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May 31, 2024 | 
positionpapers.ie | Karl Stephan
The John Krasinski movie IF came out this past weekend, and my wife and I went to see it. I won’t have to put in a spoiler alert if all I say here is that it’s about imaginary friends that children came up with and then abandoned, only to meet their “IFs” again later in life. What has this got to do with engineering ethics? Several things, actually.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Gabriel A. Andrade |Michael Cook |James Parker
The business of cryptocurrency turns out to be one of the more power-hungry forms of market speculation. An article in the April 2024 issue of Physics Today says that between 0.6 percent and 2.3 percent of the total electricity production in the United States goes to cryptocurrency mining farms. Is this a bad thing, and if so, what can be done about it?
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Michael Cook |James Parker
In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social media use on them. She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary. First, the harms.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |James Parker |Michael Cook |Faith Kuzma
For nearly a decade, there have been isolated reports of strange health problems in United States diplomatic and espionage personnel stationed in sensitive parts of the world, such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Although there is no typical case, there are some commonalities in many of the cases. The symptoms usually have a sudden onset. Victims describe hearing strange noises, feeling severe pain in the head and elsewhere, and other neurological symptoms.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Sonia McGarrity |Ida Gazzola
Some accidents are simple: two cars collide on a freeway, a tree falls on a jogger, lightning hits a golfer. Others require a chain of events, each of which is unlikely, and so are much rarer than the simple kind. The sequence of occurrences, each one fairly harmless by itself, which led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor on last Tuesday, March 26, included things that by themselves would cause few if any major problems.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Ida Gazzola |Valerie Hudson
The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed US legislation. One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30.
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Valerie Hudson |Michael Cook |James Bradshaw
Charles C. W. Cooke seems to think so. Cooke, a writer for National Review whose opinions and style I have great respect for, opines in the April 2024 issue that using Federal power to keep minors off social media is a bad idea. He concedes there is a real problem: bullying, pornography use, depression, and suicide are all results of teenagers and even younger people accessing social media.
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Feb 13, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Barbara Kay |David Thunder |Mathew Otieno
Back in June of 2023, Apple announced its Vision Pro, which the Wikipedia article about it calls a "mixed reality" headset. This week, in some parts of the world, you can now buy your own Vision Pro — for $3,500. While this will not be an obstacle for wealthy early adopters, the rest of us will probably wait until the beta-version bugs are worked out and the price comes down. In the meantime, we can think about what this means for the future of humanity.
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Jan 7, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Kurt Mahlburg |Louis March
In the United States, fears of widespread hacking causing major national disruptions have so far been mostly unfounded. There have been isolated foreign-based attacks on infrastructure here and there, but no one has so far been able to disrupt an important nationwide system deliberately for political reasons. Iran hasn't been so fortunate.
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Dec 10, 2023 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Michael Cook |Sofia Hörder
When my wife and I took a short vacation down to the Gulf Coast in October, we used part of a day to visit the Texas State Aquarium in the North Beach part of Corpus Christi. To get there, we had to take the (old) Harbour Bay Bridge that crosses a large industrial canal through which pass tankers going to the main industry of Corpus Christi, which is oil refining. That bridge was built in 1959, and about twenty years ago, plans began to be made for a new bridge.
