People, Planet & Technology #13
Ahoy folks 👋
phew... what a year-end sprint: between Christmas and New Year I was invited to talk about the sustainable web at the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club. It was my first congress and so my senses were completely overloaded ;-) All talks were recorded and can be watched for free. Some recommendations I have summarized in an article. You can see my talk incl. slides and ressources on noti.st.
For the first issue in 2020 I have chosen two, in my opinion, particularly important lead topics:
The Future of Cities
For hardly any other sector is the climate crisis associated with so much effort and complexity: They have to develop plans and visions today that will still be able to cope with completely different climatic and technological conditions 30 years from now. As always, there are cities that "simply do it" and are pioneers, such as Copenhagen. Such plans can have a lot of effects, they can not only have a negative impact on the environment, but also on our physical and mental health. And, of course, a lot of data is used and collected for this purpose. Johannes Klingbeil used a whole newsletter on this topic (text in German, but most linked articles are in English).
Protect childrens privacy
At the end of last year I learned a new word: Sharenting. This term refers to the violation of children's privacy by their parents. Who hasn't heard of it? Parents who publish funny, cute and above all very private photos of their children on social networks. Whether this child in 10 years, these pictures still find funny and cute? What effects this can have on children and what risks the careless handling of private data of children can have, you can read here and here. Please read and think about it before you post a photo of your children next time.
Enjoy this issue...
🌍 Planet
Interactive article: 2019 was hotter than normal — but what does this even mean? (vis4)
Paper: A Big Data Guide to Understanding Climate Change: The Case for Theory-Guided Data Science (PubMed Central)
Paper: Carbon Offsets: An Overview for Scientific Societies (Benjamin C. Pierce)
The Guardian's environmental Pledge 2019 / Please, give The Guardian some love for this!
Guide to dealing with air pollution in Seattle, SF, Vancouver, and other west coast cities (Steven Zhang)
Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics (YaleEnvironment360)
Greenhouse Gas Emissions 101 (Target2030)
See the Mississippi River's hidden history, uncovered by lasers (National Geographic)
Citizen science and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Nature)
AirPollution.io – great project that wants to communicate air pollution hazards in India
💻 Technology
For techies: Using computing to fix climate change (Jack Kelly)
Article and interactive viz about how Planet's satellites works (Nadieh Bremer)
Infographic: What Does Big Tech Know About You?
Video: Satellites 101 (Upstream)
To Go Green, the Energy Industry Goes Open Source (MIT Technology Review)
17 ways to make your website more energy efficient (Wholegrain)
Programming for the Planet (Tim Clifford)
Tech Leadership On Climate: A Framework
Well, It’s a Start: Can Tech Stop the Climate Emergency? (The New Stack)
Measuring the climate impact of our digital services at GDS (GOV.uk)
Ethics in tech: It’s my job, and yours (CSS Tricks)
Open Hardware: Open Access ARGOS Telemetry (Arribada)
Can the Internet Survive Climate Change? (New Republic)
🦸♀️ People
I tried to hack my insomnia with technology. Here’s what worked. (MIT Technology Review)
Nir Eyal on how to beat tech addiction: ‘We need a new skill set’ (The Guardian)
Millions of black people affected by racial bias in health-care algorithms (Nature)
Chatbots and the humanitarian sector (verity think)
I hope you enjoy this issue. I'm very interested in how you found this issue, please answer three questions or just reply to this mail.
Enjoy the readings,
and thanks again for being a part of this. 🙌
Take care.
-Niklas