Something that I have thought about a lot lately, is changing concepts of what a university is, and how it works. Some of the reasons that I have been thinking so much about this stems from the idea of elite universities in North America. They have always been fascinating to me, because I come from […]

Last Thursday, I spent several hours reading up on Norwegian and Canadian statistics in a number of categories; partly because I was preparing a research paper on Norwegian development aid, and partly because of proper interest. Here are some of my disparate findings (sources: Statistics Norway, CIDA, Norad and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs […]

Right now I am sitting in the library the University of Buffalo (visiting a friend over Thanksgiving), watching the last lecture for one of my classes - online. One of my classes is full, so I can take it online. The video is posted each week, and taken down after a week (to avoid you […]

In an interesting article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the history of the admission systems for the Ivy League schools in the US, especially focusing on Harvard. One of his points is that the admissions procedure was changed from one focusing purely on academic merit to one focusing more on “the whole person” […]

Two of Canada’s three leading national newspapers had the following news on their front page: SUV sales down because of high gas prices. That made me very happy. I remember discussing high gas prices with a friend I was staying over with in Arkansas (this was before Hurricane Katrina, but gas prices were still high […]

Just doing research for a short paper on brain drain. The statistics I am coming over are quite incredible. For example, there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago alone, than in all of Ethiopia! And of the 700 doctors that were educated in Zambia after independence, only about 60 are left. 80% of all the […]

One of the reasons the iPod family has been so successful, apart from their sleek design and shrewd marketing, has to the whole ecosystem of services and gear that has grown up around the players. You can buy bags, belts, microphones, radio transmitters - you can put linux on them, use the notes function […]