Category Archives: Technology

Dutch giant Royal Philips announced plan Thursday to build a health technology center in Tennessee that officials expect will create more than 800 jobs in the Nashville area over the next two years.

"We take great pride in the health care strength here in Middle Tennessee, and this company will only add to that," Gov. Bill Haslam said. "I can't think of a better company than Philips to complement and support Nashville's regional health care community."

Haslam said he had hosted Philips executives at the governor's mansion and also visited officials in Amsterdam on a recent trade mission to Europe and praised the company's "depth and talent and commitment."

Philips plans to consolidate various operations in Tennessee, including customer service, finance, human resources and marketing.

Craig Gruchacz, the head of global business services in North America at Philips, praised state officials for fostering a "health care technology ecosystem" in Tennessee.

"We are eager to share our ideas and our best practices and also learning from other like-minded organizations," he said.

Gruchacz said the company is scouting sites in the Nashville area and hopes to decide on a location in the coming months.

Founded in 1891, the company started by making carbon filament lamps in a factory in the Netherlands. It became a world leader in the manufacture of light bulbs before branching out into the consumer and medical electronics markets, making everything from X-ray equipment to electric shavers and televisions.

Philips last year spun off its lighting division so it could focus on its future as a health technology provider.

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Philips to build health technology center in Tennessee - ABC News

By Melinda Gates By Melinda Gates August 24 at 7:00 AM

When my youngest child was born in 2002, the flip phone was still the coolest piece of tech you could get. Now Im told that all three of my children are part of what demographers are calling iGen.

I spent my career at Microsoft trying to imagine what technology could do, and still I wasnt prepared for smartphones and social media. Like many parents with children my kids age, I didnt understand how they would transform the way my kids grew up and the way I wanted to parent. Im still trying to catch up.

The pace of change is what amazes me the most. The challenges my younger daughter will be facing when she starts high school in the fall are light-years away from what my elder daughter, whos now in college, experienced in 2010. My younger daughters friends live a lot of their lives through filters on Instagram and Snapchat, two apps that didnt even exist when my elder daughter was dipping a toe in social media.

[Teens say theyre addicted to technology. Heres how parents can help.]

But I am optimistic about what smartphones and social media can do for people. I am thrilled to see kids learning on smartphones, doctors using apps to diagnose diseases and marginalized groups such as gay and lesbian students finding support they never had before through social networks.

Still, as a mother who wants to make sure her children are safe and happy, I worry. And I think back to how I might have done things differently. Parents should decide for themselves what works for their family, but I probably would have waited longer before putting a computer in my childrens pockets. Phones and apps arent good or bad by themselves, but for adolescents who dont yet have the emotional tools to navigate lifes complications and confusions, they can exacerbate the difficulties of growing up: learning how to be kind, coping with feelings of exclusion, taking advantage of freedom while exercising self-control. Its more important than ever to teach empathy from the very beginning, because our kids are going to need it.

For other parents trying to decide how to do their job in a way that feels right despite the bewildering array of changes brought on by smartphones and social media, I want to share some of the resources that have helped me and my friends. Hopefully, these tips can spark conversation and help parents become resources for each other.

A new French labour law gives employees the 'right to switch off' from email, smartphones and other electronic leashes to preserve off-hours and holiday time. (Reuters)

The Internet is a wonderful thing. It gives kids the freedom to move around in a big world, to experiment, to connect with others. As a parent, though, I know that I am responsible for making sure that my kids are ready for all that freedom and that they know how to keep themselves safe. Heres to staying on top of all the changes social media is bringing to our kids lives, so that we can continue to guide and support them in this fast-changing world.

Melinda Gates is a businesswoman and philanthropist. She is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You can find her on Facebook @Melinda Gates, Twitter @melindagates and Instagram @melindafrenchgates.

FollowOn Parenting on Facebookfor more essays, news and updates. You cansign up herefor our weekly newsletter. We are on Twitter@OnParenting.

More reading:

10 ways to foster kindness and empathy in kids

Why you cant teach a 6-year-old to be grateful for a great life

Were the first generation of parents in the age of iEverything

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Melinda Gates: I spent my career in technology. I wasn't prepared for ... - Washington Post

By Kristian Hoelscher, Hvard Nygrd and Jason Miklian By Kristian Hoelscher, Hvard Nygrd and Jason Miklian August 24 at 6:00 AM

In a recent episode of the caustic sitcom Silicon Valley,the hard-luck start-up protagonists attend a big technology convention. They stumble across an app called PeaceFare, a game that lets players build peace on their phones by giving virtual money to virtual homeless people or virtual corn to virtual starving villagers. Launched by a rich entrepreneur to help humanity thrive, the lone skeptic Richard snidely asks whethersuch an app should instead be trying to help actual people.

