Rattled by the government’s series of measures seeking to curb cryptocurrency speculation, South Korea now finds itself sharply divided over the legitimacy of the high-stakes transactions.

In a hurried move to pacify the bewildered market, the government vowed Monday to fully review feedback before making a final policy decision, suggesting that the recently mentioned shutdown of operators is unlikely under current circumstances.

“The shutting down of exchanges as proposed by the justice minister is one of the measures seeking to curb speculation. A government-wide plan will be announced later after sufficient consultation and coordination of opinions,” the Office for Government Policy Coordination said in a statement.

The remarks were seen as downplaying Justice Minister Park Sang-ki’s remarks that they were aiming to close down virtual currency operators here.

While recognizing investor autonomy until further policy decisions, the office also called for prudence and responsibility and reiterated its plan to push for real-name transactions and to deal sternly with illegal actions involving cryptocurrency trading.

“Virtual currency is not legal tender. Its prices may fluctuate by large margins and cause big losses,” it said.

Amid mixed messages from the government that had confused investors over the weekend, the Korean public also appeared split on how to approach the cryptocurrency craze.

Local pollster Realmeter said Monday that a 78.2 percent majority of respondents called for appropriate government measures on the unbridled cryptocurrency market, in a survey conducted last Friday on 504 people with a confidence level of plus minus 4.4 percent.

But on the matter of closing down local exchanges, 47.7 percent of the respondents objected, while 42.6 percent supported the measure.

Investors, particularly the technology-friendly young generation, also voiced their concerns or support toward the measures.

“I mostly support the Moon Jae-in government’s dedication to minimize social disparity and to promote economic equity but I must say that its recent set of indecisive moves over the cryptocurrency issue has been disappointing,” said a 36-year-old financial office worker, who wished to be identified only by his surname Lim.

“Of course, the cryptocurrency investment rush is a free market trend and cannot be fully stopped but the government’s role is to suggest predictable legal guidelines upon which investors may make their decisions.”

Lee Hye-jeong, another office worker in her 30s, on the other hand, backed the recent moves for further regulations.

“One cannot but feel deprived from the rampant rumors that someone made a fortune from cryptocurrency investments and is about to quit work,” she said.

“When a certain market sector is overheated and prone to speculations, relevant government intervention is needed.”

Meanwhile, a post “No to virtual currency regulations — Has the government ever allowed the people to dream?” on the Cheong Wa Dae bulletin board had gained more than 190,000 signees as of 3 p.m. Monday.

Petitions that obtain 200,000 or more online signatures within 30 day are directly answered by senior officials and delivered to the president.

The initiative is a global innovation programme that challenges start-ups to build the next big thing in payments and accelerate the future of commerce, leveraging the Visa worldwide network. The 2018 global programme kicks off with the Thailand competition.

The competition is open for entries from today to February 9 via https://visa.co.th/everywhere. To enter, start-ups must submit a solution for one of the three challenge briefs incorporating Visa APIs, a suite of Application Program Interface available through Visa Developer Platform.

Suripong Tantiyanon, Visa Thailand country manager, said that the goal of the initiative is to accelerate the digital economy by providing Visa capabilities to enterprising innovators in Thailand. “Using the Visa Developer Platform, Visa wants to enable co-creations among many of our banking and technology partners. We look forward to seeing many creative solutions in this year’s competition,” Suripong said.

The program’s challenges are: how can start-ups innovate to create relevant and rewarding digital payment experiences for international tourists visiting Thailand?; how can start-ups leverage social media platforms to accelerate commerce and scale access to financial services?; and how can start-ups innovate to make digital payments easy to access and capable of adding value for merchants?

The finalists will be invited to pitch their solutions to a panel of industry leaders, including Visa executives, on March 9 in Bangkok. The grand prize includes Bt1 million in funding, mentorship, exposure to Visa partners and access to facilities and experts at Visa’s Innovation Centre in Singapore.

Jessada Sookdhis, president of Thai Fintech Association, said the initiative will help enrich the burgeoning fintech ecosystem in Thailand, bringing solutions to the greater population by solving real needs, and driving wider adoption of electronic payments.

The Visa initiative was created in 2015 to harness the creativity and talent within the start-up community worldwide. To date, nearly 2,100 start-ups have participated, and have collectively raised over US$2 billion (Bt66 billion) in funding. The programme has selected more than 131 finalists and 36 overall winners. More than 40 countries and regions have hosted “Visa’s Everywhere Initiative” including the US, China, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

As the processing and distribution centre for the Southeast Asian region, the country’s food product exports reached US$24 billion (Bt768.4 billion) in 2016 and is forecast to reach $26.6 billion (Bt851.6 billion) this year. This growth can be attributed to an abundant supply of food materials and the competitive prices of major agricultural products.

