DanielN

ah. ok. That totally make since. I guess my concern in holding up HK or Singapore as shining examples of economic freedom and efficiency are that both of them come with pretty terrible cases of second class citizenry as a direct byproduct of their economic freedoms. (I know this is not at all the point you were trying to make)

Go to any apartment in central in HK and you will find a 5 by 5 foot room serving as maid quarters. Then go out in central on a Sunday afternoon and you will see the streets packed with Malaysian and Philippine maids. Then go look at the stats on the number of Chinese businessmen kidnapped in Malaysia and the Philippines every year and tell me there isn't a problem. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_Fire)

This problem doesn't exist anywhere in mainland China or Taiwan. And ultimately it is hard not to view it as an ugly byproduct of economic liberalism in these particular cultures.

Comments like this are what make a binary voting system inefficient. Two thirds of your comment is spot on and pretty much exactly what I came here to say. When I initially viewed your comment it had been down voted and I debated whether or not I should vote it back up. But there are some glaring unfairnesses in your assessment that make me take pause.

Suggesting that Hong Kong is the freest state in the region is kind of ridiculous when you compare it to japan or taiwan (post martial law). Last time I had looked (3 or 4 years ago) both were higher on the UN Human Freedom Index (unfortunately I couldn't find a list online). Also I wouldn't agree that Hong Kong should be held up as an example of a start up state. I love Hong Kong, it is definitely one of the greatest cities in the world. But it produces very little in the way of innovation outside of finance. There isn't a booming start up community in Hong Kong for the same reason there isn't one in Singapore. Because to do business on any worthwhile scale, you have to know which wheels to grease and know the right people to grease them. There was a really great article on this a while ago about why a key reason there weren't any Walmart types in Hong Kong was because it was more profitable to the Triads to keep all the mom and pop shops in business than to work with larger corporations (unfortunately I can't seem to Google anything).

But honestly, those points aren't really what bothered me about your comment as to some extent they are based on perception. What was more perplexing to me was the assertion that Confucianism played a key role in the lack of democracy in Singapore. Certainly Confucianism has played a key role in shaping Singaporean society, but no more than it has in Hong Kong, and almost certainly to a lesser extent than it has in Taiwan. One would be hard pressed to find a nation with a large Chinese population in the subcontinent that doesn't have strong Confucian influences.

Ultimately Hong Kong and Singapore ( and more and more Taipei) are basically the same cities filling the same roles for different populations. The only real difference is Hong Kong is a much more fun city to live in. I agree that Singapore has a glaring issue in the freedoms they allow their people, but really there are a lot of country that do a lot of business that have similar problems (as an American I wouldn't exclude China or the US from that list).

I guess this is the aspect I don't understand. With a lifetime of twenty years, most software patents (a lot of hardware patents for that matter) cover the entire viable commercial lifetime of the product.

In our brief experience of commercial software (what has it been? 40 years? Note: that's 2 patent terms) I can't think of very many software technologies that have lasted as a commercially viable product for 10 years let alone 20.

To my limited understanding of how patents work and how the software market works I would think a patent term in the range of 1-5 years would be a lot more reasonable. It would allow for the patent holder to gain a competitively advantageous foothold in the market (the point of having a patent) and it would destroy the incentive of inventors to sell their patents rather than creating business from them.

I'd be interested to hear from people with more knowledge of these subjects than me as to why this isn't the way software patents are maintained.

Honestly, the main reason for the action that has taken place over the past 5 years or so is due primarily to the authors of this list. More specifically, it is due to their getting into positions where they have unusually wide breadths of power.

I agree with you that reform movements like what is currently building in education can have disastrous effects. However, in this instance, most of the reforms being proposed are a product of observing what has worked in charter schools, rather than a product of running in the opposite direction of what doesn't work.

I see the current reform movement as an overwhelmingly positive force in education. As long as they stick to the ideal of spreading successful charter school practices to the broader public school community I'll be happy.

PS: All you genius hackers with backgrounds in machine learning, AI, social networking, (god knows what else might be applicable). Don't like the way teacher performance is being quantified? There's a multi-billion dollar industry that could use some disruption.

There was an article in the economist a few years ago about the dominant professions of government leaders for various countries. I couldn't find it, but the basic gist was it is more a reflection of the most accessible prestige positions in a given country rather than the values of that country. If I remember correctly the study was inconclusive as to whether this actually effected governance in any meaningful way.

