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But business education clearly also suffers. What is being taught in management courses is usually not based on solid scientific evidence. Instead, it concerns the generalisation of individual business cases or the lessons from popular management books. Such books often are based on the appealing formula that they look at several successful companies, see what they have in common and conclude that other companies should strive to do the same thing.

how do you know that the advice provided is reasonable, or if it comes from tomorrow’s Enrons, RBSs, Lehmans and WorldComs? How do you know that today’s advice and cases will not later be heralded as the epitome of mismanagement?

In the 1990s, ISO9000 (a quality management systems standard) spread through many industries. But research by professors Mary Benner and Mike Tushman showed that its adoption could, in time, lead to a fall in innovation (because ISO9000 does not allow for deviations from a set standard, which innovation requires), making the adopter worse off. This research was overlooked by practitioners, many business schools continued to applaud the benefits of ISO9000 in their courses, while firms continued – and still do – to implement the practice, ignorant of its potential pitfalls. Yet this research offers a clear example of the possible benefits of scientific research methods: rigorous research that reveals unintended consequences to expose the true nature of a business practice.

such research with important practical implications unfortunately is the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, even relevant research is largely ignored in business education – as happened to the findings by Benner and Tushman.

Of course one should not make the mistake that business cases and business books based on personal observation and opinion are without value. They potentially offer a great source of practical experience. Similarly, it would be naive to assume that scientific research can provide custom-made answers. Rigorous management research could and should provide the basis for skilled managers to make better decisions. However, they cannot do that without the in-depth knowledge of their specific organisation and circumstances.

at present, business schools largely fail in providing rigorous, evidence-based teaching.

It is difficult to say if the "failure" of the academics was due to an unstinting belief in free markets or conflicts of interest. Parts of the movie did appear to be trying too hard to prove the point. However, the threat posed by academics earning consulting fees that dwarf their academic compensation, and which might therefore impair their independence, is a real one.

One of the worst was the Ivy League university economics professor engaged by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to co-author a report on the Icelandic financial system. He concluded that the system was sound even though there were numerous warning signs. When he was asked how he arrived at his conclusions, he said he had talked to people and were misled by them. One wonders how much of his conclusions were actually based on rigorous analysis.

it is troubling if academics merely become mouthpieces for vested interests. The impression one gets from watching the movie certainly does not fit with the high level of trust in academics shown by the Edelman Trust Barometer.

As an academic, I have often been told that I can be independent and objective - that I should have no axe to grind and no wheels to grease. However, I worry about an erosion of trust in academics. This may be especially true in certain disciplines like business (which is mine, incidentally).

too many business school professors were serving on US corporate boards and have lost their willingness to be critical about unethical business practices. In corporate scandals such as Enron and Satyam, academics from top business schools have not particularly covered themselves in glory.

It is more and more common for universities - in the US and here - to invite business people to serve on their boards.

universities and academics may lose their independence and objectivity in commenting on business issues critically, for fear of offending those who ultimately have an oversight role over the varsity's senior management.

Universities might also have business leaders serving on boards as potential donors, which would also confuse the role of board members and lead to conflicts of interest. In the Satyam scandal in India, the founder of Satyam sat on the board of the Indian School of Business, while the Dean of the Indian School of Business sat on Satyam's board. Satyam also made a significant donation to the Indian School of Business.

Universities are increasingly dependent on funding from industry and wealthy individuals as well as other sources, sometimes even dubious ones. The recent scandal at the London School of Economics involving its affiliation with Libya is an example.

It is important for universities to have robust gift policies as part of the risk management to protect their reputation, which can be easily tainted if a donation comes from a questionable source. It is especially important that donations do not cause universities to be captured by vested interests.

From time to time, people in industry ask me if I have been pressured by the university to tone down on my outspokenness on corporate governance issues. Thankfully, while there have been instances where varsity colleagues and friends in industry have conveyed messages from others to "tone down", I have felt relatively free to express my views. Of course, were I trying to earn more money from external consulting, I guess I would be less vocal.

I do worry about the loss of independence and, therefore, trust in academics and academic institutions if we are not careful about it.

3. Collaboration at scale Across many economies, the number of people who undertake knowledge work has grown much more quickly than the number of production or transactions workers. Knowledge workers typically are paid more than others, so increasing their productivity is critical. As a result, there is broad interest in collaboration technologies that promise to improve these workers' efficiency and effectiveness. While the body of knowledge around the best use of such technologies is still developing, a number of companies have conducted experiments, as we see in the rapid growth rates of video and Web conferencing, expected to top 20 per cent annually during the next few years.

