Getting 16.4 million people better post-secondary education? Lumina Foundation has a plan for that.

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Lumina Foundation's goal is to help people across the U.S. get a quality post-secondary education.To do that, it's providing grants, helping to shape policy, and it's investing in innovative entrepreneurs through the Lumina Impact Ventures program.

Lumina is looking to partner with entrepreneurs who are dedicated to helping students gain a fulfilling post-secondary education and for whom Lumina Foundation can be a strong value-add partner.

In 2019, Lumina Foundation and Big Think teamed up to create the Lumina Prize, a search to find the most innovative and scalable ideas in post-secondary education. You can see the winners of the Lumina Prize here – congratulations to PeerForward and Greater Commons!

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ELIZABETH GARLOW

Elizabeth Garlow is Lumina's impact investment officer. She most recently served as a community solutions fellow and domestic policy advisor at The White House during the Obama Administration, where she managed the President's Promise Zones initiative, working closely with local leaders to create jobs, improve educational outcomes, reduce crime and support overall economic growth.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Elizabeth Garlow: Lumina Foundation is working to make quality post-secondary learning available for everyone across the US. And in order to do that, we are employing a number of different strategies. We provide grants. We do work to shape policy at the federal and state levels. And we have an impact investing strategy. And through our Lumina Impact Ventures Program, we make investments in ventures that we think can be critical partners for us on this mission. So when it comes to looking at an investment opportunity, there are few things to keep in mind. The first is we want to identify those entrepreneurs that have some good product/market fit traction. So do they have some demonstrated ability to actually address a key problem or a pain point for a customer, and are there some indicators that their product or solution is really working well? The second thing that we're looking for is the ability to scale. And this is where this idea of capital intensity comes in. How lightweight is your solution? How many resources do you have to put into your solution to make it scale and work? Lumina Foundation is working to help 16.4 million new individuals get a quality credential by the year 2025. To reach that goal, we want to partner with entrepreneurs that are reaching tens and hundreds of thousands of new students and helping them on those pathways to a credential. So often this means that we're looking for technology-enabled products and services or technology platforms that have some sort of lightweight way of scaling to reach more people. And finally, we want to ensure that there is a strong mission alignment between what you're doing as a company in the world and what we are trying to do at Lumina Foundation. Are there ways that we can be a strong value-add partner for you? Can we add expertise as a foundation that helps really drive your mission as a company? And how can we work together to ensure that we're making quality post-secondary learning available for everyone in this country?

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Keeping democracy alive: Whistleblowing, civil disobedience, and discourse

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The first U.S. whistleblower protection law was passed unanimously in 1778 in response to the misconduct of Navy Commodore Esek Hopkins.

Whistleblowing and civil disobedience are tools of discourse that keep elites honest and protect democracy.

The difference? Whistleblowers are insiders who expose improper conduct to the authorities or to the press. Civil disobedience starts with outsiders whose actions slowly gain popular support, which then catalyzes change.

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ALLISON STANGER

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, a New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also the author of "One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy" and has contributed to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and The Washington Post.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ALLISON STANGER: It's really important to realize, whistleblowing is in America's DNA. It has been a concept since before the Constitution itself was ratified. The first whistleblower protection law in the United States was passed in 1778 during wartime. It is used to bring down the first commodore of the United States Navy, Esek Hopkins. Hopkins was a Rhode Islander. He was someone who had been involved in the slave trade, as the Brown Project illustrates quite clearly. And people think that the reason that Hopkins was removed from his post is because he was torturing British prisoners of war -- and he was doing that, as the whistleblowers Marvin and Shaw revealed, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The real reason he was removed -- and research in digital archives shows to be so -- is that he was defying George Washington who was telling him to engage the British in the Revolutionary War effort in certain positions on behalf of the Congress of the United States, and Hopkins was instead directing his fleet to The Bahamas to serve, effectively, Rhode Island elites who were still very much involved in the slave trade even though slavery was illegal at this time. So I think this is a really interesting example because it shows how important the founders saw fighting corruption right when you first see it.

