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 [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]

Back
So I am back in Toronto. It’s been a little over a week now, but it seems a lot longer. From the day I arrived here, tired and dirty, with a backpack full of laundry - to a room completely empty except for a dresser. I gradually assembled some second-hand and free furniture, got all [...]

This was on my reading list for a long time, finally picked it up at the Denver Public Library and read it in one sitting. Here are my as usual cryptic notes.

First example: put 750 marbles in a glass and have a group guess independently. The average will be very close to the truth.
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Finally back to Coyotitan after a very long 18 hours on a bus (it was supposed to be 14, according to the ticket seller) from Mexico city. Since the individual lights did not work, I could not read after sunset (around 8PM), and had plenty of time to think (after my brain had been toasted [...]

This is the Spanish name for NAFTA (which I found out belatedly when attending an economic conference at UNAM about regional development in Mexico), and clearly something that I need to know more about. I heard different econ professors give very different accounts about its impact on Mexico, but most agreed that it had been [...]

While playing with the University of Toronto’s library pages, I did some random searches and came across an article about “Participation in the global knowledge commons” by Leslie Chan and Sely Costa. First of all, this is an example of how digitalizing academic publishing, and making it accessible for free-text searches makes knowledge more available [...]