Well, what really sucks is the inability in the Kindle to copy text -- arguably, so far I only have one paid book on the Kindle and several of the free classics on the iPad iBook reader. So, it is quite possible that this is not a feature for *any* paid book -- but it's a meaningless shortcoming, in my opinion.
Ahhh! Interesting -- thank you. When I'd tried that in the past, the zoom icon always popped up, so I'd assumed that that was the extent of the functionality. I suppose this underscores the need for good usability!
Honestly, I was one of those folks who switched from T-Mobile to AT&T because of the iPhone. Reception in our neighborhood was bad enough, and after waiting for a couple of years (and seeing how my friends using the iPhone with T-mobile had their own set of problems), I decided to switch.
Ironically, my wife (then girlfriend) also switched from Sprint to AT&T for the same reason.
Well, I like to take notes when I read books, and mark pages of interest. Quite difficult to do with eBooks -- they are not necessarily made for annotation.
Call me when a literary genius like Dean Koontz or Tim LaHaye does this.
Sigh. I sincerely hope you were being sarcastic. And if you were not, let me introduce you to a handful few that were, indeed, literary geniuses, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk, Albert Camus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, H.H. Munro, Seamus Heaney and so on.
If it were not for the Brits, India would be even worse off. Why do you think India ever became such a force in the cheap offshore labor market? It's because so many Indians speak English.
Ahh, the joys of counter-factuals. Since we cannot go back and turn time around, we cannot really know now, can we? If it were not for the Nazis, the Jews would not have had Israel. See the fallacy?
Some amazing things have come from India, but let's be honest; India has never been a technological power-house.
In recent history, sure. But remember -- our time of recorded history is quite small, and the victors write history. Besides, I do not believe anyone ever disputed that; however, the funny thing about technology and innovation is that it shows a rising curve that often has a sharp and sudden (often unexpected) uptick, turning the tide.
There is one other reason why India is less likely to become a technological powerhouse, however -- that has to do with wars. Traditionally, wars simulate economies and aggressor nations tend to simulate the industry and come up with some pretty amazing (and disgusting) things during times of war. Every advanced society in recent history has had the benefit of a war economy to propel it forward. Given the Indian ethical themes of non-violence, that avenue of progress will likely remain untapped.
China, US, Russia, and a good chunk of Europe, on the other hand, are not afraid of war and have no such moral or ethical qualms.
I could point a multitude of fallacies in your arguments, but I will pick a couple of interest. And only because those are tangential to my focus of study, and I've spent inordinate amounts of time studying the effects of socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems in fostering innovation and technological progress.
You mention two things -- one is the number of iconic tech companies, and the other is Nobel prizes and technology breakthroughs.
You must remember that India was a colony until about 50 years ago, while the US has been an independent (and rich) nation for much longer. In fact, upon independence, India was torn into two nations (India and Pakistan), and very little was left after colonialization by the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese.
Therefore, such a nation chose a combination of socialist and private enterprise, rather than an entirely free market enterprise, because of the deep mistrust of capitalism (which was associated with imperialism, which was the cause of the colonization by the East India Company). The reason capitalism works is because it fosters innovation; however, for a nation recovering from 400 years of colonization, whose population was used for forced slave labor and battle fodder for two world wars, and whose freedom resulted in millions of deaths, innovation is less important than stability.
Therefore, the system of government and economy chosen in India was one of stability and state run enterprises, which while slow and not particularly innovative, was nevertheless run by responsible statesmen who for their times were men of honor.
Back on the topic of innovation, the Indian economy did not fully open up and start supporting a free market enterprise until the mid 1990s, which was less than 20 years ago. The infrastructure and support system necessary for fostering innovation, such as academic institutions with the resources for research and development, angel and venture capital investors etc is still in its infancy, given how the nation of India is itself only 65 years old. The Indian enterprises that you see are the handful of ones that were successful private ones in a time when everything was state run, or the ones that very recently took advantage of an opening economy and branched out. Your comparison of iconic companies is therefore quite premature -- but if you did compare your numbers to similar states that were liberated from colonial rule in the recent century, you will find that India is doing rather well for itself.
As far as the example of Nobel prizes go, the pursuit of research and development is only possible when your livelihood is not at stake. Ignoring the fact that very few women, Asians, and Africans had been awarded the Nobel anyway (I mean, even Gandhi was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), it is difficult for a relatively young nation to splurge on research and development, and guess how outstanding breakthroughs happen?
