What kind of person crosses the Nevada desert to investigate UFO conspiracies?
Area 51 is a mysterious place. Located deep in the Nevada desert, it is home to highly classified US military operations. Rumours abound that it harbours secrets about extraterrestrial life. In June, a podcaster released an interview with someone who claims to have studied flying saucers in Area 51. The video spread like wildfire on […]
Move over Facebook and Apple, the next generation of customers has other ideas
A visit to Rochdale Sixth Form College was a cheering experience last week. This year, 55 per cent of A-levels were at grades A* to B. True, Eton and Winchester do better. But this track record shows that even poor boroughs – and Rochdale is one of the poorest – have the capacity to deliver […]
Facebook, facts, and alternative fictions: How to predict the narrative of the future
Last Thursday, Facebook suffered the biggest one-day loss in the history of Wall Street. The company’s shares dropped nearly 19 per cent. Rather incredibly, Facebook reported an increase in revenue of no less than 42 per cent over the same quarter last year, and a rise in profits of 31 per cent. But the narrative […]
Cyber society needs monopoly-busting competition, not misguided regulation
The hostility towards the virtual monopolies enjoyed by tech giants such as Google and Facebook reveals some strange bedfellows. The European Commission is well known for its enthusiasm for regulation. No surprise, then, that last year the Commission fined Google €2.4bn – billion! – for giving its own services preferential treatment in search results. No surprise […]
Farewell Facebook?
So farewell, then, Facebook! That is the conclusion of a highly technical paper by two Princeton researchers, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, which received a lot of publicity in the press last week. The authors conclude that “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 per cent of its peak user […]
USA vs China continued… The Influence of Networks (and the Olympics!)
The last three Olympics have seen a titanic battle between the US and China to head the medals table. If you combine the total of the last three Games, China stands just ahead, with 121 golds to the United States’s 116. But, the US topped the table in both 2004 and 2012, while China edges […]