This gag skewers two truisms that tech innovations for peace and conflict resolution dont need to have true social impact to succeed, and most people will only help change the world if it comes without real sacrifice. Thus, it speaks to ongoing controversies. Technology-based approaches to conflict resolution and humanitarian development are admired by policymakers for their promise of bottom-up, quick-fix solutions. Traditional peacebuilding policy involving careful analysis over years or decades is being upended as these disruptive solutions gain traction. Peace and development researchers who want to influence policy debates cant just release findings but have to establish mechanisms for implementation.

Indicators can help shape policy debate

One way to do this is more traditional and doesnt necessarily involve new technologies: building and promotingstatistical indicators. For example, the United Nations ambitious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,made upof 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sets out targets and benchmarks, but doesnt say how to measure them. Formulating the indicators that will measure progress was delegated to a specially appointed Inter-Agency and Expert Group (IAEG), consisting mainly of representatives from National Statistical Offices (NSOs).

Generating this data is hard for governments, since it often involves politically controversial questions. SDG 16 calls for achieving peaceful, just, and inclusive societies measuring this involves answering complicated and controversial questions about governance. SDG indicator 16.1.2 seeks to measure conflict-related deaths in countries by sex, age and cause of death but the United Nations has no formal criteria for defining war, nor resources for collecting such data.

These measurements are tricky because there are profound political disagreements over, for instance, how to classify which kinds of organized violence constitute wars and which do not. There are two reasons for this. If you cant classify it, you cant measure and track it. NSOs are, in any event, more used to estimating administrative statistics such as demographics or economic data than information on conflicts.

In principle, outside institutions such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and the Correlates of War project have the right kind of data, but when PRIOand the UNDP hosted a large expert meeting that brought together IAEG members and experts to discuss how to measure conflict, the IAEG resisted the very idea that conflict could be measured. In one way, this doesnt make much sense, becausemost of our statistical measures of GDP and other economic facts are imperfect estimates of underlying phenomena, too. Yet there are also fundamental differences in how conflict researchers, NSOs and nongovernmental organizations collect data, and tricky questions. Should we trust the Bashar al-Assad regimes data on the number of people killed in Syrias conflict? Or that conflict-affected areas such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan can reliably report conflict data?

After pleading their case for several days, scholars finally convinced the IAEG that it was indeed possible to measure war and conflict. The meeting established a shared understanding between academics and NSOs about best practices in measuring armed conflict, and the IAEG probably willaccept the UCDP framework moving forward. Althoughit is still unclear what role the data will play, most conflict scholars consider the fact that it got on the agenda at all to be a major success.

Another example of indicator building is the coalition of 20 NGO and academic organizations to create the SDG 16 Data Initiative. This initiative, which just launched its first global report during the July U.N. High-Level Political Forum, tracks SDG 16s 12 targets to measure not just conflict but a host of governance and liberties issues in a transparent, rigorous and systematic manner, in turn building better peace policy.

Technology can help build peace

Another way is through engaging more directly with technology. Silicon Valley-type questions such as Whats the Uber for peace?' or Howcan we disrupt conflict with an app? make most peace scholars and practitioners cringe. However, technology start-ups and socially minded firms are leaping into peacebuilding, with the backing of governments and deep-pocketed philanthropic foundations.

There is a lot to be excited about. Compared with traditional ways of shaping peacebuilding policy, tech approaches are more bottom-up, designed to engage with citizens directly as opposed to working through cumbersome bureaucracies or recalcitrant politicians. Solutions such as electronic tracing apps for conflict minerals or crowdsourcing victims experiences to build a knowledge base for truth and reconciliation committees can better help those who need it most.

Yet tech start-ups often launch peacebuilding initiatives without deeply engaging with existing peacebuilding knowledge or worse, dont think that such knowledge is needed. This can mean that they are useless to local communities, or even worse can be repurposed by governments to target the very people that their technology was supposed to help, as when Mexicos government allegedly used anti-terrorism surveillance tools to instead target human rights investigators.

