Should Whales Be Hunted or Watched?

Should Whales Be Hunted or Watched?

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Spectators watch whales off the coast of southern California

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Efforts to End Shark Finning Make Progress

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11/30/2012

* This report has been updated below

This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I’m Shirley Griffith. And I’m Christopher Cruise. Today, we tell about whales. Some people want to hunt the animals, while others simply enjoy watching them in the wild. We tell about a plan for an American aquarium to import beluga whales from Russia. And we talk about a whale that could make human-like sounds. Environmental activists in South Korea are condemning a government plan to hunt endangered whales for scientific research. They believe the plan is part of an effort to re-start commercial whaling activities. Such activities are banned in many countries.South Korea announced the proposal in July at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Panama. The head of the South Korean delegation said the plan was needed to answer questions about minke whale populations. He said the hunt would take place near the South Korean coast. But he did not say how many of the animals would be caught. The International Whaling Commission has yet to make a decision on the South Korean plan.  The organization banned commercial whaling in 1986 because of concerns about the survival of whale species. But now, some South Korean fishermen say they are facing a threat from minke whales. They say these animals are eating what would have been their catch. The plan was immediately condemned by anti-whaling nations. Wildlife activists also criticized the proposal. Han Jeong-hee works in Seoul for the environmental group Greenpeace. “It’s really regretful to hear that Korean government is, like, considering conducting scientific whaling. Scientific whaling is just, like, thinly-disguised commercial whaling. And, you know, we are of course against all commercial whaling. Japan’s the only country which is doing scientific whaling at the moment and Korea is just trying to follow that.” Korea has a long history of whaling. Cave paintings found on the south coast show images of whale hunts. But such hunts and the use of whale meat as food did not really become popular until late in the nineteenth century. Every year, the South Korean town of Ulsan holds an event that re-creates those whaling expeditions. Visitors are urged to eat at local restaurants that serve whale meat. South Korea’s Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries says the goal of the plan is to help fishermen. It notes that limited whaling for scientific research is permitted under the commercial whaling ban. Japan has continued hunting whales under this exception. Critics of whaling do not believe claims by Japan that its whaling activities are for scientific research. They note that whale meat from the hundreds of whales killed in the hunt is sold to the Japanese public. Recently, we asked the International Whaling Commission about the South Korean request. Commission spokesman Simon Brockington told VOA by e-mail that since the July meeting, “there has been no further communication from the Government of the Republic of Korea to the IWC on this issue.” The next meeting of the commission’s Scientific Committee is set for next year. Mr. Brockington said the IWC’s rules require “governments to provide the Commission’s scientific committee with copies of the proposed permits in time for them to be reviewed.” He added that “at the current time, no such copies have been received.”      