technology

Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn is building a huge factory on the west end of Racine County. But the corporation’s spotlight on Tuesday was 10 miles to the east: the city of Racine. Foxconn announced that it will be building a smart city innovation center downtown, near the lakefront.

Hundreds of local governments around the U.S. have started using a 911 system that does a better job of pinpointing the location of someone who calls from a smartphone. One of them is Waukesha County.

Typically, emergency responders have only been able to narrow the location of a 911 call from a smartphone to a radius of between six and 600 meters. And, the narrowing process has taken about 30 seconds. At the Waukesha County Communications Center, officials say they now have a better system.

According to a 2017 study from Common Sense Media, 98 percent of households with children age 8 and under now have access to a mobile device like a tablet or a smartphone. That’s an increase of 52 percent from 2011.

We’ve done quite a few interviews over the years on Lake Effect about where education in the STEM fields - science, technology, engineering, and math - fits in the 21st century economy. In particular, there has been a concerted effort to attract more girls to the field, so that someday there will be more women in engineering and tech fields.

READ: Closing the Tech Gender Gap One Girl at a Time

The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s ushered in a new era of large motors that continued for more than a century.  But for the last couple of decades, a revolution in nanotechnology has begun to supplant that earlier engineering work.

Think about all the things you have that connect to the internet. Your smartphone and your computer, obviously. But then there’s the fitness tracker on your wrist. Or the app in your car that lets you check whether you’ve locked the doors. Or maybe it’s your TV set.

It’s the Internet of Things, or IoT, and it’s changed the way many of us live. But it’s also exposed us in new ways to hackers and other people who might seek to do us harm. How safe are we in the IoT landscape?

Many people who live in urban areas take high-speed internet for granted. But in parts of rural Wisconsin, internet service is slow or unreliable. 

State and federal lawmakers are working to expand broadband access. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson held a couple of meetings in Milwaukee on Monday to discuss the issue and search for answers.

Aprelle Rawski of Rhinelander is a typical, frustrated computer user. "It's just unbelievable. You're constantly being kicked out of your computer, no matter what you do. It just says: 'Internet Explorer stopped working. Goodbye.'"

For the last couple of months, people arriving to and departing from Milwaukee County's jail have had their eyes scanned. That's in addition to having their fingerprints taken during the booking process.

Commander Aaron Dobson says the scans are an extra step to ensure proper identification. "No two people have the same iris."

Dobson and his staff showed the scanning devices to the media last week. The scanners are about the size of a digital camera. They're hooked up to a computer, which checks the image of a person's iris against others in a national database.

The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design has a long history of connecting art students with industry. MIAD's signature program is the industrial design major, whose students have gone on to work for everyplace from GE Healthcare to Johnson Controls and companies around the world.

Christine Carr is about to graduate with a degree in industrial design, and her senior thesis features two projects that have one key inspiration in common: Carr’s six-year-old daughter, Lilly who has autism and is nonverbal.

With the abundance of Yelp - and other - reviews on the Internet, it can take a lot of time and research to figure out where to grab Sunday brunch or drinks with friends. 

A new app created by Milwaukeeans Ben Bourgeois and Brian Kopp, aims to make this dining decision-making process easier. Called “MealSteals,” the app points users to local restaurants and bars based on their current discount offerings. 

Every time you post to Twitter or Facebook, these sites are collecting data about you. At this point you ought to expect that by participating in social media sites, you’re giving up some of your privacy. It’s just the name of the game.

Some see big data from social media sites as a god send for researchers - a perfect way to study social habits with huge numbers of people. But what happens when that data with your personal details still attached is published for a study, for the world to see?

The holidays are often a time for giving and receiving long-awaited gifts. How many times has a plea for something new ended with, “Well, if you’re good, maybe Santa will bring it?” So it’s no wonder that many teens are hoping December will bring a new cell phone, table, or even a gaming system. But as the capabilities of these devices has increased, so too has the need to set some boundaries around these connected gadgets.

In today’s technology-immersed world, how much technology is too much for a growing child? Outside of the computers and tablets they may use in school, much of a typical kid’s social or entertainment time these days might be of the electronic variety.

Smartphones are everywhere in our lives today. It often takes an extraordinary set of circumstances for us not to be connected in multiple ways with the wider world, whether we're checking our email on an airplane or surfing the web before shutting off the light and going to sleep.

For decades at this time each summer, Wisconsin farmers have gathered to talk technology. Wisconsin Farm Technology Days began back in 1954 with a simple hay baling contest in Waupaca County.

This week a farmer south of Geneva Lake hosted.

Kyle Scott came to check it out. He works for a crop farmer northeast of here. He and his wife also farm their own five-acre parcel.