business-and-politics
Is Facebook the New Philip Morris?
As if you didn't know it already, there's now yet another psych study detailing the addictive qualities of Facebook. Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently enlisted 205 Germans and monitored them for an entire week...
Hestia Is Like Google Streetview for Greenhouse Gases
There's a lot of reasons humanity is having such a hard time cutting back on greenhouse gases. It's not just fake scientists and deniers, and/or the dollars of heavy industry. There is also the actually real issue of vagueness. A study out this week in...
Romney Vs. Obama On Climate: The YouTube Faceoff
The two top presidential candidates have been notably silent on one of the most urgent issues of our time, but Barack Obama and Mitt Romney weren't always so tight-lipped on climate change. Back in their 2007-2008, for instance, when both men were also...
Guess How Much of All Internet Traffic Is Totally Fake
The answer is 10 percent, according to a new 20 month study from web ad company Solve Media. Ten percent of all online traffic comes courtesy of bots, not humans. Which is mostly interesting in that not only is it not terribly surprising...
How Tribal Customs Confront Globalization Chaos
In the early 1930's, three Australian brothers, Mick, James, and Danny Leahy walked into the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea and became the first white people ever to meet the one million inhabitants of those fertile valleys and mountains. They...
14 Years of Feeling Lucky, Happy Birthday Google
It's been 14 years since the emergency rafts full of netizens started to ditch the sinking ships of websearch services Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, WebCrawler, MSN and AOL Search.
The Politico-Media Complex Will Tell You About Paul Ryan's Abs, Not Arctic Ice Melt
A rational person would assume that the fact that the ice covering one of the Earth's two poles has melted away to the lowest levels ever recorded — and is slated to continue shrinking at a rapid clip, thanks to global climate change — would be bigger...
Eric Schmidt Laughs at Apple Users' Puny Maps: "But What Do I Know?"
I guess this is what happens when you go around pissing people off. Now that 100 million iPhone and iPad users "have updated":http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/24/3381840/iphone-5-sales-five-million/in/3081013 to the new iOS 6 operating system (an...
Mitt Romney Says Free Enterprise Will Solve Conflict in the Middle East
Mitt Romney dropped by Bill Clinton's philanthropalooza to show off his bipartisan bona fides today. The presidential candidate, fast-slipping in the polls, took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative to deliver a 15-minute speech praising the...
Why Counterfeiters Love Election Years
Everybody loves an election year. The campaign volunteers are out and about, wearing matching T-shirts, holding clipboards and sticking lawn signs into the dirt. The TV is buzzing with the latest scooplet about this candidate's silly gaffe or that...
The Most iPhones Ever Is Still Not Enough
Apple sold five million iPhones over the weekend, a record breaking number that eclipsed the 4S sales record by a solid million phones. But for the largest company in the world, breaking old records is no longer enough. Indeed, for many, the weekend...
Smiling Banned for New Jersey Driver's Licenses, Thanks to Facial-Recognition Software
You heard that right: Smiling has been banned in New Jersey. Well, it's only been banned for driver's license photos, but I doubt there would be many offenders anyway. (Ha!!1) The reason is mildly Orwellian: the Garden State is "rolling out new...