Monthly Archives: December 2005

One Laptop Per Child

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Well some may be laughing, but Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab people really do seem to be moving this project forward. More power to their elbow!

Taiwan’s Quanta, the world’s largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

Negroponte, who is also chairman of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit group, has said he expects the laptops to be available to governments next year at a price of $100 each. A prototype of the laptop was unveiled at the recent U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis.

Under terms of an agreement with One Laptop Per Child, Quanta will devote engineering resources to develop the $100 notebook design during the first half of the year, according to a statement issued by the group. At the same time, Quanta and the non-profit organization will explore the production of a commercial version of the laptop.

Corporate Alzheimer Threat?

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Sun Microsystems really do seem to have an important point here. If there aren’t some common underlying standards then reading todays documents fifty years from now could become just like trying to read Linear B today:

Speaking to a group of reporters, Sun’s top open-source executive said that a format like OpenDocument (ODF) is needed to prevent a permanent condition of what he dubbed “corporate Alzheimer’s.”

“I want to make sure that when my grandchild studies history at university, that they can study source documents,” said Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. Phipps said that without a standard that remains stable and is widely adopted, documents won’t be able to be opened decades later.

How Reliable is Wikipedia?

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Well, pretty damn reliable apparently. Or at least that is the view expressed by the scientific journal Nature who have just carried out the first peer based comparative review of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of their science coverage. Clearly cases like the Seigenthaler one are the exception rather than the rule, and Britannica itself is not without its problems since of the eight “serious errors” reviewers found – including misinterpretations of important concepts – four came from each source, the journal reported. Maybe people should be thanking John Seigenthaler for raising Wikipedia’s profile. Well done Wikipedia.

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

…..an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

In other Turkish censorship news

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The Comics Reporter reports:

A court of appeals in Turkey has thrown out a fine against a cartoonist who depicted Prime Minister Reycip Erdogan as a horse. Sefer Selvi’s cartoon appeared in April 2004 and led to an approximately $7500 fine — although I admit I’m guessing on that latter fact, what with their being multiple Turkish currencies and my having a general conversion incompetence that usually only rears its ugly head whenever I buy DVDs from Hong Kong.

Erdogan has cases or threatened cases out against Musa Kart and Erdil Yasaroglu for animal-related cartoons they made that would be mild by US publishing standards but nonetheless honked off Erdogan. Erdogan’s habit of checking the press by lawsuit has come under fire throughout Europe as a potential issue that could keep Turkey from becoming a bigger economic partner with the West.

Waiting With Baited Breath?

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Will there or won’t there be an eleventh hour agreement on the new EU budget. Tony Blair is clearly burning the midnight oil, but the foreign ministers did not seem to be unduly impressed:

EU foreign ministers’ talks on the 2007-2013 budget ended after less than a minute on Monday (12 December), with the UK set to issue new proposals on Wednesday ahead of Thursday’s summit.

Britain is set today to publish revised proposals designed to broker a deal on a seven-year EU budget, with the new offer still expected to include heavy cuts to funding for eastern Europe. According to the FT:

Tony Blair, British prime minister, is expected to soften his proposals at the EU summit starting in Brussels on Thursday, including giving up more of the UK budget rebate and restoring some of the planned cuts in the new member states.

In pushing for a tighter EU budget for 2007-2013, the UK’s inital offer proposed cuts of almost 10 per cent in funding for eastern Europe in a total budget of €847bn ($1,000bn, £571bn).

Tony has also found a new argument, the cuts in Eastern Europe aren’t as bad as they seem, since these countries don’t know how to spend the money even when they get it (hmmmmm).

Britain claims there is little harm in reducing payments to poorer new members because they are already finding it difficult to spend the much smaller amounts they are being allocated in 2004-2006. But central Europeans say the British analysis is flawed because it looks at figures for this year, which give no indication of how well the billions of euros in structural funds will be spent.

Meantime, in a decision which is getting decidedly less coverage, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy may have pulled the plug on the enlargement process itself by refusing to approve official EU candidate member status for Macedonia. I’m not sure what this implies. Any comments from our experts out there?

German Inflation On the Way Down

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The latest inflation eport from the Federal Statistical Office in Germany says this:

The harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, rose by 2.3% in November 2005 compared with November 2004. Compared with the previous month, the index was down 0.5%. The estimate of 25 November 2005 was thus slightly corrected downwards.

Inflation threat, what inflation threat?

Orhan Pahmouk on his trial

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The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.

The Political Fallout of Italy’s Growth Problem

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Yesterday the news from Italy was the sudden drop in industrial output, today it is the fact that this makes Berlusconi’s re-election much more uphill work. In particular his coalition just lost a vote in Messina, Sicily, that they normally should have won.

This trend in indutrial output is important for what it implies about growth in Italy this year and next, and this is important for the knock-on implications for Italy’s deficit. This Italian government has incorporated an economic growth target of 1.5 per cent in its 2006 budget, and this target now seems improbable. This means the budget shortfall will be greater than agreed with Brussels, and that the deficit will rise more than anticipated. More problems.

The IMF is critical of the approach the Italian government is taking and has already expressed its fears that Italy will not meet its goal of reducing its budget deficit to 3.8 per cent of gross domestic product in 2006 from 4.3 per cent this year. The principal culprit for the IMF: Italy’s slow productivity growth.

“The nation’s economic problems are essentially ‘made in Italy’,” an IMF report said last month. “The fundamental factor accounting for weak competitiveness, and for a decade of disappointing economic performance, is slow productivity growth. Over 1996-2004, growth of output per hour worked was the lowest among all industrial countries and a cumulative 5.5 percentage points below the euro area average.”

The Postponement of Childbirth in Europe

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At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing population no longer replaces itself. This development in an of itself is no disaster – many countries arguably suffer from excessive rates of population increase – but equally reducing fertility too rapidly can lead to economic and social ‘imbalances’ that may well turn out to be, in and of themselves, ‘undesireable’.

Understanding why this is happening has begun to present an important challenge for many areas in contemporary social science as there are evidently factors involved in the process which embrace areas as diverse as demography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, economics and of course biology.

One of the characteristic features of this most recent fertility decline is that it is driven largely by a delay in childbearing: couples (and obviously in particular this means women) wait longer and longer before taking the decision to have a child. Understanding the dynamics behind this ‘delay syndrome’ is the key to developing a social policy to address the consequences, so it is particularly timely that the Vienna Institute of Demography was host last week to a Conference on this very topic: The Postponement of Childbearing In Europe. A number of interesting and important papers were presented, and I will be looking at a number of them between now and xmas. Indeed I have opened a page on my website which will be dedicated to the Conference.

But, just as a taster, why is postponment so important?
Continue reading →

Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You!

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Inflation in the eurozone is not about to spiral out of control. I have been arguing this for months now. The latest piece of evidence: French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November as compared with the previous month:

French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November on the previous month, national statistics office INSEE reported on Tuesday. That brought the annual rate of inflation down to 1.8 percent from 2.0 percent in October. The drop in consumer prices was largely driven by a 2.8 percent fall in energy prices, with petrol products down 5.1 percent.