Ring And Nest Helped Normalize American Surveillance And Turned Us Into A Nation Of Voyeurs
The allure of monitoring people silently from afar has also proved more tempting than many expected. Customers who bought the cameras in hopes of not becoming victims joke that instead they’ve become voyeurs.
How Wikipedia’s Volunteers Became The Web’s Best Weapon Against Misinformation
Twenty years after it sputtered onto the web, it’s now a de facto pillar in our fact-checking infrastructure. Its pages often top Google search and feed the knowledge panels that appear at the top of those results. Big Tech’s own efforts to stop misinformation also rely upon Wikipedia.
“Coyote”, Award-Winning Animation Short Film
A coyote loses his wife and children from an attack of wolfs. Anguished from human emotions he‘s trying to process the experience. Besides grief and delusion, evil takes up more and more space. Directed by Lorenz Wunderle.
Is This A Chinese City In Malaysia?
Forest City is being built in the Malaysian state of Johor in the southern part of the country. Here, the Johore Strait acts as a natural border between Malaysia and the independent city-state Singapore. It is one of the most ambitious urban development projects currently underway. An entire new city built from scratch.
Drought And Floods — The Climate Exodus
More people around the world are fleeing from climate change than from war. If human-induced climate change continues at the current rate, the World Bank warns that by 2050 there could be as many as 180 million climate refugees.
“Extrapolate”, A Mind-Bending Hand-Drawn Animation By Johan Rijpma
In this hand-drawn animation by Johan Rijpma a line is being extrapolated through a grid. When the line surpasses the boundaries of the grid, the process spreads to and reflects on its surroundings. Beyond each boundary, the extrapolation of movement is causing deformation in a systematic but speculative way.
The Internet’s Second Revolution
The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. You have a whole bunch of languages that don’t enjoy very good support in terms of web browsers or input. And you have a whole bunch of people who can’t actually read or write.
Life In North Korea
Are people in North Korea allowed to laugh, dance and marry? This documentary provides unique insights on everyday life in the East Asian country, which most people associate with dictatorship, military parades and nuclear missile testing.
How To Make An Attractive City
Cities are a big deal. We pretty much all have to live in them. We should try hard to get them right. So few cities are nice, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful; embarrassingly the more appealing ones tend to be old, which is weird because we’re mostly much better at making things now.
How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Architecture
Artificial Intelligence remains a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, with the potential to enhance the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of cities, or destroy the potential for humans to work, interact, and live a private life.
Thailand: Turning Straw Into Gold
Huge amounts of rice straw are left over after the harvest in Thailand. Farmers often burn it, which is terrible for the environment. A young entrepreneur has found a new use for the material. Turned into paper, it can replace plastic food packaging.
How Our Home Delivery Habit Reshaped The World
The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully.
The Economics Of Airline Class
The story of the development of airline classes really isn’t the story of how airlines developed more and more luxurious seats, it’s how they cut costs to allow more and more people to fly. It’s also a fascinating demonstration of economics.
AI Is Dreaming Up New Kinds Of Video Games
Game-making algorithms are almost as old as video games, but their use has typically been limited to generating terrain and other simple digital art. The next frontier is using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques to design entirely new kinds of games that have, to date, evaded the human imagination.
Gun Shop, America’s Love Affair With Guns
This film shows 2,328 firearms, out of the 393 million currently in the US. Arranged in a dizzying 24 frames per second progression, from handguns to semi-automatic rifles, “Gun Shop” encourages viewers to critically examine America’s love affair with guns.
How We Can Cool Our Cities
With intensive development in urban areas and the impacts of global warming becoming ever more apparent, numerous cities around the world are now taking steps to reduce their temperatures and develop a more sustainable urban environment. Here are 3 innovative ways to bring temperatures down.
Who To Sue When A Robot Loses Your Fortune
The first known case of humans going to court over investment losses triggered by autonomous machines will test the limits of liability. A Hong Kong tycoon is going after the salesman who persuaded him to entrust his fortune to the supercomputer whose trades cost him more than $20 million.
The Totally Isolated Tribe Of The Andaman
There are still people in this world who have no idea that civilization exists. On remote islands in the Bay of Bengal live mysterious tribes. Their origins are mysterious, but this film reveals how modern DNA analysis suggests that these ancient people have close links to Africa, from where they have been separated for 100,000 years.
Why Is Vermeer’s “Girl With The Pearl Earring” Considered A Masterpiece?
Is she turning towards you or away from you? No one can agree. She’s the subject of Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” a painting often referred to as the ‘Mona Lisa of the North.’ But what makes this painting so captivating?
The Start-Ups Building ‘Dark Kitchens’ For Uber Eats And Deliveroo
Venture capitalists have all aligned on the best solution: kitchens that only serve delivery customers, known as “cloud”, “ghost” or “dark” kitchens, that use a combination of advanced food preparation, underused real estate and algorithm-driven optimisation to lower overheads and increase output.