Science & Technology Archives - Page 4 of 9

The Internet

The Fall of Facebook

Plus the insurrection subcommittee prepares to confront Trump and the debt ceiling fight continues

October 5, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted on Monday afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void ...

Technology

What’s Google Up To?

It says it turned down subsidies in three cities. What gives?

October 4, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Tech giant Google recently announced that it bought a building in New York City in a massive $2.1 billion deal, which is the largest real estate purchase in the U.S. since the pandemic began. Google also said it would not avail itself of the corporate subsidy programs offered by New ...

Technology

Facebook’s Data Center Fluff

A snazzy new public relations push can’t cover up the truth

September 27, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Last week Facebook rolled out a new website dedicated to the awesomeness of its data centers, the large facilities it builds to house all the data it collects from you, me, and everyone else it surveils on the internet. I’m not kidding. Facebook built and published an entire website extolling the virtues of ...

Capitalism

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

September 15, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The Amazon “HQ2” contest—in which hundreds of cities threw everything including the kitchen sink at Amazon in the hopes of landing a new facility—was a national embarrassment showing just how tight corporate America’s grip on economic development policy is (at least until New York said no way). In a recent interview with ...

Science & Technology

The Covid Lab-Leak Debate Is Destructive

We don’t need to know the origins of Covid-19 to know how pandemics start—we need to know how to contain them and why our natural world is now more lethal

June 8, 2021 • by John Ehrenreich

_____ Was the coronavirus transmitted from wild animals to humans, or was it accidentally leaked from a lab? Whatever the answer, the spirited debate over the origins of the disease is a dangerous distraction from the serious discussion we need to have: how to prevent repeats of the Covid-19 pandemic. For most ...

The Covid Lab-Leak Debate Is Destructive

Science & Technology

The Story of the Sputnik V Vaccine

Vaccine nationalism and Cold War tropes abound

June 8, 2021 • by Marek Eby

_____ A distinct time-warp quality characterizes western reactions to Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. The international reception of the jab harkens back to the rhetoric of the Cold War, despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic permeates every aspect of contemporary life. But some knowledge of Russia’s past can lend nuance to ...

Science & Technology

Back to Belief

To believe in science – or that the aim of science is to deceive us – is to confuse opinion with belief

June 7, 2021 • by Michaël Fœssel

_____ When COVID-19 invited itself into our lives, it did not arrive alone. In its wake came a global flood of knowledge on respiratory viruses and their prevention and treatment. It has been pointed out that, in recent history, far more serious epidemics have swept through society, particularly the Spanish flu ...

Science & Technology

What Computers Can Explain

About how humans learn

June 7, 2021 • by Jacob Browning

_____ The mystery of learning is as old as philosophy: how does the nearly insensate newborn become, within just a few years, a walking, talking, intelligent being? In his new book entitled How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene illuminates the great ...

Past Present

Peloton and the History of Product Recalls

Past Present Podcast, Episode 279

May 12, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Peloton, the digital fitness company made famous by its internet-connected stationary bike, is complying with a federal voluntary recall of its Tread+, which has killed one child and injured many other children and pets. Natalia referred to historian Richard Bushman’s ...

The Internet

Glenn Greenwald Punches Down

Worse, when he attacked an intern for USA Today, this established and wealthy journalist also threw the truth under the bus

April 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

My disappointment with Glenn Greenwald, who I once admired for his work on the Snowden revelations, escalates. Watch as Greenwald, who has 1.6 million followers, deliberately exposes a recent college graduate, a woman, to a screaming mob of trolls on March 28, 2021: Screenshot via Glenn Greenwald's Twitter @ggreenwald. What a bully. More importantly, ...

The Internet

Why We Should Ban Oppressive Speech Acts

The debate around deplatforming and “cancel culture” remains mired in a naive understanding of how language really works

February 24, 2021 • by Natasha Lennard

_____ When Twitter and Facebook shuttered the account of Donald Trump, along with thousands of others for allegedly spreading far right violence and conspiracy theories, many felt that it was long overdue. Antifascist organizers and writers, myself included, have for years argued against giving platforms to white supremacists, including powerful public ...