Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 57

The exchange of business cards is as close to a universal ritual as you can find in the business world. The ritual may be universal, but the details of business cards and how they are swapped vary across countries. Americans throw their cards casually across a table; the Japanese make the exchange of cards a formal ceremony. While there are cards that are discreet and understated, others are crammed full of details and titles. Some businesspeople hand out 24-carat gold cards, and there are kindergarten children who have cards with not only their own contact details, but also with the job descriptions of their parents and even grandparents. This practice has become so common in parts of New York, for example, that the use of such cards is now prohibited by some of these institutions. Cards have been around a long time in one form or another. The Chinese invented calling cards in the 15th century to give people notice that they intended to pay them a visit, but these were for social purposes only. Then, in the 17th century, European businesspeople invented a new type of card to act as miniature advertisements, signalling the advent of the business card. In today’s world, business cards can cause people to have strong emotional reactions. According to one experienced company director, very few things can provoke more heated discussion at a board meeting than the composition of the company’s business cards. Lots of companies try to promote themselves by altering the form of the card. Employees at one famous toy company give out little plastic figures with their contact details stamped on them. One fast-food company has business cards which are shaped like a portion of French fries. A Canadian divorce lawyer once gave out cards that could be torn in two – one half for each of the spouses. For many business commentators, such gimmicky business cards prove that the use of a physical business card is nearly at an end. After all, why bother exchanging bits of thick paper at all when you can simply swap electronic versions by smartphone? However, one can just as well argue the opposite: that business cards are here to stay, and, in a business world full of meetings and correspondence, it is more important than ever that your card is unique. Attempts to reinvent business cards for the digital age have not been successful. Even at the latest technology conferences, people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from paper rather than using a digital alternative. To understand business cards, it is necessary to understand how business works. That business cards are thriving in a digital age is a forceful reminder that there is much about business that is timeless. According to Kate Jones, a business lecturer, there is one eternal and inescapable issue. Her 2006 study of more than 200 business executives in North America found that trust was the key element for running a successful business. It is vital to be able to look someone in the eye and decide what sort of person they are. In this way, you can transform acquaintanceships into relationships. A good proportion of business life will always be about building social connections – having dinner or playing sport with clients and colleagues – and while computers can deal with administrative tasks, it is still human beings that have to focus on the emotional. The rapid advance of globalisation means that this relationship-building process is becoming ever more demanding. Managers have to put more effort in when dealing with international counterparts, especially when there is not a common language, which is so often the case these days. A recent UK survey showed that chief executives of global organisations now routinely spend three out of every four weeks on international travel. It is in these situations that business cards are doubly useful, as they are a quick way of establishing connections. Cards can also remind you that you have actually met someone in a face-to-face meeting rather than just searched for them on the Internet. Looking through piles of different cards can enhance your memory in ways that simply looking through uniform electronic lists would never do. Janet McIntyre is a leading expert on business cards in today’s world. She maintains that as companies become more complex, cards are essential in determining the exact status of every contact you meet in multinational corporations. Janet also explains how exchanging business cards can be an effective way of initiating a conversation, because it gives people a ritual to follow when they first meet a new business contact. The business world is obsessed with the idea of creating and inventing new things that will change the way we do everything, and this does lead to progress. But there are lots of things that do not need to be changed and, in Janet McIntyre’s view, tradition also has an equally valuable role to play. Therefore the practice of exchanging business cards is likely to continue in the business world.