A growing population and changing consumer food preferences, such as increasing demand for various cuisines globally, have also spurred the Thai food production industry over the past five years. As consumer demand rises and diversifies, food manufacturers are looking at automation to boost production and offer consumers more food choices, placing Thailand’s food industry at the forefront of Industry 4.0.

While there are different automation technologies available, certain options are gaining traction as they greatly simplify the automation process while offering enhanced benefits. Collaborative robots (cobots) – robots designed to work sidebyside with people – is one such technology.

Offering a Helping Hand

With multiple benefits on offer, cobots are a valuable automation tool. As Thailand looks to strengthen its position as a world leader in the food industry, manufacturers can turn to cobots to reduce production cost, increase productivity through optimisation of processes to stay competitive, all while maintaining worldclass quality standards.

Compared to traditional robots, cobots have enhanced inbuilt safety features, making it perfectly safe for people to work in close proximity with the cobots. These safety features eliminate the need for fencing and bulky barriers (subject to risk assessments). Their ergonomic design also makes them lightweight and compact, and enable cobots to operate even within small and confined spaces.

Cobots are userfriendly, easy to program and easy to use. This allows them to be integrated into any existing application, regardless of the production type or size, creating endless possibilities for robotic automation across industries.

Automating the Industry

While automation adoption is generally associated with high investments, cobots allow for modular implementation – automating selected processes – to achieve progressive automation leading to increased profits. Through this approach the company can incrementally reinvest the additional profits to further automate and maximise profits.

Cobots have found their way into food manufacturing industries around the world. Their precision, flexibility and safety make them capable of handling different tasks, ranging from simple pickandplace and palletising applications, to aiding in testing and development.

Time is of the essence for manufacturers of perishable produce who aim to seal in the freshness and prolong the lifespan of their products.

This reduces food wastage while allowing the products to be shipped over longer distances to more customers, increasing the manufacturers’ revenue stream.

At Atria, a Northern European manufacturer of gourmet food products for convenience markets and retail chains, Universal Robots’ UR5 and UR10 cobots are used to label, pack and palletise fresh food products.

By automating their production lines with cobots, Atria achieved higher quality output and was able to prepare an average of 228 items per hour for delivery.

The ability to easily redeploy the cobots back and forth between packaging food and labelling packages also reduced downtime significantly – from six hours to 20 minutes – allowing Atria to supply fresh goods to customers at a competitive price.

Using cobots in packaging also enabled the manufacturer to reduce carton waste by 25 per cent. Overall the company achieved considerable cost savings, reaping a substantial return on investment (ROI).

Cobots have also been proven useful in freeing employees from mundane or potentially dangerous tasks.

In one of the largest sugar factories in Europe, cobots have been deployed in the sugar analysis process to inspect and analyse 80,000 sugar beet samples during production.

The cobots scan barcodes and pick up around 45,000 containers with sugar beet samples for analysis, from scales to filters and back again.

This process is performed by a gripper and a barcode scanner attached to the end of the cobot |arm.

Offering precision and accuracy, the cobots helped employees reduce mistakes by ensuring consistency while reducing the amount of physical effort required to carry out certain tasks. With cobots performing the repetitive tasks, employees can be redeployed to take on more stimulating and higherlevel responsibilities such as process optimisation.

The application of cobots has proved useful in ensuring hygienic food processing environments which require sterile conditions. This minimises the likelihood of food contamination that can result in costly product recalls and leave a lasting negative impact on a brand’s reputation.

Cobots can also perform a particular task around the clock when required, allowing businesses to maximise operational efficiencies and reduce production downtime. In the manufacturing sector, the deployment of cobots has shown an increase of as much as 30 per cent in output per employee.

The Way Forward

Cobots are a viable investment for longterm business sustainability and growth. Be it packaging, labelling or scanning, cobots play an integral role in transforming the food and beverage industry.

They can offer Thai food manufacturers a helping hand in automating production processes, delivering increased efficiency and productivity to help the country maintain its status as the Kitchen of The World, and to become the world’s food innovation hub.

Following Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s proposal to accept listings by firms with dual-class share structures, China Business Network quoted an unidentified investment banker as saying Chinese mainland smartphone maker Xiaomi may be among the first batch of dual-class companies to have an initial public offering in the financial hub this year, eyeing a valuation of at least US$50 billion.

