Daily Archives: March 7, 2021

Students are struggling to read behind masks and screens during COVID-19, but expectations are no different – USA TODAY

Posted: March 7, 2021 at 1:16 pm

Phaedra Simon, a single mom of three from Opelousas, LouisianaI'm not trained to teach them how to read. It's totally different from how I learned.

Simon worked hard to keep her children ages9, 8 and 7 on track when they started the year virtually like everyone else in the St. Landry Parish school district. She even quit her jobto give her youngest the attention he needed.

As soon as the chance came to return to in-person learning, she seized it, even as she worries about their health."I'm not trained to teach them how to read," Simon said.

She's continued working with them, reading at home together every night. "I'm still nervous, waiting to see their new report cards," Simon said.

School looks different for kids and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic

Kindergarteners and their parents explain what school is like a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

USA TODAY

Nearly a year into remote learning, instilling good learning habits remains a daily mission for Pam Bowling, a first grade teacher atAllen Elementary School in eastern Kentucky. Shepeppers every virtual lesson with positive narration Good job! I hear reading books being opened! a management technique usually reserved for kids off-task in an actual classroom.

Only now, the 6- and 7-year-olds in Bowlings class log on from their homes, many still donning pajamas.

Pam Bowling, a first grade teacher at Allen Elementary School in Allen City, Ky., reviews sight words with her class during a Feb. 15, 2021 virtual lesson.Floyd County Public Schools

Make sure we're sitting up, Bowling trilled at the start of her daily 9 a.m. reading session. I want you to be comfortable, but I dont want you to be too comfortable, right? We dont want to fall asleep. We want to make sure were sitting up, paying attention, just like we were at school.

On a mid-February morning, one perched at a desk, another sprawled on a couch, a thirdsatcross-legged in her bed, a stuffed Olaf, the snowman from the movie "Frozen," at her side.

I've got em with hair that looks like they've been shot out of a cannon,joked Bowling, an educator for 25 years.They're getting up, and their hair is every which way. And you can tell they're sleepy.

Even for veterans such as Bowling,teaching students to read over a videoconferencecall is an unprecedented challenge.

"It's particularly hard for teachers right now," said Taylor, the early learning professor fromRhodes College. "I dont think you can make the same connections, give the same in-the-moment feedback or at least as often as you might be if you had all of your students in a room."

In Floyd County, a community of about 36,000 in Kentuckys rural Appalachia region, Bowlings pleas for focus and participation are motivated by an unsettling reality: Poverty rates are high, and educational attainment is low.There is no time to waste.

Except for a brief return to in-person classes in the early fall, Bowling, 50,has been teaching from her dining room, a focus wall displaying weekly spelling words and reading skills affixed to a wooden hutch behind her seat.

I was very skeptical (of remote learning), Bowling recalled. I said, I don't know how we're gonna read through the camera. I don't know how that's gonna translate.

There was no sign of her early skepticism during the class's mid-February lesson asBowling and her students tackledsight words, spelling with the short e and nonfiction reading comprehension. Bowling, who said she can be her own worst critic, said she triesto remember the setup is only temporary.

Its just swallowing the fact that Hey, this is what I've been dealt with, she said. It might not be the best, it may not be the easiest approach, but and I say this almost every day to my parents and kids we're just gonna roll with the hand were dealt.

The next day, a brutal snow and ice storm knocked out power for nearly 48 hours. A few days after that, another momentous challenge loomed: With little time to prepare, Bowling and her kids eased back to in-person classes on a hybrid schedule, a litany of health and safety routines added to her charge.

"We're just gonna roll with it," she said.

WATCH: Three third grade teachers, three perspectives

When schools shuttered in March, Sydney Tolbert was a preschooler atthe Libertas Schoolof Memphis, Tennessee'sonly public Montessori charter school, and starting to makestrides in reading, her mother said.

"She was just right there. And then all of a sudden, we just stopped, recalledStephanie Tolbert, who felt relief that Libertas was of the few public schools in Memphis that offered in-person classes beginning in the fall.

I knew that if we could get her back in school, that she would just take off," Tolbert said. "And you could just see her. I watched her just, like, flourish. It was awesome.

In-person learning isn'ta pandemic panacea, especially for youngsters learning to read. In Sydney's multi-grade classroom, teacher Toni Sudduth, a classroom assistant and the 15 students practice social distancing and wear masks even when outside.

Second grader Skylar Tolbert, 7, peers over the shoulder of her younger sister, Sydney, 6, a kindergartner at Libertas School of Memphis. The sisters read at home each night after school.Courtesy photo

Although it helps that the curriculum is individualized for each student,group reading lessons, such as reviewing letter sounds, have had to be abbreviated. It's a challenge for students to be able to watch how their teacher's mouth moves while sounding out letter combinations and words. Sudduth started the year with a face mask with a clear window, but it kept fogging up. She switched to a clear face shield, so she can pulldown her mask behind the shield to demonstrate how a sound is made, then pull her mask up as the class makes the sound together, placing their hands to their throat to feel the sound as well.

Sounding out words is one area where online learning platforms provide an advantage, saidEmily Wakabi, areading interventionist at Libertas. I used to cue (students)every time, like, Watch my mouth,she said, and that's not helpful this year.

Most of Wakabi's work with about 40 children is done in person, but she meets online with students whose families don'twant to take the risk of returning to school. During a virtual session in February with second graderJada Guy, they worked onblending letter sounds to make words, and learning the new letter sound "ph." The computer froze, and an animated presentation to guide Jada as she pronounced the words lagged.

Know someone who has children who are struggling with reading? Share this story

Plenty of times, Jada demonstrated her excitement over what she was learning, including after writing down "pamphlet," a new word with the letter sound she'd been practicing.

"Was that fast, Ms. Wakabi?" she asked.

"That was so fast! You are fast," Wakabi said, explaining that building a student's confidence is a key to reading.

"A lot of times," she said, "kids need the motivation and encouragement to read just as much as they need the skills."

First grade teacher Kristin Bosco, left, works with a small group of students in her classroom at John Sevier Elementary in Maryville, Tenn., on Thursday, February 4, 2021. Bosco allows groups of up to eight virtual students to come into the classroom for in-person English-Language Arts learning from 8:30 to 11:30 in the morning.Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel

The Zoom meetingfeaturedmore personality than you see in a typical office call. A child sipped water too close to the computer. Another yawned, mouth wide open to the screen. A third sat obscured by his pencil box, which was positioned in front of the camera.

Kristin Bosco no longer gets distracted by such sights. The first grade teacher at John Sevier Elementary in Maryville, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, has 17 students in her virtual class.

She's grown accustomed to it, even if it might never feel normal to teach reading over a computer screen. While the children read a passage about a king, seeking words with the "ng" sound, Bosco flipped through her Zoom panel to see each face to make sure everyone paid attention.

Between tasks, the children talk with each other, something Bosco said she believes is important for their social growth. Learning this way has given her a window into the children's home life that she didn't always have. She hears about and often sees the children's pets and learns things such as when a parent switches jobs.

Conversations are an important foundation to literacy,helping children build vocabulary and practicewhat they're learning on the page.

Allowing children to talk more is really important," said Holmes from UL-Lafayette. "Teachers are trained to get children talking to each other. Theyre not learning that original, authentic language otherwise.

After the classreading, students brokeup into groups based on their reading level. Teacher's aide Kim Wood worked with one group, while Bosco stayed with another. Two groups occupied themselves withindependent activities. The groups rotate each day.

Bosco workedwith two boys who need the most support, takingturns with them reading a digital book about ice cream. One boy, Kian, told his teacher how much he loves ice cream, making a connection between it and the smoothie he has every night.

Kian's mom,Adrienne Schwarte, said virtual learning has allowed her to witness more of the learning process than she might otherwise see. Schwarte, a college professor,and her husbandadded a reading nook to their home to give Kian and his brother opportunities to read.

We've seen his confidence level really grow with reading," Schwarte said. "I would sayKian was probably a little bit of a slower reader at his grade level at the beginning of the yearcompared to some of the other students, and he's really picked up over the last three or four months.

At the start of the school year, third grade teacher Lisa Gemarwas asked to be one of 11 virtual teachers needed for children who didn't want in-person learning at Northside Elementary School in the Clinton, Mississippi, school district. It was an adjustment, but she was up to the challenge.

