tv Click BBC News December 7, 2019 3:30pm-4:01pm GMT
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it is the strength of the winds that stops it getting too cold. overnight lows of around 6—10 degrees celsius. tomorrow, it is a windy day, a day of sunny spells and scattered showers. the showers will tend to merge together to give some longer spells of rain in northern ireland and scotland, particularly through the course of the afternoon, with strengthening winds and the air across these areas will be getting colder as well. further south, relatively mild but no—one is immune from seeing the odd shower. some very strong winds developing later in the day. the strongest winds from storm atiyah will be affecting the western coast of ireland, gusts of 80mph here. and then through sunday night, wales and western england could see gusts perhaps in excess of 70mph.
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hello. this is bbc news with shaun ley. the headlines... the online forum reddit says it believes leaked government documents detailing uk—us trade talks and posted on its site are linked to russia. oceans are running out of oxygen as global temperatures rise putting many species of fish at risk of extinction. warnings that a mega bushfire near sydney that's burning out of control could take weeks to put out. in a rare move, a chinese—american researcher convicted of spying in iran has been freed in an apparent prisoner exchange. the billionaire businessman elon musk is cleared of defaming a british cave explorer after calling him "pedo guy" on social media.
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now on bbc news, click takes a deep dive into the world of social media and the abuse mps are suffering during this so—called outrage election . this week, the programmers of the future. i felt like steve jobs. the cities of the future. and the ugly politics of today. this thursday, the general election will give more than 45 million people their chance to decide on the uk's future. is it the brexit election?
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is it the nhs election? is it an election that will show new divisions that no longer lie along party lines. we'll soon know. amidst all this there is the usual mudslinging towards candidates. but with social media now in the mix, much of it has transferred to platforms like twitter. here at click we decided to take a closer look at the outrage in the final few weeks of battle. we sent carl miller to investigate. i am a vile creature, a traitor. much of it is misogynistic. death threats, threats of violence to some of my people here. there have been moments in which i have had anxiety attacks because of the level of threat. being called everything from a lying dog to a cheat, a traitor or death threats.
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these are some of the 330,000 of abusive tweets that prospective mps have been enduring in the run—up to the election. but we wanted to really drill down into how much of this abuse was happening, who was directed to, the nature of the abuse itself and how it was all connected so we teamed up with a thinktank, demos, to produce exclusive new numbers for the scale and nature of online abuse in the run—up to this general election. this isjosh. he has trained an algorithm to sift through millions of tweets to identify those that are abusive and aimed at candidates who were previously mps before parliament dissolved. but the algorithm first needs to be trained by humans before it can sift through millions of tweets. sojosh is teaching soila, a researcher on click, to help with this monumental task. crucial to this is how it decides what is abusive versus just and fair criticism. that's where personaljudgement inevitably comes in. what this gives us the opportunity
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to do is say right now, in british democracy, that is an insult. the algorithm is is about 70% accurate and only includes candidates running for re—election. but after a just few weeks it revealed some startling results. around 334, 000 tweets, around 7% of the total received by candidates, were insulting. that is ten for every minute of the campaign, minute in, minute out. and a lot of the abuse mps received depended on their background, their gender and their stance on brexit. what causes this insulting behaviour to arrive? some researchers suggest it is down to organised groups or disgruntled individuals. those who feel isolated from the mainstream but who now can enter the public conversation more easily than ever before. hate is a tactic used by various types of organisations and individuals. they are unified by a desire
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for someone to respond to them and we have. as a society, as individuals, we have been responding and engaging with this kind of hate forfar too long. and so for the first time in this general election we have seen mainstream political actors using trolling techniques in order to amplify their message on social media. so the three primary ones, the three main ones were honesty, intelligent and accusations of treachery. when ijoined josh, i was surprised to learn that the main party leaders were not the biggest targets of abuse — at least as a proportion of all of their mentions. borisjohnson is down at the bottom. and jeremy corbyn isn't there at all. this is not a i—party issue is, is it? this is much deeper thanjust single attacks on someone. 0ne candidate who received an awful lot was iain duncan smith. he is right down the bottom. he was also sworn at a lot and if you are white you are more likely to be called a traitor and
