Instagram is looking to channel the anger of its users by introducing a new feature that allows them to report various problems with the app by shaking their phones.
“Have you ever used Instagram and it wasn’t working like it was supposed to? It was just really getting you… really just pissing you off?” Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri asked his followers in a clip uploaded to Twitter on Wednesday.
Well, precisely for infuriating situations like that, the platform has developed a feature it’s calling “rage shake,” he announced.
Shaking your phone will, from now on, cause a special form to pop up on screen, allowing you to instantly report issues such as photos not uploading or audio not playing.
The form is also the perfect place to let out “all the emotions and feels you’ve got going on,” Mosseri insisted, assuring Instagrammers that these reports would be promptly dealt with.
Thanks to their feedback, Instagram will be able to optimize its bug-fixing process, he said. The option, which he described as a “hidden gem,” is so far available only in the US, on both iOS and Android.
The Instagram boss gently shook his own cellphone in the clip to demonstrate the feature in action. However, it’s likely upset users may well end up rage-shaking with a good deal more passion, which could increase the risk of a gadget being damaged, or their owner or even a passerby being struck should the phone fly out of their hand.
Mosseri also didn’t advise the public what to do with their rage over media revelations about alleged shady practices by Instagram and the platform’s owner, Facebook.
Among the trove of papers recently leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen was an internal study from 2020 reporting that Instagram was causing many of its young users, particularly teen girls, to suffer mental health issues and suicidal thoughts. However, the platform kept operating in the same manner despite this finding, with changes being promised only after the study made headlines this September.
MADRID, Nov 19 (IPS) – Kailash Satyarthi,? an Indian social reformer and co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Malala Yousafzai, spoke in a recent international forum about the devastating impacts of child labour.
Scientists have used artificial intelligence to “predict” formulas for new designer drugs, with the stated goal of helping to improve their regulation. The AI generated formulas for nearly nine million potential new drugs.
Researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) used a deep neural net for the job, teaching it to make up chemical structures of potential new drugs. According to their study, released this week, the computer intelligence fared better at the task than the scientists had expected.
The research team used a database of known designer drugs – synthetic psychoactive substances – to train the AI on their structures. The market for designer drugs is ever-changing, since their manufacturers are constantly tweaking their formulas to circumvent restrictions and produce new “legal” substances, while cracking their structure takes months for law enforcement agencies, the researchers said.
“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public-health concern to emergency departments across the world,” one of the researchers, UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider has said.
After its training, the AI was able to generate some 8.9 million potential designer drugs. Afterwards, researchers ran a data sheet of some 196 new drugs, which had emerged in real life after the model was trained, and found that more than 90% of these have been already predicted by the computer.
“The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world,” senior author Dr. David Wishart, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, has said.
Identifying completely unknown substances remains an issue for the AI, the research team has noted, but they hope it might potentially help with that task, since the computer was also able to predict which formulas of designer drugs were more likely to be created and hit the market. The model “ranked the correct chemical structure of an unidentified designer drug among the top 10 candidates 72 percent of the time,” while throwing in spectrometry analysis, which is an easily obtained measurement, bumped the accuracy to some 86%.
“It was shocking to us that the model performed this well, because elucidating entire chemical structures from just an accurate mass measurement is generally thought to be an unsolvable problem,” Skinnider stated.
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Nadya Zafira, an international relations student at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada University, won a writing competition for her letter to UN chief António Guterres, in which she addressed the inequalities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how indigenous communities and youth are marginalized in global conversations on climate crisis.
Taiwan’s president unveiled the country’s combat wing of advanced US-made F-16 fighters in a ceremony on Thursday, showing its new Air Force capabilities against mainland China.
The event, held at an air base in the southern Taiwanese city of Chiayi, saw the island commission the first combat wing of F-16 fighters, developed with US support.
The F-16 upgrades, costing T$110 billion (USD$3.95 billion), have been jointly completed by American manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp and Taiwan’s Aerospace Industrial Development Corp.
Taiwan’s leader, Tsai Ing-wen, touted the new F-16s as ensuring that the island’s defenses would be “even stronger” in the face of increased tensions with China.
In October, Beijing sent a record 150 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in four straight days of incursions. Over the past year, China’s Air Force has increased military activity in and around Taiwan’s ADIZ, according to Taipei.
Despite Taipei claiming it does not want to provoke a confrontation with China, the island’s president pledged that it will “do whatever it takes to defend itself.”
China has rejected claims that it is provoking conflict in Taiwan, which it sees as an integral part of its country, accusing America of “inflating” the island separatist movement, firmly stating that “Taiwan independence” is a dead end and Beijing will “take all steps” to ensure the island remains under its control. In recent years, China has become increasingly assertive about reuniting its wealthy island neighbor with the mainland.
