The U.S. has spent the last 70 years making massive investments in basic and applied research. Government funding of research started in World War II driven by the needs of the military for weapon systems to defeat Germany and Japan. Post WWII the responsibility for investing in research split between agencies focused on … More >
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A reader weighs in on:
The rapid encroachment of an Islamic state in Egypt: A timeline Jon Goodfellow said:The point about Qutb is well taken. When he was in the US, he visited a modern art museum, and later wrote that the art was fascinating, but that the venal Westerner viewers did not appreciate its aesthetic worth. How strange to condemn the culture which underpinned that artistic creation in ... More >Americans are very grateful and they think gratitude is important—they’re just not very good at expressing it. That’s one of the conclusions from a national survey on gratitude commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, which also funds the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center’s gratitude project. We’ve stressed the importance of … More > Everyone has been talking, sensibly or not, about guns since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. I had not waded in for a few reasons. Many experts are writing about the topic in the press; I have no particular expertise on the question of whether guns cost … More > As readers of this blog know, Gov. Jerry Brown of California has combined leadership on reducing California’s bloated prison population with relentless attacks on the courts whose orders have made that badly needed “realignment” political possible. Still even I was surprised by the air of unreality to the Governor’s dual … More > The election of Mohammed Morsi as Egypt’s first Islamist president, on June 24th, 2012, marked an important moment in the history of the country and promised to bring major change. In the past few months, as a popular uprising broke out against Morsi and his Islamization project, Egypt has inched … More > As described in an earlier post, there was a long period during America’ nineteenth-century economic growth in which progress was so uneven, so unequal that the height and life spans of Americans declined for a few decades. On average, those who were born between roughly 1830 and 1870 grew up … More > The debate over Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s continued operation within the Point Reyes National Seashore created two unlikely foes: environmentalists in favor of transitioning the land to wilderness, and supporters of local, organic food and a longstanding family business. The San Francisco Chronicle aptly termed it a “legal and philosophical … More > The science we cover on the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center website — aka, “the science of a meaningful life” — has exploded over the past 10 years, with many more studies published each year on gratitude, mindfulness, and our other core themes than we saw a decade ago. 2012 … More > The New Year is both a time for nostalgia and for looking ahead, it seems appropriate to see what the world will look like at mid-century. The world will be facing considerable challenges then. The population will be bigger. The United Nations predicts that the world population will grow by 2 … More > |
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