A. The island of Antikythera lies 18 miles north of Crete, where the Aegean Sea meets the Mediterranean. Currents there can make shipping treacherous and one ship bound for ancient Rome never made it. The ship that sank there was a giant cargo vessel measuring nearly 500 feet long. It came to rest about 200 feet below the surface, where it stayed for more than 2,000 years until divers looking for sponges discovered the wreck a little more than a century ago. B. Inside the hull were a number of bronze and marble statues. From the look of things, the ship seemed to be carrying luxury items, probably made in various Greek islands and bound for wealthy patrons in the growing Roman Empire. The statues were retrieved, along with a lot of other unimportant stuff, and stored. Nine months later, an enterprising archaeologist cleared off a layer of organic material from one of the pieces of junk and found that it looked like a gearwheel. It had inscriptions in Greek characters and seemed to have something to do with astronomy. C. That piece of Junk went on to become the most celebrated find from the shipwreck; it is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Research has shown that the wheel was part of a device so sophisticated that its complexity would not be matched for a thousand years — it was also the world’s first known analogue computer. The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism. D. Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human destiny? E. “We have gear trains from the 9th century in Baghdad used for simpler displays of the solar and lunar motions relative to one another — they use eight gears,” said Frangois Charette, a historian of science in Germany who wrote an editorial accompanying a new study of the mechanism two weeks ago in the journal Nature. In this case, we have more than 30 gears. To see it on a computer animation makes it mind-boggling. There is no doubt it was a technological masterpiece.” F. The device was probably built between 100 and 140 BC, and the understanding of astronomy it displays seems to have been based on knowledge developed by the Babylonians around 300-700 BC, said Mike Edmunds, a professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University in Britain. He led a research team that reconstructed what the gear mechanism would have looked like by using advanced three-dimensional-imaging technology. The group also decoded a number of the inscriptions. The mechanism explores the relationship between lunar months — the time it takes for the moon to cycle through its phases, say, full moon to the full moon — and calendar years. The gears had to be cut precisely to reflect this complex relationship; 19 calendar years equal 235 lunar months. G. By turning the gear mechanism, which included what Edmunds called a beautiful system of epicyclic gears that factored in the elliptical orbit of the moon, a person could check what the sky would have looked like on a date in the past, or how it would appear in the future. The mechanism was encased in a box with doors in front and back covered with inscriptions — a sort of instruction manual. Inside the front door were pointers indicating the date and the position of the sun, moon, and zodiac, while opening the back door revealed the relationship between calendar years and lunar months, and a mechanism to predict eclipses. H. “If they needed to know when eclipses would occur, and this related to the rising and setting of stars and related them to dates and religious experiences, the mechanism would directly help,” said Yanis Bitsakis, a physicist at the University of Athens who co-wrote the Nature paper. “It is a mechanical computer. You turn the handle and you have a date on the front.” Building it would have been expensive and required the interaction of astronomer, engineers, intellectuals, and craftspeople. Charette said the device overturned conventional ideas that the ancient Greeks were primarily ivory tower thinkers who did not deign to muddy their hands with technical stuff. It is a reminder, he said, that while the study of history often focuses on written texts, they can tell us only a fraction of what went on at a particular time. I. Imagine a future historian encountering philosophy texts written in our time and an aircraft engine. The books would tell that researcher what a few scholars were thinking today, but the engine would give them a far better window into how technology influenced our everyday lives. Charette said it was unlikely that the device was used by practitioners of astrology, then still in its infancy. More likely, he said, it was bound for a mantelpiece in some rich Roman’s home. Given that astronomers of the time already knew how to calculate the positions of the sun and the moon and to predict eclipses without the device, it would have been the equivalent of a device built for a planetarium today — something to spur popular interest or at least claim bragging rights. J. Why was the technology that went into the device lost? “The time this was built, the jackboot of Rome was coming through,” Edmunds said. “The Romans were good at town planning and sanitation but were not known for their interest in science.” The fact that the device was so complex, and that it was being shipped with a number of other luxury items, tells Edmunds that it is very unlikely to have been the one ever made. “Its sophistication is such that it can’t have been the only one,” Edmunds said. “There must have been a tradition of making them. We’re always hopeful a better one will surface.” Indeed, he said, he hopes that his study and the renewed interest in the Antikythera Mechanism will prompt second looks by both amateurs and professionals around the world. “The archaeological world may look in their cupboards and maybe say, That isn’t a bit of rusty old metal in the cupboard.”

