- A hundred and nineteen things a punkist should know. [http://www.punk.ist]
- Firewood will save the West. [Unherd] “Our dysfunctional society must return to the hearth.”
- ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes. [NYT] “When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all.”
- Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. [Nature] “We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
- Assessing the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in the residential sector gas consumption through dynamic treatment effects: Evidence from England and Wales. [Energy Economics] “This paper disentangles the long-lasting effects of energy efficiency technical improvements in UK residential buildings. The installation of energy efficiency measures is associated with short-term reductions in residential gas consumption. Energy savings disappear between two and four years after retrofitting by loft insulation and cavity wall insulation, respectively. The disappearance of energy savings in the longer run could be explained by the energy performance gap, the rebound effect and/or by concurrent residential construction projects and renovations associated with increases in energy consumption. Notably, for households in deprived areas, the installation of these efficiency measures does not deliver energy savings.”
- Mapping Four Decades of Appropriate Technology Research: A Bibliometric Analysis from 1973 to 2021. [Sains Humanika] “The purpose of the study is to examine the publication trends, collaborative structures, and central themes in appropriate technology studies.”
- Life in the Slow Lane. [Longreads] “Cooking all day while the cook is away. How the slow cooker changed the world.”
- Can a Robot Shoot an Olympic Recurve Bow? A preliminary study. [National Taiwan Normal University]
- Amnesty, Yes—And Here is the Price. [Charles Eisenstein] “The invisible workings of the Covid machine must be laid bare if we are to prevent something similar from happening again.”
- Reduce, re-use, re-ride: Bike waste and moving towards a circular economy for sporting goods. [International Review for the Sociology of Sport] “This study focuses on the bike and its role in global waste accumulation through various forms of planned obsolescence.”
- Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System. [International Center on Nonviolent Conflict]
- Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions. [Cleaner Production Letters]
- Radical online collections and archives. [New Historical Express]
No Tech Reader #35
January 5, 2023 by Filed Under: Archery, Bicycles, Bikes, Books & Reference, Communication, Cooking stoves, Economy, Energy efficiency, Energy efficiency paradox, Fire, Gadgets, Health, No Tech Readers, Phones, Technology, Warfare
No Tech Reader #33
June 14, 2022 by Filed Under: No Tech Readers
- Western Architecture is Making India’s Heatwaves Worse. [Time]
- Could Google’s Carbon Emissions Have Effectively Doubled Overnight? [The New Yorker]
- When Cities Made Monuments to Traffic Deaths. [Bloomberg] Via Aaron Vansintjan.
- Can Dryland Farming Help Growers Endure Increasing Heatwaves and Drought? + A Guide to Drought-Resilient Farm Animals + 10 Drought-Tolerant Crops to Plant Amid Water Scarcity. [Modern Farmer]
- How the Amish Use Technology. [Wired] Via Bradley Stroot.
No Tech Reader #32: Sustainable Computing
May 18, 2022 by Filed Under: Computers, Internet, No Tech Readers
- Digital sufficiency: conceptual considerations for ICTs on a finite planet, Tilman Santarius et al., Annals of Telecommunication, 2022.
- Permacomputing. Viznut, 2021.
- What might degrowth computing look like? Neil Selwyn, 2022.
- Solar Witch. A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day. More at hackernews.
- What if the internet was only available 95% of the time? Interview with Kris De Decker about the solar powered website. Inside/Out Radio, April 2022.
- The Website Carbon Calculator thinks the solar powered website is run by fossil fuels….
- What It’s Like To Stop Using Google Search, Clive Thompson, 2022.
- The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud. The MIT Press Reader, February 2022
- Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time. Vice, September 2021
- The Modos Paper Laptop. More at Hackernews.
No Tech Reader #31
May 5, 2022 by Filed Under: Digital technology, Internet, No Tech Readers, Politics, Repair
- The Technocrat’s Dilemma — Expert rule is destroying itself. Alexander Stern, The New Atlantis, April 2022. “Technocrats, when they speak in public, use the rhetoric of objective, neutral, scientific knowledge to justify policy decisions that are not — cannot be — fully “based on science”.”
- In the dark: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent. Rest of World, Peter Guest, April 2022. “The free, open, global internet is under severe threat. Blackouts and mass censorship risk fragmenting the internet and even undermining its physical integrity.”
- Their bionic eyes are now obsolete and unsupported. IEEE Spectrum, Eliza Strickland & Mark Harris, February 2022. “More than 350 blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget.”
- In the Battle Over the Right to Repair, Open-Source Tractors Offer an Alternative. Greta Moran, Civil Eats, April 2022. “The idea is to create more regional, country-level manufacturing for farm equipment, rather than having farmers rely on the major global manufacturers whose sales don’t benefit the local economy.”
No Tech Reader #30
November 23, 2021 by Filed Under: Meat, No Tech Readers, Science
- Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. [The Counter] “It’s a fable driven by hope, not science, and when the investors finally realize this the market will collapse.”
- A world without Sci-Hub. [Palladium] “The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars.”
- Manufacturing Consensus. [The New Atlantis] “We hear constantly today, and rightly enough, that trust in scientific expertise is under assault. Too often during Covid, the assailants have been the experts themselves.”