Simon Winchester in an essay on technology: “Japan introduced the bullet train, the Shinkansen, in 1964…No accident attended its first journeys, nor in any of the journeys in the years and decades since. These days the Tokaido line, running between Tokyo and Osaka, sends ultra-high-speed trains in each direction every six minutes on average, 130,000 of them each year. Four hundred and twenty-five thousand passengers are carried every day along the three-hundred-mile route, at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour. The average delay is just twenty-four seconds. Not a single person has ever been killed on the line.”
You are a network: by Kathleen Wallace. “You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity…The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.”
The Five Biggest Mistakes Companies Make With Customer Surveys: by Utpal Dholakia in WSJ. “Among them: They ask too many questions, or too few.”
