from Fast Company In rural Wyoming, a sprawling field will soon be filled with dozens of shipping container-sized boxes that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere to help combat climate change. The captured CO2, compressed into a liquid, will travel through pipelines into nearby wells that are drilled thousands of feet underground, storing it permanently. Everything will run on clean energy. The first units in the system, called Project Bison, will be running by the end of next year. By 2030, as it scales up, the project plans to capture five million metric tons of CO2 a year, or roughly […]
Continue readingHow An Enormous Project Attempted To Map The Sky Without Computers
from ars technica Recently, the European Space Agency released the third installment of data from the Gaia satellite, a public catalog that provides the positions and velocities of over a billion stars. This is our most recent attempt to answer some of the most long-standing questions in astronomy: How are stars (and nebulae) spread out across the sky? How many of them are there, how far away are they, and how bright are they? Do they change in position or brightness? Are there new classes of objects that are unknown to science? For centuries, astronomers have tried to answer these […]
Continue readingSo, You Want Twitter to Stop Destroying Democracy
from Wired A SPECTER HAUNTS the Discourse, and it’s the sense that Twitter is bad for you. There’s certainly been some chin-wagging about this—on Twitter itself (in one of its usual ironies) and in spaces like this one, where I’ve argued that the platform’s very design promotes toxic use. But claiming to quit Twitter only to come slinking back is a time-honoured tradition; numerous users embarrassed themselves by proclaiming Elon Musk’s inevitably abortive takeover to be the last straw, only to find the site’s allure impossible to resist. More alarmingly, powerful and influential people—call them “epistemic elites”—seem to be among […]
Continue readingWhen Teens Find Misinformation, These Teachers Are Ready
from NYTs Between lessons about the Revolutionary War and the functions of Congress, juniors in several history and U.S. government classes at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs are taught to defend themselves against disinformation. The students, many of them on the cusp of voting age, spend up to two weeks each fall exploring how falsehoods, prejudices and opinions can lurk in the many places they get information. They learn to trace the origins of documents, to validate a website by leaving it to consult other sources and to train a critical eye on the claims made by TikTok influencers […]
Continue readingChange: The Inevitable Choice Forward
from Educause If you ask people how they feel about change, many will say that change can be difficult, especially when it is rapid and unexpected. If change is difficult for many, then why do it? Why change? We change inevitably as we age, and we change intentionally when we alter the conditions of our mental and physical environments. Positive change is a balance of tradition and innovation; society has shown it can adapt to new trends while standing on the shoulders of tradition. For instance, successful efforts to develop and distribute effective COVID-19 vaccines rested on decades of accumulated […]
Continue readingIf You’re Suffering After Being Sick With Covid, It’s Not Just in Your Head
from NYTs When the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 ended, misery continued. Many who survived became enervated and depressed. They developed tremors and nervous complications. Similar waves of illness had followed the 1889 pandemic, with one report noting thousands “in debt and unable to work” and another describing people left “pale, listless and full of fears.” The scientists Oliver Sacks and Joel Vilensky warned in 2005 that a future pandemic could bring waves of illness in its aftermath, noting “a recurring association, since the time of Hippocrates, between influenza epidemics and encephalitis-like diseases” in their wakes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, […]
Continue readingEurope Set Itself Up for This Energy Crisis
from Wired VACATIONS IN MANY German cities are a little different this summer. Visitors to the local swimming pools in the northwestern city of Hanover have to take cold showers after their dip. A trip to Berlin will look a little less wow-worthy as the city switches off lights that illuminate 200 of its major tourist landmarks at night. On June 23, the country’s economics and climate ministry declared a major gas alert. “The situation is tense and a further worsening of the situation cannot be ruled out,” they said in a statement. Nord Stream 1, a major pipeline delivering […]
Continue readingThe Rise of the Worker Productivity Score
from NYTs A FEW YEARS AGO, Carol Kraemer, a longtime finance executive, took a new job. Her title, senior vice president, was impressive. The compensation was excellent: $200 an hour. But her first paychecks seemed low. Her new employer, which used extensive monitoring software on its all-remote workers, paid them only for the minutes when the system detected active work. Worse, Ms. Kraemer noticed that the software did not come close to capturing her labor. Offline work — doing math problems on paper, reading printouts, thinking — didn’t register and required approval as “manual time.” In managing the organization’s finances, […]
Continue readingScanning Students’ Rooms During Remote Tests Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules
from MindShift The remote-proctored exam that colleges began using widely during the pandemic saw a first big legal test of its own — one that concluded in a ruling applauded by digital privacy advocates. A federal judge this week sided with a student at Cleveland State University in Ohio, who alleged that a room scan taken before his online test as a proctoring measure was unconstitutional. Aaron Ogletree, a chemistry student, sat for a test during his spring semester last year. Before starting the exam, he was asked to show the virtual proctor his bedroom. He complied, and the recording […]
Continue reading‘We Still Have A Lot To Prove’: VC-Backed Union Startup Responds To Skepticism Around Its Model
from Fast Company Jamie Earl White grew up in a rural Texas town near Uvalde where there was a clear resources divide between “the ranching class and the non-ranching class.” As an MIT student, he took careful notes during Occupy Boston and helped lead the “Justice for Janitors” campaign—a lesson in how, even with the support of the powerful Service Employees International Union, it could still take workers a year and half to win better contract terms. So, once White found success in tech a few years later, his mind returned to the problem of workers being under-resourced. He chatted […]
