(토요모임) [10. Sep. 2016] Saturday meeting topic

[Scarlet]

Howdy ! 

It's me Scarlett !   

This week we have 4 topics. 

◈ Holidays : Chuseok bonuses, holidays increase

◈ Tech issue : Brain hi-jacking could become a reality soon, warn researchers

◈ Biology : Gene editing can now change an entire species — forever

◈ Social issue : Technology could be the best or worst thing that happened to inequality

Hope you enjoy the topics. 

With luv 

Scarlett

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Chuseok bonuses, holidays increase

Published : 2016-09-05

Despite the economic depression, a majority of Korean companies plan to increase bonuses for the upcoming Chuseok, or Korean thanksgiving. 

According to a survey of 373 Korean companies conducted by the Korea Employer Federation, there will be a slight increase of 3 percent in bonuses and 0.5 days in allowed holidays for this year’s Chuseok, which falls on Sept. 15. 

Many Korean companies give cash bonuses or gifts to their employees on Chuseok, which is one of the two biggest traditional holidays in Korea along with the Lunar New Year. 

Some 70 percent of Korean companies plan to provide an average of slightly more than 1 million won ($902) of bonus. Employees will also be allowed an average of 4.5 days of holidays. 

Big companies with 300 or more employees will provide on average 1.2 million won of bonus and 4.7 days of holidays. Small and medium-sized companies will give 994,000 won of bonus and 4.3 days of holidays.

Article source : http://khnews.kheraldm.com/view.php?ud=20160905000652&md=20160906003241_BL

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<Questions>

Q1. Do you think holidays are important? Why?

Q2. Do you think you receive more Chuseok bonus increase than last year? What are you going to do with that extra money? 

Q3. What do you do during holidays? Are there special foods connected with the holiday?

Q4. Which holiday do you like the most? What's your favorite holiday food?

Q5. What kinds of thing do you like to do on the holidays?

Q6. Are there enough holidays in your country for which workers get the day or days off?

Q7. Is it better to stay at home on holidays or go somewhere?

Q8. Do you usually need a holiday after your holiday?

Q9. How would you feel if there weren’t any holidays?

Q10. What are the pros and cons of spending holidays with your family, with your friends, or alone?

Q11. Are there holidays in your country that have come from other countries (Valentine’s, Halloween…)?

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Brain hi-jacking could become a reality soon, 

warn researchers

A vulnerability of brain implants to cyber-security attacks could make "brainjacking" a reality, say researchers

By: IANS | Published:August 29, 2016 7:57 pm

A vulnerability of brain implants to cyber-security attacks could make “brainjacking”, which has been discussed in science fiction for decades, a reality, say researchers from the University of Oxford. Writing in The Conversation, an Australia-based non-profit media, Laurie Pycroft discussed brain implants as a new frontier of security threat.

The most common type of brain implant is the deep brain stimulation (DBS) system. It consists of implanted electrodes positioned deep inside the brain connected to wires running under the skin, which carry signals from an implanted stimulator.

The stimulator consists of a battery, a small processor, and a wireless communication antenna that allows doctors to programme it. In essence, it functions much like a cardiac pacemaker, with the main distinction being that it directly interfaces with the brain, Pycroft explained.

DBS is widely used to treat Parkinson’s disease, often with dramatic results, but it is also used to treat dystonia (muscle spasms), essential tremor and severe chronic pain.

Targeting different brain regions with different stimulation parameters gives neurosurgeons increasingly precise control over the human brain, allowing them to alleviate distressing symptoms.

However, this precise control of the brain, coupled with the wireless control of stimulators, also opens an opportunity for malicious attackers.

“In light of recent developments in information security, there is a reason to be concerned that medical implants are vulnerable to attack,” Pycroft and his colleagues wrote in a recent paper published in the journal World Neurosurgery.

Examples of possible attacks include altering stimulation settings so that patients with chronic pain are caused even greater pain than they would experience without stimulation.

