Features

Human-centered design, sometimes also called human-computer interaction or engineering psychology, teaches the importance of prioritizing the needs, desires, and behaviors of people when building technology. Professionals in this discipline are usually called user experience (UX) practitioners.

Diversity and inclusivity aren’t purely idealistic goals. A growing body of research shows that greater diversity, particularly within executive teams, is closely correlated with greater profitability. Today’s businesses are highly incentivized to identify a diverse pool of top talent, but they’ve still struggled to achieve it. Recent advances in AI could help.

First proposed by computer scientist Nick Szabo in the 1990s and later pioneered by the Ethereum blockchain in 2010, smart contracts are programs that execute themselves when certain predetermined conditions are met.

Ideally, much of the world’s plastic would end up recycled into new products. In practice, that’s not the case. According to one estimate, the planet’s 9.2 billion tons of plastic has resulted in 6.9 billion tons of waste, of which 6.3 billion was never recycled.

Plastics Free July (PFJ) is an initiative of the Plastic Free Foundation, led by Rebecca Prince-Ruiz and a small team in local government in Western Australia. Celebrating its ten-year anniversary, PFJ aims to reduce the use of single-use plastics and as a result, to inspire habits that will ideally last beyond the 30 days of the challenge. Participants are encouraged to start with reducing the use of the top four: plastic bottles, bags, beverage containers, and straws.

Today, there is a wide array of professional, industry-specific media outlets for cryptocurrency news, research, and analysis. But sometimes it can be hard to know who to trust when it comes to the trustless transactions of cryptocurrency.

Over 45 percent of all Americans live with unhealthy air. According to the 2020 State of the Air report, the situation has been getting worse, year after year. An increasing number of Americans are living in communities impacted by unhealthy levels of pollution, more particle pollution days, and higher annual particle levels. As a changing climate threatens our ability to protect human health, significant action is needed from policymakers, professionals, corporations, and the general public.

April is Math and Statistics Awareness Month, a time to raise both awareness and appreciation of mathematics and statistics. There’s a lot to appreciate. Math and statistics are the undergirding force of our modern world: they power our technology, our economy, and our society.

Done right, computer engineering has put Americans on the moon with less computing power than one of today’s dishwashers. Done wrong, it’s caused two commercial airliners of incredible complexity to tragically crash into the ground after takeoff.

If you’re a soon-to-be-graduated systems engineer, the question isn’t whether you’ll receive competitive job offers, the question is which one you’ll accept. But the most hyped companies in the mainstream media aren’t necessarily the best companies to work for.