"The expectations are no different," Gemar, a 10-year teaching veteran, said of leading a class in a Zoomsession. "I'm still able to pick up on what they're struggling with, and we've built a really great relationship even virtually through a screen."

Just like their peers who are learning in person, the virtual students take weekly assessments, so teachers canreview what areas students need extra work in.Students whoneed more help meet daily with an intervention specialist for 30 minutes.

The transition to virtual learning was eased by Clinton's eight-year track record as aone-to-onedistrict, meaning every student gets alaptop or tablet.

In the Madison County School District north of Jackson, Mississippi,sometechnology issues have meantmore students needadditional intervention, saidChristylErickson, the district's curriculum director.

Some (students) are coming back that were unfortunately, because they had no internet and even hot spots that we provided did not help some of these children were packet learners," Erickson said."Their parents taught them. Now, we did have very few of those,but that's still a gap we have to close for these kids.

The experts fear the pandemic willwiden achievement gaps.

"Knowing what we know about how education inequity works, I would think its more likely that were going to see larger gaps between schools, between districts, because of those different kinds of financial resources," said Rhodes College's Taylor. "I hope that our national conversation around that is focused on the different types of resources provided to those groups rather than to look at them as individual failings."

If early readersget the resources in time and attention that they need, UL-Lafayette's Holmes said, she'soptimistic they can overcome the pandemic's challenges.

"Children are strong and can bounce back quickly, sometimes a lot faster than adults,"Holmes said."With consistent routines in place, whether learning at home or at school, I have hope that they will catch up."

Early childhood education coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from Save the Children. Save the Children does not provide editorial input.

Published11:50 am UTC Mar. 7, 2021Updated5:33 pm UTC Mar. 7, 2021

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Students are struggling to read behind masks and screens during COVID-19, but expectations are no different - USA TODAY

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First COVID-19 patient at U. Hospital says he wasnt scared to die – Deseret News

Posted: at 1:16 pm

SALT LAKE CITY The first COVID-19 patient treated at University of Utah Hospital said he wasnt scared to die, but he was hoping to pull through after his lungs quit working.

Neal Murphy, 75, believes he contracted COVID-19 on a Feb. 27, 2020, flight from California to Salt Lake City to visit his son, who is a doctor at University Hospital. He said was too tired to go to dinner that night and by morning, his temperature had reached 104.5 degrees.

I said to my wife, This is not a cold. A day later, they said, this is COVID, Murphy recalled in a U. video production created to commemorate the anniversary of Murphys survival of COVID-19.

It was the worst possible scenario, he said, adding that he was immediately isolated at the hospital. Murphy was given supplemental oxygen and was ultimately intubated and put on a ventilator for five days. At one point, he was given a 3% chance of survival.

Ive beat odds like that, thats no problem, he said. Murphy said he posted a picture of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on his hospital bed railing. If he can survive five years of torture, I can go through this.

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Murphys son, Dr. Ryan Murphy, said that in his dads situation, theres nothing he could do ... either he was going to survive or hes not.

Hes all about the fight, the struggle never give up, never surrender. Thats his ethos, the younger Murphy said.

In all, the elder Murphy, a professor of dentistry in Cleveland, was hospitalized in Utah for 13 days.

I wasnt scared. Im 75 years old. Ive been around the block a few times, he said. Theres a point where you have to say, I can do no more.

Murphy said he felt reassured by the U. staff.

Miracles are helped along by the dedicated people in health care, that cannot be denied, he said. They really are heroes. I would be a dead man without them.

The Utah Department of Health reported 570 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, as well as five new deaths.

The number of new cases has been gradually declining since after the first of the year. The rolling seven-day average of people with confirmed cases is now 9.5% with the average percentage of tests sitting at 4.6%.

The state administered nearly 26,100 doses of COVID-19 vaccine since Fridays report, bringing the total number of people who have been fully vaccinated to 304,168 in Utah. A total of 843,032 doses of vaccine have been administered in the state, according to the health department.

Utah has tested 2.24 million people for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including 7,052 since Fridays report was issued midday.

There are 194 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 29 fewer than was reported a week ago.

The deaths reported on Saturday include a Salt Lake County woman older than 85 who was not hospitalized at the time of her death; a Salt Lake County woman between the ages of 45 and 64 who was hospitalized; a Weber County man between 45 and 64 who was hospitalized; a Salt Lake County woman between 25 and 44 who was hospitalized; and, a Uintah County woman between 45 and 64 who was hospitalized.

The total number of lives lost to COVID-19 in Utah is at 1,975 since the pandemic hit here a year ago.

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Covid-19: U.S. Vaccination Pace Increases to 2 Million Doses a Day – The New York Times

Posted: at 1:16 pm

Heres what you need to know:People line up early at the Jacob Javits Convention Center Covid-19 vaccination hub on March 4, 2021.Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse Getty Images

The average number of vaccine doses being administered across the United States per day topped two million for the first time on Wednesday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A month ago, the average was about 1.3 million.

President Biden set a goal for the country shortly after taking office to administer more than 1.5 million doses a day, which the nation has now comfortably exceeded.

Mr. Biden has also promised to administer 100 million vaccines by his 100th day in office, which is April 30. As of Thursday, 54 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. Johnson & Johnsons one-shot vaccine was authorized for emergency use on Saturday, but those doses do not appear yet in the C.D.C. data.

The milestone was yet another sign of momentum in the nations effort to vaccinate every willing adult, even as state and city governments face several challenges, from current supply to logistics to hesitancy, of getting all of those doses into peoples arms.

Mass vaccination sites across the country are opening up or increasing their capacity, in part to respond to the new influx of doses from Johnson & Johnson. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday that three short-term mass vaccination sites will open in the state on Friday. Three other state-run sites, including one at Yankee Stadium, will begin administering shots around the clock. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp announced five new sites will open on March 17.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has recently helped open seven mega-sites in California, New York and Texas, that are staffed with active-duty troops. In Chicago, a vaccination site at the United Center will open next week, with a capacity of 6,000 shots a day. Many more such sites are planned.

There have been some hiccups in the massive logistical challenge of distributing millions of doses across the country, with special requirements for storage and handling. In Texas, more than 2,000 doses went to waste over the past two weeks, according to an analysis by The Houston Chronicle. A majority of those losses were blamed on blackouts that swept the state in February, leaving millions of homes and businesses without power, some for multiple days.

And Mr. Biden has made equity a major focus of his pandemic response, saying he wants pharmacies, mobile vaccination units and community clinics that help underserved communities to help increase the pace of vaccinations. Experts say that Black and Latino Americans are being vaccinated at lower rates because they face obstacles like language barriers and inadequate access to digital technology, medical facilities and transportation. But mistrust in government officials and doctors also plays a role and is fed by misinformation that is spread on social media. In cities across the country, wealthy white residents are lining up to be vaccinated in low-income Latino and Black communities.

The president said on Tuesday that the country would have enough doses available for every American adult by the end of May, though he said it would take longer to inoculate everyone and he urged people to remain vigilant by wearing masks.

The administration also announced it had brokered a deal in which the drug giant Merck & Co. will help manufacture the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The unusual agreement between two rivals in the pharmaceutical industry was historic, Mr. Biden said on Tuesday. This is a type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II.

Mr. Biden was also going to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, to give Johnson & Johnson access to supplies for manufacturing and packaging vaccines.

Connecticut will later this month end capacity limits in restaurants, offices and several other businesses, Ned Lamont, the states governor, said on Thursday, following moves by other states that have eased some virus-related restrictions.

But Mr. Lamont, a Democrat, will not lift his states mask mandate, drawing a distinction between his announcement and moves made by the Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi this week.

This is not Texas, this is not Mississippi this is Connecticut, Mr. Lamont said at a news conference.

Starting on March 19, restaurants, retail stores, libraries, personal care services, gyms, offices and houses of worship will no longer have their capacity restricted.

But businesses will be required to enforce rules on face coverings and to ensure six feet of space or plexiglass barriers between those inside customers and employees which will effectively limit capacity at several businesses.

Several other limits will remain in place, including safety and cleaning protocols at gyms and personal care services like salons and spas. Bars that do not serve food will remain closed. Unlike neighboring Massachusetts, Connecticut will not lift a curfew that requires restaurants and entertainment venues to close by 11 p.m.

