Daily Archives: January 9, 2022

The Amazon Web Services outage in early December provided a key lesson in the emerging role pf the chief technology officer (CTO),saysnoted industry consultant Keith Townsend. "Are there external mitigations that enable you from overcomplicating your system design? The more complicated your system design for high availability, the longer it takes to implement new features. It takes someone who can have these complex conversations with technical staff and the lines of business. There's the need to have a reputation and the authority to impact both sides of the conversation. That's CTO level vs. engineer level."

The CTO, long a broad-based role overlapping with that of chief information officers, is emerging as a leading player in the growth and viability of digital enterprises. A recent survey of 5,000 CTOs and CIOs by the IBM Institute for Business Value bears this out, stating that "the CTO has become one of the most strategic roles within an organization." This "may come as a revelation for some," the report's authors, led by Rashik Parmar, an IBM Fellow. "Yet, this positioning has been years in the making. CTOs are aligned to lead a new virtual enterprise model that is emerging, fueled by a fresh post-digital approach to business opportunity."

Top CTO responsibilities cited in the survey include C-suite and board advisory (88%), software development lifecycle (72%), cybersecurity (69%), innovation strategy (61%), and business continuity (59%). CTOs also add data to their list of central responsibilities. 79% of CTO respondents report a leadership role in their organization's data strategy and 70% state that their colleagues look to them for data governance and stewardship.

In a separate IBM Institute survey of 3,000 CEOs, CTOs and CIOs jointly ranked in the top three, right behind CFOs and COOs, Parmar and his co-authors add, Reporting structures also reflect a radical shift in strategic influence. 40% of CTOs indicated they now report directly to the CEO, and 67% of CTOs said they report directly into the C-suite versus a business unit or geography leader.

Where do CTO and CIO roles align, and where do they differ? "CTOs are focused on a core set of responsibilities, namely technology strategy, operations, and architecture," the study shows. "CIOs tend to own a broad set of responsibilities that bridge from the C-suite to the business units. More than 70% of surveyed technology leaders report that CIOs own back-office applications, including supply chain, workforce engagement, end-user experience, and workplace enablement."

Roles shared between CTOs and CEOs include innovation strategy. data privacy, ecosystem strategy, software development lifecycle, cybersecurity, and C-suite and board advisory initiatives.

The IBM study also finds CTOs and CIOs are often working independently. Only 45% of CTOs indicate frequent interaction with their CIO counterparts. Similarly, just 41% of CIOs highlight frequent interaction with their CTO peers.

With the relentless drive to digital, CTOs are gaining more notice than they have before, the IBM researchers observe. "We see the tech leadership role increasingly split between the CIO and the CTO, with the CTO role being relatively new in the C-suite," they state. "The strategic nature of their job has placed them in a position of heightened interaction with senior leadership, with 55% of those surveyed noting their primary C-suite engagement is with the CEO and an equal percentage engaging with the chief operating officer."

Some CTO responsibilities going forward include the following, the IBM team states:

Some of the basic requirements for those aspiring to pursue a CTO career path are provided here at GeeksforGeeks.

Read the rest here:

Never been a better time to aspire to be a chief technology officer, study shows - ZDNet

by: Michelle Ross, Nexstar Media Wire

OCEANSIDE, N.Y. (WPIX) Whether its through burial or cremation, when it comes to the end of your pets life, there are just a handful of options to say goodbye. But with new technology, pet owners are turning to water instead of fire to lay their pets to rest.

Meghan McFadden lost her dog, Gizmo, in a fire in her apartment in Queens, New York, on Monday.

Ive had him for 13 years, McFadden said. Its the only thing Ive known. Hes been through everything with me, so not having him here is just terrible.

Laying him to rest is making the grieving period just a touch easier knowing he wont be cremated, but rather put to rest in a more environmentally friendly, and perhaps gentler way.

It was just a really nice experience to have to go through when youre dealing with something like that, McFadden said.

The process is called aquamation, and is done at Compassionate Care Pet Aquamation in Oceanside, New York. Director Alan Hillsberg said it mimics exactly what happens in nature when the pet is laid to rest naturally in the soil. But depending on the moisture of the soil and temperature of the air, this could take anywhere from three months to five years for the animals body to naturally dissolve.

Our process mimics what happens in nature but only takes 20 hours to complete, Hillsberg said.

At Compassionate Care, the animal is put inside a steel basket and then lifted by a crane, which gently places it into a machine where theres a mixture of 95% water and 5% alkali.