So, while I think the OP is an idiot, your measures of success are also flawed, simply because you are comparing apples to oranges. At the end of the day, there are brilliant people of every ethnicity and nationality -- it is a question of opportunity, education, and personal impetus.
Most people think there's air traffic control everywhere. There is not, so traffic follows a predefined pattern with customary entrance and exit protocols. If you need to stay out of the final approach for someone, you have control to do that without asking anyone else, assuming you follow the predefined rules.
Yup. And I'll add that many of those rules were derived from maritime rules, and are either the same ones or similar to the ones that ships use in open water.
You are over analyzing what's a simple result, and for no apparent reason.
Even if you are the best doctor in the world, there is a finite limit to how many patients you can see or consult. Even if you are the best looking prostitute in the world who gives the best head in the world, there are only so many people you can really sleep with at a given point in time. You are physically limited.
In fact, there is even a corollary -- when you get older, and can no longer function at a similar level of insight as a doctor, or can no longer prostitute yourself, you are done. In contrast, a best selling author's works can be purchased long after they are gone. The Tolkien and the Elvis estates still receive royalties. Even in the fleeting realm of software, certain ideas (and subsequently the associated intellectual properties) hold sway for a long, long time.
So, even if you raise your rates, you are still fundamentally limited in a non-scalable profession, while those in scalable professions are not. At the end of the day, find an author, say J.K. Rowling (who is estimated to be worth ~$1 billion), and find a comparably successful doctor or prostitute.
Now, quality may be a separate dimension to measure the extent to which either profession is successful, and whether or not Rowling does as much "good" as a doctor -- but that does not take away from the scalability aspect.
Being a dentist, or a consultant, or even a prostitute isn't really scalable because you are limited by the number of patients and the number of clients that you can work on. You are limited by the number of hours in a day, and how much work you can sell (and do).
In contrast, consider a writer or an app developer/entrepreneur -- you can write one book or write a single app that can sell millions of copies, and you can make bank.
I'm not decrying the non-scalable professions -- they are quite important, and they are necessary to keep the world running. However, the big changes in the world come from the non-scalable professions, and it is a crucial difference to understand.
Why slave to make 80-100k a year with a Masters degree when you could be making 250-300k as a lawyer....
The 80-100k a year is more than sufficient incentive for shelter and food -- leaving something you enjoy for 250k is greed.
Yes, I am well aware of patronage; however, it is hard to imagine Sartre do something other than write, or Ramanujan do something other than math, patronages or not. And in fact, follow their passions they did, tribulations of life notwithstanding.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all accept hardships as a necessary evil in following our hearts. However, when you look at the dotcom boom for example, it was the result of people who did not give two hoots about technology jumping on the "IT" and dotcom bandwagon, people who had no business being there. The ones who really enjoyed technology stayed behind -- there is something to be said for doing something that happens you happy. *shrug*
And that is the problem. On some level, people replaced passion with monetary incentive. Now don't get me wrong -- I understand all too well the importance of incentives.
However, the greatest works in the arts and the sciences were the result of passionate people working on something because they felt a calling, not because they are worried about making a few grand more.
And I say this as someone who has been contemplating going back to school for a PhD because at the end of the day, I'm tired of the rat race. I had the chance to do it when I was younger, but I had my blinders on, and only cared about short term happiness (as measured by money, no less). Today, after having been through the grind, I just know that it's not worth it to give up your passions for short-term compromise because you will never be truly happy.
Yes, and language can be beautiful. To channel Hardy, mathematics is about ideas, and ways to represent ideas, which can be beautiful in and of itself. That it has any applications at all is quite incidental, and sometimes rather unfortunate. It takes away from the beauty of math (and I say this as someone who enjoys pure math as a hobby, with zero publications to my name in the subject -- doodling with ideas in the margins during meetings is a wonderful past time).
Ironically, I'd say that qualitative poli sci and the philosophy of poli sci is a lot more robust than the quantitative approaches that seem to be in vogue these days.
When it comes to psychology, it is often the opposite -- but only for small, niche areas.
That said, there are seminal works in either category that are quite amazing, but those are few and far between.
The first report that you linked to is very interesting -- thank you.
It provides an overview of non-U.S. citizens who were awarded doctorates in science and engineering, but there is no comparison against U.S. citizens provided, other than this little excerpt.
