Article Archive for May 2007
An MP3 clip… The population of many cities in Europe, the U.S. and Australia are in decline. There are too few births to replace those who die and, for a variety of reasons, they …
An MP3 clip… Blogs, wikis, podcasts and correspondents by the millions: Welcome to the world of citizen journalism. It’s messy, democratic, unfinished and ongoing. It’s riddled with errors yet self-correcting. We’re all newsmakers and …
An MP3 clip… Imagine the entrepreneurial spirit applied to large social purposes. Join us as we discover a new breed of socially conscious entrepreneurs who unite their vision and daring with the purpose and …
An MP3 clip… Peering into the heavens, do we see more valuable real estate, the next battleground, an observation post for monitoring trends on Earth, or all of the above? Who decides what happens …
The computer’s metaphorical desktop, with its onscreen windows and hierarchy of folders, is the only digital work environment most users and designers have ever known. Yet empirical studies show that the traditional desktop design does …
Stories help people feel acknowledged, connected, and less alone. Your stories help them feel more alive. To realize the power of stories is both an incredible opportunity and an awesome responsibility. Filled with enlightening anecdotes …
A RealAudio clip… The baby boomers made a lot of babies. And now, they’re all grown up — or nearly — and hitting the American workplace in waves. Twenty-somethings with iPods and attitude, ready …
An MP3 clip… Forum explores the traveling exhibit “The Da Vinci Experience,” installed at the Aerospace Museum of California. [The Forum]
A RealAudio clip… If the world could talk, what would it say to humans about our impact on the planet? Perhaps the voices of warning and the signs of change are all around us and …
A RealAudio clip… From Wikipedia — the Internet’s biggest communal encyclopedia — to your local book club, wikis allow all users to be authors and editors. They operate on a simple concept — web-content altered …
A RealAudio clip… In just a few years, Wikipedia has changed the way we research everything from the sublime to the obscure. Now, revelations that a paid editor used assumed a false identity has the …
A RealAudio clip… Why did Africans domesticate cattle and donkeys but not zebras? Why did the Aborigines invent the boomerang? What modern piece of office equipment helped foil a coup attempt in the Soviet Union …
In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet — the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By …
The most comprehensive attempt to tell the story of western technology in many years, engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, A Culture of Improvement documents the ways in which the drive for improvement has shaped our …
A RealAudio clip… It’s almost impossible to imagine modern life without the zipper. Yet for thirty years after its invention, it was so mechanically awkward that it had no real advantage over hooks and buttons. …
A RealAudio clip… The mid-20th century is often viewed as a golden era of amateur invention. But garage innovators continue to invent and modify new technologies, aided by thriving on-line communities. From aerial kite photography …
A RealAudio clip… They say “chance favors the prepared mind”. And from penicillin to velcro, many of the most important modern breakthroughs in the world of science and technology have emerged from a combination of …
A RealAudio clip… This hour on Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca and her guest discuss ideas and information for how to positively change the planet. [Here on Earth]
In Privacy on the Line, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau strip away the hype surrounding the policy debate over privacy to examine the national-security, law-enforcement, commercial, and civil-liberties issues. They discuss the social function of …
Making Aid Work offers the hopeful next steps for anyone who cares about fighting global poverty. With more than a billion people now living on less than one dollar a day, and with eight million …
A RealAudio clip… In the 21st century, a new pack of contenders are jostling for the “hot city” crown. New York and London are still very much in the race but Paris is dropping back …
A RealAudio clip… Across Africa today, Chinese crews are building railroads and schools, roads and bridges and hospitals and fiber optics. They’re pulling out mountains of minerals and oceans of oil to feed China’s roaring …
A RealAudio clip… Monitoring our own food supply has been tough enough — think e-coli and spinach. Now it looks like a weakened FDA is in no way up to the global challenge. This hour …
An MP3 clip… The program welcomes Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the recent Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. [The Forum]
What is cool? It’s one of today’s most pervasive and elusive questions. No matter who we are, we all have an innate desire to be cool, cultivate cool, and find cool. Whether it’s the next …
Most leaders who make it to the top possess characteristics that are all too human; they have politically incorrect attitudes, are conflicted, and play politics to get their way. Written by leading management consultant Anthony …
Today, when your fortunes can literally change overnight, the new strategic imperative is making your moment of maximum risk your moment of maximum opportunity. In The Upside, Adrian Slywotzky provides bold and original ideas for …
An MP3 clip… Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge. They look at how some of our favorite technology came into being, from the very first laptop right up to the iPod. [Tech …
