WHEN the island of Singapore became an independent country in 1965, it had few friends and even fewer natural resources. How did it become one of the world’s great trading and financial centres? The strategy, explained Lee Kuan Yew, its first prime minister, was “to develop Singapore’s only…

Official Correction: This story previously noted that the cost of internet access increased in Africa last year based on a report by Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) . However, A4AI has corrected a methodological error in its initial report to show that prices, in fact, dropped in Africa. The…

This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia It's hard not to at least be aware of the local noise scene if you live in Yogyakarta. That's because, most of the time, the scene comes to you, whether you want it or not. Recently, we were on a Jogja city bus when a small crowd got on board with…

Seth Blank Dec 19, 2016 I recently gave a talk on “Scaling the Team and Tech” at Blue Run Venture’s CTO Summit. I’m posting it publicly to start a larger conversation. Have you ever watched your best engineer turn into your weakest link? Have you seen key team members get constantly sidetracked by…

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium , a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. Power outlets are frustrating , but the devices we use on a daily basis? They don't necessarily make things easier. In fact, the bricks that come with many modern devices, from…

Alexis Madrigal It all started with an Instagram ad for a coat, the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat to be specific. It looked like a decent camel coat, not fancy but fine. And I’d been looking for one just that color, so when the ad touting the coat popped up and the price was in…

Photo: Art Streiber / AUGUST In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered — from afar, anyway — as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. (That’s what earning 28 Grammy awards and co-producing Michael Jackson’s biggest-selling albums will do.) But in person, the…

In East Asia, Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s death and entrance into final enlightenment in February. But at my local Zen temple in North Carolina, the Buddha’s enlightenment is commemorated during the holiday season of December, with a short talk for the children, a candlelight service and a…

A look at the cooling units outside the SuperNAP 8 data center in Las Vegas. These 1000-ton units can switch between multiple cooling modes, and have on-board flywheels to provide extended runtime in the event of power outages. Click for a larger version of this image. (Photo; Switch) LAS VEGAS -…

Image credit: chombosan / Shutterstock.com Low-power WAN (LPWAN) deployments have been popping up swiftly across the Asia-Pacific in recent months, driven by all the buzz over the Internet of Things and the revenue possibilities therein. LPWAN technologies such as Sigfox, LoRa and NB-IoT…

Passengers line up for a bullet train at a platform in Tokyo Station. Yuya Shino/Reuters Allan Richarz May 22, 2018 The nation’s famed mastery of rail travel has been aided by some subtle behavioral tricks. It is a scene that plays out each weekday morning across Tokyo. Suit-clad office workers,…

They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation. Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants,…

In training sessions on domestic violence and technology, people have started asking about how to handle the use of connected home devices in abuse situations, said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Credit Tony Luong for The New York…

Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ( read Sydney Spiesel in Slate on the risks and benefits), the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and…

Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Credit Chris Maggio for The New York Times A strange journey to the glitter factory. Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Credit Chris Maggio for The New York Times Each December, surrounded by wonderlands…

Nayu Kim / Flickr Recently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company’s ballpoints into classrooms. As a teacher, I…

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is…

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online. By the time the course began in October,…

The unsettling evidence that Alzheimer’s Disease may be transmissible under limited -- but definitely nonzero -- circumstances keeps growing. Last December I wrote about research that revealed that infectious, lethal proteins called prions have the potential to be transmitted on optical medical…

A mong the tens of thousands of kids who saw WarGames, when it opened in June 1983, were 17 year old Neal Patrick and 20 year old Timothy Winslow from Milwaukee. Like the classic film’s lead character, played by Matthew Broderick, they were nice middle class kids from the American suburbs who were…

Mar 22, 2019 Zwift , having formed an official cycling league, is now trying to get e-racing into the Olympics. The indoor cycling platform wants to legitimize e-sports and grow it into a global phenomenon to compete with real-world bike racing. The move would create a whole new discipline of racing…

