Yes, it's difficult to get a precise definition of productivity. But a 50% discrepancy shows something is astray that's hard to mask no matter how you cut the cheese. Maybe the "true" figure is only 25%, a factor of 2 less than in the CNN story. It's still a poor showing. I'm not surprised that the US-dominated readership of/. came to a consensus that dismissed the report. It would have remarkable if they hadn't - can you really say that workers in the US IT industry are going to be the most objective commentators on that CNN story?
Perhaps another example will illustrate the orginal point. Ireland, population 3.5 million, is the second largest producer of software in the world, second only to the US, population 268 million.
The quote you used from the BBC report refers to total productivity. The point of the report is that despite working fewer hours, total productivity in Europe is almost that of the US and the gap is closing. Look at the infographs. In other words, hourly productivity is higher in Europe and has been for some time. European biz is getting more bang for it's buck and European workers aren't wasting all their waking lives in cubicles either.
I think you have it backward when you say "Europeans are discovering that longer hours does not mean more production". I think Europeans have been aware of that for a long time. I think that penny is only just beginning to drop on this side of the pond, but not in a widespread fashion thanks to the sorry state of US trade unions and the economic interests who are happy to see it stay that way.
Americans certainly work longer hours than anyone else but their productivity is less than their European counterparts. Especially in computer coding with American software firms producing at "half the rate of the rest of the world" So, given these two reports, perhaps you could suggest an actual economist studying this issue to back up your claim?
Other recent work includes growing whole bladders for transplant (so far only in dogs), developing artifical kidneys for use in dialysis, and artificial skin for use in drug testing to replace experimental animals as well as for skin grafts.
Tissue engineering from stem cells is indeed the Big Kahouna for a lot of researchers and biotech companies. This was a large part of the impetus for cloning technology and drove the search for the recent discovery of Embryonic Stem Cells (ES Cells). The ES cell is the mother of all other types of cells, first differentiating into e.g a Neural Stem Cell which then differentiates into the different types of nerve cell.
There are obstacles before we can have organs and tissue on demand.Part One of The Big Problem is working out the chemical cues and genetic programming that tells a stem cell to differentiate into a specific tissue type. Part Two of The Big Problem is once you've worked out how generate specific tissue types, how do you assemble them into complete, solid, complex organs? Skin is a flat sheet, and the artificial kidney is basically lab grown cells in a jar and doesn't try to duplicate the internal structure of a real kidney. The bladder mentioned above is the most interesting in that it replicates the three dimensional struture of a real organ, but it's pretty simple too. It's basically a balloon with just two types of cell, one lining the inside, the other the outside. (The researchers used a biodegradble polymer to create a scaffold mesh to grow the cells on). Something like a liver has complicated 3d structure with many different types of cells. To crack this question involves a lot of research into embryological development - after all these structures do get bult in the womb. Embryological research throws up a lot controversy. But tissue/organ replacement is why scientists are interested in cloning and embryo research - they're not just making curiosities like Dolly for the sake of it. And this is why it's important to craft legislation regarding cloning and embryonic experimentaion in such a way that you don't stop legitimate research into giving people new kidneys or lungs while trying to stop idiots like Richard Seed from cloning humans.
Also from the Ig-Nobel page: WHAT: The annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony honors individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." This implies that the research is at best an amusing dead end. Neither the dunking or spout research falls into this catagory.
The US, through NATO, already monitors telecoms traffic, where speech recognition machines are programmed to listen for buzzwords like "plutonium" or "assasinate". Suspect conversations are then recorded for later perusal. This is not conspiracy theory, the program is called Echelon, and here'a recent CNN report. And that's not even considering military technology is usually about five to twenty years ahead of everyone else, depending on the tech. (This is also why I sometimes preface trans-atlantic calls to friends with a string of probable buzzwords, just to waste some snoop's time.)
Awarding the Ig-noble to the tea-dunker and the tea-spout mathematician was unfair, given that the Ig-noble is really for worthless or inane stuff. Both are reasonably knotty problems; I remember when people though of research into foams in the same way (what could be more trivial than froth?) - but it lead to significant theoretical and practical advances in solid state physics and beyond. The possible commercial benefits of making a biscuit that doesn't collaspe into goop at the bottom of your mug is obvious and the non-drip tea spout is a piece of interesting and non-trivial math as I'm sure anyone who's tried to model fluids can testify. It may look not look very weighty now but who knows - Riemann's non-euclidian geometry was totally useless for anything for generations, until Einstein built Relativity on top of it.