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sworn at than any other ethnicity. of course, there are human beings on the other side of the screen. i visited iain duncan smith's constituency and he told me his way of dealing with this is to never engage. the problem is sometimes with elections and things, they feed it a bit more because they tell everybody, actually we all hate each other. we don't. i don't hate labour. i have a lot of labour friends. but the internet takes abit of that anger and accelerate and makes it immediate and instantaneous and gratifying, like a drug. but abuse is not something that happens online. one day after i visited his office, it was vandalised. back at the research hub they've generated a huge map of abuse. so this is our universe of abuse. it connects the candidates being abused to the people doing the abusing. the bigger the cluster around a candidate, the greater the number of people that are
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sending them abuse. you can see that the most prominent politicians, especially borisjohnson and jeremy corbyn, but others, have their own personal entourage of people who specifically tend to abuse just them. here, the brexiteers are in pink and remainers in green. both groups angrily surrounding the two main party leaders. on this map, the abusers accusing the candidates of dishonesty are shown with red dots, while on this, those accusing them of treachery are grey. the people who are being called traitors are from the third parties and up into labour. one of the most surprising findings was that men overall tended to receive more abusive messages than women on twitter although this does not mean that what they did receive was worse or more threatening. these are broad trends. the experience of every candidate will change. for example, angela smith. she is being insulted a lot for her honesty and being called a traitorfour times more
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than the average candidate. this could be because she recently changed parties. she is now with the liberal democrats. she also voted against brexit. this was against the majority in her former constituency. and she says she has faced a torrent of abuse from anti—semitism to misogyny. in order to stay sane i do not look at most of the abuse directed at me on twitter. i just don't think an individual can cope with that. and you can feel the anger behind the tweets and the anger behind the use of capital letters, the aggression. and i find that frightening. so it seems whether you are leaving your party or taking a stance on brexit, can make you many enemies online as well. next, i wanted to see whether the type of abuse candidates received also tended to differ based on their ethnicity. what we saw here is that if you are a bame candidate you are more likely to be accused of being stupid,
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to be insulted for your intelligence. a good example is david lammy who is insulted for his honesty and intelligence and sworn at an awful lot. early in the campaign, david tweeted a report he had overseen into the disproportionate of black and ethnic minorities in the prison system and even he, no stranger to online abuse, was taken aback by the response. i was staggered at the level of abuse that i received. that is an indication ofjust how toxic things have become. most of the abusive tweets directed at me are really pushing deeply racist stereotypical tropes. they are tropes about being stupid. tropes about being lazy. they are tropes that involve the n word. so what does the research actually tell us. there is the scale.
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ten insults every minute of every day of the campaign. they cut across a political divide but they are also determined by what a candidate says and who they are. and for sure it is notjust happening on twitter and notjust happening to politicians. so i think one of the big questions we now have is politics with each passing day becomes more digital, how can we make it less angry? hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that google founders, larry page and sergey brin stepped down from their current roles of the company. the alphabet ceo and president will remain on the board. and silicon valley tech firm peloton has come under fire for an advert in which a husband gives a smartbike costing thousands of dollars to his wife. the commercial has been viewed more than a million times on youtube and it has been called sexist, dystopian and out of touch.
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transport police in australia have rolled out ai cameras to help identify drivers using their mobile phones on the road. new south wales transport previously tested the technology earlier this year, catching 100,000 drivers using their devices illegally. drivers spotted using mobiles during its first three months of the roll—out will receive a warning letter and after that they could face a fine. and finally, an electric eel is providing a shocking start to the festive season at a tennessee aquarium in chattanooga. the festive fish, called miguel wattson, powers decorations next to his tank thanks to a system of water sensors which deliver his charge on to nearby lights. his first name as a tribute to his native habitat of south america and his surname is a play on the watt, the unit of electrical power. that is a joke worthy of the worst of christmas crackers.