Or a Parkinson’s patient could have their ability to move inhibited.

A sophisticated attacker could potentially even induce behavioural changes such as hypersexuality or pathological gambling, or even exert a limited form of control over the patient’s behaviour by stimulating parts of the brain involved with reward learning in order to reinforce certain actions.

Although these hacks would be difficult to achieve as they would require a high level of technological competence and the ability to monitor the victim, a sufficiently determined attacker could manage it, Pycroft said.

“Researchers, clinicians, manufacturers, and regulatory bodies should cooperate to minimize the risk posed by brainjacking,” the researchers wrote in the journal.

Article source : http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/brain-hi-jacking-could-become-a-reality-soon-warn-researchers-3002612/

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<Questions>

Q1. Have you ever heard about the "brainjacking"?

Q2. Did you know that brain implant tech. was applied in our brain to treat some disease such as Parkinson’s disease, dystonia (muscle spasms), essential tremor and severe chronic pain. If you have those diseases, in order to lessen your pain, would you apply this kinds of innovative medical implant tech. which could possibly cause cyber attacking to yourself ? Or will you take more conventional and safe but less effective way?

Q3. Have you ever faced any kinds of information security problem in reality or in cyber space? How did you deal with those tricky situations? Do you think we have any counter measures to treat those misdeed?

Q4. If someone try to manipulate your behavior by using this kinds of tech. how would you react to it? How to protect yourself from those people?

Q5. If you can develop your intellectual strength by those technologies, would you apply those tech. to yourself? 

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Gene editing can now change an entire species — forever

TED2016 · 12:25 · Filmed Feb 2016

So this is a talk about gene drives, but I'm going to start by telling you a brief story. 20 years ago, a biologist named Anthony James got obsessed with the idea of making mosquitos that didn't transmit malaria.

It was a great idea, and pretty much a complete failure. For one thing, it turned out to be really hard to make a malaria-resistant mosquito. James managed it, finally, just a few years ago, by adding some genes that make it impossible for the malaria parasite to survive inside the mosquito.

But that just created another problem. Now that you've got a malaria-resistant mosquito, how do you get it to replace all the malaria-carrying mosquitos? There are a couple options, but plan A was basically to breed up a bunch of the new genetically-engineered mosquitos release them into the wild and hope that they pass on their genes. The problem was that you'd have to release literally 10 times the number of native mosquitos to work. So in a village with 10,000 mosquitos, you release an extra 100,000. As you might guess, this was not a very popular strategy with the villagers.

Then, last January, Anthony James got an email from a biologist named Ethan Bier. Bier said that he and his grad student Valentino Gantz had stumbled on a tool that could not only guarantee that a particular genetic trait would be inherited, but that it would spread incredibly quickly. If they were right, it would basically solve the problem that he and James had been working on for 20 years.

As a test, they engineered two mosquitos to carry the anti-malaria gene and also this new tool, a gene drive, which I'll explain in a minute. Finally, they set it up so that any mosquitos that had inherited the anti-malaria gene wouldn't have the usual white eyes, but would instead have red eyes. That was pretty much just for convenience so they could tell just at a glance which was which.

So they took their two anti-malarial, red-eyed mosquitos and put them in a box with 30 ordinary white-eyed ones, and let them breed. In two generations, those had produced 3,800 grandchildren. That is not the surprising part. This is the surprising part: given that you started with just two red-eyed mosquitos and 30 white-eyed ones, you expect mostly white-eyed descendants. Instead, when James opened the box, all 3,800 mosquitos had red eyes.

When I asked Ethan Bier about this moment, he became so excited that he was literally shouting into the phone. That's because getting only red-eyed mosquitos violates a rule that is the absolute cornerstone of biology, Mendelian genetics. I'll keep this quick, but Mendelian genetics says when a male and a female mate, their baby inherits half of its DNA from each parent. So if our original mosquito was aa and our new mosquito is aB, where B is the anti-malarial gene, the babies should come out in four permutations: aa, aB, aa, Ba. Instead, with the new gene drive, they all came out aB. Biologically, that shouldn't even be possible.