Your mother used to tell you nothing good happens after 11 oclock at night, Mr. Lamont said. You know, it gets more fun sometimes, but were going to push that off a little bit longer.

Mr. Lamonts announcement made nearly a year after Connecticuts first confirmed case of the virus is a significant step forward for the states reopening.

It followed several weeks in which new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have declined in the state, a decrease that Mr. Lamont attributed to successful mask mandates and Connecticuts vaccination rollout program.

As of Thursday, the state had 433 people hospitalized with the virus. Its average positive test rate over the past seven days is at 2.3 percent, which Mr. Lamont said was the lowest rate in nearly four months.

Were beginning to get a handle on what works, he said, pointing to the decline.

Still, over the past week, Connecticut has reported an average of 22 new virus cases a day per 100,000 people, a rate that is the 10th highest per capita among all states.

The United States as a whole is averaging 19 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Federal health officials, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have urged governors not to relax their rules, warning that the country may be leveling off at a relatively high number of daily virus cases.

But Mr. Lamont said that he did not believe that the capacity limits on businesses were having a significant enough effect on curbing the virus that they needed to remain in place.

Its not so much a question of how you adjust the dial and go capacity up 10 percent or down 10 percent, or whether you have a curfew for two weeks or four weeks, and then you go back, Mr. Lamont said. I think were finding what works is wearing the mask, social distancing and vaccinations.

Mr. Lamonts announcement reflected decisions by other states to loosen virus-related restrictions as vaccination programs were ramping up and the number of new cases were starting to plateau. Throughout the pandemic, officials have had to adjust restrictions, finding a balance between safety, economic concerns and political pressure.

The governors of New York and New Jersey, both also Democrats, with whom Mr. Lamont has collaborated significantly on the pandemic response, have raised capacity limits in businesses, including restaurants, in the past month. Both of those states have been reporting new cases at the highest rates in the country.

A small group of scientists and others who believe the novel coronavirus that spawned the pandemic could have originated from a lab leak or accident is calling for an inquiry independent of the World Health Organizations team of independent experts sent to China last month.

While many scientists involved in researching the origins of the virus continue to assert that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic almost certainly began with a leap from bats to an intermediate animal and then to humans, other theories persist and have gained new visibility with the W.H.O.-led team of experts recent visit to China.

Officials with the W.H.O. have said in recent interviews that it was extremely unlikely but not impossible that the spread of the virus was linked to some sort of lab accident.

In an open letter, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde, the French newspaper, the signers list what they cast as flaws in the joint W.H.O.-China inquiry, and argue that it could not adequately address the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab.

Many of those who signed the letter were based in France. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and one of the scientists who signed the letter, said it grew out of a series of online discussions among scientists, policy experts and others who came to be known informally as the Paris group.

Dr. Ebright said that no one in the group thought that the virus had been intentionally created as a weapon, but they were all convinced that an origin in a lab through research or by accidental infection was as likely as a spillover occurring in nature from animals to humans.

Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the W.H.O., replied in an email that the team of experts that had gone to China is working on its full report as well as an accompanying summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a couple of weeks.

transcript

We need to get past Easter, and hopefully allow more Alabamians to get their first shot before we take a step that some of the states have taken to remove the mask order altogether and lift other restrictions. Folks, were not there yet, but goodness knows were getting closer. Our new modified order will include several changes that will ease up some of our current restrictions while keeping our mask order in place for another five weeks through April 9. But let me be abundantly clear, after April the 9th, I will not keep the mask order in effect. Now, theres no question that wearing masks has been one of our greatest tools in combating the spread of the virus. That, along with practicing good hygiene and social distancing, has helped us keep more people from getting sick or worse, dying. And when we even when we lift the mask order, I will continue to wear my mask while Im around others and strongly urge my fellow citizens to use common sense and do the same thing. But at the but at that time, it will become a matter of personal responsibility and not a government mandate.

Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama on Thursday said she was extending the statewide mask order for another month, breaking with two other Republican governors who have announced plans to lift mandates in their states against the advice of federal health officials.

Aside from her decision on the mask mandate, which will now be in place until April 9, Ms. Ivey said other virus related restrictions, including allowing restaurants and breweries to operate at full capacity, will also be lifted then.

Theres no question that wearing masks has been one of my greatest tools in combating the virus, she said at a news conference.

New coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are down in the state, according to a New York Times database. About 14 percent of the residents in the state have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The states health officer, Dr. Scott Harris, said the state had already given more than a million vaccine shots.

We need to get past Easter and hopefully allow more Alabamians to get their first shot before we take a step some other states have taken to remove the mask order altogether and lift some other restrictions, Ms. Ivey said on Thursday. Folks were not there yet, but goodness knows were getting closer.

In recent days, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has been pleading with state officials not to relax health precautions now, warning about the trajectory of cases nationwide and the detection of more cases of virus variants across the country.

We are just on the verge of capitalizing on the culmination of a historic scientific success: the ability to vaccinate the country in just a matter of three or four more months, Dr. Walensky said on Wednesday. How this plays out is up to us. The next three months are pivotal.

And President Biden on Wednesday criticized officials in several states, including Texas and Mississippi, for lifting mask mandates, describing their actions as Neanderthal thinking and insisting that it was a big mistake for people to stop wearing masks.

Ms. Ivey issued a statewide mask order last summer when the number of cases in the state soared less than three months after she eased restrictions at the end of April. The mask mandate has drawn criticism from members of her own party. She extended it in January when the state was seeing a second surge of cases.

On Thursday, she said she planned to wear her mask around others, even after the statewide over was lifted. She urged residents to use common sense and do the same thing.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, is also taking a more measured approach. He said he will lift all public health measures once coronavirus cases drop to 50 or fewer new cases per 100,000 people over two weeks.

Mr. DeWine put the numbers in context: On Dec. 3, Ohio was at 731 cases per 100,000 people over two weeks; by Feb. 3, that number dropped to 445 and to 179 per 100,000 on Thursday.

This is our path back, he said in a news conference Thursday. We are in the last few miles of what has been a grueling marathon.

The chapel at Continental Funeral Home was once a place where the living remembered the dead. Now the pews, chairs and furniture have been pushed aside to make room, and the dead far outnumber the living.

On a Thursday afternoon last month in Continentals chapel in East Los Angeles, across the street from a 7-Eleven, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes.

And two bodies in open coffins, awaiting makeup.

And seven wrapped in white and pink sheets on wheeled stretchers.

And 18 in closed coffins where the pews used to be.

And 31 on the shelves of racks against the walls.

The math numbed the heart as much as the mind 62 bodies.

Elsewhere at Continental in the hallways beyond the chapel, in the trailers outside there were even more.

I live a nightmare every day, said Magda Maldonado, 58, the owner of the funeral home. Its a crisis, a deep crisis. When somebody calls me, I beg them for patience. Please be patient, I say, thats all Im asking you. Because nothing is normal these days.

Funeral homes are places America often prefers to ignore. As the coronavirus pandemic surged in Los Angeles in recent months, the industry went into disaster mode, quietly and anonymously dealing with mass death on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped. Like those in Queens and Brooklyn in the spring or South Texas in the summer, funeral homes in parts of Los Angeles have become hellish symbols of Covid-19s toll.

Continental has been one of the most overwhelmed funeral homes in the country. Its location at the center of Southern Californias coronavirus spike, its popularity with working-class Mexican and Mexican-American families who have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, its decision to expand its storage capacity all have combined to turn the day-to-day into a careful dance of controlled chaos. For more than six weeks, a reporter and a photographer were allowed by Ms. Maldonado, her employees and the relatives of those who died to document the inner workings of the mortuary and the heartache of funeral after funeral after funeral.

Beverly Hills has had 32 deaths. Santa Monica has had 150. East Los Angeles an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that is one of the largest Mexican-American communities in the United States has had 388.

With more than 52,000 virus-related deaths, California has recorded the most of any state but about average per capita. At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll hits the gut first, the eyes second.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Austrian officials will carry out a mass vaccination drive in the western district of Schwaz in the hopes of stabilizing the alpine area, which has been battered by a surge in new coronavirus infections driven in part by the variant B.1.351, first identified in South Africa.

The pilot program in Austria is the first such inoculation drive in the European Union. Like most of the rest of the bloc, the country is lagging behind some other wealthy nations such as Britain, Israel and the United States in its vaccine rollout. Only 5 percent of residents in the alpine state of Tyrol, which includes Schwaz, have received at least one shot.

