The Science Behind Our Taste Evolution

Number of words: 230 Humans are born with hardly any pre-set taste preferences. But we don’t remain blank slates for long; our appetites are rapidly moulded by the flavours around us. Nowadays that can mean trouble because our taste-tastic culture radically amplifies our inbuilt urge to consume food whenever it appears before us. Experiments show … Read more

The Psychology Behind Email Interruptions and Focus

Number of words: 90 It takes about four minutes to recover from an electronic interruption and regain your train of thought. So if you have 30 e-mails a day and look up 30 times, that’s 120 minutes of recovery time. Try setting up your computer system to receive mail every 90 minutes. That way you … Read more

Communication in a Tech-Driven World

Number of words: 199 Mass-communications technology has proliferated so rapidly that we haven’t had a chance to develop healthy protocols about when and how to use it. Now’s the time to change that To develop sustainable and rewarding relationships, it is always best to communicate in the most brain-friendly ways possible. Human contact fosters warmth … Read more

Education in the Age of Digital Distraction

Number of words: 656 Young human brains are so uniquely adaptable that they may easily get bent out of shape by frenetic virtual stimulation: ‘What human beings do better than any other species is to learn. But it also means that whatever happens in the environment will leave its mark on your brain, she argues. … Read more

The Seductive Allure of Virtual Reality in Daily Life

Number of words: 268 This is exacerbated by the fact that our primitive brains’ ever rotten sense of geography: if we see footage of a massacre somewhere far off, our minds don’t instructively think, that was thousands of miles away. They believe that it must have been close at hand, within the scope of a … Read more

The Liberation of Living Without a Mobile Phone

Number of words: 156 Ultimately I had to start becoming somewhat militant, That’s why I no longer own a mobile phone. I did for a while It seemed a good idea, but then my work colleagues got hold of the number. The little convenience-enhancer turned into a conduit for constant demands. It’s the telecoms equivalent … Read more

The Complexities of Data Sharing Agreements

Number of words: 370 The key to this type of technology collaboration lies with human values and processes and not just a focus on technology. Organizations need to decide whether and how to share data, and if so, on what terms. A few principles will be foundational. The first is concrete arrangements to protect privacy. … Read more

GitHub in Microsoft’s Open Source Transformation

Number of words: 267 In the early days of Microsoft’s history, developers protected their source code as a trade secret, and most tech companies and other organizations developed their code by themselves. But open source had revolutionized the creation and use of software. Increasingly software developers were publishing their code under a variety of open-source … Read more

The Economic Ripple Effect of Declining Horse Populations

Number of words: 310 The story begins with the extraordinary degree to which the American economy revolved around horses before the introduction of the automobile. As one historian has commented, “Every family in the United States in 1870 was directly or indirectly dependent on the horse.” Across the country, there was one horse for every … Read more

The Unseen Costs of Technological Progress in Firefighting

Number of words: 376 After more than fifty years of service, the fire horse had lost its job. It was a story about changing technology and its impact on work. Fire horses themselves had previously replaced men in pulling fire engines. Volunteer teams of men and boys had originally pulled these fire engines, but in … Read more