So what happened? The first thing that happened was the arrival of a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR in 2012. Many of you have probably heard about CRISPR, so I'll just say briefly that CRISPR is a tool that allows researchers to edit genes very precisely, easily and quickly. It does this by harnessing a mechanism that already existed in bacteria. Basically, there's a protein that acts like a scissors and cuts the DNA, and there's an RNA molecule that directs the scissors to any point on the genome you want. The result is basically a word processor for genes. You can take an entire gene out, put one in, or even edit just a single letter within a gene. And you can do it in nearly any species.

OK, remember how I said that gene drives originally had two problems? The first was that it was hard to engineer a mosquito to be malaria-resistant. That's basically gone now, thanks to CRISPR. But the other problem was logistical. How do you get your trait to spread? This is where it gets clever.

A couple years ago, a biologist at Harvard named Kevin Esvelt wondered what would happen if you made it so that CRISPR inserted not only your new gene but also the machinery that does the cutting and pasting. In other words, what if CRISPR also copied and pasted itself. You'd end up with a perpetual motion machine for gene editing. And that's exactly what happened. This CRISPR gene drive that Esvelt created not only guarantees that a trait will get passed on, but if it's used in the germline cells, it will automatically copy and paste your new gene into both chromosomes of every single individual. It's like a global search and replace, or in science terms, it makes a heterozygous trait homozygous.

So, what does this mean? For one thing, it means we have a very powerful, but also somewhat alarming new tool. Up until now, the fact that gene drives didn't work very well was actually kind of a relief. Normally when we mess around with an organism's genes, we make that thing less evolutionarily fit. So biologists can make all the mutant fruit flies they want without worrying about it. If some escape, natural selection just takes care of them.

What's remarkable and powerful and frightening about gene drives is that that will no longer be true. Assuming that your trait does not have a big evolutionary handicap, like a mosquito that can't fly, the CRISPR-based gene drive will spread the change relentlessly until it is in every single individual in the population. Now, it isn't easy to make a gene drive that works that well, but James and Esvelt think that we can.

The good news is that this opens the door to some remarkable things. If you put an anti-malarial gene drive in just 1 percent of Anopheles mosquitoes, the species that transmits malaria, researchers estimate that it would spread to the entire population in a year. So in a year, you could virtually eliminate malaria. In practice, we're still a few years out from being able to do that, but still, a 1,000 children a day die of malaria. In a year, that number could be almost zero. The same goes for dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever.

And it gets better. Say you want to get rid of an invasive species, like get Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. All you have to do is release a gene drive that makes the fish produce only male offspring. In a few generations, there'll be no females left, no more carp. In theory, this means we could restore hundreds of native species that have been pushed to the brink.

OK, that's the good news, this is the bad news. Gene drives are so effective that even an accidental release could change an entire species, and often very quickly. Anthony James took good precautions. He bred his mosquitos in a bio-containment lab and he also used a species that's not native to the US so that even if some did escape, they'd just die off, there'd be nothing for them to mate with. But it's also true that if a dozen Asian carp with the all-male gene drive accidentally got carried from the Great Lakes back to Asia, they could potentially wipe out the native Asian carp population. And that's not so unlikely, given how connected our world is. In fact, it's why we have an invasive species problem. And that's fish. Things like mosquitos and fruit flies, there's literally no way to contain them. They cross borders and oceans all the time.

OK, the other piece of bad news is that a gene drive might not stay confined to what we call the target species. That's because of gene flow, which is a fancy way of saying that neighboring species sometimes interbreed. If that happens, it's possible a gene drive could cross over, like Asian carp could infect some other kind of carp. That's not so bad if your drive just promotes a trait, like eye color. In fact, there's a decent chance that we'll see a wave of very weird fruit flies in the near future. But it could be a disaster if your drive is deigned to eliminate the species entirely.

