Why would so many people take time off from their smart phones to watch the Transit of Venus through a telescope? According to Bill Nye, it is our human desire to explore. If we ever lose that desire, we’re not going to move forward as a species.
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As Wisconsin voters stream to the polls today in the Gov. Scott Walker recall election, most commentators are warning that a Walker win would be a disaster for the left. […]
New research in The Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science finds that people who shop at organic food stores are more inclined to be judgmental. Organic foods “reduce prosocial […]
Would you be happier working for a company or being your own boss?
The quantity of knowledge contained by humanity increases by about five billion bits per second, yet our poor understanding of how information systems work could spell disaster.
Some Darwinians, such as Francis Fukuyama, Larry Arnhart, Jonathan Haidt and the late James Q. Wilson, openly and proudly acknowledge that the results of their research point in a moderately […]
Paypal founder Peter Thiel discusses how to think beyond professional tracks to find success.
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), […]
Google’s effort to map every street in the world has given the company troves of data it can use to create self-driving cars. Today, innovation means extracting data in novel ways.
As Facebook considers extending its membership circle to include pre-teens, one parent is resolved to keep her kids off the social network so they can establish friendships in the real world.
Industry and government are pushing back against commercial Internet tracking, but most consumers don’t mind the intrusion too much. In fact, many even appreciate the tracking.
As machines like drones and automobiles become more independent of their human operators, they will increasingly face moral dilemmas. Will they know right from wrong?
I got a call from a friend last year. He had prostate cancer and wanted some help thinking through what to do. He had gone to his doctors for the […]
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
What’s the Big Idea? There are not only wrong answers — there are also wrong questions, says Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and author of Big Think’s most recent Book of the Month. And sometimes […]
Monique Leroux managed to get herself elected (yes, elected) as the first female CEO in the organization’s history.
On December 17, 2009 the US carried out a missile strike against what it believed to be an al-Qaeda training camp in the south Yemeni governorate of Abyan. Unfortunately, what […]
Silicon Valley’s wage gap and income inequality between men and women must surely rank among the worst in the country.
Reflecting on creating a start up while providing for a family of four, Eric Farkas has created a list of priorities that kept his business plans on track while honoring the more important things.
Today, the crisis in Europe has gotten worse for some countries; the recent U.S. employment rates are disappointing; China is looking strong, but will that last for long? Four years ago, countries were able to devise a plan to help prevent a global depression, so why not now?
Something is wrong in the world when a real organisation is undermined by fictional comics characters with superpowers. A group inaccurately called One Million Moms or OMM (their membership is […]
When I read the news that the Bamiyan Buddhas, the giant 6th century statues in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001, would not be rebuilt, I had mixed […]
One more announcement for the weekend: This coming week, I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, attending Netroots Nation 2012 from June 7 to 10. If you’re also going and would […]
A recent computer virus highlighted by cyber security is believed to be politically influenced for use against Iran. This new information leads cyber researchers to believe governments may possibly be headed into a cyber war.
There are a couple of stories from this past week that I wanted to mention: • A three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, two of whom are […]
When employers make salary strictly confidential it makes employees complicit in the equality of wages. For employees to discuss salary and wages with co-workers has always been something that was discouraged, if not formally forbidden.
I’ve long argued that there’s a natural alliance betweenatheism and feminism, for the same reason that there’s a natural alliance between atheism and GLBT activism: because we all understand what […]
The course of anti-semitism from ancient times to now has been written about and discussed, but the authors have come up short in one way or another. The true root of this 2,000-year-old history has yet to be truly contextual, comprehensive, detailed and analytical in a manner that is coherent.
The number of foreigners moving to China for work or school is growing each year. In 2010, more than 200,000 foreigners have been reported living there. But why does China keep expats under a microscope