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Keywords: Tech

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Inside Catalonia's cypherpunk referendum

    • Marta Poblet Balcell
    • 06 October 2017
    3 Comments

    Activism advocating widespread use of encryption and privacy-enhancing technologies to bring political change in Catalonia is perhaps a sign of emerging trends on the internet: the horizontal, decentralised internet that Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, inventors of its core technologies, initially envisioned and are currently demanding.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Facial recognition tech perpetuates injustice

    • Fatima Measham
    • 06 October 2017
    12 Comments

    Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has pushed state premiers to hand over their drivers' licence database in order to enhance facial recognition systems, particularly at airports. COAG has agreed, with the ACT insisting that only perfect matches be used for non-counterterrorism purposes. It is hard to find this reassuring.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Electric carmaggedon

    • Greg Foyster
    • 14 September 2017
    6 Comments

    There are lots of reasons why China wants to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles. It desperately needs to curb air pollution, which the World Health Organization estimates kills more than a million of its citizens each year. It also wants to reduce dependence on imported oil, and help meet climate change targets. Most crucial, however, is China's intention to dominate the global market for electric vehicles and the technology that powers them, lithium-ion batteries.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The lessons learned from charitable work

    • Mariana James-Techera
    • 19 August 2017
    4 Comments

    We students go to school to learn. But one of the best learning experiences for me has happened outside school: helping the less fortunate by serving them food at the Sacred Heart Mission and collecting food necessities for the charity.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The renewables debate is won, but we may still lose the war

    • Greg Foyster
    • 17 August 2017
    9 Comments

    In the last few years, vested interests have changed their strategy for opposing action on climate change. Where they once focused on denying the problem, they’re now putting their efforts into sabotaging the solutions. Instead of funding fake experts to say the ‘science isn’t settled’, fossil fuel companies and their political backers have been running a smear campaign against renewable energy technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A terrifying new arms race

    • Todor Shindarov
    • 07 August 2017
    4 Comments

    Today’s highly technological era amazes us with possibilities for human growth and innovation, but in our amazement we often forget to tackle various pitfalls. Arguably, the biggest risk is the emerging military technology, about which there are many unanswered questions. We are faced with many uncertainties: security risks due to loss of competitiveness, potential control over advanced weapons by terrorists and, most importantly, reduced comprehension by the wider society—let alone any participation in the decision making process, as the frenzied pace of technological development increases.

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  • PODCAST

    ChatterSquare: Kate Galloway on lawyers in a tech-driven world

    • Podcast
    • 01 August 2017

    What are the implications for the legal profession as blockchain technologies, smart contracts and apps shift our approach to matters of law? Where do lawyers fit into algorithm-driven decisions and digital access to information? Kate Galloway discusses how tech is disrupting the way we think about lawyering, and the ethical problems it poses. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Electricity market for dummies (i.e. politicians)

    • Greg Foyster
    • 20 July 2017
    11 Comments

    After months of very silly debate about clean energy, one thing is abundantly clear: the electricity market is evolving much faster than most politicians and commentators can understand it. The story underneath all the distraction is that wind and solar have already changed the game. As that big Finkel report no one read made clear, 'there is no going back from the massive industrial, technological and economic changes facing our electricity system'.

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  • PODCAST

    ChatterSquare: How science intersects with politics, religion and the humanities

    • Podcast
    • 27 June 2017
    3 Comments

    Is science political? Does it actually have something in common with religion? And how do the humanities enhance scientific endeavour? We tackle these questions with @realscientists co-founder, science communicator and nanotech researcher Upulie Divisekera.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Health gap widens as wage growth falls

    • Amy Coopes
    • 26 June 2017
    7 Comments

    Universal health care is an ostensibly bipartisan prerogative, but what it actually means and how it's achieved is a somewhat moveable feast. Spending, we are told, is unsustainable as the population ages and we move toward ever-more personalised and technologically-advanced treatment paradigms. The objective of this rhetoric is to rationalise the privatisation of our health system by stealth. The latest wages figures are something of an inconvenient truth in this 'unsustainable spending' fiction.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Digital solutions to political reform

    • Kate Galloway
    • 13 April 2017
    8 Comments

    There are reasons to be concerned about the capacity of a government to govern in the current brief election cycle, and in dealing with what some describe as a 'hostile senate'. But the networked world we inhabit also calls into question the way in which politicians might be accountable to the public. Rather than focusing on changes to a system of governance derived from a different era, we should be asking what are the implications of emergent technologies on the way in which we are governed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pope Francis and the age of automation

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 20 January 2017
    7 Comments

    Many have called for the automated Centrelink debt collection system to be scrapped, but the government is standing by it. One of the reasons for this may be that the system is doing just what it's designed to do - trying to force people away from welfare reliance by making it more onerous. Pope Francis argues that far from a 'neutral' tool, technology creates a framework which conditions people and limits their possible options along lines dictated by the most economically and politically powerful.

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