Category: ideas

Delivery giant UPS uses software to determine the most efficient delivery routes. “The software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.”

“Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so.” Now “a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments.”

The device emits a frequencies that repels young people. “Almost 3300 security systems were bought within 18 months of their launch. Around 70% of those were installed in the UK, mostly in England and spread around almost every region in the country.”

A new study overturns “the theory that modern life’s relative ease has slowed or even stopped human adaptation. Selective pressures are still at work; they just happen to be different than those faced by our distant ancestors.”

“If you get hold of any of these hi-tech converged devices they all have a small, very high quality, colour screen. That means that audiences come to expect to see as well as hear their favourite audio and radio brands to the extent that if you’re using the device and there’s nothing on the screen, it can feel and look like it’s broken.”

A computer scientist “announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also revealed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.”

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV.”

Is the embrace of tacky pop culture killing the BBC and, by extension, hurting Britain’s cultural integrity? “When Britain is plummeting down the international reading rankings, possibly because children have too many tests and too little time to learn, it is fair to question whether the BBC is fulfilling its public purpose.”

new poll shows that younger people are giving up on email and using SMS and instant messaging instead. “Korean young adults put it so well. Email is simply outdated and not used between friends and colleagues. The only people you would use mobile email with are the older generation at work. Email? It’s so 90s.”

Philanthropist Harriet Fulbright, the woman behind America’s Fulbright scholarships, believes that “the established educational measures of numeracy and literacy are too limited and that there are other intelligences that we may associate with creativity: visual, kinesthetic, musical and social.”