Slighty off topic but a good tale: My father has been working for a national European broadcaster for a long time. Decades ago when they were setting up a new television and radio campus they had to run some data lines out to the techies' new buildings. He and his colleagues indicated the line where they wanted the backhoe to dig and went to lunch in the canteen. About 20 minutes later all the lights went out. Somebody had neglected to put down any markers and the backhoe had cut through the main power cable *after* where it was joined to the back-up generator. As national braodcasters in Europe also double as the goverment's Emergency Broadcast System this caused a lot of people way up the chain to get alarmed. While the cable was being repaired they had to bundle a crew down to the old emergency studio and transmitter in the General Post Office (Think Krusty the Clowns broadcast in The Simpsons).
(BTW, recent work has been done on putting vaccines into plants.) With regard to 3), I think the position that the free market will create most things and really we should just leave private industry to get on with it is unfounded historically. Most major technological advancements I can think required government funding not just for the initial "blue-sky" science but for development as well - Computers: WWII. Micro-electronics: Military Aerospace and NASA. The Internet: DARPA. Many drugs are created by the use of public funds, despite what Big Pharma would like you to believe. Today the US goverment funded NIH is at the cutting edge of biological and medical research. I'm not saying that we should abandon private research or patent protection, just that large corporations have a vested interest in propogating the myth that if they're not given a free reign, innovation will halt.
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Perhaps another example will illustrate the orginal point. Ireland, population 3.5 million, is the second largest producer of software in the world, second only to the US, population 268 million.
The quote you used from the BBC report refers to total productivity. The point of the report is that despite working fewer hours, total productivity in Europe is almost that of the US and the gap is closing. Look at the infographs. In other words, hourly productivity is higher in Europe and has been for some time. European biz is getting more bang for it's buck and European workers aren't wasting all their waking lives in cubicles either.
I think you have it backward when you say "Europeans are discovering that longer hours does not mean more production". I think Europeans have been aware of that for a long time. I think that penny is only just beginning to drop on this side of the pond, but not in a widespread fashion thanks to the sorry state of US trade unions and the economic interests who are happy to see it stay that way.
Tissue engineering from stem cells is indeed the Big Kahouna for a lot of researchers and biotech companies. This was a large part of the impetus for cloning technology and drove the search for the recent discovery of Embryonic Stem Cells (ES Cells). The ES cell is the mother of all other types of cells, first differentiating into e.g a Neural Stem Cell which then differentiates into the different types of nerve cell.
There are obstacles before we can have organs and tissue on demand.Part One of The Big Problem is working out the chemical cues and genetic programming that tells a stem cell to differentiate into a specific tissue type. Part Two of The Big Problem is once you've worked out how generate specific tissue types, how do you assemble them into complete, solid, complex organs? Skin is a flat sheet, and the artificial kidney is basically lab grown cells in a jar and doesn't try to duplicate the internal structure of a real kidney. The bladder mentioned above is the most interesting in that it replicates the three dimensional struture of a real organ, but it's pretty simple too. It's basically a balloon with just two types of cell, one lining the inside, the other the outside. (The researchers used a biodegradble polymer to create a scaffold mesh to grow the cells on). Something like a liver has complicated 3d structure with many different types of cells. To crack this question involves a lot of research into embryological development - after all these structures do get bult in the womb. Embryological research throws up a lot controversy. But tissue/organ replacement is why scientists are interested in cloning and embryo research - they're not just making curiosities like Dolly for the sake of it. And this is why it's important to craft legislation regarding cloning and embryonic experimentaion in such a way that you don't stop legitimate research into giving people new kidneys or lungs while trying to stop idiots like Richard Seed from cloning humans.
Slighty off topic but a good tale: My father has been working for a national European broadcaster for a long time. Decades ago when they were setting up a new television and radio campus they had to run some data lines out to the techies' new buildings. He and his colleagues indicated the line where they wanted the backhoe to dig and went to lunch in the canteen. About 20 minutes later all the lights went out. Somebody had neglected to put down any markers and the backhoe had cut through the main power cable *after* where it was joined to the back-up generator. As national braodcasters in Europe also double as the goverment's Emergency Broadcast System this caused a lot of people way up the chain to get alarmed. While the cable was being repaired they had to bundle a crew down to the old emergency studio and transmitter in the General Post Office (Think Krusty the Clowns broadcast in The Simpsons).
(BTW, recent work has been done on putting vaccines into plants.) With regard to 3), I think the position that the free market will create most things and really we should just leave private industry to get on with it is unfounded historically. Most major technological advancements I can think required government funding not just for the initial "blue-sky" science but for development as well - Computers: WWII. Micro-electronics: Military Aerospace and NASA. The Internet: DARPA. Many drugs are created by the use of public funds, despite what Big Pharma would like you to believe. Today the US goverment funded NIH is at the cutting edge of biological and medical research. I'm not saying that we should abandon private research or patent protection, just that large corporations have a vested interest in propogating the myth that if they're not given a free reign, innovation will halt.
...you can't staple a resignation email to your boss's head.