Science and Technology

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… »

Danny Katch interviewed, geneticist and author Joseph Graves, who helped organize 67 fellow scientists to write a response to a piece in the New York Times arguing that race is a valid biological category. I was way out of my depth here but I was able to fake it enough… »

Buried in a company announcement was acknowledgement that nearly all of its users have been targeted to some degree by Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams “Buried in Facebook’s announcement that Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data from up to 87 million users—rather than the… »

By David Swanson, The fact that 3,100 Google employees signed a letter opposing Google doing work for the U.S. military is wonderful for what it reveals. It does not reveal that a major company exists that has not long been a contractor for the U.S. military. Google, whether its employees know… »

Rohan Deb Roy, University of Reading for The Conversation Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a… »