At first glimpse, Rwanda’s capital is a model African city: clean, organised, beautiful. But behind the gleaming facade, not all is well Kigali — Theodosie Uwamohoro was hawking bottles of juice and mineral water at the bus station the day she was killed. It was a Saturday — May 7 2016. When the…

Abstract The phenomenon of ‘microdosing’, that is, regular ingestion of very small quantities of psychedelic substances, has seen a rapid explosion of popularity in recent years. Individuals who microdose report minimal acute effects from these substances yet claim a range of long-term general…

In the manicured grounds of a public library in Chandler, Arizona, Liisa Walimaa is waiting for a robot to take her to Macy’s. For a year Walimaa has been a participant in a closely guarded experiment being run by Waymo, a division of Alphabet (née Google), in this suburb of Phoenix that could…

For more than 30 years, the Inuit welcomed anthropologist Jean Briggs into their lives so she could study how they raise their children. Briggs is pictured during a 1974 visit to Baffin Island. Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made…

IT IS a classic startup story, but with a twist. Three 20-somethings launched a firm out of a dorm room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, with the goal of using algorithms to predict the reply to an e-mail. In May they were fundraising for their startup, EasyEmail, when Google…

Every 95 minutes, the Chinese satellite Zhuhai-1 02 makes a full pass around the planet, its solar-panel arms extending from its boxy body as it observes Earth. Sometimes, its path takes it over Pueblo, Colorado. There, more than 300 miles below, Mike Coletta’s receiving station can pick up Zhuhai’s…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and…

Pictures of President Xi Jinping at an exhibition for the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up, at the National Museum of China in Beijing last year. Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently, forcing…

F ifteen years ago, cybersecurity could be boiled down to a simple strategy: Secure the perimeter. Experts fought against malware and other nefarious code by implementing firewalls and other point-of-entry defenses. Since then, however, companies have moved their operations online and allowed…

I’ve mentioned this in numerous places for the last few years, so I decided it was time to finally put it into a formal piece. It seems obvious at this point that China is building a massive database of information on American individuals and companies, which they can then use for various…

Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates. The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we’re engaged in, our…

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don’t know it, but a technology likely to be the future of communication is being tested right outside their car windows. Running through the tunnel is a fiber-optic…

On one of my more recent voyages down a YouTube wormhole , I was introduced to a suspiciously profitable practice called retail arbitrage. The concept is fairly simple: You purchase products from a retail store, like Walmart or Target, and then you sell them somewhere else, like Amazon, for a higher…

“Only 30 days,” I whispered to myself. “It’s only 30 days.” This spontaneous pep talk happened at my parents’ house on September 1, opening day of my monthlong plan to turn nutritional orthodoxy on its head. For the third time in barely an hour, I rushed with the urgency of an Olympic race walker to…

In 2012, Travis Kitchens, a young writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, made a pilgrimage to the far northeastern corner of Maryland. He had heard stories about an eccentric musician and artist named Zane Campbell from up that way. People talked about a “hillbilly madman,” a punk version of outlaw…

Credit: Getty Images For the 50 million individuals worldwide ailing from Alzheimer’s disease, the announcements by pharmaceutical giants earlier this year that they will end research on therapeutics were devastating. The news is even more devastating considering projections that 100 million more…

Sign Here to Lose Everything Part 1 “I Hereby Confess Judgment” Sign Here to Lose Everything Part 1 : “I Hereby Confess Judgment” Part 2 : The $1.7 Million Man Part 3 : Rubber-Stamp Justice Part 4 : Business-Loan Kingpin How an obscure legal document turned New York’s court system into a…

ike Zelkind stands at one end of what was once a shipping container and opens the door to the future. Thousands of young collard greens are growing vigorously under a glow of pink-purple lamps in a scene that seems to have come from a sci-fi movie, or at least a NASA experiment. But Zelkind is at…

The Weakest Link is Motherboard's third, annual theme week dedicated to the future of hacking and cybersecurity. Follow along here . At 3:15 a.m. local Italian time on July 5, 2015, the usually quiet Twitter account of the infamous spyware company Hacking Team posted a confusing message: “Since we…