All residents above the age of 16 will be able to get free vaccinations when the drive begins next week. The European Union has allocated 100,000 extra doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the area near the western Austrian city of Innsbruck, which is home to about 86,000 people.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Wednesday that the effort would be our chance to eradicate the variant in the region of Schwaz.

The infection rate in the broader Tyrol region has declined from its peak of about 800 cases per 100,000 people over a seven-day period in November to just over 100 per 100,000 in the past week. But the German government closed its side of the border with the area on Wednesday night when it became clear that a high percentage of those infections were caused by the B.1.351 variant.

On Thursday, Mr. Kurz traveled to Israel where, together with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, he planned to speak with experts about collaborating on future vaccines.

In other news from around the world:

The state of So Paulo, Brazil, will head into its toughest restrictions yet this weekend, Gov. Joo Doria told reporters on Wednesday, as cases surge in the region. All bars, restaurants and nonessential stores will close until at least March 19, according to The Associated Press. The restrictions come as the country grapples with a concerning new variant that has lashed the Amazonian city of Manaus, in the northwest, and is spreading to other places. Brazil recorded its highest single-day toll of the pandemic this week.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand said that a snap lockdown imposed last week on the countrys largest city, Auckland, would end on Sunday morning. Social gatherings will be capped at 100 people and other restrictions will remain in place. The lockdown was imposed after the authorities discovered an untraceable case. They have since conducted more than 50,000 tests and traced more than 6,000 contacts.

Japan plans to extend its state of emergency for the Tokyo metropolitan area until March 21, even as it prepares to lift that declaration in six other prefectures, the national broadcaster, NHK, reported on Friday. The restrictions in greater Tokyo, which include an order for restaurants and bars to close by 8 p.m., had been scheduled to end on Sunday.

Germanys independent vaccine panel has said that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine can be used on people 65 and over, reversing earlier guidance. Although the European drug regulator authorized use of the shots in January, the German panel had initially refused to recommend the vaccine because it had not been tested enough in that age group. Because Germany is still focusing its vaccination drive on those over 80, much of the AstraZeneca doses had lingered in storage.

Hungary announced on Thursday that it would introduce a new round of restrictions next week, with some schools closed and nonessential stores shuttered, to combat a sharp rise in coronavirus cases. The announcement comes as a blow to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had been vocal about his hopes for the country to begin reopening this month.

France on Thursday vowed to vaccinate at least 10 million people by mid-April as the government, still stopping short of a nationwide lockdown, extended restrictions on movements and gatherings to areas in the country where there have been surges in local cases. So far, only about 3.1 million people, or 4.7 percent of the countrys population, have received a first injection, and only 1.7 million people, or 2.5 percent of the population, have been fully vaccinated, which puts France behind other European countries in the vaccination rollout. Jean Castex, the prime minister, said at a news conference that starting in mid-April, all people ages 50 to 74 would be eligible for the vaccine, regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

Albee Zhang contributed research.

One in 10 children hospitalized with Covid-19 at four New York area hospitals last spring and summer developed acute kidney injury, a new study has found. The rate was even higher among children also found to have a serious inflammatory condition associated with Covid-19: almost one in five of them experienced sudden kidney injury.

Children with the inflammatory condition and kidney injury frequently had poor heart function and stayed in the hospital for longer, the researchers found. The study, published in the journal Kidney International, was carried out by investigators at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, which is part of Northwell Health.

Acute kidney injury, or acute kidney failure, develops rapidly. It occurs when the kidneys stop working properly and cannot filter waste from the blood. The condition is seen most commonly in critically ill patients, and it can be fatal. It is treated with fluids, medications and dialysis.

The researchers reviewed the medical records of 152 children under age 18 with Covid-19 who were admitted to four Northwell Health hospitals from March 9 to Aug. 13. Among them were 55 children who had the inflammatory condition, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

Acute kidney injury is known to be a complication of Covid-19 disease in adults; another Northwell study found that the condition was diagnosed in over one-third of adult patients hospitalized with Covid-19. But less is known about how often kidney injury occurs in children.

Estimates of the incidence in children have varied from as low as 1 percent, in China, to as high as 44 percent, as reported in a preliminary multicenter study at 32 hospitals in the United States.

In the new study, the most common first symptoms for children with acute kidney injury were gastrointestinal, such as diarrhea and vomiting, the report said. The injury resolved in most of the children by the time they were discharged from the hospital.

Black children appeared to be at nearly three times the risk of developing acute kidney injury, researchers said. But the number of children in the study was small, and investigators were not able to tease out the effects of socioeconomic status, pre-existing conditions or other factors.

Pediatricians treating children after a hospitalization for Covid-19 may need to check their blood pressure and urine regularly, the researchers said. An episode of acute kidney injury may increase the chances of kidney disease in the future.

This informs care down the road, said Dr. Abby Basalely, the papers first author, a pediatric nephrologist who is an investigator at the Feinstein Institutes. Thinking about whether there were kidney injuries sometimes falls to the wayside, but it may be an important thing to follow up on.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is donating his three-dimensional model of the coronavirus to the Smithsonians National Museum of American History.

I wanted to pick something that was really meaningful to me and important because I used it so often, Dr. Fauci said in an interview on Wednesday about his decision to give the model to the museum.

The model, which he said was made with a 3-D printer at the National Institutes of Health, is a blue sphere studded with spikes replicating the spiked proteins that can latch onto cells in our airway, allowing the virus to slip inside. Dr. Fauci said he had often used it as a visual aid when briefing members of Congress and former President Donald J. Trump about the virus.

Its a really phenomenally graphic way to get people to understand, he said.

Dr. Fauci announced the donation and showed off the model as he was being awarded the museums Great Americans medal on Tuesday for his leadership of the nations Covid-19 response and his contributions to the fights against other infectious diseases, such as AIDS. The model will become part of the museums national medicine and science collection, Smithsonian officials said.

The National Museum of American History said its curators have been collecting items from the pandemic for a future exhibition, called In Sickness and in Health, that will examine more than 200 years of medicine in the U.S. including Covid-19.

Dr. Fauci said he could see himself donating other items to museums and institutions in the future, whether from his time managing the countrys response to the coronavirus pandemic or from his leadership of federal efforts to combat H.I.V., SARS, the 2009 swine pandemic, MERS and Ebola.

I think when you reach a certain stage you have things that are more valuable to the general public than they are to you keeping them, he said.

China is requiring some travelers arriving from overseas to receive an invasive anal swab test as part of its coronavirus containment measures, a move that has outraged and shocked several foreign governments.

Japanese officials said on Monday that they had formally asked China to exempt Japanese citizens from the test, adding that some who had received it complained of psychological distress. And the United States State Department last month said it had registered a protest with the Chinese government after some of its diplomats were forced to undergo anal swabs, though Chinese officials denied that.

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Covid-19: U.S. Vaccination Pace Increases to 2 Million Doses a Day - The New York Times

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What is automation? | IBM

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Advancements likely will occur in:

Machine learning and workflow

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking its strategic place in both operational and strategic business process management. New software enhancements to robotic process automation (RPA) will allow the technology to better observe and learn from human patterns optimizing front- and back-office experiences. Machine learning is poised to revolutionize workflow, helping to enable companies to trigger new processes, reroute running processes and make action recommendations based on predictions.

Hyperautomation

Gartner Research has coined the term hyperautomation to describe the merging of machine learning, packaged software and automation tools to rapidly maximize the number of automation processes in a business to greatly increase productivity. Hyperautomation requires a range of cognitive and automation technologies coming together to deliver both the intelligence and the power to put the intelligence into action.

Intelligent capabilities

AI-based systems will be able to remember (automating future robot configurations) and reason (predictive and probabilistic processing) so that automated systems gain the ability to learn and interact.

Intelligent industrial robots

Robots will perform multiple tasks and make decisions and work autonomously including self-diagnostic and predictive maintenance capabilities.

Low-code or no-code workflow software

Workflow software requiring minimal or no coding will continue to be a strategic priority to make process automation more accessible to the entire organization especially line of business.