It gets hot never boiling, though at 204 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to flame-based cremation, which gets up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

No smoke stacks, no smoke, Hillsberg added. It is completely environmentally friendly. There are no emissions into the atmosphere. Theres no spewing of carbon dioxide into the air.

Whats left are the bones, which get processed into a powder and put in an urn for the pet owner.

Gizmo is the second pet McFadden has aquamated in eight months, but seeing how natural the process is makes the heartache a little lighter.

Once I found out Gizzy died and I needed somewhere to put him, I wasnt calling anyone else, McFadden said.

As aquamation is becoming more popular for animals, its not yet legal for humans in New York State, though there is legislation hoping to change that.

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Aquamation: New technology provides pet owners an alternative to cremation - WDVM 25

Our ability to pay attention and focus is in free-fall. The average college student now focuses on any one task for just 65 seconds. The average office worker focuses on any one task for just three minutes.

I was so concerned by this slow acid being poured on our attention that for my new book, I spent three years researching the reasons this is taking place, interviewing more than 200 of the leading experts, and travelling all over the world for answers from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne. I learned that we have been thinking about this problem in way too simplistic a way.

I basically had two responses when I felt my own attention fraying I either blamed myself, or I blamed my phone. I thought I was lazy, or I thought my devices had hijacked me. In fact, what I learned is that there are 12 big causes of our attention crisis ones that run deep in the way we live.

To get our brains back, I came to believe we need to adopt two parallel strategies. The first is to protect ourselves and our children, as individuals, as much as possible, from the forces stealing our focus. The second is to band together and take on the bigger forces invading our attention, to stop them. Both are essential if we are going to rescue our super-power as a species our ability to focus and think deeply.

I think its easier to see these twin tracks if we look at one of the forces we can all see is damaging our attention: our current relationship with our technology.

I learned from Molly Crockett, a leading professor of psychology at Yale University, that theres a crucial technique you can use when you want to restrain yourself at a personal level from doing something harmful. Its called pre-commitment.

This is where you have a goal you want to achieve, but you know you might crack later. You dont want to eat the Pringles. You dont want to check your phone during your childs school play. But you do it anyway. To prevent that happening, you can take steps to restrict your own ability to make a bad choice in the future: you can pre-commit.

To follow her advice, I bought something called a K-Safe. Its a little plastic safe that opens at the top. You put your phone in it, and you put the lid on, and you twist the top to determine how long you want to shut your phone away for. Then its gone locked away, so youd have to smash it with a hammer to get the phone out.

I also installed on my laptop an app called Freedom, that will cut you off entirely from the internet for however long you tell it to. When you use these two techniques, you prevent the future you from cracking, changing your mind, and clicking onto Twitter.

These techniques really helped me I dont think I could have finished my book without them. But up to now, almost all the books that talk about our attention crisis focus on individual solutions like these; they have been, in effect, digital diet books.

I think we have to start levelling with people. Individual solutions can make a real difference. I am strongly in favour of them. The many I have pursued - and that I describe in my book - have greatly improved my life. But they will only get you so far.

At the moment, we are living in an environment that is systematically invading our attention. The factors that are damaging our focus run very deep. They are even in the food we eat and the air we breathe.

On their own, personal changes will not rescue our attention. We have to band together and take bigger steps to stop the forces that are trashing our focus. I learned a lot about how we might do this in Silicon Valley, where I met many of the people who have designed key aspects of the technology to which we twitch and twerk our minds 24/7.

Over three years, I interviewed many times the former Google engineer Tristan Harris, who subsequently became a viral star in the documentary The Social Dilemma. He explained to me that when Gmail was first being invented, he was assigned to work on developing the app.

One day, he would hear an engineer excitedly saying: Why dont we make it buzz your phone every time we get an email? Everyone would be thrilled and a few weeks later, phones began to buzz in pockets, and more people found themselves looking at Gmail many more times a day. He heard those vibrations everywhere he went like a kind of digital birdsong and realised that he and his team had done that, and it was happening everywhere.

Tristan realised they were responsible for more than 10 billion interruptions to peoples day, every day and he knew that once you are interrupted, it takes on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before you were disturbed.

He told one audience later: I want you to imagine walking into a room. A control room, with a bunch of people, a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today. I know, because I used to work in one of those control rooms.

Even as he worked on it, he would obsessively check his own email, making him less focused.

