Smart sensors can improve citizens' lives, especially when residents are put in charge of gathering the data.Jane Wakefield reports from the Placa del Sol in Barcelona, where Guillem Camprodon of the city's Fab Lab explains how his initiative of placing noise detectors around the square helped residents finally get the city council to take the problem of night-time disturbances seriously.Michael Donaldson, the city's commissioner for digital innovation argues that public authorities ought to be able to collect more user data, in the same way that online businesses do, in order to improve public services. But tech consultant Charles Reed Anderson warns that the hype around the potential for smart cities far exceeds what is currently achievable, while Sandra Baer of Personal Cities argues that humans need to remain at the centre of such efforts.(Picture: Noise level sensor in Barcelona; Credit: BBC)
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Folge vom 23.12.2019Smart cities: How Barcelona learned to listen
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Folge vom 20.12.2019How 24/7 life is rewiring our brainsA group of artists look at how our modern hyper-connected always-on lifestyles are affecting our behaviour and interfering with our sleep.Their work has been brought together in an exhibition at London's Somerset House, called 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for our Non-Stop World. Manuela Saragosa takes a tour with director and co-curator Jonathan Reekie.Plus the Canadian artist and author Douglas Coupland tells Manuela how he religiously guards his sleep hours in the name of creativity, and how he remembers the moment he realised his brain was being rewired by the internet back in the 1990s.Producer: Laurence Knight(Picture: Sprites I by Alan Warburton, showing at Somerset House; Credit: Alan Warburton via Somerset House)
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Folge vom 19.12.2019Our digital afterlifeWhat happens to your online presence when you die, and who owns your data? Manuela Saragosa speaks to Carl Ohman, a researcher in the digital afterlife from the Oxford Internet Institute, and Dr Elaine Kasket, a counselling psychologist and author of All The Ghosts In The Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age.(Picture: Cloud in the form of a mouse cursor arrow; Credit: cinek20/Getty Images)
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Folge vom 18.12.2019Have you paid your taxes?Tax evasion is rife in many parts of the world, but might that be partly because we are we taxing the wrong things?Ed Butler looks at two countries overwhelmed by the problem. Bolivia has the proportionately largest tax-avoiding black economy in the world (at least of countries that gather statistics on these things). Katy Watson reports from a hilltop flea market where paying tax is simply considered bad for business.Meanwhile Greek economist Nicholas Economides discusses his country's clampdown on the 30% of the economy that operates below the tax radar by encouraging a shift away from cash towards electronic payments that can be more easily monitored.But are all these efforts being directed at the wrong targets? Most of the tax burden falls on labour in the form of income tax, but comedian and author Dominic Frisby says wealth, land and capital are let off far too lightly.(Picture: Bolivian woman carrying her baby; Credit: hadynyah/Getty Images)