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‘I couldn’t stop myself’: inside the 12-step program for internet addiction | Technology

‘I couldn’t stop myself’: inside the 12-step program for internet addiction | Technology

“Hi, my name is Sarah* and I am an internet and technology addict.”

So began a meeting on a recent Wednesday afternoon, as 18 people quietly gathered on a Zoom call. Text in their small video boxes showed they hailed from locations as disparate as Oregon, India and Namibia.

Sarah and the other attendees are part of a growing fellowship called Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, a 12-step program based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous that provides tools and support to deal with compulsive internet use. It launched with just a few founding US groups in 2017 and has quickly grown to have thousands of members around the world, with more than 100 online and in-person meetings in seven different languages.

Since Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, its 12 steps have been adapted for addictions and compulsive behaviors including overeating, overspending and gambling. Now the traditionally abstinence-based

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Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology

Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology

By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican Senator Todd Young on the subject of AI regulation. He’d endured a joke, repeated too many times by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, about the subject of his next film—“It’s another biopic: Schumer.”

The award was sitting on an end table next to Nolan, who was dressed in brown slacks, a gray vest, and a navy suit jacket—his Anglo-formality undimmed by decades spent living in Los Angeles. “It’s heavy,

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Fuel cell technology can be made much more efficient thanks to immersion in caffeine, much like myself and the rest of the planet

Fuel cell technology can be made much more efficient thanks to immersion in caffeine, much like myself and the rest of the planet

Fuel cells are one of those technological developments, a bit like nuclear fusion, that occasionally show promise but always seem at least a few major steps away from becoming a reality in day-to-day life. However, Japanese researchers seem to have made some major developments in the efficiency of the tech, thanks to that wonderful, magical substance, caffeine.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan have published a study in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, detailing their discovery that the addition of caffeine to platinum electrodes in fuel cells lessens the obstruction of efficient oxygen reaction. 

Currently the presence of water affects the performance of fuel cells by reacting with platinum catalysts, meaning that fuel cells need to make use of a substantial amount of platinum, a particularly valuable substance to maintain an effective reaction.

By immersing the platinum electrodes in an electrolyte solution containing caffeine,

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Three technology pain points to address for your employees

Three technology pain points to address for your employees

Technology leaders and CIOs have a lot on their shoulders. The still-evolving world of hybrid work has technology at its core to help cope with fast-changing business demands. As a result, all business leaders are finding that their roles are expanding with opportunities to drive progressive digital-first programs.

For some companies, the transformation was so rapid that they didn’t have the time to fully vet solutions and changes to processes. As a result, not all digital initiatives have been without flaws. Adobe’s Future of Digital Work Study, which surveyed 4,500 technology leaders and workers, found a near-unanimous number of employees (87%) and tech leaders (89%) acknowledge that poor technologies are hurting the company’s productivity. More than half of tech leaders (58%) went as far as to say that poor tech is “killing” their company’s productivity and costing them between two to four hours a day in lost productivity.

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Townships track road salt, sand like gold using modern technology

Townships track road salt, sand like gold using modern technology

‘We’ve been experiencing an increase in freeze-and-thaw cycles and that’s driving our material usage,’ said Oro-Medonte Township official

Every autumn, Ontario municipalities prepare for winter’s onslaught by buying up thousands of tonnes of sand and salt that will eventually be used to keep roadways and highways clear and free of treacherous ice.

This winter, Oro-Medonte, Essa and Springwater townships will spend about three quarters of a million dollars, combined, on sand and salt.

They track it as if it were gold.

Using modern technology, virtually every ounce of material can be tracked and the efficiency of the sand and salt program can be evaluated at almost any time. Plows are equipped with either a global positioning system (GPS) or an automated vehicle location (AVL) system and electronically controlled spreaders.

“We use computerized spreader control, which allows us to manage how much material we are putting down and where we are

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