Text-message-based workflow

In his blog, Michael Lim, Program Director, IBM Digital Business Automation speculates that the de facto communication method for the new workforce is likely to be text messaging because of its high read and response rates. Its likely that enabling text messaging and text message-based workflow will be a big driver for the next generation of productivity gains in the enterprise.

automation | Technology, Types, Rise, History, & Examples …

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Automation, application of machines to tasks once performed by human beings or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labour by machines, automation generally implies the integration of machines into a self-governing system. Automation has revolutionized those areas in which it has been introduced, and there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that has been unaffected by it.

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The term automation was coined in the automobile industry about 1946 to describe the increased use of automatic devices and controls in mechanized production lines. The origin of the word is attributed to D.S. Harder, an engineering manager at the Ford Motor Company at the time. The term is used widely in a manufacturing context, but it is also applied outside manufacturing in connection with a variety of systems in which there is a significant substitution of mechanical, electrical, or computerized action for human effort and intelligence.

In general usage, automation can be defined as a technology concerned with performing a process by means of programmed commands combined with automatic feedback control to ensure proper execution of the instructions. The resulting system is capable of operating without human intervention. The development of this technology has become increasingly dependent on the use of computers and computer-related technologies. Consequently, automated systems have become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Advanced systems represent a level of capability and performance that surpass in many ways the abilities of humans to accomplish the same activities.

Automation technology has matured to a point where a number of other technologies have developed from it and have achieved a recognition and status of their own. Robotics is one of these technologies; it is a specialized branch of automation in which the automated machine possesses certain anthropomorphic, or humanlike, characteristics. The most typical humanlike characteristic of a modern industrial robot is its powered mechanical arm. The robots arm can be programmed to move through a sequence of motions to perform useful tasks, such as loading and unloading parts at a production machine or making a sequence of spot-welds on the sheet-metal parts of an automobile body during assembly. As these examples suggest, industrial robots are typically used to replace human workers in factory operations.

This article covers the fundamentals of automation, including its historical development, principles and theory of operation, applications in manufacturing and in some of the services and industries important in daily life, and impact on the individual as well as society in general. The article also reviews the development and technology of robotics as a significant topic within automation. For related topics, see computer science and information processing.

The technology of automation has evolved from the related field of mechanization, which had its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution. Mechanization refers to the replacement of human (or animal) power with mechanical power of some form. The driving force behind mechanization has been humankinds propensity to create tools and mechanical devices. Some of the important historical developments in mechanization and automation leading to modern automated systems are described here.

The first tools made of stone represented prehistoric mans attempts to direct his own physical strength under the control of human intelligence. Thousands of years were undoubtedly required for the development of simple mechanical devices and machines such as the wheel, the lever, and the pulley, by which the power of human muscle could be magnified. The next extension was the development of powered machines that did not require human strength to operate. Examples of these machines include waterwheels, windmills, and simple steam-driven devices. More than 2,000 years ago the Chinese developed trip-hammers powered by flowing water and waterwheels. The early Greeks experimented with simple reaction motors powered by steam. The mechanical clock, representing a rather complex assembly with its own built-in power source (a weight), was developed about 1335 in Europe. Windmills, with mechanisms for automatically turning the sails, were developed during the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East. The steam engine represented a major advance in the development of powered machines and marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. During the two centuries since the introduction of the Watt steam engine, powered engines and machines have been devised that obtain their energy from steam, electricity, and chemical, mechanical, and nuclear sources.

Each new development in the history of powered machines has brought with it an increased requirement for control devices to harness the power of the machine. The earliest steam engines required a person to open and close the valves, first to admit steam into the piston chamber and then to exhaust it. Later a slide valve mechanism was devised to automatically accomplish these functions. The only need of the human operator was then to regulate the amount of steam that controlled the engines speed and power. This requirement for human attention in the operation of the steam engine was eliminated by the flying-ball governor. Invented by James Watt in England, this device consisted of a weighted ball on a hinged arm, mechanically coupled to the output shaft of the engine. As the rotational speed of the shaft increased, centrifugal force caused the weighted ball to be moved outward. This motion controlled a valve that reduced the steam being fed to the engine, thus slowing the engine. The flying-ball governor remains an elegant early example of a negative feedback control system, in which the increasing output of the system is used to decrease the activity of the system.

Negative feedback is widely used as a means of automatic control to achieve a constant operating level for a system. A common example of a feedback control system is the thermostat used in modern buildings to control room temperature. In this device, a decrease in room temperature causes an electrical switch to close, thus turning on the heating unit. As room temperature rises, the switch opens and the heat supply is turned off. The thermostat can be set to turn on the heating unit at any particular set point.

Another important development in the history of automation was the Jacquard loom (see photograph ), which demonstrated the concept of a programmable machine. About 1801 the French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard devised an automatic loom capable of producing complex patterns in textiles by controlling the motions of many shuttles of different coloured threads. The selection of the different patterns was determined by a program contained in steel cards in which holes were punched. These cards were the ancestors of the paper cards and tapes that control modern automatic machines. The concept of programming a machine was further developed later in the 19th century when Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, proposed a complex, mechanical analytical engine that could perform arithmetic and data processing. Although Babbage was never able to complete it, this device was the precursor of the modern digital computer. See computers.

Jacquard loom, engraving, 1874. At the top of the machine is a stack of punched cards that would be fed into the loom to control the weaving pattern. This method of automatically issuing machine instructions was employed by computers well into the 20th century.

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Intelligent automation depends on these 4 cornerstones – VentureBeat

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Join Transform 2021 for the most important themes in enterprise AI & Data. Learn more.

There has been more than a modicum of buzz around what IDC calls intelligent process automation and what Gartner calls hyperautomation. In both cases, these terms refer to the integrated deployment of digital technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), artificial intelligence, process mining, etc. Integrating digital technologies is far from a new concept. MIT and Deloitte advocated this approach back in the day when everyone was focused on social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC).

Digital transformation is a complex undertaking. Frankly, the track record on digital transformation success is dismal, with as few as 30% of such initiatives succeeding. The integration of digital technologies may just be the lever that leads to more success. So its not surprising that a number of vendors have promoted this theme, including Appian, Automation Anywhere, Bizagi, ProcessMaker, and UiPath to name a few. However, no digital transformation effort will be effective if an organization doesnt first have four key cornerstone practices nailed down: sequence, collaboration, scope, and mindset.

Strategy is more central to digital success than technology alone, yet many firms dont have a digital strategy. In part, thats because there is a long history of jumping to a technology solution often involving just one tool for the sole use of just one department instead of creating the context to identify business opportunities. Theres a long history of department heads dictating their demands to the IT department resulting in the sub-optimal implementation of technology, the development of difficult-to-bridge data silos, and the creation of significant technical debt. For greater success with digital transformation such behavior must cease. Digital needs to be driven by the specifics of the companys strategy, and strategy needs to be driven by customer experience.

Strategy formulation is no longer just about products and competitors. You also need to consider complementary services and network effects and this often involves a shift in business models, revenue streams, and how your end-to-end processes work. So your digital program needs to be driven from the top. By putting strategy before digital technology, your organization can think through whats needed to scale RPA and machine learning. Then, data transparency and customer experience can begin to take center stage in senior leadership team discussions. Compare this to the not-so-intelligent approach to digital transformation where individual departments select individual technologies to solve small problems within departmental boundaries.

Another critical success factor is to redesign a process before automating it. Otherwise, you could be automating a broken process. Thats why its important to establish end-to-end process context using iBPMS or process mining before jumping to technology solutions. Similarly, change management focus needs to come before not after your implementation of integrated technology.

These tactics call for an unprecedented level of cross functional collaboration and a shift in management attention or mindset, which brings us to the next cornerstone.

When departments do not collaborate, transformation efforts suffer. Given the amount of rhetoric dedicated to breaking down departmental silos, it was astonishing to learn from a recent survey that 75% of 1,500 global senior and C-level executives saw business functions competing against each other instead of collaborating on digitization efforts. This lack of collaboration contributed to 64% of companies failing to see revenue growth from their digital investments. Its hard to focus on customer experience and end-to-end process performance when departments dont collaborate. Historically, individual departments have been motivated to focus on their own core duties and functions to the exclusion of others. Departments and department managers can view resources protectively and hoard data rather than sharing and collaborating.

You also need to collaborate across internal centers of excellence, technology vendors, and department heads if intelligent automation is to reach its true potential.

