Tag Archives: irregular

World

EU wants to send more migrants away as irregular arrivals grow

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  • EU border agency says 2022 irregular arrivals highest since 2016
  • Ministers discuss stepping up returns to states including Iraq
  • Hardline migration ideas return to fore
  • Top EU migration official says no money for ‘walls and fences’

STOCKHOLM, Jan 26 (Reuters) – European Union ministers on Thursday sought ways to curb irregular immigration and send more people away as arrivals rose from pandemic lows, reviving controversial ideas for border fences and asylum centres outside of Europe.

EU border agency Frontex reported some 330,000 unauthorised arrivals last year, the highest since 2016, with a sharp increase on the Western Balkans route.

“We have a huge increase of irregular arrivals of migrants,” Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson told talks among the 27 EU migration ministers. “We have a very low return rate and I can see we can make significant progress here.”

Denmark, the Netherlands and Latvia were among those to call for more pressure through visas and development aid towards the roughly 20 countries – including Iraq and Senegal – that the EU deems fail to cooperate on taking back their nationals who have no right to stay in Europe.

Only about a fifth of such people are sent back, with insufficient resources and coordination on the EU side being another hurdle, according to the bloc’s executive.

The ministerial talks come ahead of a Feb. 9-10 summit of EU leaders who will also seek more returns, according to their draft joint decision seen by Reuters.

“The overall economic malaise makes countries like Tunisia change from a transit country to a country where locals also want to go,” said an EU official. “That changes things. But it’s still very manageable, especially if the EU acts together.”

‘WALLS AND FENCES’

That, however, is easier said than done in the bloc, where immigration is a highly sensitive political issue and member countries are bitterly divided over how to share the task of caring for those who arrive in Europe.

The issue has become toxic since more than a million people crossed the Mediterranean in 2015 in chaotic and deadly scenes that caught the bloc off guard and fanned anti-immigration sentiment.

The EU has since tightened its external borders and asylum laws. With people on the move again following the COVID pandemic, the debate is returning to the fore, as are some proposals previously dismissed as inadmissible.

Denmark has held talks with Rwanda on handling asylum applicants in East Africa, while others called for EU funds for a border fence between Bulgaria and Turkey – both ideas so far seen as taboo.

“We are still working to make that happen, preferably with other European countries but, as a last resort, we’ll do it only in cooperation between Denmark and, for example Rwanda,” Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad said on Thursday.

Dutch minister Eric van der Burg said he was open to EU financing for border barriers.

“EU member states continue making access to international protection as difficult as possible,” the Danish Refugee Council, an NGO, said in a report on Thursday about what it said were systemic pushbacks of people at the bloc’s external borders, a violation of their right to claim asylum.

While EU countries protest against irregular immigration, often comprising Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa, Germany is simultaneously seeking to open its job market to much-needed workers from outside the bloc.

“We want to conclude migration agreements with countries, particularly with North African countries, that would allow a legal route to Germany but would also include functioning returns,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in Stockholm.

Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Bart Meiejer, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Bernadette Baum

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Technology

Fitbit Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications appearing on Pixel Watch

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The Pixel Watch does not have the full complement of health features found on even an entry-level Fitbit tracker. Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications are not officially supported on the Pixel Watch, but the functionality looks to be available for some people.

While the Pixel Watch has an ECG app that records electrical signals for 30 seconds and looks for signs of AFib (Atrial Fibrillation) on-demand, it does not support Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications that work while you’re still or sleeping. 

Those alerts are available on the Sense 2, Sense, Versa 4, Versa 3, Versa 2, Versa Lite, Charge 5, Charge 4, Charge 3, Luxe, Inspire 3, and Inspire 2, with the Pixel Watch explicitly not listed on support documents, product pages, or specifications.

However, some Pixel Watch owners are seeing an Irregular Rhythm Notifications page in the Discover tab of the Fitbit app. It explains the feature, and lets you “View Notifications.” This page notes when data was last analyzed.

We’re only seeing it on one Pixel Watch out of several that we checked, while there’s one other report of it being live today. For everyone else (as seen below), the Assessments & Reports page/carousel just lists “Wellness Reports” and “Heart Rhythm Assessment.”

As such, it’s not clear if this feature was intentionally enabled by Fitbit or whether a bug is responsible. It’s somewhat like how you could get Fall Detection if you reset your Pixel Watch and paired again. We’ll be reaching out to the company for more information.

Compared to most other Fitbit devices, the Pixel Watch also lacks SpO2 tracking, high & low heart rate notifications, and skin temperature variation.

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Technology

Fitbit Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications work on these trackers

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Earlier this month Fitbit was granted clearance by the US FDA to passively send notifications when signs of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) were detected by its smartwatches and trackers. Now, Fitbit is officially rolling out Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications to nine of its products, including the Sense and Charge 5.

Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications are what Fitbit has decided to call notifications that alert users of a potential heart problem. AFib is the most common form of irregular heart rhythm, affecting more than 5 million people in the United States alone according to John Hopkins Medicine, and Fitbit says over 33 million are affected globally. AFib is a serious condition that leaves those affected at five times higher risk of a stroke, according to Fitbit.

The technology that powers these notifications on Fitbit is similar to what is used for electrocardiogram (ECG) readings but doesn’t require quite as much hardware. Rather, they rely on Fitbit’s PPG (photoplethysmography) algorithm, which the company claims is 98% effective at detecting these conditions compared to a traditional ECG machine. Where ECG is restricted only to Fitbit Sense and Charge 5, Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications will be available on nine products, as listed below.

