Big Think Blog

If you thought the accusations of Barack Obama’s intellectual elitism were old news, an open letter from sixty-one Nobel laureates, released September 25th, may lend the argument some new gloss. The letter, which says that the Bush Administration has seen “vital parts of our country’s scientific enterprise…damaged by stagnant or declining federal support” is pretty damning for Republicans. It even goes so far as to say that “our prosperity is at risk.” But these guys—some of the best minds in physics, chemistry and medicine—are measured enough not to be alarmist, and they seem confident that a Barack Obama presidency will provide a solution: “Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world’s leading country.” While its possible that this endorsement was the product of some serious hobnobbing at the Harvard Club, it could also be thanks to Obama’s early announcement of his science platform, not to mention the names of his top five science advisors. John McCain has been less transparent. So will this latest endorsement by the smartest guys in the room make Obama too elite to elect? We defer to Jon Stewart, who, for one, wants “a president who is embarrassingly superior to me.”

How far apart were your grandparents born compared to your parents? How far apart were you and your partner born? Physical proximity was once the greatest predictor of marriage, but with the rise of global migration patterns, not to mention the internet, “the girl/boy next door” is no longer such a likely spousal candidate. A team from The Rockefeller University has developed a more accurate method for predicting future patterns of migration, reports the university newsblog. Earlier methods were often wildly inaccurate. Professor Joel Cohen, the study’s lead investigator, says that “Understanding international migration has become more important in recent years because fertility worldwide has dropped…That means the relative importance of migration as a factor in population change is accentuated, particularly for the countries that are the big receivers.” The article did not address whether the study considered climate change as a factor in migration patterns. When Big Think spoke to geneticist Spencer Wells, (and possessor of the best job title ever: “Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society”), he reminded us that climate has always influenced migration.

On Sunday, loyalists of Alyaksandr Grigoryevich Lukashenko won all 110 seats in the Belorussian parliament. Either reviled as Europe’s last dictator or revered as a Slavic “Great Leader,” Lukashenko rules Belarus much as a Soviet satellite state. Despite promises that opposition candidates had a fair shot at gaining seats, many, including representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, claimed the elections were rigged. The Eurasia desk at the National Alliance for Democracy reported that OSCE monitors were made to stand meters away from vote counters at polling stations and that only 43 out of 69,845 spots on electoral commissions were filled by opposition members. Facing off against OSCE monitors, were mainly Russian CIS observers. In August, the CIS delegation head noted rather cryptically, “The preparations for the parliamentary election in Belarus are going on in a calm manner, just as planned.”

Lukashenko has made few efforts to conceal his antipathy toward his detractors. In early 2007, he stated, “We will wring their necks, as one might a duck.” In Minsk, democracy proponents are monitored by secret police and regularly have their offices raided. Following a page right out of Solzhenitsyn, offenders are even ushered off to labor camps deep in taiga and not heard from again. Belarus walks a political tightrope between the EU and Russia with the EU, especially neighboring Poland and Lithuania, clamoring for increased trade, and Russia courting Minsk as a valuable gas market. Opening trade with the EU could nudge Belarus toward democracy, but, for the moment, the country’s prime orientation remains toward Moscow. George Washington University Professor, James Goldgeier, gave us his thoughts on a resurgent Russia and what that could mean for geopolitics in the region. As with Belarus, the EU’s dependence on energy supplies flowing from the east represent a crucial strategic card in Russia’s deck.

Last week, The Times’ Shifting Careers blog interviewed Patricia Martin, author of RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business. Martin coins “RenGen” as shorthand for “Renaissance Generation.” The wily successors of GenX are conceiving myriad new links between business and the environment, the environment and the arts, and the arts and technology. They are the world’s first class of cultural consumers. They rely on “teaming” for their creative output. They are responsible for social consciousness infiltrating the workplace like never before. Managers in all fields, Martin argues, should explore and capitalize upon their RenGen potential. The result will be new marriages of what we do 9 to 5 and what we truly care about. Richard Florida provides further insight on the creative class breaking down the RenGen geographically. Florida is a Rothman School of Management professor and “thought-leader” who says choosing a metropolis is the most important decision in the life of a RenGen-er. We had Graham Hill talk about his rise as a RenGen entrepreneur. As founder of Treehugger, Hill saw modernizing the hippie aesthetic, from tofu to Birkenstocks, as the first step to bringing environmentalism into the digital age. Where does Hill’s entrepreneurial brain gets its ideas? He mentions the good old magic of books.

As markets fluctuate, banks collapse, and the world comes face-to-face with frightening uncertainty, it’s nice to take solace in those things in the world that really last, like rocks. A team of Canadian and American researchers from McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal, and the Carnegie Institution for Science announced that they have discovered the oldest rocks in the world. The rocks, known as “faux-amphibolites,” are estimated to be 4.28 billion years old, the oldest surviving pieces of the earth’s crust. The findings, which will be published in Friday’s issue of Nature, are the geological equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, giving scientists a rare glimpse into the nature of our planet’s early history. “Geologists now have a new playground to explore how and when life began, what the atmosphere may have looked like, and when the first continent formed,” said Jonathan O’Neil, a PhD candidate at McGill and the the lead author of the Nature study. Now if they could only turn those rocks into gold!