One day, his friend James Williams another Google strategist addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question. How many of you want to live in the world you are designing? There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

The people who had worked at the heart of this machine told me that in order to understand why social media, at the moment, is so bad for your attention, you need to know one thing. The fact that it wrecks your attention is not inherent to social media itself. Its happening for a more specific reason.

Every time you open Facebook, these companies make money, in two ways. The first is obvious you scroll through your feed, and see ads. The second is more subtle and much more valuable. Every time you send a message or status update on Facebook, or Snapchat, or Twitter, and every time you search for something on Google, everything you say is being scanned and sorted and stored. These companies are building up a profile of you, to sell to advertisers who want to target you.

For example, starting in 2014, if you used Gmail, Google would scan through all your private correspondence, to generate an advertising profile exactly for you. If (say) you email your mother telling her you need to buy nappies, Gmail knows you have a baby, and it knows to target ads for baby products straight to you. If you use the word arthritis, it will try to sell you arthritis treatments.

Every time you put down your phone, they lose both these revenue streams. So their products are designed, deliberately, to maximally capture and hold your attention. The cleverest engineers in the world spend all day figuring out how to get you to switch tasks to their site.

Your distraction is their fuel. So they learn what most engages you, and they target it ruthlessly. They train you to crave the rewards their sites offer. So as Tristan put the problem plainly when he testified before the US Senate: You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.

The deepest solution, I was told by many people who had been at the heart of these companies, is to go to the heart of the problem this business model itself. As the leading designer Aza Raskin argued to me, these corporations shouldnt be allowed to invade your attention and sell it to the highest bidderbecause it is anti-human. It should be outlawed.

This sounded drastic when I first heard it, but I remembered that when we discovered that painting your home with leaded paint severely harmed kids attention, we banned it. You still paint your home, just without the attention-wrecking ingredients.

There are alternative business models for social media that dont depend on figuring out the weaknesses in your attention and constantly targeting them. There are several feasible alternatives. We could pay a small monthly subscription fee. Or these companies could be owned by the public, as with sewage systems across the world. Just as we all own the sewage pipes to prevent cholera outbreaks, we might want to own the informational pipes to prevent the attentional equivalent of cholera.

Once the financial incentives change, social media can be designed to heal your attention, not hack it.

There are all sorts of ways that can be done but none will get off the drawing board until the incentives are right.

Of course, these companies want us to continue simply to blame ourselves, and to fiddle with our habits while they design more and more inventive ways to invade and steal our focus. But it doesnt have to be this way.

Sometimes I hear people say its too late to make certain changes to the web or platforms or digital technology, James Williams told me. But the axe, he added,existed for 1.4 million years before anybody thought to put a handle on it. The web, by contrast, is less than 10,000 days old.

We are, I realised, in a race. On one side, there is the rapidly escalating power of invasive technologies, which are figuring out how we work and fracking our attention. On the other side, there needs to be a movement, demanding technologies that work for us, not against us.

At the moment, the movement for humane technology consists of a few brave people. We all need to decide are we going to join them and put up a fight? Or are we going to let the invasive technologies win by default?

This also goes for the other 11 factors that are ruining our ability to pay attention. Ask yourself: Do you value attention? Do you want your kids to be able to focus? If you do, we have to take steps in our own lives and we need to band together to fight to reclaim our minds.

Stolen Focus Why You Cant Pay Attention is published by Bloomsbury. You can read Karlin Lillingtons review of it here

Johann Hari is a British writer who has authored two best-selling books on drugs and depression

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The 65-second attention span: Technology has stolen our ability to focus. Can we get it back? - The Irish Times

BMWs E Ink color changing technology stole the show at CES 2022. Even non-car journalists and tech fans were wowed by the fascinating new technology, which allowed the BMW iX to change its exterior color from white to black and back again. However, some car enthusiasts, while impressed by the tech itself, struggled to find a real-world use-case scenarios for the tech, other than showing off. So we thought wed list off a few genuinely useful applications of the E Ink tech, to prove that it could be a worthwhile technological pursuit.

Ever been to a car dealership that just doesnt have the car you want in the color you want but you dont want to order it without seeing the color in person? Happens all the time, as dealers cant always stock every color option. With one E Ink demo on the showroom floor, the dealer could, in theory, cycle through all of the cars colors, to show customers what they look like in the flesh. Not only would that cut back on dealer stock, making inventory more convenient for them, it would provide customers a better experience.

