Latest Articles

Latest Articles

The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.

Sam Biddle says date sites like Match.com should screen out sex offenders. But how far should such screening go? And once a sex offender always a sex offender?
ProPublica, a non-profit news startup, scooped up a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, its second in two years and the first ever for a series of stories that were not also published in print.
In the near future, an intelligent electricity grid may collect data across neighborhoods, cities and states to inform consumers of the cheapest time to use energy, but the system carries privacy risks.  
UPDATE: See additional reponse to statements made by Joe Romm. Last night marked the release of the report Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate, part of a […]
The disappearance of digital information is an issue our global society must address better or we won't lose bits and bytes, we'll lose our history, warns Read Write Web.
The latest installment of the BigThink Global Roundtable on the Future of Economic Competition asks about the future of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency -- and what […]
More than half of British adults are so worried about their online reputation they would love to erase all they had ever posted on the Internet about themselves, a new survey shows.
Let's get to some updates on volcanic (or possibly not) rumblings around the world: Philippines: PHIVOLCS are watching Taal closely, but at least over the last 24 hours, seismicity at […]
When someone these days is exposed publicly for perpetrating an act of racial bigotry against African Americans, somewhere during their non-apologizing and excuse making, you are almost certain to get […]
Yesterday I had a very pleasant talk with Tim Ridgway of Califone which once more showed how broad the transition period we are currently go through actually is. Califone develops […]
They say that you’re not supposed to apologize for not blogging. Instead, you’re supposed to just start back up again. But I’m usually much more prolific online and have been absent for […]
Forget the mouse and keyboard, and even the swipe, pinch and touch - the next generation of human-computer interactions will be the gesture, the body movement and even thoughts from […]
“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend of New York Times writer Holland Cotter asked. “It disappeared.” What that friend was alluding to, and what Cotter analyzes in a recent […]
This video companion to Richard N. Katz's E-Book "The Tower and the Cloud" explores how computing power has reduced our reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and […]
Today, I was planning to write about memory in decision making, but when I came across this new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, I felt like I had […]
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Of all the Shakespeare analogies of recent years (George W. Bush as Henry V; Hillary Clinton as Lady Macbeth), President Barack Obama is perhaps the most elusive.
Salman Khan's self-paced learning model reverses the traditional "one size fits all" educational paradigm. Khan's model assigns video lectures as homework, and "what used to be homework the students now […]
There are three major functions of higher education: knowledge, socialization and accreditation. How can the Web simulate this experience of college?
Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell argues China's currency has become "almost de facto convertible" and should be included in the international reserve basket held by the IMF.