From the paper:
Some academics and scientists do not view scientific migration as a problem, but as a net gain. These proponents believe that the international flow of knowledge and personnel has enabled the U.S. economy to remain at the cutting-edge of science and technology. A 2005 report of the National Academies states that:
The participation of international graduate students and postdoctoral scholars is an important part of the research enterprise of the United States. In some fields they make up more than half the populations of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. If their presence were substantially diminished, important research and teaching activities in academe, industry, and federal laboratories would be curtailed, particularly if universities did not give more attention to recruiting and retaining domestic students.50.
I think the Iraq War was a political disaster, and would have advised against it on those grounds, but was morally just, WMD's or not.
HAHAHAHA! Thanks for a great laugh. So, we are in the process of enforcing your morals on the rest of the world?
Apart from the fact that our intervention caused Iraq to splinter into factions and result in tens of thousands of deaths because of sectarian violence, the moral high-ground does not fly when we're guilty of far worse.
These are people in positions of power, making decisions for the rest of us. I would not trust a plumber to make decisions on medicine -- so, why should I trust someone who is at best mediocre in his educational achievements with no formal training of any kind in in economics with making economic decisions?
The guy worked as a computer technician, attended an unknown seminary of all places, and probably has at best a superficial and tenuous grasp of economics (and perhaps several other subjects). It is the notion of the idiot kid from my highschool becoming a politician, and succeeding.
Now, I have nothing against novel ideas -- if anything, I think both Hayek and Mises had some interesting thoughts on free markets and on the stupidity of political language in determining economic terms. The world is driven by interesting and unique ideas that can forever change it, and I strongly believe that that's the strength of this country.
However, I do believe that as the world gets increasingly complex, epistemological arguments aside, it becomes imperative that we have real experts making decisions. The notion that populism and the consensus driven approach of idiot-public can somehow solve the increasingly complex scientific, societal, political, and economic problems is what is wrong with the democratic world today.
I remember reading The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, where he remarks just how easy it is construct a nationality and instill "patriotism" with a a few speeches, a simple flag and a song. He decries the sheer simplicity and irony of it all. It exploits people's tribal instincts to "belong" somewhere, and is the oldest con game in the book.
Eh, I've worked with people like that. The type that flip over your tie to see if it's an "acceptable" brand (i.e. if it's not Charvet, Brioni, Drakes or something nicer, they scoff and judge the tie -- and you). It's disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, what really sucks is the inability in the Kindle to copy text -- arguably, so far I only have one paid book on the Kindle and several of the free classics on the iPad iBook reader. So, it is quite possible that this is not a feature for *any* paid book -- but it's a meaningless shortcoming, in my opinion.
Ahhh! Interesting -- thank you. When I'd tried that in the past, the zoom icon always popped up, so I'd assumed that that was the extent of the functionality. I suppose this underscores the need for good usability!
Weird, because the Kindle app on iPad and it does not have that feature (and I just checked, to make sure).
The Apple iPad Reader seems to have it, but it doesn't always work with all eBooks.
This is true. Most Star Trek fans are in the closet. With Tom Cruise dressed in his Jedi outfit.
Honestly, I was one of those folks who switched from T-Mobile to AT&T because of the iPhone. Reception in our neighborhood was bad enough, and after waiting for a couple of years (and seeing how my friends using the iPhone with T-mobile had their own set of problems), I decided to switch.
Ironically, my wife (then girlfriend) also switched from Sprint to AT&T for the same reason.
Well, he is called the BadAnalogyGuy...
Well, I like to take notes when I read books, and mark pages of interest. Quite difficult to do with eBooks -- they are not necessarily made for annotation.
Sigh. I sincerely hope you were being sarcastic. And if you were not, let me introduce you to a handful few that were, indeed, literary geniuses, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk, Albert Camus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, H.H. Munro, Seamus Heaney and so on.
Ahh, the joys of counter-factuals. Since we cannot go back and turn time around, we cannot really know now, can we? If it were not for the Nazis, the Jews would not have had Israel. See the fallacy?
In recent history, sure. But remember -- our time of recorded history is quite small, and the victors write history. Besides, I do not believe anyone ever disputed that; however, the funny thing about technology and innovation is that it shows a rising curve that often has a sharp and sudden (often unexpected) uptick, turning the tide.
