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1/9(月)　SNSの利用は10代の脳の変化と関連している

Social Media Use Is Linked to Brain Changes in Teens, Research Finds

fraught　緊迫した、(問題などが)いっぱいの
ascertain　確かめる、解明する
trajectory　軌道、弾道
salience　突起、顕著な特徴
prefrontal　cortex　前頭前皮質

著者：Ellen Barry
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

The effect of social media use on children is a fraught area of research as parents and policymakers try to ascertain the results of a vast experiment already in full swing.

A new study by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina tries something new, conducting successive brain scans of middle-schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of especially rapid brain development.

The researchers found that children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed a distinct trajectory, with their sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time. Teenagers with less engagement in social media followed the opposite path.

The study, published Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics, is among the first attempts to capture changes to brain function correlated with social media use over a period of years.

“We can’t make causal claims that social media is changing the brain,” said Eva H. Telzer, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and one of the authors of the study.

But, she added, “teens who are habitually checking their social media are showing these pretty dramatic changes in the way their brains are responding.”

A team of researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 169 students in the sixth and seventh grades from a middle school in rural North Carolina, splitting them into groups according to how often they reported checking Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feeds.

At around age 12, the students already showed distinct patterns of behavior. Habitual users reported checking their feeds 15 or more times a day; moderate users checked between one and 14 times; nonhabitual users checked less than once a day.

The subjects received full brain scans three times, at approximately one-year intervals, as they played a computerized game.

While carrying out the task, the frequent checkers showed increasing activation of three brain areas: reward-processing circuits, which also respond to experiences like winning money; brain regions that determine salience, picking out what stands out in the environment; and the prefrontal cortex, which helps with regulation and control.

The results showed that “teens who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,” Telzer said.

The findings do not capture the magnitude of the brain changes, only their trajectory. And it is unclear, authors said, whether the changes are beneficial or harmful.

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1/10(火)　退職とはさらに仕事をすること

As Asian Societies Age, ‘Retirement’ Just Means More Work

toil　骨折る、骨折って働く
bloat　(…を)ふくれさせる、膨大にする
pronounced　明白な、著しい
leverage　(目的達成のための)効力、影響力　*英[liːvərɪdʒ] / 米[levɚɪdʒ]
accomodate　(…に)適応させる、対応させる
have no choice but to …　…するしかない、…する以外に選択の余地がない

著者：Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

TOKYO — With populations across East Asia declining and fewer young people entering the workforce, workers increasingly are toiling well into their 70s and beyond. Companies desperately need them, and the older employees desperately need the work. Early-retirement ages have bloated the pension rolls, making it difficult for governments in Asia to pay retirees enough money each month to live on.

Demographers have warned about a looming demographic time bomb in wealthy nations for years. But Japan and its neighbors have already started to feel the effects, with governments, companies and, most of all, older residents grappling with the far-reaching consequences of an aging society. The changes have been most pronounced in the workplace.

Working at his age “is not fun,” said Yoshihito Oonami, 73, a vegetable delivery person in Japan’s capital. “But I do it to survive.”

For some older people, the demand for workers has given them new opportunities and leverage with employers, especially if they felt pushed out by early-retirement ages in favor of younger workers. Now the question these aging nations are grappling with is how to adapt to the new reality — and potential benefits — of an older workforce while ensuring that people can retire after a lifetime of work without falling into poverty.

In East Asia, where populations are graying faster than anywhere else in the world, there is an urgent need for more flexibility. Japan, South Korea and China have all been forced to experiment with policy changes — such as corporate subsidies and retirement adjustments — to accommodate population shifts. Now, with the rest of the world not far behind, many nations will probably look to Asia for lessons in how to respond to similar crises.

Japan isn’t the only country in East Asia where older people feel they have no choice but to keep working. In South Korea, with a poverty rate among older people close to 40%, a similar proportion of those 65 and older are still working. In Hong Kong, 1 in 8 older residents works. The ratio is more than one-fourth in Japan — compared with 18% in the United States.

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1/11(水)　オゾン層の回復が軌道に戻る

Restoration of the Ozone Layer Is Back on Track, Scientists Say

back on track　軌道に戻る
rogue　不正な
refrigerant　冷却材
synthesize　統合する、合成して作る 　
synthesizer　シンセサイザー
Chlorofluorocarbon　クロロフルオロカーボン(CFC)
depletion　使い尽くす、枯渇させる
crack down　(…を)厳しく取り締まる、厳罰に処する

著者：Henry Fountain
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

The weakened ozone layer, which is vital to protecting life on Earth, is on track to be restored to full strength within decades — the latest success of a global effort by nations to stop using chemicals that had been destroying the critical layer in the upper atmosphere.

