Rick Docksai's blog

Moving files and programs into clouds sounds great, but how secure will they be? Business and organization leaders everywhere are asking this, and many remain undecided on the answer. They wonder whether they really should trust the cloud with their most sensitive records.

Cloud computing made big strides forward in 2012, and if a host of industry experts proves correct, it will make even bigger advances in 2013.

Hold a mobile phone and you hold a piece of the biggest technological and learning platform in history—and incidentally, it’s a platform that’s revolutionizing life in general around the world.

Tape recorders, portable music players, digital cameras—mobile phones and their apps are already substituting for, or even replacing, many such products that used to be ubiquitous in everyday life. Don’t be surprised if they soon stand in for car keys and credit cards, as well.

Chemical toxins are an increasingly serious threat to human and environmental health worldwide, according to Global Chemicals Outlook, a report that the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released on September 5.

Although digital divides between the world’s industrialized and developing areas loom large, development experts are finding ways to cross them.

A huge step forward for family planning worldwide took place Wednesday, July 11, in London, where more than 200 leaders of the world’s governments, foundations, corporations, and nonprofit groups convened and committed a whopping $2.6 billion over the next eight years toward provision of contraceptive supplies, services, and information throughout developing-world communities.

A remote village in Kenya may be hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, so what can its villagers do when one of their own comes down with a serious medical condition? That’s where point-of-care tests (POCTs)—portable devices that can diagnose patients on-site for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, heart disease, and many other illnesses—come in.

The world has gained ground on some serious environmental problems but is stuck or is losing ground on many others. A renewed effort by the whole global community is humanity and the Earth’s only hope. This was the consensus of a UN Environment Programme official, a U.S.

“I think envisioning the future is very much at the root of what we do as science-fiction writers,” said Steve Wilson, author of the SF science-fiction audio series The Arbiter Chronicles. “We look at the world today and pick our own piece of it—say, technology—and what it will do Earth, or to society, or to us as humans.”