technology

Online retail giant Amazon established itself more firmly in the education technology market this week by introducing Amazon Inspire, an online resource that will offer teachers and students free instructional materials. Amazon Inspire is set to launch in the fall, just in time for the upcoming school year.

Several years ago, physician, statistician, sword swallower and vibrant lecturer Hans Rosling produced a fascinating 4-minute video that presented 120,000 data points and showcased how mostly western nations became healthy and prosperous in just 200 years – after countless millennia of malnutrition, disease, wretched poverty and early death.

The electronic payments industry has revolutionized worldwide markets, making services like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and touch and pay systems possible. As the industry grows and innovates, consider the effects of this technology on the US economy.

A recent USA Today/Rock the Vote survey of millennials shows 80 percent of millennials support transitioning to “mostly clean” or renewable energy by 2030. Although their hearts may be in the right place, few millennials appear to realize how much energy their lifestyle actually consumes, where this energy comes from, and how much it would cost to transition to a nation that’s powered predominantly by renewables by 2030.

For years, water, or, more accurately, its scarcity, has been predicted to be the next doomsday scenario. In 1994, the American Philosophical Society published a book bearing the title: Is water our next crisis? In 2007, NBC featured: Crisis feared as U.S. water supplies dry up. More recently, in 2011, NPR did a story on Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization—a new book in which the author posits: “water is surpassing oil as the world’s scarcest critical resource.” This year, a Business Insider (BI) report called “water scarcity problems” a “looming national issue.” In September, the Associated Press declared: “The water crisis is already here.”

The seven years of the President Barack Obama Administration have provided us with two diametrically opposite things. The government time and again failing utterly in just about everything it tries to do – economic recovery, job creation, health care, defense of our borders and our nation, budget stewardship,…. Meanwhile, the Administration and its Democrat Party keep usurping and pushing to usurp as much of the private sector as possible – to add it all to the government’s (ir)responsibility portfolio.

Giant technology companies who deliver much of their services via “cloud” computing – such as Apple, Google, and Facebook – have claimed for years that they generate the massive amounts of electricity they need from renewable sources, despite their obvious dependence on fossil fuels.

The EPA has announced a new program to combat the damage your air conditioner is doing to the environment – but is such a program really necessary? The answer is not very surprising.

It is timely to fact check the Federal Government’s storyline that broadband is a ‘core utility,’ given a new White House report that directs municipalities that broadband is a “core utility… like water, sewer and electricity;” and given that a senior FCC official recently encouragedlocal municipalities at the NATOA conference to build their own local broadband infrastructure with the FCC’s backing now that the FCC has claimed the legal authority to preempt State laws limiting municipal broadband.

I would like to thank Crain’s Chicago Business for the opportunity to respond to the article published on September 10th: “Is U.S. commitment to renewable fuels waning?” Frankly, the article was either poorly researched or intellectually dishonest to an incredible degree. Contrary to the author’s claims, the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) has been a failure in almost every respect. Rather than mandating more ethanol be used, we should realize ethanol is a corncob pipedream, and do away with RFS, also known as the ethanol mandate, once and for all.

But COMPTEL is fake lobbying with fake letters – for this very old technology. Because COMPTEL is apparently anti-science.

ComEd is in the process of installing 4,000,000 “Smart Meters” across the state of Illinois. Traditional analog electric meters are being replaced. Featured in Part 1 was a CUBFacts informational sheet on which CUB’s misleading statements were followed each time by an expert’s explanation.

According to newly unearthed documents, an EPA policy director colluded with the anti-coal Sierra Club on policies regulating carbon emissions, particularly from coal plants.