Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

Search Results

You searched for: -

There are 2667 results  for your search.  View and Refine Your Search Terms

  • Where surveillance cameras work but the justice system doesn't

    Mexico City's 11-year-old video surveillance system, one of the most advanced in the world, was a massive investment in public safety: about $660 million to date to cover the city with more than 30,000 cameras and other devices. Like so much else in Mexico's law enforcement apparatus, it has done little to control crime but instead has become a tool of corruption and official impunity. While the cameras have helped keep tourists and elites safer, the vast majority of crimes go unreported and only a tiny number of police investigations benefit from the surveillance system.

    Read More

  • Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

    Batteries that can be fully charged in five minutes have been created for the first time, allowing electric cars to recharge faster. The Israeli company StoreDot produced 1,000 of these new lithium-ion batteries, which can be recharged for 1,000 cycles while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity. It could be a few years before they are mass produced, but the CEO of the company says that this feat “demonstrates it is feasible and it’s commercially ready.”

    Read More

  • More Dayton residents have conflict during COVID-19. Mediation comes to the rescue.

    In Dayton, neighbor disputes and other conflicts ended up in mediation far more often in 2020, thanks to the Dayton Mediation Center's online services at a time when local court operations were limited by the pandemic. A 23% increase in cases can be seen as both bad news and good: more conflicts among people frustrated by social distancing, but more willingness to address conflicts constructively through dialogue mediated by trained volunteers. Dayton police, who are often called to intervene in neighborhood and domestic spats, will be trained to refer cases to the free mediation center in 2021.

    Read More

  • “What You Share Defines You”: Indonesia Has World's Biggest Fact-Checking Network

    CekFakta is a collaborative network that fights misinformation with around 6,000 fact-checkers from major Indonesian media organizations, citizens, and academics. The group holds training sessions to help journalists identify doctored images and misinformation, with the idea that participants will pass the skills on to their colleagues. CekFakta impacted 2019 presidential debates with large-scale, real-time, collaborative fact-checking that enabled a quick release of fact-checked information. The collaborative process is key to helping people find high-quality information amid so much online content.

    Read More

  • How British Scientists Found the More Infectious Coronavirus Variant

    In March when fewer than 100 coronavirus infections had been found in the U.K, researchers in Cambridge decided to begin sequencing coronavirus samples as part of an "unparalleled surveillance system for Covid" that could identify and track possible mutations or the virus. This effort – which involves labs sending leftover material from testing swabs to the researcher's genomics lab where they are stored and analyzed – has culminated in hundreds of thousands of genome sequences and "sounded an alarm for the world" about the new fast-spreading variant.

    Read More

  • How Open Source Experts Identified the US Capitol Rioters

    Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

    Read More

  • One, two, tree: how AI helped find millions of trees in the Sahara

    Tree mapping helps researchers understand deforestation and climate change, however the technologies used often miss trees that aren’t clustered. Researchers, in collaboration with NASA, used high-resolution satellite images, previously only available to commercial entities, to find a surprisingly large number of trees in the Sahara Desert. Using AI deep learning and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at the University of Illinois, they identified more than 1.8 billion trees, manually marking nearly 90,000 so the computer could “learn” which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

    Read More

  • Pandemic Boosts Effort to Improve Inmates' Welfare

    As part of the coronavirus lockdown in Zimbabwe, people were banned from visiting prisons, but a mobile app has allowed relatives to send supplies to those who are incarcerated via their cellphone. This newest initiative in the succession to reform the prison system uses mobile money to send supplemental goods from the prison’s tuck shop to relatives who are incarcerated.

    Read More

  • An Algorithm Is Helping a Community Detect Lead Pipes

    BlueConduit, an analytics startup, applies statistical models to identify neighborhoods and households that might have lead pipes. The models include dozens of factors, such as the age of the home and proximity of other homes where lead has been found, to help predict likely locations of lead pipes and create a ranking by likelihood that cities can use to prioritize which pipes to examine. In Flint, MI, about 70% of the homes identified using the models had lead pipes, compared to about 15% of homes where excavations did not use the model. The company is working with organizations in dozens of other cities.

    Read More

  • Farmers Can be Isolated and Unsure How to Seek Support. One State is Trying to Help.

    The state of Wisconsin has launched a pilot initiative that aims to help farmers who are dealing with job stressors access mental health services including "a 24-hour wellness hotline, tele-counseling sessions and vouchers for in-person visits with participating mental health providers." While some of the services have proved more successful than the others, as a whole, use of the counseling services has increased, especially as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

    Read More