The source said Xiaomi management had met several investment banks in Hong Kong over the Christmas holidays, and the company is expected to pick its sponsor and underwriter soon. Xiaomi could not be reached for comment immediately.

Bloomberg early last month reported that Xiaomi was in talks with investment banks and was seeking a valuation of at least US$50 billion through an IPO. Mainland media later reported that the company had set the second half of this year as the target date for its IPO; the company expected its valuation to reach as much as US$200 billion.

Xiaomi has had six funding rounds to date, including the most recent investment of US$1.1 billion in 2014 at a US$46 billion valuation.

The Hong Kong stock market is currently very much sought-after by technology companies, partly because of the reform of its IPO listing rules.

The city’s exchange operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing proposed two chapters of new existing listing rules in the middle of last month, aiming to draw more and more high-quality emerging and innovative companies to the city.

One proposal is to let technology companies with at least HK$10 billion in valuation list with multiple classes of shares, as well as to permit pre-profit biotech firms to launch, subject to additional disclosure and safeguards. Details of the rule changes will be put up for a formal public consultation in the first quarter this year.

Dual-class shares structures typically give one set of shareholders greater voting rights than others. The structure is favored by many technology companies, which seek extra voting power for top executives as protection against pressure for short-term returns.

After Hong Kong lost its spot as the world’s top IPO fund-raising venue last year, HKEx Chief Executive Charles Li Xiaojia said he believes these reforms will make Hong Kong an even more compelling global IPO center for new-economy companies seeking a listing venue.

“In fact, we’ve seen a marked increase in the number of listing enquiries we’ve received of late,” he writes in his blog.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the shift in the configuration of the News Feed on Thursday, saying it would reduce engagement by users at first but would lead to their improved “well-being.”

While Zuckerberg described the move as being designed to bring people closer together and foster more “meaningful social interactions,” analysts noted that it comes amid criticism of the world’s leading social network on various fronts.

Facebook has been under fire for months for the proliferation of Russian-created “fake news” on the platform that may have impacted the 2016 presidential election.

Zuckerberg initially scoffed at the suggestion Facebook had been used as a Russian propaganda tool, before acknowledging that mistakes had been made and promising to do better in 2018.

Facebook revealed in September that “inauthentic” accounts created in Russia had purchased advertising on the site designed to increase tensions during the election campaign.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll published in October found that Americans believed by a two-to-one margin that Facebook should have done more to identify and reveal the Russian ads.

In September, in another blow for the social network, ProPublica reported that Facebook’s ad-buying platform could be used to deliver ads to users who identify as anti-Semites.

Facebook said it quickly shut that capability down.

The company also took a number of steps to eliminate graphic or violent content on the site following several incidents, including the live-streamed murder of a young girl in Thailand.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll published in October found that Americans believed by a two-to-one margin that Facebook should have done more to identify and reveal the Russian ads.

 ‘More social and less media’

Despite some turbulence, Facebook appears to have weathered the storms so far.

A study published in August by NetBase found that Facebook is still the preferred brand of Internet users.

In September, the latest month for which figures are available, Facebook’s total number of users was up 16 percent over a year earlier to 2.07 billion.

And while Facebook suffered on the stock market on Friday — its shares lost 4.47 percent — analysts said they did not expect it to last.

“We believe these changes will be beneficial to Facebook in the medium and long term,” said Brian Weiser of the Pivotal Research Group. “In our view, making the feed more relevant should boost user and engagement growth over time.

“Facebook is making the service more social and less media, and that’s likely a positive for the vast majority of users,” Weiser said.

RBC Capital Markets said lower user engagement with the site may provide a “headwind to growth in the near-term,” but the changes will be “helpful for the long-term health of the business.”

While analysts were sanguine, some users, particularly publishers, were worried.

Susann Hoffman, co-founder of the German website Edition F, said she was upset that the move had been done without any consultation.

“I am personally quite unhappy with the fact that Facebook decides for its users what is relevant to them and what not,” Hoffman said.

She argued for more personalization — giving users a greater ability to decide for themselves which content they would like to see.

And to cats and horses, for that matter, as high-end gadgetry showcased at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show offered ways that smart devices can improve the lives of animals and their human friends — starting with a good night’s rest.

US-based Petrics was at the show with what it billed as the first pet smart bed, capable of keeping tabs on their weight and time spent lounging.

The soon-to-be-released bed cools or warms to provide comfy temperatures for naps, and synchronizes to activity trackers that monitor how much exercise they are getting so that owners get a complete daily report.

