Tempers ran high at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft’s Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.
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In a guest post today, my colleague Paul D’Angelo, a professor of communication at The College of New Jersey, considers how the news media have defined the role of social […]
Parag Khanna says that a choice made ten years ago—not by the State department but by American universities—could have the greatest influence on whether new Arab governments move toward or away from the West.
Life code (the famous A, G, T, and C of DNA) will be as important to the next generation of entrepreneurs as digital code (0’s and 1’s) is now.
The life code (the famous A, G, T, and C of DNA) will be as important to the next generation as digital code (0’s and 1’s) is now.
Part II of my notes from Cairo – note this should not be mistake for expert analysis on Egypt. This is simply my notes of my own experiences. Friday Night, […]
Famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil is notoriously inaccurate in his weather predictions, but there is still much that humans can learn from other species.
I don’t often blog about things other than Yemen, mostly because I dislike reading stuff from people who speak without knowing, and as I have been forced to listen countless […]
When the late Idi Amin launched a successful coup attempt against the then President of Uganda, Milton Obote, he made sure that the latter was attending Commonwealth Conference, before sending […]
The question of using genetic enhancement to raise test scores may seem like a bad joke—or science fiction. But U.S. policymakers and families, may need to start asking themselves if they can “win the future” without it.
In vitro babies should be pre-screened for severe birth defects, argues Jacob Appel. If this creates a slippery slope, parents can find “level places on it” (and maybe save money […]
The author of the Declaration of Independence and surely our most “intellectual” president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that we have life and liberty for the pursuit of happiness. In his private letters, […]
The ice remains here in Ohio – and the weather is truly crazed. The temperature when I woke up this morning: 36F. Temperature an hour and a half later: 25F […]
Over the last several decades, both through good economic times and bad, the United States has transformed into the planet’s undisputed worry champion.
Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they will launch into a treatise about the Three Primary Colors: red, blue, and yellow. This would be wrong, says Jason Cohen.
A very smart statistician has realized that it is possible to sort, with upwards of 90 percent accuracy, the winning scratch tickets from the losing ones before anything is scratched off.
All Americans, not just those in senior governmental positions, could benefit from having the option to watch Al Jazeera English—or at least having the option not to watch it.
An “invisibility cloak” that’s able to hide items thousands of times larger than before now exists, scientists say. The cloak works by wrapping light around an object.
Arguably, the U.S. now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in most countries, so enormous time and effort are devoted to finding loopholes.
The Google Art Project offers a new form of collaboration that allows museums to take extraordinary art works beyond their individual homes to create the first global art collection.
Nature is smart, efficient and innovative. That’s why scientists and engineers all over the world try to copy it in their labs. The field concerned with imitating nature is called biomimetics.
Seven years before Charles Darwin went public with his evolutionary theories in On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer sketched out the basics of evolution and natural selection.
Two management consultants identify four guiding principles successful companies have followed to prepare for a world of constant Internet connectivity.
I didn’t get to watch the livestream of the first half of our Farsight 2011: Beyond The Search Box event today, but the parts I did see were enough to […]
“The future of search is verbs.” This is what Bill Gates told Esther Dyson over dinner, and what Esther Dyson told us at Big Think’s Google v. Bing/Farsight 2011: Beyond […]
For many Washington, DC readers the upcoming event at the Newseum, co-organized by the School of Communication at American University, is likely to be of strong interest. Details are below […]
Long gone are the days when Clapham was a small, rustic village well beyond the gates of medieval London. Also gone, but less long, is the era of Clapham as […]
Four out of five autism sufferers are male. Are fundamental male-female brain differences causing the gap?
In a panel near the end of Farsight 2011, several panelists spoke about how the sheer quantity of information around us is affecting the way we think — and even how our brains are developing.
In a special presentation at Big Think’s Farsight 2011, Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and CTO of Russian search engine Yandex spoke about why his company has been dominant in that country’s […]