Technology

Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable places. When the black names were tapped in up came adverts for criminal record searches.

Can science and technology become the backbone of the British economy? David Willetts thinks so — he’s set out eight great technologies he believes will ‘play a vital role in delivering economic growth’. The Universities and Science minister explained today why British scientific research needs beefing up, albeit in a very free market manner: ‘The challenge is to reap an economic benefit from this capability without clunky interventions that risk undermining the open curiosity-driven research which is what makes us special in the first place. For too long the UK has been hampered by a 'valley of death' between scientific discovery and commercial application.

When future generations look back at the early 21st century, they may well decide that its political turmoil — the collapse of the euro, the spread of Islam, the rise of China — pales into insignificance next to a far more important development: a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and their social environment. This was the moment in history, they may conclude, when our species mastered the art of manipulating its brain chemistry to produce intense bursts of short-term pleasure. As a result, billions of people began to have more fun than their minds and bodies could handle — and developed insidious, life-sapping addictions.

The Sunday Times lists the ‘Top 500 Apps in the world’ (£) today, and I’m pleased to say that The Spectator’s brand new app ranks no.4 in its ‘news apps’ category. The newspaper describes the list as ‘the good, the mad and lovely’ and ours emerges as little of all three. What we have sought to do with the new app is combine our blogs and the magazine, and we are (I think) the first magazine to do so. The Sunday Times gives it the thumbs-up. It ranks us behind its own app, and those of the BBC and Sky News. Here’s its verdict: ‘The contents page may be slightly eccentric, but it’s worth persevering with them.

Here at Coffee House, we normally exhume a piece from The Spectator archives on Fridays. But we thought we'd make an exception, today, for the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's ascent into space. The piece below is actually the only one that the magazine ran at the time, and is by the politician/journalist/author Desmond Donnelly.

Twelve different checks later and I'm in Free Libya, hurling down the road to Tobruk at 100 mph, with Arabic music blasting away. This place is firmly held rebel territory and most journalists have moved towards the battlefields further west. A pair of beautiful American relief workers tell me just to keep going "to see real action". They've just from Benghazi and are headed back to Egypt. They grab my driver. Tobruk, though, has plenty of action for me; and I need to get back to my programme in Cairo. After all, I'm a think-tanker, not a war correspondent. I stop by the oil refinery which is beginning to run again, as is the pipeline. Next week exports will begin.

On Boxing Day, Fraser blogged on whether the iPad and other mobile devices will save British journalism. His view peered into the future, but what about the market today? Fraser points to The Times’ Christmas Day edition, the first of the paper that was available purely in electronic form. Along with Apple and News International’s iPad-only 'Daily' newspaper to be launched next year, this represents a landmark achievement that could signal the beginning for the future of journalism. Or it could represent an industry collectively hurtling towards a brick wall. Online journalism has now been with us for a decade – but, strikingly, no one has taken the issue of making money from it seriously.

I must admit that I despaired this morning when I heard that Nick Stern was arguing that meat eating should become socially unacceptable because of climate change. Those of us who think that climate change is happening and that human activity is a part of it have a big enough case to make without people thinking that they won’t be able to have a Sunday roast or a reviving steak if the green lobby gets its way. People are, understandably, not going to accept being told that they can’t fly, eat meat or have the heating on. The solutions to the problems posed by climate-change have to be technologically led. A hair-shirt approach will simply not have public support and won’t be accepted by every country.