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Digital Planet: 29/05/2012

Factual: Science & Nature

29/05/2012

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, 29/05/2012

Author Andrew Keen on how today's online social revolution may be affecting us adversely

Author Andrew Keen discusses some possible adverse effects of social networking; Technological help for sailors with spinal cord injuries; CERN openlab – science data-crunching on a giant scale.

Andrew Keen discusses his new book Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us.  He warns that social networking could have adverse effects that have not have been properly considered by society. He questions whether our privacy, responsibility and freedom are being threatened. 

A team of sailors with spinal cord injuries in New Zealand are using a sailing simulator to re-learn how to sail with their disabilities. Sailability Auckland are using sip-and-puff controllers to set sails and haul ropes.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, generates hundreds of millions of particle collisions each second. To record, store and analyse these experiments is a massive data challenge: the LHC produces roughly 20 million gigabytes of data each year. Openlab is a partnership between CERN and IT companies to develop cutting-edge solutions for crunching all these numbers.  Next week the fourth phase is officially launched.

(Image: A scientist in the LHC Computing Grid room. Credit: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty Images)

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