Better collaboration between academics and innovators is possible our recent article outlines five thematic areas where joint efforts between academics and innovators can generate significant value: forecasting political economies of conflict; business and virtual peacebuilding; climate and environmentalism; migration and identity; and urbanization.

IGOs and multilateral donors have all expressed interest in platforms that look to scale up cooperation beyond the local level. The merging of data, innovation, peace scholarship and conflict resolution policy could add solidity to social innovation, help understand its upstream and downstream consequences, and incorporate insights from scholars, entrepreneurs and policymakers in the Global South. This would change the boundaries of peace research, reframe research priorities by merging scholarly, commercial and social value, and show that innovation actors and scholars can act together as peacebuilders.

Peace sciences goal is to understand how we can better contribute to peacebuilding. This implies that we as scholars must recognize how these new forms of communication and knowledge dissemination are influencing the policy world, and be prepared to react and act accordingly.

Kristian Hoelscher, Hvard Nygrd and Jason Miklian are Senior Researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Elements of this post are adapted from the recent article A New Research Approach for Peace Innovation.

This article is one in a series supported by theMacArthurFoundation Research Network on Opening Governancethat seeks towork collaboratively to increase our understanding of how to design more effective and legitimate democratic institutions using new technologies and methods. Neither theMacArthurFoundation nor the Network is responsible for the articles specific content. Other posts in the series can be foundhere

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Information technology can help build peace. This is how. - Washington Post

What is happening today with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is how I imagine the dot-com gold rush in the 90s felt.

Since I was too young to experience those years (I was 5 years old), I am paying extra close attention to what is happening today. And for those that don't realize it yet, Bitcoin and Ethereum are quickly changing the world. Age-old industries are being disrupted, the first (and potentially most foundational industry of all) being money.

Anyone who thinks Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just a fad falls into the same category of people who thought "that Internet thing" was just a fad back in the 90s. That's what makes these innovations so interesting is that they seem to be eliciting all the same reactions, meanwhile showing all the same signs of future success. Remember when we thought the concept of sending each other pictures over the Internet was "crazy" and would "never happen?" I swear, I have a family video from the early 90s of my uncle showing my dad his brand new laptop, and making a joke that one day they would press a button and the digital photo would just appear on the other person's laptop. They both started laughing--as if that would never happen.

And then it happened just a few years later.

That's what's happening today with blockchain technology. It's so dense and do difficult to explain (similar to the concept of the Internet back in the 90s) that it has yet to really become a mainstream topic of consideration. But to those paying close attention, blockchain has all the potential in the world to disrupt some very old, very big industries: banking, big pharma, insurance, voting, and entertainment, to name a few.

Here's what interests me about blockchain technology and the entertainment industry:

How many times have we heard the infamous case study of a band being signed to a major label, only to sue them (and usually their manager) a few years later after realizing they'd been skimped on millions of dollars in royalties?

That has been happening since the days of Elvis.

What's interesting about blockchain technology is that, by using what are called "smart contracts," those contracts are executed on automatically through the blockchain. So, if a band signs to a label and their contract states that they receive 70% of every dollar made, with the label receiving 30%, those distributions happen every time a dollar enters the door--assuming all of this is being done on the blockchain. No more relying on a person to count the dollars. No more trusting other people to deliver on the contract. It all happens on the blockchain, and is validated through math.

The whole idea behind blockchain technology is trust. Transparency. Everything is out in the open, and anything that gets processed through the blockchain can be seen and validated by anyone on the blockchain.

Take that concept, and you can see why this is such threatening technology to such big industries. A lot happens behind closed doors, so to put it all out into the open is groundbreaking, to say the least.

Another way that blockchain technology is impacting the music industry is with royalty distributions on digital platforms.

As it stands, artists are victims of the system. If they want access to the massive user bases on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., then they have to be OK with getting paid pennies on the dollar for people to listen to their music. What an artist makes on these streaming platforms is nothing compared to what artists in the 90s made on CD sales.

One startup that is looking to tackle this issue with blockchain technology is called OPUS, a streaming platform for artists to upload their music and receive 98% of the revenue. For those that don't know, 98% is unheard of, and is leagues above what an artist would make selling their music on Apple Music, for example.

The idea behind OPUS is to solve for three massive issues in the music business: revenue share, censorship, and transparency. This is the beauty of using blockchain technology, because all three of those can be delivered on. The revenue share issue is solved by giving artists 98% of all royalties, the censorship issue because the power remains in the artists hands, and the transparency issue because labels can no longer hide money from the artists. And because it is built on the blockchain, none of these parameters can be changed down the road--whereas other services may decide one day to cut the percentage given to artists.

