I met my first drone playing Call Of Duty: Black Ops. In the game, you can control one of these unmanned flying vehicles to hover and fire missiles to destroy enemy territory. In real life we also associate drones with death from above. The news constantly reminds us of their destructive power, but at a recent Brains and Beakers, Youth Radio’s science-speaker series, Chris Anderson demonstrated how drones can be constructive too.
It’s easy to find alarming evidence that we’ve lost our way when it comes to civics in the US. But longtime global activist and MIT prof Ethan Zuckerman says there’s a lot to get excited about too, if we’re willing to think in new ways about what it even means to be civically engaged in the digital age.
“How Long Will I Cry: Voices of Youth Violence” is a new play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. The play depicts young people who were involved with gangs, and participated in or were victims of street violence. It follows the true stories of young people in Chicago.
ProPublica is still the cool new kid in investigative journalism— less than five years in the game, and they’ve got the best toys, plenty of talent, and everyone wants to be their friend. And that doesn’t just apply to journalists. The investigative journalism outfit’s big data projects draw interest from programmers too. That’s why the Engineering and Computer Science departments at UC Berkeley asked Jeff Larson from ProPublica’s News Applications team, to talk about the new ways that coding is helping tell stories.
It is truly heartbreaking to post article after article chronicling the decimation of an entire generation – my generation – to gun violence. As a blogger in Chicago, I’ve written headlines like “Shirley Chambers Loses Fourth Child to Gun Violence,” “19 Shot Overnight; 13 Wounded in Just 30 Minutes,” and “Hadiya Pendleton, Teen Who Performed At Obama Inauguration, Shot and Killed on South Side.”
Students from Redwood High School in Redwood City, Calif. collaborated with teacher/musician Tom McFadden to make a rap music video that teaches a science lesson.
Could video games save the environment? Maybe with the right video game, and that’s what Greg Niemeyer is trying to build. Niemeyer specializes in digital art, and his most recent work focuses on games that seek and support cultural change. He’s an assistant professor for new media at UC Berkeley, and presented at the last Brains and Beakers event, Youth Radio’s quarterly science lecture series.
As a college student, I love this whole phenomenon of the “sharing economy.” That’s the term economists use to define a community of people who freely share and swap resources, often managed online through websites or forums. Turns out, actually paying for stuff, or just throwing it out, is so 2011–if you can share it instead.
Facebook says you’ve got to be at least 13 to sign-up, yet there are millions of underage users, giving away…
