Volume 7 Issue 28_Sun Bay Paper

The Sun Bay Paper Page 18 April 22, 2022 - May 5, 2022 Musk Can Thwart Twitter's True Censors When whistleblowers tried to expose conditions in a Saudi women's prison and advocate for human rights reforms, Twitter suspended their accounts. That's the kind of problem Elon Musk can solve. The Tesla CEO offered $43 billion to buy Twitter's stock and take the company private last week, writing that he believes in the social media company's potential "to be the platform for free speech around the globe." While Musk has plenty of supporters, an outsize share of American pundits regard his overtures with skepticism. By Easter weekend, dismissive hot takes and ponderous thinkpieces flooded the internet. Musk doesn't understand content moderation, the naysayers argue, and a free speech-friendly Twitter would embolden bigots, spread misinformation and foment a digital dystopia. Writing for The Guardian, former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich suggested Musk's malign influence might even erode democracy. Such shrill alarmism from latter-day Chicken Littles doesn't merit a response. It's the thoughtful writers capable of nuanced critiques who really disappoint, betraying their failure of imagination and parochial view by centering the debate on conservative claims that Twitter shows favoritism to the political left. Tweaking the terms of service and rewriting moderation algorithms would certainly show up on Musk's to-do list, and perhaps some American right-wingers banished from the bird app for breaking its rules would see their access restored. Those changes pale in comparison to the worldwide impact of a communication channel that follows Musk's "free speech absolutist" philosophy. Like other U.S. tech titans, Twitter cooperates with government censors in the foreign countries where it does business. It's in bed with repressive regimes that imprison people for criticizing heads of state or challenging the state-sanctioned religion. That's a problem several orders of magnitude greater than how much latitude U.S. users have to spout conspiracy theories or badger their political rivals. The human rights organization Freedom House documents the Saudi prison reform advocates' account suspensions in its Freedom on the Net 2021 report, which assigns Saudi Arabia an abysmal 24-out-of100 score for online free expression. "Saudi dissidents and political activists who post content critical of the Saudi government from outside the country have reported incidents where platforms like Facebook and Twitter have removed content or blocked access to their accounts," the Freedom House report states. Surely, it's just a coincidence that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a major Twitter shareholder, and that he wasted no time in publicly opposing Musk's offer. In a canny retort, Musk asked bin Talal to describe the kingdom's view on journalistic free speech. Jamal Khashoggi's permanent silence is the only answer we need. The most brazen authoritarians and theocrats abuse their cozy relationship with social media executives to flag content far outside their jurisdictions. In December 2018, Twitter emailed Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey to warn that his tweets broke Pakistan's blasphemy laws. Furey rebuffed the advisory, and fellow North American users might laugh off such impotent overreach from the safety of our shores. But if convicted of blasphemy, a Twitter user in Pakistan faces the death penalty. In Silicon Valley, obliging propagandists and censors is regarded as a necessary trade-off in order to access foreign markets. If a company wants to operate an office in another country or maintain servers there, it must abide by the local laws. What if a digital disruptor came along and shattered that conventional wisdom? If anyone can find a workaround, it's probably an American billionaire with a private space company at his disposal. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sought to disable internet access, Musk's SpaceX launched satellites into orbit to provide its Starlink broadband service to the Ukrainian resistance. Hewlett Packard Enterprise deployed the International Space Station's first data center in February 2021. Keeping content out of authoritarians' clutches might call for a server farm in outer space. Infamous for its suppression of dissent, China currently blocks access to Twitter within its borders. Imagine if cutting-edge engineering could evade such terrestrial barriers and give 1.4 billion Chinese citizens access to a worldwide network of uncensored news and information. Elon Musk is uniquely positioned to make Twitter a transformative tool that advances free expression around the globe. If that makes speculation about whether he'd reinstate @realDonaldTrump seem small-minded, well, it should. Corey Friedman Tumors Partially Destroyed with Sound Don't Come Back Noninvasive sound technology developed at the University of Michigan breaks down liver tumors in rats, kills cancer cells and spurs the immune system to prevent further spread -- an advance that could lead to improved cancer outcomes in humans. By destroying only 50% to 75% of liver tumor volume, the rats' immune systems were able to clear away the rest, with no evidence of recurrence or metastases in more than 80% animals. "Even if we don't target the entire tumor, we can still cause the tumor to regress and also reduce the risk of future metastasis," said Zhen Xu, professor of biomedical engineering at U-M and corresponding author of the study in Cancers. Results also showed the treatment stimulated the rats' immune responses, possibly contributing to the eventual regression of the untargeted portion of the tumor and preventing further spread of the cancer. The treatment, called histotripsy, noninvasively focuses ultrasound waves to mechanically destroy target tissue with millimeter precision. The relatively new technique is currently being used in a human liver cancer trial in the United States and Europe. In many clinical situations, the entirety of a cancerous tumor cannot be targeted directly in treatments for reasons that include the mass' size, location or stage. To investigate the effects of partially destroying tumors with sound, this latest study targeted only a portion of each mass, leaving behind a viable intact tumor. It also allowed the team, including researchers at Michigan Medicine and the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, to show the approach's effectiveness under less than optimal conditions. "Histotripsy is a promising option that can overcome the limitations of currently available ablation modalities and provide safe and effective noninvasive liver tumor ablation," said Tejaswi Worlikar, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering. "We hope that our learnings from this study will motivate future preclinical and clinical histotripsy investigations toward the ultimate goal of clinical adoption of histotripsy treatment for liver cancer patients." Liver cancer ranks among the top 10 causes of cancer related deaths worldwide and in the U.S. Even with multiple treatment options, the prognosis remains poor with five-year survival rates less than 18% in the U.S. The high prevalence of tumor recurrence and metastasis after initial treatment highlights the clinical need for improving outcomes of liver cancer. Where a typical ultrasound uses sound waves to produce images of the body's interior, U-M engineers have pioneered the use of those waves for treatment. And their technique works without the harmful side effects of current approaches such as radiation and chemotherapy. "Our transducer, designed and built at U-M, delivers high amplitude microsecond-length ultrasound pulses -- acoustic cavitation -- to focus on the tumor specifically to break it up," Xu said. "Traditional ultrasound devices use lower amplitude pulses for imaging." The microsecond long pulses from UM's transducer generate microbubbles within the targeted tissues -- bubbles that rapidly expand and collapse. These violent but extremely localized mechanical stresses kill cancer cells and break up the tumor's structure. University of Michigan

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