4. The growing ‘Internet of Things' The adoption of RFID (radio-frequency identification) and related technologies was the basis of a trend we first recognised as "expanding the frontiers of automation." But these methods are rudimentary compared with what emerges when assets themselves become elements of an information system, with the ability to capture, compute, communicate, and collaborate around information—something that has come to be known as the "Internet of Things." Embedded with sensors, actuators, and communications capabilities, such objects will soon be able to absorb and transmit information on a massive scale and, in some cases, to adapt and react to changes in the environment automatically. These "smart" assets can make processes more efficient, give products new capabilities, and spark novel business models. Auto insurers in Europe and the United States are testing these waters with offers to install sensors in customers' vehicles. The result is new pricing models that base charges for risk on driving behavior rather than on a driver's demographic characteristics. Luxury-auto manufacturers are equipping vehicles with networked sensors that can automatically take evasive action when accidents are about to happen. In medicine, sensors embedded in or worn by patients continuously report changes in health conditions to physicians, who can adjust treatments when necessary. Sensors in manufacturing lines for products as diverse as computer chips and pulp and paper take detailed readings on process conditions and automatically make adjustments to reduce waste, downtime, and costly human interventions.

5. Experimentation and big data Could the enterprise become a full-time laboratory? What if you could analyse every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn't have to wait for months to get data from the field? What if…? Data are flooding in at rates never seen before—doubling every 18 months—as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from Web communities and newly deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as "big data." Technology for capturing and analysing information is widely available at ever-lower price points. But many companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. In some cases, the new approaches help companies make decisions in real time. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.

Using experimentation and big data as essential components of management decision making requires new capabilities, as well as organisational and cultural change. Most companies are far from accessing all the available data. Some haven't even mastered the technologies needed to capture and analyse the valuable information they can access. More commonly, they don't have the right talent and processes to design experiments and extract business value from big data, which require changes in the way many executives now make decisions: trusting instincts and experience over experimentation and rigorous analysis. To get managers at all echelons to accept the value of experimentation, senior leaders must buy into a "test and learn" mind-set and then serve as role models for their teams.

6. Wiring for a sustainable world Even as regulatory frameworks continue to evolve, environmental stewardship and sustainability clearly are C-level agenda topics. What's more, sustainability is fast becoming an important corporate-performance metric—one that stakeholders, outside influencers, and even financial markets have begun to track. Information technology plays a dual role in this debate: it is both a significant source of environmental emissions and a key enabler of many strategies to mitigate environmental damage. At present, information technology's share of the world's environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world's data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. McKinsey research has shown, however, that the use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.

7. Imagining anything as a service Technology now enables companies to monitor, measure, customise, and bill for asset use at a much more fine-grained level than ever before. Asset owners can therefore create services around what have traditionally been sold as products. Business-to-business (B2B) customers like these service offerings because they allow companies to purchase units of a service and to account for them as a variable cost rather than undertake large capital investments. Consumers also like this "paying only for what you use" model, which helps them avoid large expenditures, as well as the hassles of buying and maintaining a product.

In the IT industry, the growth of "cloud computing" (accessing computer resources provided through networks rather than running software or storing data on a local computer) exemplifies this shift. Consumer acceptance of Web-based cloud services for everything from e-mail to video is of course becoming universal, and companies are following suit. Software as a service (SaaS), which enables organisations to access services such as customer relationship management, is growing at a 17 per cent annual rate. The biotechnology company Genentech, for example, uses Google Apps for e-mail and to create documents and spreadsheets, bypassing capital investments in servers and software licenses. This development has created a wave of computing capabilities delivered as a service, including infrastructure, platform, applications, and content. And vendors are competing, with innovation and new business models, to match the needs of different customers.

8. The age of the multisided business model Multisided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges. In the media industry, advertising is a classic example of how these models work. Newspapers, magasines, and television stations offer content to their audiences while generating a significant portion of their revenues from third parties: advertisers. Other revenue, often through subscriptions, comes directly from consumers. More recently, this advertising-supported model has proliferated on the Internet, underwriting Web content sites, as well as services such as search and e-mail (see trend number seven, "Imagining anything as a service," earlier in this article). It is now spreading to new markets, such as enterprise software: Spiceworks offers IT-management applications to 950,000 users at no cost, while it collects advertising from B2B companies that want access to IT professionals.

9. Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid The adoption of technology is a global phenomenon, and the intensity of its usage is particularly impressive in emerging markets. Our research has shown that disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. With an economic recovery beginning to take hold in some parts of the world, high rates of growth have resumed in many developing nations, and we're seeing companies built around the new models emerging as global players. Many multinationals, meanwhile, are only starting to think about developing markets as wellsprings of technology-enabled innovation rather than as traditional manufacturing hubs.

10. Producing public good on the grid The role of governments in shaping global economic policy will expand in coming years. Technology will be an important factor in this evolution by facilitating the creation of new types of public goods while helping to manage them more effectively. This last trend is broad in scope and draws upon many of the other trends described above.

Munich Re explains in the context of recent disasters (emphasis added): Overall, pressure on prices in most lines of business and regions is persisting. Munich Re therefore consistently withdrew from under-rated business. It nevertheless proved possible to expand accounts with individual major clients, so that the business volume grew slightly on balance, despite the difficult environment. Munich Re owes this profitable growth especially to its ability to swiftly offer complex, tailor-made reinsurance solutions to its clients. Besides this, the many large losses resulting from natural hazards and also from man-made events, had a stabilising influence on the lines of business and regions affected. Thus, prices increased markedly for natural catastrophe covers in Australia/New Zealand (Oceania) and in offshore energy business. There were no major changes in conditions in this renewal season. The overall outcome of the reinsurance treaty renewals at 1 January 2011 was again very satisfactory for Munich Re.

There is downward pressure on prices in the reinsurance industry because there have not been enough disasters to keep up demand and thus premium prices. The following observation was made just three months ago: Insurance and reinsurance prices have been falling across most business lines for two years, reflecting intense competition between well-capitalised insurers and a comparative dearth of major catastrophe-induced losses.

as Munch Re explains, they have been able to overcome the dearth of disasters because recent extreme events have allowed them to increase prices on coverage in a manner that not only counteracts recent losses to some degree, but even allows for "profitable growth."  As with most tall tales, the one about the financial plight of reinsurers dealing with a changed climate isn't going away any time soon. It is just another bit of  popular unreality that effective decision making will have to overcome.

As a teacher at the City University of New York, I am constantly aware of the possibility that my students might cheat on their tests. I do take some elementary precautionary steps

Still, my job is not that of the policeman. My students are adults who theoretically are there to learn. If they don’t value that learning and prefer to pay someone else to fake it, so be it, ultimately it is they who lose in the most fundamental sense of the term. Just like drug addicts, to return to my earlier metaphor. And just as in that other case, it is enablers like Mr. Dante who simply can’t duck the moral blame.

n open letter to the president of SUNY-Albany, penned by molecular biologist Gregory Petsko. The SUNY-Albany president has recently announced the closing — for budgetary reasons — of the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts at his university.

Petsko begins by taking on one of the alleged reasons why SUNY-Albany is slashing the humanities: low enrollment. He correctly points out that the problem can be solved overnight at the stroke of a pen: stop abdicating your responsibilities as educators and actually put constraints on what your students have to take in order to graduate. Make courses in English literature, foreign languages, philosophy and critical thinking, the arts and so on, mandatory or one of a small number of options that the students must consider in order to graduate.

But, you might say, that’s cheating the market! Students clearly don’t want to take those courses, and a business should cater to its customers. That type of reasoning is among the most pernicious and idiotic I’ve ever heard. Students are not clients (if anything, their parents, who usually pay the tuition, are), they are not shopping for a new bag or pair of shoes. They do not know what is best for them educationally, that’s why they go to college to begin with. If you are not convinced about how absurd the students-as-clients argument is, consider an analogy: does anyone with functioning brain cells argue that since patients in a hospital pay a bill, they should be dictating how the brain surgeon operates? I didn’t think so.

Petsko then tackles the second lame excuse given by the president of SUNY-Albany (and common among the upper administration of plenty of public universities): I can’t do otherwise because of the legislature’s draconian cuts. Except that university budgets are simply too complicated for there not to be any other option. I know this first hand, I’m on a special committee at my own college looking at how to creatively deal with budget cuts handed down to us from the very same (admittedly small minded and dysfunctional) New York state legislature that has prompted SUNY-Albany’s action. As Petsko points out, the president there didn’t even think of involving the faculty and staff in a broad discussion of how to deal with the crisis, he simply announced the cuts on a Friday afternoon and then ran for cover. An example of very poor leadership to say the least, and downright hypocrisy considering all the talk that the same administrator has been dishing out about the university “community.”