OPUS is currently raising funds through an ICO to continue working toward this vision of artist empowerment.

When you look at the landscape of digital music, I really do believe decentralizing the industry is the next logical step. Even SoundCloud, one of the most popular streaming platforms on the Internet, has reported that they are quickly running out of cash and exploring potential acquisition deals (not so much out of choice, but by necessity) because artists have no way to monetize their audiences. But with something like OPUS, artists still have to do the heavy lifting of marketing their own music, except they're more handsomely rewarded for their efforts.

Blockchain technology will fundamentally change the way business is done in industries all over the world. I would encourage you to start paying attention now.

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Blockchain Technology Is Set to Disrupt Every Industry--and Music Is Next - Inc.com

CORBIN KOTTMANN

The Missouri S&T University Police Department is continuing to support the students and staff of the university through their use of new surveillance technology. Doug Roberts, Chief of Police for the Missouri S&T Police Department said the new cameras located around campus are helping them not only by acting as a deterrent for crimes, but by additionally serving as an information source for officers.

This year weve installed several different new security cameras around campus Chief Roberts said, adding that the cameras either prevent crimes from happening or assist us when were investigating them.

The department currently has over 40 cameras installed in key points around the campus, which send a constant feed to the departments office. The footage from these cameras can be accessed from the Chiefs office as well as the main control room, with a large monitor mounted to show the entire campus.

Chief Roberts showed how he can access the cameras from his cell phone, allowing him to monitor the campus while in meetings or when he is occupied with other duties. The technology effectively allows him and other officers to be on patrol at all times. Chief Roberts said this technology goes hand in hand with the universitys new Rave Guardian app in helping students become more in tune with the campus police department.

Weve given students a way to interact with our department by text and by phone, he said. But now were watching them too. So if theyre engaged with us and theres a problem on campus, they can call us, we can zoom in on an image and see whats going on in that area. We can give the officers that are responding real world info and give them directions to be safe.

Chief Roberts said the cameras have already proven their worth in solving bicycle thefts on campus.

Theres bikes that get stolen because its a crime of opportunity he said, giving the example of a bike they recovered on Monday, August 21. Once the department received a report of a stolen bike, Chief Roberts said they were able to pull the footage and see the suspect along with the bike, which was registered as a student bike with he university.

We ended up identifying the suspect because of our surveillance cameras and captured him and the bike, Chief Roberts said. We saw two people going towards Thomas Jefferson Hall, one riding a bike and one not, and then two people, one pushing a bike and one riding a bike coming back. We were able to identify that bike as a student bike.

Chief Roberts said they are looking to install more cameras by the end of the school year to further enhance their ability to monitor the campus, and even provide ways to communicate with students from a distance in the next phase of this new installation.

Pretty soon were going to be putting speakers in the tunnels so we can communicate with peopleif somebodys hurt or if we something suspicious, we can tell them law enforcement is on their way.

The cameras currently in place record for about 386 days, according to Chief Roberts. Placing more cameras in the future will decrease the available memory, but Chief Roberts said the standard for memory is typically around 30 days, so they exceeding that by a significant amount. This footage is also shared with the City of Rolla Police Department as well.

Its the best technology out there right now, Chief Roberts said. Weve done a lot of research. The cameras also create notifications in the office for movement at night, and when someone is loitering in an area, bringing suspicious activity to officers attention.

This is how were going to prevent those bike thefts, this is how were going to investigate thefts that are reported, Chief Roberts said. This has already proven its value. He added they are not relying on yesterdays technology, and are striving to use state of the art equipment to improve campus living.

Chief Roberts said they are looking at bids to implement the next phase of the installation, and will have a plan for further implementation soon.

Originally posted here:

Campus police using technology to solve and prevent crimes - The Rolla Daily News

The global gaming market has been growing by double-digits in recent years, hitting $91 billion in revenues last year. SuperData Research called it the biggest year in the digital games market and playable media world ever.

While the biggest growth has come from segments like mobile gaming, new technologies have the potential to radically upend the gaming market, providing newfound growth opportunities. One such technology, blockchains, arguably has the biggest long-term potential.

Here are three ways blockchain technology will permanently change the future of gaming.