So the House rejected the proposed bailout plan, which was designed to prop up struggling financial institutions and shield the “real” economy from the effects of the mortgage crisis. Although the plan had the support of President Bush, both presidential candidates, and leaders of both parties in the House and Senate, a large defection by House Republicans doomed the vote. The bailout discussions are making Republicans strange bedfellows with more liberal critics of the plan, like Duke associate professor of law Andrew Foster, who wants more focus on those on the underside of the crisis, like individuals struggling to pay bad mortgages and those already in foreclosure. Foster recently articulated what he says are the three key provisions any bailout should include. First, he says, any plan must allow for homeowners to stay in the their homes. Second, the financial service industry needs new, effective regulation. And third, any bailout should be set up to avoid Wall St. windfalls. When free-market bureaucrats and social-welfare advocates agree on something, on anything, you know times are extraordinary. So if homeowners are victims to be protected, shouldn’t the bad guys be punished? Watch The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin discuss how much blame falls on the bank CEOs.

The words “still on the table” have become a mantra for manliness, (and that includes you, Hillary), as the presidential candidates try to prove their toughness over the course of the campaign. While Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain refer to the possibility of a nuclear strike against Iran, “still on the table” also apparently applies to nuclear energy, a subject once considered closed by many anti-nuclear activists. For example, the pro-nuclear overtures initiated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have led to the abandonment of Italy’s 1987 referendum banning nuclear power: the country’s first nuclear power plant will open in 2017. Now that flowers push through the concrete at Chernobyl, the fear of nuclear power seems to have waned; Big Think recently interviewed Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and director of the EPA under George W. Bush. Since leaving that less-than-desirable position, she has co-founded CASE (Clean and Safe Energy) an organization “dedicated to giving citizens the facts about nuclear energy.”

Weirdly, campaigns once dedicated to citizen vigilance against Nuclear have faded from consciousness. Films such as Groundspark’s “Deadly Deception,” the Academy Award-winning film that fueled a boycott against energy giant General Electric are now eighteen years old. (Watch a Quicktime clip, or go to their site.) The morose resignation of the farmer pointing out the homes of his cancerous neighbors seems to belie Whitman’s statement that “the closer you live to a nuclear reactor the more support you have for it.” Moral of the story: Keep your fingers crossed that the nuclear option really has become safer in the past twenty years, because it is definitely staying on the table.

The House’s official rejection of a $700 billion economic rescue plan and ensuing market chaos on Monday was met with perhaps the most sensationalized headlines since the bombing of the USS Maine (or the birth conspiracy of TomKat’s enigmatic lovechild/alien, Suri). Among the more prominent titles of the day: “BAILOUT FAILS, STOCKS PLUNGE,” “LEADERLESS: HOUSE FAILS…,” “-777.” To those who thought that lurid reporting was the exclusive domain of grocery checkout lines, I regretfully inform you that yellow journalism is alive, well and omnipresent. Perhaps consumer confidence might benefit from a sweeping reduction in font sizes or more delicately crafted leads? Given that even the most trustworthy of news agencies have repeatedly failed us, how might we better assess the world today? In this clip, associate NYU journalism professor, Jay Rosen, sits down with Big Think to share his ideas for the best ways to digest news.

The fifteenth century had Gutenberg, and the twenty-first has the Espresso Book Machine. The University of Michigan Library, the first university library to install the new-age printing press, may also be this generation’s Mainz, Germany. A book-lovers answer to the Kindle, the Espresso Book Machine prints and binds out-of-copyright books and publications from an array of digital sources, including the Open Content Alliance. It’s likely to make a huge difference in the lives of academics in search of rare and out of print texts, but at $10 a pop and only 5-7 minutes to print, the press may also revolutionize book buying for the masses. Paul Courant, dean of libraries at University of Michigan, called the new press “a great step toward the democratization of information.” It could also be an important innovation in the fight to save print media. Big Think recently spoke with Walt Mossberg on the future of media. Here’s what he had to say.

In 1893 at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” explaining the individualism of the American people as a result of the resourcefulness required of westwardly-roving pioneers. With the “closing of the frontier” made official by the 1890 census, Turner prophesied the end of American exceptionalism. Given the United States’ recent dive in international status, Turner would be thrilled to hear of the latest innovation in urban design: “Territorial Art,” or the creation of new land masses.

Although the new frontier is being added to Korea, not California.MIT’s news office announced that a team of designers from MIT has won the right to execute an enormous landfill project on South Korea’s western coast. “A 401 square kilometer area that will house farms, cities and developments ranging from a spaceport to an amusement park…While hewing to the contest’s requirements of hard-nosed realism, [the design team] envisioned islands created with soil dredged from the sea floor and filled with farms and small cities, with a total population of 600,000.” “It’s effectively a new scale” says Professor Alexander D’Hooghe. “And who knows, maybe in the long term, like urban design, it becomes a new discipline. Maybe today we’re facing the birth of a new sub discipline: Territorial art.” Professor and team-member Nader Tehrani actually said that the notion of a “tabula rasa” would not fly in the United States. It sounds like we need to go back to our innovative pioneer roots. Whether or not we ascribe to these values, Americans seem to have internalized the national narrative of manifest destiny and frontierism.

Peter Bienart, the editor at large of The New Republic, echoes the mythology of American identity when he says that “Americans had a greater expectation of freedom…you could reinvent yourself in the United States always by moving along the frontier.” Perhaps when the Koreans have conquered their frontier we can have our scientists back. And get to work on expanding California. We are going to need the space, especially if bio-fuels become our primary source of energy. Paola Antonelli, the curator for design and architecture at MoMA, describes the current need for environmental innovation, and her optimism for design’s ability to solve that need, what she calls,”a renaissance of positive efforts in the world.”