France's Social Programs are Behind Their Better Health

The creation of public programs to improve the health of women and babies began in nineteenth-century Europe, where governments found themselves in need of robust young men to fight their wars and expand their empires. Following a crushing defeat in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, for example, France set up a series of programs intended to care for pregnant women, promote breastfeeding, and improve infant welfare. (David Barker has suggested, half seriously, that this early attention to materna...

 A Prescient, Cautionary Statement on IT

The new industrial revolution which is taking place now consists primarily in replacing human judgement and discrimination at low levels by the discrimination of the machine. The machine appears now, not as a source of power, but as a source of control and a source of communication. We communicate with the machine and the machine communicates with us. Machines communicate with one another. Energy and power are not the proper concepts to describe this new phenomenon. If we, in a small was, mak...