These Fitbit products support Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications:

  • Fitbit Sense — firmware version 44.128.1.42 or higher
  • Fitbit Versa 3 — firmware version 36.128.1.42 or higher
  • Fitbit Versa 2 — firmware version 35.68.9.7 or higher
  • Fitbit Versa Lite — firmware version 38.33.1.30 or higher
  • Fitbit Charge 5 — firmware version 20001.141.4 or higher
  • Fitbit Luxe — firmware version 58.20001.130.17 or higher
  • Fitbit Charge 4 — firmware version 20001.78.33 or higher
  • Fitbit Charge 3 — firmware version 20001.49.45 or higher
  • Fitbit Inspire 2 — firmware version 20001.98.14 or higher

Update: On a support page, Fitbit has confirmed that you’ll need to update the firmware on your Fitbit to use this feature. We’ve updated the list above to include the minimum firmware version for each device.

Fitbit detects irregular heart rhythms without any user interaction, taking readings when the wearer is staying still or asleep. Notifications are sent to the Fitbit app.

Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications are rolling out starting on April 25 on the hardware above, but they may take a few weeks to appear for everyone.

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Science

Something in The Eyes Reveals if You’re Looking at a Person Who Doesn’t Exist

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We live in fake times. Reality is as prevalent as it ever was, of course, but it’s becoming harder to find all the time.

Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more unsettling than in the weird world of ‘deepfakes’ and other computer-generated faces of people who don’t actually exist (yet look uncannily like the real thing).

 

Scientists have now developed a technique that could help us detect whether the faces we’re looking at are indeed genuine people, as opposed to phantasms conjured by artificial intelligence (AI).

According to a new preprint study led by first author and computer scientist Hui Guo from the State University of New York, the secret is in the eyes – specifically the shapes of the pupil, it turns out.

(Guo et al., arXiv, 2021)

Above: A breakdown of eye anatomy including regular pupil shape (top), along with a comparison of a real face and pupils (left), with artificial ones (right). 

Zooming in on the artificial eyes of fake faces created by a machine learning system called a generative adversarial network (GAN), the researchers noticed something funny about the pupils.

Unlike real pupils, many of the fakes weren’t actually round.

“Pupils have near-circular shapes for healthy adults,” the team explains in the study.

“Comparing with the real faces, we observe that visible artifacts and inconsistencies can be observed in the eye regions of the GAN-generated faces.”

According to the researchers, this strange giveaway is due to GAN models lacking an understanding of human eye anatomy, particularly with regard to the geometrical shapes of regular pupils.

 

To explore how widespread this tell-tale phenomenon is, the researchers developed a detection tool that automatically extracts the outlines of pupils from eyes in photos and then evaluates them to check whether they have elliptical shapes.

In an experiment running the tool against a database of 2,000 images (1,000 being real faces, and 1,000 being fakes), the system reliably worked to distinguish the two groups.

“We found irregular pupil shapes widely exist in the high-quality StyleGAN-generated faces, which are different from the real human pupils,” the researchers explain.

“We propose a new physiological-based method that can use the irregular pupil shapes as a cue to detect the GAN-generated faces, which is simple yet effective.”

According to the team, technology like this could one day help counter malicious use of realistic-looking fakes used to deceive people on social media platforms, amongst other places.

At least until someone can teach the AI the proper shape of a pupil, of course.

The findings are available on the preprint website arXiv.org.

 

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Health

One alcoholic drink raises risk of irregular heartbeat: study suggests

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A single alcoholic drink was associated with a two-fold increased risk of atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeat, researchers found.

The findings, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, appear to contradict the perception that alcohol can be “cardioprotective,” according to the University of California San Francisco. The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and involved 100 participants, most of whom were white males, and 56 had at least one atrial fibrillation episode. 

“Contrary to a common belief that atrial fibrillation is associated with heavy alcohol consumption, it appears that even one alcohol drink may be enough to increase the risk,” Dr. Gregory Marcus, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UCSF, said in a statement. 

“Our results show that the occurrence of atrial fibrillation might be neither random nor unpredictable,” Marcus said. “Instead, there may be identifiable and modifiable ways of preventing an acute heart arrhythmia episode.” 

Results also associated at least two drinks with an over three-fold increased risk of atrial fibrillation over the next four hours, and identified a correlation between blood alcohol concentration and heightened risk of irregular heartbeat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “atrial fibrillation, often called AFib or AF, is the most common type of treated heart arrhythmia. An arrhythmia is when the heart beats too slowly, too fast, or in an irregular way.”

SOME ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION MAY BENEFIT HEART DISEASE PATIENTS, STUDY SUGGESTS

Researchers conducted the study by recruiting patients from cardiology outpatient clinics at UCSF, who had at least one alcohol drink per month. The study excluded people with a history of substance or alcohol use disorder, among others. Participants were tasked with wearing an electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor for about four weeks, pressing a button upon consuming a standard-size alcoholic drink. They were also fitted with a recording alcohol sensor and periodically underwent blood tests indicating alcohol consumption over the prior weeks.

According to UCSF, study participants averaged about one drink daily throughout the time under study.  The study had its limitations, including the possibility that participants forgot to press the monitor, or neglected to do so “due to embarrassment,” though sensor readings would’ve been unaffected, per UCSF. The sample also didn’t include the general population, but was limited to patients with established atrial fibrillation.

“…This is the first objective, measurable evidence that a modifiable exposure may acutely influence the chance that an AF episode will occur,” Marcus added in part.

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