What can we learn from visualizing the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia?
All Articles
As much as I disagree with the blasphemy law, I do not think that criminalising the act of blasphemy is violative of any fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason.
Artificially separated from a natural cycle of light and dark, the bodies and brains of mice go haywire in ways that may mimic the human effects of circadian disruption.
The idea that language shapes thought was taboo for a long time, said Dan Slobin, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the ice is breaking.”
Statistical analysis must find ways to expose and counterbalance all the many factors that can lead to falsely positive results — among them human nature and the effects of industry money.
Pretty much everyone knows that Superman is the original super hero, and maybe the greatest of that genre. As Jim Crocesang, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.” But one super […]
Football – yes, we mean soccer – divides the British capital into a medieval-looking map of invisible territories, frontlines and enclaves.
The leading Darwinian conservative has done me the honor of responding to my previous post, including the excellent comment by Brendan Foht. According to Larry, the criticism of him for rejecting the idea of […]
Gun control and drug policy are important issues, but it’s dangerous to read too much into a single tragedy. It isn’t fair to suggest that Republican rhetoric was in any way responsible for Jared Loughner’s attack in Arizona.
“Effective signals in a marketplace have the characteristic that the people with a high quality product have lower costs of emitting the signal than people with a low quality product, […]
Hello from snowy Minnesota! I’m here at Gustavus Adolphus College to give a talk for the Geology Department (special thanks to Dr. Elli Goeke for inviting me out!) Thought I’d […]
Silicon Valley greats tend to leave a host of successful entrepreneurs in their wake. But now “successful alumni” are starting to include people who were never really alumni to start with.
With nearly 5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, mobile networks are the most powerful communication technology systems today. But they are still centralized, top-down networks wherein a cellular provider disseminates […]
To Regain Civility in American Politics, We Need to Rethink Media, Education, and How We Participate
Whether it is climate change, immigration, or income inequality, America seems incapable of making progress on solving complex problems. In fact, it seems that the country is locked in a […]
Just before leaving New York to return to England, I went with my family to visit a former journalist colleague who lives with her partner and two gorgeous young boys […]
Budding public intellectual and critic of foreign aid, Dambisa Moyo says the promises of globalization have not been realized. The Independent interviews the economist.
David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise; the late author will likely become America’s next canonized writer, says Jennifer Howard.
Why is it that astrobiologists consider water a prerequisite when seeking out alien life? Steve Nerlich of Universe Today details what alien biochemistry would look like.
Clay Shirky says that social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere—which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.
Researchers have made strides in understanding the human mind, filling the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy, says David Brooks at The New Yorker.
Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one.
Across the Internet the use of “Dear” is going the way of sealing wax; email has come to be viewed as informal even when used as formal communication.
It seems inevitable that the number of books sold through bookstores will plummet, says Judge Posner. Traditional bookstores are doomed, concurs Nobel Laureate Becker.
Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue, says the conservative columnist Ross Douthat.
The Arizona shooting suspect has been called ‘unstable,’ and no motive has been identified. But did the vitriol in the debates over immigration and health care trigger the attack?
In 15 to 20 years, says futurist Ray Kurzweil, a biotechnology revolution will yield powerful ways for us to reprogram our genes. Our bodies will be altered on the genetic […]
The foremost quality that makes wood wood, both as a material and as a metaphor, is its inflexible rigidity. Dutch designer Carolien Laro, however, has challenged this age-old conception with […]
When a disaster devastates a country’s infrastructure, we tend to think about physical infrastructure damages — roads, telecommunication, delivery routes. But the damage to information systems can often be even […]
Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for Thomas Robert Malthus. You remember Malthus, he was the one who argued that humanity was destined to remain in poverty because every time […]