Professor Timothy Snyder

In an interview with German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder located some of the Donald Trump hysteria in a historical context. In particular, Snyder touched on Trump’s actions in the first three weeks of his administration, as well as what to expect moving forward.

President Trump has jumped right into the presidency these last few weeks, issuing executive orders left and right. Snyder explained, “the institutions have not thus far restrained him. He never took them seriously, acts as if they don’t exist, and clearly wishes they didn’t.”

While many Americans believed that the democratic institutions that are presently in place would rein in the president’s actions, Snyder said, “It is all about him all of [the] time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions.” Snyder also noted that Trump doesn’t actually seem to care about the institutions of American democracy at all, and instead has treated institutions and the law “as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism.”

Snyder is not the only intellectual to draw connections between Trump’s actions as […]

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EHang is building the world’s first ‘Autonomous Aerial Vehicle’ for transporting people. The head of Dubai’s Roads & Transportation Agency announced at the World Government Summit on Monday that the drone would be flying by July
Credit: AP

A Chinese drone maker has revealed a giant quadcopter big enough to fit a passenger will be buzzing through the Dubai skyline in July.  Dubbed EHang 184, the drone is described as the world’s first ‘Autonomous Aerial Vehicle’ for transporting people.  The rider punches in a destination on a touch screen in front of the passenger seat, then the drone would fly there automatically.  (emphasis added)

Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) is building 1,000 charging stations and helping to turn a Midwestern metropolitan area into one of the fastest-growing electric vehicle markets in the country.
Credit: Andrea Hsu/NPR

In the world of electric cars, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: More people might buy electric vehicles, or EVs, if they were confident there would always be a charger nearby. And businesses might install more chargers if there were more EVs on the road.

Now, utilities are stepping forward to solve this problem, and not just in California or the Northeast. A $20 million project launched two years ago by investor-owned Kansas City Power & Light, whose service area straddles the Kansas-Missouri border, has turned a Midwestern metropolitan area into one of the fastest-growing electric vehicle markets in the country.

About 6% of the electricity generated in America is used to power air-conditioning systems that cool homes and offices. As countries such as Brazil, China and India grow richer, they will surely do likewise. Not only is that expensive for customers, it also raises emissions of greenhouse gases in the form both of carbon dioxide from burning power-station fuel and of the hydrofluorocarbons air conditioners use as refrigerants.

As they describe in a paper in this week’s Science, Ronggui Yang and Xiaobo Yin of the University of Colorado, in Boulder, have a possible alternative to all this. They have invented a film that can cool buildings without the use of refrigerants and, remarkably, without drawing any power to do so. Better yet, this film can be made using standard roll-to-roll manufacturing methods at a cost of around 50 cents a square metre.

The new film works by a process called radiative cooling. This takes advantage of that fact that Earth’s atmosphere allows certain wavelengths of heat-carrying infrared radiation to escape into space unimpeded. Convert unwanted heat into infrared of […]

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Credit: Scout

“This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go,” said professor Jonathan Albright.

Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle — a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas.

By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms […]

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