Author: The Conversation

The video-sharing app TikTok is a hot political potato amid concerns over who has access to users’ personal data. The United States has moved to ban the app. Other countries, including Australia, have expressed concern. But does this mean your children who use this app are at risk? If you’re a parent, let me explain the issues and give you a few tips to make sure your kids stay safe. A record-breaker Never has an app for young people been so popular. By April this year the TikTok app had been downloaded more than 2 billion times worldwide. The app recently broke all records for the most downloaded app in…

The difficulty many people have getting tested for SARS-CoV-2 and delays in receiving test results make early warning of possible COVID-19 infections all the more important, and data from wearable health and fitness devices shows promise for identifying who might have COVID-19. Today’s wearable device gather data about physical activity, heart rate, body temperature and quality of sleep. This data is typically used to help people track general well-being. Smartwatches are the most common type of wearable. There are also smart wrist bands, finger rings and earbuds. Smart clothing, shoes and eyeglasses can also be considered “wearables.” Popular brands include Fitbits, Apple…

COVID-19 has altered nearly every aspect of American life, including the workplace. For millions of Americans, the kitchen or the living room now doubles as the office and conference room. This workspace shift, likely to last long past the pandemic, offers some conveniences, of course, but it also teems with potential pitfalls. Traditional tactics for achieving credibility in presentations – audience interaction and engaging body language, for example – are not accessible when you appear on a laptop or smartphone screen. Suddenly, what you say carries more weight than ever. As an English language studies professor, I wanted to understand how presenters build credibility, so I analyzed…

In a synthetic chemistry lab, we have worked out how to convert the red pigment in common bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to turn bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to store rechargeable energy. Supercapacitors store electric charge, in contrast to batteries, which store chemical energy. Brick’s porous structure is ideal for storing energy because pores give brick more surface area than solid materials have, and the greater the surface area the more electricity a supercapacitor material can hold. Bricks are red because the clay they’re…

In response to COVID-19, almost every university has scrambled to move its teaching online. To do this, academics have been choosing between two approaches: live videoconferencing using tools such as Zoom, or pre-recording videos and posting to platforms such as YouTube. Previous reviews have shown videoconferences are an okay substitute for classes, but what about videos? What do students say? Previous reviews have looked at student preferences for online learning as opposed to face-to-face lectures and they do not find any differences. Even when teachers make monumental efforts to create flipped classrooms, where they provide online videos before interactive workshops, there are no…

The Trump administration has turned up the heat on Chinese tech companies TikTok and WeChat with an executive order that US companies have 45 days to stop transacting with them. The administration has also recommended that Chinese firms listed on US exchanges be removed unless they provide US regulators access to their audited accounts. It comes only days after the US president gave the go-ahead for Microsoft (or rival US bidders) to buy TikTok if the purchase can be completed by September 15. Failing that, Trump says he will shut down the video-sharing app in the US. Zhang Yiming, the chief executive of ByteDance, which owns TikTok,…

Elon Musk thinks his company Tesla will have fully autonomous cars ready by the end of 2020. “There are no fundamental challenges remaining,” he said recently. “There are many small problems. And then there’s the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together.” While the technology to enable a car to complete a journey without human input (what the industry calls “level 5 autonomy”) might be advancing rapidly, producing a vehicle that can do so safely and legally is another matter. There are indeed still fundamental challenges to the safe introduction of fully autonomous cars, and…

Facebook has faced a lot of criticism over the years for failing to moderate hate speech. Its policies have come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks thanks to the Stop Hate for Profit campaign. Started by civil rights groups in the US, the campaign has led to some of Facebook’s biggest customers pulling their ads from the social media platform for the month of July. As much as 99% of Facebook’s US$70.7 billion (£55 billion) in revenues come through advertising and the boycott initially resulted in an 8% knock to Facebook’s market value (amounting to US$72 billion). Yet, even with the hundreds of companies that…

The Crew Dragon spacecraft, produced by private company SpaceX, is scheduled to return from the International Space Station (ISS) and splash down in the Atlantic ocean on August 2. Contingent on a favourable weather forecast and a successful final week at the ISS, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will begin the undocking procedure on August 1, and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere the next day – a total of 64 days since lift off. The historic launch took place on May 30 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the first time a commercial space company has carried humans into orbit around Earth. But while the…

If a surgeon arrived at the operating theatre wearing a mask they had made that morning from a tea towel, they would probably be sacked. This is because the equipment used for important tasks, such as surgery, must be tested and certified to ensure compliance with specific standards. But anyone can design and make a face covering to meet new public health requirements for using public transport or going to the shops. Indeed, arguments about the quality and standard of face coverings underlie recent controversies and explain why many people think they are not effective for protecting against COVID-19. Even the…