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earlier this year, amazon web services ran get it. a competition for children to design an app to design solve a problem. the prize, bringing it to fruition. after stiff competition from various mental health and well—being concepts, this lot triumphed with their web app to transcribe school lessons for the deaf and hard of hearing. a few weeks after their win, i came here to the team's school, bishop storford college prep in order to find out a little more about what they created. so this is how we connect to the app and how it works. it connects to a teacher's phone and the teacher has a microphone so it will display what the teacher is saying in real—time on the student's phone so it will help them learn in class and understand the lesson more.
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can you tell me about your hearing issues and how this will hopefully help? i have hearing loss and there is often a lot of background noise when you focus on something.. this app connects to your phone, you don't have to worry about the background noise, you just have to focus on the person speaking. how much of an issue do you find listening in the classroom? i find it hard when you sit at the front and people behind you are talking and you're trying focus on the teacher. and for lip reading they need to be facing your direction. yes. there is also the issue of children regularly needing hearing aids re—moulded as they grow. so how do they get started creating the app? we looked through what we had noted down and thought to ourselves how could we had to put it together so it would be something that works. nota gimmick. so after we found our target audience we sent the information to amazon who judged it and then the competition started.
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and you won. how did that feel? amazing. no—one could believe it. i wasn't there on the day but i heard you all gave a very, very good presentation on stage. how was it to get up in front of a big huge grown—up audience? i felt like steve jobs. launching your equivalent of the iphone? yes. when ready, the app will be opensource so it will be available to other schools. but the process so far, much like creating any tech, has come with its challenges. it is just a bit disappointing that it is not coming up perfect first time. there is an unrealistic standard, but it is a bit disappointing to know that there is a lot more work to be done. this is part of a bigger picture. the direction we push kids
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in in an ever—changing world. i think with the careers that are opening up, technology is becoming more important. notjust being able to use it but to have an understanding of what it is and where it has come from. there is a misnomer about artificial intelligence. everybody talks about al but they don't explain to the youngsters what it means. ai is based on data. that is all that is. built up data. and they can create things from data. that is a skill set that they can use in any walk of life going forward. do any of you want tech jobs in the future? i would love a job in tech in the future. because being an artist is just creating art, but being an app designer is creating art that is functional and usable and it helps so many people. i definitely want to try and put technology into surgery and things like that and robotics because i find it extremely interesting how they manage to do
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certain things with technology and make it do amazing things. brilliant. lara's new friends aren't the only ones thinking about the future. last week, the european parliament officially declared a climate emergency. but while most of the climate narrative is concentrated on the predicted catastrophe, filmmaker damon gameau has taken a different approach. the power of innovation, imagination, creativity. that is within all people. the film is a letter to my now six—year—old daughter, showing her what the world could look like in 2040 if we put into practice the best solutions that are already available, so i call it an exercise in fact—based dreaming. everything i show her in the future has to already exist right now
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and be scalable and practical in some form. 2040 is a film full of positive possibilities, a future where solar power generation happens on every roof and energy is traded between households. animals and diverse crops mix in small agricultural pastures that create healthier soil with deeper roots, which lock in co2 and hold more water in the land. i met up with damon at zsl london zoo, where he explained that simply sending out negative messages charged with fear and anxiety can actually shut down the problem—solving part of our brains, which is no good for thinking our way out of climate change. when we are only hearing that one side of the story, there's a lot of paralysis for some people, so i thought if we are going to sound the fire alarm, you also have to show people where the exits are.
