Bruce McCall paints a future that never happened — full of flying cars, polo-playing tanks and the RMS Tyrannic, “The Biggest Thing in All the World.” At Serious Play 2008, he narrates a brisk and funny slideshow of his faux-nostalgic art. Read More…
China revealed that water pollution in 2007 was more than twice as severe as official figures. Read More…
According to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), 85 percent of Chinese families can not afford housing expenditure, and house prices are much higher than their incomes. Read More…
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. Read More…
China began its annual mass passenger transportation for the traditional Lunar New Year, with an expected 2.54 billion journeys in the coming 40 days. Read More…
Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value — and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. Read More…
China’s population of Internet users jumped by nearly a third to 384 million at the end of 2009, an official report showed recently, just a few days after Google threatened to retreat from the expanding market. Read More…
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. Read More…
Mike Rowe, the host of “Dirty Jobs,” tells some compelling (and horrifying) real-life job stories. Listen for his insights and observations about the nature of hard work, and how it’s been unjustifiably degraded in society today. Read More…
As of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped. This slows the delivery of aid after a disaster — and hides the economic potential of unused lands and unknown roads. In this short talk, Google’s Lalitesh Katragadda demos Map Maker, a group map-making tool that people around the globe are using to map their world. Read More…