Four months ago, the South Korean government reported to the country’s lawmakers about the plan to re-start whaling. A Foreign Ministry official says the plan is still under consideration. She says the government will listen to the opinions of concerned organizations and members of the International Whaling Commission. Earlier in this report, we heard from Han Jeong-hee of Greenpeace. She says pro-whaling forces appear to be in control of the South Korean government. “Suddenly they just reported this about the task force and going back to the scientific whaling decision. This is very disappointing. We hope the government change their mind again and go for non-lethal research.” Lee Hae-chan is the head of South Korea’s main opposition. He says some people in coastal communities support the idea of research whaling because it will help the local economy. Mr. Lee admits that his country no longer faces poverty and does not need whale meat for protein. But he says if there is a true need for scientific research, limited whaling might be acceptable. Lee Man-woo is vice representative of the Whale Culture Preservation Association in Ulsan. He and others say whaling has been a part of Korean culture for thousands of years. He also says meat from hunted whales should not be wasted. His group says it should be sold at a reasonable price to foreign tourists and to those who like to eat whale meat. Recently, a small serving of meat sold in Ulsan for up to $50. Both South Korea and Japan say there are so many whales in their waters that these largest of all mammals are eating too much fish. Japan has been widely criticized for its research program. Thousands of whales have been killed in the northern Pacific and near Antarctic waters since the 1980s. An aquarium in the American state of Georgia wants to import eighteen beluga whales from Russia. The United States currently has 31 beluga whales. They are living in six aquariums and marine parks. Four of them are at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The Georgia Aquarium has asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for permission to import the beluga whales. If approved, aquarium officials would send some of the animals to the other facilities. The Georgia Aquarium says it hopes to use the beluga whales in research, education and breeding programs. They currently are being held at a Russian research center. Yet many people oppose the plan. They say it is wrong to keep any wild animal captive. In October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration held a hearing on the proposal. More than 130 people attended the meeting. NOAA says it received about eight thousand nine hundred written comments about the Georgia Aquarium’s plan. Because of the great interest in the subject, the agency gave 60 days for public comments. Usually, people are given 30 days. NOAA officials are studying how the beluga whales might be affected by being brought to the United States. They also want to know whether the Georgia Aquarium and its partners can properly care for the whales and how they might be used in educational activities. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act sets rules which NOAA must consider when deciding whether these animals may be imported. NOAA officials told VOA they plan to make a decision on the request by early next year. Recently, beluga whales were in the news for another reason. The journal Current Biology reported that one of the whales made human-like sounds. Researchers had been caring for the whale for years before it died in 1999. Over many hours, they recorded what they say is the whale repeating human speech it had just heard. The researchers say the whale’s natural sounds changed as it heard more humans speaking. They admit that the recording does not sound like human speech. But they say these “inflections” are like those of a human voice. The researchers say the sound is unlike those that whales make naturally, but not “unlike those of the human voice.” Listen for yourself. The researchers believe this is evidence of what they call “spontaneous mimicry of the human voice, presumably a result of vocal learning.” In other words, they suspect the beluga whale was copying the sounds made by humans. Four years after the whale started making the human-like sounds, it stopped. The researchers say the times when the whale most sounded like a human were never recorded.* “After this report was prepared, South Korea dropped plans to hunt whales for scientific purposes. The South Korean government was required to report any plan for a whale hunt to the International Whaling Commission by December 3rd.  But South Korean officials confirmed on Wednesday (December 5) that the government decided against the idea.  Officials said the country would use non-lethal means to study the animals.  The environmental group Greenpeace welcomed the South Korean decision

