Bjorn Lomborg does cost/benefit analysis on global good. There are surprises when you examine what are the highest-yield targets in the domains of health, poverty, education, reduced violence, gender equality, climate change, biodiversity, and good governance. Reducing trade restrictions floats to the top: $1 spent yields $2,000 of good for everyone. Contraception for women is […]

What qualities help assure that
 a community can survive the threat of disaster? The population density of cities leads to inherent vulnerabilities to mass climate disasters: such as single point of failure transit systems and utilities built prior to today’s environmental realities. At the same time the resources of cities offer tremendous potential for preparation

Organizational psychologist Tara Behrend focuses on the implications of a digitally connected world of work. As pervasive data collection becomes increasingly common in modern work and educational settings, she examines what it means for individual freedom and self-determination. Pervasive data collection is a feature of most modern work and education settings. Dr. Tara Behrend, Director

From 01960s political protests to successfully eradicating smallpox, Brilliant recalls his long, strange trips around a changing world. His personal stories include icons of the last century from Steve Jobs to MLK to the Grateful Dead. Recollections of a visionary physician, technologist, and seeker, in conversation with Long Now’s Stewart Brand with whom Dr. Brilliant

Burglary reveals unexpected ways of moving through—and misusing—the built environment. In his talk Manaugh (author of the BLDGBLOG blog since 02004) discusses how, for burglars, architecture itself is a tactical tool. Seen through the lens of breaking and entering, walls become doors, sewers merely underground streets. At the core of A Burglar’s Guide to the

Code for America was founded in 02009 by Jennifer Pahlka “to make government work better for the people and by the people in the 21st century.” The organization started a movement to modernize government for a digital age which has now spread from cities to counties to states, and now, most visibly, to the federal

Rationality, a cornerstone of modern economic theory, is increasingly called into question by new behavioral research

. By looking at subsistence societies, this biological anthropologist reaffirms that humans can act in their own self-interest. Bringing an evolutionary perspective to formal decision theory, Dr. Jones will explain what we can learn from the most rational people in

Was it ecocide? The collapse of the mini-civilization on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long been considered one of the great Green morality tales. Once the people there cut down the last tree, story goes, they were doomed. Their famous statues were an arms race that completed the exhaustion of their all-too-finite resources. Moral of

“You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,” Johnson argues. He chronicles how, throughout history, world-transforming innovation emerges from the endless quest for novelty in seemingly trivial entertainments–fashion, music, spices, magic, taverns, zoos, games. He celebrates the observation of historian Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), “Civilization arises and unfolds in and as

Stanford historian Fred Turner discussed how concerns about mass media in the 01940s set the stage for not only the psychedelic 01960s, but also today’s social media. This presentation connects the subjects of Turner’s two most recent books: “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” and “The Democratic Surround”. Fred Turner is a two-time fellow of the Center