who knows. >> jacob ward joins us from san francisco. this is mined boggling when we see all the money and competition. the concept of competing for something which no market exists. how does that work? >> well, i mean, ali, at this point what we are talking about is competition as normalizing force, a stabilizing force. most companies would tell you they are grateful to the other for existing. there's a legitimizition of ambitions in the fact that there's two crazy people in the room, rather than just one. throughout the history of the privatisation of space, competition is what allows efficiency to happen, what allows is to be affordable and enforces a certain safety. when we think about it of oh, well, it's a frontier, your standards are different to what they are when we talk about sending private enterprises up there. competition is more of a normalizing influence sthan a true race -- than a true race to bring anything back. >> let's talk about the safety and the dangers and the look of regulation. these cop companies that are compe

jacob ward explains. >> scientists have been worried about the arctic for decades.ut a new report put out by the national oceanic and atmospher ic administration or noaa. >> the arctic is like a thermostat. we're changing the thermostat, and that feeds back in our global climate and the weather we experience. >> the world is seeing some of the lowest levels of arctic ice in decades. that's effecting the weather everywhere. in the u.s. alaska's temperatures of january 2014 is nearly 20 degrees higher than a year earlier, and snow melted three to four weeks earlier in scandinavia and western russia. at the at the same timsame reported extreme warming temperatures. in the past they have focused on the specific conditions of the ice sheet, but this year they feel they have enough data to begin describing secondary effect its. for instance, on polar bears. they are what we call a dependent space. they're decreasing the area in the summer this is decreasing polar bear numbers, and the health and the condition of the polar bears. >> past studies have focused on very specif

jacob ward explains. >> luige hospital in milan subpoena typical of the front line of hiv aids.t's a busy place full of recently diagnosed and long-term patients who are here for antiviral drugs. >> they told me i had to take four different kind of pills, i was really scared because everyone knows that they bring a lot of problems. >> the drugs are chosen from 27 possible medications. typically, a cocktail of three or more of those drugs is given in a single dose. they are designed to suppress the virus in the body and often make transmission more difficult. >> dr. jay levy, an american physician among the first to discover the advice in the 1980s worries the drugs may be inviting disaster. he believes that the unchecked use of anti-ret proceed viral drugs may help the virus to mutate into a resistant form, one that we cannot treat. >> i am quite concerned that if we continue to advocate the use of the drugs in this country or in europe where they have the funds to do it, we may be breeding the event annual emergence of a multi-resistant virus that can come back and that you wan

jacob ward explains. >> scientists have been worried about the arctic for decades.ut a new report put out by the national oceanic and atmospher ic administration or nooa indicate that the conditions there are increasingly unstable. >> the arctic plays a very important role in regulating the global climate. the arctic is like a thermostat, and because we're losing sea ice and glacial ice, we're changing the thermostat, and that then feeds back into our global climate. and the weather that we experience. >> the world is seeing some of the lowest level of arctic ice in decadesser. that's affecting the weather everywhere. in the u.s. alaska's average weather in 2014 was nearly 20 degrees higher than a year earlier, and snow melted four weeks earlier in scandinavia. the report presented here in san francisco at the american geofiscal union which is the world's largest space and earth meeting has in the past only focused on the specific condition of the ice sheet. but this year scientists believe they have enough data to describe secondary effects in the arctic, for insta

jacob ward explains, the air traffic control system in the u.s. is falling behind the times and in need of an overhaul. >> as your plane pushing back and is ready for takeoff it enters a sprawling and complex system. it's safe with 0.2 actions but the national air space is inefficient. >> it's a manual process, starting at the gate with a ramp controller. he or she will hand it off to a tower controller and will be handed off to another controller in the departure or arrival area and yet again be handed off to another en route controller and likely many en route controllers. >> since no central system coordinates the people the f.a.a. is working on one that will. the new system is the next generation air transportation system, or next gen. n.a.s.a. has been commissioned to build tracking software. it will replace the radar based ground control with g.p.s. a technology capable of tracking planes. right now the system relies on humans to hand the planes to one another. these are limitations of the human mind. they can't plan far enough ahead. >> in

jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> peru is on the front line of global warming. it's home to 70% of the world's tropical glaciers. but they're disappearing at an alarming rate. we have reports high up in the andes mountains. >> for centuries people have relied on melt water in the mountains. here in the city the markets are full of produce. but there is a problem, the mountain's water source is slowly disappearing. the rivers run fast for now, but the glaciers that feed them are melting away. >> benjamin morales is a glacierologist. he remembers the glacier in its heyday when people even skied here. >> until--it stretched all the way down. >> we walk where once ice hundreds of meters deep now the glacier has receded all the way back to the face of the mountain. >> we're losing time because all the glaciers, it's going to the sea. >> it is a stunning science but full of danger. new lagoons of ice is forming, increased threats of mudslides and flooding disasters. >> they say this glacier is melting at such an incredible rate that it could be gone in 30 or 40 years,

. >> jacob ward joins us from san francisco. it's mind boggling when you see all of the money and competition. the concept of competing for something for which no market exists. how does this work? >> well, at this point we're talking about competition as a normalizing, stabilizing force. both companies will tell you they are grateful to the other for existing. but also throughout the history of the privatization of space, competition is what allows efficiency to happen. and it enforces a certain kind of safety. when we think it's just a front tier of public space exploratio explorations, your standards are different. so competition at this point is is more of a normalizing influence than a true race to bring things back. >> let's talk about the safety and dangers and the idea of lack of regulation. >> sure. >> these companies competing for instance for the google prize, are so far ahead of any regulator regulators, do we have to think about exploitation or those sorts of things? >> absolutely. if you take the moon as an example

jacob ward explains. >> bacteria are becoming resistence to the drugs that we use to kill them. in the united states alone, at least 2 million people become infected each year with back tier yeah that are resistence, and at least 23,000 people die as a direct result of those. that is a massive problem, one that dwarfs many other more visible public health threats. and there are many factors that can contribute to the problem. the fact that drug companies aren't really making new antibiotics, it is expensive and time consuming and making pharmaceuticals and a business, so this group is hoping to convince world leaders to create the drugs they need, but this a host of other factors that make bacteria ever harder to kill. antibiotic drugs are being less effective because as they are used in greeter numbers of people, they are getting more and more opportunity, to develop resistence. you should think of it like practice, the more it has a chance to practice on the drugs, the more they see them on the battlefield, the better they get at resisting the effects. and there are two big re

signs and technology correspondent jacob ward looks at early warning systems and how reports are communicated. >> tsunami science advanced enormously and new system are online. the 28 country, 400 million ocean tsunami system senses approaching sees through a network of sys monitors and boyce and can send an alarm within 10 minutes. the trouble is getting that warning to individuals in time for them to escape. in archa indonesia, devastated by the 2004 tsunami, a 2012 earthquake at sea did not set off the systems, a failure. in india, it cannot reliably reach citizens, it must rely on faxing them the news in some cases. >> how and where it's built is a factor. we are under the watchful gaze of the pacific tsunami warning center in the san francisco. experts are worried when it comes to a tsunami, about an earthquake triggered in alaska, giving us four hours of warping. with a clear early warning, this water frond is not prepared -- waterfront is not prepared for big floodwaters. that is true. some work has gone into developing survival capsules, but few companies are willing to make the massi

. >> jacob ward joins us from san francisco. it's mind boggling when you see

well, for more on this, yesterday our science technology reporter jacob ward said that it did not fit their pattern of attacking. jake ward said that the malware used was one that was used in the past. you heard what the president had to say. what are you thinking? >> well, it's interesting. it certainly is more evidence has been gestured at by the fbi but it's not that we're seeing a great deal of it. we saw earlier today a representative by hule hewlett-packard who has done one of the few exhaustive looks at north korea, the tools used are things that could be bought off the shelf. it's not a smoking gun to say that the same technologies used in this have been used in the past. these technologies are basically what you buy on the black market and use. the same way that you use tools to remodel your kitchen. it's the same kind of idea that there are widgets involved. this may not be the fingerprint that the fbi makes them sure of. >> what about the ip dress. address. would you put that in the same category? >> this is the kind of thing that the ip addresses, you can route through sev

