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Via Kevin Drum, this vignette from Johann Hari about his experience taking Provigil, which (we’re told) college students describe as “viagra for the brain”:
I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, [...]

It may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese [...]

Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here).
One talk drew heavily on my Wilton Park speech on evaluation (read it here), but I also spoke about technology’s impact on diplomacy. The full text is after the jump [...]

A civil servant friend told me yesterday that the Cabinet Office has just issued guidance that all senior civil servants (that’s deputy directors and upwards) are now allowed to blog, publicly, in their own names, about the issues that they work on. 
Fascinating if so - but not surprising, given the approach being signalled by Tom [...]

From Gizmodo, a terrible tale of technology, misunderstanding and revenge.  Our story begins in Turkey, where Emine and Ramazan are in the process of separating.  After deciding to split, they continue to hurl barbs at each other by text message - including one from Ramazan in which he accuses his wife thus:
You change the topic [...]

Utilitarian philosopher (and celebrity corpse) Jeremy Bentham famously proposed a “Panopticon” design for a prison: a circular building, with the warder sat at its center able to see all the inmates in their cells around him at all times. The warder would have to be hidden behind Venetian blinds to conceal who he was looking at, [...]

I posted a few weeks ago suggesting that one of the big -isms of this century would be transhumanism, or the idea that humans can ‘evolve’ to higher beings through the use of technology.
On that theme, I’ve been digging the news story recently about the legal battle by Oscar Pistorius, also known as the Blade [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called “user-generated swiftboating“…

The Cult of the Dead Cow, a noted hacker group, has just conducted some interesting research on government computer network security vulnerabilities (hat-tip: John Robb).  CDC’s headline conclusion:
(1) Web site security on government and military web servers is stronger in China than in the west. 
And also - er:
(2) Adult content is out of control with Chinese [...]

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Here’s an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds.  The speaker is Clay Shirky, an American writer on the social effects of internet technologies.  He says:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set [...]

The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present.
This week, the news read like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American [...]

Further to David’s previous posts on this, John Robb is working the problem too.  Three observations from him:
Vulnerability. All of the same network vulnerabilities we see other infrastructures are in force with the Internet’s long haul systems (the network analysis of systempunkts applies). If this was a real attack rather than a series of accidents [...]

Those of our readers in public service will be delighted to hear of a new project designed especially for you: Wikileaks.  The short version is explained on the site’s homepage:
Have documents the world needs to see?  We protect your identity while maximizing political impact.
The site’s page on how the submissions process works elaborates thus:
Wikileaks accepts [...]

Blake Hounshell at ForeignPolicy.com has a succinct answer to people who don’t think binding targets are necessary in climate policy: this graph, which shows patent applications on sulphur control technologies in the US.  Guess what happened in 1970 and 1971?

By now, we’ve all read enough horror stories to know that we have to exercise restraint in what we post on Facebook or Friends Reunited. But are we sufficiently attuned to the risks of You Tube and camcorders in cellphones?
Before you answer that question, you may wish to view this engaging film of David [...]

We do, according to this ABC News piece (courtesy of Bruce Schneier):
A teen suspect’s snap decision to secretly record his interrogation with an MP3 player has resulted in a perjury case against a veteran detective and a plea deal for the teen.
Unaware of the recording, Detective Christopher Perino insisted under oath at a trial in [...]

So said Wired.com earlier this week in a piece today entitled ‘Facebook is always watching you’:
Amid heightened concerns surrounding Facebook’s new advertising platform, the social networking site has given users a new reason not to trust it: Researchers recently busted the company for tracking users activities on external sites, even after they logged out of [...]

I’m having a lazy Saturday morning in my kitchen, and pottering through Erik Davis’s gloriously out-there tome Techgnosis (it says on the blurb: “writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervour have always permeated the story of technology”. Being only 17 pages in, I can’t tell you yet [...]

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