So the Big Think’s AGE OF ENGAGEMENT is advertising a showing of Carl Sagan’s hugely influential film CONTACT. The film will be shown, appropriately enough, as an excellent example of how […]
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Despite the high-wire histrionics in Washington over the debt ceiling and America’s recent credit rating downgrade, the economic crisis is fundamentally about jobs and prosperity.
Readers in the Washington, DC area are invited to join us at American University this Fall semester for a seminar series sponsored by the Doctoral program in Communication. The seminars […]
The new experimental “brain chips” developed by researchers at IBM and DARPA represent a fundamental breakthrough in computing power. If these brain chips are ever commercialized, they would make possible what are essentially thinking, artificial brains.
That’s the conclusion of Flagg Taylor—one of the leading experts on totalitarian communism: I’ve spent and continue to spend a great deal of time thinking about totalitarianism. In what guise […]
What was prehistoric human sex like? Most of us conjure “the hackneyed image of the caveman, dragging a dazed woman by her hair with one hand, a club in the other.” Psychologist Christopher Ryan says this image is mistaken in every detail.
Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville has outlined an important component of President’s Obama’s case for a second term. Sure, the economy is tanking. And so are the president’s ratings, because […]
The scientific concept that will most impact our world is the idea that will unify two opposite ideas, those of Newton and Einstein, says Big Thinker Ajitkumar Tampi Trivikram.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recentlywrote that while members of the U.S. armed forces may as a group be politically conservative, “they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos.” Kristof’s […]
So last night at the ISI honors program (after a long and luxurious dinner at a great restaurant), we actually had a speaker from CANADA—a brilliant professor of political philosophy […]
One of the most disappointing moments in an otherwise fairly encouraging Republican New Hampshire debate was that none of the seven candidates would continue federal funding for human space flight. […]
For the past few weeks I have been going back and forth with Frank Cilluffo and Clint Watts over their paper on what to do in Yemen. (Their original post […]
Officials in one Boston suburb are the first to move beyond the traditional measure of success—economic growth—and track their citizens’ happiness as a measure of wellbeing.
The communal aspect of public education is under attack by advocates of public school privatization promoting “parental choice.”
Francis Fukuyama tells Big Think about the pressures that one must overcome in rethinking positions–in his case, his views on the Iraq War–and how he overcame those pressures.
Yuval Levin, the most astute and imaginative of the Republican public intellectuals, has noticed that Democrats have stopped being progressive. That means, from one view, they no longer believe that History (with […]
Near-Earth Asteroids are a threat to our planet, but they also represent an opportunity to generate enormous wealth, and may drive the commercial space race.
As a result of the economic downturn and the cancellation of the Constellation program, it’s now Shuttle Endeavor’s turn to take it’s last voyage into space. After a postponement of […]
Over the past few years, scholars and scientists have been re-examining both the goals and the nature of science communication initiatives. In a guest post today, Melanie Gade reviews much […]
Product development and launch was easier when the consumer was young enough to see everything as new and novel. While admittedly fast moving and hard to keep, the ‘tween through […]
Terry Moe and John Chubb say… n n There is every reason to believe that technology will only become more effective with time. The same cannot be said of the […]
In almost two weeks, comedian Jay Leno will be making his debut on a live comedy show to air at 10 pm. Not content to rest on his laurels, Jay […]
Stephanie Sandifer recently blogged about the concept of ‘teachers as learners’: Rather than immediately engage in a technology purchasing frenzy, take some time to begin discussions on your campus about […]
[This is Post 1 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.] Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week […]
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog] nn Why haven’t schools changed more? Maybe because they can’t. n In their 2005 Phi Delta Kappan article, Can Schools Improve?, Christensen, Aaron, & Clark […]
My goal for June: 30 days, 30 book reviews. This post is a review of Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling by Rick Hess. My short recommendation? I […]
Discussions of China tend to focus on size – a nation of over 1.3 billion people certainly deserves attention from business and investors worldwide. But, ‘total’ numbers reveal little about […]
Good brand marketing is about getting the right emotional response from your target audience. You can get people to buy a product in many ways, but to get them to […]
There’s a pretty big kerfuffle going on about marketing guru Seth Godin’s recent launch of Squidoo brand communities. n Godin launched a service that aggregated the conversation occuring about companies […]
Tomorrow, the Republicans plan to roll out their “Pledge to America” outlining what they plan to do if they regain control of Congress. The platform is an updated version of […]