Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash - Adobe's popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser - was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure, Jobs banned it from the iPad.

My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever.

In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company's executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere.

If we don't like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds - and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.