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Intelligent Burocracy

This is a Snippet from "The World is flat"

"As venture capitalist John Doerr once remarked to me 'You talk to the leadership in China and they are all engineers, and they get what is going on immediately. The Americans don't, because they are all lawyers'. Added Bill Gates: ' The Chinese have risk taking down, hard work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them - --"

The exaggerated fear of radioactivity

The attached article from "The Spiegel" is interesting. If the facts and numbers are true (and the Spiegel should not dare to invent such stories),  then we have another good piece how the link between science and human progress has been attacked by a certain cultural tendency of the left in the last decades.

The Gini Coefficient

The Gini Coefficient measurs inequality in countries (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient). A high Gini coefficient means high inequality. The lowest Gini coefficient among industrialized countries has Norwegia with 19, many countries in Latin America are high upto 60, the extremest measured values. China went up from values in the 20 during communism to a 44 by the Deng reforms (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality) The West European Countries have lower Gini coefficients than the USA.

Freeman J. Dyson

I just finished reading the book "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet", a passionate plea of an astrophysicist in his 80s that only science can bring freedom and prosperity to humankind:

An interesting point is that he tells that the alliance between science and craft industry was that what made the former so developing in the 20th century. His hypothesis is that only a strong development in solar energy combined with genetic technology and the extension of the internet to all individuum will be able to resolve the problems of a world with 6 billion people.

Economic participation in the age of networking: Digital Ecosystems of Knowledge, Business and Services

I am participating at the moment in the conference titled above. The openig keynote from Bruce Perens was very interesting in discussing the economic importance of openSource software. He pointed out that no software development that is crucial for the business success of a company will be open, he called that differentiating technology, but that, in the moment a software goes on sale, is not differentiating any more. In these cases the openSource model shows to be more powerful.

AskWiki uses Wikipedia for semantic search

AskWiki uses Wikipedia for semantic search -
AskWiki is a service that
answers simple questions with passages from Wikipedia. It is the
product of a collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and
AskMeNow,

Why I could not team up with the Republicans

I am quite concerned about several aspects in the politic of the democratic candidates for the presidency, especially their tendency against globalization and in support of American protectionism. Another problem I have with them is their huge dependency from public sector unions. But look to the attached YouGov polls published in the Economist!

One of the points is striking and alarming: To the question if creationism should be taught in public schools, 80% of Republican voters answered yes, but also 50% of Democratic voters. Devastating!

Rosa nel pugno non finito?

Sembra che c'è ancora possibilità di formare una sinistra italiana libertaria. Dopo la partita della maggioranza dei DS per il compromesso storico bonsai, alcuni dei dissident sembrano a non voler pietrificarsi con la sinistra cubana die Bertinotti & Co.  Angius sta lavorando col SDI per il nuovo Partito Socialista, nella lettera allegata esponenti dei Radicali e dello SDI chiamano per la doppia tessera fra le loro organizzazioni.

Electric Cars

Electric cars | Wingless migration | Economist.com

Both, the Spiegel and the Economist were writing about new initiatives to foster electric cars in these weeks. The more interesting one in the Spiegel, cited by the Economist was about a Shai Agassi (Ex Number 2 from SAP) project to create an infrastructure that would make a real use of electric cars possible (https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,514256,00.html).

Workshop on European Information Space

On October 29 and 30 the Workshop on the European Information Space was hosted in FAO and co-organized by my team. The workshop brought together projects from two different directorates of the DG Information Society and Media. It was organized by the DILIGENT (Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology). Donatella Castelli from the CNR in Pisa, the DILIGENT coordinator succeeded in bringing together numerous projects funded by the EU in the area of Digital libraries and in the area of Research Infrastructure-

johanneskeizer.com