Admittedly, the tech would have to improve for that to happen, as even the best versions of this technology are limited to a handful of colors, but the project lead on BMWs E Ink tech, Dr. Stella Clarke, said a wider color gamut was possible in the future.

During BMWs presentations of the BMW iX Flow with E Ink technology, one of the use cases for the tech was finding your lost car in a parking lot. With the push of a keyfob button, the car could flash its entire body colors back and forth, making it easier to spot. But what if we take that one step further and use it for emergency flashers?

Lets say your car is stuck on the side of the road in a snow storm, having the entire vehicles exterior flash from your body color to red and back, constantly, would make your car far easier to spot for emergency personnel. It could also potentially be used to flash specific warnings on the body of the car, to help emergency personnel understand the situation before they even get out of the car.

Spouses, partners, or whoever cohabitates and shares the same car, could each have the color they want. Raise your hands, whos ever bought a car and you wanted one specific color but your partner wanted another and you just couldnt agree? Happened to me, when we bought my wifes Volkswagen Tiguan. I wanted Dark Moss Green and my wife wanted white. Guess which color we got?

With BMWs E Ink technology, both partners could have the color they want and just switch the color back and forth, depending on whos driving it. At the moment, the tech only works with two colors it could be any two colors but only two but thats all a couple would need. One color for each partner and everyones happy.

This one more helps other motorists than it does the owner of the E Inked BMW. While charging, you can easily see your cars battery status from whatever connected app it has. However, for people searching for a charging port to use, it could be helpful to see just how close a car is to being done charging. If youre searching a packed charging station and you see that the BMW iXs E Ink exterior is displaying a nearly full charge, you might hang out a bit to see if the owner leaves soon, this way you dont miss the spot.

Also, for the owner, its a bit more convenient, if the car is in your driveway, to just take a look out of your window to see your cars battery status, rather than opening up the app and waiting for it to load and connect. It might not be the most necessary function but nice things make life nicer.

So there are some genuine real-world applications for BMWs E Ink technology that could make ownership better, safer, and more enjoyable. At the moment, its just a flashy tech exercise but, if given the development money and resources, BMWs E Ink could be a hugely helpful technology moving forward.

Link:

These Are the Best Use Cases for BMW's E Ink Color Changing Technology - BMWBLOG

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Category Creation and Digital Ecosystems in Wearable Technology" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This approximately 25,000-word (99 pages) report provides a well-organized thematic analysis of the statements and activities of wearable technology companies.

It deconstructs the business concepts of category creation and digital ecosystems, providing a framework that informs business innovation and investments in new areas.

The launch of Apple's streaming service and the recently declared pivot by Facebook, now a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, increased the importance of an up-to-date and forward-thinking understanding of hardware-supported digital worlds. Additionally, the pandemic has made health/wellness-supporting tools more relevant.

New or evolving categories might initially allow for higher prices, either to reflect the novelty or the newfound benefit that novelty represents, such as increased convenience or even social status. This is the case with wearable technologies.

Through these premiums or sheer volume, category-creating businesses often achieve faster revenue growth, as well as higher valuations, especially if they actively build buzz or rewrite narratives.

However, the long-term consumer interest in maintaining pricey subscriptions that add value to wearable technology use is unclear and possibly overestimated.

The report is structured as follows:

This report will provide comprehensive answers to the following key questions:

Key Topics Covered:

Category Creation in Wearable Technologies

Digital Ecosystems and Data in Wearable Technologies

Management, Culture, and Recruitment in Wearable Startups or Business Units

Companies Mentioned

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jb8s3e

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Global Overview of Category Creation and Digital Ecosystems in the Wearable Technology Market 2021 - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Business Wire

In this issue: delivering tangible climate change regulation, the role of cryptocurrency in power, and the Ukrainian debt dispute.

Could 2022 be the year that climate change regulation gets tangible? Environmentalists have been urging the worlds governments, companies and leading decision-makers to take environmental protection more seriously for years, but in the wake of COP26, and with increasingly dire warnings about the worlds climate and the impacts of human activity on its fragile nature, 2022 could be the year that those warnings are finally heeded.

Indeed, with financial pressures also pushing many producers away from fossil fuels, and towards renewables, there is genuine hope that clean power becomes a project of not only environmental benefit, but profitable enterprise too. Of course, challenges remain to realising these ambitions on a global scale, but there remains cause for optimism.

