Ecosia 🌍

What is Ecosia?

Simply put, Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees with its profits.

💻📱 👉 💷💲 👉 🌱🌳

Which Search Engine Does Ecosia Use?

Ecosia is an organisation and search engine in its own right, but its results are powered by Microsoft Bing. Bing itself is carbon neutral and the whole of Microsoft are looking to go green by committing to be carbon negative by 2030.

How Green is Ecosia?

Ecosia recognise the impact the internet has on the environment of our planet. Ecosia runs on renewable energy, meaning your searches aren’t negatively impacting the planet.

“If the internet were a country it would rank #3 in the world in terms of electricity consumption” – Ecosia, 2018

In fact, searching with Ecosia is actually positively impacting the planet, with each search removing CO2 from the atmosphere. How? Because they plant trees with their profits.

As mentioned above, Bing (which powers Ecosia) is carbon neutral, so searching using Ecosia is a win-win from the perspective of your carbon footprint 👣

How Does Ecosia Make Money?

Like Google, Ecosia don’t make money from search results, they make their revenue from the ads that sit alongside the results.

Every time you click on an advert on Ecosia, you contribute to their revenue, which ultimately leads to trees being planted somewhere around the world

Ecosia tree tracker

They have a helpful counter on their search results to show you how many trees you’ve personally contributed towards.

So far they have planted over 100 million trees worldwide, supporting projects in 15 countries.

Why am I Promoting Ecosia?

The reason I wrote this article is because I think Ecosia awesome. They’re an organisation trying really hard to do the right thing and they’re clearly having an impact.

Congrats Ecosia on your success and thank you for what you’re doing for the world 🙏🎉🎊

Ecosia.org 🌍 give it a go 😊

Hacker Cultures

EASST

The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology held its annual conference in August, and a veritable feast of information it turned out to be (as is their website).

In particular though I would like to point readers towards a podcast series, based upon a panel held during the conference.

The podcast series is called Hacker Cultures. From the website:

This year, Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. This series comes to you from the 2020 joint Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference, titled “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds” which took place from August 18th-21st. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, the Hacker Cultures panel rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. The hosts of this podcast are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, and Mace Ojala, a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen. On-site recording and production was done by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme song is titled “Rocky” by Paula & Karol. Funding for the editing of this podcast comes from the University of St. Gallen.

The episodes are in the style of an interview rather than a lecture, easy to follow and really interesting.

What is on Offer?

Episode 1: Morgan G. Ames – Throwback Culture: The Role of Nostalgia in Hacker Worlds
Episode 2: Minna Saariketo & Mareike Gloss – In the grey zone of hacking? Two cases in the political economy of software and the Right to Repair
 Episode 3: Annika Richterich – Forget about the learning: On (digital) creativity and expertise in hacker-/makerspaces
 Episode 4: Alex Dean Cybulski – Hacker Culture Is Everything You Don’t Get Paid For In the Information Security Industry
 Episode 5: Jeremy Grosman – Algorithmic Objects, Algorithmic Practices
 Episode 6: Stephane Couture – Hacker Culture and Practices in the Development of Internet Protocols
 Episode 7: Ola Michalec – Hacking infrastructures: understanding capabilities of Operational Technology (OT) security workers
 Episode 8: Sylvain Besencon – Securing by hacking: maintenance regimes around an end-to-end encryption standard
 Episode 9: R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard – ‘I didn’t sign up for this’: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communities

Really entertaining, informative and featuring lots of well known experts, 15 to 20 minutes each, well worth a browse.

The Past, 20/20 and FUTURE of ICT Standardisation 2 – 3 September 2020

The Future of ICT Standardization

If you are free this week, why not register for the Standards and Innovation in Information Technology Conference? The event is online, takes place on 2 and 3 September, and is free!

The conference is made up of six online panel discussions on important current topics, featuring lots of well-known experts. Issues addressed will include (but not be limited to) the role of ICT standardization in combatting Covid-19, the question of whether Standardization can help ensure fair competition with the tech giants, global trade and digital trade barriers, Big Data, AI and inclusivity.

This is a conference of the highest level, so it should be extremely informative and provide good debate.

Registration is available here.

Overview of the Panels and Presenters:The Role of ICT Standardisation in Combatting Covid-19


Time and Date: 2 September 2020, 15.30 – 16.30 CEST, 6.30am – 7.30am US PDT
Organiser: Jochen Friedrich, IBM, DE
Panellists:
Emilio Davila Gonzalez, European Commission, BE
Edgar Guillot, Orange (Chair, ETSI E4P project), FR
Jenny Wanger, Linux Foundation, US
Zhou Ping, CESI, CN
Experience panel:
Frank Karlitschek, NextCloud, DE
Alexandre Zapolsky, Linagora, FR

The Future of Intellectual Property and Standards — What Do the Data Tell Us?
Time and Date: 2 September 2020, 17.00 – 18.30 CEST, 8.00am – 9.30am US PDT
Organiser: Jorge Contreras, U. of Utah, US
Panellists:
Justus Baron, Northwestern U., US
Rudi Bekkers, TU Eindhoven, NL
Tim Pohlmann, IPlytics, DE
Tim Simcoe, Boston U., US
Tom Cotter, U. of Minnesota, US

Can API Standardisation Ensure Fair Competition with the Tech Giants?
Time and Date: 2 September 2020, 19.00 – 20.30 CEST, 10.00am – 11.30am US PDT.
Organiser: Ken Krechmer, Isology, US
Panellists:
Joe Decuir, University of Washington, US
Kalle Lyytinen, CWR U., US
David Reed, U. Colorado Boulder, US
Jill Van Matre Dupré, U. Colorado Boulder, US

Standards and Global Trade: TBT vs. Digital Trade Barriers?
Time and Date: 3 September 2020, 15.00 – 16.15 CEST 6.00am – 7.15am US PDT.
Organiser: Donggeun Choi, KSA, KR
Panellists:
Gloria Pasadilla, Leadership Design Studio Pte Ltd., SG
Joshua Paul Meltzer, Brookings Institution, USA
Heejin Lee, Yonsei U., KR
Devin McDaniels, WTO, CH

Big Data and AI Standards as Contributors to UN SDGs
Time and Date: 3 September 2020, 16.30 – 17.30 CEST, 7.30am – 8.30am US PDT (pending confirmation).
Organiser: Ray Walshe, DCU, IE
Panellists:
Ray Walshe – Dublin City University, IE
Paul Foran – Huawei Ireland Research Center, IE
Satyam Priyadarshy, Halliburton, US
Tomas Malik, UNECE, CH (tbc)

Re-designing Standardisation for Inclusivity
Time and Date: 3 September 2020, 18.00 – 19.30 CEST 9.00am – 10.30am US PDT.
Organiser: Carl Cargill, US
Panellists:
Wendy Seltzer, W3C, US
Linda Garcia, Georgetown U., US
Michael Spring, U. Pittsburgh, US