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What are the main benefits of WordPress?

It’s flexibility suits bot big and small businesses which want a site that can adapt to their complex and multifaceted needs.

It is very easy to use, so also beginners will be able to create sophisticated websites and in a very short span of time.

WordPress offers its users a variety of themes, which can be customised very easily and yet give you the capability to make sites with an unique look.

It offers hundreds of plugins, necessary to who needs more specialised functions.

It is optimised of SEO thus it makes one website rank high on search engines.

Sites created via WordPress have a high mobile responsiveness.

It has a 'built-in’ blog feature for whoever wants to add a blog to their site.

Whoever uses WordPress will benefit from the support of the WordPress community.

The above is a paraphrased summary of the 8 main features you can get by choosing WordPress. If you want a deeper insight into each of the above-listed 8 points, check out this website.

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An interesting interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about how chatbot 'taught itself' to speak Bengali.

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Controversy about TikTok

TikTok is one of the most popular apps among social media users. However, some western countries have been slowly and yet steadily starting to raise some concerns about its suitability within their legislations – with US leading the scene.

Here is the full story.

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The Pros of AI

In two previous posts I addressed Elon Musk’s concern about the developed stage AI has reached. In a nutshell, Musk maintains that AI presents a “profound risks to society and humanity.”

In this post, I will, instead, address the other side of the coin: how AI can help humanity. In particular, I focus on one of the many advantages of AI: the fact that it can help humanity to solve, or at least better fight, climate change.

Below, I summarise four main reasons, listed by Mastrola (2023), why human fight against climate change can benefit from AI.

1. The amount of climate data to be collected, analysed and used to make informed predictions about environmental changes and policy decisions about climate issues is huge. AI can help scientists to speed those processes up – which is a very important point when it comes to climate change, given the limited amount of time we have to seek to solve it.

2. AI is essential for achieving the carbon zero economy – one of the objectives of the EU's long-term strategy to fight climate change. For instance, AI is currently assisting scientists throughout the whole chain of activities leading to the realisation of windmills.

3. AI is being used to make energy-related activities more efficient, thereby reducing their environmental impact.

4. AI can help scientists to relate satellite and observational data with model predictions about environmental changes.

These are just a few of the benefits intrinsic to AI as to climate change. However, I believe that they are sufficient to justify AI supporters – with all due respect to Elon Musk.

To read the full Mastrola’s (2023) article, follow this link: https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/03/07/artificial-intelligence-combat-climate-change/#:~:text=Another%20application%20of%20AI%20to,are%20found%20in%20the%20environment.

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What does the Jack Teixeira case reveal about security?

Check out this article by The Guardian to find out what security challenges the Jack Teixeira case poses to US national security.

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Is AI training problematic? According to Elon Musk it is. Check out the link on the next post.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65110030

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Are HTML and CSS still relevant?

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a formatting system or markup language for the web used to display material retrieved over the Internet and to define the structure of web pages (Hemmendinger, n.d.; Kolade, 2021). CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is “a style sheet language which is used to describe the look and formatting of a document written in markup language” (What is CSS, n.d.). This means that HTML and CSS are not programming languages: HTML is a markup language, namely a language that “define[s] the data and describe its purpose on the webpage” (Romy, 2012); CSS is the language that tells the browser how we want HTML to appear (Bhattacharya, 2022). In a nutshell, HTML and CSS’s purpose is not to program a computer, but rather to structure information and style user interfaces (Nikov, 2022).

Both languages have been created three decades ago: respectively, in 1993 and in 1996. This is one of the reasons why some people, especially those who are new to web development, cast doubt on the importance to learn them in 2023. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), Ruby, Python, and especially JavaScript are what first-time web developers are more interested in learning. In fact, the latter languages are the programming languages whereby dynamic and interactive websites can be developed. Now, if those programming languages are what we use to create websites, why do we still bother learning HTML and CSS non-programming languages?

One reason it that, even if you are developing websites by using content management systems (e.g., WordPress) or no-code site builders (e.g., Webflow), “a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and the principles that they introduce to web development is still useful” (Nikov, 2022). But most importantly, HTML/CSS “are the only languages for creating frontends for websites, web apps, cars, smart electronics, and connected appliances, and they probably stay that way for a long time” (Nikov, 2022). This is to say that, to be able to do anything on the frontend (“the part of the website or app that the user gets to see and interact with” [Nikov, 2022]), one needs to know HTML/CSS (Nikov, 2022).

HTML and CSS are, therefore, still important and worth learning. Although digitalised societies are characterised by fast-paced technology, and prone to disregard longstanding technologies, HTML and CSS teach us that not all that which is old deserves underestimation and quick dismissal.

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Why are videos more effective than written contents? Follow the link above to have a concise insight into it.

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What is the YouTube algorithm and how does it work? Click on the link above to find it out!

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Bloggers vs Vloggers, namely written contents vs visual media product featuring moving images

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Chat GPT and Academia

What is the impact of chat GPT on academic education? The associate director at Boston College’s Center for Digital Innovation in Learning, John Fitzgibbon, and the national education reporter with the Washington Post, Laura Meckler, join Adam Reilly (a reporter at GBH News) to provide an answer to that question: Educators struggling to detect new AI technology in students’ work.