A prime driver of human progress has been trade, in both goods and ideas. Isolation, in contrast, leads to stasis, suspicion, even regression. As Matt Ridley described in The Rational Optimist, when the land bridge connecting
Author: The Conversation
People have a mental model of shopping that is based on experiences from brick-and-mortar stores. We intuitively understand how this process works: all available products are displayed around the store and the prices are clearly marked. Many stores
In sport, we don’t just want to know who won. We now want to know how to replicate success and then improve on it. And to do this, we’re using data — and lots of it. The field of “big data” analytics has come to sport and athletics, with massive implications for sport as we know it. The Women’s Tennis Association
In 2004, Bill Gates pronounced usernames and passwords dead. Gates, a man consistently thinking ahead of the crowd, was right. Most of us — including our employers and the online services we rely on — just haven’t caught up yet. Gates’s statement came at a time when the devastatingly simple consumer-focused
Apple Pay has been launched to much fanfare. People with the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus are now able to make credit card payments at certain shops and restaurants in the US. But Apple Pay isn’t the first of its kind and the technology it uses has actually been around for the past 15 years. So why has
According to TechRepublic, Google produced two of the five worst technology products of 2009 – Android 1.0 and Google Wave. The fact that Google remains dominant suggests that, while not infallible, it’s rich enough to take risks and weather occasional failures. If you are as rich as Google, it’s not extravagant to allow
It should be no surprise to anyone that many smartphones may have been designed to last about 24 months — the length of a typical contract with a network service provider. After all, it is a fast-moving, high-turnover market and planned obsolescence is how it is kept moving. Being high turnover means
There have been so many leaks, hacks and scares based on misuse or misappropriation of personal data that any thought that “big data” could provide benefits rather than only opportunities for harm may be fading in the public imagination. Beyond the humiliation of those involved, the main effect has been to deepen
How do you decide if you can trust someone? Is it based on their handshake, the way they look you in the eye, or perhaps their body language? We know that what someone wears has an effect on our trust in them. If you happen to
How safe is Microsoft Windows? After all, the list of malware that has caused major headaches worldwide over the last 15 years is long – viruses, worms and Trojans have forced computers to shut down, knocked Korea offline and even overloaded Google’s servers. Now, how safe