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New, free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data are providing competition for premium providers such as TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Navigon.
Finding out that Facebook still tracks them when logged out has driven many users to use the Google Chrome extension Disconnect to help protect their privacy.
Just as peacocks spread their tails to signal virility, men have used conspicuous consumption to signal wealth and women have used the appearance of youth to signal fertility – all […]
4chan founder Christopher Poole, knwon for promoting the value of digital anonymity, on why the Web should recognise that, "We all have multiple identities. It’s not abnormal."
Alongside usability and user experience, Web design must provide PET (persuasion, emotion, trust) to yield the right results from users. Paul Rouke says Booking.com shows how.
Ford is installing a feature in its new vehicles—and many of its older ones—that uses its voice-activated technology to read text messages out loud.
The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, […]
Here's an interesting graph from a new paper by Kenny Shirley and Andrew Gelman: The most obvious thing here is white Americans have been and remain much more likely to […]
Last Thursday I recorded a bloggingheads session on Yemen with Afrah Nasser. In the 43-minute video we talked about the current stalemate in Sanaa and what, if anything, can be […]
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It turns out we’re not the only species that assembles ourselves into networks, says sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Consider the slime mold.
"It turns out we’re not the only species that assembles ourselves into networks," says sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis.
From hard data about China's economic prowess to cultural markers like Sesame Street's new impoverished puppet, it sure seems like the U.S. is losing ground, and fast.
Globalization brings structural changes to national economies faster than they can react, resulting in unemployment, skill mismatches and wealth inequality, says Nobel Laureate Michael Spence.
On October 31st, the United Nations estimates that the seventh billion child will be born. But people have worried about overpopulation since long ago. Are we approaching a threshold?
This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership […]
Despite the emergence of social media, social change still requires the use of physical space. Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park are proof of America's dwindling public sphere.
If I had to give the Occupy Wall Street movement a piece of advice, I would tell them to focus their growing chorus against Wall Street excesses on corporate governance […]
The Indian motor company Tata has been marketing its newest model, the Nano, as the world's cheapest car. But sales have been abysmal as people shirk the stigma of poverty.
Wikipedia is universally relied on and universally distrusted. On the one hand, it’s a stunning repository of knowledge that has rendered the World Books of my not-so-distant childhood utterly obsolete; […]
How a riddle involving one river, two islands and seven bridges prompted a mathematician to lay the foundation for graph theory