1. Blockchains will disrupt traditional gaming companies

Blockchains are known for their ability to bring decentralization to massive industries, pushing the power from centralized organizations to the consumers themselves. Blockchains will do the same thing for gaming.

To move from gaming universes where corporations own the content (e.g. Activision/Blizzard, CCP Games, and Perfect World) to platforms that are owned by the users themselves would have huge ramifications.

For example, gamers currently have gatekeepers (centralized organizations) dictating prices, levying taxes, censoring users, controlling content, and monetizing their data. With decentralized platforms, consumers can socialize and transact without intermediaries. This will provide gamers with more control and flexibility when it comes to their gaming experience.

2. Blockchains will enable cross-platform support

As long as gaming content is created on a centralized platform (ie. owned by a single organization), cross-platform support will suffer. For example, Facebook could easily prevent gaming content developed for its Spaces VR world from working on any platform other than Oculus, which it also owns.

By reducing a consumers or developers ability to use multiple platforms, gaming companies have limited the growth of in-world communities. Decentralized platforms, powered by blockchain technologies, will give gamers and developers what they really crave: full control. Only then will users experience the best gaming has to offer.

Chris Vollmer, a strategist in PwCs global entertainment and media business, told VentureBeat last year: If I was a game publisher, I would think more about social community and peer-to-peer connections and a network for a specific property and create more connectivity.While Vollmer was talking about gaming in general, blockchain-enabled experiences could empower the creativity he thinks is necessary.

3. Blockchains will give the power back to gamers

Gaming experiences controlled by a centralized entity (often a corporation) pose several issues:

Done right, blockchain-powered gaming can remove these limits, letting gamers take more control over their experiences. For example, FirstBlood lets e-sports players challenge the field and win rewards using smart contracts and oracles in the blockchain. The game world my team has built, Decentraland, is a blockchain-based VR platform owned by its users, not a single corporation. And Blockchaingais developing games wheredigital items are freely tradable on a public blockchain, outside of the game.

Like any other technology revolution, blockchain will take time to mature. It is still nascent, especially when applied to gaming. But when the disruption does happen, the impacts will be pervasive, shifting ownership, control, and user experiences. It all makes the gaming industry is as exciting as ever.

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3 ways blockchain technology will change how we game - VentureBeat

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.

Its still fresh in my mind, the scene of female genital mutilation, said Purity Achieng, a 17-year-old from Kenya.

Achieng was speaking on stage in the finals of the Technovation Challenge World Pitch Summit, a competition that invites girls from around the world to come up with tech solutions to local community problems. Since it began in 2009, 15,000 girls from more than 100 countries have participated in the competition.

Achieng and her team of four other Kenyan teen girls call themselves The Restorers. They are taking on Female Genital Mutilation or FGM. They have created an app, called i-Cut, which connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue agents and offers support for those who have already been cut. It also provides information for anyone seeking to learn more about the practice.

The pain of having your clitoris cut just because someone wants to have you go through a rite of passage, said Achieng, during her pitch at the competition. Its painful and no one wants to listen to you. You cry and there you are, almost dying but nobody is caring about that.

At least 200 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation or FGM in 30 countries, reports UNICEF.And 44 million are girls 14 and younger. The practice involves cutting out all or part of a womans clitoris, which is said to eliminate almost completely a womans sexual pleasure, in hopes of ensuring her virginity and keeping her faithful in marriage.

The Kenyan girls in this competition have not experienced FGM firsthand, as their tribe does not practice it, but they have friends who have. One of Achiengs best friends was forced to drop out of school and into an early marriage at 15 after FGM, which greatly affected Achieng.

I think for teenagers to be able to identify problems around them and provide a solution, that is really, really inspiring, said Dorcas Owinoh, the teams mentor, who works as a community manager at LakeHub, a technology innovation hub in Kisumu, Kenya. It was Owinoh who brought the idea of the Technovation Challenge to the team.

Achieng said it was her friend dropping out of school after FGM that inspired the team to create the app.

Other teams in the international event came from Armenia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Cambodia, the U.S. and other countries. The Restorers were the only team who qualified from the African continent.

Its always better when the people who face the problems, come up with their own solutions because theyre the most organic, said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO or Iridescent, the nonprofit behind Technovation.

Though the i-Cut app has the potential to save lives, it has not been embraced by all Kenyans.

One village elder drove six hours to their school to protest the app because, according to him, thats an African culture and the girls are being, according to him, Westernized, Owinoh said.

