Science and Technology

by Ellen Brown originally posted on Truthdig, 03/07/2018   Spurred by the heavily cash-reliant cannabis industry, Los Angeles residents will be the first in the country to vote on a public banking mandate, after the City Council agreed on June 29 to put a measure on the November ballot… »

By Will Morrow On Friday, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced at a meeting with employees that the company will not renew its contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven following its expiry in 2019. Under the program, which Google entered in September last year, the company has provided the… »

Summary of the first lecture by Akop Nazaretian, in the postgraduate course, “Theoretical Approaches to History”, organized by the Department of Philosophy of the Central University Marta Abreu de las Villas and with the collaboration of the Centre for Humanist Studies Toltecáyotl and the International News Agency Pressenza. The… »

Felix Arndt, De Montfort University for The Conversation.  Facebook recently announced that it will add a dating app feature to its offering. This will join its portfolio of messaging, event marketing, blogging, instant photography, gaming and a digital marketplace, to name just some of its services. The… »

By Gail Tverberg Reading many of today’s energy articles, it is easy to get the impression that our energy problem is a quality problem—some energy is polluting; other energy is hoped to be less polluting. There is a different issue that we are not being told about. It is the fact that having… »

Since Zoroaster humanity has been struggling with the good vs evil dichotomy. What is “natural”, what is learnt, what belongs to the individual, what to society, what to the gods… Confronted with the realities of a cruel dehumanising system the “noble savage” (apparently mis-attributed to Rousseau but already present in ancient… »

By Pat Elder, Both Nik Cruz, the Parkland shooter, and Dimitri Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Santa Fe shooter, were emotionally distraught because of girls who rejected their advances. They were both outcasts in their respective high schools. They both played video games that simulated war.  In his Facebook bio, Dimitri showed… »

We republish here two related articles from The Conversation that show the need to remain vigilant of what social media is doing with the information we share. Four ways your Google searches and social media affect your opportunities in life Lorna McGregor, University of Essex; Daragh… »

By Joshua Masinde NAIROBI (IDN) – Productive use of energy holds the key to livelihood transformation in Africa’s rural areas. Small industries could improve their production processes and efficiency if they had better access to electricity and technologies. Without electricity, rural micro-enterprises make do with labour intensive and time-consuming manual… »

The for-profit social media giant Facebook harvests vast amounts of data from each of its 2 billion users across the globe. This data trove gives Facebook unparalleled commercial power and, as is becoming increasingly clear, the ability to influence significant events, including national elections. Revelations about Facebook’s role in the… »