How immigration has affected one former corporate executive.
Raymond Boyle: "I never thought this would happen to me ... Having a job gave me a sense of pride. Every week I brought home a check, I was able to feed the family ..."
Q: "And how much were you making?"
Boyle: "Eight hundred and forty thousand and a half percent share in the company."
We have obtained secret documents which RIAA lawyers use to determine whether to file a lawsuit against a copyright violator. These documents give insight into the RIAA's decision-making process, and could help people avoid lawsuits in the future. We offer these documents as a public service.
This is old now, but no one has yet recommended it.
Over the years, President Bush's State of the Union address has averaged almost 5,000 words each, meaning that the President has delivered over 34,000 words. Some words appear frequently while others appear only sporadically. Use the tools here to analyze what Mr. Bush has said.
Alberto Mujica, President and CEO of Reputation Technologies, feels the support of groups like these furthers the development of a more secure internet: "The MIT Spam Conference will gather some of the smartest people to have thought about, and worked on, this problem. Their support is a good thing for all of us who depend on email as a communication medium."
The proceedings are available, but, bizarrely, only as an ISO image.
I will be frank. Educators, and I include myself, for I have spent many years as an adjunct professor at various institutions, are far less certain how to teach "generalship" than we are of how to teach the laws of thermodynamics.
And yet it is clear that an understanding of the broad issues, the big picture, is so much more influential in determining the ultimate success or failure of an enterprise than is the mastery of any given technical detail.
The understanding of the organizational and technical interactions in our systems, emphatically including the human beings who are a part of them, is the present-day frontier of both engineering education and practice.
Alexis de Tocqueville is a towering figure in 19th-century political thought, on a par with Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill and more prophetic than either of them. It is therefore a bit confounding to realize that, despite all the books and essays about Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America, there was no full-scale biography in English of the man himself.
Now there is.
Obligatory caveats aside, Brogan's achievement here is monumental. He wears his learning lightly, the analysis conveys a distilled wisdom that is blessedly bereft of academic jargon, the prose is engaging (with a conversational voice that invites the reader into an ongoing dialogue), and the posture toward Tocqueville is appreciative but never mindlessly celebratory. This is a book virtually certain to win some major prizes.
The image of the eccentric genius runs deep in the public perception of mathematicians. Mostly, it's nonsense, but occasionally not ...
What about the shape of the universe, the book's subtitle? Poincaré after something far more important: how to tell what shape anything is. The universe, or a doughnut, were just examples.
Mathematics creates general tools, which scientists and others use to solve specific problems, and tool-making itself is motivation enough for doing mathematics. And, in fact, mathematical physicists are currently using topological methods to understand the shape of the universe, as the book explains in its proper place.
It is always unfair to review a book by comparing it with another book which exists only in the reviewer's imagination, with the title What He Should Have Written Instead. In this ideal book, page lengths are so malleable that every conceivable side issue can be pursued, and expository difficulties miraculously vanish. But I would like to have seen a bit more about the beautiful geometrical ideas in Perelman's proof, and I would have been willing to forgo some of the earlier history to make room. Be that as it may, The Poincaré Conjecture makes one of the most important developments in today's mathematics accessible to a wide audience, and it deserves to be widely read.
The history at the end of history — Francis Fukuyama
Topic: International Relations
11:54 am EDT, Mar 31, 2007
Francis Fukuyama explains himself to the people of Pakistan.
The road to liberal democracy in the Middle East is likely to be extremely disappointing in the near to medium term, and the Bush administration’s efforts to build a regional policy around it are heading toward abject failure.
To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home.
But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society — that is, a political order characterised by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernisation.
Moreover, the desire to live in a modern liberal democracy does not translate necessarily into an ability to actually do so. The Bush administration seems to have assumed in its approach to post-Saddam Iraq that both democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which societies would revert once oppressive tyranny was removed, rather than a series of complex, interdependent institutions that had to be painstakingly built over time.
Long before you have a liberal democracy, you have to have a functioning state (something that never disappeared in Germany or Japan after they were defeated in World War II). This is something that cannot be taken for granted in countries like Iraq.
... Coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.
If the choice is protecting IP versus innovation, you've got to default to innovation. You can't win by living off your morals in this new global economy.
The old IT department model was: We're IT, we build infrastructures and applications and deliver them to users to meet their needs. And a new model might be: We harness the power of mass collaboration within our enterprise and outside, to create platforms whereby both internal and external users can coinnovate capability and value.