Seeing is believing, it is said. But, asks Richard Gregory, could it be the other way round? Two of the great British men of the 17th century, the philosopher John Locke and the physicist Isaac Newton, were both aware that objects are not coloured, and that against all appearances light is not coloured either. This is still not generally recognised even now, 400 years later, because it seems so implausible. Yet it tells us something very important — that perceptions are not identical with what we perceive, and may be very different. The most accurate historical account of perception is that of the 19th-century German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz. However, it was ridiculed at the time. Von Helmholtz thought that perceptions are unconscious inferences we make based on a combination of clues provided by the eyes and other senses, and knowledge of the world. This idea of unconscious inference for perception preceded, by several years, the psychoanalyst Freud’s notion of the unconscious, which was also initially treated with derision because it undermined the notion of humans as pre-eminently rational beings who could be held responsible for their actions and awarded blame or praise accordingly. Crucially, perception of the present depends on rich, though of course not always correct or appropriate, knowledge from the past. We interpret sense data (what we hear, touch, taste, see and smell) from the present according to what we already know. This raises the question: if we see the present through memory, why aren’t past and present confused? The pioneering Russian neurologist Alexander Luria described the case of Mr S, who had a remarkable memory. However, he was prone to just such confusions, for example mistaking seeing his clock for remembering it, and so failing to get up in the morning. This suggests that perhaps an important function of perception is to underline the present. Individual perceptions have a vividness that is rare for memories, which might be how we are able to separate them. Try this: look at something for a few seconds, and then shut your eyes and visualise it in memory. You will almost certainly find that the memory is pale by comparison with the perception. Perhaps this is why past and present are not normally confused. Luria’s Mr S had exceptionally vivid memories, and rich synaesthesia (experiencing perceptions from another sense as well as the one being stimulated, such as musical notes experienced as colours), which may be why he confused seeing with having seen. The complexity of processes involved in how we see first impressed itself on me 45 years ago. With my colleague Jean Wallace, I studied the rare case of Sydney Bradford, a man who had been born blind but, through a corneal graft at the age of 52, suddenly found himself able to see. Almost immediately after the operation he was able to ‘see’ but he could only see those things that he already knew about, having experienced them through touch. It was his touch memories that enabled him to perceive them with his eyes. When Bradford was first taken to the zoo, he proved utterly unable to see an elephant as he had no knowledge to make sense of his perceptions. The more recent case in California of Mike May, who was also born blind, is similar. Since his operation, his sight has gradually improved as he learns to see, for example, by understanding how shadows represent depth and tell us about the shape of things. Some of the consequences of May’s new-found vision were less happy. He had been a champion blind skier, but following the operation, he would have to shut his eyes while skiing to block out what he now found was a terrifying sight. But acceptance of this intimate connection between memory and perception, even though it was first noticed in the 17th century, has been slow in brain science. Despite the fact that state-of-the-art brain imaging shows that perception animates parts of the brain associated with both present information and memory, most research on memory and perception is still undertaken as if these were separate processes. Seeing used to be thought of as taking place only in the eyes, and in quite specialised brain regions; but now it seems that half the brain is occupied with seeing, requiring a lot of energy. Perhaps this is why we shut our eyes for a rest. It is not just extreme cases like Mike May, but also much more common errors of seeing — illusions — that can reveal the crucial role of memory in governing what we (think we) see. Perception depends on specific knowledge and probabilities. Our brains calculate the likelihood of what is out there, and when too far-fetched, perceptions are rejected. A dramatic and discomforting example is looking at the two sides of a face-mask. From the front it is a convex shape with the nose sticking out. Then if the mask is rotated, the back of the mask will be seen as convex, though we know that it must be concave. It is almost, if not quite, impossible to sketch the back of a hollow mask to look as it is — hollow. Science often learns from what does not happen: people not seeing a hollow face as hollow is the most revealing experiment on perception. The unsettling truth from brain science is that even people with no visual impairment see what, at some level, they expect to see, and often miss things as they really are.