jacob ward explains. >> your life, total potential earnings, the value you represent in society is 8.7 million. no, really, that is the statistical value of your life. i don't mean you in particular. it's a standard measure averaged by academic researchers surveying insurance companies and agencies. it comes with its own acronym. vsl. standing for the value of a statistical life. regulators use vsl to determine how much to spend on safety standards that save human lives. it's not a fixed number. federal agencies value life differently, depending on the regulations they are considering. the maths changes. the environmental protection agency, as it measures the risks of mortality of what might be toxic, uses a baseline of 7.6 million. the transportation department used values of $6 million. the food and drug administration puts a price tag of $7.9 million on human life. the value of life is calculated differently in the courts. a civil lawsuit in the death of michael brown, or eric garner could result in millions in reword to the families of the dead -- reward to the families, depending

jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> falling oil prices rapidly changing the balance of power throughout the world. but what about the battle taking place across the island in washington? the discussion of money, in a controversial pop line, who wins, who loses, that's next. >> isil, ukraine, ferguson, crises that commanded headlines in 2014, and president obama's attention in the year that saw no shortage of conflict at home and abroad. for more on that mike viqueira joins us from the white house with a look back at how the president met those challenges and what is ahead. >> as the rocky year came to a close, president obama was accentuating the positives. >> i said that 2014 would be a year of action, and would be a breakthrough year for america. and it has been. >> there are reasons for optimism. the economy is heading up. while the jobless rate dips down. along with another encouraging sign. the price at the pump plummeting. >> i'm glad to be able to pull together my cab inspect. >> mr. obama began 2014 with a vow to go around congress. that's what it took to enact his endi got a pe

our science and technology reporter, jacob ward is with us. jake let's talk about the technology. exist? >> yeah, it's been around for a long time, ali. today on cyber monday, you can get a camera called the narrative that will do pretty much the same thing. it will take a photograph every five seconds and send it to the cloud. i don't know why you would want that, but in theory that's something that people want. it's a very, very straightforward peace of technology. >> all right. what is -- has anybody studied what effect it has on the behavior of police officers, law enforcement to have these cameras? this >> yeah, the sort of pilot program, the study that everybody refers to is the study of a city in rialto here in california, a city of 100,000 people. and the police force were randomly assigned cameras. as part of a controlled study, and the results were incredibly dramatic. the number of complaints about police dropped in one 12-month period from 24 complaints to 3. a drop of 88%. and that was when only half of the police officers were wearing cameras. and the use of force wa

jacob ward joins us from san francisco.or more on this story let's bring in the former assistant of infrastructure with homeland security. we just heard that north korea was involved with the sony hack, and they based this on ip addresses that they attributed to north korea. is that the most accurate way to determine the origins of a hack? >> well, i think it's the most direct way to determine those oogenies but i believe there are other attributes of that attack that they can assign to attribution. ip addresses is the simplest way, but there will be other factors tha and significantels that the fbi intelligence can determine attribution. >> how could north korea pull off such a sophisticated cyberattack? >> well, i think--i don't know the details of the intelligence findings, but we presume that it's been coming from north korea physically. they may have used a proxy. they could have conducted the attack elsewhere. i don't know all the details of what's been discovered through the forensics investigation. i think we have t

used science and employed psychologists to enhance interrogation techniques, jacob ward has more on how science play as role in torture. >> reporter: once upon a time and still in some places today torture was a matter of inflicting physical pain. but in the modern era a terror sort of pseudoscience has created new methods of applying psychological pain. i'm talking about sleep depravation, mock execution, threats to family members. these techniques have the advantage of leaving little or no physical trace on the money which deprives victims and international courts of crucial evidence. but the thing to understand is that the researchers who looked at the distinction between physical and psychological torture had found that in the end the affect on the victim is largely the same. whether it's the body or the mind. whether the victim has been sexually assaulted or simply held in a constant state of terrible anxiety a common affect is the disintegration of the personality. the point of torture in a setting like this is to regress the victim to a place where he or she loses all hope of con

jacob ward, al jazeera america. >> in malaysia the tsunami coincided with another natural disaster. floods have hit and blamed for five deaths. the relief efforts continue to be hampered by the weather. >>> in new york mourners gathered from all over the country to remember a slain police officer. he and his partner were shot and killed last saturday. this comes as a community in new york tries to heal. the nypd has arrested search people for making threats against police officer. meanwhile, protesters continue to hold demonstrations. in a sea of blue nypd police officers paid their respect for officer ramos today. the services for ramos' partner are still pending. the man suspected of killing the officers shot himself shortly afterwards. the suspect claimed he was going to kill police officers in retribution for the deaths of michael brown and eric garner earlier this year. demonstrations in the wake of their deaths and more than 100 people block streets chanting "black lives matter" yesterday. most of the protesters from peaceful but a small group broke store windows and pulled li

