Headline, January 07 2022/ ''' '' GREATS -STUDENTS- GRAPES '' '''

''' '' GREATS -STUDENTS-

 GRAPES '' '''

2021 : HONG KONG - TAIWAN - SINGAPORE - Vietnam - Cambodia - Laos - Peru - Argentina - Madagascar - Zambia - Sierra Leone, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines ........ :

VIRTUAL REALITY beckons The World Students Society. The Global Founder Framers see piles of money in ability to be metaverse gatekeepers. Wellcome World, to The World Students Society

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY RISES AND HONORS AND humbly thanks these great  students and readers who flew in with reconnaissance missions and made splendid nourishing and delightful comments.

The Shift : One mighty student said : '' !WOW! : The greatest invention of all times. All Good And Every Tech Award.''

The Founder Framers shot back : '' The World Students Society comes in peace and love for Mankind. No bystanders. Join up to build a new and a better world.''

In the tech industry, 2021 was a year of profits and pivots. Thanks in part to the pandemic and the digitization of our lives, all of the big tech companies got bigger. Facebook changed its name to Meta, Jeff Bezos went to space, Jack Dorsey left Twitter and Silicon Valley fell harder for crypto.

Every December, partly to cheer myself after a year of covering tech' scandals and shortfalls. I use this column to highlight a handful of tech projects that improved the world during the year.

My criteria are loose and arbitrary, but I look for the kinds of worthy, altruistic projects that apply technology to big, societal problems, but don't get much attention from the tech press, like start-ups that are using artificial intelligence to fight wildfires, or food delivery programs for the needy.

Especially at a time when many of the tech's leaders seem more interested in building new, virtual worlds that improving the world we live in, it's worth praising the technologists stepping up to solve some of our biggest problems. So here are some 2021's Good Tech Awards.

Cracking The Protein Problem

One of the year's most exciting A.I. breakthroughs came in July when DeepMind - a Google owned artificial intelligence company - published data and open-source code from its groundbreaking AlphaFold project.

The project, which used A.I. to predict the structures of proteins, solved a problem that had vexed scientists for decades, and was hailed by experts as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.

And by publishing its data freely, AlphaFold set off a frenzy among researchers, some of whom are already using it to develop new drugs and better  understand the proteins involved in viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

Google's overall A.I. efforts have been fraught with controversy and missteps, but AlphaFood seems like an unequivocally good use of the companies vast expertise and resources.

Improving Criminal Justice

Prisons aren't known as hotbeds of innovation. But two tech projects in 2021 tried to make America's criminal justice system more humane.

Recidviz is a nonprofit tech start-up that builds open-source data tools for criminal justice reform. It was started by Clementine Jacoby, a former Google employee who saw an opportunity to corral data about the prison system and make it available to prison officials, lawmakers, activists and researchers to inform their decisions.

Ammelio, a nonprofit startup founded by two Yale students and backed by tech honchos like Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt, is trying to disrupt prison communications, a notoriously exploitative industry that charges inmates and their loved ones exorbitant fees for phone and video calls.

It released a free video calling service, which is being tested in prisons in Iowa and Colorado, with plans to add more states in 2022.

Cleaning Up Social Media

FEW tech stories made as big an impact in 2021 as the revelations from Frances Haugen, the facebook product manager turned whistle-blower who was the main source for The Wall Street Journal's blockbuster ''Facebook Files'' series.

By making public thousands of documents detailing internal Facebbok research and discussions about the platform's harms, Ms. Haugen advanced our collective knowledge about Facebook's inner workings, and her congressional testimony was a landmark moment for tech accountability.

Shortly after Ms. Haugen went public, two former members of Facebook's integrity team, Jeff Allen and Sahar Massaachi, started the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit group that is meant to help social media companies navigate issues related to trust, safety and platform governance.

Their announcement received less attention than Ms. Haugen's document dump, but it's all part of the same effort to educate lawmakers, technologists and the public about making our social media ecosystem healthier.

The Fastest Philanthropist

MacKenzie Scott, who got divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, did not introduce new technology or a start-up in 2021. But she is giving away her Amazon fortune - estimated to be worth more than $50 billion - making other tech philanthropists look like penny pinchers.

She donated more than $6 billion in 2021 alone to a host of charities, schools and social programs, an astonishing feat for an individual working with a small team of advisers.

[For scale, the entire Gates Foundation gave out $5.8 billion in direct grants in 2020.]

And unlike other donors, who splash their names on buildings and museum wings, Ms. Scott announced her gifts quietly in a series of understated blog posts. Lets hope that in 2022, more tech moghuls follow her lead.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Tech & Awards, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Kevin Roose.

With most respectful dedication to this great human and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and then the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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