The New Stanford Blog Directory: Stem Cells, Philosophy and Beyond

Blogs are abound­ing these days, and what’s unfor­tu­nate­ly miss­ing is an effec­tive way to orga­nize this new world of infor­ma­tion and to make it acces­si­ble to oth­ers. Until a good, large-scale solu­tion comes along (I don’t count Tech­no­rati or Google Blog Search as the real answer), some of this will get done the old fash­ioned way, the way Yahoo did it back in 1996 — that is, index­ing by hand.

Last week, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty launched the Stan­ford Blog Direc­to­ry, which hopes to index the col­lec­tive blog­ging wis­dom com­ing out of the uni­ver­si­ty com­mu­ni­ty (fac­ul­ty, staff, alum­ni, etc.). This small list will inevitably grow over time. But it already includes some blogs (in addi­tion to Open Cul­ture) that you may want to peruse. Let’s high­light a few:

Smart Ener­gy Show: 6.6 bil­lion peo­ple live on the earth today. 9.2 bil­lion will be here by 2050. And, as time goes by, ener­gy demand will inevitably push toward a break­ing point. Smart Ener­gy takes a close look at how we can meet “this ris­ing demand with­out inflict­ing per­ma­nent dam­age” on our frag­ile envi­ron­ment. And it explains what sci­ence, gov­ern­ments and indi­vid­u­als can do to meet this chal­lenge. The blog is writ­ten by Mar­got Ger­rit­se­na, pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Ener­gy Resources Engi­neer­ing, and the blog posts are often accom­pa­nied by infor­ma­tive videos.

The Stem Cell Blog: Writ­ten by Christo­pher Thomas Scott, this blog exam­ines the sci­ence, ethics, busi­ness and pol­i­tics of stem cell research. Scott is par­tic­u­lar­ly well posi­tioned to do this. He is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Pro­gram on Stem Cells in Soci­ety and the author of Stem Cell Now: An Intro­duc­tion to the Com­ing Med­ical Rev­o­lu­tion. Plus he has taught a course called Straight Talk About Stem Cells that you can access on iTunes for free.

Phi­los­o­phy Talk: Writ­ten by two Stan­ford phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, Ken Tay­lor and John Per­ry, this blog accom­pa­nies a week­ly radio show (also called “Phi­los­o­phy Talk”) that offers a “down-to-earth and no-non­sense approach” to phi­los­o­phy that’s rel­e­vant to every­day life. Along the way, the blog/show explores phi­los­o­phy that touch­es on our beliefs, rela­tion­ships, pas­sions and the world around us.

For more Stan­ford blogs, enter the Blog Direc­to­ry here. For more Stan­ford con­tent on Open Cul­ture, click here.

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