Upper-intermediate

The Japan Times reported that most world leaders chose to fly to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, but Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg made headlines for deciding to sail instead.

This has prompted a gathering of tourism executives to ponder how to address the fact that flying adds to the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming. According to data cited by the Air Transport Action Group, in 2019, commercial flying accounted for about 2 percent of global carbon emissions and about 12 percent of transport emissions. By 2020, emissions from global international aviation are projected to be about 70 percent higher than in 2005 due to rising travel demand.

Car rental companies in Japan have figured out why some customers are returning their vehicles with barely a mile on the clock. Rather than travel from point A to B, as many as one in eight “drivers” are using their rental cars to take a nap, catch up on work or even brush up their language skills, according to industry surveys.

The unusual habits came to light after Orix Auto found a number of its 230,000 registered users were not driving their rented vehicles. Other rental firms noticed similar anomalies in their customers’ mileage records and approached them hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Human-built machines immortalize human problems, as we are discovering more and more. Voice recognition software isn’t good at identifying higher-pitched (i.e., predominantly women’s) voices. Facial recognition software is far superior at identifying white men’s faces than literally anyone else’s. Motion sensors often seem to be unable to detect dark skin, a problem that seems to also infect some wearable health monitors.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is when Amazon wrote AI software to sort through resumes to identify top applicants. Because of how Amazon had recruited and hired over the previous ten years—the base dataset that the AI used to train itself—the software penalized any mention of “women’s” and disregarded candidates from women’s colleges. It was basing its definition of an optimal candidate on human hiring decisions, and since tech is so dominated by men, that definition assumed the optimal candidate would be as well.

When Addy Tritt was 25 years old, she went to her local Payless shoe store in Hays, Kansas, a few years ago. She didn’t intend to walk out with the last of the store’s inventory.

The store was going out of business and had slashed its prices. When the last 204 pairs of footwear dropped to $1 each, Tritt figured she could buy some and donate them somewhere. 

“My pile just kept growing bigger and bigger,” said Tritt. She finally went up to the sales associate and asked, “Can you get me a deal on all of these shoes?”

After a few phone calls to the Payless corporate office, Tritt was in possession of all the remaining shoes, valued at approximately $6,000. She purchased them for about $100.

“I’m a college student. I don’t have a lot of extra money to be throwing around,” she said. “I don’t know why I did it―I just did. It’s part of being a human.”

New Zealand hasn't been walking the talk on climate risk, finds a sweeping new analysis of hundreds of annual reports and statements.

Climate change threatens hundreds of billions of dollars of property and infrastructure, and will require an economy-wide shift toward lower emissions. However, of more than 380 large organisations analysed, just 40 recognised the risks as of serious concern—suggesting that boards either opted not to publicly disclose the implications, or didn't discuss them at all. "Both are horrific—but the latter is particularly more horrific," said Wendy McGuinness, chief executive of Wellington-based think-tank the McGuinness Institute.

Japan has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the industrialized world. Why is that? Watch the video and discuss it with your teacher, or write about it using the discussion questions below.