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The Higgs Particle Is as Good as Found
Orion Jones
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552 - When Macbeth Met Hamlet: a Scandinavian Scotland?
Frank Jacobs
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A Catalogue of Social Media (and Related) Tools
Alan Rosenblatt
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Venture Capital for the 99%
Dominic Basulto
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This Super Camera Captures What's Beyond Human Comprehension
Michio Kaku
Phantom Economic Threats
The world is awash with economic turmoil and in it are winners, losers, heroes and villains. This sets the stage for opportunities to point fingers and place blame. The problem, however, is so complicated that it's difficult to pin point one culprit for the financial collapse. In fact, some say it's downright dangerous to target one offender when there are so many moving parts to the global economy.
Instead we should be using this time to learn some lessons from our mistakes. For instance, Chinese households save over 30 percent of their household incomes, which is a remarkable number considering Americans save around 4 percent. What propels the Chinese from saving so aggressively and what lessons can we learn from them?
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Lessons To Learn From China's Not-So-Big Spenders
It's no secret that Americans spend too much. So what can they learn from China, a country where households save over a third of its income for a rainy day?
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Globalization Fears That Drive Political Discourse
Political candidates are jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing China for the US' economic woes. But experts say this perception is distorted and dangerous.
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Who's Really to Blame for the Economic Crisis?
Economist Parag Khanna leads a distinguished panel on the future of economic competition. The first topic in this series asks what really led to the recent economic crisis. -
Who’s to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
David Wessel sees a long list of culprits, from the credit rating agencies to financial press—but puts the majority of the blame on Wall Street. This series was made possible by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
Latest
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Testing Our Moral Convictions: Decriminalising Possessing Child Porn To Reduce Child Crime
about 4 hours ago
Last time, in the introductory post, I suggested that evidence is more important than outrage. Outrage indicates how outraged individuals want the world to be; evidence tells everyone how the world is. Too often, we let outrage guide us; for too long, we let positions with negative social ... Read More
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Lessons To Learn From China's Not-So-Big Spenders
about 4 hours ago
What is the Big Idea? In a recent trip to a Costco in Manhattan, shoppers were seen pushing around large shopping carts filled with items like family-sized jars of mayonnaise and bulging packs of fluffy, colorful tube socks. Moms navigated congested aisles with their screaming children and ... Read More
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Globalization Fears That Drive Political Discourse
about 4 hours ago
What is the Big Idea? The backlash against U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra’s political attack ad is coming from all sides, including those in his own party. For those who missed it, the ad slams incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow’s foreign economic policies and depicts a young Asian ... Read More
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Why David Hockney Went Back to Nature
about 5 hours ago
“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture , “because there’s the infinite there, meaning you can’t think it up.” That film captures Hockney painting many of the amazing landscapes that ... Read More
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How to Become More Creative
about 11 hours ago
What's the Latest Development? First, stop searching for the creativity formula. When Steve Jobs was designing Pixar's office space, the computer graphics company he founded between gigs at Apple, he wanted to locate the building's only bathrooms in a center atrium, forcing people to interact ... Read More
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Brains Are Automatic, But People Are Free
1 day ago
What's the Big Idea? Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it ... Read More
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THE “SLIPPERY SLOPE” ISN’T SLIPPERY: IT’S POT-HOLED, GRAVELLY, AND LITTERED WITH DEBRIS and SPEED BUMPS
1 day ago
The “slippery slope” is a popular argument in the same-sex marriage debate. Where do you draw the line, opponents argue? If you start allowing marriage between people of the same sex, then why not require that the law recognize threesomes, group marriage, incest, beastiality, and polygamy? Can ... Read More
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Support African Americans for Humanism
1 day ago
As NPR recently reported, there's a high price to pay for being a black atheist in America. African Americans who come out of the closet as nonreligious may be cut off by their own families, may be labeled a "race traitor" or an "apostate", or accused of lacking morals or having "holes in their ... Read More
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Will the Supreme Court Rule on Same-Sex Marriage?
2 days ago
On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2010 district court ruling that California’s Proposition 8 forbidding same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. It was the first time a federal appeals court had overturned a state law against same-sex marriage. In the majority opinion ... Read More
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The Crazy Cat Lady, Explained
2 days ago
Why do people hoard pets? Psychologists have explained the phenomenon as arising from early childhood experiences. Animals are often stable fixtures in an otherwise dysfunctional life. Yet what if your cat makes you even more dysfunctional? An evolutionary biologist named Jaroslav Flegr argues ... Read More
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Clean Water is the Best Prophylactic
2 days ago
"The most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor," Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler observe in their recent book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Demographers have found alarming birth rates in the developing world, and it is linked to what Diamandis and Kotler call the ... Read More
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The Contraceptive Clash: Not About Religious Rights
2 days ago
In the continuing flap over the Obama administration’s decision to require Catholic institutions to provide birth control under the new health care law, both sides have failed to come to grips with the complexities of religious liberty. In the weeks since the mandate was announced in January ... Read More
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IdeaFeed
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Creative Processes
How to Become More Creative
Always mindful of the mind, Jonah Lehrer offers a brief history of creativity. Based on empirical results, brainstorming and teleconferencing are out, accidental interactions and trust are in.
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Creative Processes
Sleepy or Drunk? You're Ready to Problem Solve!
Grogginess is a virtue when it comes to finding creative solutions to tricky problems. Lack of concentration frees your mind to create new associations that may yield an important new insight.
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positive psychology
How Positive Thinking Keeps You Healthy
Having a positive attitude is about more than being in a good mood. The way you think determines parts of your body chemistry, which in turn control your physical health.
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Brain Teasers
Why Our Brains Love Powerful Music
Researchers say emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the brain, the same chemical that creates a sensation of reward while eating good food, having sex or taking drugs.