While cross-team collaboration might appear simple in theory, in practice it is challenging as the teams responsible for special skills such as process improvement and customer experience often sit in different parts of the organization and report to different executives. Further, the methodology that customer experience teams use is different and sometimes difficult to bridge with that of process improvement teams, which can impact their ability to collaborate. Similar challenges apply to collaboration across vendors due to the proprietary platforms that vendors have worked to develop. That has led to some vendors, including Pegasystems, Appian, and Telus International, to acquire complementary technologies instead of making the effort to work closely with others.

No one can see the big picture when individual departments just look at their own technology needs. The recent book Intelligent Automation outlines the importance of scope and context through a banking example: In a credit card fraud management case, a bank was able to deploy one digital tool and realize a 30% improvement in resolving fraud. However, when the bank looked at the end-to-end process and integrated the use of multiple digital technologies, it was able to solve 70% more instances of fraud and saved $100 million.

Both process mining and iBPM suites can give organizations the needed scope and context to optimize the transformation effort. Thats important because one of the common and persistent challenges is scaling digital technology. This is particularly evident with RPA, where Forrester found that a majority of organizations implementing RPA have fewer than 10 bots in production. Brent Harder, head of Enterprise Automation at Fiserv, has led the major automation initiatives at two financial services organizations. He told me that, in order to scale, its important to become really good in the discovery phase and get better at identifying the right metrics. The right context will serve to reinforce RPAs goal of augmenting human workers making processes faster and better, not just cheaper. Harder also emphasizes that the initiative must have strong champions and a solid delivery team who are intent on building in-house capability.

The right scope matters for digital transformation. Frankly, if the digital effort is not cross-functional then its not transformational. If the effort is not focused on customer experience and targets only cost reduction, then its not transformational. According to recent research on AI, organizations that viewed and changed large business processes in integrating AI solutions were five times as likely to realize significant financial benefits.

For many organizations, taking a big picture approach demands not only focusing on the right scope, it also involves a fundamental shift of management attention a new mindset.

Shifting management attention from a traditional static, hierarchical view of business to a customer centered, agile, business process-based view of performance involves a new mindset. First, instead of just thinking about what is good for the company, leaders need to focus on what is good for customers. Second, instead of thinking just about what is good for their individual departments, leaders need to shift their attention to what is good for the entire organization. Then, instead of just thinking about deploying one discrete technology for the benefit of an individual department, leaders need to think about deploying multiple digital technologies in an integrated, agile manner for the benefit of the business.

All of the above requires a significant change in mindset. It must overcome decades of silo behavior conditioning. Its shocking to observe that some experts in intelligent automation still focus on use cases by department instead of value stream or end-to-end process.

A big-picture view also calls for a management mindset where theres explicit attention across customer experience, employee experience, and company profits. And not just at the start of a transformation effort. Its all too common for leaders to be enthusiastic and visible in the early stages of a transformation and then be drawn to other issues and leave things to be run by the project team.

Implementation skills such as change management are comparatively underemphasized in many organizations, leaving many leaders and information systems teams underprepared for this important part of the process. When there is a focus on change management, all too often its limited to stakeholder analysis and a communication plan. In many instances, thats just not enough. Paul Fjelsta, an expert in behavior management who Ive known for years, says we need a new approach: Instead of just focusing on the technical side of change, leaders and project teams need to understand the specific behaviors that need to be changed and how to change them. Researchers at MIT also emphasize the importance of leadership capability, as a key enabler in driving systemic and systematic organization change.

The integrated deployment of digital technologies such as RPA, iBPMS, AI, and process mining can lead to higher success rates in digital transformation efforts. But to effectively deploy these technologies, you need to have the four cornerstones in place Ive described above sequence, collaboration, scope, and mindset. If you lack any of these cornerstones, you risk hitting a number of pitfalls, such as deploying a technology for the benefit of just one department, not tearing down data silos, failing to focus on customer experience, failing to view the business in the context of end-to-end processes, and holding onto detrimental interdepartmental behavior.

Andrew Spanyi is President of Spanyi International. He is a member of the Board of Advisors at the Association of Business Process Professionals and has been an instructor at the BPM Institute. He is also a member of the Cognitive World Think Tank on enterprise AI.

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Extend Your Crews’ Senses With Automation – The Maritime Executive

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By Wrtsil Voyage 03-05-2021 01:37:00

You utter automation, and everyone is immediately transposed to a sci-fi future where robots rule the world, cars fly and crewless ships sail the worlds oceans.

Even within the marine industry, we often forget that unmanned vessel isnt the only arrow in the automation quiver. In fact, smart autonomous solutions are already solving todays major shipping challenges like decarbonization, overcapacity, safety, and human error. Onboard and onshore, for instance, this translates to lesser accidents, significant fuel savings, reduced emissions, efficient operations, and ship designs.

Wrtsil Voyage calls this Smart Autonomy a commercially viable and step-by-step application of intelligent solutions that create immediate and quantifiable operational value today, while opening the pathway for greater vessel autonomy in the future.

Take, for instance, situational awareness solutions, a critical building block on the pathway to greater vessel autonomy. But Wrtsil Voyage business development manager Dr. Sasha Heriot is keen to emphasize that smarter sensors benefits do not lie in the distant future of crewless vessels. Smart sensor technology already supports crews in routine maneuvers. They help achieve operational effectiveness and safety, especially in busy ports and waterways, where incidents are most common.

Digital eyes for enhanced awareness

Data shows that 80 to 90 percent of vessel casualties are rooted in human error. Considering the scale of modern operations the distances vessels travel and the traffic they encounter effective watchkeeping can be a challenge even for the most competent crew. Also, some situations surpass human capabilities. Thats where situational awareness solutions come in.

Think of them as lookouts with superpowers: a unique pairing of sensor tech (such as radars, lasers, and camera) with navigation systems creates a complete digital picture of a vessels maritime environment to identify potential hazards.

Such enhanced situational awareness enables safer maneuvering in ports and harbors, effective navigation through crowded waterways, hazardous target identification and environmental monitoring. Smart sensors on tugs and ferries inform decision making, mitigating the effects of poor visibility, and eliminating radar blind spots.

That said, smart sensors do not replace leadership, experience, or intuition. Rather, they compensate for the human factors that increase risk. Sensors do not get tired or lose concentration, and they can look in all directions at the same time. Like the human crew, they can also raise an alert if they detect a potential hazard, or the vessel position unexpectedly deviates from its course.

Going beyond GNSS

Where human senses end and the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) fails, these smart sensor technologies sweep in to fill the gap, help the crew take informed decisions and prevent casualties. For example, night vision cameras, LIDAR, and short-range high-resolution radar provide digital vision in conditions where humans are blind. These sensors offer a full 360 view around the vessel, eliminating blind spots so that the crew can understand their immediate surroundings when docking and for safety maneuvers. In other applications, high-resolution radar and high accuracy laser sensors are used to detect and identify objects at different distances from the vessel to optimize navigation route selection.

In addition to monitoring what is happening around the vessel, onboard situational awareness is also integrated with real-time navigational systems, making operational decision-making more seamless, increasing efficiency, and making shipping safer.

This integration of sensors places some demands on vessel infrastructure and processes. On the hardware side, a well-balanced sensor suite around the vessel has to be supported by a server with enough processing power to handle large volumes of data in real-time. Data fusion and analysis software are also crucial, as every sensor generates both high data volumes and different interpretations of the ships environment that must be reconciled into a coherent picture and user experience. As with all digital systems, a process is also needed to patch and update sensor software and hardware to maintain functionality and ensure cybersecurity.

Awareness in action

The above demands were explored in practice in IntelliTug, Singapores first commercial autonomous tug and a working example of situational awareness in action. It is equipped with advanced sensors and positioning technologies, including an automatic identification system (AIS), global positioning system (GPS), thermal and daylight video cameras, an AIS receiver, a motion reference unit and Wrtsils advanced RS24 radar.

As Chris Chung, Wrtsils Director, Digital Innovation and Strategic Projects explains, although this project explored the move towards autonomous vessels, a core focus was to reduce the risk of accidents, particularly in ports, by eliminating blind spots around the vessel.

Busy ports, especially in Asia, are used by a lot of smaller vessels that do not have AIS. There is also a risk of grounding the vessel or hitting dropped containers and other objects, he adds.

