All Articles Tagged "politics and technology"
Obama Answers Viewers’ Questions in YouTube Interview
(Washington Post) — YouTube chose from more than 140,000 questions submitted from viewers about a range of subjects, from the recent unrest in Egypt and Tunisia to the future of American competitiveness. Obama repeated many of his marquee lines from the State of the Union address, responding to a question about what subjects students should be learning: The United States is “going to have to out-build, out-educate, out-innovate every other country.”
Clooney, Google, UN Team Up to Watch Sudan Border
(AP) — A group founded by American actor George Clooney said Tuesday it has teamed up with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war after the south votes in a secession referendum next month. Clooney’s Not On Our Watch is funding the start-up phase Satellite Sentinel Project that will collect real-time satellite imagery and combine it with field analysis from the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, organizers said. The data will point out movements of troops, civilians and other signs of impending conflict. The U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Program and Google will then publish the findings online.
The Mayor of Twitter and Superhero of the Blizzard
(Time) — After a blizzard started blanketing the Northeast on Dec. 26, an event that earned the Twitter hashtag #snowpocalypse, Booker turned the microblogging site into a public-service tool. Residents of the city, which has a population of around 280,000, swarmed Booker’s account (@CoryBooker) with requests for help, and the mayor responded. He and his staff have bounced around Newark shoveling streets and sending plows to areas where residents said they were still snowed in. “Just doug [sic] a car out on Springfield Ave and broke the cardinal rule: ‘Lift with your Knees!!’ I think I left part of my back back there,” he reported in one message. One person let Booker know, via Twitter, that the snowy streets were preventing his sister from buying diapers. About an hour later, Booker was at the sister’s door, diapers in hand.
