Body and Mind
Is technology distracting us from the real relationships in our lives? We talk with Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. Read more...
J. Craig Venter, author of "Life at the Speed of Light," went from surfer dude to one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome. Now he's working on changing our biology. Read more...
Sir Ken Robinson – whose TED Talk on creativity is one of the most popular of all time – once tracked down a music teacher in the port town of Liverpool, England. The teacher had taught two of the most famous Liverpudlians of all time - Paul McCartney and George Harrison - and Robinson asked if he had noticed anything special about McCartney and Harrison when they were students. The response? Read more...
Harvard Professor Paul Peterson and Former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn have been studying the American education system for a long time. What they've observed is a disturbing trend.
"We had the greatest schools in the 19th century and the early 20th century," said Peterson. "We had elementary education before any other country. We had high schools before any other country. We built colleges before any other country."
But in the 1970s, the momentum changed.
Think about those emails you get every minute, the texts constantly vibrating in your pocket, a news cycle that never ends. In his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff offers up an arresting theory about how living in this brave new world changes us.
This week, we spoke with author Douglas Rushkoff about a new kind of economy that doesn't involve punching the clock. But what does it look like when you're creating and selling your own product? Your own brisket, pickles, or ideas? We talked to Susan Piver, director of the Open Heart Project, an online meditation and mindfulness guide designed to help people cope with what Rushkoff calls "present shock."
The last time you saw Watson the supercomputer, he was probably cleaning up on the game show Jeopardy! But since roundly defeating reigning champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson hasn't been resting on his laurels. In fact, just two years after his debut, Watson - as Steve Gold, executive at Watson Solutions at IBM describes it - has been "going to work." So what sets Watson apart from the average, run-of-the-mill computer sitting in your cubicle (which, we would hazard to guess, has not recently won thousands of dollars on a television game show?)
Most of us have seen a television commercial and thought: “If only I had that iPad, that new television set, or that big Jacuzzi, I’d be so much happier.” But Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, authors of the new book "Happy Money" aren’t so sure. When it comes to money—whether in the form of a bonus, a new car, or the latest gadget--they argue that more is not always better.
When journalist Steven Brill first began investigating the American health care system for his article "Bitter Pill, he started in a familiar place: medical bills. What he found shocked him. One patient, for example, paid $2,293 per day just for room and board in a hospital - about ten times more than he would have paid for a hotel room - and had little choice in the matter.
"There's no marketplace at all," Brill says. "The person buying the service has no leverage, no power, and no visibility into the cost."