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all the cars that your mum and i ever owned were stranded assets, meaning that 96% of the time they were parked or unused. damon's 2040 is a world where autonomous vehicles drive us around and because they are always active, there is no need for car parks. in fact, there is no need for even one car per household, which means far fewer cars on the roads. and that means that we could reclaim large chunks of our cities for green spaces, and even to grow food locally in disused car parks. probably the most exciting solution in the film is seaweed. it is widely accepted that we need to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and out of the oceans in huge quantities in order to slow global heating. it turns out that seaweed is fantastic at this so—called carbon sequestration. it's the fastest growing organism in the world, it can grow half a metre a day,
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and up to 50 meters long. and up to 50 metres long. so what that means is it has just turbocharged sequestering that carbon faster than a tree. this, made from recycled material, becomes a platform for the seaweed to grow on. it sits just below the surface and sinks lower as the seaweed grows and gets heavier. the seaweed can be regularly harvested and used for a range of purposes. 0ur stretched resources and growing emissions are partly due to our increasing consumer culture, but also partly due to an exploding global population, and that leads damon to discuss a less talked about cause of climate change. there's about 100 million girls that don't get to complete their education every year for a variety of reasons, religious or taken out to put to work. if a girl is able to complete her education and is given access to reproductive health services, plus viable work opportunities, she gets to choose when and how many children she has,
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and that comes down to two. but if she is taken out of school early, the number is five or more. the un says that by 2050, that is a difference of 1.1 billion people, which has an enormous impact on our resources. so, empowering girls and women, fantastic, let's do that anyway, but we get this other bonus with our emissions and resources. well, christmas is finally here, having started in about september this year by my reckoning. it means that there are now millions of sparkles and twinkles begging to be instagrammed. many of the latest smartphones boast cameras with impressive night mode credentials. but which one is best? we asked chris fox to put them to the test. we've come out to central london to try three of the latest smartphone cameras to see how they cope with low light. the huawei mate 30 pro, iphone 11 pro, and google pixel 4 all boast that they take impressive shots at night,
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but will any leave the competition in the dark? i will also take some photos on the iphone 7 plus from 2016 to give us an idea of how much phone cameras have improved. my first stop is this bridge in london, we are going to capture a cityscape at night starting with huawei mate 30 pro. and huawei says its phone takes really good pictures at night because the camera sensor in here is 125% bigger than the one in the iphone 11 pro max, so it lets in more light. so, how did they stack up? all three of the phones took sharp, bright photos of the skyline at night. the mate 30 pro picture looked slightly more crisp but the colours were less saturated. the iphone 11 pro photo looked more vibrant but not quite as sharp, while the pixel 4 seemed to have a nicer colour balance with a bluish sky rather than the orange tint that we saw in the others. but for me, there was no clear winner. all of them took nice photos.
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so the next stop is the embankment. i've come to have my picture taken with the london eye, and i've got soila here using the google pixel 4 first. google says its special sauce is computational photography, so it is going to take a string of photos and stitch them all together and use machine learning to clean up any noise or artefacts, so i have to hold still. all three of the new phones took a brighter photo than the old iphone 7 plus. once again, the mate 30 pro seemed to take the sharpest photo. if you look at my face, it's in focus and it also seemed to pick out lot of detail on my jumper. the pixel 4 photo was pretty sharp too, and i felt the colour balance was more flattering. i would probably be happy to post this one on my instagram. but in this location, i think the iphone 11 pro struggled, it didn't pick out as much detail in myjumper and the coloursjust looked weird no matter how many times we took the shot. when apple introduced the iphone 11
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pro, they said it would be better at taking photos in dimly lit bars, and it doesn't get more dim than this. this is gordon's wine bar in london, and it's mainly lit by candles so let's see how the phones manage. the difference with the iphone 11 pro is i don't have to activate night mode, it does that automatically when it detects its dark, and it is telling me to hold still while it stitches together several photos just like the pixel 4. all three phones took a picture that wouldn't have been possible on a phone a few years ago. just like the previous shots, the mate 30 pro photo came out brighter overall and sharper, and it's hard to believe this was taken in candlelight. once again, the pixel 4 had a more flattering colour balance and there was less detail on the iphone 11 pro shot which you can see if you zoom in on soila's hair. this might be the biggest challenge for the phones yet. we are in stjames‘ park,