 

MOOCs Are Moving Forward

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MOOCs add to a tradition of what is known as distance learning

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12/05/2012

From VOA Learning English, this is EXPLORATIONS in Special English. I’m Bob Doughty. And I’m Faith Lapidus. Today we tell about the growing popularity of Massive Open online Courses in higher education. The movement toward education by computer is developing fast. Massive Open online Courses, called MOOCs, are changing how people learn in many places. For years, people could receive study materials from colleges or universities and take part in online classes. But such classes were not designed for many thousands of students at one time, as MOOCs are. Course materials provided by MOOCs can serve both those studying far away from school and those attending classes in person. Anyone with a computer and an online connection can sign up for a MOOC. Students do not have to pass entrance exams. They also do not need to have studied the subject before. One professor praised MOOCs because they let people who could not attend a traditional college continue their education. He asked, “Who knows where the next Albert Einstein will come from?”   The spread of Internet learning for huge numbers of people is leading some colleges to join the movement. Major universities like Stanford in California and Harvard in Massachusetts have invested millions of dollars to help launch MOOCs. Those schools and others may have heard an attention-getting prediction. The man who created the MOOC service Udacity says that in fifty years, only ten traditional universities will remain in the world. That prediction came from Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist probably best known for his part in making Google’s driverless car. He is still a research professor at Stanford University. But he left his teaching position at Stanford to help start Udacity, a provider of MOOCs. Universities that fail to join the movement for MOOCs may be worried about their chances of survival. Colleges also hope to gain more students and cut operational costs in return for their investments. The web site Class Central says twenty-three new courses were added to the list of available MOOCs by October first. These study programs are from about four weeks to twenty-four weeks long. They usually have videos, homework, weekly tests, a final examination and a rating in the class. A growing number of organizations offer the courses. They include the California Institute of Technology, also known as Caltech. Other providers include edX, a partnership of universities led by Harvard, and a not-for-profit company called Coursera. Two Stanford University computer scientists, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, launched Coursera a year ago after years of research. Today, Coursera and other MOOC providers offer hundreds of courses. Daphne Koller says that before long, people may wonder why college students ever filled a room to hear a lecture. Traditionally, colleges and universities required teachers to give lectures to their classes for an hour or more. The teacher provided information, and the students took notes. This method did not seem satisfactory to Professor Koller and others at Stanford. She and her students organized a program that tested possible changes. The changes they accepted became part of Coursera. one such reform was the auto graded assessment, in which students test themselves on their progress. Andrew Ng was working separately from Professor Koller at the time. He was developing technology for improving educational methods while she worked on course content or information. Her main goal was to increase the time that students spent with their professor.  The two teachers came to understand that they had the makings of something new. In fall of two thousand eleven, Stanford offered courses open to students who do not attend the university. Mr. Ng remembers launching the courses, and finding that he and Daphne Koller had created something very popular. “We’d been working on technology for several years, and this had culminated last year with Stanford University offering three free online courses, each of which had an enrollment of something like one hundred thousand students and up. And based on that, we Today, that “something” has more than one million students. Will many of these students do all of their college work by computer? If so, they would enter the professional world with course completion documents instead of a degree. For years, a degree has been the sign to employers that students have completed the requirements for a college education. But today, employers may be more than willing to offer work to a student with an excellent record in MOOC courses without a college degree. That is especially true at technology companies. Andrew Ng says many people want to know why people would pay to attend college when they can use MOOCs instead. “So, one question we have often been asked is if you can take all those Princeton and Stanford courses online for free, why would anyone still pay two hundred thousand dollars for a Princeton degree?” But Andrew Ng says attending classes in person at a good university is still important. He does not believe that course content alone is the real value of attending a university like Princeton. Instead, he says, relationships between students and professors and with other students are more important. Mr. Ng says many professors are creating on-line videos for their lectures. They then ask their students to watch the videos at home the week before class. The computer scientist notes it is lot more fun for students to work in teams at solving problems than listening to a lecture. Many universities hope to receive return on their investments in ways other than saving on operations. Coursera, for example, plans to develop a job placement service for top-performing students. After a time, the money from that service would flow back to the schools, Andrew Ng says. Moody’s Investor Service predicts that MOOCs will help large, famous universities gain more students. It says schools that create content for MOOCs can earn money by providing the course material to smaller schools. But the investment service is warning that smaller, less well-known colleges may suffer because of MOOCs. It says students may want to receive certificates from major universities instead of attending a local junior college that provides traditional credits. Recently, the University of Washington said it was the first American university to offer credit for MOOCs, credit that could be used toward a degree from the school. The university’s online courses include those in computer science, information security and risk management. One criticism of MOOCs has been that most courses being offered are in science, mathematics and technology. But several courses in literature are now available. Barry Nelson heads the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University in Illinois. He says education has changed over time, and that educators have continued to improve their methods of helping people learn. “I certainly think it will affect things, but I like to put things in a little bit of perspective. We have had new paradigms almost since the beginning of the printing of words in the book allowed people to learn things separately, and without the need of a university or any other kind of kind of class. And we have been doing computerated learning and distance instruction for many, many years. “ Professor Nelson says it is far from sure how much MOOCs will change college life. He said he thinks that the universities of tomorrow will combine many kinds of learning. “How it will all go together is still up in the air. I have been of the opinion which is what universities will evolve to do is to still present some traditional classes, but that universities in some sense will be integrated.” He also says computer-based distance learning and asynchronous learning will be part of the future university. Asynchronous learning lets students do the course work at any time. The professor predicts that those methods will be used with individual tutoring, life experience, independent study and lectures. A problem for MOOCs seemingly arose recently when officials in Minnesota informed Coursera about an old statute. The rule said universities could not provide free online courses within the state without paying for registration. But the problem seemingly was cleared up quickly. The state said its people were welcome to take online courses from Coursera. The Minnesota higher education office promised that it will work with the state legislature in January to amend the statute. An official said that for now, he sees no reason to require registration of free, non-credit courses.

