Guest Thinkers

In researching Groupon’s IPO for the earlier post, I tried to think about which markets are being affected by Groupon. The biggest is almost certainly Yellow Pages ($26Bn worldwide) — […]

Going public now allows Groupon to establish dominance against their competitors. They can encourage a perception from the public markets that LivingSocial et. al. are “Groupon Clones.”

1. I was glad to learn from BIG THINKER Daniel that Walmart has become a catalyst for change on the Green or environmental front.  That’s good news, because what that corporation’s brains […]

Over the last few weeks, the Dieng Volcanic Complex (also known as the Dieng Plateau) in Indonesia has been increasingly showing signs of potential eruptive activity. The complex began experiencing […]

Apple Inc. has reached deals with major music companies to help launch an online storage service called iCloud. Steve Jobs is expected to unveil the online listening platform next week. 

Dear educator, if you were on Twitter yesterday, you might have found: this awesome reflection about working with a teacher on technology integration; or these resources about ‘learning styles’ and […]

What constraints govern the physical process of computing? Is a minimum amount of energy required per logic step? There seems to be no minimum, but some other questions are open.

“Scandinavian Pain” burns crimson in the night in one photo by Ragnar Kjartansson featured in the new exhibition North by New York: New Nordic Art in celebration of the centenary […]

As much as the car chieftains of Detroit try to fight it, America is slowly but surely turning away from the concept of car ownership. Instead, hundreds of thousands of […]

Housekeepers at the Pierre Hotel will get panic buttons in the wake of two highly publicized attacks on Manhattan hotel cleaners. The buttons are part of a deal hashed out […]

I can’t count the number of times I heard, “It’s not if you win or lose. It’s how you play the game” when I was growing up. And how often […]

Is there a kind of noble consistency in insisting the rich pay more taxes and not be entitled to government payments they don’t need?

While groups may have been wise at the start of the experiment, as soon as individuals within the group became aware of others’ estimates and choices, the diversity of opinions plummeted.

As a Canadian I am baffled by the fact that a country like the US, with its culture of civil rights, has no federal law to prevent men and women […]

Prosperity means more greenhouse gases. In a perverse way, the global recession was good for the environment, because emissions actually fell in 2009. But as the world economy begins to […]

Among the appalling sights Primo Levi witnessed at Auschwitz was the fervent prayer of a prisoner grateful to be spared the ovens. “I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud,” […]

Something rather weird happened last Thursday. In one the the regular “Spring Cleaning” briefings on its developer blog, Google announced that they would limit the number of requests you may […]

Choice is good. It’s always nice to have options. It makes us feel more in control; it supports our vision of ourselves as “deciders” in our own lives. But choice can also come with negative consequences.

I’ll be posting my summer schedule soon – it is a busy summer for me this year for a number of reasons (as you’ll see). So, to keep things interesting, […]

Older workers are news these days. Consider two contrasting New York Times stories reported on the same day. Nelson Schwartz writes in Easy Out the Gray-Haired. Or Not., that older […]

A long weekend right about now does wonders for getting a little focus back, especially after such a busy week with the eruption of Grímsvötn. I even got a weekend […]

It’s 2011. If you’re invisible to the world, aren’t you also irrelevant to the world? I use the Rapportive plugin for Gmail. It’s a pretty powerful little add-on that gives […]

Everybody’s a critic, especially when it comes to public art.  Mix in religion, a beloved figure, and modern art and you’ve got yourself all the ingredients for controversy.  The recently […]

In his book, The Heart and the Fist, former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens writes about the Greek conception of phronesis. A kind of practical wisdom (a poor translation, but the […]

My man Ta-Nehisi Coates has proven once again why I always click the link to his blog over at The Atlantic when the minutia of the internet starts trending towards […]

Sometimes when you see a particularly compelling advertisement in a store window, you might stop and look at it. Now that advertisement is looking back at you too. Immersive Labs, […]

President Obama has shown himself to be weak in his dealings with the Middle East, says Robert Fisk, and the Arab world is turning its back and shaping its future without American influence.

Looking to past elections to predict the outcome of one soon to come doesn’t usually work that well.  Back in October 2008, I looked to eight past elections to try […]

Marc Goodman tells Big Think that in the future “the virtual agents of good and evil will do battle in cyberspace–making this a very interesting field to be in!”

Buzz has been building about the possibility of that Sarah Palin will run for President after all. Palin announced on Thursday that she will launch a bus tour of key […]