Countries like Finland, South Korea and Poland got smarter not by spending more money or creating more tests. The children learned how to think, and to thrive in the modern economy.
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When the President gives a speech today, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Big Think, “you might hear the pundits tearing it down before he even finishes the speech.”
As François Jacob famously said, evolution is a tinkerer and not an engineer. When you’re a tinkerer, you throw things together to solve the problem at hand.
In September I covered a paper that described the massive amount of bias created in the legal system in parts of the US where forensic laboratories are paid in return […]
How do 21st century photo editing techniques impact classic conceptions of beauty? Just have a look at the image above, by the Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano. Giordano’s Venus project gives Photoshop makeovers to paintings such as Botticelli’s La Nascita di Venere.
The screenwriter Danny Strong explains how listening to critical feedback is essential to the creative process.
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.
In science, and genomics in particular, the difference between what we know and what we don’t is enormous. At this point, we’re still figuring out how much we don’t know.
Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, tells Big Think that people should have access to anything that is fundamentally theirs.
MIT’s Donald Sadoway advocates “science and service to society” as opposed to “science and service of career building.”
The less we know about something like energy, the more likely we are to use and abuse it in ways with long-reaching, harmful consequences.
If you have not found a partner or if you’re not sure if you want to compromise or you want to live with someone else for the rest of your life there’s just a lot of hope for you out there from the science.
If you can think of a human activity or occupation, there will be people who love it and live for it and others who couldn’t bear it.
Animators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. created this short movie showing how the sun can cook a comet.
I was in a creative nonfiction program some years ago, and as part of the program, students would visit with culture magazine editors in New York. An editor explained to […]
Within some non-Western cultures, voice hearing is valued and it would not be seen as indicative of any illness at all.
Non-interference was probably the most important thing that happened in my professional life.
Emerging economies may have a bigger impact on the American economy and in particular they are powerful enough to take away the lower value added jobs in the tradable sector to an extent that may have an impact on work opportunities for a subset of our fellow citizens.
This “autonomous pack horse” is designed to interact with troops in a “natural way” like a trained animal would.
You’re trying to really pit your wits against history, but we’re all in that situation.
What one can do is absorb and act on the insight that events which we’ve been taught are abnormal are in fact normal and that normal collapses, normal breakdowns, normal crises occur within most human lives.
Innovators, they start with a question. Questions that are not normal. They provoke the status quo. They challenge the way things are. They turn things a bit upside down.
Some people are really good on the innovation side but not so good on the execution side. But that can be changed.
An awful lot of innovation is based on the remixing of existing ideas and sometimes adding a little bit new as well.
There’s a new area called predictive maintenance where companies look at vibration patterns and other patterns admitted by machines days or hours before the breakdown before a part falls apart.
I can’t tell individuals at the point of collection what I’m going to use the data for. And therefore I can’t ask them to consent to that because there’s nothing to consent if I don’t know what I’m using it for.
We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle.
Your brain learns to block out the noises that it hears all the time.
The moral philosopher John Rawls, whose theory of distributive justice will likely get mentioned at some point in discussions about the end of the filibuster for presidential nominations, would likely sit back and belly laugh at the change in these rules. He might laugh because he could be of the opinion that it is long overdue.
Note: Yesterday’s Praxis post, “What Your Yearbook Photo Says About Your Gender,” critiqued the latent sexism in instructions to students at a New York City school on how to primp […]