There is one other reason why India is less likely to become a technological powerhouse, however -- that has to do with wars. Traditionally, wars simulate economies and aggressor nations tend to simulate the industry and come up with some pretty amazing (and disgusting) things during times of war. Every advanced society in recent history has had the benefit of a war economy to propel it forward. Given the Indian ethical themes of non-violence, that avenue of progress will likely remain untapped.
China, US, Russia, and a good chunk of Europe, on the other hand, are not afraid of war and have no such moral or ethical qualms.
I could point a multitude of fallacies in your arguments, but I will pick a couple of interest. And only because those are tangential to my focus of study, and I've spent inordinate amounts of time studying the effects of socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems in fostering innovation and technological progress.
You mention two things -- one is the number of iconic tech companies, and the other is Nobel prizes and technology breakthroughs.
You must remember that India was a colony until about 50 years ago, while the US has been an independent (and rich) nation for much longer. In fact, upon independence, India was torn into two nations (India and Pakistan), and very little was left after colonialization by the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese.
Therefore, such a nation chose a combination of socialist and private enterprise, rather than an entirely free market enterprise, because of the deep mistrust of capitalism (which was associated with imperialism, which was the cause of the colonization by the East India Company). The reason capitalism works is because it fosters innovation; however, for a nation recovering from 400 years of colonization, whose population was used for forced slave labor and battle fodder for two world wars, and whose freedom resulted in millions of deaths, innovation is less important than stability.
Therefore, the system of government and economy chosen in India was one of stability and state run enterprises, which while slow and not particularly innovative, was nevertheless run by responsible statesmen who for their times were men of honor.
India has an great tradition of math, science, and philosophy, but most of that was rooted out and replaced by the British in an attempt to stamp out any cultural traditions. In fact, the number system that's in use today originated in India, and was transplanted in the western world by traveling Arabs.
Back on the topic of innovation, the Indian economy did not fully open up and start supporting a free market enterprise until the mid 1990s, which was less than 20 years ago. The infrastructure and support system necessary for fostering innovation, such as academic institutions with the resources for research and development, angel and venture capital investors etc is still in its infancy, given how the nation of India is itself only 65 years old. The Indian enterprises that you see are the handful of ones that were successful private ones in a time when everything was state run, or the ones that very recently took advantage of an opening economy and branched out. Your comparison of iconic companies is therefore quite premature -- but if you did compare your numbers to similar states that were liberated from colonial rule in the recent century, you will find that India is doing rather well for itself.
As far as the example of Nobel prizes go, the pursuit of research and development is only possible when your livelihood is not at stake. Ignoring the fact that very few women, Asians, and Africans had been awarded the Nobel anyway (I mean, even Gandhi was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), it is difficult for a relatively young nation to splurge on research and development, and guess how outstanding breakthroughs happen?
So, while I think the OP is an idiot, your measures of success are also flawed, simply because you are comparing apples to oranges. At the end of the day, there are brilliant people of every ethnicity and nationality -- it is a question of opportunity, education, and personal impetus.
Yup. And I'll add that many of those rules were derived from maritime rules, and are either the same ones or similar to the ones that ships use in open water.
You are over analyzing what's a simple result, and for no apparent reason.
Even if you are the best doctor in the world, there is a finite limit to how many patients you can see or consult. Even if you are the best looking prostitute in the world who gives the best head in the world, there are only so many people you can really sleep with at a given point in time. You are physically limited.
In fact, there is even a corollary -- when you get older, and can no longer function at a similar level of insight as a doctor, or can no longer prostitute yourself, you are done. In contrast, a best selling author's works can be purchased long after they are gone. The Tolkien and the Elvis estates still receive royalties. Even in the fleeting realm of software, certain ideas (and subsequently the associated intellectual properties) hold sway for a long, long time.
So, even if you raise your rates, you are still fundamentally limited in a non-scalable profession, while those in scalable professions are not. At the end of the day, find an author, say J.K. Rowling (who is estimated to be worth ~$1 billion), and find a comparably successful doctor or prostitute.
Now, quality may be a separate dimension to measure the extent to which either profession is successful, and whether or not Rowling does as much "good" as a doctor -- but that does not take away from the scalability aspect.
The trick is in finding a job that is "scalable".
Being a dentist, or a consultant, or even a prostitute isn't really scalable because you are limited by the number of patients and the number of clients that you can work on. You are limited by the number of hours in a day, and how much work you can sell (and do).
