Archive for July 6th, 2007
High Life
High art meets low culture: The Guardian blogs Big Brother UK.
Cameo
The Times wants us to pick our favourite “Simpsons” cameo appearance. (Links to YouTube included)
It seems that just about everybody has been on the show – except Naser Khader.
Who Wants to Be a Teacher
Applications for school teacher- and pre-school teacher-programmes in Denmark are down 11 and 18 per cent respectively in comparison with last year. Maybe Denmark will have to attract Finnish educators in a couple of years’ time?
Iraqi Refugees
The BBC highlights the stream of Iraqi refugees to Sweden – one of the European countries that didn’t support the invasion in Iraq.
The timing of the BBC report is a bit ironic as the Swedish Migration Board has decided that Iraqis as a rule can be sent back to most parts of the country, including Baghdad. (Link to the official press release, in Swedish)
To receive refugee status in Sweden, Iraqis will now have to prove that they were specifically tarteged.
In Europe, Sweden has been a favourite target for Iraqis because of a relatively liberal refugee policy. Countries like Denmark and the UK – which participated in the invasion of Iraq – have generally been extremely reluctant to accept refugees.
Further reading: Iraqi Refugees: Our Problem or Sweden’s?, Washington Post 18 June, 2007.
The Life Aquatic
Following the reports about Roskilde Festivalen at a safe distance is – hm – interesting reading. For the last couple of days Denmark and southern Sweden has been hit by a deluge of almost biblical dimensions which has left the festival area partly flooded – and according to Politiken, rescue workers warn that festival goers risk drowning.
The real problem is alcohol: Collapsing in the mud is in fact dangerous.
And just to add insult to injury, the Danish railways report that they are cancelling some train services between Copenhagen and Roskilde due to illness, which means that getting out of the place will be a bit difficult.
I hope that my old mother hasn’t had the cellar in her house flooded.
links for 2007-07-06
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Überpünktlich, fürsorglich, pflichtbewusst: Denken unsere Nachbarn das immer noch über uns? Ein Streifzug durch die Wissenschaft
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Drei Spritzen zu ein paar Hundert Euro haben mir mehrere Tausend Trainingskilometer erspart. Ich beginne zu verstehen, was Epo im Radsport bewirkt hat.
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The economic gains to clustering, the rise of the mega-region, the onset of a spiky world convince me that our new world will be denser and spatially concentrated than the old one.
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even when America does beat European countries in the productivity rankings, “[t]he United States’ much higher output per person is due mostly to more hours on the job, not to superior productivity while working
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Quite naturally, the combination of cars being invented, cars being massively subsidized, and governments being successfully lobbied by car companies to dismantle mass transit systems led to a massive shift in the direction of sprawl.
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Stephen Cecchetti says technology will cause health insurance markets to fail and, coupled with a desire for equity in access to medical treatment, this will force governments to step in and run the health care system:
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Terrorism is not driven by economic conditions:
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Blogs, Wikis und Podcasts: Wie neue Kommunikationsmittel beginnen, den Uni-Alltag zu verändern.
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Across time and culture, the female predilection for chattiness and the male penchant for taciturnity have approached the status of unarguable facts. Now, two studies appear to bury these age-old stereotypes.
Toys
Toys, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.
Just to bring a little variation in the deluge of iPhones: A Mac paired with a Nokia.
Corporate Giveaway
Why would you want to give away your products to your employees? Robert X. Cringely has the answer:
Follow up on any problems. The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company’s decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems. (My emphasis)
Question: How would you achieve this in, say, an organisation which provides education?
Yak, yak, yak
Via Language Log:
Overall, the women produced an average of 16,215 words per day, the men 15,669. Although a naive interpretation is that this shows that women are more talkative, the variance is large, so the difference of 546 words, only 7%, is not statistically significant. Indeed, although I don’t think that anything can be made of the fact statistically, inspection of their data reveals that the handful of really extreme magpies, who produced over 40,000 words per day, were all male.
Update: Die Zeit asks if relationship guides now have to be revised or if we can throw them all into the garbage can.
The Downs and Downs of Being a Social Democrat
Bad news for the German Social Democrats: According to a poll published by TV network ARD only 28 per cent of the voters would vote for the party if elections were held next Sunday.
Good news for the German Social Democrats: The CDU/CSU and FDP only poll 48 per cent of the vote combined and do not hold a relative majority of votes.
Bad news for the German Social Democrats: SPD can only win a majority with the support of Grüne (okay) and Linke (which will happen on the day pigs fly after hell has frozen over)
Good news for the German Social Democrats: Most of SPD’s old voters have moved to the “don’t know” category.
And then the strange news: According to the poll, a plurality of voters would prefer Foreign Minister Frank-Walther Steinmeier as the party’s candidate for the Chancellorship at the next election. Steinmeier leads in front of Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück and party chairman Kurt Beck.