Whistleblowing is a cousin of civil disobedience. Hannah Arendt thought that civil disobedience was a uniquely American institution, very much connected to Tocqueville's emphasis on the importance of civic associations and the vitality of American democracy. Civil disobedience is different than whistleblowing because civil disobedience is about highlighting unjust laws, and you break the law in order to get public opinion on your side to believe the law is unjust and should be overturned. Whistleblowing is different because it's not about breaking unjust laws. It's about serving the rule of law itself. So whistleblowers expose illegal or improper conduct that is at odds with self-government. So whistleblowing is related to civil disobedience, but they're two distinctive enterprises. You might say that civil disobedience starts with outsiders and slowly gains popular support and that's how change comes about, whereas whistleblowers are insiders who see behavior that they believe is improper and expose it either to the authorities or to the press. And this is a really important way of keeping our elites honest because if we don't have honest elites, you can't have self-government. You can't have liberal democracy.

The first whistleblower protection law actually says you have an obligation to report misconduct when you see it, and this is intimately connected to democracy. And I really believe the Founders were right on that point, and you can see this in a number of examples today where, you know, take the #MeToo movement. That very much started with insiders exposing horrific misconduct. And then slowly you saw through social media that actually -- I think it's some statistic like 40% of women on Facebook came forward with #MeToo, 'this has happened to me as well.' But that started with elites pointing out that this has happened and it's wrong, and that rallied all sorts of other people to say, 'Hey, wait a minute. I might have kept quiet about that. I might have thought that was part...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/sponsored-institute-for-humane-studies/whistleblowing

Writing a will: What to leave behind after you die

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A will is not a simple, one-piece-of-paper kind of document. There are many different kinds of wills: There's a will to handle your things. There's a will to handle your body. And there are wills to handle your legacy.

If you don't prepare a will, and if you don't set up a trust, and if you don't arrange your advance directives, then you, and your loved ones, fall into these default legal mechanisms that aren't necessarily always commonsensical.

In ethical wills, which are gaining popularity today, deceased individuals pass along tips of wisdom or things they've learned to those who survive them — this is an opportunity for them to pass along the narrative of how they say life, what they thought of themselves and others, and what they hope for their loved ones.

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BJ MILLER

BJ Miller, MD, is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he practices and teaches palliative medicine. He has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and interviewed on Super Soul Sunday, The Tim Ferriss Show, and On Being with Krista Tippett, and has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and around the world.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BJ MILLER: As these things go, there are layers of issues. So a will is not sort of a simple, one piece of paper kind of document. There are many different kinds of wills. There's wills to handle your things. There's wills to handle your body. And there are wills to handle your legacy, in a way. We have layered in systems and structures and legalities and all sorts of paperwork to this subject. So, if we have some old-fashioned notion that death is natural, it'll come, society absorbs death all the time, family members absorb death all the time, that we can just kind of let nature take its course, well, again, we've supervened in nature in too many ways by now.

So if you don't prepare, if you don't do your will, if you don't set up a trust, if you don't do your advance directives, et cetera, then you fall into these default mechanisms in our systems that aren't necessarily always commonsensical. So one thing that happens all the time -- and it happens at every level of society -- I mean, most recently, Prince famously died and had not done his will. And it's left an enormous mess for his family and his estate. And they'll be fighting in that family for I don't know how long, for a long time. And so much of that could have been obviated by doing a will, putting it in a trust. It's not fun. But it's also not that difficult. You just have to take time to do it.

So this is sort of one of the ways that death goes from difficult to feeling impossible, or difficult to feeling almost cruel. The pain that we layer on top of our grief can be profound. And it's often for the lack of these very simple things, like you just didn't do your paperwork. Or a common scenario is someone takes the time to put their estate into a trust-- if you put into a trust, your family gets to avoid probate, which is a hellish legal process that goes on for years, generally speaking. But they'll set up a trust but they'll forget to put their assets into the trust. Or they'll forget to sign a piece of paper.

Or they'll do their will, and then not tell anyone where it is. These kinds of things are really common. And you can imagine, it's a simple mistake. I mean, there's an advance care directive, which is often also called a living will. And that's where you stipulate your wishes for how do you want to be treated if -- when you're who do you want to be your health care proxy, making decisions for you if you can't? That is probably the single most important thing any of us can do, is to name our health care proxy. And that's a relatively easy process.

