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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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I’m Libertarian, but one of the problems with being a Libertarian is that the word is used by so many people to mean so many different things that it’s really hard to tell what you’re getting when you have someone say to you, “I’m a Libertarian.” For example, I understand that Reason magazine, a ...
If I were to give you advice on what to tell your daughter, who say, is a 13-years-old adolescent, I would definitely present all kinds of options to her as really valid. I would present the heterosexual family as a model. I would also say should could live a full life as a single person with ...
What's the Latest Development? Thanks to technological innovations in the past decade, film making has become increasingly decentralized and going to the movies is no longer the go-to entertainment option. Still, Hollywood is dreaming as big as ever and several movie studios are set to begin ...
What's the Latest Development? A recently published study conducted by Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has found that the more national debt a country has, the greater tendency there is for slow, or negative, economic growth. The study was seized on by fiscally conservative politicians who seek ...
Last November, I published an article here on BigThink called, The Apocalypse May Already Be Here, or “Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark,” where I shared some of my thoughts about the state of culture in one of the most progressive societies on earth. The article centered around a ...
David Karp just became a lot wealthier and Yahoo became a lot hipper. And we became a lot more interested in Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking platform that Yahoo bought for over $1 billion. For the uninitiated, we have compiled a short list of Tumblrs that are worth checking out ...
What's the Latest Development? The once-gritty city of Berlin is getting a make over, an afternoon that Barbie would surely approve of. Two interactive, life-size dollhouses launched recently as Barbie maker Mattel's latest effort to expand the doll's franchise. One of the dollhouses in central ...
In advance of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil is investing heavily in high-tech surveillance equipment to make the games "one of the most protected sports events in history." The arsenal will include a fleet of American-made PackBot 510 robots and Israeli-made drones. The image ...
What's the Latest Development? The public debate over gay marriage in France is decided but a modern group of Catholics who still speak strongly in favor of traditional marriage has emerged as a modern sociological phenomenon. "Today, everyone asserts their identity, why shouldn't we?" asks ...
Can the scientific literature be trusted? In "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine, basically says no, it cannot. Far from a kook or an ...
This article originally appeared in the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. The courtroom is hushed. A teenage boy has been slain, riddled with bullets during a drive-by shooting, and there, on the witness stand, is his crying mother. She's understandably weeping ...
Ross Douthat, the only conservative columnist for the New York Times, reports some good news and some bad news. The good: The Americans are becoming less criminal and less violent. There are fewer murders. And I’m adding or guessing that right as we become attuned to the dangers of bullying ...
What's the Latest Development? The concept of empathy—putting yourself into another's shoes—has fueled political and moral thinking of late, inspiring presidents and academics to hail the feeling of another's pain as necessary to curing the world's ills. Crucial to empathy is "victim ...
What's the Latest Development? A partnership between Google and NASA has resulted in the purchase of a quantum computer which both organizations expect to aid in the development of artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, a branch of AI that focuses on construction and study of ...
What's the Latest Development? Controversy surrounding a Harvard dissertation which claimed a genetic link between race and intelligence has cost its author, Jason Richwine, his job at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. Richwine, who recently wrote on the high costs of ...