1 Mar 2011 - permalink
Absolutely fantastic video with Hans Rosling explaining statistics and why it is so important as a means to understand the world and ourselves. Rosling, as always, is sparkling with energy.
Hans Rosling is among my all time favourite scientists.
10 Feb 2011 - permalink
Umair Haque for Harward Business Review on Egypt’s Revolution provides excellent economic perspective:
What we’re watching is a massive malfunctioning of the global economy. At the root of the problem: dumb growth. Dumb growth is, in many ways, bogus — rather than reflecting enduring wealth creation, it largely reflects the transfer of wealth: from the poor to the rich, the young to the old, tomorrow to today, and human beings to corporate “people.” Dumb growth is growth without prosperity. And it’s far from an Egyptian problem.
And further:
The challenge now is leaping to a higher order of innovation: institutional innovation, because it’s institutions that set the incentives that mold and shape human achievement in the first place.
Brilliant!
9 Feb 2011 - permalink
British artist and cartoonist Darryl Cunningham takes on the issue of global warming.
9 Feb 2011 - permalink
Warren Ellis:
In CASINO ROYALE, James Bond is the Bond girl. Look at the way they even show him emerging from the ocean like Ursula Andress. Sexual torture, too, if less creepy-glam than being stripped and painted gold. Vesper Lynd is Bond: never not in control, never without a plan, seducing to further her goals. She has to die so Bond can become her.
4 Feb 2011 - permalink
The team behind Forumwarz built an iPhone game, iCapitalism. It’s a game consisting of nothing but in-app purchases:
Click on the Play tab. Then click Increase Your Level. You will be presented with a list of level upgrades you can purchase with real money.
There is no skill involved at all. The person paying the most, will be at the top of the leaderboard. After nine (!) weeks, it was rejected. The idea is humorous but I understand why it pass the approval process.
There is but a small step from iCapitalism to games like Farmville or Smurf’s Village. They all create incentive to spend real money playing the game. Either because the game does nothing at all or because the game consists of pointless delays and slow downs.
iCapitalism was rejected. Why is Farmville and similar allowed?
2 Feb 2011 - permalink
The danish newspaper Information and several others report how the new Danish law on residence permits has affected at least one foreign citizen who has been to war for Denmark. Only in Denmark has a translated version of the article appearing in the Danish paper Politiken.
A war veteran from the war in Afghanistan (and soon on his second tour), Baralai Hassenzai has been denied permanent residence because he lacked 15 of 100 required points in so called “active citizenship”. Volunteering in a football club for kids for a full year, for instance, would count toward the needed points. Serving as a soldier to the Danish nation apparently does not! The Danish Immigration Service even told him that he could be denied even temporary permit because he traveled back to his home country.
When risking your life for the country, having lived in there since childhood, is not “active citizenship”, it is not criteria for judging a wish to participate and contribute but instead a hostile system hell-bent on alienating certain groups.
Hassenzai has appealed the decision.
25 Jan 2011 - permalink
Horace Dediu quotes Tim Cook on Apple’s mission:
We believe in the simple, not the complex.
[…]
And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.
That’s a goal everyone should adhere to
25 Jan 2011 - permalink
Santa Fe Institute reports on findings by Luis Bettencourt and colleagues of new relations between the relative size of a city and various statistical properties of its inhabitants:
The researchers have shown, in fact, that with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is, on average, 15 percent wealthier, 15 percent more productive, 15 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime regardless of the city’s geography or the decade in which you pull the data.
Remarkably, this 15 percent rule holds for a number of other statistics as well – so much so that if you tell Bettencourt and West the population of an anonymous city, they can tell you the average speed at which its inhabitants walk.
Fascinating insight that just might allow us to better plan for the continuing urbanization.
“Almost anything that you can measure about a city scales nonlinearly, either showing economies in infrastructure or per capita gains in socioeconomic quantities,” Bettencourt says. “This is the reason we have cities in the first place. But if you don’t correct for these effects, you are not capturing the essence of particular places.”
25 Jan 2011 - permalink
Basil Safwat investigates exactly what happens when you’re in the iPhone mail app and a new message arrives. It’s a fantastic example of the incredible attention to detail that makes Apple products so insanely great.
24 Jan 2011 - permalink
Errol Morris made this 30-minute film for IBM, celebrating their centennial. It’s a fantastic tribute to the brilliant people of IBM and what we can accomplish under the right circumstances. (via John Gruber)