User:NicSrennoc96

= Nicolas Conners  =

While I have always had an interest in environmental topics and what not, it wasn't until I took a handful of classes at De Anza that I was able to form more solid personal beliefs about environmentalism. The Carbon Xprize I chose deals with the capture and utilization of CO2 which has unfortunately taken the back seat to more flashy "Green" technology like grid-scale batteries and electric cars. Carbon Capture is a broad term because the technology can be scaled from individual industrial plants to region-wide efforts to clean the very air we breath; the captured carbon can be utilized in a variety of ways, most common is to inject the carbon underground for permanent storage or to turn the stored carbon into synthetic fuels for traditional usage.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a539765.pdf

The Office of Naval Research and the Palo Alto Research Center co-developed a system to extract carbon from seawater to create synthetic fuel aboard Navy ships using electrolysis; using seawater instead of direct air capture is crafty because carbon dioxide is at most 140 times more concentrated in water. The best part about this is that a small scale plant is operational in Key West Florida and recently received a patent in 2016, US #9303323. The Navy is primarily interested in this technology because it allows ships underway to create their own fuel using nuclear reactors instead of heading to a foreign port to refuel. The use of shipboard nuclear power allows a singular large vessel to produce fuel for the battlegroup instead of all vessels being nuclear powered, this can be a significant cost saving for the lifespan of a warship, which is now hovering around 35-50 years. The Navy estimates that their synfuel will cost $5.78 per gallon which sounds like a lot but in reality, traditional petroleum delivered by a tanker at sea costs roughly $7-10 dollars per gallon. As of now, the two things holding back this technology from commercialization is more funding for the expansion of the program and newer generations of nuclear power like Molten Salt or High Temp. gas turbine reactors; the new reactor technology is a necessity in order to meet the Navy's goal of 100,000 gallons of JP7 jet fuel per day.

https://www.carboncure.com/

Concrete is a material that is extremely taken for granted for in our modern world, it is so heavily used that concrete production account for 7% of global CO2 emissions; Carbon Cure is one solution to cutting back this massive amount of released carbon dioxide by capturing and injection the CO2 back into the concrete during the curing process, creating not only a net neutral carbon product but also a much stronger concrete than traditional Portland Cement. The company was founded in 2007 the goal to reduce carbon emissions by 15% in 2030, the company is also an Xprize finalist and received twenty million dollars in prize money; They believe that there is a $400 billion dollar market in the carbon enhanced concrete market, being able to sequester 1.4 gigatonnes of CO2 annually is just another benefit to this new process.

https://carbon.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/teams/c2cnt

C2CNT, another Xprize winner, is demonstrating the viability of sequestering CO2 into far more useful Carbon Nanotubes; carbon nanotubes, once considered science fiction and theoretical, are a stronger variation of carbon fibers that can be used in larger infrastructure projects. In much the same way that Biochar is a carbon-negative soil amendment replacer for fertilizer, these carbon nanotubes are a carbon negative structural material that can replace steel and other artificial building materials. The team at George Washington University has already demonstrated small scale success and is well on there to comercializing their research.

= Group 1 "Best" resources =

1. Introductions
1-1: Alternatives to Google - Ecosia ; Ecosia uses their add revenue to purchase trees to plant in developing nations like Ethiopia, Ecuador and Indonesia. It takes about 45 searches to purchase one young tree for planting and every user gets a personalized counter to see how many trees they've helped plant! https://www.ecosia.org/?c=en Best 

1-2: Community Service - https://www.bookshare.org/cms/ is a translation site for those born with learning disabilities like dyslexia or even blindness; volunteers can help edit books or even scan new books to add to their depository. I think it's really special to help volunteer so that others may have the opportunity to read.

2. Privacy and Freedom of Speech
2-1: Ad Blocker: https://adblockplus.org/ Ad Blockers can be used to stop annoying popups from appearing but also stopping funding for many sites and content creators. I personally do not use Ad Blockers but I can easily see the appeal to them, I think I mainly do not use blockers because I don't browse too many varied sites; for the sites I do browse I'd like to keep have a sustainable income for site upkeep and or other web needs. Best

2-2: Two Factor Authentication: https://authy.com/what-is-2fa/ Two FA is beyond simple passwords with a variety of characters, most commonly used are sms texts to our cellphone. Passwords are historically weak and most people simple reuse them in masse (Me)

3. Intellectual Property
3-1: Trademark - Trademarks are used to lock down names, phrases, logos and symbols to a original creator or owner, Trademarks are very similar to Copyrights as they both need to be claimed at the Patent Office which is a Federal branch of the Department of Commerce. Trademarks are important because they allow original works to be solely owned and monetized by their creator which incentivized more original works. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics Best

3-2:  Intellectual Philanthropy - IP is the ability to share knowledge for free, hence it's philanthropic. MITs "OpenCourseWare"  which is a repository of lectures, notes and exams freely available to the public with no registration. 70% of the professor at MIT provide material to the system that has been accessed by tens of millions globally. http://www.ccheac.com/intellectual-philanthropy-mits-opencourseware-an-interview-with-shigeru-miyagawa/

4. Crime
4-1: Crime - https://cointelegraph.com/news/cookieminer-malware-tries-to-hack-mac-users-cryptocurrency-exchange-accounts-report Cookieminer is an OSX malware designed to find personal crypto currency information by gathering info from cookies, iTunes and iOS sms's. OSX used be campaigned by Apple as unhackable unlike PC but it's 2019 and Apple software is now just as vulnerable as Windows.Best

4-2: Hacked, now what? - https://www.finder.com/bank-account-is-hacked  Bank hacking, to me, is the scariest form of hacking since I have always been cautious of my spending and investment habits; so that's why I posted a web resource page full of helpful tips to avoid fraud but also how to deal with the ultimate what ifs. Thankfully I have never had to deal with true account infiltration but I did recently deal with a fraudulent purchase on my credit; thankfully my bank refunded it and gave me a new card in under five days, I'm super grateful it went easy.

