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Category: Technology

The total information awareness we feared the government acquiring, we have freely given to the tech giants

The total information awareness we feared the government acquiring, we have freely given to the tech giants

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Renee DiResta writes: “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into … a virtual, centralized grand database,” the New York Times columnist warns. On the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s numerous government testimonies and…

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What are the limits of manipulating nature?

What are the limits of manipulating nature?

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In Scientific American, Neil Savage writes: Matt Trusheim flips a switch in the darkened laboratory, and an intense green laser illuminates a tiny diamond locked in place beneath a microscope objective. On a computer screen an image appears, a fuzzy green cloud studded with brighter green dots. The glowing dots are color centers in the diamond—tiny defects where two carbon atoms have been replaced by a single atom of tin, shifting the light passing through from one shade of green…

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Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

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Henry Kissinger writes: The internet age in which we already live prefigures some of the questions and issues that AI will only make more acute. The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant. Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or…

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Data centers, the factories of the digital age, emit as much CO2 as the airline industry

Data centers, the factories of the digital age, emit as much CO2 as the airline industry

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Yale Environment 360 reports: The cloud is coming back to Earth with a bump. That ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence – in hundreds of giant data centers that are taking a growing toll on the planet. Data centers are the factories of the digital age. These mostly windowless, featureless boxes are scattered across the globe – from Las Vegas to Bangalore, and Des Moines to Reykjavik. They…

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Bitcoin consumes more energy than Switzerland

Bitcoin consumes more energy than Switzerland

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Eric Holthaus writes: Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago. It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands. That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate…

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William Morris’ vision of a world free from wage slavery is finally within reach

William Morris’ vision of a world free from wage slavery is finally within reach

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Vasilis Kostakis and Wolfgang Drechsler write: At the beginning of the 21st century, a new world is emerging. Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our socioeconomic life. A new commons-based mode of production, enabled by information and communication technology (ICT), what we now call digitisation, redefines how we (can) produce, consume and distribute. This pathway is exemplified by interconnected…

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The Dreamtime, science and narratives of Indigenous Australia

The Dreamtime, science and narratives of Indigenous Australia

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Lake Mungo and the surrounding Willandra Lakes of NSW were established around 150,000 years ago. from www.shutterstock.com David Lambert, Griffith University This article is an extract from an essay Owning the science: the power of partnerships in First Things First, the 60th edition of Griffith Review. We’re publishing it as part of our occasional series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity. Scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems have…

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Palantir knows everything about you

Palantir knows everything about you

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Bloomberg reports: High above the Hudson River in downtown Jersey City, a former U.S. Secret Service agent named Peter Cavicchia III ran special ops for JPMorgan Chase & Co. His insider threat group—most large financial institutions have one—used computer algorithms to monitor the bank’s employees, ostensibly to protect against perfidious traders and other miscreants. Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers” from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc., which JPMorgan engaged in 2009, Cavicchia’s group vacuumed up emails…

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Why the human brain is so efficient

Why the human brain is so efficient

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Liqun Luo writes: An important difference between the computer and the brain is the mode by which information is processed within each system. Computer tasks are performed largely in serial steps. This can be seen by the way engineers program computers by creating a sequential flow of instructions. For this sequential cascade of operations, high precision is necessary at each step, as errors accumulate and amplify in successive steps. The brain also uses serial steps for information processing. In the…

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The battle to ban plastic bags

The battle to ban plastic bags

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A plastic bag floats in the ocean in this 2016 photo. Creative Commons By Sylvain Charlebois, Dalhousie University and Tony Robert Walker, Dalhousie University There are increasing concerns about the use of plastics in our day-to-day lives. Single-use plastics of any kind, including grocery bags, cutlery, straws, polystyrene and coffee cups, are significant yet preventable sources of plastic land-based and marine pollution. In Canada, bans on plastics have so far been left up to municipalities, and some are taking action….

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A suspect tried to blend in with 60,000 concertgoers. China’s facial-recognition cameras caught him

A suspect tried to blend in with 60,000 concertgoers. China’s facial-recognition cameras caught him

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The Washington Post reports: The 31-year-old man, wanted by police, had thought playing a numbers game would be enough to allow him to fade into anonymity. The population of China is a staggering 1.4 billion people, give or take a few million. More than 45 million of them live in Jiangxi province in southeast China, and 5 million of those people are concentrated in Nanchang, the province’s capital. On the night of April 7, nearly 60,000 people — or roughly…

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Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

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Fast Company reports: You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their…

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It’s not my fault, my brain implant made me do it

It’s not my fault, my brain implant made me do it

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Probes that can transmit electricity inside the skull raise questions about personal autonomy and responsibility. Hellerhoff, CC BY-SA By Laura Y. Cabrera, Michigan State University and Jennifer Carter-Johnson, Michigan State University Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to…

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Are today’s teenagers smarter and better than we think?

Are today’s teenagers smarter and better than we think?

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Tara Parker-Pope writes: Today’s teenagers have been raised on cellphones and social media. Should we worry about them or just get out of their way? A recent wave of student protests around the country has provided a close-up view of Generation Z in action, and many adults have been surprised. While there has been much hand-wringing about this cohort, also called iGen or the Post-Millennials, the stereotype of a disengaged, entitled and social-media-addicted generation doesn’t match the poised, media-savvy and…

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Attack on Atlanta one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city

Attack on Atlanta one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city

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The New York Times reports: The City of Atlanta’s 8,000 employees got the word on Tuesday that they had been waiting for: It was O.K. to turn their computers on. But as the city government’s desktops, hard drives and printers flickered back to life for the first time in five days, residents still could not pay their traffic tickets or water bills online, or report potholes or graffiti on a city website. Travelers at the world’s busiest airport still could…

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