The Latest from Big Think

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Even if Berlusconi leaves the soon, he will leave behind a toxic legacy, one in which the media cynically undermine democratic norms and women have been robbed of their dignity.
The next big thing that will rock the Internet: machine to machine (M2M for short) connectivity. It's machines rather than people connecting to the Internet.
Research on facial recognition suggests meaningful changes occur during early and middle adulthood. Should we rethink what we believe about cognitive development and aging?
The White House touts as tight-fisted a budget proposing a record $1.645 trillion deficit for fiscal 2011, due largely to a new surge in spending to 25.3% of GDP.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.
I eat out of bins too. So what? Freegans know the best use of leftover food is to eat it – why arrest a woman for picking up discarded waffles?
How to gauge how sound the academic mainstream in a given field is likely to be, and how justified one would be to dismiss contrarians out of hand.
The coming integration of humans and machines may be a bit further off than he thinks, but Michael Chorost convinced me that we will get there someday.
When the telephone was invented, there were similar fears that human interaction would suffer, but neither it, nor the internet, changes fundamentally human traits like love and friendship.
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Jaron Lanier explores the question of whether there is a sustainable revenue model for online services.
Regular readers may recall some of my despatches from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean last year. I had been asked to go there in order to meet with President […]
The author of our Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, carefully distinguished in private letters between the modern life devoted to the pursuit of happiness and happiness itself.  He says that Epicurean philosophers […]
Onto some news … Japan: The Shinmoe-dake Crater at Kirishima continues to be noisy - producing another impressive explosion Monday morning. However, the order for people in the region closest to […]
As intellectuals go, B.F. Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals—at least the insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific ones who blathered unproductively about "freedom" and "dignity."
China's rise as the world's second-largest economy highlights a new postindustrial reality: Population counts as much as productivity in determining economic power.
The last time valuations soared so high for companies like Groupon and Facebook with modest track records, or no track records, the trend line heralded the dot-com crash.
What happens when a Hollywood heartthrob and the art world collide? Berlin is about to find out as it plays host to James Franco's first ever commercial gallery show.
The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up around social media sites and The Huffington Post? Most of the value was created by people working free.
This week, Watson takes on humans at "Jeopardy!" But how close are we to a computer that thinks? Google's director of research explains how far we've come.
Will a Middle Eastern oil disruption crush the economy? New research suggests the answer is no—and that a major tenet of American foreign policy may be fundamentally wrong.