Designing Green Cities of the Future

We may all conjure up different images when we try to think what cities in the future will look like, say 20, 50, or 100 years from now. For the optimistically minded, these cities may be idyllic, clean, hi-tech, and utopian, while for the more pessimistic among us, such cities may look bleak, barren, in…

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Asteroid Mining and Capitalism in Space

Asteroid mining is the exploitation of raw materials from asteroids and bringing these resources back to Earth. With an exponentially rising global population, precious resources are quickly becoming depleted. Luckily, asteroids contain many materials that we need and so mining them could set us on the path to a sustainable future. There are, however, some…

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The Ethical, Psychological, and Social Implications of Mass Surveillance

In 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the British spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), tapped fibre-optic cables for access to our personal communications (including emails, Facebook posts, internet histories, and phone calls), and then shared this information with the National Security Agency (NSA), the major spy agency in the US. The Snowden…

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Is Social Media Activism Effective?

Social media activism involves using channels such as Twitter and Facebook to promote some sort of positive campaign, whether it relates to equality, human rights, animal rights, environmental protection, or physical and mental health. Such activism often relies on the use of trending hashtags, which has been dubbed hashtag activism. Social media users will include…

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Automation Could Mean the End of the McJob

The term ‘McJob’ applies to any job that is low-skilled, low-paying, unstimulating, and has few prospects. We might call these dead-end jobs. Author Douglas Copeland popularised the term McJob in his novel Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture (1991), which conveys the struggles of Gen Xers, those born in the 60s to early 80s.…

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