An MP3 clip… Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Richard Ho, the Director of Disease Simulation at Johnson & Johnson and Randy Scott, Chairman & CEO at Genomics Health. Ho explains how they are simulating …
An MP3 clip… Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with San Jose State Professor Randall Stross about the great inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who he believes invented the modern world and has much in common with Apple …
An MP3 clip… Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, about the role of the improbable in our lives. [Tech Nation]
A RealAudio clip… This hour on Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca talks to a social enterpreneur whose cell phone company is making triple impact on poor rural villages in Bangladesh: connection to …
A RealAudio clip… This hour on Here on Earth, Jean Feraca and her guests talk about growing environmental activism and green endeavors in China, including a futuristic town near Shanghai designed by visionary green architects …
A RealAudio clip… This hour on Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca asks a renowned physicist why our universe is just right for life. [Here on Earth]
A RealAudio clip… Engineers Without Borders takes American students to countries like Rwanda and puts them to work. This hour on Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca talks with the National Director, a …
A RealAudio clip… As invention and intellectual property become ever more important for companies worldwide, a technology guru explains how he is seeking to profit from this change. Nathan Myhrvold used to be chief scientist …
A RealAudio clip… The field of genetic engineering has been around for nearly three decades but biologists and engineers are now beginning to take the research a stage further. They’re trying to programme cells like …
A RealAudio clip… The invisibility cloak is no longer stuck in the realm of fantasy, but is soon to become a reality. Peter Evans talks to the researchers who have engineered an entirely new material …
A RealAudio clip… Scientific research requires thorough research and precise calculations — We know that. But Albert Einstein once said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” What was it about Einstein’s mind, and the way …
A RealAudio clip… Google is working with four states to gain access to their public databases. At a click you could find out about government contracts and budgets. Advocates say that’s good for open government. …
A RealAudio clip… Renegade husband and wife philosophers Pat and Paul Churchland met forty years ago in a college Plato class. Their instincts as philosophers — then and now — run outside the philosophy mainstream. …
A RealAudio clip… Writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a kind of folk hero in the backroads of Vermont and across the country, wherever farmers markets flourish and citizens rise in fear of global …
A RealAudio clip… When online video-sharing sensation YouTube was a couple of scruffy founders and video clips of cats and karaoke, nobody cared in the canyons of old media big power. But when new media …
A RealAudio clip… You might not guess it from the “Made in China” tags that seem to be on everything these days. But even now, in the era of off-shoring jobs and hyper-competition from overseas, …
An MP3 clip… Frans Johansson is a widely respected thought leader and consultant specializing in business innovation, an entrepreneur and hedge fund manager, an international speaker, and the author of The Medici Effect: What Elephants …
A RealAudio clip… “Colony collapse disorder” is the name scientists have given to the problem plaguing honeybees across the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As much as a quarter of the honeybee population is …
An MP3 clip… The show discusses a surge in direct-to-borrower lending over the Internet for social justice causes. [Forum with Michael Krasny]
An MP3 clip… The show looks at initiatives to reduce greenhouse gasses, including carbon trading, and carbon offsets. [Forum with Michael Krasny]
An MP3 clip… The program welcomes philosopher Michael Sandel whose latest book, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, explores the moral quandaries raised by genetic engineering. [Forum with Michael Krasny]
A RealAudio clip… What trends will influence technology, politics and the arts in the new year? There’s no shortage of prognosticators pointing to the “next big thing”. But many forecasts reveal more about our current …
A RealAudio clip… You don’t have to worry about sweaty palms or bad breath. But you do have to think about whether your avatar — a digital representative of yourself — knows how to walk, …
A RealAudio clip… The Internet is home to tens of thousands of virtual radio stations, streaming world music, opera, local indie fare, and much more. But a recent decision to increase required royalty payments has …
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and …
The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and in general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations …
Universities and colleges are in a unique position to take a leadership role on global warming. As communities, they can strategize and organize effective action. As laboratories for learning and centers of research, they can …
No is perhaps the most important and certainly the most powerful word in the language. Every day we find ourselves in situations where we need to say No — to people at work, at home, …
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