When a group of the poorest households in West Bengal, India, received a one-time economic boost—an influx of capital like a cow, or an inventory of trinkets they could then sell at a market—that “big push” didn’t only help them out momentarily. It improved their lives even a decade later. The experiment in West Bengal, based on a program called “Targeting the Ultra Poor,” pioneered by a Bangladeshi NGO called BRAC, began in 2007 and was part of a
2022 could be the year that the big internet platforms pull the plug on paid political advertising, some in political campaign circles believe. In fact, Higher Ground Labs, which invests in progressive campaign tech companies, states it clearly in its 2022 Investment Thesis: “All large technology platforms will limit or outright ban paid political activities.” The thesis argues that voters are growing less persuadable by political messages from strangers that show up in their socia
While cybercrime gets a lot of attention from law enforcement and the media these days, I’ve been documenting a less high-tech threat emerging in recent months: a surge in stolen checks. Criminals are increasingly targeting U.S. Postal Service and personal mailboxes to pilfer filled-out checks and sell them over the internet using social media platforms. The buyers then alter the payee and amount listed on the checks to rob victims’ bank accounts of thousands of dollars. While the
So the holidays have been good to you and you’re enjoying a fancy new Apple gadget. Now that you’ve loaded it to the brim with apps, games, photos, and videos, get the most out of its battery life by simply tweaking the following three settings. Turn off unnecessary location services Many of the apps you’ve installed want to know where you’re located at all times, and while iOS is pretty good about asking you whether newly installed apps are permitted to access your l
Internet giants like Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta, as well as a host of smaller companies, are looking to build what’s somewhat nebulously known as the metaverse: a set of virtual worlds where people can hang out, make music and art and, yes, go to meetings. One open question, assuming the metaverse proves popular, is whether the technology will be tightly controlled by a handful of companies operating their own incompatible systems—as social media apps and video games basica
RadioShack, once beloved by late 20th century electronics geeks as the place to go for circuit components and replacement adaptors, by the early 2000s, was fast becoming obsolete. The Onion famously joked back then that even the CEO couldn’t understand how the store was still in business. The brand’s U.S. stores have since largely shut down, but now, RadioShack’s current owners, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, want to use its supposed cachet among investors and aging, conservativ
I am sitting in a conference room with a bevy of laptops in front of me—so many that they’re blocking my view of the monitor where I’m about to videoconference with some of the people who created them. With a variety of case stylings, colors, materials, and approaches to fundamental design decisions, they are not exactly a matched set. But they’re all iterations of a specific computer: Dell’s XPS 13. The disparate models represent a decade’s worth of evo
For the past five years, the video-editing app LumaFusion has been a poster child for iPad productivity. While the iPad has always been usable for more than just content consumption, video editing is exactly the kind of creative task that Apple loves to champion. LumaFusion, which was created by former product developers from Avid and Pinnacle, two of the longest-established names in video editing, shows that the iPad can rival a laptop or desktop computer in handling complex editing jobs. It wa
I have a weird relationship with apps I need to use for work. If I don’t like using them, I put very little effort into learning how to use them well. If I do like using them, then I get overly excited about squeezing every last drop of productivity out of them. Microsoft Teams is slowly but surely growing on me. I wouldn’t quite call it true love yet, but let’s just say I’ve sunk some meaningful time into exploring its delightful, not-so-obvious time-savers. Here
When the U.S. raced to lock down the country in the face of a quickly spreading novel disease, telehealth provided a lifeline. Using technology such as video calls, healthcare organizations were able to screen individuals for COVID-19 before there was any testing infrastructure. But now in this later stage of the pandemic, Americans are coming out of their homes and going back to the doctor’s office. Stocks for big telehealth companies are down. While telehealth remains an important tool