Tag: Technology

Best Buy Center Gives Wisconsin Teens Access to Technology

Loknath Das

 Best Buy’s Teen Tech Center at Minneapolis Central Library is serving underprivileged youth by providing them with hands-on access to technology. About 300 teens are active members in the free program, Minnesota Public Radio reported . The program provides teens with computer software and equipment that they can use to learn new skills and make things. Available technology includes virtual reality headsets, a green screen and a soundproofing recording studio. Kiara Raquel launched her natural skin care line last year. The 18-year-old uses the center’s resources to help grow her business, Venus…

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How Technology Is Leading Us Into the Imagination Age

Loknath Das

In many ways, the future is unpredictable. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Combined with technological automation and the disappearance of traditional jobs, this leaves us with a critical question: how can we survive such a world? The answer may be imagination. Initially coined by Rita J. King, the imagination age is a theoretical period beyond the information age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value….

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How to grow cannabis? With modern science and technology

Loknath Das

Cannabis plant strains in jars in MediJean’s Health Canada-licensed tissue culture development lab are kept for research as manager Abdul Ahad works in the Richmond, B.C., facility, in this 2014 file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck) In Canada and around the world, legal cannabis producers face many challenges: Varying government regulations, high security requirements and a lack of reliable information on how to grow their crops. Growing cannabis has been illegal for so many years that scientific research on how to best produce this crop is limited. Much of the knowledge on how…

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Can paperless finance technology increase household income in India?

Loknath Das

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) committee looking into household finance has several fascinating takeaways into what impedes Indian families from saving, insuring, and investing better. Headed by Tarun Ramadorai, professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College London, the committee report says households can significantly augment their annual income if they had access to formal financial institutions and products, and that technology has a key role to play in ensuring this access. A good money management plan can help augment a household’s income. The household finance report determines this augmentation…

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Are the Amish right about new technology?

Loknath Das

The basic stereotype about the Amish – drivers of horse-drawn buggies, wearers of huge beards – is that they’re stuck in the 18th century: if a technology wasn’t invented by then, you won’t find them using it today. (What goes clip clop, clip clop, bang bang, clip clop? An Amish drive-by shooting.) So it’s alarming to learn, as the New York Times reported recently, that smartphones, PCs and computer-controlled machinery are increasingly part of the community’s daily life. There are Amish bakeries that take credit cards. So much for your fantasy –…

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Why We Need to Discuss the Downsides of New Technology

Loknath Das

Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller’s new book OTHERWORLD is on sale now where books are sold. In 2003, a guy at Harvard built a website so his fellow students could ogle each other. By 2012, one billion people were using that site to stay in touch with their friends. In 2016, the Russian government turned to Facebook to influence the United States presidential election. No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, saw that one coming. Eighty years ago, beetles were consuming Australia’s crops, so the government imported cane toads from South America, hoping they would get rid…

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A Tiny Technology Stock Ready To Explode On The Upside

Loknath Das

Investors focusing too much attention on large technology stocks like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have perhaps missed a tiny technology company ready to explode on the upside, Universal Display, as Qualcomm’s stock did back in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Universal Display is up 582% over the last five years. And that may be just the beginning. Universal Display and Qualcomm are in different segments of the technology industry. Universal is a developer and manufacturer of organic light-emitting diode technologies and materials. It also provides services to the display and lighting industries….

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New cars increasingly crammed with distracting technology

Loknath Das

The infotainment technology that automakers are cramming into the dashboard of new vehicles is making drivers take their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel for dangerously long periods of time, an AAA study says. The study released Thursday is the latest by University of Utah professor David Strayer, who has been examining the impact of infotainment systems on safety for AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety since 2013. Past studies also identified problems, but Strayer said the “explosion of technology” has made things worse. Automakers now include more…

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Technology could make us immortal. But there will be consequences.

Loknath Das

mmortality has gone secular. Unhooked from the realm of gods and angels, it’s now the subject of serious investment — both intellectual and financial — by philosophers, scientists, and the Silicon Valley set. Several hundred people have already chosen to be “cryopreserved” in preference to simply dying, as they wait for science to catch up and give them a second shot at life. But if we treat death as a problem, what are the ethical implications of the highly speculative “solutions” being mooted? Of course, we don’t currently have the means…

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Defense Secretary Mattis predicts bigger defense role for private technology firms

Loknath Das

Defense Secretary James Mattis says he sees a growing role for the technology industry in defending the United States. The comments suggest a potential untapped market for Amazon and Google, whose hometowns Mattis visited this week on a West Coast swing, and other large companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Like the leaders of these tech companies, Mattis is focused on acquiring more expertise in artificial intelligence. The difference is his goal: getting it into the U.S. military faster, to make it a “more lethal and more effective” fighting force. “Many of the advances [in AI] are…

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