just someone with charm and creativity to get inside a life that we are all posting online >>> jacob ward, let's continue the conversation. dan, your job is to protect u.s. companies. how do you do that against cyber attacks? >> we discussion what data they have, and who is willing to go after it. in the case of sony pictures we think who would be interested. what methods those groups have historically used. they've been under attack for many years. we like to look at the history of peers in the industry and others that suffered similar event. >> and the guardians of peace - that group. they came on to the scene with the latest round of attacks. there's not a lot of information available about them online. as referenced before, there's a large investigation going on to determine who they are and what they are capable of doing. >> we talk about iran. who lessons have we learnt? >> well, at the technical level we learn about monoculture, and the importance of having good systems administration. there is a question of limits of what we call deter ends. i feel confident that china is not gosk

jacob ward has the story. >> the veterans administration is an enormous and traditional institution. when they take this radical a step, you know the problem is out of control. nowhere is that more apparent than when you talk to the veterans themselves, especially those in the grip of addiction. >> this veteran who asked we call him by his nickname says he's been addicted to heroin. heroin and prescription opiates offer a similar addictive potential and rick of death by overdose. that's where the veterans administration has a problem. 50% of patients seek help for chronic pain, helping to make v.a. the largest prescriber of opiate pain-killers. the united states is one of the biggest prescribers of opiates. a national group led by va specialist is developing a programme giving a veteran at risk of being prescribed opiates, and others, another drawing, narcan, it can temporarily reverse an overdose, whether from heroin or pills. >> opioid painkillers were prevented to treat temporary sharp pain. since the 1990s, they have been prescribed as a standard means of treating chronic long-te

jacob ward, al jazeera, planet earth. >> 13 years in afghanistan international forces pull out combats. how it's fragile government can build on gains. and a bus terminal in texas is a gateway for undocumented immigrants. we meet one mother who is reunited with her children there after a decade apart. >> any toe forces are leaving afghanistan after a war that has cost tens of thousands of lives and more than a trillion dollars. the 13-year military combat mission ends today. thousands of nato troops will remain in afghanistan to support the afghan army. al jazeera's jennifer glasse has more from kabul. >> in 2007 helmand province was filled with taliban fighters. nato had been in the country for six years. nato troops walked a delicate line in in a country suspicious of strangers. >> they could be an enemy but at the same time, locals, we don't want to harm them. >> the mission was to get rid of poppy crops, but now it is stronger than ever. training police was focus of nato in 2010. now there are 375,000 afghan security forces they're struggling against a resurgent taliban. this has

. >> jacob ward joins us now from san francisco. of competing for something -- for which no market exists, how does this work? >> well, i mean ali i think what we're talking about here as a competition as a stabilizing force. i think both of these companies would tell you they are grateful to the other for existing. but also, you know, throughout the history sort of the privatization of space, competition is what i lous efficiency to happen, and it also enforces a certain kind of safety. when we think of it as a frontier of public exploration, suddenly your standards are different. so competition at this point is more of a normalizing influence than a true race to bring anything back, although these that. >> let's talk about the idea of lack of regulation. these companies that are competing, for instance for the google lunar x prize are so far ahead of any regulators, do we have to think about exploitation or those kinds of things. >> i think you absolutely do. if you just take the moon as an example, that is governed right now unde

we turn to our science and technology editor jacob ward. jake. why are these so vulnerable? >> these are woefully out of date i am not kidding. if you wondered for instance why it is the gate agents seem in a rush to get you seated and on the tarmac and you sit there in a line waiting to take off, the systems are not coordinated, it is one blind handoff after another. it is not prepared to handle an increase from 700 million passengers from the u.s. right now to well over a billion in 2021. >>> entering a sprawling and complex system, it's quite asafe with only 0.2 major accidents per million passengers but the national air space is very inefficient. >> it's a manual process, starts at the gate with a ramp controller and he or she will then hand them off to a tower controller for the airport surface and they will be held off to another controller in the departure or arrival area, and very likely many en route chromers. >> reporter: since no central controller coordinates those workers, the faa is working on one that will. the agency has commissioned nasa to build new trackin

