Edge in the News: 2013
[enlarge]
Meet the 'Edge Series' organizer John Brockman
"In asking some of the the most sophisticated thinkers in the world 'What are the questions you are asking yourselves?' I am aware that this is not for everybody. I am aiming at the brightest people and fortunately, there enough people out there interested in the latest knowledge derived from empirical scientific investigations.
...The office window in John Brockman's (age 72) office looks out at the Empire State Building. He is an architect and impresario of 'scientific ideas' and a showman. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works .... these towering books, representative of his interests, go through his hands, both in his professional role as a literary agent and CEO of Brockman, Inc. and in wearing his nonprofit hat as President of Edge Foundation, Inc. and publisher and editor of Edge.
Brockman has taken scientists out of their usual territory, and secured for them a global role as the most highly recognized thinkers in the society of informed intellectuals.
Thus, the focus of the new Edge book This Will Change Everything is concerned with predictions about the future based on empirical scientific evidence. Korean translation by Kim So. Published by Galleon.
Nautilus, a new science magazine whose first issue appeared online April 29, has New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye, one of the beat’s veterans, feeling a bit a nostalgic. In a review on Monday, he wrote:
The audience has fragmented among stalwarts like National Geographic and Scientific American; blogs; and new-media adventures like the TED talks, the World Science Festival and Edge.org, the online salon, and Simons Science News, a new effort by the mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons. ...
... It’s easy to sympathize with Overbye. Since the number of science writers and newspaper science sections began to plummet at the end of the ’80s, there has been a sense among the concerned that there is a crisis in science journalism. Thanks to new online ventures like Nautilus, however, that feeling has begun to dissipate. ...
...The Times started its science section in 1978. A year later the same folks who publish Penthouse brought forth Omni, a mix of science and speculation. In rapid succession the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, started Science79; Time Inc. started Discover; and Science Digest expanded to a full-size glossy magazine. The New York Academy of Sciences published The Sciences.
This profusion led to a hiring frenzy for science journalists, who, for a golden while anyway, had a blast producing magazines on scales of time and money that seem unworldly today.
A decade later most were gone or struggling for lack of advertising, despite circulations in the range of half a million and despite the growing importance of science in an age of climate change, energy crises and AIDS. The lone survivor of that golden era, Discover, has been sold four times. A more recent arrival, Seed, noted for its edginess, exists only online.
The audience has fragmented among stalwarts like National Geographic and Scientific American; blogs; and new-media adventures like the TED talks, the World Science Festival and Edge.org, the online salon, and Simons Science News, a new effort by the mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons. ...
Every year, Edge.org, the virtual scientific think tank, a central question. This time the result is a collection full of articles that becoming a simple, non-obvious idea provides an explanation for a complex series of phenomena…
…This explains everything nicely shows that not clear formulated questions can lead. produce excellent insights Precisely because of the different individual interpretations of the question by the contributors is a wonderfully varied trip through the intersection of the worlds of aesthetics and truth become a must for any interested layman.