We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
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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What's the Latest Development? Last weekend, as part of its Project Loon, Google launched 30 balloons, which together helped provide basic broadband-like Internet access to 50 or so testers in the Christchurch area of New Zealand. The balloons hover about 12 miles above the Earth -- well out of ...
The anonymous author of the Big Think Neurobonkers blog has published a wee reply to my recent posts arguing that NSA leaker Edward Snowden should be prosecuted: To act on one’s conscience and leak information that is believed to be in the public interest is a noble choice. The ...
The Taiwanese version of the Onion (sort of) has put out a new video mocking President Obama's hypocrisy regarding NSA surveillance. The US has long criticized China for being a surveillance state and locking up its own citizens for opposing government policies. But 2013 has revealed a ...
What's the Latest Development? When it comes to cyberattacks that shut down business servers and steal valuable data, some companies want to take "an eye for an eye" approach, launching counterattacks that could involve malware or covert shutdowns of hackers' computers. Such activity is illegal ...
What's the Latest Development? With unemployment rates among young Europeans remaining high, and amid fears of potential civil conflict, some governments are reconsidering using part of their budgets to fund early retirement programs for older workers. It's one of the ideas that may come up at a ...
What's the Latest Development? Since 2005, designers at Carnegie Mellon University have been refining a surveillance system that is capable of tracking over a dozen individuals simultaneously -- just like the Marauders' Map described in the Harry Potter books. The multi-camera setup was ...
Yes, the kitten with four eyes, two noses and two mouths is real. She was born on Tuesday and answers to, cue the pun, “Deucy.” What does Deucy have to do with Edward Snowden, aside from their adorable whiskers? A lot. I could explain, but Hobbes does such a better job. Arguing for entrusting ...
What's the Latest Development? A century after becoming all but extinct east of the Rocky Mountains, cougars -- also known as mountain lions, pumas, and panthers, among other names -- are on the move, as evidenced by an increasing number of sightings in 11 Midwestern states as well as in ...
What's the Latest Development? On Monday, days after it was revealed that the US government was amassing millions of telecommunications and Internet data records, a Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll of just over 1,000 adults showed that a majority are fine with the government's actions if ...
As the impressive scope of the NSA surveillance operation known as PRISM comes to light, smart people in the blogosphere are divided about how up in arms we ought to be. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story in the Guardian, charges that the United States “wants to destroy ...
What's the Latest Development? Adding to the increased focus on global food waste is a new report from the World Resources Institute linking that food to the water used to grow and/or process it. Seventy percent of freshwater use is for agriculture -- growing crops for human as well as animal ...
What's the Latest Development? Kamran Mohseni and his team of researchers at the University of Florida's Institute for Networked Autonomous Systems have created a small sensor-equipped drone -- "just 6 inches long and about the weight of an iPod Nano" -- that can be launched in numbers from a ...
Macroeconomics is not as young a field as you might believe. Even in Roman times, emperors used monetary policy to influence credit, prices, and demand. Yet for all humanity’s experience, we still make huge blunders. Why? The reason has to do with the inexactitude of macroeconomics. Unlike ...
What's the Latest Development? First assigned to the Soviet Union a year before its 1991 dissolution, the Internet suffix .su has now become home to what Group-IB's Andrei Komarov believes is "more than half the cybercriminals in Russia." The number of malicious sites in the domain space doubled ...
What's the Latest Development? Two organizations -- the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- have announced that they will partner together to support a treaty that will allow for greater worldwide distribution of published works that ...