Digital technologies are often put forward as a solution to environmental dilemmas. The spread of the internet came with claims of a huge reduction in printing, and by replacing paper with bytes, we thought we’d reduce our negative environmental impact
Imagine yourself graduating from high school, with the world before you.
But now you must decide what career you want to pursue. You hope for a job that will pay the bills, but also one you will enjoy. After all, you will spend a large portion of your waking hours at work.
Hardly a week goes by without a report announcing the end of work as we know it. In 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne were the first to capture this anxiety in a paper titled: “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”.
Phones, tablets and laptops are usually at the top of many teenage wish lists at Christmas. But parents often worry that giving their children a mobile phone might mean they never see them again. Will they stay locked away in their room for the whole Christmas break? It turns out that might not be such a bad thing.
Across the world, the conversion of information into a digital format – also called “digitalisation” – has increased productivity in the public and private sectors. As a result, virtually every country in the world is working towards a digital economy.
Modern society has given significant attention to the promises of the digital economy over the past decade. But it has given little attention to its negative environmental footprint.
Satellites are becoming increasingly important in our lives, as they help us meet a demand for more data, exchanged at higher speeds. This is why we are exploring new ways of improving satellite communication. Satellite technology is used to navigate, forecast the weather, monitor Earth from space, receive TV signals from space, and connect to remote places through tools such as satellite phones and NBN’s Sky Muster satellites. All these communications use radio waves. These are electromagnetic waves that propagate through space and, to a certain degree, through obstacles such as walls. Each communication system uses a frequency band allocated for…
Think about the way plastic pollution has been reported in recent years and you’re probably picturing plastic packaging, films and microfibres. But Christmas brings a deluge of another relatively short-lived plastic product that has received a lot less attention – children’s toys.
With a collective gasp and puzzled looks, the world was recently introduced to Tesla’s newest vehicle. The so-called Cybertruck is an angular, stainless steel, all-electric pickup truck that quickly became polarizing.
Our electronic devices store a plethora of sensitive information. To protect this information, device operating systems such as Apple’s iOS and Android have locking mechanisms. These require user authentication before access is granted.
