“The sleight of hand that focuses attention on technical solutions while covering up violations of the rights of real people is the moral tragedy of development today.”
William Easterly – Tyranny of Experts (p15)
Is new technology a panacea for solving global hunger, pollution, and poverty? Or is it shortsighted, wishful thinking to believe that humankind will develop technological solutions to free ourselves of our most intractable problems?
Many conversations that I have about the future, and the role of future tech, wind their way towards one of these two extremes. This dichotomy turns out to be counterproductive, coloring over important nuances that will shape our future.
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This is an article written for the Huffington Post.
Donald Trump may not like it, but addressing climate change is an issue that fits perfectly within Republican ideology.
Let me tell you why.
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10 reasons you need to care about climate change – regardless of your politics
Moving into the New Year, the global climate is in a state of disarray and uncertainty. 2015 looks to be the hottest year on record by a considerable margin, followed by 2014, with all of the top ten occurring post-1998. A powerful El Niño is already contributing to fierce droughts in southern and eastern Africa, while the UK and the Midwestern United States are submerged by extreme floods. On Christmas Eve, Central Park in New York City reached a high temperature of 72 degrees. Climate change is here.
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image source: http://research.kraeutli.com/
This is an older post originally written for the International Agriculture Colloquium - a student organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I’ve been thinking a bit about data. In agricultural development, much like nearly anything else, data-driven approaches are gaining increasing traction and are becoming essential prerequisites for funding and project success at nearly any scale. This being said, there are multiple significant challenges that sidecar our burgeoning capacity for generating and analyzing data. Today I’d like to talk about three of them.
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