Cartography: The true true size of Africa | The Economist. Speaking of Africa, the place is huge.
Tag: economist
Online fraud: Blatancy and latency | The Economist
Blatancy is a means of weeding out all but the most credulous respondents. (…) A big cost for [spammers] is the time they spend coaxing fully into their net those who show initial interest. So they need to select the most promising targets, rather than timewasters or the wary. “By sending an e-mail that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks [victims] to self-select.”
Legal disclaimers: Spare us the e-mail yada-yada | The Economist
E-mail disclaimers are one of the minor nuisances of modern office life, along with fire drills, annual appraisals and colleagues who keep sneezing loudly.
Perfect timing, Economist. We had a fire drill yesterday, annual appraisals last month, and this morning *I* was the guy with the sneezing fit.
Legal disclaimers: Spare us the e-mail yada-yada | The Economist
Business clichés: The subtleties of corporate English | The Economist
“It’s terribly important, at least in American business meetings, to be constantly acknowledging the contributions other people have made”. (via) A further rhapsody on “deep dive”:
There’s something athletic, soulful even, about the thought of physically diving into a spreadsheet, kicking around in its dusky deep columns, paddling lazily through the surf of numbers, digging for hidden gems among its pivot tables, and coming up for air gasping but ecstatic, with the decimal points cascading down your forehead.
Business clichés: The subtleties of corporate English | The Economist
Being foreign: The others | The Economist
An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility. It may be this sense of a return to childhood, consciously or not, that gives the pleasure of foreignness its edge of embarrassment.
Mark Larson 