Finally, there is the argument that the humanities don’t pay for their own way, unlike (some of) the sciences (some of the time). That is indubitably true, but irrelevant. Universities are not businesses, they are places of higher learning. Yes, of course they need to deal with budgets, fund raising and all the rest. But the financial and administrative side has one goal and one goal only: to provide the best education to the students who attend that university.

That education simply must include the sciences, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as more technical or pragmatic offerings such as medicine, business and law. Why? Because that’s the kind of liberal education that makes for an informed and intelligent citizenry, without which our democracy is but empty talk, and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.

Maybe this is not how education works in the US. I thought that general (or compulsory) education (ie. up to high school) is designed to make sure that citizens in a democratic country can perform their civil duties. A balanced and well-rounded education, which includes a healthy mixture of science and humanities, is indeed very important for this purpose. However, college-level education is for personal growth and therefore the person must have a large say about what kind of classes he or she chooses to take. I am disturbed by Massimo's hospital analogy. Students are not ill. They don't go to college to be cured, or to be good citizens. They go to college to learn things that *they* want to learn. Patients are passive. Students are not.I agree that students typically do not know what kind of education is good for them. But who does?

students do have a saying in their education. They pick their major, and there are electives. But I object to the idea that they can customize their major any way they want. That assumes they know what the best education for them is, they don't. That's the point of education.

The students are in your class to get a good grade, any learning that takes place is purely incidental. Those good grades will look good on their transcript and might convince a future employer that they are smart and thus are worth paying more.

Just how many of your students do you think will remember the extensive complex jargon of philosophy more than a couple of months after they leave your classroom?

and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.We are there. Welcome. Where have you been all this time? In a capitalistic/plutocratic society money is power (and free speech too according to the supreme court). Money means a larger/better house/car/clothing/vacation than your neighbor and consequently better mating opportunities. You can mostly blame the women for that one I think just like the peacock's tail.

If a student of surgery fails to learn they might maim, kill or cripple someone. If an engineer of airplanes fails to learn they might design a faulty aircraft that fails and kills people. If a student of chemistry fails to learn they might design a faulty drug with unintended and unfortunate side effects, but what exactly would be the harm if a student of philosophy fails to learn Aristotle had to say about elements or Plato had to say about perfect forms? These things are so divorced from people's everyday activities as to be rendered all but meaningless.

human knowledge grows by leaps and bounds every day, but human brain capacity does not, so the portion of human knowledge you can personally hold gets smaller by the minute. Learn (and remember) as much as you can as fast as you can and you will still lose ground. You certainly have your work cut out for you emphasizing the importance of Thales in the Age of Twitter and whatever follows it next year.

However, a greater concern lies in the notion of climate change itself. Climate change is in essence one kind of nature-society relationship, in which humans influence the climate through greenhouse gas (particularly CO2) emissions, and the climate strikes back by heating up and going crazy at times. This can be further simplified into a battle between humans and CO2: reducing CO2 guards against climate change, and increasing it aggravates the consequences. This view is anchored in scientists’ recommendation that a ‘safe’ level of CO2 should be at 350 parts per million (ppm) instead of the current 390. Already, the need to reduce CO2 is understood, as is evident in the push for greener fuels, more efficient means of production, the proliferation of ‘green’ products and companies, and most recently, the Cancun talks.

So can there be anything wrong with reducing CO2? No, there isn’t, but singling out CO2 as the culprit of climate change or of the environmental problems we face prevents us from looking within. What do I mean? The enemy, CO2, is an ‘other’, an externality produced by our economic systems but never an inherent component of the systems. Thus, we can declare war on the gas or on climate change without taking a step back and questioning: is there anything wrong with the way we develop?  Take Singapore for example: the government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 16% under ‘business as usual’ standards, which says nothing about how ‘business’ is going to be changed other than having less carbon emissions (in fact, it is questionable even that CO2 levels will decrease, as ‘business as usual’ standards project a steady increase emission of CO2 each year). With the development of green technologies, decrease in carbon emissions will mainly be brought about by increased energy efficiency and switch to alternative fuels (including the insidious nuclear energy).