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it's very dark, there's no lights here, so will the cameras be able to pick up any photos at all, and will we get robbed for waving around a few grands‘ worth of cameras? let's find out. that looks just like its daytime! the fact that any of these phones took a clear shot in near—darkness is impressive. if you zoom in, you can tell that none of them are crystal—clear but that is probably not the point here. the new phones all took snaps in the dead of night that looked like they were taken during the day. it's pretty impressive how much phone cameras have improved injust a few years thanks to new hardware and a lot of heavy lifting by the software. i found some of those night mode shots looked a little bit artificial, and in some cases the phones took as nice shots just in the regular camera mode. the real test was that near darkness shot taken in stjames‘ park. that was truly impressive,
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but i wonder how useful it will be for a majority of people, and whether people will really want to take lots of pictures in near complete darkness remains to be seen. that was chris fox in a park in the dark. and that is it from us for this week. if you would like to get hold of us during the week, you can. we live on instagram, facebook, youtube and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching, and we will see you soon. hello there. we have had quite a mixture of weather to start off the weekend. for many of us in england and wales, it has been dry with quite a bit of cloud but also some spells of sunshine, like these shropshire earlier in the day, but in scotland, it has been quite a different look to the weather with outbreaks of rain working in for
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many of you through the afternoon and rather low cloud as well. 0ur attention at the moment is focusing on what is going on in the north atlantic. this swirl of cloud is notjust one area of low pressure, it is in fact two, one here and one here, and these two areas of low pressure combine to make storm atiyah, and it is this squeeze on the isobars on the southern portion of the low that brings the strong winds to the southern coast of ireland and during sunday night time across wales and western areas of england, too. before we get there, overnight tonight it will be quite a windy night as a band of heavy rain pushes east across all areas. as the rain clears, it will be followed by blustery showers, but it is the strength of the winds that stops it getting too cold. temperatures overnight for most between 6 and 10 celsius. for sunday's forecast, rain clearing away from the south—east quickly, then it is a day that is going to be much windier than it was today, a day of sunshine and blustery showers, but those showers will tend to merge together to give longer spells of rain in northern ireland
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and scotland, as colder air tends to work in here. it will be a windy day nationwide, but the strongest winds are to the south of our centre of low pressure. forecast to reach 80mph around the coastline of west ireland and then this squeeze in the isobars works into wales and western england where we could get gusts of 70mph or perhaps even stronger than that. winds that strong are perfectly capable of bringing down tree branches so there is a risk of some disruption from these strong winds from sunday into monday for some of us. heading into monday's weather charts, that storm system works off into europe and what we have in its place is these northerly winds coming straight down from polar regions. it is going to be a cold day. monday sees plenty of sunshine but that said, there will be frequent showers across northern scotland and frequent showers coming down the north sea to affect the eastern coast of england as well. inland, yes, there might be some sunshine, but factor in those strong and cold winds and it will feel quite bitter on monday.
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this is bbc news. i'm shaun ley. the headlines at 4pm. the online forum reddit says it believes leaked government documents detailing uk—us trade talks and posted on its site are linked to russia. the really big question is how did those leaks get there in the first place? how did they end up online, being amplified by what reddit says is part of a known foreign influence operation? 0ceans are running out of oxygen — warn scientists — as global temperature rises put many species of fish at risk of extinction. fears that a mega bushfire near sydney that's burning out of control could take weeks to put out. in a rare move, a chinese—american researcher convicted of spying in iran has been freed in an apparent prisoner exchange with the us. the billionaire businessman elon musk is cleared of defaming a british cave explorer after calling him "pedo
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