Good Fact

The Young Adults Are More Than Alright

- Adam Clare

Baby Boomers are just like their parents – they complain about all the problems they think the youth are causing (as if it’s the youth fault the planet is experiencing irreversible climate change and the economy was maladjusted a few years back). The older generations often accuse younger people to be lazy and doing everything “wrong” – well, those Boomers couldn’t be more wrong. It turns out that young adults today are kinder, more ambitious, more caring, and are looking for more satisfying lives than their parents.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett recently wrote a great piece on what it’s been like studying and working with the 18-29 year old demographic for the last couple decades. It shows that the future is in good hands!

The ‘selfish’ slur also ignores how idealistic and generous-hearted today’s emerging adults are. In the national Clark poll, 86 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is important to me to have a career that does some good in the world.’ And it is not just an idealistic aspiration: they are, in fact, more likely to volunteer their time and energy for serving others than their parents did at the same age, according to national surveys by the US Higher Education Research Institute.

Read more.

The Day We Fight Back Against Spying

- Adam Clare

Thanks HuffPo!

The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance is today!

Thanks to Edward Snowden we have learned about America’s and other countries illegitimate and immoral mass surveillance operations. More revelations about the extent of the surveillance programs are sure to come. Just in the past couple of days it was revealed that the NSA operates a kill list based on SIM cards in cell phones regardless of who actually uses the phone.

The argument that we shouldn’t care about the surveillance because they only look at metadata is bunk. SIM cards are an example of the metadata the NSA (et. al) care about and it has led to too many civilian deaths from drone strikes.

People like myself find this type of surveillance to be rather problematic and insanely dangerous. If you’re in Canada be sure to tell your local MP that you are opposed to the spying done by Canada’s NSA: CSEC.

More than 5,300 web-based companies and other organizations, including Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, Mozilla the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, have joined forces to protest National Security Agency surveillance on Feb. 11.

More at the Huffington Post.

New Technique For Restoring Historic Videos

- Adam Clare

USC Shoah Foundation has a large collection of interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. Old physical media formats are susceptible to damage from fires to improper storage and USC has had to deal with this. The tech department at the foundation has figured out a painless way to restore and even improve the quality of footage from the damaged media.

Remembering history and being able to hear first hand accounts of events (no matter how horrific) can only help humanity. If we forget our history we are likely to repeat it.

Ryan Fenton-Strauss, video archive and post-production manager at ITS, was tasked with researching video restoration techniques currently being used in the motion picture industry. He found that there were very few existing options for restoring tape-based material.

“It seemed terribly unfortunate that after a survivor had lived through the Holocaust and poured his or her heart into a testimony, that parts of it would be lost due to a technical problem during the recording process,” Fenton-Strauss said.

However, Fenton-Strauss had an epiphany while sorting family photos with Google’s Picasa tool. He noticed that Picasa’s facial recognition software was so powerful that it could recognize his six-year-old daughter as a baby.

“I realized then that if we could automate the process of identifying the “good” and “bad” images using image recognition software, then we could correct some of our most difficult video problems,” Fenton-Strauss said.

Read more here.

Bill Gates Shares Some (More) Good News From 2013

- Adam Clare

Bill Gates is best known for his hyper capitalistic behaviour creating Microsoft, but since he left the company he’s trying to change that perception. Indeed, he has done good things for the planet since he left he company he once founded. Gates and his wife have created the Gates Foundation to improve the world. They have done great work in leading American philanthropy and also contributed greatly in the fight against malaria.

He is optimistic about the future and you should be too! He points out some good news in his 2013 year in reviews.

Child mortality went down—again. One of the yearly reports I keep an eye out for is “Levels and Trends in Child Mortality.” The title doesn’t sound especially uplifting, but the 2013 report shows amazing progress—for example, half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990. That’s the biggest decline ever recorded. And hardly anyone knows about it! If you want to learn more—and I’d urge you to—the report has a good at-a-glance summary on page 3.

Read the Good News Review here.

Think Dirty on Your Mobile to Shop Clean

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Think Dirty is an app for your mobile phone (iOS only) designed to help people understand the ingredients in products. It’s focused on cosmetics products as a starting point for how to avoid cancer causing chemicals.

Think Dirty™ app is the easiest way to learn about the potentially toxic ingredients in your cosmetics and personal care products. It’s an independent source that allows you to compare products as you shop. Just scan the product barcode and Think Dirty will give you easy-to-understand info on the product, its ingredients, and cleaner options.

AppStore

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