Continue readingEmail Doesn’t Suck. It’s Email Clients That Need Improving
from Wired POSTCARDS MAY BE one of the most obvious examples of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message.” Regardless of what you write on one, a postcard tells someone, hey, I was out and about in the world, and I was thinking of you. I am an inveterate sender of postcards. For all the instantaneousness of today’s communication options, nothing quite conveys a message the way a postcard does. Another aspect I find McLuhanesque is the gap between when you mail the postcard and when the person receives it. The card is independent of both sender and […]
Continue readingEthereum’s “Merge” is about to put every ether miner out of work
from ars technica In a few weeks, Ethereum is slated to undergo the most significant change in its seven-year history. Until now, the Ethereum blockchain has been secured using a method called “proof-of-work,” which consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Belgium. Next month’s switch to a new method called “proof-of-stake” is expected to cut Ethereum’s energy consumption by a factor of 1,000. The stakes are high. A botched transition could mean chaos for the many crypto projects built on top of Ethereum. A smooth transition would be the culmination of years of careful planning by Ethereum’s core developers. […]
Continue readingWhen They Don’t Know What They’re Talking About…
from Seth’s Blog People tend to do one of two things: not talk talk Both are a problem. If we’re facing an important issue at work, at school or in our community, our instinct is to let others who are better informed speak up. Which prevents people from voting on a school budget or even volunteering to speak in class. We need their input and their solutions, but without insight and understanding, folks understandably hold back. More here.
Continue readingBill Pitman, Revered Studio Guitarist, Is Dead at 102
from NYTs Bill Pitman, a guitarist who accompanied Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and others from the late 1950s to the ’70s, and who for decades was heard on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood films and television shows, died on Thursday night at his home in La Quinta, Calif. He was 102. His wife, Janet Pitman, said he died after four weeks at a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he was treated for a fractured spine suffered in a fall, and the past week at home under hospice care. Virtually anonymous outside the music world but revered within […]
Continue readingSome of the Biggest Brands Are Leaving Russia. Others Just Can’t Quit Putin. Here’s a List.
from NYTs In the latter half of the 1980s, roughly 200 American companies withdrew from South Africa, partly in protest against its apartheid system. As businesses fled the country, South Africa’s segregationist president, P.W. Botha, came under increasing economic pressure. The corporate exodus contributed to the end of apartheid, and was a remarkable display of the power that companies have. When they’re courageous enough to use that power for good, it can help topple repressive governments. Over the past six weeks, we’ve witnessed a similarly extensive response from the private sector to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Hundreds of American companies […]
Continue readingThree Interconnected Trends To Change The Way We Live And Work
from Forbes Distributed Leadership is going to be the norm because we are changing how we relate to each other (remote work, generational shift, digital working and living methods) so leadership is changing to. The natural distance has shrunk from things like social filtering to email, collaboration tools, social, real-time interactions, so the flow of communications and the associated frictions that occurred have almost totally disappeared. This changes how our relationships work from positional hierarchies to ones based on a constant test of trust in relationships. In effect problem solving is no longer going to be driven be external experts, […]
Continue readingHackers Using Fake Police Data Requests against Tech Companies
from Schneier on Security Brian Krebs has a detailed post about hackers using fake police data requests to trick companies into handing over data. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name. But in certain circumstances – such as a case involving imminent harm or death – an investigating authority may make what’s known as an Emergency Data […]
Continue readingWall Street’s Rigid Culture Bends to Demands for Flexibility at Work
from NYTs When Tom Naratil arrived on Wall Street in the 1980s, work-life balance didn’t really exist. For most bankers of his generation, working long hours while missing out on family time wasn’t just necessary to get ahead, it was necessary to not be left behind. But Mr. Naratil, now president of the Swiss bank UBS in the Americas, doesn’t see why the employees of today should have to make the same trade-offs — at the cost of their personal happiness and the company’s bottom line. Employees with the flexibility to skip “horrible commutes” and work from home more often […]
Continue readingThe Problem of ‘Personal Precedents’ of Supreme Court Justices
from NYTs Supreme Court justices, like most people, like to appear to be consistent. No one wants to be thought to be a flip-flopper, an opportunist or a hypocrite. That means justices try not to disavow earlier legal views, even ones that appeared in dissents, in opinions they wrote as appeals court judges, in academic work, at their confirmation hearings and elsewhere. This impulse, which a provocative new article calls “personal precedent,” can be at odds with respect for precedent in the conventional sense. The force and legitimacy of such personal precedents has seldom been explored, and the rare scholars […]
Continue readingBa.2 Omicron Symptoms: What To Look Out For As Variant Spreads In The US
from Fast Company According to the latest Nowcast data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the BA.2 omicron subvariant of COVID-19 has now become the dominant strain across the United States. As of April 2, 2022, the BA.2 variant makes up 72.2% of all cases in the country. While that total is expected to only grow in the coming weeks, as of now BA.2 is more dominant in some areas of the country than others. Here are the areas of America most affected with BA.2 as well as the latest symptoms to watch out for as the […]
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