Netizen

Saturday, February 02, 2013

The Viking Lead

It seems like goodness follows once you finally manage to manage your fiscal house.

The Economist: The Nordic countries: The next supermodel

So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up. ...... The performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an SMS message. ...... they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector ...... They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geeley. ....... focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund ..... look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects ..... a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks. ...... Their levels of taxation still encourage entrepreneurs to move abroad: London is full of clever young Swedes. ..... When Angela Merkel worries that the European Union has 7% of the world’s population but half of its social spending ...... Norway is a particular focus of the Chinese. ..... The state is popular not because it is big but because it works. A Swede pays tax more willingly than a Californian because he gets decent schools and free health care. The Nordics have pushed far-reaching reforms past unions and business lobbies. .... inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations ...... root out corruption and vested interests ..... abandon tired orthodoxies of the left and right and forage for good ideas across the political spectrum

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

An Upswing On The Way

Source: We Could Be Witnessing The Dawn Of A New Stock Market Super Cycle

Long Data Is Still Big Data

Image representing Hadoop as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

You add the time dimension to Big Data and you get Long Data. Long Data is still Big Data.

Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to ‘Long Data’

crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves. ..... But no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it, it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time. ..... as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold over time? ..... many of the thi

Structure of Evolutionary Biology - Blue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

ngs that affect us today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time ...... Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the norm). ..... Shifting baselines have been cited, for example, as the reason why cod vanished off the coast of the Newfoundland: overfishing fishermen failed to see the slow, multi-generational loss of cod since the population decrease was too slow to notice in isolation. ..... Fields such as geology and astronomy or evolutionary biology — where data spans millions of years — rely on long timescales to explain the world today. History itself is being given the long data treatment, with scientists attempting to use a quantitative framework to understand social processes through cliodynamics, as part of digital history. Examples range from understanding the lifespans of empires (does the U.S. as an “empire” have a time limit that policy makers should be aware of?) to mathematical equations of how religions spread (it’s not that different from how non-religious ideas spread today). ...... building a clock that can last 10,000 years .... the 26,000-year cycle for the precession of equinoxes ...... Just as big data scientists require skills and tools like Hadoop, long data scientists will need special skillsets. Statistics are essential, but so are subtle, even seemingly arbitrary pieces of knowledge such as how our calendar has changed over time

Marissa Mayer Doing Search Could Get Interesting

Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Search is, after all, the fundamental operation on the web. Steve Jobs left the PC to Bill Gates when he returned. But there is no post-Search like there was a post-PC. Search is here to stay. She does not have to become number one. All she has to do is become a strong number two and shine elsewhere. Mayer seems to be saying the Yahoo search results are already pretty good, but search results presentations could be vastly improved.

Marissa Mayer Aims Yahoo’s Guns at Google Search

Yahoo search was one of three parts of the company Mayer called out as in most urgent need of an overhaul, along with Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo.com homepage ..... by far the most lucrative business at Google, where Mayer once headed its search product ..... All of the innovations in search are going to happen at the user interface level moving forward and we need to invest in those features both on the desktop and on mobile .... Yahoo, presumably, can improve its search engine by simply wrapping Microsoft’s search infrastructure in an improved user interface. ..... Yahoo helps power searches on the Siri digital assistant included with Apple iPhones and iPads.