One thing that has been obvious about the response to the Chinese virus pandemic is how willing the public has been to co-operate with government restrictions that would normally be associated with totalitarian states. There have been some rumblings, particularly with over-zealous police fining people for anything from
Well anyone who likes a bit of sport knows that there isn’t much going on anywhere in the world at the moment. Football is cancelled, rugby is a goner, yachting, mountainbiking, skiing, all gone. But what about motor racing? Well sure, the actual belting around racetracks is right out,
Katharine H. Greenaway University of Melbourne Alexander Saeri Monash University Tegan Cruwys Australian National University We are now a society at a distance. As of this week, New South Wales has closed restaurants, bars, gyms, and entertainment venues where people gather in large numbers. Victoria has similarly implemented a shut
Reports out of Europe this week say that as a result of the lockdowns over there, too many people are using Netflix and YouTube, and as a result, the Internet is becoming overloaded and slow. As a result, YouTube and Netflix will temporarily reduce video quality in the United Kingdom
Now that Facebook has sent home its human workers and all that’s left are Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow bots, a curious phenomenon has emerged. Tech giant Facebook recently admitted that it marked posts linking to genuine information and articles about the Wuhan coronavirus as spam, blaming a “bug
Joe Burton University of Waikato It didn’t take long for a terrorist to show how hard it is to prevent violent extremist content being shared online. Within six months of the attacks at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 last year, which were live streamed on Facebook, a far-
Dave Pine The beautiful state of Colorado is known to be a Millennial Greenie hipster’s paradise. Their environmental policies are usually a good indication of which direction the rest of the US will head. “Wind turbine blades won’t be buried in the Logan County landfill any longer. Although
ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is the first Chinese tech company with a serious chance when it comes to competing with the American social media giants such as Facebook and Instagram. CKGSB Knowledge Fair Observer TikTok’s latest viral challenge has the world’s teens gluing up their top lips with
Oh dear, oh, dear. It seems all is not rosy in the green world of hybrid motoring. The plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) owners are not actually saving the planet. Woe is me! It seems that the claimed ‘economy’ figures touted by the manufacturers are not actually achievable out
Robert Hassan University of Melbourne A survey this year revealed that Australians, on average, spend 10.2 hours a day with interactive digital technologies. And this figure goes up every year. This is time we don’t get back. And our analogue lives, which include everything not digital, shrink in
Get them hooked and then slug them later when they are far too invested in the product to back away. Clearly IONITY, a European EV charging network, were thinking this when they hiked their EV charging prices by more than 500%. I am sure that the fact that this happened
The Chinese Government has decided that anything other than the ‘official’ line on the Coronavirus is “fake news” and anyone spreading such fake news will be ‘invited’ to spend 3 – 7 years in the slammer. I don’t suppose that WeChat has ever held itself out as a champion of
A paywalled article in the Financial Times reports the musings of Cambridge Professor of Engineering and the Environment, Julian Allwood. His conclusion is that the only way for aviation to hit net zero by 2050 is to stop flying. Yeah right! Dreaming of electric planes and planting trees will not
Daniel Wagner fairobserver.com Soon enough, the West will be looking at China in the tech space from the front window, rather than the rearview mirror. Science and technology will become the lifeblood of the Chinese economy in this decade and will remain its lifeblood in the future. That is,
