ha!

Ha! I'm getting better at this - I am happy to report that I can now get through The Economist in a single one-hour sitting without threatening to shred it to pieces ! (Obviously I haven't lost any of my passion for life ;) ).

Let's do things by topic this time:
PERSONAL
"More than 100 people were arrested in Guinea, after an apparent attempt to kill President Lansana Conté last week. He is ill and has no obvious successor; Guineans worry that his death might spark a civil war"
Word on the street (i.e. my sister who lives there and called two days ago) is that it was staged (by the president) to (1) attract popular pity and (2) give himself the ability to imprison random people he had grudges against - although they had nothing to do with the coup. That and the price of rice, the staple food, has more than tripled in the past 10 months. Nice.

SOCIAL
"The global birth rate fell to a new low. The average woman in the developing world now has 3.9 babies over a lifetime, compared with 5.9 in the 1970s, according to the United Nations." Oh by the way, I'm in the fun process of applying for jobs, including some positions in UN organisations. Wouldn't it be fascinating?

"Brazil. Taming an urban monster." article on the challenges for the mayor of Sao Paolo.
We're doing a very similar assignment on Mexico City, and the challenges of balancing horrible air quality and economic development.
I also got landed the fun assignment of writing 1,000 words on Artificial Life. I may have sounded sarcastic (for a change?), but I actually love the topic of ALife. It was my favourite class at MIT, and the one I got to TA. So if you ever want to know about Braitenberg vehicles, Conway's Game of Life, Ray's Tierra, Karl Sims' evolutionary creatures, or the Red Queen's paradox, give me a shout. I think I'll end the assignment though by talking about the links to spirituality. It's a bit dangerous, but it's so interesting to see the similarities between the kinds of work certain people do in Artificial Intelligence and the religious stories they inherited. One of my professors' theory was basically that researchers were using AI to enact their religious background. Anyway, that's a long, wild tangent from the topic of Brazil.


"Nepal. The education system is a casualty of Nepal's Maoist insurgency."
Let me just put a plug in for a non-profit started by a fellow MIT student houser. It's NCEF for Nepalese Children's Education Fund (http://www.nepalchildren.org) and does just that: put kids through school.

Let me also talk about another wonderful experience. There were 1,600 of us singing together for a Tsunami fundraising event. Beautiful choral works in a great church at the center of town. There wasn't much room left for an audience, so apparently people crowded outside in the town square to listen. It was a truly unforgettable experience.

ECONOMIC
"Japan has released preliminary figures indicating that China (including Hong Kong) had overtaken the United States to become its biggest trading partner in 2004". It's happening, folks... Bubye USA...

"How cheap air fares are bringing Europeans together"
We had a terrible experience with RyanAir ten days ago. We decided to take advantage of my whooping 2 days of break in between an intensive course and the second term to go to Rome. Fabulous time in Rome of course. However, the way back was painful to say the least. I did a little research, given as it was that I had to hand in a paper on airlines' corporate strategies two days later, and found that RyanAir has a horrific customer sat problem. The worst in Europe. You do really get what you pay for. And if you don't pay for the extra insurance, if your luggage is lost, they don't owe you a dime nor an apology. Looks like the too much cost-cutting line was crossed way back. It's really too bad for those of us who wanted to believe in a free lunch - I mean a $1 airfare to another country.

SOFTWARE
"Google launched an online facility that allows people to search for television programme stills. The service will eventually expand to include video clips." Who is not working at Google these days?

compared with...
"Microsoft decided not to continue fighting a European Union antitrust decision..."

OXBRIDGE (=Oxford-Cambridge for the unitiated)
"Oxford wants to be more like Harvard. That will annoy a lot of people."
At the basis for the excellence of the undergraduate teaching at Oxbridge is the concept of supervision. Supervisions are sort of like tutorials, except that they're done an individual or pair basis. So you get very targeted teaching; during supervision you can bet your supervisor will find out how well you're doing, which means pushing you if you can handle it and explaining the tough parts more thoroughly if you're struggling. It works extraordinarily well. That is until the ugly head of capitalism rears its head. Let's see, what is more cost-effective: a tutorial class for 25 students done by a poor grad student, or an individual supervision? mmh... That's basically what the article is talking about. Interestingly, Cambridge hasn't mentioned anything like that yet, but they are also under terrible financial pressure.

Unfortunately, not all is rosy in Cambridge. Some of you might have heard my frustration when once we were discussing water resources in class in the context of sustainable development and some undergrads majoring in engineering were simply proposing that countries without proper water resource be entirely wiped off the map. (That didn't go over too well with my friend from Jordan). Another friend of mine was telling me a similar story - she's in political science and they were discussing democracy and why it was now a prevalent concept/model/framework. The undergrads had all kinds of deep thoughts, but none of them thought about the fact that it could simply be a case of "the winner writes history". Now, I don't have anything against democracy, I'm just cautious about ivory tower grads shaping the world without any experience of reality. It's like the numerous courses we had to attend about corporate strategy and corporate culture, etc. from academics who not one day in their lives have worked for a private corporation.

While we're at it, another note on Cambridge: did you know that Trinity (College) is the 3rd largest fortune in England?? They could afford to not charge any room and board fee to their students, but since they're already the most attractive Cambridge college (half the Nobel prizes went here), the other colleges made Trinity sign a contract stating they would still charge the same kind of rates as the other colleges.

I think that'll be it for this post. Next time maybe I'll do a bit more on books I'm reading - unless you have a request, in which case send it alone. Ciao!