Having the tallest building in the world has always been a source of pride for a country. Currently the UAE has bragging rights with the 829.9 meter Burj Khalifa. Nate Berg wanted to know the theoretical maximum height of a building:

• One of the biggest limitation appears to be available area. The taller the building the broader the base structure has to be to support the weight of the building.
• A concept 4,000 meter superstructure in Japan (pictured above) would have had a base that spread out several kilometers.
• Another important limitation is the transportation system. Lifts can only go so fast and people don’t want to stand around in one waiting to reach the top.
• Yet there’s no reason why, in theory, a manmade structure couldn’t be taller than, say, a mountain. According to one expert a tower as tall as Mt. Everest (8.8 km) wouldn’t be out of the question.

To read more and to find out why we might soon see a series of buildings that look like the Eiffel tower, the two year span that saw the constructuction of the tallest building in the world three times, other towers that are expected to go up soon and take the record from the UAE, and other considerations related to the question, click here.

Source: The Atlantic

Via: Kottke

Matt Ridley discussed humanity’s relationship with the apocalypse:

• In 1968 it was predicted that the world would run out of food and that famine would kill hundreds of millions in ten years.
• Since 1922 it has been predicted that the world will run out of energy. Yet the world has continued to innovate and discover new sources of energy.
• There are four horsemen in the Biblical Apocalypse and our perceptions of Apocalypses in the present also revolve around four themes:
  • Chemicals. DDT, air pollution, sulphur dioxide, and CFCs were all meant to be our end. They weren’t.
  • Disease. Swine Flu, SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola…the list goes on. Oprah once warned her viewers that 1 in 5 Americans would die of AIDS by 1990.
  • People. There are too many of us for the planet to support. We must kill most of us to save a few of us. Yet our population has grown and living standards appear to be…improving.
  • Resources. Oil, metals, and just about everything have been predicted to run out. They haven’t.
• And what about the latest apocalypse scenario? Climate change? The answer is somewhere in the middle – it won’t be our end – but we should do something about it all the same.

The full article is extremely long, and covers the outline provided above in much fuller details. It’s something we’re told about every day, especially in the year 2012. It’s well worth a read.

Source: Wired

Ramesh Raskar and his team at MIT developed a camera that can take pictures so fast that it is possible to watch light travel. In the TED talk above he discusses the applications of such a camera:

• It is theoretically possible to take a picture of the inside of a fruit. This would allow you to determine whether or not it’s ripe just by taking a photo of it.
• Cars that can see around corners and prevent possible collisions.
• Medical imaging devices that can see inside your body with nothing but a burst of standard light, allowing you to avoid harmful x-rays.

The entire talk is fascinating and in it Dr. Raskar explains in extremely simple terms how all of this is possible, what the future may look like, how such technologies would work, and why it is about time. Watch the full video embedded above.

Source: TED

Via: Kottke

Philip N. Howard advocates for a radical idea: The US government should take control of Facebook.

• Facebook’s share price has plummeted. Almost half of all surveyed Americans believe that Facebook will eventually fade away.
• This would be a pity – Facebook’s dominance in the social media sphere makes it incredibly valuable to the public.
• Under the government’s control, Facebook’s privacy standards could be solved with federal laws being enacted to safeguard our data.
• While Facebook works towards the social good a lot of the time, there are times when it doesn’t. Such as when it banned Palestinian pages, or its policy against using pseudonyms which hurts democratic activists in authoritarian countries.
• Facebook employees might even support such a move – with government control they would no longer have to devise ways to get people to click on more ads and generate revenue. Rather, they could focus on combing through the data for important social research.
• Non-Americans might dislike the idea of the American government taking control of Facebook, but there are plenty of government owned properties that are accessed and appreciated by the world over such as the BBC.

It’s a fascinating article and well-worth a read. If you click here you’ll find out the feasibility of such an idea, the potential risks, why international users might support such a move, how such a move could stimulate new business ventures, ethical implications of Facebook’s management decisions, how Facebook could help us in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases and terrorism, how it would be like a public utility, and greater analysis of all the issues involved.

Source: Slate

It’s election time and the Presidential contenders are spending billions of dollars to win. But what are they spending it on? Rebecca Berg reports:

• Swing voters – those who aren’t certain yet which candidate they will vote for – make up only about 4% of the electorate.
• Many of them are located in states which reliably vote for one candidate or another – meaning that their votes won’t matter.
• It’s the thin sliver of swing voters who live in swing states who will see up to $2 billion spent persuading them.
• Swing voters have become rarer in recent years as the electorate has become more polarized.
• Swing voters are more likely to be young, female, or Hispanic.