The man had learned of the app after local media reported of the girls acceptance into Technovation. Owinoh said school leaders and teachers remained calm, spoke with him, and then asked him to leave.

Technovation comes at a time when women in tech are facing blowback, not just in Kenya, but even at the Google headquarters where the competition was held.A Google employee was recently fired after writing a memo positing that women are biologically inferior to men in regards to working in technology.

I know the journey wont always be easy but to the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that theres a place for you in this industry, theres a place for you at Googledont let anyone tell you otherwise, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the girls.

The Restorers did not win the Technovation Challenge, but they will continue their fight against FGM and hope to get i-Cut into the Google Play Store soon.

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Kenyan Girls Use Technology to Combat Genital Cutting - Voice of America

For Silicon Valley companies that must balance the right to free speech with the risk of empowering and broadcasting abhorrent beliefs, the violence in Charlottesville has been a clarifying moment.

In a cascade of notes to employees and public statements, technology executives rushed to condemn the hatred and bigotry that underlay an attack on protesters who were rallying against a white supremacist march in Virginia. Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically denounced Donald Trump for asserting a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis and told his employees the company would match donations to anti-discrimination groups to which he was personally directing $2 million.

There were more concrete developments than C-suite condemnations. One after another, companies moved to cut off services to customers linked to the bloodshed and to the constellation of beliefs surrounding it - or, at the minimum, to reiterate that they could.

Domain name service provider GoDaddy said it would no longer work with the neo-Nazi forum Daily Stormer, as did Google and Cloudflare, whose CEO called the site reprehensible.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed in a post that the company would be vigilant in removing posts that promote hate crimes or acts of terrorism. PayPal released a statement saying it would not provide services to groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis that "promote hate, violence or racial intolerance",and Apple nixed Apple Pay support for websites that sell white supremacist apparel. Uber said in a statement that it opposed discrimination of any kind and retained the right to ban users from the app.

Even the dating app OKCupid piled on, saying in a tweet that after discovering a white supremacist using the app, Within ten minutes we banned him for life.

In explaining those moves, companies said they were simply hewing to preexisting policies that govern how their services are used and prohibit violent threats.

This is not a shift or new policy, just a reiteration of our existing commitment to remaining vigilant against the advancement of hate, intolerance and violence on our platforms, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in an email.

But the rush of tech firms announcing their right to refuse service to avatars of hate could signal a larger change underway, business experts predicted, with Silicon Valley now facing a heightened expectation of policing violent views.

Particularly in the Valley, theyre all about freedom and not being the arbiters of opinion, said Kellie McElhaneyof the Center for Responsible Business at UC Berkeley. But now that is changing and they are taking a stand.

Companies likely felt compelled to act stand in part because of pressure from customers and from employees, said MsMcElhaney, who recounted hearing from tech workers demanding their employers draw a line. But firms that have positioned themselves as altruistic drivers of innovation have also set a high bar.

Theres an evangelist streak to a lot of the companies that get attentionthe goal is to make the world a better place through better geo-location apps, for example, said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a fellow in the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara Universitys Leavey School of Business. If youre putting that in a front and center in your corporate mission and vision and the communications you have internally and externally, and youre confronted with a value-based challenge - you said youre a company that wants to make the world a better place, and now you have to do it.

Even if there is really only a public statement with no underlying action, that is important, MsPozner added. Im not so cynical to think this is all window-dressing.

Related video:The cast of Detroit discuss Charlottesville violence

Debate has raged for years over the responsibility that comes with running a global platform that allowsideas to spread and groups toorganise regardless of their aims. Some tech companies, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have faced criticism in the past for not being quick enough to ban users or scrub content that harasses others or incites bigotry.

What theyre doing now, I think, is laudable, but it doesnt come out of nowhere, said Joseph Holt, a professor of business ethics at the University ofNotre Dame. Companies have tried to resolve the tension between two competing ideals, Mr Holt said: were neutral, we just host the sites, we don't supply the content versus these other values around protecting users from violence and just general civility.

I think a lot of values are getting a little more weight now, Mr Holt said. It seems clear that some of what the companies are doing is a response to social pressure - but I don't think the social pressure is what makes them espouse a value. It just gives more weight to the other side of the equation. How deep and lasting a change that is I think remains to be seen.

Those competing priorities were evident in GoDaddys justification for booting Daily Stormer. While the company said it generally supports free speech, even in the case of sites offering tasteless, ignorant content, Daily Stormer crossed the line by violating a prohibition on promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in violence.

