The Internet is about to hit its fourth major shift in server architecture. The early days were powered by simple Perl applications. As the dotcom hit, Java application servers running on highend UNIX machines powered the majority of the web and created a multibillion dollar per year industry. In…

Subscriber Only Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version In October 1958 an organization called the National Association of Educational Broadcasters held its annual convention in Omaha, Nebraska, and featured as its keynote speaker a Canadian professor of English named Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan…

Last year a self-confessed stationery addict who reads this blog contacted me and corresponded a little about her eclectic collection of mechanical pencils. With a little encouragement, Sandra agreed to do a guest piece on some of her pencils, so here’s her article on some pencils that came from her…

In my favourite picture of Amy Winehouse, she’sholding a hoover. It’s partly the thought that Amy Winehouse did the hoovering, partly that she looked like that – hair aloft, fag askew, lids weighed down with liner – full-time. She always mixedthe real and the unreal. Her voice, described in the…

The Mozilla user experience team often designs features that represent sites to users in a variety of ways. For example, Firefox tabs display favicons and page titles, while Panorama displays favicons, titles, and page thumbnails. So, I thought it would be useful to investigate the effectiveness of…

Twenty years ago, Tracy Kidder published the original nerd epic. The Soul of a New Machine made circuit boards seem cool and established a revolutionary notion: that there's art in the quest for the n

Gender by and Thomas W. Malone From the Magazine (June 2011) The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. Recommended For You Leadership Is Your…

Rebuilt Season In the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan, three high schools combined to form the Soso Rengo baseball team, to give players from affected areas a chance to compete in the national tournament.Credit...Ko Sasaki for The New York Times ONO MACHI, Japan — When the earthquake and…

Takata players have extra motivation to reach the national tournament.Credit...Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times OFUNATO, Japan — Entering this port city by car these days means confronting nature’s fury and its fickleness all at once. The tsunami that hit Japan’s northeastern coast four months…

Allison Arieff on design and architecture. Most talk of work these days revolves around the latest unemployment figures, the difficulties of getting and/or holding onto a job and/or how we are all working more hours for less money and less vacation time, or the bleak prospects for newly minted…

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu A Toronto public school has caused enormous controversy in the press this month for its makeshift Muslim congregation. For the past three years, every Friday afternoon during the darker months, nearly 400 Muslim students at Valley Park Middle School, have—under the auspices of the…

I love Apple. I love Apple so much that if someone gave me a bulletproof vest made out of MacBook Airs, I’d strap it to my back and take a bullet to my chest to protect my precious aluminum friends. But Steve’s lying to us when it comes to FaceTime. “And we’re going to take it all the way. We’re…

This story originally appeared on J-School Buzz and was edited and adapted for MediaShift with permission. It was written by David Teeghman, a recent graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. To incoming students in the Missouri School of Journalism planning to buy an Apple MacBook just because…

For many journalists there’s something halting to the phrase, let alone the idea, of an “advertorial publication.” After all, advertorials are something of a boogeyman (but a boogeyman with a checkbook, which is nice) in the straight-journalism world, products that look, walk, and talk like news…

Aaron Harris/Bloomberg/Getty Images Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days…