To read more including the examples of several such swing voters, what the Obama and Romney campaigns have to say, what swing voters look like, how and when they might decide, the importance of the debates, how Romney’s Vice Presidential pick changed things, and other fascinating details, click here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

From Amazon stars to reviews on Trip Advisor, we rely heavily on websites for reviews of services and products before purchasing them. Are they reliable? Ray Fisman wrote:

• The benefits from gaming the review system are potentially lucrative. An extra half star on Yelp can boost revenue by up to 9%.
• Smaller businesses gain more from a half-star review than bigger ones because they’re less well known. Everybody knows what it will be like to eat at a Pizza Hut. Therefore smaller businesses have a greater incentive to game the review system.
• Smaller businesses also have a bigger incentive to post fake reviews because for them the repercussions are less serious. If a large company is caught engaging in such practices then the resulting press coverage would affect their brand across any other stores or franchises that they might have.
• Research suggests that not only are small business owners likely to post fake reviews which rate their businesses highly, they are also more likely to post negative reviews for nearby competitors.
• Evidence suggest that many anonymous book reviews on Amazon also come from the authors and the publishers themselves.
• Technology might be the solution: algorithms can potentially detect if a review is genuine or not.

To read more including the what economists describe as the “cheap-talk” problem, the virtues of crowdsourcing, links to research and papers, how one fake review detection algorithm works, how the ratings of TripAdvisor compare to Expedia, the limits of open-source, and various examples of companies caught posting fake reviews, click here.

Source: Slate

It’s Shark Week this week, an annual event that is now celebrating its 25^th anniversary. Micah Zenko argues that more people have probably died from shark-attacks on screen than in real life. Since less than one America dies each year from shark attacks he compiled a list of things more deadly to Americans than sharks:

• Dogs. Man’s best friend has a murderous streak – canines kill 16 people a year.
• Fireworks. They may finish off a Disney Land show but they also finish off 6.6 people a year.
• Trampolines. Perhaps it’s an Olympic sport because 1.1 people die on one every year.
• Skydiving. To be fair this is really just natural selection at work. Americans don’t really have…feathers.

To read more including the theme park ride that’s more dangerous than a shark, why sugar and fat aren’t the only deadly things about snacks, and blades spinning 100 times a second, click here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Via: Freakonomics

Now that the Olympics are done and dusted who came out on top? Who disappointed? More populated countries should do better since they have more people who could potentially be star athletes. Richer countries should also do better since they can spend more on facilities and training. Using a country’s GDP and population numbers then, a list of expected medals per country can be created and compared with the actual medal count. Charlotte McDonald reports:

• Former members of the Soviet Union exceeded expectations. This is likely because of the strong sporting infrastructure left over from the days of communism.
• Small or low-income countries with a lot of depth in track and field events such as Jamaica and Kenya also did well.
• The US, UK and China did better than expected – and it shows – they dominated the medal tables.
• Countries with large populations and relatively large GDPs did badly if their per capita GDP was low. India, Indonesia and Mexico fall into this category.
• Countries with high income but no sporting tradition did poorly. They include Saudi Arabia and Israel.
• Countries that focus on the Winter Olympics such as Austria and Switzerland also underperformed.
• The countries whose success surprised all experts were Iran, Jamaica, and New Zealand.
• Those who did unexpectedly poorly included Germany, Brazil, and Romania.

The entire article has much more details and full tables. The examples presented here are just a selection of those discussed here.

Source: BBC

They’re ubiquitous, boring, and crucial to the global product supply chain. Tom Vanderbilt unlocked the story behind the humble pallet:

• 80% of US commerce is carried on a pallet.
• Pallets may account for 46% of US hardwood lumber production.
• IKEA has updated the design of its products not for aesthetic reasons, but to modify it so that more can fit on a pallet. IKEA was able to reduce costs by 60% when it almost tripled the number of mugs that could fit on a pallet.
• Pallet efficiency is so important that there’s an entire science devoted to figuring out ways to fit more products on a pallet.
• Pallets trace their rise to the late 30s when gas-powered trucks made pallets the ideal way to transport goods. World War Two also helped. Wars are won, in part, upon the efficiency of supply lines, and the effectiveness of American supply lines were due in part to the pallet.
• The future of the pallet is uncertain. They’re useful for transporting large quantities of goods. Now grocery stores prefer to get smaller, more frequent deliveries, and consumers order individual goods online.

To read more including the credit given to shipping containers, what “pallet overhang”, “pallet gaps” and “the pallet loading problem” are, the leading pallet magazine, the merits of a pooled versus a one-way pallet, the fragmented pallet standards across the globe, and what “mixed product SKUs” are, click here.

Source: Slate