RBC’s new innovation hub adds another 300 tech jobs to Calgary, A DNS error brought down major services on Thursday, and technology is attributing to loneliness in adolescents.
It’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday, July 26, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
RBC is bringing 300 tech jobs to its new Calgary innovation hub. Set to launch in September, the hub will reside within RBC’s current office in Banker Hall at the heart of downtown Calgary. Job openings in areas such as artificial intelligence, data engineering, software development among others have already been posted online. The Calgary Herald mentioned that according to a CBRE report, Calgary’s tech sector is flourishing with its technology workforce increasing by 18 percent in the past 5 years.
A DNS error caused a brief but intense service outage on Thursday. Internet infrastructure Akamai announced on Thursday that an error within its systems has taken many major services offline, including parts of Amazon, Steam, various airlines, and a few video streaming services. Although Akamai fixed the error within 30 minutes, thousands of error reports still flooded Downdetector during the intermission. The company later published an official cause on Twitter, attributing the error to a bug in the DNS system introduced by an update.
Loneliness is on the rise globally despite the advancement in communication technology. The phenomenon is affecting adolescents the hardest, according to a new report published in the Journal of Adolescence. The report showed that between 2012 and 2018, nearly twice as many teens showed higher levels of school loneliness compared to the years before 2012. The study pinned the increase to internet and social media use, not income inequality or other factors, as the main reason for the rise. It explained that as teens spent more time online, they spent less time in person and thus reduced chances for emotional closeness. Many countries are already aware of this fact. For example, France banned smartphones in elementary schools in 2018. There are similar policies in Canada as well; Ontario has banned all cellphones in classrooms since November 2019.
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