Guest Thinkers

With his appointment of Chris Cerf as Commissioner of Education, Chris Christie is rebuilding New Jersey public education using sweeping, data-driven methods that have been tested (and sometimes bitterly contested) in New York City and Washington, DC.   

We weigh choices about risks against the associated benefits, and the bigger the benefits, the less we worry about the risk.

This week ended up being a little busier than I expected – I had to make that quick transition from wedding/honeymoon to beginning to prepare for my field/labwork coming up […]

Now that summer’s here and the time is right to turn to reruns of various kinds, I’m trying to spend the ample time I have as a tenured professor watching […]

Jean Jacques Rousseau called cities “…the abyss of the species“. Well, they may not be that bad, but with their crowding and competition and noisy get-ahead in-your-face rat race environments, […]

Political pundits who are already naysaying the Obama Administration’s decision to release 30 million barrels of oil from our strategic reserves have no idea how Wall Street works. If the […]

Which country would have the upper hand in a full-scale cyber war between the United States and China?

There probably isn’t a flashpoint in science right now as touchy as climate (well, maybe evolution). When it comes to climate change, everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks their […]

I already wrote once or twice about the mind change in our society that we are used to getting information or answers to our questions right now, anywhere we are. […]

Gossip: you can’t avoid it. And maybe, you shouldn’t want to. Scientists have argued that gossip is an important tool for social cohesion and information transmission, allowing us to function […]

Georges Braque once said that he and Pablo Picasso were “roped together like mountain climbers” during the formative years of Cubism—1910 through 1912. Picasso and Braque scaled the mountain of […]

Early this morning, a number of prisoners escaped from a Yemeni central prison in the eastern coastal city of al-Mukalla. The details, as with most stories – particularly breaking ones […]

The eruption of Nabro in Eritrea has been a bit of an enigma, mostly because the volcano is (a) so remote and (b) it’s previous activity is mostly unknown. In […]

So maybe it’s time to come down from space and say some obvious things about the campaign for the Republican nomination. The first is that Sarah Palin has been defeated […]

Kathy is a teacher. She has a basket. Kathy puts all of her favorite things in her basket and takes it everywhere so that they’re close at hand. Because she’s […]

I spend a lot of time hunting for cool stuff. Garage sales, estate sales, yard sales, antique stores, junk shops – you get the idea. I spend more time looking […]

–Guest post by Patrick Riley, AoE Culture Correspondent There was a time when mainstream media coverage of an upcoming movie would create buzz about the film. Nowadays, publications like the New […]

The first total lunar eclipse of 2011 took place less than a week ago although people residing in North America weren’t able to enjoy it. This time around, people in […]

Soon, you will be able to experience superstar chef David Chang, the genius behind the ever-expanding Momofuku foodie empire, as a brand-new iPad app. This Lucky Peach app is, in […]

In case you missed some of the volcanic activity that wasn’t in Chile or Eritrea (I know I did), here is the (slightly late from me) Global Volcanism ProgramWeekly Volcanic […]

Can we profit from someone else’s innocent error? Former New York Times columnist Randy Cohen answers the first in a series of ethical questions from Big Think readers.

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, […]

More and more of the soldiers being put in harm’s way in Iraq are actually machines. Scholar and Wired for War author P.W. Singer explains what happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality.

I’m back! It was a great week off down in Charleston, but it is now time to get back to work. Rather than try to catch up on all the […]

When I first started blogging on BigThink, I compiled a list of people who I admired. I wanted to use those folks as a north star as I was trying to […]

Paul Bogush pushed back (in a nice way) on my recently-popular post, If you were on Twitter. First he wrote about how most educators are too busy to be involved in […]

1.3 trillion bricks are manufactured each year worldwide. 10% of them are made by hand in coal-fired ovens, emitting on average 1.4 pounds of carbon per brick or 800 million […]

Understanding the effectiveness of a marketing channel fully requires understanding the revenue impact that the channel drives. Both as a source of a prospect (e.g. prospects who respond to a […]

If the prosecution of John Edwards for campaign finance violations were to succeed, it would set a bizarre precedent. [Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com, Creative Commons.]

Waterbirths are so passe. Today’s elite stunt-birther wants the obstetrical equivalent of a fish pedicure, a koi assisted birth. From the FAQ: Why koi? Koi, or 錦鯉, are ornamental varieties […]