Get SMART in 2021 Over the last decade or so, you’ve no doubt heard just about any appliance or electronic device marketed as being ‘smart’. We all know now about smart phones, and there are also refrigerators and dryers that are smart as well. As recently as three years ago, we began to hear about smart cars, headphones and even shoes, making the term ‘smart’ a victim of the same hype we saw in the 90’s with the term, ‘extreme’ (or later ‘Xtreme!’). [...]

Welcome to Tech Essentials’ 2nd installment of our thought exercise on media bias. (This relates to “Tech Essentials” as many are viewing their “news” through online “opinion” blogs). If you recall from last week, we were outlining tactics (mentioned in this article) that leverage bias to get your attention through online media [...]

Read This Article on Media Bias (or the Dog Gets It)! If there’s one thing you should know about me (in addition to being obsessive about e-sign and e-security), it’s that I’m a proud parent. Recently, I was at the dinner table engaging in a lively debate with my daughter about current events, and I was thrilled at how she could piece together a cogent argument. Her logic was impeccable, and her presentation was compelling. However, when I asked her how she knew her facts were tr [...]

Bad Things Come in Small Packages; Good Things Come in No Packaging at All We at Tech Essentials had been hoping to have at least a one-week respite from any talk of COVID, and we were sooo close this week...until I saw an article about a British mathematician who calculated that, based on there being two quintillion virus particles with an average diameter of 100 billionth of a meter, all the COVID in the world could easily fit into one (empty) can of soda. That’s right. T [...]

Let’s Ring in a New Era of Privacy? The German philosopher, Hegel, wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here) that history is merely a never-ending series of reactions to reactions. Once a thing is done, there is an inevitable reaction to it and then a reaction to that and so on. Technology works the same way in that innovations are often countered and re-countered by subsequent innovations. The technology that allowed for connectivity via social media spawned an outcry about [...]