Elsewhere, we consider the potential impacts of the increasingly popular, and energy-intensive, cryptocurrency mining industry, which threatens to disrupt both traditional ways of conducting business, and the power infrastructure behind those transactions. We also investigate the Ukrainian power debt dispute, and ask whether mandatory power auctions are harming the countrys stuttering renewables sector.

Whether you are on a desktop, tablet or smartphone, you canread the magazinefor free online, and join the conversation onTwitter.

2022 predictions: Climate regulation gets tangible

As the forces pulling the energy transition tire, the biggest changes to power generation in 2021 will push bigger changes in 2022.Matthew Farmerreports on what could come next for the power industry.

Read more.

The new mining: inside the cryptic beginnings of a midstream power market

In areas with limitless renewable energy, power companies are digging up gold by mining for cryptocurrency. Matthew Farmer investigates this latest phenomenon for the power industry.

Read more.

Big data and modelling data: Encoord on data in energy

As data takes centre stage in the energy industry, new means of tracking and modelling will be required to catalogue and interpret this data. JP Casey speaks to Encoords Carlo Brancucci about data in the energy industry, and the companys SAInt platform.

Read more.

Emerging technologies, efficient processes: inside energy storage methods

As renewables make up an increasingly large share of the worlds energy mix, efficient storage solutions will be needed to make the most of this power potential. JP Casey profiles some of the emerging and established methods of energy storage in the world today.

Read more.

They have discriminated against us: inside the Ukrainian power debt dispute

Matthew Farmer speaks to DTEK Renewables CEO Maris Kunickis, who says an instrument of the Ukrainian Government has discriminated against his company.

Read more.

No longer merely a pipe dream, electric vehicles are now a key component of many countries driving landscape, with policymakers and carmakers alike eager to invest more in clean vehicles around the world. We ask what lessons can be learned from the example of electric cars for other emerging clean energy technologies, and consider the new challenges facing the vehicles of the future, challenges which no longer resemble technological obstacles, but logistical and regulatory puzzles.

Industrial Vent and Inline Silencers

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Building real change: the new issue of Future Power Technology is out now - Power Technology

This column is an opinionby Kate Schneider,a master's student at the University of Oxford from Waterloo, Ont.For more information aboutCBC's Opinion section, please see theFAQ.

Last month, CBC released a report divulging new details about the Toronto Police Service's use of Clearview AI's controversial surveillance technology. The findings confirmed that Toronto police had employed facial recognition software to identify both suspects and victims in several dozen police investigations.

These findings built on news from February 2020 that initially revealed several officers had used a trial version of the software, despite their denial of its use a month prior.

This news in itself is deeply unsettling, and not just for the privacy implications. It reveals a concerning degree of power held by police forces and how certain technologies can enable the abuse of that power.

The Toronto Police Service is not the only law enforcement agency in Canada to have come under fire for its relationship with Clearview AI. These revelations were announced in the wake of Canada's Privacy Commissioner ruling in June that the RCMP's use of Clearview AI to scrape online images of Canadians without their consent violated the federal Privacy Act. Police departments in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa have also disclosed using or "testing" this software in the past.

Clearview AI is based in the United States, yet is well-known globally for its facial recognition software. Multiple police departments around the world have admitted to using this technology, including departments in the United States, France, Australia, and the United Kingdom.Most of these countries have asked Clearview to purge its database of images collected there. It is projected that one-quarter of U.S. police forces have facial recognition tools at their disposal.

This facial recognition technology can be applied in a number of situations. Police have been criticized for using it to identify protestors at public demonstrations. They can also pull footage from CCTV cameras near crime scenes and attempt to match the identified faces with Clearview AI's alarmingly vast database of over 10 billion images scraped from social media websites.

Clearview AI's capabilities are becoming even more terrifyingly sophisticated. In October 2021, CEO Hoan Ton-That announced that Clearview was developing new facial recognition tools that could unblur faces disguised for privacy reasons or identify someone even when masked.

In a time when law enforcement agencies have already come under heightened scrutiny through movements like Defund the Police, Canadian police forces' relationship with Clearview AI should make us even more skeptical of expanding police power.

In particular, the ability of police to surveil Canadians is most concerning for the potential impacts on racialized people, especially Black and Indigenous individuals.

Although we sometimes pretend that racism is exclusively an American problem, Canada has its own established history of racial discrimination carried out by police. As activist and writer Desmond Cole has documented, Canadian police have upheld racially discriminatory programs, such as carding. An Ontario Human Rights Commission report in 2020 also found that Toronto police disproportionately targeted Black Canadians.