"This increases overall accuracy because not all radars work effectively in the rain, for example, and different cameras are used for day and night vision. Bringing together multiple detection capabilities creates a clearer picture of the vessels environment.

Digitizing the maritime environment

Apart from helping officers understand the vessels surroundings, situational awareness also provides computer systems with the data required to enable autonomous processes.

This data is used to train maritime AI (Artificial Intelligence) in object recognition and detection. AI is especially valuable because it brings the ability to differentiate between larger and smaller vessels, especially in harbors and ports, where larger ships are severely limited in speed and manoeuvrability compared with smaller, more agile crafts. However, it is also beneficial in open navigation, where they track objects, identify collision risks, enhance navigation, and save costs.

American Steamship Companys (ASC) MV American Courage is a recent example of situational awareness sensors working in tandem with navigational systems for semi-autonomous ship movement. With a cargo-carrying capacity of 24,300 gross tonnages, it is the largest ship ever to perform an automatic dock-to-dock operation, that too, in the challenging waterways of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, US.

Named the crooked river by Native Americans, the narrow, winding, and the heavily congested waterway was the testbed for Wrtsil SmartMove Suite. It used the industrys most advanced sensors and high-accuracy ship control systems, taking the concept of automated dock-to-dock operations to the next level.

The complete Voyage Smart technology package addresses the American Courages restricted water maneuvering profile requirements, including a position margin of less than two meters and transit under bridges. The technology utilises the surrounding environment for vessel positioning, making it ship-based rather than onshore. The resulting impact was a further reduction of the American Courages operating costs, explains Pierre Pelletreau, VP of Engineering, Rand-ASC Holdings LLC.

This is not about going captain-free, rather, enhancing the capabilities of the onboard crew as they traverse shuttle routes, congested or restricted areas. When vessels must operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we are pleased to offer an automated dock-to-dock transit solution that ensures every trip is conducted safely, adds John J Marshall, Senior Business Development Manager, Automation & DP, Americas, Wrtsil Voyage.

The IntelliTug project, American Courage and other applications show how situational awareness and smart autonomy technologies can create a safer work environment. Complete vessel autonomy may be a distant vision for some in shipping, but the solution to reduce human limitations with technologies that augment and enhance the crews capabilities are already available.

This message is sponsored byWrtsil Voyage.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

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Rebuild security and compliance foundations with automation – TechTarget

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Businesses have invested a lot of money, effort and technology into addressing cybersecurity challenges in the wrong way. They have been covering issues by applying bandage after bandage rather than attacking the root causes. Ironically, we have reached a point in cybersecurity where the layers of patchwork protection we have been adding are becoming the root cause of the issues ever more frequently. And while organizations are clearly investing in necessary cybersecurity technology, investments in other critical areas such as automation of key proactive security processes and shifting compliance left into the design and early development, are significantly lagging behind.

Overreliance on perimeter defenses has created larger attack surfaces for already large targets, such as financial institutions. As the regulatory landscape grows more complex by the day, organizations that do not begin to automate and streamline compliance will be faced with rising costs that will come back to their clients.

It is time for organizations to rebuild the foundation of security and compliance by embracing automation, creating and deploying secure software and addressing the challenges of implementing requirements that are not written for engineers.

The days are over when software development could take a year or two between major releases. Organizations in every sector are under pressure to develop and deploy software swiftly, sometimes in a matter of days. It's not that organizations don't want to implement security early or achieve compliance by design; they just don't have the resources needed to keep track of everything that needs to be done from the start on their own while also remaining competitive.

No analyst that I am aware of has predicted that in 10 years, compliance problems will be solved by technology. Compliance is a people and process problem. Look at Equifax and Capital One, for example. Both companies had policies in place for securing their technology that, if implemented correctly by its users, likely would have prevented their breaches.

This is where automation truly shines. When we consider how compliance regulations are written, compared to how software is written, it becomes even more understandable how an organization might experience a lapse in compliance. It is unreasonable to expect software engineers and technologists to fully understand regulations that were written by policymakers and implement them into software.

Financial institutions have a particularly onerous set of compliance obligations, ranging from Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirements to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with international or regional requirements, such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act, compounding the burden. Only the health care and pharmaceutical industries come close in terms of regulations. And those regulations are regularly updated or altered, requiring institutions to continually adjust their software to meet the standards.

Verizon's 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report found that nearly 90% of all data breaches are financially motivated, up from 71% last year. For that reason, many retailers contract out their financial transactions in order to limit their liability, leaving that job to banks and other financial institutions. Amid pressure from boardrooms and the general public to ensure the integrity of transactions, costs and complexities of compliance continue to increase. The costs of noncompliance can be overwhelming. Data breaches in the banking industry cost institutions an average of $18.3 million, according to a study by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute. Significant breaches can cost even more.

The practice of layering security measures on top of one another, often at the perimeter of the network, has become commonplace. Web application firewalls were designed to buy time for developers to fix issues that might have slipped them. Nowadays, they are becoming the first line of defense and are either ineffective or even worse, becoming a source of entry for attackers. However, each layer adds another level of complexity that can be used against an organization by attackers fishing for accidental openings in the network. And this layering does not address the problems in the foundation, which was put in place in another computing era and isn't built to handle the speed and scale of modern networks.

For financial institutions, security postures are driven by compliance with regulatory mandates. Institutions that don't automate and streamline their compliance will continue to leave themselves exposed to breaches and the considerable costs in terms of both money and reputation. Organizations can't afford to wait solely for a software fix.

These financial organizations especially need to focus on remaking their security foundations so they are built for the current computing environment. This won't happen overnight, but it also isn't as complicated as it sounds. By building automation into the foundation, organizations can meet their compliance requirements at the speed of business, better ensuring the integrity of their data. And they can avoid the habit of simply layering on new technologies, which increases complexity, expands access and ultimately can leave them vulnerable to attack.

About the authorEhsan Foroughi is the vice president of product at Security Compass. He is an application security expert with over 13 years of management and technical experience in security research. He led the Vulnerability Research Subscription Service for TELUS Security Labs. As an entrepreneur, he has also served as the founder and CTO of TELTUB, a successful telecommunications startup. Ehsan holds a M.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Computer Science, a B.Eng. from Sharif University of Technology, as well as CISM and CISSP designations.

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Global Automation and Robotics Market Report 2021: Assistive Robotics Market will Reach $21.3 Billion by 2026, Driven by Healthcare and Social Needs -…

Posted: at 1:15 pm

DUBLIN, March 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Automation and Robotics Market in Industrial, Enterprise, Military, and Consumer Segments by Type, Components, Hardware, Software, and Services 2021 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report evaluates the global and regional robotics marketplace including the technologies, companies, and solutions for robots in the industrial, enterprise, military, and consumer segments. The report includes detailed forecasts for robotics by robot type, components, capabilities, solutions, and connectivity for 2021 to 2026.

With the substantial amount of capital behind global industrial automation, the industrial robotics sector will continue a healthy growth trajectory, which is supported by many qualitative and quantitative benefits including cost reduction, improved quality, increased production, and improved workplace health and safety.

In the wake of COVID-19, and with the now democrat-controlled executive and legislative branches pushing for minimum wage increase, we see a major push for further automation and robotics within the United States service sector. This is because many businesses see repetitive tasks as performed with great safety, less expense, and reduced probability for service disruption with robotics rather than reliance upon human workers.

Robotics is increasingly used to improve enterprise, industrial, and military automation. In addition, robots are finding their way into more consumer use cases as the general public's concerns fade and acceptance grows in terms of benefits versus risks. While many consumer applications continue to be largely lifestyle-oriented, enterprise, industrial, and military organizations utilize both land-based and aerial robots are used for various repetitive, tedious, and/or dangerous tasks. Adoption and usage are anticipated to rapidly increase with improvements to artificial intelligence, robotic form factors, and fitness for use, cloud computing, and related business models, such as robotics as a service.

The next decade will witness substantial influence of AI upon robotics. The next generation of robotics will include many pre-integrated AI technologies such as machine vision, voice and speech recognition, tactile sensors, and gesture controls. AI has enabled consumer robots to learn while performing a variety of tasks including cleaning, controlling home appliances, reading, performing butler services, and many more. It is anticipated that further improvement in AI and related technologies such as cognitive computing and sensor fusion, will enable consumer robots to take on increasingly more difficult tasks.