Thus, the way we develop will hardly be changed. Nobody questions whether our neoliberal system of development, which relies heavily on consumption to drive economies, needs to be looked into. We assume that it is the right way to develop, and only tweak it for the amount of externalities produced. Whether or not we should be measuring development by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or if welfare is correlated to the amount of goods and services consumed is never considered. Even the UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) scheme which aims to pay forest-rich countries for protecting their forests, ends up putting a price tag on them. The environment is being subsumed under the economy, when it should be that the economy is re-looked to take the environment into consideration.

when the world is celebrating after having held at bay the dangerous greenhouse gas, why would anyone bother rethinking about the economy? Yet we should, simply because there are alternative nature-society relationships and discourses about nature that are more or of equal importance as global warming. Annie Leonard’s informative videos on The Story of Stuff and specific products like electronics, bottled water and cosmetics shed light on the dangers of our ‘throw-away culture’ on the planet and poorer countries. What if the enemy was instead consumerism? Doing so would force countries (especially richer ones) to fundamentally question the nature of development, instead of just applying a quick technological fix. This is so much more difficult (and less economically viable), alongside other issues like environmental injustices – e.g. pollution or dumping of waste by Trans-National Corporations in poorer countries and removal of indigenous land rights. It is no wonder that we choose to disregard internal problems and focus instead on an external enemy; when CO2 is the culprit, the solution is too simple and detached from the communities that are affected by changes in their environment.

We need hence to allow for a greater politics of the environment. What I am proposing is not to diminish our action to reduce carbon emissions, for I do believe that it is part of the environmental problem that we are facing. What instead should be done is to reduce our fixation on CO2 as the main or only driver of climate change, and of climate change as the most pertinent nature-society issue we are facing. We should understand that there are many other ways of thinking about the environment; ‘developing’ countries, for example, tend to have a closer relationship with their environment – it is not something ‘out there’ but constantly interacted with for food, water, regulating services and cultural value. Their views and the impact of the socio-economic forces (often from TNCs and multi-lateral organizations like IMF) that shape the environment must also be taken into account, as do alternative meanings of sustainable development. Thus, even as we pat ourselves on the back for having achieved something significant at Cancun, our action should not and must not end there. Even if climate change hogs the headlines now, we must embrace more plurality in environmental discourse, for nature is not and never so simple as climate change alone. And hopefully sometime in the future, alongside a multi-lateral conference on climate change, the world can have one which rethinks the meaning of development.

it can be trained from very early in a child’s education. There’re ways that you can get quite young children to recognize what’s a good argument and what’s a bad argument. And as children grow older, it can be done in a more and more sophisticated form until by the time they’re undergraduates in universities they would be studying Plato’s dialogues for example and really looking at those tricky arguments and trying to figure out how to think. And this is important not just for the individual thinking about society, but it’s important for the way people talk to each other. In all too many public discussions people just throw out slogans and they throw out insults. And what democracy needs is listening. And respect. And so when people learn how to analyze an argument, then they look at what the other person’s saying differently. And they try to take it apart, and they think: “Well, do I share some of those views and where do I differ here?” and so on. And this really does produce a much more deliberative, respectful style of public interaction.

The second [quality] is what I call “the ability to think as a citizen of the whole world.” We’re all narrow and this is again something that we get from our animal heritage. Most non-human animals just think about the group. But, of course, in this world we need to think, first of all, our whole nation -- its many different groups, minority and majority. And then we need to think outside the nation, about how problems involving, let’s say, the environment or global economy and so on need cooperative resolution that brings together people from many different nations.

That’s complicated and it requires learning a lot of history, and it means learning not just to parrot some facts about history but to think critically about how to assess historical evidence. It means learning how to think about the global economy. And then I think particularly important in this era, it means learning something about the major world religions. Learning complicated, nonstereotypical accounts of those religions because there’s so much fear that’s circulating around in every country that’s based usually on just inadequate stereotypes of what Muslims are or whatever. So knowledge can at least begin to address that.

the third thing, which I think goes very closely with the other two, is what I call “the narrative imagination,” which is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person to have some understanding of how the world looks from that point of view. And to really have that kind of educated sympathy with the lives of others. Now again this is something we come into the world with. Psychologists have now found that babies less than a year old are able to take up the perspective of another person and do things, see things from that perspective. But it’s very narrow and usually people learn how to think about what their parents are thinking and maybe other family members but we need to extend that and develop it, and learn how the world looks from the point of view of minorities in our own culture, people outside our culture, and so on.

since we can’t go to all the places that we need to understand -- it’s accomplished by reading narratives, reading literature, drama, participating through the arts in the thought processes of another culture. So literature and the arts are the major ways we would develop and extend that capacity.