So you've got the living will slash advance directive -- naming your proxy, naming your durable power of attorney for finances. And then you can get into things like who gets what after you're gone, et cetera. So there's that bundle of paperwork that also will often cover what's called code status. So if you die, when you die, do you want medical effort to try to revive you, resuscitate you? Or do you want to let people make you comfortable and let you go? You can make those kinds of stipulations in your will and your advance directive.

On top of that, if you have assets, if you have anything that you want heirs to inherit beyond personal items, you'll really...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/bj-miller-will

The best hospitals have more superbugs. Do patients have a right to know?

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Many of the best hospitals also have superbugs within their walls.

One medical dilemma is whether to tell patients about a superbug's presence: will it inhibit them from seeking care?

The best hospitals may have the most superbugs, but they also have the experts who know how to treat patients sickened by bacteria, and possess some of the most powerful antibiotics around.

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MATT MCCARTHY

Matt McCarthy, MD, graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to complete his internal medicine residency at Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of two national bestsellers, "The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly" and "Odd Man Out." His newest book, "Superbugs," is on-sale now.

McCarthy is also an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell and a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MATT MCCARTHY: One of the things that's really interesting that hospitals are wrestling with now is how to talk about superbugs. And the reason for this is that patients are fearful every time they hear that there is a superbug inside of their local hospital. But the irony here is that many of the best hospitals see the most superbugs. They have the most sophisticated diagnostic techniques.

They have the most powerful antibiotics. And they often care for the sickest patients. They also have the experts who know how to treat these. And so a controversial ethical issue right now is how much disclosure should hospitals have talking about the superbugs that they find within their walls. Patient advocates say that this is like a restaurant having an outbreak of food poisoning and that we have an obligation to be transparent in what we're finding.

Many experts disagree with that because just because there is a superbug inside of a hospital doesn't mean that it infected anyone. It doesn't mean it was spread around. And in fact, the infection may have been cured very easily. So what we're trying to figure out now is how best do we talk about these things. Sometimes patients call people from the Department of Health and say, does a hospital or a nursing facility have superbugs. Is it infested? Can I send my mother there?

And we wrestle with how much to tell patients because, if the best hospitals have the most superbugs, what do we say? And I'm all for transparency, but I want to make sure that we couple that with education. What I want patients to understand is that a world class hospital may have more superbugs, but they've also got the world-class medical treatments and the experts who know how to treat you.

So figuring out how we talk about this in an informed way is one of the areas that intersect between my two interests of infectious diseases and medical ethics.

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We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.

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How to suffer like a total pro: Comedian Pete Holmes on ego, judgment, & feeling special

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When you're going through a moment that tests your patience, even causes you to psychologically suffer, sometimes you have to step back and say, "Yes, thank you."

Suffering is like sandpaper, and, if we choose, it can buffer us and make us better versions of ourselves.

Also, it's critical to find a quiet place within where just the fundamental fact that you are participating in reality imbues you with enough value and dignity to draw upon at any moment. Regardless of exterior sentiments about you.

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PETE HOLMES

Pete Holmes is a comedian, writer, cartoonist, "Christ-leaning spiritual seeker", and podcast host. His wildly popular podcast, You Made It Weird, is a comedic exploration of the meaning of life with guests ranging from Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert to Seth Rogen and Garry Shandling.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PETE HOLMES: L.A., and we're here in New York. And something that I'll repeat in my head over and over is resist nothing, which seems so silly. But to me, it's a real key to happiness, is trying to-- again, Richard Rohr says, love is learning to say yes to what is. And that is one of the most fundamental spiritual-- I know people don't like that word, and we can talk about that and how I understand that. But one of the most fundamental principles of this thought prism is learning to say yes to what is. It is madness, as Eckhart Tolle says. It's madness to resist what's happening.

You know what I mean? Obviously, if you can change something, if something is unpleasant or physically painful and you can pivot, yeah, resist-- resist. I'm all for that. But if your flight is delayed, you can watch people start suffering. So there's an unpleasant thing happening-- a flight has been delayed. But the suffering happens when you start-- and you can watch this happen from what other people and myself call the witness place. You watch yourself constructing a story. And this is where suffering comes. It's your attachment to how you think things should be.

And of course, I still do this. Please, don't think I'm-- I'm sitting in a chair, I'm not floating. [LAUGHS] But you see the story begin to happen. And you go, Delta or United should do better. They're always doing this. That's the first level. And then you start going, I'm going to miss this thing, or, I'm going to be late to the dinner, and damn it, my ticket cost this much. This is the narrative that we build. Really, something has happened. The flight is delayed. Maybe it was completely preventable, but it's happening. So it's very useful-- I talk about in the book, one of my mantras that I repeat all the day-- not all the day-- all the livelong day isn't just resist nothing, but it's, yes, thank you. And I can't tell you what a shortcut to peace-- real peace, not story peace-- I'm being peaceful, but actual surrender peace is, yes, thank you.

Somebody, for some reason, brought my attention to somebody that was tweeting mean things about me. I don't know why I clicked the link. They were like, what's up with this person? They're tweeting mean things about you. I could have just deleted the email. I click on it. We have this weird masochistic-- so I click on it and I'm reading these, and it took me from such a nice place to such a bad place, until I said, thank you. Oh, wow, you just called bullshit on a really fundamental but flawed happiness system that I have running in my brain-- not my heart, in my brain. Which is that if people love me and if they think I'm really special and if they think I'm really smart-- oh, and this one thinks I'm good looking, this one likes my shirt. I must be worthy of love. Then somebody, just as valid and just as anonymous, says, I don't like him.

And then I start to suffer. There's a hole-- in the bowl that I hold my love, now there's a hole and it's dripping out. And I told my wife, Val, I told her about it. I was telling her how embarrassed I was that here I am with all this knowledge of these principles, but I can be taken down with a series of mean tweets. And I remembered in our discussion to say, thank you. I was like, oh, right. Suffering is like sandpaper, and it's buffing me and it called bullshit on me. And I was like, thank you. And as soon-- so here's the thought. This guy's being an asshole to me and I'm clinging onto it like this. Somebody doesn't like me. I wrote a book, maybe people won't like my book. Maybe they'll think I'm ...

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Sleep hacking: How to control your mitochondrial clocks

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You can go a month without food, or three or four days without water, but try to go three or four days without sleep. "It's at least as important as water. But you don't see people going on water diets very often, but you do see people who just don't get enough sleep all the time," says Dave Asprey

Quality sleep is foundational to good health, helping to ward off diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's. It's also a key strategy for anti-aging.

Dave Asprey shares what he's learned about sleep hacking: Don't eat after the sun goes down, turn the lights down as much as you can after the sun goes down, and black out your room – you'll need more than regular black-out curtains. Watch the video to find out why.

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DAVE ASPREY

Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, professional biohacker, the New York Times bestselling author of Game Changers, Head Strong and The Bulletproof Diet, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of Bulletproof Radio, the Webby Award–winning, number one–ranked podcast. His new book is Super Human (2019).

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVE ASPREY: One of the biggest things you can do that isn't going to cost you anything is improve the quality of your sleep. It's funny, because when you get a good night's sleep regularly at the right time, your risk of cancer drops dramatically. Conversely, if you are a shift worker or you regularly fly all over the place and you don't take care of your biology, your chances of cancer go up a lot. One night of bad quality sleep can change your ability to regulate your blood sugar by up to 40%. Now, that's the path to diabetes. And what about Alzheimer's disease? People who don't get enough sleep and don't regulate their blood sugar also have problems with Alzheimer's disease. And the list goes on. So sleep is a foundational element. And if you really think about it, you can go three, four days without water maybe. You can go a month without food. But try and go three or four days without sleep. It's at least as important as water. But you don't see people going on water diets very often, but you do see people who just don't get enough sleep all the time. This is one of the primary anti-aging things.

But the problem with sleep is that, actually, a lot of people don't have time for sleep. And it's OK to not have time to sleep, because you have a job, you have a family, you have a social life, and you have stuff you wanted to do. So what are you going to do? Are you going to choose to die earlier or to get sleep? Or maybe there's a better way. And in Super Human, I talk about sleep hacking. And here's an example. I landed in New York last night, and I flew from the west coast from Seattle. Now, that's a recipe for a terrible sleep, for jet lag. But I changed the amount and the color of light that I allowed into my eyes on the airplane using patented glasses that I created called TrueDark. And in fact, if I look at my phone here, I track my sleep with a ring. It gives me a very detailed analysis. And I'll tell you my real numbers from last night. I didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked. But what I did get was five hours and 23 minutes of sleep. I didn't get to my hotel until 1:00 in the morning. And I was traveling with one of my kids. But I got two hours and 11 minutes of deep sleep. That's more deep sleep than a 20-year-old gets an eight hours. And I got 58 minutes of dreaming sleep. So I got better sleep than most Americans get on most nights even though I flew in the wrong direction three hours and was sleeping in a foreign environment. How the heck do you do that?

Well, the biggest thing is to turn the lights down at night. Just dimming your lights, turning off the bright white stuff in your kitchen and your bathroom after the sun goes down, it doesn't change the length you'll sleep necessarily, but it changes the quality of your sleep. And since I couldn't do that on the airplane or in the hotel room, I wore glasses that took out the bright colors, the blue light. And you go back to the '50s: We had incandescent bulbs, and not that many of them, and they weren't that bright. Now that we have these fluorescent lights and LED lights, we can have incredibly bright light right before bed. In fact, most of us do. And that sends a signal to the ancient parts of our body, sub-cellular things that control our aging and control how our body responds to the environment -- they're ...

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Computing history: From government secrets to a failed tech utopia

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Elon Musk isn't the first technologist to worry about robot overlords. The early computers of the '40s and '50s were referred to as electronic brains, and people regarded them with fascination and fear.

Until the 1960s, computing power was wielded only by corporations and the government. Then, out of the 1960s counterculture rose a generation of technologists with a techno-utopic vision: Give everyone a personal computer as a tool for empowerment and enlightenment, rather than being siloed machines of government secrets and war.

The personal computing movement thought technology would solve inequality, racism, and war – but as we now know, it did not. History seems to suggest that humans, not tech alone, must be the agents of change.

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MARGARET O'MARA

Margaret O’Mara is the author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America." She is a professor of history at the University of Washington, where she writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MARGARET O'MARA: Ever since the advent of digital computing, technologists had been thinking about how computers could enlarge human capacity, and both in ways that were empowering and also ways that were terrifying. I mean, worries about the robot overlords have been with us for a very long time. You know, there was this combination of fascination and fear with which, not only technologists, but the broader world and the American public viewed the advent of digital computing. Originally, the first computers in the '40s and the '50s were referred to as electronic brains. They were brains that could do better than the mind of man. And that was both exciting and terrifying.

By the time you got to the late 1960s, to the Vietnam generation, computers figure in the American imagination, and particularly in the baby boom generation imagination, as these sort of giant, ominous things that are by and large controlled by very large corporations and by the government. That's where most the computers were, right? So think back to "2001: A Space Odyssey" to HAL, the computer run amok; this giant supercomputer that takes control of the spaceship. That's what computers meant to many people of that generation.

And so, out of that generation come a group of technologists, particularly in the Bay Area, people coming out of Berkeley, out of Stanford. Other people, like Steve Jobs, who are growing up in the Bay Area, who are very much shaped, not only by their exposure to computers in this period, because that's when computers are going into schools, like Steve Jobs's high school computer lab; that was one of the things about growing up in the Bay Area is you're one of the first places to be a high schooler with access to computers. But a lot of these students and these young people say, OK, the computer should not be just under control of the establishment. What we need to do is, to change the world, we need to take this immense power of the computer and figure out how to make it personal. How to take the computer and make it a tool for empowerment, and enlightenment, and equity, and communication, rather than something that is the holder of government secrets, a maker of war.

And so the personal computer generation has this politics -- it's a politics that's very much adapted from the counterculture of the 1960s -- all this is coexisting and happening at the same time; everyone's listening to the same music and doing the same drugs. But what's really different is that technologists, they weren't all hippies. They were, you know, a lot of them were pretty straight-laced. But they did share this techno-utopianism, this belief that technology was going to be a tool for empowerment. You hear one person after another -- people like Stewart Brand, the founder and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. People like Ted Nelson, the person who thinks up the idea of hypertext and creates this manifesto in the early 1970s that's talking about -- that is entitled Computer Lib -- how computers can liberate. And this is the foundational politics of this computer generation, that all of the concerns about inequity, and sexism, and racism, and the control by faceless bureaucracies and institutions -- all that could be solved if people had their own computers and had a way to communicate with them.

Now, that's a...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/computing-history-from-government-secrets-to-a-failed-tech-utopia

College education is still a class luxury in America. PeerForward is changing that.

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More than two-thirds of American jobs require some kind of secondary education. Unfortunately, kids growing up in a low-income area simply do not have the same resources as wealthier areas when it comes to applying for college or making it to graduation.

PeerForward works with students in low-income areas to get them into college by helping them identify their target college, find and apply for financial aid, and consider how their choice of major connects to their future career.

PeerForward now is expanding onto college campuses to help students persist to earning a degree. The organization hopes to reach 10,000 college students by 2024.PeerForward is a winner of the Lumina Prize. Discover what they're about here.

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ALOYSIA JEAN

Aloysia “AJ” Jean is a communities engagement specialist at PeerForward, where she is focused on creating and implementing innovative solutions for college access and college persistence programs serving low-income and first-generation students. AJ is a PeerForward Alumna 2011.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ALOYSIA JEAN: I wouldn't be where I am right now without the help of my community, especially my PeerForward community. Applying to college can really feel like an obstacle too big to bear, especially if you don't have people beside you to help you forge that path. I went into this thinking that I had to forge it alone.

But by the end of it, I was so grateful to have the help of PeerForward beside me, not only because they gave me the tools and the skills that I need, but because they gave me the encouragement and the support and the love and the empathy that I needed to feel seen and to feel like I could actually do it.

So right now, your zip code is probably the best predictor of whether or not you'll graduate from a two or four-year college. We want to change that. We no longer want circumstances outside of our control to predict whether or not we'll actually be able to achieve what we set our minds to. Our problem is the fact that often in low-income communities, guidance counselors and guidance counseling staff is understaffed and overwhelmed.

The college degree gap between low and high-income communities is vast. And it's a problem that's persisted for more than 50 years. When I compare people from my hometown to my network from college, it's clear to me that the statistics are true. By age 24, folks from high-income communities are five times more likely to earn a college degree than the folks I grew up with. A degree can feel like an unattainable luxury. But in reality, more than 2/3 of American jobs require some post-secondary credentials.

Our method of making sure that low-income students have a better chance at receiving a higher education is mind-blowingly simple. We take a resource that's available in every high school and college campus -- influential students, students who have a drive to get to college, students who have a drive to get that degree, students who have that drive to make a change in their own communities. We don't count on our students to just be influencers of the mind. We count on them to influence students to action.

We've identified three key steps that help students get a better chance at a higher education. First, we teach students how to identify and recognize what characteristics they want in a college that's perfect for them. How is it that you're going to operate in this space? And what do you want this space to look like for you?

Two, we teach them different ways of finding financial aid and applying for it, not just the FAFSA and the CSS Profile, but how to identify different streams of revenue to pay for the college price tag and how to not let that price tag deter you from getting to your dream of that college degree.

Third, we help connect college to career. Why does it matter what you're studying? And how will it affect your life after you get this degree? It's not just what you're studying but where it'll get you. And we want to make sure that everyone takes enough time to think about it that by the time they reach their senior year, they have a plan in place.

We teach students much more than how to navigate the college application process. We teach students how to make real change in their community. And I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to pass down those skills to a new generation of peer leaders who will hopefully go on to cre...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/Lumina-Foundation/college-low-income

Rules for civil engagement: How to talk with someone unlike yourself

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There is a basic set of rules you can use when talking with someone who believes different things than you do, says Jonathan Zimmerman.

Statements like, "You're a blankety-blank" close discussions rather than open them. Instead, say, "You know, that's interesting. That's not the way I see it. Tell me more about why you think that."

Being more open about your intentions can help, too. Tell the person that you see the issue from a different angle, and ask them what they think of your view. A key rule for civil discourse, especially in this political climate, is to recognize the difference between emotion and argument. The depth of conviction with which something is said is not a substitute for argument quality or truth.

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JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN

Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of History of Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school social studies teacher, Zimmerman is the author of "Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford) and six other books. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other popular periodicals.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN: It seems to me that in order to be civil, you do have to follow a certain set of basic rules about human dialogue and discourse. So if you begin with a statement, and I say, "You're a blankety-blank", that's not going to further the discussion. It's probably going to end it. A more civil response would go something like this: "You know, that's interesting. That's not the way I see it. Tell me more about why you think that." So civility, for me, connotes the rules of decent and polite behavior That we need to follow in order to have a reasonable discussion and disagreement. Another really interesting one is just to say, "Listen, I just want to tell you that I see this differently. And I'd like to share that with you to see what you think." That is prefacing it by saying, acknowledging right off the bat, that you see things differently and asking the person to react to what you're saying. Something else I've seen that I think works really well is, "You know, I think we come at this from different places. Would you like to talk more about it?" Just ask the person, because sometimes the answer is going to be "No". I would say other important rules, for me, are don't be afraid of emotion but don't mistake it for argument. There's nothing wrong with being emotional. Frankly, I would say at this moment in political history, if you're not emotional about something, you may be a sociopath. I mean, it's an emotional time. It's a brittle, a troubled, and emotional moment, so it's fine to be emotional. But don't confuse emotion and argument. The depth with which you feel something is not an indice of its strength as an argument. All the worst and most awful bigoted, racist, hateful people in history have felt what they felt very deeply. But the depth of their feeling shouldn't be seen in any way as an indice of its truth. So it's fine to have deep feelings and emotions. I do. But don't mistake them for argument.

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What proof is there that the universe is evolving?

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Light moves at 186,000 miles per second. As fast as light speed is, when you think about how large the universe is, light takes time — a lot of time — to actually get to us from distant objects.

The sun is about 93 million miles away. At 186,000 miles per second, it takes about eight minutes for light from the sun to actually reach us here on Earth.

Because of this, when you look up at the sun — with eye protection — you're actually seeing the star as it was nearly 10 minutes ago, not as it is in real time.

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MICHELLE THALLER

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: One of my absolute favorite things about being an astronomer is we are actually time travelers-- real time travelers. We work all the time with looking back into the history of the universe. And there's a wonderfully simple reason why. And that's that light only has a finite speed. As fast as light speed is-- light goes at 186,000 miles per second. That's incredible. But as fast as that speed is, when you think about how large the universe is, light takes time, a lot of time, to actually get to us from distant objects. So let's start off with the nearest star. It's kind of the simple way to begin.

So the sun is about 93 million miles away. And at 186,000 miles per second, it takes about eight minutes for light to actually get to us from the sun. So when you stand on the surface of the Earth today and look up at the sun-- with eye protection-- you're actually seeing the sun as it was eight minutes ago. There's no way you can see the sun as it is right now, because the light has to take time to travel that 93 million miles to us. So even in our own solar system, you actually look back into the past. Depending on where the planets are-- planets like Mars, maybe you're looking at something on the order of 15 minutes away, by the time you get to the outer planets, you're looking at things that are many hours away.

So even our own solar system is looking back into the past as you look farther out into space. But then things start to get much more dramatic as you look farther and farther away. And in fact, the nearest star to us in the sky, Alpha Centauri, is four light years away. That's the time it takes light to travel in one year. One light year is about 6 trillion miles. There's no way you can see Alpha Centauri the way it is now. You're seeing it as it was four years ago. You go farther out, and soon this becomes very dramatic. The nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, is 2 million light years away. So when you look up at Andromeda, you're looking at light that came to the earth at the very, very dawn of the human species.

Two million years ago, we were fairly different than we are now. The farthest we can see, you're actually looking back billions of years-- you're actually looking back at light that's coming to you today, the light is actually arriving at your eyeballs today-- before the earth even formed. And the farthest away we can see is actually quite breathtaking. We can see a distance that corresponds to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. That's something like 13 billion years ago. The light actually took 13 billion years to get to us. And the thing that's so powerful about that as a scientist is, over that much time, things start to look very different. Even in the course of a few million light years away, galaxies look pretty much the same way they do now. The stars look very much the same, the galaxies look a lot like the Milky Way.

But as you go farther and farther out into space and the light has taken longer to reach you, things begin to change very dramatically. Galaxies don't look the same. They tend to be smaller, they tend to be more active, they have very active black holes at their center...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/michelle-thaller