The word entrepreneur is tossed around a lot today, but it’s meaning changes depending on the context. The concept was first introduced in 1723 by French economist Richard Cantillon but […]
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The tens of thousands of turbines generating power around the world on land and, increasingly, at sea, represent a stunning reversal of fortune for an industry that fifty years ago was virtually non-existent.
Can the study of art history stop looking like ancient history itself? Can it transcend the old approaches and embrace the digital world? As digitized as art history has become […]
NASA has agreed to fund a study into whether or not mining asteroids for precious metals and minerals is economically sound. Surely not at the moment, but it might be in the future...
“Millions of words have been written about organizational leadership – especially in an anxious economy.” So writes John Boyle in his introduction to Leadership in Uncertain Times, a series of […]
Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week […]
The introduction of tablets to the kindergarten crowd sounds like a phenomenal opportunity to assert the leading role of American innovation.
The Jokers to the Right in my title don’t require further introduction. They’re the social conservatives who belittle rape in their anti-abortion zealotry, believe that the control and suppression of […]
In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to share an article written by my former colleague Ross Robertson for EnlightenNext magazine called “A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21stCentury.” […]
For the third year running, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” list of […]
President Obama has unveiled his proposed 10-year budget today, and while there’s nothing particularly shocking included for those who have been following the ongoing debate between the White House and […]
As we mourn the passing of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, let’s not forget what took us there in the first place. No, it […]
Sure, economics is about making money. But it's really about human behavior in general. In his Great Big Ideas lecture, University of Chicago professor Saul Levmore looks at the origins and tools of economics.
George Soros last Sunday blamed Angela Merkel for the euro crisis – and gave her three months to fix it. Speaking at the 7th Festival of Economics in Trento (Italy), […]
The Matrix is real… and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly […]
Today we’re pleased to announce our second Big Think Book of the Month, the dazzlingly ambitious Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, out May 22, 2012 from […]
Ari Phillips — a graduate student in journalism at the University of Texas — has started a unique project documenting the story of climate change in the U.S. Southwest via […]
The idea of creating mixed boards is gaining significant traction, due to several key global trends.
Question: What do VCRs, Betamax players, condom use in Thailand, and hybrid corn seeds in Iowa have in common? Answer: The adoption of these innovations each followed a logical, predictable […]
This week, NOAA’s Climate Service and Climate Watch magazine launched a video short course and lecture series featuring a diversity of world class experts explaining the major scientific, social, and […]
BY ABHIJNAN REJ A Jurassic Park in the Canary Wharf? On the 6th of May, 2010, at around 2:45 pm, the Dow fell unusually rapidly losing over 9% of its […]
Many of the cognitive tools (heuristics and biases) that we use for all sorts of decision-making also influence our choices about risk.
We generally assume that if we use more energy-efficient machines we will use less energy. If we install energy-efficient light bulbs in place of incandescent bulbs, for example, it will […]
So my post on whether or not higher education is worth it got a lot of responses, mostly negative. Many of the respondents chimed in through email and want to […]
Would you choose the state of equality and justice envisioned by John Rawls or the state of radical individual liberty envisioned by Robert Nozick? This question is posed by Yale professor Tamar Gendler in this week's Floating University lecture.
It is the premise of the course that there are precious few important ideas relevant beyond their specific disciplines, but that it is these very ideas that are the foundation of a modern education.
At the journal Public Understanding of Science, a forthcoming study provides one of the first cross-national comparisons of how energy policy has been covered and debated in news coverage [abstract]. […]
So one of our BIG THINKERS, Daniel Honan, gave us a fine introduction to one of the biggest ideas around, THE END OF HISTORY. Daniel is right that the idea […]
While the British Navy may have secured military victory for the British Empire, Shakespeare's words secured the peace.
Salman Khan envisions the kind of school he would like to send his own son to. In a way it resembles the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear, where teachers and peers alike are empowered to act as mentors, humanizing the classroom.