'Rest of World' Photo Contest Highlight's Tech and Solar's Impact

Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering global tech news from 100 countries, the site announced this week. "But at Rest of World, the story of tech is as big as the world that's using it" - so they just finished their first international photography contest.We asked our readers to send us images of technology's impact in their communities - as seen from their lenses. We received 548 entries from around the world, including from Afghanistan, Mexico, Nigeria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Photographers captured a wide range of issues, from facial recognition software used at gated communities in Brazil to students studying on their phones during a power outage in India. They recognized 10 photos in all - three winners, and seven "honorable mentions" - including one showing a surgeon implanting a venomous snake with a radio telemetry device in India "to try and mitigate human-snake conflict in the region," as well as a stunning aerial view of a vast solar park in Dubai. There's solar-powered cooking device in India, and the face of an old man in Nepal using headphones for the first time in his life. And the #1 photo shows children in rural Palestine watching TV "with electricity generated from solar panels at their home inside a cave," vividly illustrating the point that they'd turned to a decentralized, self-generated power technology. ("For decades, rural Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta have lobbied for connection to the electric grid, but the Israeli state does not recognize such villages as legitimate and refuses to issue any kind of master plan for their development.")

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