Technology is often portrayed as less biased due to assumptions that it eliminates human prejudice. However, police surveillance software has been shown to misidentify racialized individuals at a higher rate than white suspects.

With all these factors compounded together, it's clear that police employing surveillance technology is not only an issue of privacy. It's also an issue of racism.

Canadian police forces' use of Clearview AI demonstrates a need to regulate facial recognition surveillance technologies due to their disturbing abilities to violate our privacy. More fundamentally, it also shows the need to be increasingly wary of the power wielded by police in Canada.

As shown, the speed of technological innovation and the correspondingly more sophisticated tools available to law enforcement will only continue to exacerbate the risks of allowing extensive police power. While all Canadians should be concerned, our country's previous history of policing shows that racialized individuals will most likely disproportionately suffer the consequences.

Experts and advocates against police violence have already laid out multiple suggestions for how we can limit police power and keep our communities safer in alternative ways. The findings about Canadian police and Clearview AI demonstrate that it's time we paidcareful attention to these demands and act upon them.

Do you have a strong opinion that could add insight, illuminate an issue in the news, or change how people think about an issue? We want to hear from you. Here'show to pitch to us.

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Use of controversial surveillance technology demonstrates the need to limit police power - CBC News

Lyten, an advanced materials company developing lithium-sulfur battery technology based on Lyten 3D Graphene, has announced that it secured a prototype Other Transaction (OT) agreement in support of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) around high-specific energy storage and management solutions.

A core objective of the agreement is to demonstrate a lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery solution that will significantly increase the duty cycle of small satellites for the U.S. Space Force, which is one of many applications for the new Li-S battery technology. The ultimate goal of the effort is to develop a lithium-sulfur rechargeable battery capable of three times the energy storage capacity of current lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, enabling the use of higher duty cycle spacecraft and those that function longer during an eclipse.

Lyten has been developing its pristine, 3-dimensional graphene material that can be formulated and tuned at the molecular level and used to significantly improve batteries among other applications. When formulated into its advanced Li-S battery chemistry, Lyten's batteries reportedly deliver greater energy density, superior temperature performance, faster recharging time, and greatly improved safety.

Additionally, Lyten's cell technology is based on sustainable materials, requiring no cobalt, nickel or other rare minerals and provides the lowest carbon footprint of any battery. Through its unique Li-S batteries and proprietary, 3-dimensional graphene technology, Lyten is poised for additional improvements in the near future.

"Our state-of-the-art battery solution gives the DIU and U.S. Space Force a tool that will enable the use of smaller, lighter battery packs, better positioning them to use smaller spacecrafts, reduce the overall cost to orbit, and sustain Low Earth Orbit operations during eclipse," said Shawn Black, President of Government, Aerospace & Defense at Lyten. "We look forward to successfully fulfilling the testing phase of this project and engaging with the DIU again in the future."

With advanced energy and materials being a key part of the DIU's initiative, Lyten was first awarded the contract in spring 2020 and since then has rapidly and successfully prototyped three different battery configurations, including pouch cells and cylindrical cells. The batteries will undergo a comprehensive level of testing as requested by the Space Systems Command, prior to production implementation.

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Lyten commissioned by US DIU to demonstrate battery technology for space applications | Graphene-Info - Graphene-Info

Part 3 of TED Radio Hour episode Reshaping Evolution

What if we could rescue endangered species before they disappear? Biotech entrepreneur Ryan Phelan explores how genetic engineering tools can save species that would otherwise go extinct.

About Ryan Phelan

Ryan Phelan is the cofounder and executive director of Revive & Restore, a wildlife conservation organization that promotes the use of biotechnologies along with standard conservation practices. The goal of Revive & Restore's projects is to enhance biodiversity through new techniques of genetic rescue. They've worked to improve biodiversity in populations of black-footed ferrets, Przewalski's horse, coral, and more.

Previously, she founded and served as the CEO of Direct Medical Knowledge and DNA Direct, both with the goal of empowering health care consumers.

Phelan earned her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

This segment of TED Radio Hour was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Twitter @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadio@npr.org.