Where companies draw that line is now likely to come under more scrutiny. The risk, Mr Holt said, is that companies swing too far in one direction and begin censoring or blocking potential customers before theyve done anything objectionable, where companies preemptively removed a company, kicked them off the web, took away their domain name because given their ideas they might say something that incites violence.

That possibility was not lost on Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Even as he defended severing ties with Daily Stormer, saying in a CNBC interview that life was too short to deal with jerks like this, Mr Prince cautioned that tech firms wield significant power to shape what type of speech survives in the world.

What Im concerned about is that technology companies like Facebook, like Google, like Cloudflare, that control huge swaths of the Internet, could make a determination without any kind of legitimacy or political responsibility and literally wipe someone off the Internet, Mr Prince said.

Striking the right balance is going to be an ongoing process that requires examining cases one by one, said MsMcElhaney, who acknowledged the peril of tumbling down a slippery slope. But she said tech companies did not have the option to stay idle.

When youre running the largest most influential companies in the world and you can register large-scale change with one move, thats huge, she said. They represent so much power and visibility as a communication vehicle for these groups.

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Taking a stand on Charlottesville, technology companies seek balance with free speech - The Independent

Chris Hughes of Facebook: briefly publisher of New Republic magazine. Photograph: Jason Gardner/New Republic

Where might James Graham find another journalism drama to rival Ink, his triumphant Birth of the Bun saga this time maybe on Broadway? Easy. He could call Franklin Foer, whose emerging chronicle of his second, and last, stint as editor of the New Republic sums up the profound clash of attitudes to the news trade in wincingly human terms. A play for two characters.

The New Republic (founded 1914) is one of those great American magazines of liberal opinion that stagger perpetually between boom and bust. Five years ago, it was on the market again, bust fears back. Enter Chris Hughes, a 28-year-old from the Facebook engine room, Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, a young man high on ambition and altruism, his millions of dollars already banked.

When I first heard the New Republic was for sale, he says, I went to the New York Public Library and began to read. Issues of the magazine stretching back, writers like Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson and James Wood: the fascination to own all this was overwhelming.

So Foer, a decade older and wiser, becomes editor once more. He aims for the stars while Hughes tutors him in the use of Upworthy (for virality) and Chartbeat (for maximising clicks). Theres a data guru installed in the newsroom soon enough, charged with maximising reach. This is a new/old Republic, except that the old propensity for losing money remains constant and eventually the young master of the universe insists something, something big, must be done. To save the magazine, we need to change the magazine, he tells Foer. Engineers and marketers are going to begin playing a central role in the editorial process.

They would give its journalism the cool, innovative features that would help it stand out in the marketplace, a vexed Foer writes. Of course, this required money, and that money would come from the budget that funded long-form journalism. We were now a technology company.

This from Foers account of his second editorship in the Atlantic magazine and a forthcoming book is a contested assertion: Hughes says he never made that precise technology divide. But nor can he be happy about what swiftly happened afterwards: the forced exit of Foer, the resignation in protest of many of the staff, the sale of the poor old Republic yet again.

You can feel twinges of sympathy for the protagonists. Both had good intentions, but hugely different preconceptions. Yet three conclusions from Foer stand clear of such complexity.

One significant because he felt it early on, before the rest of the media world began to catch up is stark, and now commonplace.

Foers second conclusion is equally bleak.

And then theres the big picture.

In some ways, these criticisms are merely the culmination of rising apprehension over the years. Journalists have been used to promoting good tales for themselves and for inserting stories they consider serious into the mix. Chartbeat, parse.ly and the rest seem poised to take that choice out of their hands. Upworthy tests dozens of headline pitches for them. Reporters want their copy to be read, to be sure. But they dont like to think of themselves as robots especially when, as we see, the clicks fail to deliver advertising riches.

And beyond that, peering into the mists from atop Trump Tower, theres a fundamental change of focus. Of course the Donald revolutionises ratings: observe what he has done for MSNBC or the New York Times. Hes a malign saviour. Every fresh outrage last week the Nazis and the banishing of Bannon is click heaven. But where is there any sense of balance in this particular mix?

There are stories with viral appeal. Take a bow, Cecil. But some continuing stories over years, never mind minutes produce only indifference. Polling, for instance, rates Northern Irelands border as a Brexit problem far inferior to others in national opinion; just as the twists and turns of the Troubles failed to sell papers long ago. Yet how are we supposed to live in a country that closes its mind to issues that viscerally engage its citizens?

