LESSON TWELVE: A House of Cards

PICK A PASSWORD: Go ahead and change your e mail pass- word, the class will wait. Now, how many different combinations of letters, numbers, and special characters can you remember? Most tech users when urged to make their passwords more complex for security reasons resort to ver- sion 1.0 and write them down or store them in a text file. This, of course, has the unintended consequence of making them less safe. 

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.PICK YOUR POISON: You would think that after helping to end World War I, Americans would want to have a drink and either celebrate the end or mourn the casualties. Not so much. Instead, the United States began a massive social experiment with Prohibition in 1920. Historical film maker Ken Burns recaps how going dry meant unemployment, business failures, bootlegging, and a rise in attendance at church...for the still legal sacramental wine. 

Prohibition: Unintended Consequences | PBS

PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series on PBS directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

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Hardcore History 50 - Blueprint for Armageddon I

The planet hadn't seen a major war between all the Great Powers since the downfall of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. But 99 years later the dam breaks and a Pandora's Box of violence engulfs the planet.

​GO HARDCORE: Discover storyteller Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. A veteran journalist with two extremely popular podcasts, Carlin gives history the kind of passion- ate analysis it deserves. Check out part one in his history of the Great War, Blueprint for Armageddon. 

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GET FREAKY: Take a listen to the Freakonomics podcast about The Cobra Effect. In Colonial India, it was decided by the powers that be that fewer cobras would mean a safer environment. So, a bounty was placed, and the government paid for cobra carcasses. And some people will do anything for a buck, including raising their own cobras in captivity in order to kill them and collect. When the program was cancelled, the snakes were released. Thus, the population of cobras likely increased due to the program. Hear more about snakes on the Indian plain.

The Cobra Effect: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast - Freakonomics

Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called "The Cobra Effect." (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player in the post, or read the transcript below.) The gist: when you want to get rid of a nasty pest, one obvious solution comes to mind: just offer a cash reward.

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GO GOOGLING: Unintended consequences aren’t just about lone gun men and economic theory. An Internet search for the term should return somewhere over 6 million hits. Browse the results and the news to review the unintended consequences of things like airline safety measures, school discipline, China’s one child policy, seat belt laws, airing your politics on Facebook, and new rules to protect NFL quarterbacks. 

Google

Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

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The First Google Maps War

Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time. Did Google Maps almost cause a war in 2010? On Nov. 3 of that year, Edén Pastora, the Nicaraguan official tasked with dredging the Rio San Juan, justified his country's incursion into neighboring Costa Rica's territory by claiming that, contrary to the customary borderline, he wasn't trespassing at all.

THEN MAP IT: Google itself comes under scrutiny for changing the way we live in seemingly strange and unpredictable ways. Did Google Maps start a war in 2010? Read More from the New York Times.

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GET CHAOTIC: “Chaos happens, let’s make better use of it.” Historian Edward Tenner takes us back forty thousand years into the past to show how our ability to innovate also creates a lot of positive outcomes. We learn a lot, it turns out, from our disasters. His TED talk is a good reminder that not all unintended consequences are negative. He notes that we’re all in this together and your decisions can have consequences for others, presumably to include me. So, study up and read on. 

Edward Tenner: Unintended consequences

Every new invention changes the world -- in ways both intentional and unexpected. Historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.