5. Employment, Education and Entertainment
5-1: Open Text Books - https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm Open Textbooks are a great way to reduce the financial barrier to an education, Merlot is an amazing site that hosts thousands of books available to all. It's ridiculous for single use textbooks to cost over $100 and it's even more ridiculous that schools force these book purchases on their students. Best

5-2: Assistive Technology -  https://mashable.com/2011/04/20/design-for-visually-impaired/#cIwP5ZT_YPq4 With recent laws like the ADA building codes have been forced to update their accessibility for all members of society; websites like buildings, should be equally accessible to all the world wide web. Future web design should take into account that a large minority of people need some special touches to make an GUI feel like home.

6. Midterm - Grand Challenges
6-1: CO2 - https://www.nrl.navy.mil/news/releases/nrl-seawater-carbon-capture-process-receives-us-patent A few years ago the Navy funded a demonstration to create jet fuel from capturing carbon from seawater; while the project was wildly successful, it was also energy intensive and really needs nuclear energy to function properly. Ideally in the future this carbon neutral fuel will be a common sight on large nuclear powered tanker ships but also shore nuclear facilities that will commingle alongside desalination, hydrogen production and other uses for high temperature process heat. Best

6-2: Adult literacy - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html Literacy rates in our shouldn't be a problem in our country period and yet it is, why? 32 million adults cannot read in our nation and that number hasn't improved in the past decade either, a very real travesty. Low literacy levels are linked to vast increases in crime and violence; is problem fixable by throwing money at it or do we have a cultural issue?

7. Evaluating and Controlling Technology
7-1: Machine Learning - https://www.shield.ai/content/2018/9/13/what-is-machine-intelligence Machine learning is the first step to AI, currently ML is confined to narrow programming for certain task but it is rapidly developing to become a social norm. Like anything related to AI's ML can hold a lot of dangers if a program decides to learn more than it's boundaries, but the pure convenience of automated thinking outweighs any of its woes. 

7-2: Internet of Things - https://www.techhive.com/article/3297744/smart-home-guide-for-beginners-how-to-make-your-home-more-convenient-to-live-in.html IoT is basically taking something "dumb" or simple like a light switch and turning it "smart" by adding bluetooth or an IR receptor etc. Another great example is Nest, a brand I have in my house, Nest is known for producing "smart" thermostats and smoke detectors that can be controlled through an app on your phone; Nest was also recently purchased by Google and there has been concerns that Nest equipment is being used to spy on it's users. The trade of security for convenience is an age old question and will continue to be pervasive for next several decades if not longer. Best 

8. Risks, Failures and Responsibilities
8-1: Conflict of Interest - https://otc.unc.edu/inventors/patents-copyrights-trademarks/conflicts-of-interest/ CoI occurs when revenue and ethics cross path, generally revenue or profits triumph over ethics. Specifically in technology, CoI has occurred with companies like Google and Facebook collecting information on it's user to better shape advertisement for greater revenue. The average user has no clue that their providers have mapped out an individual profile of interests which is packaged and sold to marketers. Best

8-2: Computers and Medicine - https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/robotic-surgery/about/pac-20394974 The future of medicine lies with robotics, specifically robotic surgery which claims to be less painful and invasive. These mechanical deft hands are already in use globally, with my father being on the receiving end for his kidney surgeries last year; Hopefully only good can come from these contraptions.

9. Anytime, Anywhere
9-1: Mobile Learning - Convenience, practicality and gamification are all ways to help the recent trend of mobile learning, which allows an education anytime and anywhere. Mobile learning is designed to be used with cell phones and tablets in mind allowing global coverage with 24/7 accessibility, the biggest draw to me is the personalization of a formalized education; the current generation of high schoolers will be able to take advantage of these much more than I.  https://elearningindustry.com/mobile-learning-trends-2018

9-2: E-voting - Electronic voting has the possibility to drastically reverse declining voter participation and yet when it has been implemented the numbers hardly move a few percentage points, why is that? Both the Swiss and Estonian population have access to electronic voting and while the youth do take advantage of these options the overall numbers remain steady and now with the increase threats of foreign hacking many other countries like the Netherlands are reversing the choice in E-voting, which now seems to be a wise move. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-15/election-hacking-bucking-the-trend-swiss-rely-on-online-voting Best

10. Technology Advances, Social Trends
10-1: Workplace automation -https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/ Replacement by robot is everyones greatest fear like finding your lover in bed with someone else, in this modern age of humanism to be replace by a machine makes one feel small and insignificant. Thankfully sci-fi robots are still decades or more away so there's no big rush to be worried, the wired article is quite candid with its facts; most easily understood is the ATM, the ATM allowed bank branches to be much cheaper to open so more job were created since more banks were opening. The one job that has been truly automated is the lonely elevator operator, much like the Pullman Porter it was a position for the lower class to achieve recognition among the better to dos. Best

10-2: Tech Awards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM49xEshtFs&list=PLy9Z_P3t7XMA7618-gDl7CI9UrSSvu7a6&index=7 Last week when I chose Angaza for my tech award I firmly believed in their message to provide abundant solar energy to villages that have never before had electricity and I still stand by my choice. There are over a billion with no access to electricity, just a few handle of solar panels could power communal water purification, lighting, heating and clothe washing; with all of the task automated then parents can truly begin to educate their children so that their country as a whole will develop to bountiful standards.