Theres a real conflict here, a choice of democracy good or bad. James Grahams Ink sees Hugh Cudlipps earnestly educational Mirror pitched in battle against Rupert Murdochs determinedly entertaining Sun. Now see the same battle, with a walk-on part for Virginia Woolf, waged in tomorrows world. Not as a struggle between good and evil, but one where Silicon Valley seeks, with benign incomprehension, to write the programs and push the vital buttons that take control of our information and imagination.

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Technology and the New Republic just never seemed to click - The Guardian

Before Arizona could be recognized as a leader in blockchain technology legislation there was one major challenge helping lawmakers get your head around exactly what the technology is.

It was very difficult, you know, trying to explain to people, said Arizona State Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler. You never want to vote for something that you dont fully understand and this is, to say the least, a tough thing to get your head around.

Weninger sponsored a bill that makes Arizona one of a handful of states to accept electronic signatures on contracts, a law that is made possible through the use of blockchain.

Blockchain is best known as the technology behind bitcoin, the system that lets people use digital currency in place of standard government-issued money. The technology was created in 2009 as a decentralized, replicated, peer-to-peer review network to serve as a public ledger for bitcoin but quickly found other uses in online data verification and the transfer of value.

Weninger called his bill a little stab at getting acceptance and understanding of the new and often misunderstood technology that backers say could ultimately lead to more-secure voting, money handling, identification and more.

Lawmakers have called the new technology bulletproof, saying that it adds a level of trust in the management of records and identity management, among other applications.

One such application is the electronic signature law passed by Arizona. Using blockchain, an encoded, or smart, contract allows the technology to act as a witness to an agreement, validating, overseeing and imposing terms of the contract with no need of a middleman or third-party organization.

In March, Gov. Doug Ducey signed Weningers bill, HB 2417, to recognize signatures and smart contracts secured though blockchain as valid forms of contracts.

Ducey said the smart-contract bill shows Arizona to be a state thats really leading the way in embracing and recognizing these new technologies, said Patrick Ptak, a spokesman for the governor.

Blockchain technology is new and emerging, Ptak said. It kind of started out as an application for Bitcoin but now industries across the spectrum are seeing new applications for it from finance to healthcare to law and its something that we think has a lot of potential. I think that were just barely tapping its potential uses and applications.

Blockchain works by recording transactions whether they be digital currencies, smart contracts or something like an electronic vote as blocks of data, with each updated added to the others chronologically hence a blockchain.

This encryption algorithm of blockchain has been called un-hackable due to the nature in which it distributes information to multiple parties creating a shared database. Because blockchain is decentralized, there is no one central computer that can be hacked. If one computer were to be hacked, every other computer running that database would cry foul.

What makes blockchain appealing is that it allows a standard for trust for online transactions, or a starting point for untrusted parties to carry out transactions without a normal intermediary such as a bank.

In Arizona, lawmakers are looking forward to numerous possibilities that a future with this technology could provide.

It (blockchain) adds a level of trust for a citizen to know that their data is being properly managed, but also having access to knowing who and for what purposes their data is being looked at, said Tommy Leander, a legislative assistant for Rep. David Schweikert, R- Fountain Hills.

Schweikert in February helped launch the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, saying it is critical for members of Congress to begin comprehending both their current applications and future use cases. Weninger also credits Schweikert with inspiring the smart contract bill.

Weninger, who said he shared YouTube videos of TED Talks with fellow lawmakers in an effort to help them understand blockchain, said that despite the confusion his colleagues were eager to be at the forefront of this technology.

Democrats and Republicans like being at the tip of the spear of new technologies and new ways of doing things, he said.

Weninger added that besides business applications, he hopes to see more government applications of blockchain in the future.

I think the technology will get better, I think the proof of concept will get better and here in Arizona well keep expanding, he said

As one of a half-dozen states to embrace blockchain legislation, Arizona hopes to see new companies come to the state, Ptak says.

Arizona, in general, has been a national leader in being the first to recognize and embrace these technologies and youre seeing the result in that a lot of tech companies are now coming to Arizona and coming to the Phoenix area, Ptak said.

Cronkite News reporter Joe Gilmore contributed to this report.

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Arizona edges to front of states eyeing blockchain technology - Arizona Daily Star