Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Armine Yalnizyan offers a warning about the spread of the tapeworm economy in which corporate profiteers wriggle their way into public services and siphon off resources. – Julia Velkova discusses how reliance on tech monopolists undermines the capacity to decide and deliver on
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – David Michaels, Emily Spieler and Gregory Wagner examine how negligent pandemic policies (even when COVID-19 wasn’t being treated as a matter of general denialism) resulted in tens of thousands of worker deaths in the US alone. Olivia Man et al. find that prenatal exposure
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Colin Carlson discusses why we should be treating the climate crisis as a health emergency (while also recognizing that such a thing demands urgent action rather than enforced denial). Debra Werner discusses the progress being made on at least identifying methane emissions
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jon Henley reports on new research showing that adopting right-wing policies does nothing to help left-of-centre parties win votes (while producing disastrous effects in shifting the spectrum of political options). – Laura Weiss discusses why U.S. Democrats need to acknowledge and present a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Ryan Meili discusses how a blinkered focus on austerian “efficiency” and exit strategies prevents the development of care systems capable of meeting long-term needs. And Dione Wearmouth reports on the fallout from the UCP’s insistence on putting performative politics over even those
Continue readingThings Are Good: Figuring Out AI Consciousness
AI generated image Artificial Intelligence keeps popping up everywhere from generative AI which created the image above to the financial sector. What AI is currently doing is copying and reformatting data into new patterns (but still using the inputted patterns), meaning that currently AI is not conscious and is not
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Derek Lynch writes about the need to recognize that humanity isn’t separate from the living environment it needs to survive. Eric Ralls points out how the climate breakdown and dwindling biodiversity are part of the same crisis. And Katie Surma highlights how climate
Continue readingThings Are Good: Desalination on the Cheap for the Masses
Water water everywhere and plenty of drops to drink. Researchers from MIT have found a way to passively convert seawater into drinking water using a setup so simple it seems too good to be true. Their device basically uses heat from the sun rays and a siphon. The apparatus produces
Continue readingThings Are Good: Be My Eyes, Be My AI
The visual impaired population is getting more support from AI to help them ‘see’ the world around them. The already very successful human-powered app Be My Eyes (we’ve covered it before) has launched Be My AI, an automated tool that can help in certain circumstances. Using an AI trained to
Continue readingThings Are Good: The AI Incident Database Catalogs AI Errors
The threat Artificial Intelligence holds is unknown and many people are rightfully concerned about the potential harm that AI can cause. The AI Incident Databaseo help us as a society to think through how we should regulate AIs by tracking any problematic issue that has been raised by the actions
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Student Absences
I’ve been thinking about the concern with kids not going to school for reasons beyond the rampant illnesses caused by letting a highly-infectious virus run wild. The Fortune article suggests that schools are less welcoming now. “Everyone seemed less tolerant, more angry.” They mention a host of reasons for absences including
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: A Republican and a Democrat take on big tech
The headline in The New York Times “Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren: When It Comes to Big Tech, Enough Is Enough” caught my eye for two reasons, both good. First, it was a breath of fresh air to see two senior senators from the opposing parties, one Republican (Graham) and
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: The amazing American economy
Reading a very good book recently I was once again reminded of the irrepressible nature of the American economy. The book is Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. It tells the story of that technological miracle that created the modern world—the silicon chip.
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: Should We Bring Back The Lord’s Day Act
No I am not going all religious on you This would be more of a Day for Humanity, a day that would not belong to the billionaires and millionaires but to the common people and the community. This would be a day where all profit making activities would be banned
Continue readingThings Are Good: Collision 2023 Day 3
The final day of Collision conference and there are still more startups to write about. It’s neat that there are so many companies looking to address the UN SDGs! Loop wants to be the so called middleman, and that’s good. They are on a mission to make it super easy
Continue readingThings Are Good: Collision Day 2
I’m back at Collision Conference for another day of finding startups doing good in the world. Let’s see what today brings. Ensogo provides a system for teams to track and ensure they are meeting their ESG and sustainability goals. They do this by breaking down an abstract goal like better
Continue readingThings Are Good: Collision 2023 Day 1
I’m at Collision conference today in Toronto looking for some cool new good things to share. I’ll update this post as I find stuff. A record-breaking 30 percent of startups this year at Collision are women-founded. The first company that’s a good one is Unwrapit. They want gift giving to
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: Generative AI—threat or opportunity?
“No contract! No content!” and “Here’s a pitch: Pay us, Bitch!” Thus the Hollywood members of the Writers Guild of America colourfully voice their views during their strike against the studios, streaming services and networks. It is expected to last a while. The last one, in 2007-08, lasted 100 days.
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Cellular Phones in the Classroom – Disruptive
Let’s file this under common sense facts we should all know. Cellphones are connected to social media one of the greatest detractors from long term attention span and focus. Children are not particularly good at self regulation and control Thus, we should enforce standards of conduct around the use of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Machine Learning Improves Enzyme Eating Plastic
A bacteria that eats plastic may sound too good to be true since we have so much plastic waste littering the planet. The rouble with plastic eating bacterias is that they aren’t efficient nor can they survive long outside the lab. So a research team turned to machine learning, or
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