For many years, the leading model of development ... used by economists and international agencies measuring welfare was simply that for a country to develop means to increase [its] gross domestic product per capita. Now, in recent years, there has been a backlash to that because people feel that it just doesn’t ask enough about what goods are really doing for people, what can people really do and be.

so since 1990s the United Nations’ development program has produced annually what’s called a “Human Development Report” that looks at things like access to education, access to health care. In other words, a much richer menu of human chances and opportunities that people have. And at the theoretical end I’ve worked for about 20 years now with economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for economics. And we’ve developed this as account of -- so for us what it is for a country to do better is to enhance the set of capabilities meaning substantial opportunities that people have to lead meaningful, fruitful lives. And then I go on to focus on a certain core group of those capabilities that I think ought to be protected by constitutional law in every country.

Life; health; bodily integrity; the development of senses, imagination, and thought; the development of practical reason; opportunities to have meaningful affiliations both friendly and political with other people; the ability to have emotional health -- not to be in other words dominated by overwhelming fear and so on; the ability to have a productive relationship with the environment and the world of nature; the ability to play and have leisure time, which is something that I think people don’t think enough about; and then, finally, control over one’s material and social environment, some measure of control. Now of course, each of these is very abstract, and I specify them further. Although I also think that each country needs to finally specify them with its own particular circumstances in view.

when kids learn in a classroom that just makes them sit in a chair, well, they can take in something in their heads, but it doesn’t make them competent at negotiating in the world. And so starting, at least, with Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, people thought: “Well, if we really want people to be independent citizens in a democracy that means that we can’t have whole classes of people who don’t know how to do anything, who are just simply sitting there waiting to be waited on in practical matters.” And so the idea that children should participate in their practical environment came out of the initial democratizing tendencies that went running through the 18th century.

even countries who absolutely do not want that kind of engaged citizenry see that for the success of business these abilities are pretty important. Both Singapore and China have conducted mass education reforms over the last five years because they realized that their business cultures don’t have enough imagination and they also don’t have enough critical thinking, because you can have awfully corrupt business culture if no one is willing to say the unpleasant word or make a criticism.

So they have striven to introduce more critical thinking and more imagination into their curricula. But, of course, for them, they want to cordon it off -- they want to do it in the science classroom, in the business classroom, but not in the politics classroom. Well, we’ll see -- can they do that? Can they segment it that way? I think democratic thinking is awfully hard to segment as current events in the Middle East are showing us. It does have the tendency to spread.

so maybe the people in Singapore and China will not like the end result of what they tried to do or maybe the reform will just fail, which is equally likely -- I mean the educational reform.

if you really don’t want democracy, this is not the education for you. It had its origins in the ancient Athenian democracy which was a very, very strong participatory democracy and it is most at home in really true democracy, where our whole goal is to get each and every person involved and to get them thinking about things. So, of course, if politicians have ambivalence about that goal they may well not want this kind of education.

when we bring up children in the family or in the school, we are always engineering. I mean, there is no values-free form of education in the world. Even an education that just teaches you a list of facts has values built into it. Namely, it gives a negative value to imagination and to the critical faculties and a very high value to a kind of rote, technical competence. So, you can't avoid shaping children.

ncreasingly the child should be in control and should become free. And that's what the critical thinking is all about -- it's about promoting freedom as the child goes on. So, the end product should be an adult who is really thinking for him- or herself about the direction of society. But you don't get freedom just by saying, "Oh, you are free." Progressive educators that simply stopped teaching found out very quickly that that didn't produce freedom. Even some of the very extreme forms of progressive school where children were just allowed to say every day what it was they wanted to learn, they found that didn't give the child the kind of mastery of self and of the world that you really need to be a free person.

Aware planned to sell the four-disc DVD box set of the EGM only to its 600 members, as an official record of the event. But its executive director Corinna Lim, 45, said an MDA official contacted her 'a few days' after news of the $100-per-set DVDs broke last October, to ask if Aware had a distribution licence. Ms Lim, a former corporate lawyer, said Aware has appealed against the need for one. She argued that the licensing requirement applies to businesses, not non-profit organisations.

Section 6 of the Films Act states that a person must have a valid licence in order to 'carry on any business, whether or not the business is carried on for profit, of importing, making, distributing or exhibiting films'.

