Written by John Moravec on Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 13:44
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The Poeple’s Daily reports that,
A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China’s Anhui Province.
The device will reportedly be built for USD 37 million — 15 times less than the ITER Tokamak project — although at a smaller scale. The question begs, however, is China developing into a hot spot for cost-effective research and development?
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Category: Innovation, Technology
Tags: China, fusion, research and development
Written by John Moravec on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 7:30
PC Advisor’s Peter Sayer writes that Malta might be Europe’s most innovative country if its proportion of high technology export revenue is taken into consideration:
Malta, [...] a member of the EU since May 2004, derives a greater proportion of its export revenue from high technology than any other European country, according to figures from Eurostat, the statistical service of the European Commission. High-tech goods and services accounted for 55.9 percent of Malta’s exports in 2004.
R&D in the European Union, however, remains relatively low:
Spending on R&D is one way in which companies – and countries – stay ahead of their market. Average spending on R&D was 1.9 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) in the EU in 2004, compared with 2.59 percent in the US and 3.15 percent in Japan, according to Eurostat. In Europe, 54 percent of that expenditure was financed by businesses, and the rest by governments. In the US, 63 percent of R&D was financed by business, and in Japan 75 percent.
Read the full article.
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Category: Innovation, Public Policy, Technology
Tags: Malta, research and development
Written by John Moravec on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 7:46
Roger Martin writes that “Chinese and Indian companies aren’t leaving design to the North Americans”:
“There is a romantic notion in North American business that its future lies in design and innovation, while India and China will be the home of less skilled, lower-paying operations churning out the products and services the U.S. comes up with.
…
These globally oriented outfits are not entrusting all creativity, design, and innovation to ‘first world’ opponents while they huddle over their workstations. True, they have staggering cost advantages over traditional competitors.”
Ritzer (1998) writes that globalized systems “do not excel at innovation: they are at their best in implementing and rationalizing ideas stemming from other sources” (p. 178). Is the heavily globalized West about to discover that creativity and innovation cannot be commoditized and managed as such?
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Category: Articles, Globalization, Innovation
Tags: China, creativity, India, outsourcing
Written by John Moravec on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 22:26
Some U.S. students are taking note of a lesson learned by U.S. corporations and are outsourcing their homework. Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal writes:
Rent A Coder enables people — usually Americans — who need computer programs to put them out to bid — usually for cut-throat prices by Indians and Eastern Europeans.
…
Indeed, some programming students appear to be outsourcing their way through college. “Pascal Rookie,” from Colorado Springs, Colo., has put five school projects to bid. And while he may be a plagiarist, at least he treats his helpers well: Mr. Rookie has received the highest marks possible for a buyer in the eBay-like rating system used by Rent A Coder. “A pleasure to work with him,” said one.
Is the outsourcing of learning another sign that the U.S. is losing its innovation advantage?
More on the “innovation advantage” tomorrow morning…
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Category: Globalization, Innovation, Technology
Tags: outsourcing, pedagogy, students
Written by John Moravec on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 7:12
In an audio podcast, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Director of the Singularity Institute for Artifical Intelligence, talks about what will happen if and when we make machines that are smarter than we are:
Link to NeoFiles Web site.
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Category: Accelerating Change
Tags: artificial intelligence, Technological Singularity
Written by John Moravec on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 7:30
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports their take of the top ten trends affecting education in 2005:
- The browser-based application
- Firefox
- Wikipedia’s news reporting
- The $100 laptop
- Podcasting
- A renewed debate on what students are doing on the Internet
- OpenOffice.org 2.0
- Web 2.0
- Moodle
- Blackboard’s takeover of WebCT
Read the original article.
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Category: Technology
Tags: Blackboard, Firefox, Internet, Moodle, OpenOffice.org, podcasting, trends, WebCT, Wikipedia
Written by John Moravec on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 13:40
NewScientist reports:
Development giants China and India “hold the world in balance”, says a new report by a US environmental think tank.
“The choices these two countries make in the next few years will lead the world either towards growing ecological and political instability – or down a development path based on efficiency and better stewardship of resources,” says a report from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, US.
The solution? A policy based on innovation.
But Flavin says countries like China and India have the chance to develop in a more benign way than already industrialised nations. “[By] leapfrogging today’s industrial powers, they can become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within a decade,” he says.
Read the full article.
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Category: Innovation, Public Policy
Tags: China, development, ecology, India
Written by John Moravec on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 9:00
The Sloan Consortium, an online education group, finds that 2.35 million people took an online course in 2004. Furthermore:
- The overall percent of schools identifying online education as a critical long-term strategy grew from 49% in 2003 to 56% in 2005.
- The largest increases were seen in Associates degree institutions where 72% now agree that it is part of their institution’s long-term strategy, up from 58% in 2003.
- The smallest schools, private nonprofit institutions and Baccalaureate colleges remain the least likely to agree that online education is part of their long-term strategy.
Read the full report: [pdf]
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Category: Technology
Tags: online, strategy
Written by John Moravec on Sunday, January 15, 2006 at 21:43
Today, Wikipedia turns five years old. From their announcement:
“The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.”
That’s over 500 articles per day for the English-language version alone!
This follows last month’s finding that Wikipedia matches the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy.
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Category: Technology
Tags: Wikipedia
Written by John Moravec on Saturday, January 14, 2006 at 21:12
Upcoming Urban Leadership Academy workshop in Minneapolis:
Creating Schools of the Future through Systems ThinkingFebruary 1, 2006
Verna Allee, Verna Allee and Associates
Verna Allee, M.A., is recognized worldwide for her work as a pioneer in the field of knowledge management. She is a practitioner, thought leader, author, and frequent keynote speaker on value networks, knowledge management, intangibles, communities of practice, and new business models. Through her value network of colleagues, she consults with a wide variety of organizations—from global corporations and entrepreneurial startups to government agencies and global action networks. She will speak on bringing the wisdom of knowledge management and systems thinking into our schools.
Verna’s publications include The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks (2003) and The Knowledge Evolution (1997), which is a continuing best seller in the knowledge management field. She is also co-editor with Dinesh Chandra of What is True Wealth and How Do We Create It? (2003). Verna is a contributing author to several books and journals and is on the editorial board of Knowledge Management magazine.
(Read more …)
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Category: General
Tags: futures, intangibles, knowledge management, organizations, systems thinking, value networks
