Guest Thinkers — February 16, 2011

After class

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

I love winter. But I’ll admit it’s been a bit nippy here lately. Here was the temp when I got out of my class in Mason City Wednesday night:

My class is a blended model of instruction: some face-to-face meetings and the rest online. In this kind of weather, that means fewer long drives through blowing snow for me and my students and fewer frozen noses. We can cozy up inside our warm homes and yet still learn from each other… Awesome!

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

A collage featuring ancient Egyptian art, handprints, geometric sketches, and prehistoric tools, alongside the text "Human Agency" and the number "2" in the top right corner on an orange and white grid background.

The Past

How humanity transformed its fate

From surviving on wild plants and game to controlling our world with technology, humanity’s journey of progress is a story of expanding human agency.

a man sitting in a wheel chair next to a laptop.

High Culture

Stephen Hawking’s famous voice belonged to this pioneering MIT scientist

Dennis Klatt developed trailblazing text-to-speech systems before losing his own voice to cancer.

Hard Science

The weird, dangerous, isolated life of the saturation diver

The divers spend their waking hours either under hundreds of feet of water on the ocean floor or squeezed into an area the size of a restaurant booth.

Two men engaging in a brain-teasing game at a table.

Neuropsych

Why your brain hates other people

And how to make it think differently.

a polar bear rolling around on its back.

Life

In Canada, misbehaving polar bears go to jail

The jail environment teaches the animals that approaching humans results in a boring and annoying experience.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

Kaplan University ads

If you haven’t seen them yet, here are two ads currently being aired by Kaplan University. They come out pretty strongly against the traditional postsecondary paradigm. What do you think?