 

 

 

To Protect Rhinos, Anti-Poaching Business Grows in South Africa

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Members of the Pilanesberg National Park Anti-Poaching Unit (APU) stand guard as conservationists and police investigate the scene of a rhino poaching incident in South Africa, April 19, 2012.

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12/04/2012

From VOA Learning English, this is the Agriculture Report in Special English. Some private game farmers in South Africa are hiring armed protection for their rhinos. New security companies are being started to fight an increase in rhinoceros poaching. Poachers are now well-armed and well-financed. A single horn sells for than $65,000 per kilogram -- more valuable than gold. Rhino horns are sold mostly in Vietnam and China, on the false belief that they can cure all kinds of problems. Simon Rood started a security company in South Africa five years ago, when rhino poaching started to increase. Today, his 35 rangers supervise an area of 150,000 hectares in Limpopo province. Simon Rood was a soldier in the South African army, and gives military training to his rangers. He says they have never lost a rhino to poaching. This, he says, is because his rangers patrol 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and live and sleep in the bush. "24/7, they've got to live in the bush, 24/7 the guys patrolling. Obviously the guys are moving around. You've only got so many people on the ground. but you've got area coverage. They're moving from area to area." Callie Botha manages a lodge that had six rhinos. Recently he found one dead, with its horns cut off. He owned the rhino for 12 years. "I fed it every day. He was part of the family." Replacing a rhino costs about $28,000. But Callie Botha says armed protection also costs a lot, and he worries about his own safety. So he may stop breeding rhinos. "The risk is too high." But others are willing to pay. Stephen Leonard owns an eco-lodge for nature travelers. He started using the security service after an incident at the beginning of the year. "In end of January, we had an instance where people came inside the property and they tracked down rhinos." He did not lose any rhinos but decided to increase security. "The poachers are heavily armed, and we are not, so we'd rather get people that are armed to come and do the anti-poaching for us." Karen Trendler works at South Africa's only rhino orphanage. She says increasing security is important. But, like Simon Rood, she thinks there should be a law to establish rules for training. "If the security companies are not well-trained, there is always the risk of corruption." She says a long-term solution will come through education and law enforcement. She says Yemen is an example of a country that has stopped buying rhino horn. "The rhino horn was used for ceremonial daggers. And there was a huge demand for rhino horn. And through a very, very well coordinated and aggressive awareness project, linked with good law enforcement, that demand has been reduced completely." Poaching of endangered animals in Africa is growing. You can find a series of stories about poaching at voanews.com. And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture Report. I'm Karen Leggett. __

 

Watching a Film in Your Car, Before the Age of the Small Screen

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Children atop the family car at the Galaxy Drive-In Theatre in Ennis, Texas

