Fighting Hunger and Poverty with Mobile Technology Steve Baragona | Washington, D.C. Mobile phones are the latest weapon in the fight against hunger and poverty. The devices provide a new way to deliver information to developing world farmers in hard-to-reach places. A group at the University of Illinois has produced several videos that demonstrate simple, […]
Inventing the Future
Posted May 18th, 2011 at 3:22 pm (UTC-4)
100 Years of IBM’s Technological Innovation For one of the world’s foremost inventors, Bernie Meyerson is a fairly modest guy. Perhaps that’s because his game-changing invention of silicon germanium – basically the stuff that makes every modern computer chip work – began as an accident. “Many, many years ago,” says Meyerson, “when I was a […]
When News Isn’t News
Posted May 10th, 2011 at 6:03 pm (UTC-4)
How Long Before “New” Media Becomes “Old”? This morning began with an experiment. Rather than pick up my daily newspaper, flip on the radio or even look at the television, I decided to get all my news solely from my iPad. It was different…and honestly, not very satisfying. For example, browsing through Google News there […]
A Vaster Wasteland?
Posted May 5th, 2011 at 5:10 pm (UTC-4)
Is the Internet Better, or Worse, Than TV? It’s one of the most cited speeches of the 20th Century…or, at least, two of the most quoted words. However the man who delivered it, Newton Minow, says we’re remembering the wrong two words. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy had only been in office for […]
On Our Site
Posted April 27th, 2011 at 5:04 pm (UTC-4)
Digital Frontiers’ Doug Bernard is out of the office at the moment, but DF would like to draw your attention to a few stories elsewhere on voanews.com. The first is from Dorian Jones in Istanbul, and this story describes a web trend in Turkey: Turkey already bans more websites than any other European country. Now […]
New Year, New Relationships
Posted April 21st, 2011 at 3:01 pm (UTC-4)
Bun Tharum | Phnom Penh As in past, this year’s Cambodia’s New Year celebrations saw many of that nation’s young traveling home, visiting old friends and catching up with their families. This is a time-honored tradition. But now that the festivities are concluded and people return to their modern lives, Cambodia’s youth are returning to […]
The Conspiracy Factory
Posted April 4th, 2011 at 5:39 pm (UTC-4)
“Conspiracy theory is pornography for lazy researchers.” – Chip Berlet
Transcending Man
Posted March 18th, 2011 at 7:03 pm (UTC-4)
The Works and Ideas of Futurist Ray Kurzweil There’s a moment near the end of “Transcendent Man,” a new documentary about futurist Ray Kurzweil. The camera follows Kurzweil to the lip of a seashore as he silently watches the waves churning in and out. “What are you thinking about?” an off-camera voice asks. “I’m thinking […]
