What’s the Big Idea? On May 20, Pakistan shut down Twitter for eight hours after the microblogging site refused to remove tweets that linked to a page encouraging people to post pictures […]
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Facebook is working to release its own brand of smartphone. After a $16 billion payday at its IPO, the company has found it needs to justify its paycheck, especially as ad revenues decline.
Access to mobile computing, to allow employees to check email outside of working hours, increases productivity up to a point. After that it just burns people out and makes them unhappy.
I don’t know why this still surprises me (particularly since expressions like the one in the title to this post have been floating around for several hundred years), but whenever […]
A Russian Internet security firm has discovered what is perhaps the world’s most complicated computer virus ever. Given its complexity, a specific country may be behind the attacks.
New facial recognition technology that reads faces for emotional cues could be applied on a mass scale to better understand the general mood of entire populations, even whole nations.
Google’s chairman recently warned a British audience that the Web will remain vulnerable to cyber attacks for the next ten years. Education is essential to maintaining a free and open Internet.
However hard most political leaders try, almost whatever they do in an attempt to look fashionable and plugged into the real lives of voters, it never seems to quite work. […]
Thus did the Economistcharacterize the dynamic between China and India, arguing that how they “manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those that scarred the 20th century […]
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic […]
In response to a lot of feedback on yesterday’s post, the loudest and nastiest of which came from people who deny climate change, I have revised the essay to […]
I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]
It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also the bright thing to do, says former IOSCO chair Jane Diplock.
For Washington, DC readers, Politics & Prose will be hosting a book event Sunday, June 10 at 1pm relevant to many of the themes discussed at this blog. Details below. America the […]
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]
Never before in our nation’s history have we faced such a monumental decision. The stakes are enormous: the next President will not only be dealing with a possible recession but […]
Nation building is an “in and out” state of mind that is believed to create success with limited spending. Cultivating will take time, but has the potential to create honest dialogues among the U.S. and the other countries that would lead to missions being better carried out.
Ironically, America as a nation seems to have forgotten exactly what Memorial Day is about. Barbeques, all-day sales, the “official” start of summer—all of these threaten to crowd out the […]
The human “capacity for culture” and globalization have the potential to turn us into one culture. With the growing desire to learn about different cultures and the increasing want to travel around the world—it is like “we are machines capable of greater cooperation, inventiveness and common good on Earth.”
The federal government is asking automakers to stop creating in-car devices that can distract drivers from the road. Auto companies such as Audi, Cadillac, Nissan and Ford are among the many that have been including electronic devices with features for drivers to play around with, and now Facebook and Twitter are accessible features.
The Department of Defense and researchers have collected and compiled the data on combat trauma and suicide. On Memorial Day people remember soldiers that paid the price for freedom, yet less than ten percent died on the battlefield.
A report based on income, housing and life satisfaction to determine the happiest countries in the world, indicates that what makes people truly happy is hard to pinpoint.
Noah Millman intervenes sensibly in the great Douthat–Sanchez debate about morality and religion: Okay, so humanists don’t have strong reasons for their faith in human rights. Do Christians have strong […]
This blog was originally posted on Law Think. MON 21/5/2012 Immigration: House of Commons A brief discussion was had concerning immigration and Article 8. New immigration rules will be in […]
Some men–those who lack empathy and warmth–are better than others when it comes to picking up on visual cues that flag women as more willing to engage in casual sex.
The modernist concept of a fragmentary and ephemeral self, like that put forward by Virginia Wolf, is false, says psychologist Bruce Hood. He argues that the self does not exist at all.
Following research on how humans express emotion through facial expressions, MIT scientists have created new computer software that understands human emotion better than we do.
For decades, the world’s most prolific scientists have relied on the American college undergraduate to represent humanity. Not surprisingly, they may not be very representative.
A recent study at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has found that, partly as a result of their genes, centenarians are commonly outgoing, optimistic and easygoing people.
There are editors (the initial and final gatekeepers) who are not catching (or do not care about) these blatant displays of academic dishonesty.