Archive for December, 2010

What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students.

Medicine and science connote objectivity and the public may innocently assume contributions from the medical profession are dispassionate facts that lack political and ideological intrusion. AHowever, the medical profession, like every other human endeavour, operates within the realm of the human condition. In this context it is wholly expected there will be a natural tendency for the opinion and political agendas of doctors to be communicated as if they were based on science and research.

Curiously, even the most successful Android hardware manufacturers like Samsung and HTC areAhedging their bets on Google's mobile platform either with their own OS (Bada) or Microsoft's (WP7).

We've seen women break or attempt to break into big time male-dominated sports. Danica Patrick has had a successful career as a driver (though, for the record, neither she nor any of her male colleagues are athletes). Michelle Wie certainly wasn't stopped from attempting to move from women's golf to men's. She got into one men's tournament and failed to qualify for the PGA tour, but our culture, her past encouragement, a lack of viewers, media coverage, etc, had nothing to do with her inability to compete. The fact is, she is at a competitive disadvantage to men. This is all the more true for sports like football and hockey.

You don’t really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of "drinking the koolaid." You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it’s the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion… or rather passion in the hate dimension.

Open source is everywhere as 2010 draws to a close, and we’ve already weighed in with our assessment of the four biggest open source events of this year. Some of the best analysts on the open source scene are also weighing in, including putting some metrics on the number of open source projects and general open source adoption. The results are eye-opening.

There is a cynical slant to this piece, which the title gives away, but much of his logic and question are sound, it's just the conclusions where he sometimes runs astray. I agreeAMarshall McLuhan was a lousy writer and a jumbled thinker, and technology revolutions tend to warp the idea of what a true revolution should bring. The Internet certainly has changed some things for the better, but it has had little effect on others (Are Americans happier or better educated on average than in 1994?).

Late last year, a neurological disorder (Hydrocephalus, for the medically inclined) robbed me of cognitive abilities and 27 years of memories, personality, and emotions. ASkills can be re-learnt, and it’s surprising how little of what we "are" is a skill, voluntary or involuntary. I have re-learnt the language I work in, and re-acquired the technical skills to re-align with my old profession of a technical wordsmith.

This year, Germany finally paid off its old bonds for World War 1 reparations, as Margaret MacMillan has noted in the New York Times. AMacMillan asserts that "John Maynard Keynes, a member of the British delegation in Paris, rightly argued that the Allies should have forgotten about reparations altogether." Actually, the truth is more complicated. AA fuller understanding of Keynes's role in the 1919 Paris peace conference after World War 1 may also offer a useful perspective on his contributions to economics.