Bobby Miller
Writer Website
Practical Technology
Fight World Hunger from Your Computer: How Free Rice’s Trivia Saves Lives
800 words
With climate change, world hunger, poverty and too many fatal illnesses to list, it can feel overwhelming to think about all the issues we need to address. Some people who look at everything wrong with the world assume there’s so little they can do that they end up doing nothing—or perhaps they “like” a charity on Facebook and leave it at that. However, small contributions to worthy causes can change lives, even if it’s one life at a time.
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Innovative Pet Care: Everything from a Tweeting Cat Collar
to a Poop Identification Program
1,800 words
It’s no secret that we love our pets. According to the American Pet Products Association, Americans were estimated to spend about $47.7 billion on their pets in 2010. We want what’s best for them, whether it’s in the form of a toy, a device that lets us take care of them better, or a new medical advancement to treat their illnesses. Luckily, new pet-related products are always being released, giving us a wider variety of options to choose from as we care for our pets. Here are some that have caught our eye.
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You Have the Right to Innovate: Policing Technology
1,400 words
Violent crime in the United States has been declining since 2008, according to CNN. Although this could be attributed to a number of factors, one of the main deterrents of crime is an effective police force. As is the case for many other professions, technology is continually changing the policing field. From seemingly simple apps for officers and citizens to flying cameras, a number of tools have emerged to help police departments keep their areas safe.
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How Smart is a Smart Gun?
2,500 words
. . .
Researchers want to prevent children from using misplaced firearms and stop criminals from using ones that they have stolen. With these incidents in mind, various gun manufacturers and tech companies have invested in “personalized firearms,” which are sometimes called childproof guns, user-authorized handguns or smart guns. The National Institute of Justice explains that a smart gun is one with safety mechanisms designed to recognize the authorized user. It will fire if the correct person is using it, but will refuse to activate if the incorrect person somehow gets their hands on it. Our government believes that smart gun development is essential to making firearms safer. From the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, the NIJ invested over $11 million in smart gun research.
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SurveyMonkey: How Dave Goldberg’s Website Helps Businesses and Charities
1,100 words
. . .
The website is relatively simple. If you’re part of a business or research group that needs people to answer surveys on just about any subject imaginable, then you can have SurveyMonkey distribute your questions to eligible participants. You can see how answers tend to vary among demographics such as age, race, gender and location, which can be valuable for a business trying to figure out what its target audience wants.
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No More Heavy Backpacks: The Pros and Cons of Digital Textbooks
1,300 words
Two years ago, Dave Johnston, a marine biologist at Duke University, had the idea to produce a digital textbook for students. In an e-mail, he said that it felt wrong to ask students to buy five different textbooks for one class, especially considering only certain parts of each were used. He also believed that creating an interactive book would help students become more deeply involved with the material. Better yet, an e-textbook could be updated immediately with recent findings, something important in a field where discoveries are constantly being made. Thanks to technical expertise and free authoring systems such as Apple’s iAuthor, the project came to fruition and is being maintained to this very day under the name Cachalot (French for “sperm whale”).
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