In contrast, consider a writer or an app developer/entrepreneur -- you can write one book or write a single app that can sell millions of copies, and you can make bank.
I'm not decrying the non-scalable professions -- they are quite important, and they are necessary to keep the world running. However, the big changes in the world come from the non-scalable professions, and it is a crucial difference to understand.
I quote (the OP):
The 80-100k a year is more than sufficient incentive for shelter and food -- leaving something you enjoy for 250k is greed.
Yes, I am well aware of patronage; however, it is hard to imagine Sartre do something other than write, or Ramanujan do something other than math, patronages or not. And in fact, follow their passions they did, tribulations of life notwithstanding.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all accept hardships as a necessary evil in following our hearts. However, when you look at the dotcom boom for example, it was the result of people who did not give two hoots about technology jumping on the "IT" and dotcom bandwagon, people who had no business being there. The ones who really enjoyed technology stayed behind -- there is something to be said for doing something that happens you happy. *shrug*
And that is the problem. On some level, people replaced passion with monetary incentive. Now don't get me wrong -- I understand all too well the importance of incentives.
However, the greatest works in the arts and the sciences were the result of passionate people working on something because they felt a calling, not because they are worried about making a few grand more.
And I say this as someone who has been contemplating going back to school for a PhD because at the end of the day, I'm tired of the rat race. I had the chance to do it when I was younger, but I had my blinders on, and only cared about short term happiness (as measured by money, no less). Today, after having been through the grind, I just know that it's not worth it to give up your passions for short-term compromise because you will never be truly happy.
Yes, and language can be beautiful. To channel Hardy, mathematics is about ideas, and ways to represent ideas, which can be beautiful in and of itself. That it has any applications at all is quite incidental, and sometimes rather unfortunate. It takes away from the beauty of math (and I say this as someone who enjoys pure math as a hobby, with zero publications to my name in the subject -- doodling with ideas in the margins during meetings is a wonderful past time).
Ironically, I'd say that qualitative poli sci and the philosophy of poli sci is a lot more robust than the quantitative approaches that seem to be in vogue these days.
When it comes to psychology, it is often the opposite -- but only for small, niche areas.
That said, there are seminal works in either category that are quite amazing, but those are few and far between.
The first report that you linked to is very interesting -- thank you.
It provides an overview of non-U.S. citizens who were awarded doctorates in science and engineering, but there is no comparison against U.S. citizens provided, other than this little excerpt.
From the paper:
Some of us just have just learnt to run really fast, by running practice marathons.
Yes, but you're talking about Fox News here.
HAHAHAHA! Thanks for a great laugh. So, we are in the process of enforcing your morals on the rest of the world?
Apart from the fact that our intervention caused Iraq to splinter into factions and result in tens of thousands of deaths because of sectarian violence, the moral high-ground does not fly when we're guilty of far worse.
Yes, except that this was a UN resolution.
Wonder what the UN thought about us going into Iraq... oh wait.
These are people in positions of power, making decisions for the rest of us. I would not trust a plumber to make decisions on medicine -- so, why should I trust someone who is at best mediocre in his educational achievements with no formal training of any kind in in economics with making economic decisions?
The guy worked as a computer technician, attended an unknown seminary of all places, and probably has at best a superficial and tenuous grasp of economics (and perhaps several other subjects). It is the notion of the idiot kid from my highschool becoming a politician, and succeeding.
Now, I have nothing against novel ideas -- if anything, I think both Hayek and Mises had some interesting thoughts on free markets and on the stupidity of political language in determining economic terms. The world is driven by interesting and unique ideas that can forever change it, and I strongly believe that that's the strength of this country.
However, I do believe that as the world gets increasingly complex, epistemological arguments aside, it becomes imperative that we have real experts making decisions. The notion that populism and the consensus driven approach of idiot-public can somehow solve the increasingly complex scientific, societal, political, and economic problems is what is wrong with the democratic world today.
I remember reading The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, where he remarks just how easy it is construct a nationality and instill "patriotism" with a a few speeches, a simple flag and a song. He decries the sheer simplicity and irony of it all. It exploits people's tribal instincts to "belong" somewhere, and is the oldest con game in the book.
Eh, I've worked with people like that. The type that flip over your tie to see if it's an "acceptable" brand (i.e. if it's not Charvet, Brioni, Drakes or something nicer, they scoff and judge the tie -- and you). It's disgusting.