Articles By

Hana Wolf

Freedom Isn’t Free, and Neither is the Web: a PRISM FAQ

PRISM is a large scale, government-run, metadata surveillance platform.  In other words, it’s a complex computer program built to gather, evaluate and communicate automatically generated personal information.  It was created and supervised by people working for the United States National Security Agency.

PRISM’s functions are to collect, store, sort and generate reports on how people act on the Internet.  This is also called behavioral tracking…

Wastewater recycling: How open minds save closed systems

Singapore, Los Angeles, Windhoek (the capital of Namibia in Africa) and the tiny town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico are doing it. Astronauts do it – NASA considers it a high priority – and doing it in the desert can help to diminish the environmental impact of any town whose water needs surpass the sustainable local supply.  This would probably include every community in New Mexico.  And yet this remarkable marriage of space-age technology and Spaceship Earth ethics, which uses chemistry to create alchemy by making something pure and nourishing from something gross and stinky, spends a lot of time languishing in literal and figurative holding tanks.