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As Silicon Valley startups race to develop the next generation of sophisticated, algorithmic marketing software, it’s instructive to note the success of Thinkmodo – a viral marketing firm that films all its videos on iphones, does no market testing, and doesn’t even mention the name of the product in its campaigns.  
A new pair of buildings opened at NASA’s Ames Research Center use technology and design to create as much energy as they use, modeling what manned bases on other planets will look like. 
Slate recently highlighted the fastest-growing industries in the USA – everything from hot sauce to self-tanning products to 3D printers to generic pharmaceuticals. Here’s one industry they missed: the recycled […]
Back in January, I wrote about Jessica Ahlquist’s court victory over an illegal “School Prayer” banner in her high school in Cranston, Rhode Island. That was almost the end of […]
Last week I asked readers to answer this single question: “What is democracy?” I asked this question — without consulting a dictionary or political science textbook — because I am […]
James Cameron, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Peter Diamandis aren’t afraid to fail.  If these men were afraid, they wouldn’t be attempting the most ambitious private space exploration […]
UPDATE: Steve Jobs famously said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” I wanted […]
In a previous post, I indicated what I consider the “dangerous” realisation that there is no top-down meaning; that our actions aren’t found to be important by anyone (or One) […]
With bookstores vanishing, the Pulitzer committee skimping on Pulitzers, and the Amazon dragon twining its bright yellow coils around every publisher on Earth, the book industry finds itself in dire peril. But lo! What […]
Is Facebook making us lonely? No! Sometimes there are actually clear answers to rhetorical headline questions. Claude Fischer, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, gets empirical in the Boston Review. […]