'I really take the view that we are not obliged to have a licence, and if they make us have a licence, they would be setting a terrible precedent for Singapore. 'That means any organisation that wants to distribute to your shareholders or just your members would need a licence.' She noted that recordings of the EGM were online, such as on video-sharing site YouTube.

But MDA director of customer services and operations Pam Hu told The Straits Times yesterday that the MDA has required some religious and arts groups - and not just businesses - to possess the distribution licence. Ms Hu added, however, that the MDA is reviewing Aware's appeal and would notify the group of the outcome shortly.

On the M18 rating, she said this is because the DVDs 'feature discussion of homosexuality and Aware's sexuality programme, which stirs up strong emotion among the members'. 'This contributed to the M18 rating as it requires maturity to understand the issues discussed and not be carried away by the emotive passion of the meeting.'

Observers were divided on how to interpret the law. Singapore Management University assistant law professor Eugene Tan said the language of the law does not limit its reach and thus could apply to Aware. But Professor Ang Peng Hwa, of Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said Aware should not need a licence as it does not distribute films in its normal course of work. 'If it needs to have a licence, that means any company that does a corporate video will also need (one). MDA will be flooded with licensing (applications),' he said.

This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher-quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s. America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards. The result was a boom in product innovation in all aspects of life during the 20th century. Today we can go to our hardware store and choose from hundreds of light bulbs that all conform to government-mandated quality and performance standards.

Technological standards not only promote innovation — they also can help protect one country’s industries from falling behind those of other countries. Today China, India and other rapidly growing nations are adopting standards that speed the deployment of new technologies. Without similar requirements to manufacture more technologically advanced products, American companies risk seeing the overseas markets for their products shrink while innovative goods from other countries flood the domestic market. To prevent that from happening, America needs not only to continue developing standards, but also to devise a strategy to apply them consistently and quickly.

The best approach would be to borrow from Japan, whose Top Runner program sets energy-efficiency standards by identifying technological leaders in a particular industry — say, washing machines — and mandating that the rest of the industry keep up. As technologies improve, the standards change as well, enabling a virtuous cycle of improvement. At the same time, the government should work with businesses to devise multidimensional standards, so that consumers don’t balk at products because they sacrifice, say, brightness and cost for energy efficiency.

This is not to say that innovation doesn’t bring disruption, and American policymakers can’t ignore the jobs that are lost when government standards sweep older technologies into the dustbin of history. An effective way forward on light bulbs, then, would be to apply standards only to those manufacturers that produce or import in large volume. Meanwhile, smaller, legacy light-bulb producers could remain, cushioning the blow to workers and meeting consumer demand.

Technologies and the standards that guide their deployment have revolutionized American society. They’ve been so successful, in fact, that the role of government has become invisible — so much so that even members of Congress should be excused for believing the government has no business mandating your choice of light bulbs.

review sites could do more. For example, Yelp could have offered to represent Alice itself, or even filed for a declaratory judgment that Alice's post was not an infringement of copyright.

According to Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose, that isn't Yelp's role. "The way we approach this space is that we're a platform," she told Ars by phone. When faced with a lawsuit threat, "some reviewers might choose to take down their reviews, others may choose to leave them intact."

Wendy Seltzer, founder of the Chiling Effects clearinghouse, thinks that's not good enough. "It's in Yelp's interest not to let it or its submitters be manipulated by these agreements," she said. "The reading public is going to learn that these things exist and then come to distrust the sites."

Transparency is another key weapon against review censorship.

Ars talked to Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, about the steps her company takes to prevent manipulation by business owners. "Angie's List is positioned very differently in the review space," she said. "We don't accept anonymous reviews. Consumers pay to be a part of Angie's List. And any time a flag is raised about a review, it's reviewed by a human." Angie said that her company actively penalizes businesses who try to use user agreements to censor her users. "Whenever we find that a doctor is asking patients to sign this kind of agreement, we put a notification on that provider's record," she said. "We also take them out of search results."

So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL’s enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he’d write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he’d never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning.

Mr. Miller’s job, as he made clear in an article last week in The Faster Times, an online newspaper, was to cram together words that someone’s research had suggested might be in demand on Google, position these strings as titles and headlines, embellish them with other inoffensive words and make the whole confection vaguely resemble an article. AOL would put “Rick Fox mustache” in a headline, betting that some number of people would put “Rick Fox mustache” into Google, and retrieve Mr. Miller’s article. Readers coming to AOL, expecting information, might discover a subliterate wasteland. But before bouncing out, they might watch a video clip with ads on it. Their visits would also register as page views, which AOL could then sell to advertisers.

commodify writing: you pay little or nothing to writers, and make readers pay a lot — in the form of their “eyeballs.” But readers get zero back, no useful content.