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12/03/2012

From VOA Learning English, welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in Special English. I’m June Simms. Drive-in movie theaters are considered an American invention. Drive-ins became very popular in the United States after World World Two. They combined two popular loves in America: cars and movies. So why did most of the drive-ins later close? That was a question VOA's Christopher Cruise often wondered about. This week on our program he looks for the answer. The first drive-in movie theater opened in the United States in 1933. Popular Science magazine described a theater in Camden, New Jersey, as the first of its kind in the word: an open-air movie theater just for motorists. People could watch a film on the big screen while sitting in their car, eating, talking and relaxing.Many drive-in theaters opened in the 1950s, as the American economy expanded after the war and more people bought cars.In the 1960s -- when I was a boy -- there were between 4,000 and 6,000 drive-in theaters in the United States. I lived in the northeastern state of Maine. Not a lot of people live there. Yet my parents could take me and my three brothers and two sisters to any of four drive-ins located within an hour’s drive of our home. But almost as soon as drive-ins were everywhere, their popularity began to fade. Today, fewer than 400 are still operating in the United States.​​April Wright is producing a documentary about drive-in theaters and the special place they held in American culture. The film is called "Going Attractions: The Rise and Fall of the Drive-In as an American Icon." She plans to release it early next year on the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the first drive-in theater. April Wright visited more than 400 current and former drive-in sites across the country during her research for her film. Drive-ins, she tells me, were "the perfect blend of entertainment and car culture." They represented the hopefulness that followed the war, when the soldiers came home and millions of babies were born. "So at the time they flourished, it was after the baby boom, and so there was the convergence of a strong economy and lots of kids and car culture -- people being able to afford cars. There wasn’t really television at that point in all the homes. And so it was just sort of this thing that families did where they saw their neighbors, where they took their kids. And it was this whole evening out that was very social, very wholesome for the communities, and that’s when they started." So why did drive-ins lose their appeal? April Wright looked for the reason. "The more I looked into it, I realized it wasn’t a single factor, not only that made drive-ins go on the decline but also what made them flourish. There is a common denominator and it’s completely cultural. They rose really quickly -- the spike is sort of narrow. And they also declined very quickly -- the spike there is also kind of narrow. They rose really quickly in the late '40s and they declined really quickly in the early '80s, so they had about a 40-year span of popularity." 

Cars entering the Galaxy Drive-In Theatre in Ennis, Texas

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Cars entering the Galaxy Drive-In Theatre in Ennis, Texas

​​In the 1960s, families were breaking up as the divorce rate rose sharply in the United States. April Wright thinks that is one reason drive-ins closed: A shared family experience like going to a drive-in movie lost some of its appeal.But another reason many drive-ins closed was their location. Many had been built outside cities on land that at the time was not very valuable.But as the American population grew, more and more people moved from the cities to the suburbs. Soon, many drive-in theaters found themselves surrounded by houses and stores rather than by forests or empty land. Now the land was very valuable. Offers from developers to buy the land became hard to resist for the owners. After all, fewer people were going to drive-ins, and property taxes were increasing because the land was now worth more. Also, in some areas, insects, especially mosquitoes, were a problem. They would fly into open car windows during the movie. Some drive-in theaters sold insect-killing kits. I can tell you from personal experience that these helped, but not much. In northern areas of the United States, drive-in theaters were open just a few months of the year. In the north, nights can get cold even during the summer. Blankets and portable heaters helped -- but, again, not much. Even when the drive-ins were open, the theaters often sat unused during daylight hours. Sometimes, the land would be used for open-air markets during the day, but these did not bring a lot of income. What did bring a lot of money in many cases was when the land was sold to build homes, shopping centers and office buildings.There were other problems for drive-in theaters, especially in the late 1960s. Some of the older theaters were dirty and not well-maintained. The quality of the films declined. And the spread of daylight saving time meant the sun might not set until eight or even nine o’clock. This may have reduced attendance, although some people disagree. But, at the same time, other changes were taking place with popular entertainment. More people were buying color televisions. And more indoor theaters were opening with multiple choices of films. The 1970s and '80s brought video rentals and cable TV with many choices of channels. Television made it easier, and cheaper, to stay home for entertainment. By the end of the eighties, the number of drive-in theaters had fallen by two-thirds from their peak. Today, we live in a time of what documentary filmmaker April Wright calls "the individualization of the entertainment experience." There are more choices and more ways than ever to experience entertainment. If you really want to watch a movie in your car, you could watch it on a DVD player or stream video on a mobile device. You don't have to go to a drive-in anymore. But some people still do.

