In the Media
The Lever
Microsoft Pushed Back Against Regulators Before System Crash
By Freddy Brewster, Lucy Dean Stockton, Katy Schwenk, & Helen Santoro
“Regulators should carefully avoid any intervention” the company said in response to a federal probe of security and interoperability risks.
Washington Post
AI chatbot mimics anyone in history—but gets a lot wrong, experts say
By Daniel Wu
A GPT-3-powered app simulates conversation with historical figures but has dictators and Nazis offer false apologies for their crimes.
Commonplace
5 Things about Critical Data Center Studies
On Elemental Thinking
By Mél Hogan, Dustin Edwards, and Zane Griffin Talley Cooper
The three of us have been writing an article together called “The Making of Critical Data Center Studies,” in which we track its development over the past decades to establish it as a field in its own right.undefined In planning these Five Things about Critical Data Center Studies, we thought carefully about different ways to approach this assignment: was it better to talk about news headlines, or go by new concepts in emergent scholarship, or more effective to draw out important tensions in the field?
Open.Intel
Beyond the hype: Intel's efforts for greener, sustainable blockchains
By Tamara Kneese & Zane Griffin Talley Cooper
Intel's commitment to addressing climate change runs deep.
We've pledged to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in global operations by 2040, to increase the energy efficiency and lower the carbon footprint of Intel products and platforms…
Arctic Hub
Keeping Knowledge in Narsaq
By Signe Ravn-Høgaard
Lise Autogena is keen to ensure that future research in Narsaq will be of more direct benefit to the local community. Therefore, she has initiated a research station in Narsaq to bring together locals and researchers from around the world.
Wired
Crypto Is Poised to Reshape Taxes—and Cities
By Adam Willems
Tokens like CityCoins could turn taxes into another investment vehicle, for better or worse.
Buzzfeed News
This Texas Town Was Deep In Debt From A Devastating Winter Storm. Then A Crypto Miner Came Knocking.
By Sarah Emerson
A 2021 winter storm overwhelmed Denton's power grid, pushing the city into crushing debt. Then a faceless company arrived with a promise to refill its coffers — and double its energy use.
Buzzfeed News
Congress Is Trying To Figure Out What To Do About Crypto's Colossal Carbon Footprint
By Sarah Emerson
House members pushed back on crypto CEOs' assertion that bitcoin's energy consumption is actually a "feature not a bug.”
The Atlantic
Greenland’s Rare-Earth Election: A vote last month answered an important question about the world’s largest island.
By Robinson Meyer
“Tunulliarfik Fjord has always played an outsize role in global history. One thousand years ago, the Viking Erik the Red settled there, the last outpost in the Norse expansion into North America. When the United States established a protectorate over Greenland during World War II, it built one of its first airports in what is now Narsarsuaq, a large town on the fjord. And now Tunulliarfik is the site of a mining project that has overturned politics on Greenland…..”
Sermitsiaq
Kunst producerer ny viden
Af Niels Ole Qvist
Mere end nogensinde er der brug for en anden tilgang til at skabe nye indsigter. Det kan kunstens og kulturens metoder bidrage til, fortæller idékvinde bag forskninghus i Sydgrønland. Hun betegner Arctic Hub som “et meget vigtigt initiativ”
Green Rocks
Greenland is set to oust a rare earths mine that's in the crosshairs of global industries
By Ian Morse
“Greenland, a land of 56,000 people whose ice sheet is an epitome of climate crisis catastrophe, saw its government collapse in February amid political fights over a mine that touts itself as the solution to rising temperatures. The proposed mining project would extract uranium and rare earth elements that are used for wind turbines…”
The Atlantic
The Weekly Planet: Why Celebrities Are Agog Over This Tiny Climate Think Tank
By Robinson Meyer
“The think tank Carbon180 is, as far as I know, the only American nonprofit dedicated to studying the removal of carbon-dioxide pollution from the atmosphere. It is not a very large organization. When such things are possible, its 15 employees are headquartered in a renovated concert hall turned co-working space in Washington, D.C., a building notable as the site of the first Beatles concert in the United States….”
Penn Today
Exploring cryptocurrency and blockchain in Iceland
By Michelle Berger
“A virtual reality film, photo series, and soundscape from Penn and Rutgers document the effect this fast-growing tech industry is having on the country’s natural resources and people… “
WHYY News, Philadelphia
Learn how blockchain works at cryptocurrency mining exhibit in University City
By Peter Crimmins
“A small machine about the size of a shoebox hums continuously in the lobby of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s an ASIC miner, an applied-specific integrated circuit designed to do one thing and one thing only: generate Bitcoin….”