jacob ward joins us from san francisco. give us a refresh ir course on -- refresher cores on how the flu -- course on how the flu works. >> what you are sowing is a dead form -- seeing is a dead form of what scientists will see. your body is getting a dress rehearsal, a practice dummy that it learns to fight against. then when the body encounters the food in the wild, it has the antibodies developed that can kill it off as soon as it enters the system. >> why does the vaccine's effectiveness seem to vary. something that is so important this year. >> well, it's because the scientists - two reasons. one is they are gambling every year as to which strain of the flu it will be. the flu changes. it's a whily bug. you have to come up with a new formulation to fight off what is coming in. the problem this year is the most sort of dangerous - is not the right word - virulent form of the flu, one of three that this hot is designed to fight, turns out to have twisted -- drifted jeb eticily -- genetically. the antibody aimed at one ki

let's go to jacob ward live in san francisco. you mentioned that it does not seem to fit in north korea's hacking industry. did today's information provide any clarity in that regard? >> well, michael, i put that question to the head of hewlett-packard research group who has done one of the few big exhaustive reports on north korea's cyber warfare technology, and i asked him whether north korea is sophisticated enough to pull this off. >> they're definitely sophisticated enough. there is a marketplace where any actor as long as they have money can buy expertise. even if they didn't have all the expertise required they can go in to the black market and purchase those skills as long as they have money. >> so the difficulty here, michael, even though some of the commitmen equipment and software matches attacks on south korea, those kinds of software packages are quite generic, and anybody can come by them. >> it's relatively gentlemen necgeneric, and it gets used and reused. >> so it's really not a conclusive smoking gun here. anyon

jacob ward has more from san francisco. >> it's been an exciting year for space exploration, the u.s. space agency handed on an asteroid and a japanese satellite taking a bike from one. and now an 8-foot nasa spacecraft. the size and shape of a baby piano, about to rip past pluto, which is strange, hostile, something that we have not visited before. we are not going there to get it ready for human habitation. the light of the sun looks like a dim, distant flashlight. it takes four hours to reach the surface, making the place cold. the surface temperatures around negative 382 degrees farenheit and because of its weird elongated orbit cuts a huge obviously in the journey around the sun. you can't predict the seasons. it makes it a hard place to set up shop. we are going there because pluto is part of a kyper belt. as this probe passes through that belt, it will be like a rapid fire tour of the beginning of the universe. here is pluto, rocks, boom, we are gone. that makes this a tricky mission. not only did the spacecraft have to be put to sleep. it's reliable, hard to turn something on

jacob ward has been looking into the use of police body cameras. he is in san francisco tonight.ake, let's talks about this technology? hasn't it been around for a while? >> yes, absolutely. this is very simple stuff. you have seen it on the dashboards of delivery vehicles and truck drivers. they keep a 30-second loop of the footage, and then discard it until the prater manually activates it. >> so what do we know about the effects of body cameras on actual police behavior? >> there has only been one well-controlled study in reality, california, a city of about a hundred thousand people. and it showed there can be a dramatic effect on the behavior of police. the police were randomly assigned sort of half of the force was wearing these cameras at one time or another, and would use it to go about their business, and it turned out that in one 12-month period, the incidents of police -- complaints against police dropped by 88%. from 24 complaints to just 3. and the use of force was half as likely on people who were wearing the cameras as for police officers that were not. the problem

jacob ward joins us live from san francisco. we've seen, pretty significant that the va is now getting involved in handing it out. >> well, tony, what's new here is that the veterans administration is such a sprawling organization, it just has a tremendous implication for the nation as a whole and that's nowhere more evident that when you speak to veterans who are in the grip of addiction to opiates and heroin. this veteran who asked that we call him by his nickname says he has been addicted to heroin and prescription opiates for most of his life. and for boston like so many veterans, heroin and other opiates offer a similar risk of death by overdose. that's where the veterans administration has a massive problem. 50% of its patients seek help for chronic pain, the largest prescriber of opiate painkillers. the united states schools 80% of prescription opiates, 16,000 overdoses a year. now a national group led by va addiction specialists is developing a program that would give any veteran at risk of abusing opiates and perhaps al

jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> falling oil prices rapidly changing the balance of power throughout the world. but what about the battle taking place across the island in washington? the discussion of money, in a controversial pop line, who wins, who loses, that's next. >> al jazeera america presents >> somebody's telling lies... >> it looks nothing like him... >> pan am flight 103 explodes december 21st, 1988 was the right man convicted? >> so many people, at such a high level, had the stake in al-megrahi's guilt >> the most definitive look at this shocking crime >> the major difficulty for the prosecution that there was no evidence >> al jazeera america presents lockerbie part two: case closed >> it's a chilling and draconian sentence... it simply cannot stand. >> its disgraceful... the only crime they really committed is journalism... >> they are truth seekers... >> all they really wanna do is find out what's happening, so they can tell people... >> governments around the world all united to condemn this... >> as you can see, it's still a very much volatile situation... >> the go

jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> so how about this. a video of a homeless man receiving $100. has gone viral. it stunned the person who gave it to him. >> reporter: josh was doing a social experiment. he wanted to see what would happen when he gave a homeless man $100. watch. >> 100 bucks, here. >> no way. keep it. it's your money now. >> reporter: so the homeless man's name is thomas. he can't believe josh's generosity and thanks him. so josh's cameraman follows him around. he walks in to the liquor market. he walks out with some bags in his hands. then awhile later he walks away and he walks towards a group of friends. there he is handing them, as you see, food. so he's handing out food to his friends. but it doesn't stop there. he then goes to another table of friends, and he hands them food as well. at this point josh decides to go up to him. watch. >> i owe you an apology. you went to the liquor store earlier. >> i thought i was going to get all smacked up drunk. >> i thought you were going to buy alcohol. >> but there are things

. >> jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> next, our picture of the day, plus. >> we've come a long way but it shows how much further we have to go. >> sports and social commentary, nba star lebron james had no problem take okay controversial issues. >> a conflict that started 100 year ago, some say, never ended... revealing... untold stories of the valor... >> they opened fire on the english officers... >> sacrifice... >> i order you to die... >> and ultimate betrayal... drawing lines in the sand that would shape the middle east and frame the conflict today >> world war one: through arab eyes only on al jazeera america >> hundreds of days in detention. >> al jazeera rejects all the charges and demands immediate release. >> thousands calling for their freedom. >> it's a clear violation of their human rights. >> we have strongly urged the government to release those journalists. >> journalism is not a crime. >>> athletes and politics don't always mix. many american sports stars chose to keep kwooift on the most controversial social issues. this week's, the nba's best players seemed t

as jacob ward explains the air traffic control system in the u.s. is falling behind the times and is in major need of an overhaul. as the plane pushes back. it's entering a sprawling system. it's safe with 0.2 accident, but the national air space is very inefficient. >> it's manual it starts at the gate with a ramp controller. he or she will hand it off to a tower controller for the airport surface. and be handed to i don't remember controller to departure areas, and be handed off to another controller and likely en route controllers. >> since no system coordinates all the people the faa works on one that will. the new system is a next generation transportation system and n.a.s.a. has been commissioned to build tracking software for it. the system replaces the radar based control with g.p.s. technology capable of tracking every plane. the system relies on humans handing planes to one another. it makes it impossible to coordinate in advance. there's a lot of variability. these are limitations of the human mind they can't plan far enough ahead. here i

jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> in a related topic, 2014 was also the year of the hack massive data breaches hit from the places we shop to the celebrities we stalk, and details of some 56 million credit card accounts stolen from home depot. a number of celebrities saw private nude photos on the internet and hackers hit sony pictures leading to ginseng being pulled from theaters. let's deem with the hacking. from a tech point of view, why do we see massive hacks? is it a case of hackers outsmarting the programmers that do security software? >> it's double-edged, the media talks about it, the bigger the hack, the more we're going to talk about it and that's the hacker's dream, stand back and get bragging rights and say i did that, i was responsible for that. on the flip side, we're dealing with this we sort of head down, horse blinders up without really stopping to say what is it exactly that we are doing here. where are these emails going? where is my credit card information stored? who you secure is that information when i go shopping? >> it does make me wonder whether this fe