The successful F-16 development process has been seen by Taiwan as the latest visible sign of the military partnership between Washington, DC and Taipei. Back in 2019, America approved an $8 billion sale of F-16s to Taiwan, which would bring the total number of jets in the island’s fleet to 200.
During the event, the Taiwanese president praised America for remaining steadfast in its cooperation with the island despite opposition from China. “As long as we adhere to the values of democracy and freedom, there will be more like-minded countries standing on the same front with us,” Tsai said alongside US diplomat Sandra Oudkirk.
In 2019, after the US and Taiwan agreed to upgrade the F-16 fighter jets, then-Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang threatened to sanction American firms unless the deal was halted. Beijing opposed the military partnership between Taipei and Washington, DC, arguing that the sale violated international law, harmed relations between the countries, and breached the One China policy, which America recognizes.
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Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has described an anti-lockdown protest in his city as an “orgy of violence.” The Dutch demonstration devolved into a violent riot that saw police open fire on protesters.
Aboutaleb described the events of Friday night as an “orgy of violence,” after protesters packed Rotterdam’s central Coolsingel shopping street to voice their opposition to an ongoing partial lockdown, a ban on New Year’s Eve fireworks displays, and the possibility of a two-tiered system of freedom in the Netherlands, one of liberty for the vaccinated and restrictions for those without the jab.
The protest soon got out of hand, and police said on Saturday that 57 people were arrested. Protesters were seen torching police vehicles and launching fireworks at police, who shot at them in response.
Aboutaleb said that the cops had been “forced” to use their weapons. “On a number of occasions the police felt it necessary to draw their weapons to defend themselves,” he told reporters. “They shot at protesters, people were injured.”
Police say at least seven people were injured. Two of these injuries were caused by police bullets, and the victims are still in hospital. One officer was hospitalized, while several others were treated at the scene for minor injuries.
France’s best-known book of words, Le Petit Robert dictionary, has caused a stir by including the non-binary personal pronoun as an alternative to the existing masculine and feminine terms.
While the annual update of the Petit Robert dictionary is often a topic of considerable debate in French media, the latest edition has caused quite the backlash, with some, including a cabinet member, accusing it of pandering to wokeism.
The word “iel,” a neologism combining the French words for he and she (“il” and “elle“), is described as the personal pronoun for a person of any gender. “Personal pronoun subject to the third person singular and plural, used to evoke a person of any gender. The use of the pronominal in inclusive communication,” the dictionary’s entry reads.
Striking out at the latest inclusion, François Jolivet, an MP in President Emmanuel Macron’s LREM party took his protest to the Académie Française, the official guardians of the French language.
Describing the move as “wokeism,” Jolivet said in a letter to the Académie that the word “iel” had no place in the French language and claimed it would be a precursor to the rise of ‘woke’ ideology, which undermines the values of the Gallic nation.
Outspoken Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer also chimed in. “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language,” he tweeted, sharing Jolivet’s letter. “Just as our schoolchildren are consolidating their basic skills, they don’t need to have this as a reference,” he added.
The head of Gaullist party Debout La France, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, further criticized Petit Robert’s “woke” addition. “Let’s defend our language against these ridiculous fanatics of deconstruction and let’s boycott the collaborators who give into them,” he tweeted.
Le Petit Robert has responded to the “lively debate” by claiming that the pronoun has been used increasingly in society in recent months and they chose to reflect this by adding it to their latest update. The publication also said that some have welcomed the addition.
France’s offensive against wokeism, which has been described by some as an Anglo-Saxon import, recently saw Blanquer vow to increase the teaching of ancient Greek and Latin languages. The education minister claims that the classical vernaculars respond to a demand for logos (language as a tool for reason), in a world where “a lack of reason is spreading like wildfire.”
The children of families who were affected by the massive earthquake which devastated large parts of south-west Haiti in August this year are receiving free hot meals at school as part of an initiative by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to support the recovery of the country’s most vulnerable communities.
Sporadic clashes broke out at massive Saturday demonstrations in major European cities, as thousands of people took to the streets of Vienna, Paris and Rome to express their discontent with Covid-19 restrictions.
The Austrian capital Vienna on Saturday saw the largest protest turnout since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 38,000 people took to the city streets to join a dozen demonstrations protesting government measures.
Austria se colocó en pleno apartheid sanitario esta semana, mirando a Viena ahora mismo, no lo pensarías, recuerda que dependen únicamente de la conformidad del pueblo, la resistencia es clave. pic.twitter.com/tKRAIJ2GLt
— Creo en la justicia divina y terrenal 💞💞🇪🇸🇪🇸 (@Ninita0011) November 20, 2021
Tens of thousands have taken to the streets today in one of the largest protests in the history of Vienna, Austria, after the government implemented a new COVID lockdown and became the first in the world to announce compulsory vaccination.pic.twitter.com/FFriWCZioG
The protests came a day after the Austrian authorities ordered nationwide compulsory vaccination from February 1 and imposed a full lockdown, starting Monday. The massive procession that spanned over several kilometers marched along Vienna’s central ring road. The city center was paralyzed for several hours as traffic was restricted.
Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party, whose members joined the rallies, put the number of protesters at 100,000. Some demonstrations were also attended by members of various far-right groups. The protests were generally peaceful but footage published by Ruptly video news agency showed several scuffles between the police and the demonstrators breaking out.
Law enforcement spoke of a total of five arrests. One incident saw a protester attempting to grab an officer’s gun and take it from its holster. In another incident, the officers were pelted with bottles and fireworks and had to use pepper spray in response.
#w2011 Die Situation in Wien eskaliert. Die Polizei scheint, trotz der bekannten Grossmobilisierung und zahllosen Gewaltaufrufen, äusserst schlecht vorbereitet. An mehreren Orten wurde die Polizei umzingelt und musste sich zurückziehen. pic.twitter.com/4VzZTbww2S
Hundreds of kilometers away from Vienna, in the French capital Paris, events took a more dramatic turn. There, a demonstration against the government Covid-19 measures coincided with the third anniversary of the Yellow Vests movement. Hundreds of protesters took part in the protest, which quickly turned into clashes between the demonstrators and law enforcement.
The protesters were building barricades and setting them on fire as well as pelting police with bottles and various other projectiles. Law enforcement responded with profuse amounts of tear gas, sometimes filling entire streets with thick smoke to disperse the crowds.
PARIS – Un conteneur est renversé pour utiliser les bouteilles comme projectiles.
Rome saw a massive demonstration against Italy’s Covid-19 health pass, also known as the Green Pass. Some 4,000 people gathered in the center of the Italian capital, according to the police. The demonstrators were waving national flags and chanting “Freedom” and “No Green Pass,” referring to the vaccination certificate needed to enter various public venues such as clubs or bars.
The crowd staged a sit-in in the Circus Maximus – an ancient Roman chariot-racing stadium converted into a modern-day park. They remained there after sunset, lighting the area with thousands of phones and colored smoke bombs. The rally was peaceful, though, as the police did not report any incidents.
Unlike Rome, Italy’s northern city of Milano saw clashes between protesters and the police as law enforcement officers sought to break up an unauthorized rally at the city center. Large police forces were deployed to the city center and several squares were cordoned off.
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Protesters thronged the streets of Australian cities on Saturday, demanding an end to what they called the “tyranny” and “oppression” of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the proposed expansion of the government’s pandemic powers.
In Melbourne, Sky News reporter Sophie Elsworth described “tens of thousands of people streaming through the streets.” The march came after a week of smaller protests aimed at Victoria Premier Dan Andrews’ controversial pandemic bill, which if approved by the state’s legislature would allow Andrews and Health Minister Martin Foley to declare an indefinite state of emergency and issue public health orders by decree – including “any order… that the minister believes is reasonably necessary to protect public health.”
Tens of thousands of people keep streaming through the streets. Many I’ve spoken to are concerned about the state govt, Premier, vaccine mandates, the pandemic bill & what future holds for their kids. #melbourneprotestpic.twitter.com/smexulQ4ts
Should the bill pass, it would allow Andrews to target certain classes of people with these orders, categorizing them by age, occupation, or vaccination status. Fines for noncompliance would range from up to AU$21,800 for people and AU$109,000 for businesses.
Alternative media sources claimed that more than 100,000 people showed up to protest. However, the demonstration remained free of the violent clashes seen at protests in Melbourne in recent months.
“Australia has been willing to send troops to all parts of the world to help people become free,” one military veteran told a crowd of listeners during the protest. “To now be fighting oppression here in our own country, it’s saddening.”
Melbourne Australia 🇦🇺
An Aussie veteran is calling former servicemen and cops who have sworn an oath to Australia to stand up against the tyranny 👊 pic.twitter.com/4RsoRMjoJE
Huge numbers of protesters also turned out in Sydney, and although more than 600 police officers were deployed to watch over the gathering, no arrests were made, 9News reported.
Holding signs decrying state “tyranny,” the demonstrators chanted “freedom” and called for the firing of state politicians who have implemented a two-tier system where the unvaccinated are denied many of the privileges extended to the fully jabbed.
Similarly massive gatherings took place in Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, with no notable incidents of violence or police action. Further afield, protests are taking place in more than 120 cities around the world this weekend, in a loosely coordinated event dubbed the ‘Worldwide Rally For Freedom’ by activists.
Thousands of people have descended across Rundle Park today as part of an Adelaide freedom rally. Some of those in the crowd say they have lost their job as a result of mandated vaccinations in their sector. @9NewsAdelpic.twitter.com/YdzvxYJhqF
