It sounds more like the storyline for a movie, but this piece in the International Herald Tribune by Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Coming Plague”, highlights an area where technology might be able help stem the tide of bird flu: One … Read more
I love BBC World, the satellite news channel, and I love offering feedback (rarely welcome, as readers will know). In the hope of satisfying both passions I joined the BBC World Panel where “users are invited to register and record their comments online and to take part in regular surveys and questionnaires specifically on viewing … Read more
As you know, I’m a huge fan of newsmaps — efforts to convey news information using more visual approaches — and here’s another excellent idea, from a guy called Jeroen Wijering, who, according to Cool Hunting is a recent graduate of the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. One of his most recent projects is … Read more
It’s my rather pompous term for the way that email, SMS and, in particular, the SlackBerry [sic] reduce the quality of our replies. Nowadays, it seems, a prompt one-line answer to an email is considered somehow more productive, efficient, effective and “smart” than actually contemplating for a moment the subject and the best response. However … Read more
All this stuff about people obsessively airbrushing their Wikipedia biographies is getting out of hand. In December we heard that even Jimmy Wales himself, the guy who has done more than anyone else to make Wikipedia what it is now, was not above tweaking the entry on himself. My conclusion then was that Of course, … Read more