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On December 9th 2007, a curious event took place at the University of South Carolina football stadium. As 29,000 people filed inside, each was given a piece of paper bearing four names and phone numbers. During the event, each person called those names and asked them to vote for Obama in the coming primary election.

Those [...]

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, an article in the New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein talks about the massive changes that are in store for publishing and books with the advent of digital content and devices. The article begins well, summarising the revolutionary changes wrought by Gutenberg’s press, and quickly reaches the present day [...]

…and the Case for Public Service Games
The BBC is a world-class broadcaster that produces some of the very best TV, radio and news. It’s also an organisation that is desperately holding on to its past glories, while ignoring the potential and importance of the internet.
What is the BBC for? According to its Royal Charter, the [...]

Update 2 Nov: Just set up a wiki to document resources about the Network Challenge at http://redballoon.wikispaces.com – feel free to join in!
You may have heard of DARPA before – they’re the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1969, they created ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet, and more recently, they run the DARPA [...]

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the [...]

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, writes about Google’s efforts to digitise the world’s books and create a new universal library. For the most part, the article is really very well-written and enlightening.
However, when comes around to criticising Google Book Search [...]

Six to Start is based in a large building containing dozens of managed and serviced offices. On the way to the shared kitchen at work, I noticed two empty meeting rooms. It occurred to me that, just like an empty seat on a plane, an empty meeting room is lost cash. Sure, there is a [...]

I finished watching Life on Mars a few weeks ago, and have become mildly obsessed with it. This tends to happen with any good book, TV show or movie that I see – I end up wanting to use elements in games or other projects, until the next shiny thing comes along.
After a few beers [...]

A phenomenon well-known by psychologists, and pretty much everyone else, is called ‘tip of the tongue’, and it’s described in this American Scientist article:
When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops.
Suppose you [...]

One of the many sad results of Perplex City being put ‘on hold’ is that I can’t explore the effect of cognitive enhancement on society. As a former neuroscientist who studied experimental psychology at university, I always enjoyed writing about my pet fictional company, Cognivia, and its range of cognitive enhancements including Ceretin (wide-spectrum enhancement), [...]