Longer-term, the publisher sees many robotics and automation solutions involving multiple AI types as well as integration across other key areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics. The combination of AI and the IoT has the potential to dramatically accelerate the benefits of robotics for consumer, enterprise, industrial, and government market segments.

Leading industry verticals are beginning to see improved operational efficiency through the intelligent combination of AI and robotics. The long-term prospect for these technologies is that they will become embedded in many different other technologies and provide autonomous decision-making on behalf of humans, both directly, and indirectly through many processes, products, and services.

This report also includes analysis with forecasts covering AI technology and systems by type, use case, application, and industry vertical. Forecasts also cover each major market sector including consumer, enterprise, industrial, and government.

Components included in forecasts include: Controllers, Robotic Arms, End Effectors, Drive Systems, Sensors, Power Supply, Motors, Grippers, Transducers, Hydraulic Cylinders, Wheels, Linear Actuators, Processors, and ICs.

Select Report Findings:

Report Benefits:

Key Topics Covered:

1 Executive Summary

2 Robotics Market Overview2.1 Robotics Market Segmentation2.2 Enterprise Robotics Market2.3 Industrial Robotics Market2.4 Military Robotics Market2.5 Consumer Robotics Market

3 Robotics and Automation Technology Trends3.1 Artificial Intelligence and Robotics3.2 Convergence of AI and IoT in Robotics3.3 Teleoperation and Cloud Robotics3.4 Digital Twins Technology and Robotics3.5 Fifth Generation Wireless, Beyond 5G and Robotics3.6 Cloud Business Models and Robotics as a Service3.7 Human and Robotics Cooperation

4 Robotics and Automation in Business Transformation4.1 Emerging Opportunity Areas4.2 Moving Beyond the Factory Environment4.3 Robotics as a Service and the Outcome Based Economy

5 Robotics Companies and Solutions5.1 Americas5.2 2G Engineering5.3 3D Robotics5.4 Adept Technology Inc.5.5 Aethon Inc.5.6 Alphabet, Inc. (Google)5.7 Amazon Robotics5.8 Anki Inc.5.9 Apex Automation and Robotics5.10 Auris Surgical Robotics Inc.5.11 Autonomous Solutions, Inc.5.12 Axium Inc.5.13 Canvas Technology5.14 Carbon Robotics5.15 Carbon3D5.16 Celera Motion5.17 Clearpath Robotics5.18 Construction Robotics5.19 CyPhy Works5.20 Denso Wave Inc.5.21 Ekso Bionics5.22 Ellison Technologies Inc.5.23 Energid Technologies5.24 Epson Robots5.25 Fetch Robotics5.26 Ghost Robotics LLC5.27 Greensea Systems Inc.5.28 Hypertherm Inc.5.29 IAM Robotics5.30 inVia Robotics5.31 iRobot5.32 Intuitive Surgical, Inc.5.33 Jibo5.34 Kairos Autonomi5.35 Knightscope5.36 Kraken Sonar Systems Inc.5.37 Lockheed Martin5.38 Locus Robotics5.39 Micromo5.40 Modbot Inc.5.41 Octopuz Inc.5.42 Omnicell Inc.5.43 PrecisionHawk5.44 ReWalk Robotics5.45 RobotLAB Inc.5.46 Rockwell Automation Inc.5.47 Rokid Inc.5.48 SapientX Inc.5.49 Savioke5.50 Seegrid5.51 Sharp Electronics Corp.5.52 SkySpecs5.53 Soft Robotics Inc.5.54 Softweb Solutions Inc.5.55 SRI International5.56 Staubli5.57 Stryker (MAKO Surgical)5.58 Suitable Technologies5.59 SynTouch5.60 Teradyne Inc.5.61 Titan Medical5.62 TM Robotics5.63 TORC Robotics5.64 Transcend Robotics5.65 ULC Robotics Inc.5.66 Universal Robotics5.67 Vecna Technologies5.68 Verb Surgical5.69 VEX Robotics5.70 VGo Communications5.71 Vigilant Robots5.72 Virtual Incision Corporation5.73 Willrich Precision Instrument Co.5.74 World Drone Academy5.75 Wynright (Daifuku Co Ltd)5.76 Yaskawa Motoman5.77 Asia-Pacific5.78 Aurotek Corp.5.79 Cyberdyne5.80 Daihen Corp.5.81 DJI5.82 FANUC Robotics5.83 Foxconn Technology Group5.84 GreyOrange5.85 Hanson Robotics Ltd.5.86 Kawasaki5.87 Mitsubishi Electric Corp.5.88 Nachi Fujikoshi Corp.5.89 Pari Robotics5.90 Qihan Technology Co.5.91 Samsung5.92 Seven Dreamers Laboratories Inc.5.93 Siasun Robot and Automation Co Ltd.5.94 SoftBank Robotics Corporation5.95 Sony5.96 Toyota5.97 WaveBot5.98 Yamaha Robotics5.99 Europe5.100 ABB Robotics5.101 AMS RBR5.102 Blue Ocean Robotics ApS5.103 Comau Robotics5.104 Delphi Automotive5.105 Kuka Robotics5.106 Milvus Robotics5.107 Mobile Industrial Robots ApS5.108 Open Bionics5.109 Reis Robotics5.110 Roboplan5.111 Robosoft Services Robots5.112 Schunk5.113 Siemens5.114 Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd.5.115 SSI Schaefer5.116 Starship Technologies5.117 Staubli International AG5.118 Swisslog5.119 Teun5.120 Touch Bionics5.121 Universal Robots A/S5.122 Visual Components Oy5.123 ZenRobotics

6.0 Global Robotics Forecast 2021 - 20266.1 Global Robotics Market 2021 - 20266.2 Global Markets Robotics by Category 2021 - 2026

7.0 Industrial Robotics Market 2021 - 2026

8.0 Consumer Robotics Market 2021 - 2026

9.0 Enterprise Robotics Market 2021 - 2026

10.0 Military and Government Robotics Market 2021 - 2026

11.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/9hcp6r

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Global Automation and Robotics Market Report 2021: Assistive Robotics Market will Reach $21.3 Billion by 2026, Driven by Healthcare and Social Needs -...

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Workplace Automation 2.0 what is it and what’s in store for you? – Latest Digital Transformation Trends | Cloud News – Wire19

Posted: at 1:15 pm

The sudden outbreak of a pandemic had made us go through several drastic transformations, one of which has taken over todays workplaces,globally. Workplace automation, which had been agood-to-haverequirement till then, has suddenly transformed into a must-have with businesses looking to invest more in it.

Every business had shifted from its physical premises to hand-held smartphones, and our homes are our workplaces now. The pandemic had rendered a centralized reporting structure to todays decentralized workforce. All of these have been possible due to the widespread adoption and implementation of automation during this New Normal. With workplace automation 2.0, we atNexAEIbelieve you can be anywhere but still be here!

The smart and timely adaptation of digitization and automation amid all the turbulence and ambiguity has made businesses much more robust and dynamic than the pre-COVID era. Organizations have learned to leverage technologies the right way and enhance their performances along with upgrading themselves digitally.

The automation that we are talking about has made businesses crisis-proof and fit for the future. They have emerged out as moreAgile, Intuitive, Engaging, and Connected. This new normals intelligent automation 2.0 has equipped workplaces with unquestionable rationality, improved accuracy, and much greater speed.

Work, workplace, and working circumstances are changing every hour today, and so is automation. Therefore, even the slightest delay in its adoption and the subsequent follow-up will push you away from gaining that necessary cutting-edge. The deployment of intelligent automation will help you run in this race and firm up your position as a trusted brand in this testing time. Workplace Automation 2.0 will progress with the new normal uncovering itself further, bit by bit. All you need to do is be at the right spot, adequately armed so that you do not waste any time in adopting it and advancing further.

We will reveal more about Workplace 2.0, its components, and help you define the pathway to creating and enabling a smarter workplace of the future.

The post Workplace Automation 2.0 what is it and whats in store for you? appeared first on NASSCOM Community |The Official Community of Indian IT Industry.

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Global Automation and Robotics Market Report 2021: Assistive Robotics Market will Reach $21.3 Billion by 2026, Driven by Healthcare and Social Needs -…

Workplace Automation 2.0 what is it and what’s in store for you? – Latest Digital Transformation Trends | Cloud News – Wire19

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