An evening with Peter Klein – Emmy-award journalist and former producer of CBS 60 Minutes

Blake Sebastian on February 3, 2016

 

Watch IdeasXChange present the 2016 Meet & Greet evening with guest speaker Peter Klein.

An Emmy-Award Winning Journalist and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, Klein discusses his experience as an investigative journalist and talks about the importance of dialogue between people of different backgrounds and disciplines.

He is also a former producer of CBS News 60 Minutes and in 2009, alongside his colleagues he started the International Reporting Program (IRP) – a UBC project that reports on under-covered global issues around the world.

He is currently turning the IRP into the Global Reporting Centre (GRC), a non-profit organization that follows a similar vision – highlighting important and neglected stories worldwide. The GRC partners with leading reporters and media organizations to produce solutions-oriented journalism.

The IRP’s first project resulted in the Frontline and WORLD documentary investigation, which looked into the international electronic waste trade, earning Klein and his class an Emmy for the Best Investigative Newsmagazine.

Pluto’s frozen wonderland like never seen before

Blake Sebastian on December 9, 2015

NASA has released its sharpest images of Pluto’s frozen wonderland to date. The photos taken from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured resolutions between 250 to 280 feet per pixel – meaning the images reveal areas smaller than half a city block.

The super high-resolution images of the dwarf planet were taken during New Horizons July flyby.

The above video is composed of the images captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July flyby.

The photos captured an 80 kilometre wide strip starting at Pluto’s horizon as seen from the spacecraft, to the shoreline of an icy plain known as Sputnik.

“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth,” said John Grunsfeld in a statement, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Image: Pluto’s ‘Badlands’ showing how erosion and faulting have sculpted this icy crust into rugged badlands on Pluto’s surface. Courtesy of: NASA.

The images were captured with the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

Image: Pluto’s Layered Craters and Icy Plains. Courtesy of: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

It took previous spacecrafts decades to capture images at this resolution of Venus and Mars, but took New Horizons only less than five months to capture images at this sharpness of Pluto.

Scientists expect more images of the icy terrain over the next several days.

Students can learn coding with a new $5 computer

Blake Sebastian on December 1, 2015

You can now buy a computer for the price of one beer.

The UK-based Raspberry Pi Foundation – a charity promoting the study of basic computer science to schools – announced the Raspberry Pi Zero, a tiny computer at the cost of $5 USD or about $7 CDN. The first one they first announced was about $33 CDN.

CEO of Raspberry Pi Eben Upton said in a video when he was a child, the high cost of computers where a real barrier for him trying to learn about computers, ”really what we are trying to do with Raspberry Pi is to make sure that cost is never going to be a barrier to anyone who is interested in getting involved in coding.”

The tiny computer has half a gig a ram, an HDMI connector, and SD card and USB slot – allowing users to connect a keyboard, screen and mouse. It also runs applications like Minecraft, Scratch and Sonic Pi.

Raspberry PI has manufactured several tens of thousands Raspberry Pi Zero units so far.

As much as Eben would like to provide free computers, he says they aren’t going to go any cheaper in the foreseeable future, “we’ve gone from the cost of, let’s say four lattes to one latte.”

Study says envy is the main motivator behind Facebook posts

Blake Sebastian on November 30, 2015

A study by the University of British Columbia says jealousy and self-importance drives Facebook users to portray their best selves through their posts.

Researchers say this cycle of comparison with others leads to a decrease in metal well-being.

“Social media participation has been linked to depression, anxiety and narcissistic behaviour, but the reasons haven’t been well-explained,” says Sauder School of Business Professor Izak Benbasat. “We found envy to be the missing link.”

According to Benbasat, travel photos cause the most Facebook envy, pushing friends to posts their best pictures. He says the posts aren’t fueled by the need to compete, but rather the need to keep up appearances.

Benbasat and his team of collaborators from the Sauder School of Business led the study. The team surveyed about 1,000 Facebook users from a German university then asked the students a series of questions about their Facebook habits – cross-referencing their responses with the feelings they reported when using the site.

Image courtesy of: Flickr

“Sharing pictures and stories about the highlights of your life – that’s so much of what Facebook is for, so you can’t take that away… but I think it’s important for people to know what impact it can have on their well-being,” says Benbasat.

Thousands attend climate march in downtown Vancouver

Blake Sebastian on November 30, 2015

Thousands attended the Global Climate March in Vancouver filling the streets with messages to world leaders who have arrived in Paris.

The UN climate summit kicks off on Monday where discussions on national limits of greenhouse gas emissions will arise.

People began gathering in the early afternoon in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery then marched throughout the downtown core. Climate change activists held protests across many cities.

Check out how some people described the events on Twitter: