One of the biggest of big businesses today is the global traffic in drugs. One of the most intractable of social problems is the scourge of drugs in the community. And one of the worst things that can happen to you is to develop a drug addiction. The w...

On The Big Idea, a welcome to the world of Big Data. We have a huge amount of information about the world we live in, and most of us, who have access to the internet, add to it every day. But where is this data to be found, and in what form? Who gets t...

This week's topic is Confucius, one the greatest teachers the world has seen. The ideas of Confucius, emphasising self-cultivation, probity, loyalty, and respect for the past, were transmitted through the words of others, eventually becoming a powerful...

Someone once said: Human history is about three things: numbers, numbers, and numbers. The big picture is the story of the growth, the movement, the fortunes and conflicts, the expansion and decline and sometimes the disappearance of large groups o...

This week's Big Idea is Intellectual Property. Douglas Kerr and his guests ask the question: Who owns ideas, and how? The term "intellectual property" is not exactly a paradox, but it's certainly a problem. (Sat, 8.30am-9am) 11-5-2013

We are living in a highly sexualized society: sexual language and imagery saturate our culture, media and the internet, sex is considered the key to our psychology – even childhood, many people complain, is increasingly sexualized. When we’re not doing...

In traditional Chinese society, a gentleman was expected to have skills in the three great arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Chinese artists have produced an extraordinarily rich body of work, characterized by acute and poetic observation of n...

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English poet William Wordsworth began a poem with these lines: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Most of us, some of the time, know what he m...

On 28th March 1941, one of the greatest of modern novelists filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse, near her home in southern England. Virginia Woolf's suicide seems to have been the result of depression and the fear of madn...

The Basic Law is the constitutional document of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and came into force in 1997. In this week's the Big Idea, Douglas Kerr will be discussing the Basic Law with Martin Lee, barrister, former legislator, foundin...