An array of firms meanwhile showed off wearable devices to monitor pets on the move, aiming to consign neighborhood “lost” posters to history.

Among them was Whistle, which is up to a third-generation device equipped with GPS and mobile network capabilities.

Custom “safe zones” can be set up around a home and if pets wander out-of-bounds their humans will get smartphone messages allowing them to pinpoint where their pooch, or kitty, is on the map.

“If your pet gets out they can be missing for hours or days,” said Whistle spokesperson Heather Wajer.

“You can put up posters around the neighborhood and search for them, or you can just look at your phone and see where they are.”

– Fido calls home –

Leaving your pet behind at home can cause anxiety both for humans and their animals.

While home cameras that can stream feeds via the internet have been around for some time, Petcube has improved on the basic concept by introducing “smart” elements.

With the help of artificial intelligence, pets movements in front of its camera will trigger a video call to their human’s phone as well as a preview “pet selfie” clip.

Its device also comes with laser pointers allowing people to remotely play with their furry friends if they’re getting bored, and even reward good behavior by firing off treats during calls.

Petcube co-founder and chief executive Yaroslav Azhnyuk estimated that 40 million households will use connected pet devices by the year 2022.

Meanwhile, startup Pebby is working on a “smart robotic ball” with built-in camera, wi-fi, Bluetooth and laser pointer capabilities, affording more opportunities to play remotely.

Taking care of kitty’s business

Cleaning your feline friend’s litter box is an unpleasant but necessary task, unless you (and house guests) are prepared to stomach a strong stench.

Now, though, automated boxes are at hand that use sensors to detect when the animal enters and leaves the unit, before giving the litter time to clump, then sifting through it and depositing the waste into a carbon-filtered drawer.

Litter-Robot sales hit new highs on Black Friday and Cyber Monday due to the release of a smartphone application that gets data about kitty’s daily visits to the feline loo, according to founder Brad Baxter.

When animals left home alone need to get outside to take care of business, they can now do so through PetWALK pet doors — sturdy barriers that are more secure and airtight than flaps, and are automatically triggered by RFID pendants.

French saddle maker CWD meanwhile was at CES with what it billed as the first smart saddle tailored for the equestrian sport of jumping.

Technology in saddles gathers data about stride, approach, recovery and more, then sends it to smartphones and pairs it with video so riders can improve performance, research and development engineer Camille Hebert told AFP.

CWD has partnered with French start-up Arioneo to weave in an “iPulse” strap that adds data about a horse’s heart rate.

“Everything in our lives is smart,” said Whistle’s Wajer. “If technology can help make our pets lives better, than that is fantastic.”

The change to the way Facebook ranks posts will put more weight on social interactions and relationships, according to News Feed product manager John Hegeman.

“This is a big change,” Hegeman told AFP.

“People will actually spend less time on Facebook, but we feel good about that because it will make the time they do spend more valuable, and be good for our business in the end.”

For example, a family video clip posted by a spouse will be deemed more worthy of attention than a snippet from a star or favorite restaurant.

“We think people interaction is more important than passively consuming content,” Hegeman said.

“This will be one of the more important updates that we have made.”

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg has said that bringing people together and strengthening communities in the real world are priorities.

The news feed ranking update, which is set to roll out globally in the coming weeks, is expected to support that goal.

“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” Zuckerberg said in a post at his Facebook page.

“And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

Google, Twitter and Facebook have come under fire for allowing the spread of bogus news — some of which was directed by Russia — ahead of the 2016 US election and in other countries.

Facebook has introduced a series of changes intended to address the problem.

“We are doing a ton of work to reduce the frequency of bad content on Facebook,” Hegeman said.

“This update is more about amplifying the things people value.”

He cited academic research indicating that interacting with loved ones is crucial to a person’s wellbeing, while reading news articles or watching shared videos may not be.

“There is really no silver bullet here to determine what is most meaningful, but we are trying to mine the signals to get the best representation that we can,” Hegeman said.

Known for setting annual personal goals ranging from killing his own food to learning Mandarin, Zuckerberg’s stated mission for this year is to ‘fix’ the social network, including by targeting abuse and hate, and making sure visiting Facebook is time well spent.

“I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions,” Zuckerberg said Thursday.

In fact, they may have a “survival advantage” over non-carriers if diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, a form that is particularly hard to treat, a team wrote in the journal The Lancet Oncology.

“Women diagnosed with early breast cancer who carry a BRCA mutation are often offered double mastectomies soon after their diagnosis or chemotherapy treatment” compared to non-mutation carriers, study co-author Diana Eccles of the University of Southampton said in a statement.