The last worrisome thing is that the technology to do this, to genetically engineer an organism and include a gene drive, is something that basically any lab in the world can do. An undergraduate can do it. A talented high schooler with some equipment can do it.

Now, I'm guessing that this sounds terrifying.

Interestingly though, nearly every scientist I talk to seemed to think that gene drives were not actually that frightening or dangerous. Partly because they believe that scientists will be very cautious and responsible about using them.

So far, that's been true. But gene drives also have some actual limitations. So for one thing, they work only in sexually reproducing species. So thank goodness, they can't be used to engineer viruses or bacteria. Also, the trait spreads only with each successive generation. So changing or eliminating a population is practical only if that species has a fast reproductive cycle, like insects or maybe small vertebrates like mice or fish. In elephants or people, it would take centuries for a trait to spread widely enough to matter.

Also, even with CRISPR, it's not that easy to engineer a truly devastating trait. Say you wanted to make a fruit fly that feeds on ordinary fruit instead of rotting fruit, with the aim of sabotaging American agriculture. First, you'd have to figure out which genes control what the fly wants to eat, which is already a very long and complicated project. Then you'd have to alter those genes to change the fly's behavior to whatever you'd want it to be, which is an even longer and more complicated project. And it might not even work, because the genes that control behavior are complex. So if you're a terrorist and have to choose between starting a grueling basic research program that will require years of meticulous lab work and still might not pan out, or just blowing stuff up? You'll probably choose the later.

This is especially true because at least in theory, it should be pretty easy to build what's called a reversal drive. That's one that basically overwrites the change made by the first gene drive. So if you don't like the effects of a change, you can just release a second drive that will cancel it out, at least in theory.

OK, so where does this leave us? We now have the ability to change entire species at will. Should we? Are we gods now? I'm not sure I'd say that. But I would say this: first, some very smart people are even now debating how to regulate gene drives. At the same time, some other very smart people are working hard to create safeguards, like gene drives that self-regulate or peter out after a few generations. That's great. But this technology still requires a conversation. And given the nature of gene drives, that conversation has to be global. What if Kenya wants to use a drive but Tanzania doesn't? Who decides whether to release a gene drive that can fly?

I don't have the answer to that question. All we can do going forward, I think, is talk honestly about the risks and benefits and take responsibility for our choices. By that I mean, not just the choice to use a gene drive, but also the choice not to use one. Humans have a tendency to assume that the safest option is to preserve the status quo. But that's not always the case. Gene drives have risks, and those need to be discussed, but malaria exists now and kills 1,000 people a day. To combat it, we spray pesticides that do grave damage to other species, including amphibians and birds.

So when you hear about gene drives in the coming months, and trust me, you will be hearing about them, remember that. It can be frightening to act, but sometimes, not acting is worse.

Article source : http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_kahn_gene_editing_can_now_change_an_entire_species_forever/transcript?language=en

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Gene-policy transfer

China may relax its almost total ban on growing GM food

Apr 23rd 2016 | BEIJING | From the print edition

AFTER years of fierce debate in China about whether to allow widespread growing of genetically modified (GM) food crops, a strong signal emerged in 2013 that the leadership wanted to push ahead. It was given in a speech on agricultural policy by President Xi Jinping. In it he recounted his own experience of hunger during China’s great famine in the early 1960s. He also recalled lean times later that decade during the Cultural Revolution when he went months without “seeing the tiniest drop of oil” or “knowing the taste of meat”. He said that guaranteeing China’s “food security” was still a serious worry. Hinting at what he saw as a possible remedy, he said China must “occupy the commanding heights of transgenic technology” and not yield that ground to “big foreign firms”.

Twenty years earlier, visiting European scientists had been flabbergasted at how much progress China appeared to be making in this area. Unlike the Europeans, who had had to beg regulators for permission to experiment with a few hundred square metres of GM plants, their Chinese counterparts were conducting trials across tens of thousands of hectares.