In a report for the United Nations, scientists said Monday that China had largely eliminated rogue emissions of one of those chemicals, known as CFC-11.

Once widely used as a refrigerant and in foam insulation, CFC-11 was first synthesized a century ago. Along with similar chemicals, collectively called chlorofluorocarbons, CFC-11 destroys ozone, which blocks ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and otherwise harm people, plants and animals. Chlorofluorocarbons were banned under the Montreal Protocol, a landmark environmental agreement that took effect in 1989.

If countries continue to maintain bans on chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals, ozone levels between the polar regions should reach pre-1980 levels by 2040. Ozone holes, or regions of greater depletion that appear regularly near the South Pole and, less frequently, near the North Pole, should also recover, by 2045 in the Arctic and about 2066 in Antarctica.

“The recovery of the ozone layer is on track,” said David W. Fahey, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory and a co-chair of the protocol’s scientific assessment panel.

In the 1970s, scientists first determined that chlorofluorocarbons were depleting ozone high in the atmosphere. By the mid-1980s, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone over the Antarctic, sparking an urgent international effort to repair it. More than 100 ozone-depleting compounds were eventually banned and phased out.

Chinese emissions had threatened to delay restoration of the ozone layer by a decade, but the new report said it had only been put off by a year.

Emissions of CFC-11 began increasing after 2012 and appeared to come from East Asia, according to a 2018 study. Investigations by The New York Times and others strongly suggested that small factories in eastern China were the source of the rogue emissions.

At the time, the head of the United Nations Environment Program, which oversees the protocol, called illegal production of CFC-11 “nothing short of an environmental crime which demands decisive action.”

But a follow-up study in 2019 showed that emissions were declining, a sign that the Chinese government was cracking down on new production of CFC-11.

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1/12(木)　ブラジルの襲撃事件はなぜ起きたのか？

What Drove a Mass Attack on Brazil’s Capital? Mass Delusion.

far-right　極右、極端な保守主義
storm　襲撃する
be outnumbered　劣勢である
negligent　怠慢な、過失の
complicit　(犯罪などに)加担した、共謀した
lay bare　暴露する
insidious　陰湿な
rigged　不正操作された

著者：Jack Nicas
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

BRASÍLIA, Brazil — For the past 10 weeks, supporters of ousted far-right President Jair Bolsonaro had camped outside Brazilian army headquarters, demanding that the military overturn October’s presidential election. And for the past 10 weeks, the protesters faced little resistance from the government.

Then, on Sunday, many of the camp’s inhabitants left their tents in Brasília, the nation’s capital, drove a few miles away and, joining hundreds of other protesters, stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential offices.

By Monday morning, authorities were sweeping through the encampment. They dismantled tents, tore down banners and detained 1,200 of the protesters, ferrying them away in buses for questioning.

Why an encampment demanding a military coup was allowed to expand for more than 70 days was part of a larger set of questions that officials were grappling with Monday, among them:

Why were protests allowed to get so close to Brazil’s halls of power? And why had security forces been so outnumbered, allowing throngs of protesters to easily surge into official government buildings?

Brazil’s justice minister, Flávio Dino, said various security agencies had met Friday to plan for possible violence in the planned protests on Sunday. But, he said, the security strategy hatched in that meeting, including keeping protesters away from the main government buildings, was at least partly abandoned on Sunday and there were far fewer law enforcement officers than had been anticipated.

“The police contingent was not what had been agreed upon,” he said, adding that it was unclear why plans had changed.

Some in the federal government blamed the governor of Brasília, Ibaneis Rocha, and his deputies, suggesting that they had been either negligent or complicit in understaffing the security forces around the protests.

Late Sunday, Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice, suspended Rocha from his job as governor for at least 90 days.

Whatever security lapses may have occurred, Sunday’s riot laid bare in shocking fashion the central challenge facing Brazil’s democracy. Unlike other attempts to topple governments across Latin America’s history, the attacks Sunday were not ordered by a single strongman ruler or a military bent on seizing power, but rather were fueled by a more insidious, deeply rooted threat: mass delusion.

Millions of Brazilians appear to be convinced that October’s presidential election was rigged against Bolsonaro, despite audits and analyses by experts finding nothing of the sort.

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1/13(金)　フィンランドが教える「誤報を見抜く力」とは？

How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation

misinformation　誤報
resilience　耐性
preschool　幼稚園
vulnerable　弱い
prevalent　流行る

著者：Jenny Gross
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?

“Just because it’s a good thing or it’s a nice thing doesn’t mean it’s true or it’s valid,” she said. In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect that the videos had on them.

Her goal, like that of teachers around Finland, is to help students learn to identify false information.

Finland ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.

