Author: The Conversation

As we all head back to school during a global pandemic, it’s a good time to ask whether students are learning the skills they need to keep themselves and their communities safe. Over the last decade, scholars, policy makers and citizens have been concerned about whether young people had the key skills they needed to survive and thrive in the digital economy. Canada, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, among others, have developed position papers and programs aimed at promoting digital skills. Coding, in particular, has been promoted as an essential component of public education. Most public schools now teach students…

Passwords, by definition, are secrets. We use them to identify ourselves to systems and gain authorized access to places that other people are denied access to. Every online account is an identity, but only if it is reserved for the exclusive use of its owner. But when it comes to the passwords of children, grown-ups often pull rank, claim ownership and exercise authority without a moment’s hesitation. Breached accounts Over the past decade, there have been almost 10,000 data breaches involving personal information of all kinds, from financial transactions to health data. Data breaches are often enabled by the availability of…

With the vast majority of North America’s thousand-plus fan conventions cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual conventions (called cons) have been a bright spot for fans in an otherwise bleak year. Although organizers have experimented with different ways to run an online convention, none had as high expectations as the San Diego Comic-Con’s Comic-Con@Home. The virtual event, held July 22–26, featured content distributed across several platforms, including video panels, a virtual exhibition hall and a cosplay masquerade on Tumblr. From the beginning, it promised not only to fill the Comic-Con-shaped hole in regular attendees’ summers but also to make a Comic-Con experience accessible to fans…

If thoughts, feelings and other mental activities are nothing more than electrochemical signals flowing around a vast network of brain cells, will connecting these signals with digital electronics allow us to enhance the abilities of our brains? That’s what tech entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested in a recent presentation of the Neuralink device, an innovative brain-machine interface implanted in a pig called Gertrude. But how feasible is his vision? When I raised some brief reservations about the science, Musk dismissed them in a tweet saying: “It is unfortunately common for many in academia to overweight the value of ideas and underweight bringing them to fruition. The idea…

A banknote has been sitting in my wallet for six months now. As time ticks on, it burns an ever greater hole in my pocket. At first, I felt uneasy spending it, following COVID-19 warnings to pay more attention to hand hygiene and the surfaces we all touch on a daily basis. Now I have less and less opportunity to do so. While the World Health Organisation has never advised against using cash, more and more businesses are displaying signs that read “We Only Accept Contactless Payment” next to their registers. A recent global poll conducted by MasterCard – a company with reason to favour…

Health products, like detox teas and mood-boosting waters, rely on a lack of neuroscientific knowledge to make their claims. Some of these claims are unsubstantiated, while others are completely made up. My doctoral research investigates visual processing, but when I look at the big picture, I realize that what I’m really studying are fundamental aspects of brain anatomy, connectivity and communication. One specific function of the visual system that I have studied during my degree is the blue-light detecting molecule, melanopsin. In humans, melanopsin is seemingly restricted to a group of neurons in the eye, which preferentially target a structure in the…

As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a livestreaming website called Twitch.tv. An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game. While viewers eagerly await Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is…

Drones have changed how we see the world. Even more profoundly, drones have transformed how we witness the world: how we decide the events that matter and create our shared “truth” of what happened. Remotely piloted and equipped with sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles are changing the way we witness war, climate change, political protest, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, drone footage has broadcast the unrest in the US city of Kenosha following the shooting of Jacob Blake and the devastation of the Beirut chemical explosion and Tropical Storm Laura. Drone technology can blur viewpoints, pull focus onto surveillance and allow people to…

Cybersecurity is like a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as the good guys put a stop to one type of attack, another pops up. Usernames and passwords were once good enough to keep an account secure. But before long, cybercriminals figured out how to get around this. Often they’ll use “brute force attacks”, bombarding a user’s account with various password and login combinations in a bid to guess the correct one. To deal with such attacks, a second layer of security was added in an approach known as two-factor authentication, or 2FA. It’s widespread now, but does 2FA also leave…

The demand for cheaper, greener electricity means that the energy landscape is changing faster than at any other point in history. This is particularly true of solar-powered electricity and battery storage. The cost of both has dropped at unprecedented rates over the past decade and energy efficient technologies such as LED lighting have also expanded. Access to cheap and ubiquitous solar power and storage will transform the way we produce and use power, allowing electrification of the transport sector. There is potential for new chemical-based economies in which we store renewable energy as fuels, and support new devices making up an “internet of things”. But our…