Since then, however, Chinese policy had grown much more conservative, for two main reasons. The first is anxiety among some members of the public about the safety of GM foods. The other is a worry that China’s food market might become reliant on foreign GM technology. True, a large share of the soyabeans imported by China are genetically modified. So is the vast majority of the cotton it grows. In 2015 there were more than 6.6m farmers growing GM cotton, and a total of 3.7m hectares of GM crops under cultivation, including cotton and papaya, according to Randy Hautea of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, an industry group. But the government has been reluctant to approve the growing of GM staples such as maize (corn) and rice.   

Concerns about China’s growing dependence on food imports (see chart) may be causing policymakers to rethink. This year’s Document Number One, the name given to an annual statement on agriculture that is released by the leadership in January, said for the first time that China would “carefully promote” GM food crops. On April 13th Liao Xiyuan, an official at the agriculture ministry, said China planned to “push forward” commercial cultivation of GM maize over the next five years.

Worries about foreign domination of GM technology may ease if a $43 billion deal reached in February goes ahead for the takeover of Syngenta, a Swiss agricultural firm, by a Chinese company, ChemChina. The acquisition must still be approved by regulators in several countries, but it could give China control of Syngenta’s valuable GM-seed patents.

China’s policymakers may be trying to bring belated order to what is already thought to be the widespread, illegal, growing of GM crops. Greenpeace, an NGO, reported in January that 93% of samples taken from maize fields in Liaoning province in the north-east tested positive for genetic modification, as did nearly all the seed samples and maize-based foods it gathered at supermarkets in the area. Anti-GM campaigners in China may be too late in trying to close the barn door.

Article source : http://www.economist.com/news/china/21697272-china-may-relax-its-almost-total-ban-growing-gm-food-gene-policy-transfer

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<Questions>

Q1. How do you think about the concept of gene editing? 

Q2. What is your stance for gene drive to eliminate the malaria mosquito? Do you agree or disagree with this idea? 

Q3. Currently China announces plans to grow more varieties, increase acreage of GMO crops. How do you think about China's decision? 

Q4. How do you think about Genetically modified organism(GMO) food? Do you agree or disagree?

Q5. Have genetically engineered crops reduced insecticide applications?

Q6. Do genetically engineered crops help or hurt poor farmers?

Q7. Do we absolutely need genetically engineered crops to feed the world?

Q8. Do we have GMO labeling system in Korea? 

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Technology could be the best or worst thing 

that happened to inequality

Written by Vivek Wadhwa/ Distinguished Fellow and Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley

Published Thursday 11 August 2016

I live in the future. I drive an amazing Tesla electric vehicle, which takes control of the steering wheel on highways. My house, in Menlo Park, California, is a “passive” home that expends minimal energy on heating or cooling. With the solar panels on my roof, my energy bills are close to zero – including running the car. My iPhone is encased in a cradle laced with electronic sensors that I can place against my chest to generate a detailed electrocardiogram. With this, I can take a reading virtually anywhere on Earth and send it to my doctors. Because I have a history of heart trouble, including a life-threatening heart attack, knowing that I can communicate with my doctors in seconds instead of hours takes the fear out of hiking the open space reserves in the hills.

I spend much of my time talking to entrepreneurs and researchers about breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics. These entrepreneurs are building a better future, often at a breakneck pace. One team built a fully functioning surgical-glove prototype to deliver tactile guidance for doctors during examinations – in three weeks. Another built visualization software that can tell farmers the health of their crops using images taken by off-the-shelf video cameras flown on drones. That technology took four weeks. You get the idea. I do, in fact, live in the future as it is forming. It is forming far faster than most people realize, and far faster than the human mind can comfortably perceive.

Technology: the great leveler?

