Edward Tenner is a historian of technology and culture. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center and holds a Ph.D in European history. More
What do flat-screen televisions, soft-drink vending machines, and spectacular bridges have in common? All have hidden design flaws that engineers evidently had not expected, yet that have inadvertently encouraged dangerous behavior.Consider a new study cited by MSNBC:Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them. . . . [S]uch injuries had… More »
The Boston Globe Ideas section has an essay by the staff writer Drake Bennett on the implications of happiness research for the law. It's not surprising that lawyers should have taken an interest in research on happiness. The profession has 3.6 times the rate of depression of the average occupation, and a male suicide rate twice the U.S. national average. Even the Positive Psychology movement, which promotes happiness as a goal of psychotherapy, finds the legal… More »
When I read about the newspaper crisis, I think of Edwin Diamond, the New York University journalism professor who opened a conference I attended on "The Potential Downside of the National Information Infrastructure" at the now-discontinued Annenberg Washington Program in 1995. In his lecture, and in his landmark study of change at the New York Times (still in print after over 15 years), he revealed the fragility of newspapers' relationship with technology. Diamond… More »
The H1N1 epidemic began as a prologue to tragedy and is ending like a Gilda Radner - Emily Litella sketch from the old Saturday Night Live: "Never mind." Yet it might still mean life or death for many people. On the positive side, the Guardian reports that British scientists have established the virus's full genetic code, and that the pace of vaccine research is encouraging. Further,[a]t a meeting of Asian health ministers in Bangkok today, the WHO director general… More »
The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble and Colgate have responded vigorously to consumers' new thrifty avoidance of higher-priced premium brands -- by raising prices of flagship products like Tide detergent even more.We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British… More »
Ted Anthony of the Associated Press interviewed me for his provocative analysis of the American spirit in a time of troubles. My take:If people had a vivid enough imagination of the threats they really face, the reactions that might occur could be almost as severe as the threats that we're anticipating.The dark side of the attention economy, in which human time becomes the scarce resource no matter how much content on the Internet is free, is competition among our… More »
"Don't say 'If only,' say 'next time,'" goes the familiar saying. But there's a problem in learning from mistakes. If we're not extremely careful, the lessons we draw may create even greater problems. The historian William H. McNeill, one of my graduate teachers, coined a brilliant phrase for the phenomenon, one unfortunately even more apt now than when I cited it in Why Things Bite Back: the Law of the Conservation of Catastrophe. It suggests that "every gain in… More »
New chess software makes it easier for younger players to reach the top of their game—and harder to stay there
