Why do people see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich or hear demonic lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven"? Using video and music, skeptic Michael Shermer shows how we convince ourselves to believe -- and overlook the facts.

If you think scientists lead boring, monotonous lives, you must not know about Tycho Brahe. The 16th century astronomer who accurately predicted planetary motion led quite a dramatic life -- complete with a kidnapping, a sword duel and...

What does the world look like when you map it using data? Social geographer Danny Dorling invites us to see the world anew, with his captivating and insightful maps that show earth as it truly is -- a connected, ever-changing and...

What puts the “science” in social science? Today we’ll explore positivist sociology and how sociologists use empirical evidence to explore questions about the social world. We’ll also introduce two alternatives: interpretative sociology...

How do different societies establish a social hierarchy? Today we’re starting our unit on social stratification, starting with four basic principles of a sociological understanding of stratification. We’ll explain open and closed systems...

In many ways, our memories make us who we are, helping us remember our past, learn and retain skills, and plan for the future. And for the computers that often act as extensions of ourselves, memory plays much the same role. Kanawat...

Pick up a book, magazine or screen, and more than likely you'll come across some typography designed by Matthew Carter. In this charming talk, the man behind typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial (designed just for phone...

Chat with a friend about an established scientific theory, and she might reply, "Well, that's just a theory." But a conversation about an established scientific law rarely ends with "Well, that's just a law." Why is that? What is the...

So we’ve talked about computer memory a couple times in this series, but what we haven’t talked about is storage. Data written to storage, like your hard drive, is a little different, because it will still be there even if the power goes...

What is culture? How do we define it and how does it change? We’ll explore different categories of culture, like low culture, high culture, and sub-cultures. We'll also revisit our founding theories to consider both a structural...

Traditionally, geography is studied as two interconnected parts: physical geography and human geography. For the first half of this series, we will be focusing on physical geography, which is all about recognizing the characteristics of...

So, what is geography? In our first episode of Crash Course Geography, we will endeavor to answer this seemingly simple question with the help of a similarly simple factoid: that the US imports more than 3 billion pounds of bananas from...

Learn why an entire field of Psychology is in trouble.

Psychology research can be tricky, because brains are complicated. But does that mean it isn't a science?

Now that you have a solid understanding of the media landscape, it’s time to equip you with the essential skills for navigating it.

Null Island - The Busiest Place That Doesn't Exist

Today we’re turning our sociological eye to another major social institution: religion. We’ll use symbolic interactionism to help us understand the dichotomy of the Sacred vs. the Profane. We’ll compare the perspectives of structural...

This week we introduce sociology’s three major theoretical paradigms, and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each paradigm.

Social class in America is... hard to talk about. As Sociology, the difficulty lies in pinning down what we mean by "Social Class." In this episode of Crash Course Sociology, Nicole chats to us about how Sociologists figure this out so...

How do sociologists study and understand social interaction? Today we’ll explain the language sociologists use to discuss how we interact with the social world. What are statuses and roles? How are they different? How do you acquire...

In the second half of our education unit, we’re using conflict theory to explore a few social inequalities in the US education system. We’ll look at variation in school funding and quality, the role of cultural capital, and some of the...

In order to understand the history of media literacy we have to go all the way back to straight up literacy. In the first half of our look at the history of media literacy, Jay takes us all the way back to Ancient Greece and forward...

Paul Andersen explains how scientists analyze and interpret data. Data can be organized in a table and displayed using a graph. Students should learn how to present and evaluate data.

Today we’re going to finish up our unit on data visualization by taking a closer look at how dot plots, box plots, and stem and leaf plots represent data. We’ll also talk about the rules we can use to identify outliers and apply our new...