tries to understand the user, it also gives regular prompts that suggest how the user can finish the sketch.

Output: Google's online drawing AI experiment, Sketch-RNN, is now able to complete people's drawings. The neural network is able to suggest ways to finish a drawing the user has started in one of a number of categories including flowers, cats and other animals. As well as trying to fit its output to the user's work, as the user works on the drawing it gives regular suggestions for the drawing.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Scottish start-up makes bioplastics from langoustine shells
 In Scotland, a biotech startup called CuanTec has developed a shelf-life-extending food wrapping for seafood made from the shells of langoustines.

“The push towards elimination of petroleum plastic from the food chain across Europe has created a void in the market,” CEO Dr Cait Murray-Green says. “This allowed us to create a food contact material which is anti-microbial, biodegradable and compostable and for this to be a first to market in the bioplastic food wrapping sector.”

The company also produces salmon feed from processing byproducts. “We are searching for and establishing relationships with Scottish companies in the food and drink sector,” Murray-Green adds. “That is key to taking CuanTec forward. It is a true circular economy example, as our suppliers can also be our customers.”

According to The National, the UK seafood industry loses £2 billion annually to food waste and spoilage. CuanTec’s bioplastic won the company the £150,000 Higgs Edge award last week.

Output: Scottish biotech firm CuanTec has developed an antimicrobial food wrapping made from the shells of langoustines, which could extend the shelf-life of seafood. The "biodegradable and compostable" wrapping created in response to the need to reduce reliance on petroleum-based plastics, will help reduce landfill and cut down on food waste and spoilage, which costs the UK retail and manufacturing sectors £2bn a year, according to The National.