After Finland, the European countries that ranked highest for resilience to misinformation in the Open Society Institute survey were Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland and Sweden. The countries that were the most vulnerable to misinformation were Georgia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania. The survey results were calculated based on scores for press freedom, the level of trust in society and scores in reading, science and math.

The United States was not included in the survey, but other polls show that misinformation and disinformation have become more prevalent since 2016 and that Americans’ trust in the news media is near a record low. A survey by Gallup, published in October, found that just 34% of Americans trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, slightly higher than the lowest number that the organization recorded, in 2016. In Finland, 76% of Finns consider print and digital newspapers to be reliable, according to an August survey commissioned by a trade group representing Finnish newspapers that was conducted by IRO Research, a market research company.

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1/14(土)　UFO、その多くの正体が判明

Report Categorizes Many Unexplained Sightings as Drones, Trash or Birds

fueled 焚き付けた
phenomen 現象（複数形）
quell 鎮圧する
otherworld 別世界的
adversarial 敵対する
optical illusion 目の錯覚

著者：Julian E. Barnes
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

WASHINGTON — A new declassified document on UFOs reported to the U.S. military found that a majority have ordinary explanations, although dozens remain officially unexplained.

The failure to categorize many incidents has frustrated intelligence officials and fueled conspiracy theories, but Pentagon officials say the incomplete findings are a result of inadequate sensor collection, not evidence of advanced technology or any sort of government cover-up.

The new report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, examines 366 incidents either observed or submitted since the last report on unexplained phenomena was released in 2021.

With the release of any government report on UFOs, officials hope the information will quell speculation around the unexplained incidents. But such hopes are inevitably dashed because incidents that cannot be categorized fuel new rounds of speculation and conspiracy.

Of the newly documented incidents, 26 were found to be drones, 163 were balloons and six were airborne clutter, such as birds or trash. The remaining 171 incidents have not yet been attributed.

A portion of those unexplained incidents that “demonstrate unusual flight characteristics” will get further study, according to the report. But the report does not outline how many incidents fall under that category, an omission likely to stoke further speculation by people who have embraced explanations such as otherworldly visitors or advanced unknown technology by adversarial powers.

Military and intelligence officials have said in many cases that imperfect sensor readings have prevented any sort of formal conclusion. Even in those cases, the limited available evidence suggests the incidents are likely to have more ordinary explanations as well.

Congress has pressed the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to do a new review of material they have collected, stretching back to the days of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book.

In that era, the Pentagon referred to reports — sometimes of their own classified programs — as UFOs. In recent years, as new reports from Navy pilots sparked new interest, the Pentagon began calling the unidentified sightings unidentified aerial phenomena, reflecting a belief that some incidents might not be objects but optical illusions or poorly understood, but natural, atmospheric events.

With the creation of another task force to examine the sightings, the Pentagon changed the name again to “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” keeping the same initialism but reflecting that some unexplained incidents could be on the water, under the sea or in space.

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1/15(日)　マイクロソフト、チャットGPTに大きくベット

Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate AI

GPT　Generative Pre-trained Transformer
poised　準備ができている、見通しである
indicative　表示して、表れて
conspicuous　顕著な、はっきり見える
prompt　コマンド入力、プロンプト

著者：Cade Metz and Karen Weise
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

SAN FRANCISCO — When a chatbot called ChatGPT hit the internet late last year, executives at a number of Silicon Valley companies worried they were suddenly dealing with new artificial intelligence technology that could disrupt their businesses.

But at Microsoft, it was a cause for celebration. For several years, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, had been putting the pieces in place for this moment.

In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco company that designed ChatGPT. And in the years since, it has quietly invested another $2 billion, according to two people familiar with the investment who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

The $3 billion paid for the huge amounts of computing power that OpenAI needed to build the chatbot. And it meant that Microsoft could rapidly build and deploy new products based on the technology.

Microsoft is now poised to challenge Big Tech competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple with a technological advantage the company has not possessed for more than two decades. Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI as it seeks to push its technology even further, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The potential $10 billion deal — which would mainly provide OpenAI with even larger amounts of computing power — has not been finalized and the funding amount could change. But the talks are indicative of the tech giant’s determination to be on the leading edge of what has become the hottest technology in the tech industry.

Based on earlier technologies called GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, ChatGPT is the most conspicuous example of technology called generative artificial intelligence, the term for a system that can generate text, images, sounds and other media in response to short prompts.

The new generative AI technologies could reinvent everything from online search engines like Google to digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. Microsoft sees these technologies as a way of expanding and improving its already wide range of products for businesses, computer programmers and consumers, while boosting revenues across its Azure cloud computing services.

OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4, which could be released as soon as this quarter, according to Matt McIlwain, a managing partner at Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, and four other people with knowledge of the effort.

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