One of the largest markets in the world will soon be demanding manufactures to let consumers repair what their products. You may have bought a product like a cellphone that gets minor damage which you can’t repair yourself, so you need to send it back to the manufacturers for an
Continue readingTag: technology
Things Are Good: How Satellite Alerts Save Forests
Information is key to success, and that’s especially true when it comes to fighting deforestation. Organizations and governments trying to protect our forests need to know where the illegal activity is happening, when, and who the perpetrators are. A team of researchers wondered if providing alerts from satellites could help
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: Happy New Years
Community My New Years Resolution for our society is to no longer worship at the twin altars of individualism and technology but rather to embrace the saviour of community. From the industrial revolution to the high tech revolution we have deluded ourselves that technology would solve all our problems. While
Continue readingThings Are Good: Tired of Google’s Control Over Your Life? Try These Instead
I’ve been using Duck Duck Go instead of Google search for years and don’t regret it. There are less ads and the search results include more diverse sources – plus I don’t get trapped in Google’s filter bubble. Over at No More Google they have compiled a list of services
Continue readingThings Are Good: Graphene as a Limitless Power Generator
Graphene has long been heralded as an amazing new material that can change entire industries and revolutionize the economy. Notably this has yet to happen. Yet. At the University of Arkansas a team of physicists found a way to use graphene to generate limitless power based on the movement of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Submerged Servers Are More Efficient Than Landlubber Servers
A few years ago Microsoft decided to sink a data centre and see how well it performs. The short answer is: well, the underwater server farm did just fine. This is significant because it proves that underwater data centres are feasible and, to Microsoft’s surprise can be more reliable. Data
Continue readingThings Are Good: USA Court Rules NSA Spying Illegal
Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to bring to the world’s attention that the American government illegal (and unethically) spies on innocent people everywhere on the planet. Many Americans called Snowden a traitor and a liar. Now, the courts in his home country agree with Snowden: the wiretapping by
Continue readingThings Are Good: Mozilla Launches an Incubator to Fix the Internet
Due to increased consolidation of influential websites on the internet (like Google and Facebook scrapping content from other sites) the quality of the web has arguably decreased. To stymie this corporatization of the internet, the makers of Firefox, Mozilla, have decided to launch a fund to create companies that make
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Distance Yourself From Evil, Not People
The Boycott Big Tech Movement Begins Here First rule: Question everything, and think for yourself. Second rule: Don’t support your slavers. (Gandhi, MLK and Thoreau would understand. It’s time for mass civil disobedience.) Nothing is free. If you want to say no to Big Brother, you have to pay for
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Video Calls: Communication In A Hyper-Connected & Deeply Dissociated Society
Thoughtful commentators to the Smithsonian and BBC recently “recommended limiting video calls to only those that are necessary. Petriglieri adds that positioning the video screen to your side may make it feel like you’re in a nearby room instead of under scrutiny. University of Québec psychologist Claude Normand tells National
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Work and Workaholism: Puritanism, and A Day Off
This morning when I got up, feeling exhausted again from the on-going 30-year stint of sleeplessness and insomnia, I thought, I should take a day off – considering I pretty much never take a day off. (Some people imagine that writers and philosophers sit around all day staring at their
Continue readingeaves.ca: Covid-19: Lessons from and for Government Digital Service Groups
This article was written by David Eaves, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital, with Tommaso Cariati and Blanka Soulava, students at the Harvard Kennedy School. It first appeared in Apolitical. Government digital services have proven critical to the pandemic response. As a result, the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Fashionable Solutions to Thwart Invasive Surveillance
What you wear can impinge the ability of people to look at you. That’s been true for centuries, but today your fashion choices can actually make it harder for governments or private entities to track you throughout the day. The mass surveillance in our current society should concern you as
Continue readingThings Are Good: How We can Track COVID-19 and NOT Invade Your Privacy
To figure out the spread of COIV-19, or other diseases, the technique of contact tracing gets used by researchers to decipher who is likely to have been exposed. When too many people are infected then contact tracing takes too much labour and subsequently becomes less useful, which has led tech
Continue readingThings Are Good: Folding@Home now Faster Than Fastest Supercomputer
Scientists can use your help folding. In particular they could use your computer to help understand how proteins fold. In order to understand viruses and ways to fight them it helps to run simulations to see how proteins interact with each other. You can get your computer to devote a
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The doctor is out… of the province #nlpoli
Health minister John Haggie announced on Friday that doctors in the province could now start seeing patients remotely either by telephone or using video conferencing. Kinda bizarre, though, given that some doctors in the province have already been doing this. In any event, using technology to see patients remotely is
Continue readingThings Are Good: 3D Printing Respirators to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Italian health care system finds itself short on parts due to the influx of COVID-19 patients. Due to the nature of the virus people with it are more likely to need breathing support as lungs are in such a bad shape. Some geniuses at one Italian hospital decided to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Avoid these Evil Tech Companies
Tech companies have transformed from the stereotypical scrappy startup to the stereotypical megacorporation hellbent on making money before all else. Google is a great example of this transition from a company doing good to a company getting in arguments with its employees about how evil they should be. Slate asked
Continue readingThings Are Good: Enjoyment of Life Increases by Deleting Facebook
It’s well known that Facebook is bad for your mental health, and let’s be honest it’s likely bad for humanity at large. The engineers at Facebook purposefully create algorithms to get you hooked on the site and exploit your emotions so you spend more time on the site. Why? So
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Website Powered by the Sun
The world wide web consumes a lot of energy to keep running as it is. The energy sources we use to power the net can make a big difference in the baron footprint of the entire web, which has led one website owner to see if they could run their
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