“Our findings suggest that this surgery does not have to be immediately undertaken along with the other treatment.”

According to the American Cancer Society, women with a mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes have a seven-in-10 chance of getting breast cancer by the age of 80. They are also more likely to get it at a younger age than other women.

In 2013, Hollywood star Angelina Jolie announced she had had both breasts surgically removed as a preventative measure after tests revealed she carried the mutation, despite not having been diagnosed with cancer.

For the new study, Eccles and a team recruited 2,733 British women aged 18-40 who had been diagnosed with breast cancer between 2000 and 2008.

Twelve percent of the women had a BRCA mutation.

The team tracked the women’s medical records for an average period of just over eight years, and found that 651 of 678 total deaths were due to breast cancer.

“The study found that there was no difference in overall survival two, five or ten years after diagnosis for women with and without a BRCA mutation,” a press statement said.

In a subgroup of women with triple-negative breast cancer, those with a BRCA mutation had slightly higher survival rates for the first two years after diagnosis.

“In light of their findings the authors suggest that women with triple-negative breast cancer and a BRCA mutation who choose to delay additional surgery for 1-2 years to recover from their initial treatment should be reassured that this is unlikely to affect their long-term survival,” the statement said.

“However, risk-reducing surgery will still likely be beneficial for BRCA mutation carriers to prevent another new breast or ovarian cancer from developing in the longer term.”

While only about five percent of breast cancers are diagnosed in women younger than 40, a high proportion of deaths fall in this age category.

The concept electric motorcycle, called ‘Motoroid,’ then balanced in position, holding its place even when Asamura tried gently to push it over.

Nearby, a robot that might seem suited for a futuristic action film was astride a production model Yamaha super-bike that it had ridden at speeds topping 200 kilometers per hour on a test track.

“The motor bike is the recent past, and the Motoroid is the future,” Yamaha spokesman John Boreland told AFP as he glanced from one two-wheeled creation to the other.

“The object is to see what lessons can be learned to connect machine to human more effectively.”

The robot-ridden Yamaha motorcycle, called ‘Motobot,’ is fast but blind, relying on pre-programmed routes, according to Yamaha.

Lessons learned so far from the research model include that “human beings react a hell of a lot quicker,” according to Boreland,

Flesh-and-blood riders have also proven better at grasping the courter-intuitive notion of counter-steering and leaning through turns, he added.

The Motoroid model boasted autonomous features such as balancing on its own, recognizing riders, and being summoned with a wave.

Wings on the back of the seat were designed with the help of a psychologist to gently squeeze a rider’s lower back in a sort of reassuring caress at potentially perilous high speeds, Boreland said.

“Somewhere along the line, this will all meld together so you’ll be part of the bike and it will figure things out for you,” Boreland said of insights and advances resulting from the concept motorcycles, which are not for sale.

Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science.

“Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need,” said co-author Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.

A total of eight ice sites, some as shallow as a few feet (one meter) below the surface, and going as deep as 100 meters or more, have been exposed by erosion.

These underground cliffs, or scarps, appear “to be nearly pure ice,” said the report.

The discovery was possible due to images and data sent by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), launched in 2005.

The probe’s first find of water on Mars was published in Science in 2010.

Widespread ice

But now, scientists realize that ice is more widespread than previously thought, said lead author Colin Dundas, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.

“There is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, which records the recent history of Mars,” he said.

“What we’ve seen here are cross-sections through the ice that give us a 3-D view with more detail than ever before.”

The ice contains bands and color variations that suggest it was formed layer by layer, perhaps as snow accumulated over time, leading to ice sheets.

Researchers believe the ice formed relatively recently, because the sites appear smooth on the surface, unpocked by craters that would be formed by celestial debris smashing into the planet over time.

But just how and when they formed remains unclear.

The cliffs are located in the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars, at a latitude of 55 to 58 degrees, which on Earth would be similar to Scotland or the tip of South America.

These regions slip into a frigid darkness during the Martian winter and would not be a suitable site for a long-term human camp.

However, they are not as treacherous as the poles, and if a sample could be drilled from one of the glaciers, researchers could learn plenty about Mars’ climate and the potential for life on Earth’s neighboring planet.

“If you had a mission at one of these sites, sampling the layers going down the scarp, you could get a detailed climate history of Mars,” said MRO deputy project scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“It’s part of the whole story of what happens to water on Mars over time: Where does it go? When does ice accumulate? When does it recede?”

NASA plans to send the first human explorers to Mars by the 2030s.