Floating University
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WATCH: Ideas Rule the World, not Kings or Corporations
What will historians say about our time 250 years from now? Lawrence Summers asks this question in a thought-provoking lecture about the evolution of ideas.
WATCH: Learn to Invest and Start a Business in Under an Hour
We all want to be financially stable and enjoy a well-funded retirement, but we don't want to squander our hard-earned money on poor investments.
WATCH: Strange Beauty — How Reading the Classics Will Change You
Yale Professor Jeffrey Brenzel argues that reading the great classics can not only enrich your education, but also actually make your life better.
WATCH: The Great Unexpected Utility of the Arts
The most important thing about art is every person's capacity to make it, and that the body/mind discipline of cultivating your artistic abilities has collateral utility for every aspect of life.
WATCH: Social Capital — If You Want to Succeed, Start Making Friends
Our successes and failures are similarly linked to others, though we may feel their effects only personally. Every choice you make, every behavior you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe.
WATCH: Inside Every Human Cell Lies the Fountain of Youth
Professor Douglas Melton takes a look at the basis for regenerative medicine, the human body’s ability to divide, grow, and specialize cells.
WATCH: Psychology is the Study of Innate Human Compassion
We're halfway through our rollout of The Floating University here at Big Think. It's some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web. Here's number six of 12 on our list, featuring Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.
WATCH: Everyone Has Their Price — An Introduction to Economics
Money doesn't make the world go round; it's just a stand-in for value, and an arbitrary one at that.
WATCH: A Universe in a Nutshell — The Physics of Everything, with Michio Kaku
Professor Michio Kaku delivers a glimpse of where science will take us in the next hundred years, as warp drives, teleportation, and time travel converge with our scientific understanding.
WATCH: How Societies Should Organize — Balancing Freedom and Community
Warning: You might not want to watch this at the dinner table (it gets political), but in the name of having great discussion over important issues, we hope you will!
WATCH: How We Speak Reveals What We Think, with Steven Pinker
We're thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think. Here's number two on our list, featuring Harvard linguist Steven Pinker.
WATCH: When Ideas Have Authority, We Learn, Profit, and Grow
We're thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think: It's some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web.
FU Asks: How Would You Invest $100,000?
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 […]
Larry Summers on the Rise of China and India
The United States is entering uncharted waters as a superpower, as it slowly climbs out of a crippling recession and faces an electoral showdown this fall between cautious globalism and […]
Primate Vices: What Monkey Pornography and Celebrity Worship Tells Us About Human Nature
Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus […]
FU Asks: Why Did Economists Drop the Ball on the Housing Bubble?
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 […]
What is Art? Join the Floating University at the New York Public Library Tomorrow Night
It is one of the most debated subjects of all time: What is art? Some might think it doesn’t much matter whether or not consensus is achieved on this highly subjective […]
Frankenmeat: Growing a Burger in a Petri Dish
Using human stem cells to tackle human health issues remains controversial in the United States, but a team of Dutch researchers has found a potentially crowd-pleasing application of stem cell […]
William Ackman on the Psychology of the Successful Investor
Following the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, subsequent economic downturn, innumerable investigative journalism pieces about the big banks and investment practices, and finally the rise of the Occupy […]
Language Pragmatics: Why We Can’t Talk to Computers
Speech recognition technology continues to fascinate language and cognitive science researchers, and Apple’s introduction of the Siri voice assistant program in its recent iPhone 4S was heralded by many as […]
Disrupting Education: There Are No Boundaries to Knowledge Anymore
It used to be that if you went to an elite school you didn’t have access to the best minds unless you were physically in their presence. That is not […]
Obama’s Budget Priorities: Can We Compete with China and India?
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 […]
FU Asks: Should the Government Fund the Arts?
Welcome to a new 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 […]
Paul Ryan, Individual Liberty, and the Fate of Medicare
Just as Mitt Romney appears to be wrapping up the Republican nomination for the presidency, congressional Republicans are taking steps to set up their own political framework for the 2012 […]
Life’s Too Short: How to Read the Right Books
Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like […]
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Are One Step Closer to Reality
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane […]
Moving a Cemetery: How to Drag Higher Education into the 21 Century
Our university system is bloated, inefficient, too expensive, and increasingly out-of-sync with a digital society and global economy. Dr. Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard, is […]
Do You Have the Moral Compass of a Toddler?
Are we born with a sense of morality?
Why You Need a Time Machine: Dr. Kaku Explains String Theory
In this excerpt from his lecture for The Floating University, Dr. Kaku explains that time machines do not violate Einstein's laws of physics, and that future humans would be wise to build one and slip through a wormhole before the cooling universe extinguishes all known life.