- Craig Venter
J. Craig Venter (born John Craig Venter October 14, 1946, Salt Lake City) is an American biologist and businessman.
- Danah Boyd
Danah Michele Boyd (born 1977), also known as danah boyd, is an American academic, researcher, and blogger best known for media appearances where she speaks about social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace. Since 2003, she and her research have been quoted on the subject of social networking in dozens of different articles in media sources such as NPR, Wired, MSNBC, "USA Today", and "The O'Reilly Factor"..
- William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born, Conway, South Carolina) is an American-born science fiction author who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, partly due to coining the term "cyberspace" in 1982, and partly because of the success of his first novel, "Neuromancer", which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1984.
- Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901, Philadelphia - November 15, 1978, New York City) was an American cultural anthropologist.
- Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf (September 12, 1892 - August 11, 1984) was a leading American publisher of the 20th century, founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and (of the previous generation) Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt. Knopf paid special attention to the quality of printing, binding, and design in his books, and earned a reputation as a purist in both content and presentation.
- John Locke
John Locke was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British Empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers and contributors to liberal theory. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, …
- Jim Gray
James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born 1944, lost at sea January 28, 2007) is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."
- Peter Suber
Peter Suber Professor of Philosophy Earlham College
- Peter Dale Scott
Peter Dale Scott was born in Montreal in 1929. His poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror ; Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse ; and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 . An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and U.S.-Iraq wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations.
- Gordon Bell
C. Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is a computer engineer and manager, an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering and oversaw the development of the VAX.
- Ellen Goodman
Ellen Goodman is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist. Goodman worked as a researcher and reporter for Newsweek magazine between 1963 and 1965, and has worked as an associate editor at the Boston Globe since 1967....
- Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes (born April 6, 1959) is a designer and theorist in the fields of online learning and new media. Born in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council of Canada as a senior researcher in November 2001. Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology's e-Learning Research Group, …
- Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin) is the chair of Opsware, a software company, and cofounder of Ning, a consumer Internet company. He is best known as a cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser. In 2005, it was revealed that he is one of the people behind Ning, which recently launched a free "playground" for social software.
- Jim Garrison
Earling Carothers "Jim" Garrison (November 20, 1921 - October 21, 1992) - who changed his first name to simply Jim in the early '60s - was the Democratic District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana from 1962 to 1973; he is best known for his investigations into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
- Bruce MacCabee
Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D. (May 6, 1942) is an optical physicist employed by the U.S. Navy, and a leading UFO researcher. He is listed in "Who's Who in Technology Today" and A"merican Men and Women of Science". In addition, he is a noted contemporary UFO investigator specializing in technical analysis and photoanalysis of UFO cases. The following information is derived primarily from his website's biography page.
- Frans de Waal
Frans B.M. de Waal (born 1948, the Netherlands) was trained as a zoologist and ethologist in the European tradition at three Dutch universities (Nijmegen, Groningen, Utrecht), resulting in a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Utrecht, in 1977. His dissertation research concerned aggressive behavior and alliance formation in macaques. In 1981, Dr. de Waal accepted a research position at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
- Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth F. Loftus (born in Los Angeles, CA) is a psychologist who works on human memory and how it can be changed by facts, ideas, suggestions and other forms of post-event information. Her work is controversial, and has much direct application in law and other fields.
- Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997. Her column BoomTown originally appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and also online at WSJ.com. Previously, Ms. Swisher covered breaking news about the Web's major players and Internet policy issues and also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University and Co-Director of the Quality of Life Research Center. He is also Emeritus Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago, where he chaired the department of psychology. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi is one of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of creativity.
- Gerald Schatten
Dr. Gerald Schatten is a Professor and Vice Chair of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Deputy Director at Magee-Womens Research Institute and Director of the Pittsburgh Development Center. He also has appointments in Cell Biology, Physiology and serves as Director of the Division of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
- Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam (January 29, 1926 at Santokdas, Sahiwal in Punjab - November 21, 1996 in Oxford, England) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work in Electro-Weak Theory which is the mathematical and conceptual synthesis of the Electromagnetic and Weak interactions, the latest stage in the effort to provide a unified description of the four fundamental forces of nature.
