Technology & Innovation

Why are experts so bad at making predictions? The world is a messy place with countless intervening variables and confounding factors, which our brains are not equipped to evaluate.

Facebook is increasingly being used in courts to decide who is — and who isn’t — suitable to serve on a jury, the latest way in which social-networking is altering the court system.rn

Businesses will learn harsh but valuable truths if they subject new ideas to controlled experiments, says Microsoft’s Ronny Kohavi.

Loss-making Twitter has been valued at $10 billion. Facebook is said to be worth more than Ford. Now, for some investors, the alarm bells are starting to ring.

Deep in the lush undergrowth of corporate America, security, consulting and PR companies see lucrative business opportunities in helping WikiLeaks targets get their retaliation in first.

Bernie Madoff languishes in jail; bankers continue to profit as the poor lose their homes. Stealing from the rich is punished more than stealing from the poor, says Danny Schechter.

Congress has no chance of closing the budget gap unless lawmakers go to where the big money is: defense, entitlements and tax breaks. The defense budget is not sacred.

Facebook users with more friends suffer more stress and “neurotic limbo” from feeling they have to continually update and amuse their larger audiences, according to new research.

Biology and the natural world are helping economists build new models to understand the dynamics of the financial sector and why the sub prime loan crisis caused so much damage.

One way or another, it’s clear the food price bubble has reached crisis levels. But why hasn’t it reached America? And will the honeymoon soon be over?

BMW has opened a car plant where all employees are aged over 50, taking the lead in Germany to get those laid off or in early retirement back on the production line.

Yes, that’s right: Apple isn’t the best at everything. Apple’s new fee structure for premium content not only risks anti-trust issues—its 30% cut is greedy, says TechCrunch.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that America’s 2011 deficit will be $1.5 trillion, or 9.8% of GDP, and debt held by the public in the 2011 fiscal year will approach 70% of GDP.

Despite the vast amounts of computing and communication power in corporate hands, companies are only at the early stages of using I.T. to revamp business practices.

There are certain aspects of economic life, such as expensive hotel internet connections, which can only be explained when we grapple with the bounded nature of our brain.

The most important thing a leader can do is dream. And dream big. Big ideas and big concepts lead to major change, says Tuck School of Business professor Vijay Govindarajan.

The next big thing that will rock the Internet is machine to machine connectivity (M2M for short), in other words, machines bypassing people in order to connect to the Internet.

Literature has always been slower than the other art forms to grapple with technological and cultural changes—which is both a source of its continued appeal as well as its potential […]

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.

The coming integration of humans and machines may be a bit further off than he thinks, but Michael Chorost convinced me that we will get there someday.

China’s rise as the world’s second-largest economy highlights a new postindustrial reality: Population counts as much as productivity in determining economic power.

The last time valuations soared so high for companies like Groupon and Facebook with modest track records, or no track records, the trend line heralded the dot-com crash.

The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up around social media sites and The Huffington Post? Most of the value was created by people working free.

This Valentine’s Day Nobel prize-winning economist Michael Spence explains how the concept of economic signaling can help you nab your true love—whether or not you’re Lloyd Dobbler from 80s romance flick “Say Anything.”

Compare your level of romance to the national average for 48 different countries, and see where in the world you would best fit in romantically. 

It’s a dismal view, but the main reason why we have Valentine’s Day is to stimulate commerce. However, it’s not obvious that a day created to stimulate commerce really stimulates.

In the high-stakes arena of Google search results, some companies game the system in order to get high traffic. But Google insists there are standards in search engine optimization.

Why the jobless recovery? Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did.

While many people predicted during the frenzy of the dot-com bubble that the rise of the Internet would mean the “end of geography”, that hasn’t happened.

While an actual level of shady and dishonest practices is probably impossible to measure, the U.S. has slipped from 19 to 22 in the latest ranking of perceived public corruption.