Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Farms Race

    True to hacker form, an MIT team wants "open-source agriculture," a technology that takes food production back from big corporations and makes it widely accessible. To this end, the OpenAg community, comprised of coders, horticulturalists, engineers, plant scientists, and teachers, is developing food computers. But the technology is still being developed, and the economics don't yet pencil out for profitability.

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  • How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations

    GEDmatch started as a "casual side project," but investigators have been using the genealogy website to solve murder and sexual assault cases, opening a new set of both opportunity and ethical questions. The site is free to all, so investigators have used it to match DNA information and find suspects using family connections - a strategy that concerned the founders of the site at first, although they've come around to the idea after seeing the positive impact it has had.

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  • Sexual-Harassment-Reporting Apps Help Stop Abuse in Global City Streets

    Using data collection and visualization, apps like SafeCity, HarassMap, and #WalkFreely are crowdsourcing locations where individuals have been sexually harassed or assaulted so that others know to take precautions. Some operate on a global scale, others locally, but what they all offer is a platform for people to share their story and hopefully prevent it from happening again. Such apps have led to action from community members, the media, and officials who have taken notice of the high rates in certain places and taken action.

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  • The Crime Machine, Part I

    The creation of CompStat fostered a huge drop in crime rates in New York City by the 1990s. The idea came from an odd and obsessive transit cop was to track every single crime daily in every precinct and use that data to systematically go after everything from murders to low-level crimes once ignored by police. It was a drastic shift in the way NYPD worked and was credited with making the city far safer, but was also flawed.

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  • Mass tourism is ruining historic cities. Only government can stop it

    With tourism on the rise, governments are figuring out how to limit overcrowding and environmental damage. Replicable ideas include marketing beaches and other attractions off the beaten path, regulating hotels and vacation rentals, and even requiring that every tourist must be accompanied by a local guide.

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  • A rural Montana district goes all in on makerspaces

    A coalition of philanthropic and professional development organizations are partnering with a rural Montana school district to provide donated hardware and software and professional development training. By developing "makerspaces," the initiative aims to ensure students and teachers learn tech literacy, a skillset many of their urban and suburban counterparts take for granted.

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  • Lab-grown Meat on your Table

    "Farm to table" is a well-known saying in the food industry, but "lab to table" is also rapidly joining the rank of commonplace terminology. To both reduce the amount of animals killed and lessen the impact on the environment to raise livestock, researchers have found a way to manufacture cell-based meat that is created in a lab, yet still has the texture of meat.

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  • In Colorado Senior Homes, A Companion For Those With Dementia: A Robot Named Ryan

    Companion robots are making their way into Colorado senior living communities with the goal of providing meaningful company to residents. Equipped with a "soft human face," the companion robots mitigate against depression and isolation while also reminding community members to take their medications and interact with those around them.

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  • Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

    Amazon trashed its automated resume-reviewing software after the company discovered that the software had taught itself to discriminate against women applicants. The situation shows the limits of machine learning in human resources.

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  • Kenya's Government Is Evicting Indigenous People. Tech Helps Them Fight Back.

    Kenya's indigenous communities are fighting the government's attempts to seize the land they live on using an app called This is My Backyard, or TIMBY. The app helps users to securely encrypt videos and pictures that can then be used for legal and publicity purposes, allowing community members to gather evidence and hold leaders accountable.

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