The distant future is no longer distant. The pace of technological change is rapidly accelerating, and those changes are coming to you very soon, whether you like it or not. Look at the way smartphones crept up on us. Just about everyone now has one. We are always checking email, receiving texts, ordering our goods online, and sharing our lives with distant friends and relatives on social media. These technologies changed our lives before we even realized it. Just as we blindly follow the directions that Google Maps gives us – even when we know better – we will comply with the constant advice that our digital doctor provides. I’m talking about the artificially intelligent app on our smartphone that will have read our medical data and monitor our lifestyles and habits. It will warn us not to eat that eat slice of cheesecake lest we gain another 10 pounds.

So you say that I live in a technobubble, a world that is not representative of the lives of the majority of people in the US or in the world? That’s true. I live a comfortable life in Silicon Valley and am fortunate to sit near the top of the technology and innovation food chain. So I see the future sooner than most people. The noted science-fiction writer William Gibson, who is a favourite of hackers and techies, once wrote: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet”. But, from my vantage point at its apex, I am watching that distribution curve flatten, and quickly. Simply put, the future is happening faster and faster. It is happening everywhere. Technology is the great leveler, the great unifier, the great creator of new and destroyer of old.

The greatest shift since the dawn of humankind

Once, technology could be put in a box, a discrete business dominated by business systems and some cool gadgets. It slowly but surely crept into more corners of our lives. Today the creep has become a headlong rush. Technology is taking over every part of our lives; every part of society; every waking moment of every day. Increasingly pervasive data networks and connected devices are causing rapid information flows from the source to the masses – and down the economic ladders from the developed societies to the poorest. From biology to energy to media to politics to food to transportation, we are witnessing unprecedented shifts that are redefining our future.

Perhaps my present life in the near future, in the technobubble in Silicon Valley, sounds unreal. Believe me, it is something we will laugh at within a decade as an extremely primitive existence. We are only just commencing the greatest shift that society has seen since the dawn of humankind. And, as in all other manifest shifts – from the use of fire for shelter and for cooking to the rise of agriculture and the development of sailing vessels, internal-combustion engines, and computing – this one will arise from breathtaking advances in technology. This shift, though, is both broader and deeper, and is happening far more quickly than the previous tectonic shift.

The dark side of the technological revolution – and how to avoid it

Such rapid, ubiquitous change has, of course, a dark side. Jobs as we know them will disappear. Our privacy will be further compromised. Our children may never drive a car or ride in one driven by a human being. We have to worry about biological terrorism and killer drones. Someone you know – maybe you – will have his or her DNA sequence and fingerprints stolen. Man and machine will begin to merge into a single entity. You will have as much food as you can possibly eat, for better and for worse.

The ugly state of politics in the United States and Britain illustrates the impact of income inequality and the widening technological divide. More and more people are being left behind and are protesting in every way they can. Technologies such as social media are being used to fan the flames and to exploit ignorance and bias. The situation will get only worse – unless we find ways to share the prosperity we are creating.

We have a choice: to build an amazing future such as we saw on Star Trek, or to head into the dystopia of Mad Max. It really is up to us; we must tell our policy-makers what choices we want them to make. The key is to ensure that the technologies we are building have the potential to benefit everyone equally; balance the risks and the rewards; and minimize the dependence that technologies create. But first, we must learn about these advances ourselves and be part of the future they are creating.

This article is based on Vivek Wadhwa’s upcoming book, Driver in the Driverless Car: How our technology choices will create the future, which will be released this winter.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/technology-could-be-the-best-or-worst-thing-that-happened-to-inequality?utm_content=bufferdf712&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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<Questions>

Q1. Do you think technology is making inequality worse?

Q2. Why do we need technologies?  

Q3. What is the most critical concern in your society? Can you tackle those troubles with newly developed tech.?

Q4. Can you make any exemplary case of technologies which are equally beneficial to every human being? 

Q5. What technology-related blogs, podcasts, tweets or websites do you follow? Do you share any information yourself online? 

Q6. How do you keep your technology skills current?

Q7. What are your favorite and least favorite technology products, and why?