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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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What's the Latest Development? Citizens in rural Nepal, Cambodia, and nine other Asian countries have greater-than-ever access to the Internet and all its benefits, thanks to the efforts of the PAN Localization Program, also known as PANL10n. Since 2003, this group of software engineers ...
With per capita income above $5,000, China is no longer a poor country. That also means that China's growth rate will continue to slow. So that also means that fears that China's economy will overtake the U.S. are unfounded, argues Ruchir Sharma, author of Breakout Nations , who argues in the ...
Two years ago Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman published a book called Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy . Altman offered predictions for what the global economy would look like 10, 20, 40 years down the road. In the video below ...
In today's ever-changing and highly volatile world we have no shortage of predictions. What we do have is an accountability shortage. In today's lesson, Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman holds himself accountable by comparing what he predicted a few years ago in his book Outrageous ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at Lancaster University have developed a video advertising system called Sideways that can change the ads it displays based on the eye movements of shoppers passing by. Senior researcher Andreas Bulling says the system uses a single camera to "[detect ...
Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad has crossed a "red line" by using chemical weapons, according to the line that the U.S. State Department and President Obama have repeatedly drawn in the sand. And yet, the problem, some would argue, is that this line in the sand has not be drawn with a sword ...
I won't propose an answer to this hugely complex question today. Instead, I want to point out some striking similarities between the American perspective on the conflict in Chechnya a decade ago and the run-up to the Obama administration’s pending decision on how to handle the Assad regime’s ...
Everyone's got an opinion about economics. In the punditocracy, in the blogosphere. Wherever you look you see differing views about how we really ought to approach economic policy. The problem, as Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman points out in the video below, is that "it's getting ...
Facebook has made some decisions about its rules, its internal rules, that sometimes play out quite negatively for activists. For instance, Facebook has a policy that requires people to use their real name and so even though a lot of activists in a lot of countries are using Facebook to organize ...
What's the Latest Development? Asimov's Three Laws be damned: On Tuesday New York-based Human Rights Watch launched a campaign seeking to stop the development of "killer robots" and other artificially intelligent weapons. The organization is putting together a coalition of groups from around the ...
What's the Latest Development? With air pollution levels in Beijing and other major Chinese cities at record highs in the last few months, parents and others are finding themselves consumed with anxiety over the health of their children. Some are choosing schools based on the level of built-in ...
What's the Latest Development? On Sunday, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwartzman announced the creation of a $300 million scholarship program that over the next 50 years will send 10,000 students to China's Tsinghua University for one all-expenses-paid year of graduate study. Beginning in ...
What's the Latest Development? Videos released Thursday that clearly showed two men suspected of carrying out Monday's Boston Marathon bombing -- one of whom is on the run as of this posting -- are, according to writer Farhad Manjoo, "a sign of the virtues of video surveillance." He argues that ...
As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But I think we're going away from the kind of economy in which wheeling and dealing on Wall Street is sort of the pinnacle to something that is much more broad-based. I have pet theory, which is only a pet theory, but it ...
What's the Latest Development? With two major global events coming up -- the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics -- now sounds like a good time for the Brazilian government to announce a startup accelerator program. The country's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is offering ...