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To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans. 

Several years ago Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid teamed with violinist, composer and neuroscientist Dave Soldier to explore popular music preferences in the United States. They determined what music people […]

Here’s a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do […]

One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, […]

Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance.  Mark McDonald catalogued […]

I’ll be honest. I’d hoped to hold out a bit longer before falling back on this staple of any Asian culture column, but it was unavoidable in this case. The […]

First of all, I am not an analyst nor do I own any stock in any public company. The last time I did invest in a promising Internet company ended […]

The weekend is a good time to get some culture, and since there are a lot of things lately that I’m enjoying, I figured I’d write one completely miscellaneous post […]

Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]

Richard Dawkins, the most famous “atheist” on the planet, has argued “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.” 

Following the demise of cap and trade legislation, green group leaders acknowledged that despite spending several hundred million dollars to pass the bill, they were unable to create public demand […]

I’d be happy to make a bet with real money that Marx was just plain wrong about immiseration, and will continue to be proved wrong.

As our political and media systems rapidly evolve, social scientists are revisiting and updating existing models, theories, and methods for investigating the effects of the media on political attitudes and […]

Today marks the start of the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s great scientific meetings. Many of the panels held in Vancouver […]

This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major topics and provide […]

In the global quest for superpower status, who represents you? Delphi Fellow Parag Khanna argues that in the future, we will all be diplomats.

Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips […]

Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]

However you feel about the right way out of the U.S. government’s struggles over its debt ceiling, I think we can all agree that the week past has not been […]

Einstein “finally concluded that time travel might be inherent in his equations,” but dismissed the notion “on physical grounds.”

Climate change campaigns in the United States that focus on the risks to people in foreign countries or even other regions of the U.S. are likely to inadvertently increase polarization […]

Here it is, the answers to your volcanic questions for Dr. Clive Oppenheimer. His new book, Eruptions that Shook the World, comes out this week and I’ll have a review […]

This semester, 22 undergraduate and graduate students from a diversity of majors at American University have participated in a new course that I created titled “Science, Environment and the Media.”  […]

[cross-posted at The Gate] Defamation can be either written (libel) or spoken (slander) and is generally defined as false statements of fact that harm another’s reputation. The United States Supreme […]

Chris Craft has posted an interesting scenario about the potential legal liability of using Slideshare , or any non-district-sponsored web service, that has advertisements that may be inappropriate for school-age […]

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog ] A few back-of-the-envelope calculations here (estimating conservatively when in doubt)… A. Number of students and teachers 50 million public school students+3.3 million public school […]

Debate on personality disorders, classifications, diagnoses, and treatments is well worthwhile, and a colorful spokesperson never hurts.

Okay, at the risk of being labeled a Scrooge, I’m going to say it, because one of the things we bloggers do is challenge each other (hopefully politely) to spark […]

Every week, the Wall Street Journal publishes a quick-and-dirty “Tricks of the Trade” column with an expert within a certain field. Some weeks, it might be a wine sommelier at […]

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, […]