From the category archives:

World-scale issues

A Unique Health Care System

November 15, 2009

International comparison of health care costs and performance metrics
Life expectancy and infant mortality vs. total health spending as a percentage of GDP.

Data plots are from here and here. Circle areas are proportional to population.
I found this surprising.

Asian Universities are Lagging
(according to lagging indicators)

November 7, 2009

I’ve recently written several posts related to research and education in China and India, and the comments led me to examine how their best universities are ranked among the universities of the world. The answer is “Low”, but the measuring rod looks crooked.
The “Academic Ranking of World Universities” (ARWU) is widely regarded as the best [...]

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Indian education, top to bottom

November 5, 2009

In response to my last post, which mentioned some high points in Indian education, a comment by fiaorsh offers some perspective on the extensive low points.
Since my reply ended up looking more like a post, I’m making it one:

@ fiaorsh — You make some important points regarding education in India, and I’d like to [...]

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E-Drexler in India —
where do all the visitors come from?

November 2, 2009

Rosa recently returned from Ashoka meetings in Chennai and Hyderabad, reminding me of some information I’d collected about Indian visits to my website, E-drexler.com. India is enormously diverse (e.g., many cultures, 18 officially recognized regional languages, and very different state governments), and I became curious about where inside India this traffic was coming from. Here’s [...]

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Nanotechnology research:
A better picture of work in China

November 1, 2009

The previous post, “Nanotechnology research papers: The world’s most prolific authors”, had statistics that suggested (but didn’t directly indicate) a large global role for nanotechnology research in China. This was discussed in the comments, where Patrick, in particular, noted some of the relevant questions and difficulties with the analytical categories.
I pointed to a source that [...]

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An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

October 24, 2009

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.
After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed [...]

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Total Recall:
How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything

September 20, 2009

Gordon Bell, a long-time leader and innovator in the world of computation, has immersed himself in a life-changing experiment. Bits and pieces of news about it have been circulating for years, and his new book, just published, gives a full picture. In brief, Gordon records and indexes what he sees, hears, and more — [...]

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Comments on Science, Engineering,
and Innovation for The Drucker Institute

August 20, 2009

I was recently invited by the Drucker Institute to outline my thinking on innovation, and I discussed how managers can help to resolve some surprisingly deep communication problems at the interface between science and engineering. They’ve posted a two-minute extract as a audio clip their current Drucker Apps page; it’s in the right-hand column.
The Drucker [...]

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Asia and the elements of innovation

August 6, 2009

The worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently invited me to write about prospects for innovation in Asia, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion of where the world’s primary centers of innovation will be in the coming decades.
Today, they posted the result, “Asia and the elements of innovation”. I focus on China, and [...]

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Apollo+40

July 20, 2009

We are still in the prehistory of effective space technology. The problem is that we aren’t (yet) very good at making things.

The Antiparallel Structures
of Science and Engineering

June 22, 2009

Science and engineering are inseparable domains of thought and action, linked by a shared language of mass and energy, molecules and thermodynamics, physical systems and physical law. This shared language makes communication deceptively easy — easy, because scientists and engineers can see every detail in the same way; deceptive, because they see these details in [...]

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The Paradox of Choice

June 3, 2009

In standard theories of rationality, it is practically axiomatic that having more choices is always better. It should come as no surprise that this isn’t true of real human beings: Too much choice can make us miserable.
In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz unfolds a broad picture of the perversities of [...]

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