You can’t mess with Google forever. In February, the corporation concocted what it concocts best: an algorithm. The algorithm, called Panda, affects some 12 percent of searches, and it has — slowly and imperfectly — been improving things. Just a short time ago, the Web seemed ungovernable; bad content was driving out good. But Google asserted itself, and credit is due: Panda represents good cyber-governance. It has allowed Google to send untrustworthy, repetitive and unsatisfying content to the back of the class. No more A’s for cheaters.

the goal, according to Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, who worked on Panda, is to “provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Google officially rolled out Panda 2.2. Put “Whitey Bulger” into Google, and where you might once have found dozens of content farms, today you get links to useful articles from sites ranging from The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, the F.B.I. and even Mashable, doing original analysis of how federal agents used social media to find Bulger. Last month, Demand Media, once the most notorious of the content farms, announced plans to improve quality by publishing more feature articles by hired writers, and fewer by “users” — code for unpaid freelancers. Amazing. Demand Media is stepping up its game.

At the heart of this debate is the need to ensure that in a world where many, if not all, of the important details of our lives – including our relationships – exist in cyber-perpetuity, people retain, or reclaim, some level of control over their online selves. While the world of forgetting may have vanished, we can reshape the new one in a way that benefits rather than overwhelms us. Our overriding task is to construct a digital way of life that reinforces our existing sense of ethics and values, with security, trust, and fairness at its heart.

Figure 1 summarises the data and shows how printing diffused from Mainz 1450-1500. Figure 1. The diffusion of the printing press

City-level data on the adoption of the printing press can be exploited to examine two key questions: Was the new technology associated with city growth? And, if so, how large was the association? I find that cities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses. My work uses a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to document the association between printing and city growth. The estimates suggest early adoption of the printing press was associated with a population growth advantage of 21 percentage points 1500-1600, when mean city growth was 30 percentage points. The difference-in-differences model shows that cities that adopted the printing press in the late 1400s had no prior growth advantage, but grew at least 35 percentage points more than similar non-adopting cities from 1500 to 1600.

The restrictions on diffusion meant that cities relatively close to Mainz were more likely to receive the technology other things equal. Printing presses were established in 205 cities 1450-1500, but not in 40 of Europe’s 100 largest cities. Remarkably, regulatory barriers did not limit diffusion. Printing fell outside existing guild regulations and was not resisted by scribes, princes, or the Church (Neddermeyer 1997, Barbier 2006, Brady 2009).

Historians observe that printing diffused from Mainz in “concentric circles” (Barbier 2006). Distance from Mainz was significantly associated with early adoption of the printing press, but neither with city growth before the diffusion of printing nor with other observable determinants of subsequent growth. The geographic pattern of diffusion thus arguably allows us to identify exogenous variation in adoption. Exploiting distance from Mainz as an instrument for adoption, I find large and significant estimates of the relationship between the adoption of the printing press and city growth. I find a 60 percentage point growth advantage between 1500-1600.

The importance of distance from Mainz is supported by an exercise using “placebo” distances. When I employ distance from Venice, Amsterdam, London, or Wittenberg instead of distance from Mainz as the instrument, the estimated print effect is statistically insignificant.

Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward pressure on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants. In the pre-industrial era, commerce was a more important source of urban wealth and income than tradable industrial production. Print media played a key role in the development of skills that were valuable to merchants. Following the invention printing, European presses produced a stream of math textbooks used by students preparing for careers in business.

These and hundreds of similar texts worked students through problem sets concerned with calculating exchange rates, profit shares, and interest rates. Broadly, print media was also associated with the diffusion of cutting-edge business practice (such as book-keeping), literacy, and the social ascent of new professionals – merchants, lawyers, officials, doctors, and teachers.

The printing press was one of the greatest revolutions in information technology. The impact of the printing press is hard to identify in aggregate data. However, the diffusion of the technology was associated with extraordinary subsequent economic dynamism at the city level. European cities were seedbeds of ideas and business practices that drove the transition to modern growth. These facts suggest that the printing press had very far-reaching consequences through its impact on the development of cities.