You've got to hand it to Apple chief executive Tim Cook, it takes some balls to stand up to Congress. It takes even more to make demands of them when you're meant to be in the dock yourself.

In front of a Senate sub-committee, Cook yesterday unabashedly confirmed that Apple's...

During times of austerity charity is more important than ever. Lamentably, however, the sector as a whole has suffered greatly as a result of the recession. As demand for the services charities provide has ballooned, supply has failed to keep pace with it; last year the use of food banks...

Back in the 1990s, blogger, photographer, music producer and all round tech wizard Andrew C. Bulhak created a revolutionary computer program known as the Dada Engine. By combining some elementary grammatical rules with randomly generated bundles of text, the Dada Engine can spew out what sound like entirely plausible sentences...

We are a particularly innovative species when it comes to creating ways to make us feel increasingly insecure about the way we look.

The term 'chubby chaser' for instance, has entered our modern lexicon. It is not a term of endearment; 'chubby chaser' is used to describe someone with the...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It is also - unsurprisingly for a quality so ineffable - entirely elusive. Everything, it is said, is obvious in hindsight; if only it wasn't so illusory we would surely be flawless in the art of decision-making.

Because we lack some kind of retrospective oracle,...

"Oh, and there's one more thing," the supervisor told me. "When you're in the school, don't mention the 'three T's'"

"The three T's?" I replied, curious.

"Yes. Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan"

As I've discovered in my month or so in Dalian, north-east China, the 'three T's' are nothing out of...

In times of crisis, the need for clear information is more important than ever. Crunching the numbers in a transparent way is one of the best methods of public policy formation available to us, and data concerning jobs and growth has informed many reasonable economic arguments in recent years. These...

Good governance is a rare commodity. It requires compromise, flexibility and progressive thinking. Unfortunately, our political discourse is firmly rooted in a handful of supposedly eternal truths that received wisdom tells us we can never sacrifice. This thinking needs to be altered if governments are to effectively serve the greatest...

2012 has certainly been an eventful year. For many in Britain, sporting glory will be the enduring memory of all that has passed. For others, it will be the spectacle of the Royal family, through times of both celebration and of controversy.

For me, however, it is the continued apathy...

In case you haven't heard, there's a rumour going round that the print media is dying. Basically, print is slow, and Twitter et al. are faster. The prevalence of digital media has resulted in fewer print readers, which has resulted in declining advertising revenue. Or so the argument goes.

News...

Much has been made of presidential candidate Mitt Romney's devotion to the Mormon Church. In previous writing, I may have been a little too hasty to trivialize Romney's faith, thinking it of only limited relevance to his policy ideas.

But as the campaign trail has continued its insufferably slow progress...

Some individuals have achieved staggering levels of affluence compared to their peers. This is undeniably true. So is the fact that some countries have accumulated a stock of wealth that is by orders of magnitude larger than their competitors.

Some people must be doing something right, and, by extension,...

Over the past few weeks, I've been glued to American TV drama The Newsroom. For those of you who've not yet seen it, The Newsroom documents the goings on in (surprise surprise) a fictional newsroom, and, take my word for it, its utterly compelling viewing.

The opening scene of the...

From the very day they are born, our children are told that life is a competition. They are told that they must work their hardest to be quicker, stronger, sharper and more successful than their peers. They are told to follow their aspirations, and to not let anything or anyone...