- Raymond Moody
Raymond Moody (born June 30 1944) is a parapsychologist. He is most famous as an author of books about life after death and near-death experiences, (a term which he coined in 1975). His best selling title is "Life After Life". Moody studied philosophy at the University of Virginia where he obtained a B.A. (1966), a M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D (1969) in the subject. He also obtained a Ph.D in psychology from West Georgia College, …
- Jerome Clark
Jerome Clark (1946 -) is an American researcher and writer, specializing in unidentified flying objects and other anomalous phenomena; he is also a songwriter of some note. Clark is one of the most prominent UFO historians and researchers active today. Although Clark's works have sometimes generated spirited debate, he is widely regarded as one of the most reputable writers in the field, and he has earned the praise of many skeptics.
- Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin (born 1955 in New York City) is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. Smolin is best known for devising several different approaches to quantum gravity, in particular loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, …
- Marcus Buckingham
Marcus Buckingham is a motivational speaker, trainer, public leader, researcher and author. He claims to have trained over 2 million people through his books, seminars and lectures.
- Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born October 11, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a popular American novelist and screenwriter.
- Eric Reeves
Dr. Eric Reeves is professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has spent the past seven years working full-time as a Sudan researcher and analyst, publishing extensively both in the United States and internationally. He has testified several times before the Congress, has lectured widely in academic settings, and has served as a consultant to a number of human rights and humanitarian organizations operating in Sudan.
- Michael Apted
Michael Apted (born 10 February 1941;) is an English director, producer, writer and actor. He was one of the most prolific British film directors of his generation but is best known for his work on the "Up!" series of documentaries. On June 29, 2003 he was elected President of the Directors Guild of America. He returned to television, directing the first three episodes of the TV series "Rome". His last feature film project was "Amazing Grace", …
- Rick Strassman
In 1990, Rick Strassman began the first new human research with psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, drugs in the United States in over 20 years. These studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an extremely short-acting and powerful psychedelic produced by the human brain and an active ingredient in ayahuasca, an entheogenic brew consumed by Latin American indigenous peoples as part of religious ceremonies.
- Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee (Traditional Chinese:李開復 Simplified Chinese:李开复 pinyin:Lǐ Kāifù, b. December 3, 1961) is an information technology executive and a computer science researcher. The founding president of Google China, he was hired in July, 2005. He became the focus of a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft, his former employer, …
- Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic. He is best known for his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (abbreviated as "GEB") which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
- Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin OBE, DL. (born April 28 1960, in Cardenden, Fife, Scotland) is one of the best-selling crime writers in the United Kingdom. His best known books are the "Inspector Rebus" novels.
- K. Eric Drexler
Often described as the 'father of nanotechnology', K. Eric Drexler is a researcher whose work focuses on advanced nanotechnologies and directions for current research. He has authored numerous journal articles, and his books include Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation . He helped lead development of the 2007 Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems , a project managed by Battelle and hosted by several of the U.S. National Laboratories.
- David Hanson
David Hanson is an American robotics designer and researcher, resposible for the creation of a series realistic humanoid robots.
- Max Tegmark
Max Tegmark (born 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he belongs to the scientific directorate of the "Foundational Questions Institute". As part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey team, he has worked on data analysis, extracting the parameters of the Lambda-CDM model from observational large-scale structure and cosmic microwave background data.
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
- Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves is a writer, syndicated columnist and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
- Ali Abunimah
Ali Hasan Abunimah is a Palestinian-American, born of a mother made a refugee in 1948 from the village of Lifta now in Israel, and a father from the village of Battir in the West Bank, who co-founded Electronic Intifada, a not-for-profit, independent online publication about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective. Abunimah has served as the Vice-President on the Board of Directors of the Arab American Action Network.
- Erich von Däniken
Erich Anton Paul von Däniken is a controversial Swiss author best known for his books about extraterrestrial influence on human culture since prehistoric times, that helped inspire the New Age movement. He is one of the key figures responsible for popularizing the paleocontact and ancient astronaut hypotheses. There were numerous forerunners to von Däniken in the field but he is the best-known and has sold the most books about these hypotheses.
- Stephen Lee
Stephen Lee is a chemist who won a MacArthur Award in 1994. He is currently a professor at Cornell University.