New York, NY: In an effort to expand the breadth and depth of its daily offering of insightful ideas and curious content, Big Think is proud to announce the addition of three new blogs: Dollars and Sex , Strange Maps , and The Age of Engagement.
Since 2006, London journalist Frank Jacobs has served up hundreds of cartographic curiosities on Strange Maps, all of which can now be found on Big Think. Jacobs collects all kinds of maps — real, fake, imagined, and historic — and publishes them with commentary. Jacobs’ most popular map, “US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs,” has been viewed over 587,000 times.
Garnering over 17.2 million lifetime pageviews, the 476 maps featured thus far on Strange Maps range from the delightfully playful to the chilling. “Pop vs. Soda” shows by region of the United States what locals call the 43 gallons of carbonated beverages that the average American drinks annually, while “Europe, If the Nazis Had Won” is a sobering speculation on how the continent would have been divided if the Axis powers had prevailed in World War II. Some of Jacobs’ maps pack a provocative punch. Ludacris’ “Rap Map of US Area Codes” highlights the area codes of regions of the country where the rapper sings about having “hos” and “French Kissing Map” shows by region in France, how many kisses it’s appropriate to plant on someone’s cheek upon greeting.
If a bisous or two won’t arouse your attention, Marina Adshade’s posts on Dollars and Sex surely will. An economics professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who teaches an undergraduate course on “The Economics of Sex,” Adshade has a knack for revealing the complicated relationship between lust and lucre. From online dating to prostitution and pornography, Dollars and Sex sheds an economist’s light on things which often happen in the dark. For example, Adshade’s most recent posts explore whether sexy professors are at a disadvantage because of their looks, the correlation between cheap drinks and risky sex, the paradox of regulating prostitution, and the connection between AIDS and gay marriage:
- Do Sexy Profs Get Derailed From the Tenure Track? – A recent study suggests that when it comes to professors, there’s a penalty for being pretty.
- Dollar Drinks and Risky Sex – Inflated drink prices may slow the spread of STIs.
- Prositution Paradox: Regulating Brothels Can Spread Disease – Evidence shows that more enforcement of licensing and STI testing actually increases the number of sex trade workers on the streets.
- Gay Marriage and AIDS: We Now Know the Connection – When it comes to HIV, it turns out tolerance is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Rounding out Big Think’s new blogs is The Age of Engagement, written by American University professor Matthew Nisbet, which examines how the developement of new media and communication technologies have altered politics, science, culture, faith, education, and business. Nisbet wrote an influential blog called Framing Science that is now part of The Age of Engagement; all the archival posts for Framing Science can now be found at Big Think.
About Big Think
Big Think is a global knowledge network that showcases the cutting-edge ideas of leading experts in a variety of fields. Big Think has interviewed more than 1,500 thought leaders, including economists Paul Krugman and Muhammad Yunus, futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologists Rickard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Paul Nurse and Anthony Fauci, filmmaker Ken Burns, novelists John Irving and Paul Auster, business leaders Meg Whitman and Richard Branson, investors Peter Thiel and George Soros, journalists Arianna Huffington and David Remnick, US Poet Laureates Billy Collins and Rita Dove, US senators John McCain and the late Teddy Kennedy, particle physicists Freeman Dyson and Michio Kaku, and artists Chuck Close and Jules Feiffer. For more information about Big Think, please visit http://www.bigthink.com.
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