The Mayfield Drive-In movie theater in Chardon, Ohio put up this sign earlier this year

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The Mayfield Drive-In movie theater in Chardon, Ohio put up this sign earlier this year

An owners group says 42 new drive-in theaters have been built since the nineteen nineties. And 63 former ones have reopened. But not all the news is good. Some of the new and reopened theaters have since closed. And another challenge is coming. The movie industry is moving to digital distribution of films to theaters. The cost of having to upgrade to digital equipment may be more than many older, struggling drive-ins can afford.Many of today's drive-in theaters are owned by families rather than big movie theater companies. In many cases the owners are the children or grandchildren of the first owners. Drive-ins seem to be operated at least as much from a passion to keep them open as a desire for profit. The owners believe the theaters are important to their community. Earlier this year, Donald Brown purchased the Skowhegan Drive-In in the small town of Skowhegan, Maine. He operated a drive-in theater in the state of Delaware for 14 years. That theater was profitable, he says, and he believes he can make a profit with his new theater by focusing on families. Young people, he says, are not going to see movies at the drive-in anymore. For that, he blames video games, the Internet and mobile phones. one of the things that we noticed dramatically beginning in 2005 was the disappearance of the young adult audience that really sustained us through the fall. The films that would attract that audience just did not bring them in after two thousand four and it seemed to correspond with the availability of the electronic media."

A family watches a movie at the Silver Moon Drive-In theater in Lakeland, Florida

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A family watches a movie at the Silver Moon Drive-In theater in Lakeland, Florida

​​​​The Skowhegan Drive-In opened in 1954. It has space for three hundred fifty cars. Donald Brown told me he was surprised by the level of reaction in the community when he bought the theater. "It’s astounding. We’ve really had an outpouring of support on the Facebook page, the website and just while I’m working up there during the day, the number of people who’ve come in and inquire as to when we’re opening -- ‘I hope you’re not closing this and redeveloping the land’ -- has really been very supportive."He says it shows that even today, with all the other entertainment choices available, drive-in movie theaters can still be an important focus in the cultural life of a community.

 

 

Rights Group Calls for Ban on Fully Autonomous Killer Robots

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Using the same technology responsible for lethal strikes elsewhere in the world, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is expanding its use of Predator B unmanned aircraft outfitted with powerful infrared cameras and sensitive radar to patrol U.S. borders.

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Drones: Not Just for Military Use

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11/30/2012

From VOA Learning English, this is the TECHNOLOGY REPORT in Special English. An international rights group has called on world governments to ban fully autonomous weapon systems. Human Rights Watch recently released a report called, “Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots.” It warns that fully autonomous systems could increase risk to civilians during armed conflict. Militaries around the world are increasingly using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also called drones, in modern warfare. They say drones make war safer and more effective. The machines can gather intelligence, help identify targets, and provide deadly force - but only if a human operator gives the order. Human Rights Watch fears that within 30 years developments in technology could remove the need for human operators. David Mepham is the United Kingdom director of Human Rights Watch. one of the things that holds us back from barbarism in contexts of war obviously this distinction between combatants and civilians and we are worried about a robotic weapon of the future not being able to distinguish between a child holding out an ice cream and someone holding a weapon." The United States and other militaries have stated they have no plans to remove human supervision over the decision to use deadly force. Human Rights Watch says a treaty would help to guarantee that this does not happen. The group says a ban on what it calls “killer robots” would be similar to current bans on the use of landmines and cluster bombs. Hugo Rosemont is an independent security expert in Britain. He says discussions about the future of autonomous technology should not be limited to its military uses."There also needs to be a public discussion around some of the wider applications, such as in the use of disaster management and humanitarian relief."   For example, France sent remote-controlled robots to Japan last year to help contain the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power center. This was a job that most people would agree was better left to machines. In a separate but related story, airplane passengers could soon take to the air without a pilot on the plane. In the next few weeks, a group in Britain will carry out test flights of a Jetstream 31 passenger airplane. A pilot on the ground will control the plane through its autonomous flight system. Safety pilots will be on the aircraft to make sure everything operates correctly. The tests will show how well the plane navigates and follows the orders it receives from the ground. The Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evalutaion and Assessment group is leading the project. The flights are set to leave from the Warton Aerodrome in Lancashire, England.