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"The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. New America emphasizes work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st Century information-age economy -- an era shaped by transforming innovation and wealth creation, but also by shortened job tenures, longer life spans, mobile capital, financial imbalances and rising inequality. The foundation's mission is animated by the American ideal that each generation will live better than the last. That ideal is today under strain. Our education and health care systems are struggling with problems of quality, cost and access. The country requires creative means to address its fiscal challenges and pay for needed public, social and environmental investments. Abroad, the United States has yet to fashion sustainable foreign and defense policies that will protect its citizens and interests in a rapidly integrating world. "

"Critical Thinking Challenge: Join the WikiLeaks Debate By Breanne Harris on December 9, 2010 First question: Were you scared to click on this leak? According to a State Official speaking to students at Columbia University, you should be! An email sent to students from the University of Career Services center, said you should avoid linking to or commenting on anything regarding WikiLeaks if you ever plan to apply for a job in the federal government. The WikiLeaks scandal continues to dominate headlines and create a great opportunity for a critical thinking debate. Much like our Open Debate on TSA Policies, we'd like to open a debate on this issues surrounding the WikiLeaks issue."

"Critical reading means thinking carefully about an author's claims, rather than accepting these claims at face value. It requires several skills: · identifying the claims or arguments of a text; · evaluating the logic of these arguments; · determining whether the author has presented sufficient and valid evidence in support of these arguments; and · considering alternative evidence and arguments that might challenge the author's claims. Why bother? Because if you don't read critically, you may miss the main arguments of the text, or - worse - your opinions may be influenced by bogus arguments."

When you are reading for understanding, here are some questions to ask. They will help you weigh the arguments and check for validity.

How does this apply to Internet searches? We are looking for authority. What are the practices we should adopt to navigate the network world?

"Working at the intersection of psychology and economics, Weber is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. Recently, she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental issues. She describes her research as follows: "I try to gain an understanding and appreciation of decision making at a broad range of levels of analysis, which is not easy, given that each level requires different theories, methods and tools. So at the micro end of the continuum, I study how basic psychological processes like attention, emotion and memory (and their representation in the brain) influence preference and choice. At the macro end of the continuum, I think about how policy makers may want to present policy initiatives to the public to make them maximally effective. This range of topics and methods is challenging, but at least in my mind the different levels of analysis inform and complement each other." "

"Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond. Applying critical thinking skills through web research can help students: * Improve search skills. * Evaluate the information they find. * Incorporate them in their work. Explore the ready-to-use curriculum below, including detailed lesson plans, student worksheets, and class demonstrations on: * Mechanics of searching * Validity and reliability * Plagiarism * Citing web sources * Civil discourse"

"One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar." This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.

No matter why you want to do it, there are simple and effective methods you can use to increase your cognitive thinking skills in useful and lasting ways.

"Connect Employees' Ideas With Management's Objectives Gain business results by encouraging social innovation Connecting employees' ideas with management's objectives is both a revolutionary opportunity and a significant challenge for organizations. Every single day, employees generate ideas for new businesses, products and process improvements. By implementing a social innovation strategy in your organization, you can automate the processes of pulling together expertise, experience, and authority of individuals to manage ideas forward into actual innovation projects, improving the quality of decision-making and accelerating the pace of innovation."

Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.

"Species diversity refutes the theory of evolution"

"Be like Socrates: assume people are unaware of their own ignorance (including yourself) and politely, warmly, probe to sort out the difference."

A new pilot study has been looking at how neuroscience can be used to understand how business decisions are arrived at, and the role it can play in management accountancy by evaluating the decision-making process and the role that emotional responses play their part in this