This week’s Thought You Should See This update for my friends at Doblin:

Much shock and sadness in England, as looters turn out in force to terrorize various city centers. The cause of the riots, despite what premier David Cameron would have us believe, is not Twitter, BBM or social media. It’s decades of active neglect along with a populace encouraged to turn away from anything one might recognize as a moral code and toward self-involved gain and to hell with the rest of you. Way too many links to include in one small round-up (image above from front page of The Times, showing a woman jumping from a burning building in Croydon), but Peter Oborne’s The Moral Decay of Our Society is as Bad at the Top as the Bottom is worth a read, while this Hackney woman’s rant at the tragedy of the small-minded riots is a good reminder that perhaps not all is lost, yet.

Also this week on Thought You Should See This:

File under: worth checking out when you have a spare moment: the New York Times’ new experimental design/development site, Beta 620.

Green Biz’s Joel Makower writes a nice appreciation of Interface’s Ray Anderson, who died earlier this week. The charismatic company founder made a name for the huge strides he took toward creating sustainable business practices in what had previously been an incredibly un-green field.

Some interesting stats on social networking, even though wrapped in one of those irritating, hand-wringy “however will we cope with the overload?” lifestyle type pieces.

In There’s No Such Thing as Big Data, writer Alistair Croll looks at the conundrum facing big businesses looking to innovate. Must-read.

An Ed Ruscha art project from 1965 foreshadows Google Street View by decades.

Hard not to agree with the insight of the XKCD cartoon, Password Strength.

Fascinating chart from Nanex shows that financial “innovation” is alive and kicking on Wall Street.