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Ryan Phelan: How gene technology can save species on the brink of extinction - NPR

I was browsing through some of the sources I have used for this column recently and one from the past (September 19, 2016) caught my interest again, I used to be a Human Being by Andrew Sullivan. It was a criticism of the social outcomes wrought by, you guessed it, the internet, but it was the subtitle that really interested me: An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too. He backs up his claims that range from spread of misinformation to the mechanisms it uses that will lead to addiction. If your search engine can find the article, I highly recommend reading it if only for the line, If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.

My initial reaction was if that was true over five years ago, is it better now or worse? Well, to cut to the chase, some things are better and some are worse.

PROS AND CONS

On the positive side, the internet has a plethora of videos from showing you how to fix your washing machine to dealing with your computer (most of the time). Its an easy way to keep in touch with friends, make travel plans, arrange your photos, shop, and, well, you fill in the rest. One can subscribe to receive current news on the Washington Post, The New York Times, Wikipedia and the Wall Street Journal to check or explore source materials for their column. Just sayin.

On the negative side there also exist sites that can cause harm to the user and thus harm society. For example, consider the truly evil websites like the how to commit suicide website directed at teens which can be easily spread via the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok sites. Additionally, the TikTok site has an app that recommends teens to take extreme measures to lose weight with diets ranging from 300 calories per day to taking laxatives after overeating and if they find that they just cant adhere to the stupid and spartan diet, other teens resort to shaming them, You realize giving up after a week. Isnt going to get you anywhere, right? ... Youre disgusting, its really embarrassing.

To be fair, TikTok said it would adjust its recommendation algorithms to avoid showing users too much of the same content, as part of a broad reevaluation of social media platforms and the potential harm they pose to younger users.

To test this out I tried typing how to commit suicide in google search and got 322,000,000 hits and the first page looked like this

Help is available

Speak with someone today

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Hours: Available 24 hours. Languages: English, Spanish. Learn more

1-800-273-8255

Intercepting and rerouting queries like these is best handled by the operating system or browser instead of TikTok itself.

RUMOR TO DANGER

The internet is exceptionally good at spreading most any unsubstantiated rumor. like the Pizzagate affair which included the outragious claims that Hilary Clinton was using a pizza shop to snare unsuspecting children that were to be sold to sex traffickers.

Pizzagate was so effective in convincing one man that pedophile Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that in 2016, he showed up with an AR-15 to rescue the nonexistent children. He was sentenced to four years in prison for the three shots he fired into the restaurant. Pizzagate was a cautionary tale, showing how online conspiracy theories about sex-trafficked children could lead to real-life violence. But that did nothing to stop more made-up stories from spreading.

For a more comprehensive analysis, search on:

Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C 2016 on washingtonpost.com

For another horrific example of the internet amplifying rumors and presenting them as facts, search on Wayfair hoax Washington Post where a weird combination of circumstance and a propensity to believe conspiracy theories turned a harmless two-day run-away by a teen into another sex-trafficking bundle of misinformation, harming many folks along the way. The article is too long to describe all of the mayhem caused, not least that the police and social services personnel were reassigned from real jobs to work on this fake one.

A less deadly but important example is from the Dec 13, 2021 article in the New York Times,

Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation

At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.

Those claims were grounded in news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families whom the Trump administration had separated, some of whom have not been reunited. But the payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to that small fraction of migrants.

SPINNING PLATES

This is a good example of fibbing by omission. What the Inbox article omitted was an explanation of why it might actually be a cheaper and a more efficient way to control the current flood of immigrants into this country. It could cost more money for continuing to enforce the illegal immigrant problem we already are confronted with. But, then again we are dealing with politicians, and as the old saying goes, The best way to tell if a politician is lying is that his lips are moving.

The Mathematician and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (18611947) states in his book The Aims of Education a viewpoint that I have always thought as a given: Civilization advances in direct proportion to the number of operations humanity can perform without thinking about them. And I still believe it applies to many things today such as elevators, air conditioners, and automobiles, but it seems to me that this viewpoint is not entirely true about the internet. Along with its many conveniences come unforeseen problems that can only be solved by thinking about them.

Dr. Stewart A. Denenberg is an emeritus professor of computer science at Plattsburgh State, retiring recently after 30 years there. Before that, he worked as a technical writer, programmer and consultant to the U.S. Navy and private Industry. Send comments and suggestions to his blog at http://www.tec-soc.blogspot.com, where there is additional text and links. He can also be reached at denenbsa@gmail.com.

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Technology and Society: The internet and its discontents | Opinion | pressrepublican.com - Plattsburgh Press Republican