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

Search Results

You searched for: -

There are 17026 results  for your search.  View and Refine Your Search Terms

  • In South Bend, Pete Buttigieg challenged a decades-old assumption that streets are for cars above all else

    Reconfiguring streets to slow automobile traffic through its downtown business district and encourage pedestrians and bicycling enlivened South Bend's street life and proved a boon to its restaurants and other businesses. Then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg pushed for the $25 million plan to make the streets safer and encourage people to spend more time and money in the area. Drivers complained about increased travel time, as they have about other cities’ “complete streets” programs. But Buttigieg and his supporters hope to push the concept when he runs the federal Transportation Department.

    Read More

  • “What You Share Defines You”: Indonesia Has World's Biggest Fact-Checking Network

    CekFakta is a collaborative network that fights misinformation with around 6,000 fact-checkers from major Indonesian media organizations, citizens, and academics. The group holds training sessions to help journalists identify doctored images and misinformation, with the idea that participants will pass the skills on to their colleagues. CekFakta impacted 2019 presidential debates with large-scale, real-time, collaborative fact-checking that enabled a quick release of fact-checked information. The collaborative process is key to helping people find high-quality information amid so much online content.

    Read More

  • Can a ‘Guaranteed Income' for Black Entrepreneurs Narrow the Wealth Gap?

    A program in Oakland, California, is helping Black women-owned companies survive the economic downturn since the onset of the pandemic. Known as Runway, the financial innovation firm provides $1,000 a month without any conditions. The monthly income allows historically-marginalized entrepreneurs to focus on how to pivot in order to survive the pandemic. The decision to provide cash payments to this particular demographic was based on research that highlights the lack of financial security nets in the Black community that prevent business owners from relying on their friends and family in times of need.

    Read More

  • How Open Source Experts Identified the US Capitol Rioters

    Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

    Read More

  • On its 20th birthday, Wikipedia might be the safest place online

    Wikipedia’s large number of volunteer editors document history in real time, while making sure different viewpoints are considered and avoiding misinformation. While other social media sites are hesitant to label unreliable sources and misinformation, Wikipedia clearly labels controversial and unproven topics and deploys many tools to avoid false information. A single page per topic makes monitoring easier, pages can be locked from new edits, and people who frequently make false edits can be banned. While it doesn’t claim to be a reliable source, editors do follow policies meant to keep out anything untrue.

    Read More

  • Plantation tours bypass the ‘big house' to focus on the enslaved

    In an effort to combat racial injustice, former plantations are shifting the narrative typically given on tours to focus on the lives of the enslaved who once lived there instead of enslavers who owned the plantations. The initiative sprung from a need to accurately portray the history of slavery and better “inform the present.”

    Read More

  • Need a place for school age students to learn online in Detroit? A new child care scholarship offers a quick solution.

    In Michigan, state officials started offering child care subsidies to online learners ages 5-12, nearly 20,000 children enrolled. The aid is helping parents, guardians, and caretakers of school-age children continue to work while their children receive guided instruction. Local organizations and non-profits are offering scholarships to help parents pay for childcare since it takes close to a month for them to receive subsidy funds.

    Read More

  • How Californians are resorting to crowdsourcing to get their Covid-19 vaccine

    Residents of California are working together to crowdsource where COVID-19 vaccinations are being offered, and who they're being offered to. While the state has failed to implement a transparent dissemination strategy, 70 volunteers joined forces to create a spreadsheet that keeps track of what clinics are offering the shot and what parameters must be met to receive it. Users have reported that they were able to schedule an appointment because of this effort.

    Read More

  • One, two, tree: how AI helped find millions of trees in the Sahara

    Tree mapping helps researchers understand deforestation and climate change, however the technologies used often miss trees that aren’t clustered. Researchers, in collaboration with NASA, used high-resolution satellite images, previously only available to commercial entities, to find a surprisingly large number of trees in the Sahara Desert. Using AI deep learning and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at the University of Illinois, they identified more than 1.8 billion trees, manually marking nearly 90,000 so the computer could “learn” which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

    Read More

  • Cooperation and Chocolate: The Story of One Colombian Community's Quest for Peace

    Plagued by an internal war, a group of villages in Colombia created a “Peace Community,” declaring themselves neutral in the conflict and focusing their efforts on cultivating the 150 hectares of cacao trees in collectively owned plots to sell to global markets. While villagers still experience violence, the earnings from their crops go into a collective pot and the community decides together how to distribute the funds. “To them, this is actually a very profound act of transcending traditional capitalist society models and building something together,” says an anthropologist who has studied the community.

    Read More