I'm disappointed I couldn't find the article cause it was interesting to see the dominance in various countries: engineers in china, businessmen in japan, lawyers and legacy wealth in the us, lawyers in the uk, teachers and doctors in france, etc.

It's standard form for writing news headlines, by-lines.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, (applications of machine learning) there are plenty of examples of this.

See google search suggestions, facebook's news stream, google ad suggestions, last.fm and pandora's music suggestions, etc.

Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning, and you too can know as much about machine learning as I do!

(edit): actually if you read the wiki article you will know an infinite amount more about machine learning than me.

The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same. See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples.

But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.

I agree. Planet Money is a great example of what financial news should be. And it is a completely replicable phenomena. Its strength largely comes from a few personalities who are engaging, intelligent and intellectually curious and asking them to report on a subject they know little about. It gives a really strong mix of high end analysis and laymen explanations for the financial and economic mechanisms at work.

Whats interesting about this style of reporting is that it seems to actually produce more in depth and nuanced analysis than what you typically see in, say, the wall street journal. I suspect this is because the laymen explanations lea to side analysis of issue that would otherwise be washed over. Where most financial news sources would report on the current state of toxic assets and how they are effecting broader markets, planet money in this series has spent an entire year reporting on what a toxic asset actually is, how it progresses through a market, its role in the market crash and what is being done to correct it. And all of this in about 3 minutes once a week.

this is basically my point. The things you look for in great programmers are not the same things you look for in finding great people to spend a weekend with. In order to make this a truly great experience they should put some time into finding a way to make good matches both in start-up-employee-potential and enjoyable-person-potential.

cool idea, but sending you resume (or some facsimile of it) to find a place to crash is a little strange.

ah, put it like that and I would probably agree with you. The way you phrased the issue the first time I was under the impression you were suggesting that fenty's opponent might be anti-Rhee. I was confused by this because I was under the impression that Rhee has pretty overwhelming political clout and public support. Currently it's just bad politics to be anti-Rhee in DC (unless you're a union leader). It would make more sense that Rhee would threaten to walk without continued support and unilateral power.

Could you explain how action from the private sector might help to reform the public education system. Unless you're referring to vouchers I'm not sure I understand the connection you're trying to make.

Also, I'm not sure its accurate to claim that Rhee might lose her position if Fenty isn't re-elected. His opponent seems to be on the same side of education reform as him and most of his claims to "anti government" policies are more in the realm of police and tax reform (at least as I understand it; I don't live in DC)

the really disappointing thing about ping is that unlike last.fm, apple has access to the binary file for itunes and so could provide even more info about your listening habits.

I assume last.fm's scrobbler works entirely from the unencrypted itunes file which only gives play count.

I would think that Apple would employ a lot more computer engineers and people on the hardware side and that these would be the tech employees at apple with highest salaries, but I might be completely off base.

Anyone have any ideas if this is true?

don't give up on journalism, it's only dead to those who aren't great writers, and this guy is a great writer.

no direct sources off the top of my head but http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Intervi... is a good start

well for what its worth, a lot of studies suggest that you actually get better teachers if you exchange these "fringe benefits" for higher salaries.

Looking for answers in such macro terms is probably not an effective response to the problems posed in the article.

What would likely be more effective would be data on changes in teacher salaries over time, changes in administrator salary over time, etc.

This makes a huge difference in the argument if for no other reason than that the increase in revenue over time has been due to increased services (not necessarily relating to the betterment of the state or its educational systems) rather than the deepening of the pockets of existing services in 1964.

I've tried this in Boston. Mass-holes will not stand for you to screw with their traffic jams.

It is arguable that this has only become true in the past ten years. For a long time lack of IP controls was a big barrier to international trade for China.

I totally see why this is a fear. But actually I don't see a feature like this causing these kind of problems. How is it any different than receiving a text when you are busy or running into someone you know when you don't have time to chat. Everyone has times when they are busy and everyone has times when they aren't busy and want to be social.

More to the point, mandarine will not become the language of international business for the same reason French WAS the language of international business up to the early 1900s; the french were involved with business everywhere even though the british and germans had most of the consumer population.

Furthermore, English education is already an integrated part of the chinese (and asian) education systems.

This seems to coinside, at least in the examples you give, with companies that have a "suit culture" who still recognize the importance of perpetuating a hacker culture. Maybe it is a simple flaw in the to-market process for such cultures.

google notifo. Its a notification service you can link your account to.