StickWithANose

The New York Times can surprise you every now and then by publishing informed debates on issues by informed observers [as opposed to a motley crew of think tank hacks] who can actually help readers understand a rather complex issue. As a follow up to a Room for Debate on China’s education model that I [...]

One of the most frustrating elements of public discourse on education policy is the repeated referencing of how the US is falling behind in science and math. For the very serious thinkers, the fact that China is pumping out large numbers of college graduates and PhD’s every year is a sign that the US is [...]

Considering how similar our two nations are it is always interesting to me to see how differently the Canadians view the world in comparison to the US. Watching our political discourse sink into madness and our democracy devolve further into a corporatist racket, I often wonder what our northern neighbors must think of all this. [...]

Last week, I pointed readers toward this tragic story of Chinese laborers committing suicide en masse in which I attempted to link those suicides with the concept of Alienation. This week, Bloomberg has published an article that does a far better job at making that connection… albeit unwittingly.
Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology [...]

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of [...]

This ladies and gentlemen is how educational transformation begins…

While the oligarchs consistently tell us that our schools are falling behind the education systems of global competitors like China, it is fascinating to see how few lessons we actually take away from international approaches to education. The oligarchs are forever telling us that we need to emulate the Japanese and the Chinese in order [...]

I was not alone in condemning Google in 2006 for agreeing to censor search results in order to gain access to that long-time fetish of corporate America: the Chinese market. For a supposedly new kind of corporation bandying about the slogan “don’t be evil“, the agreement to censor search results cut to the core of [...]

As his decline in poll numbers becomes increasingly evident, Team Obama appears to be doing some soul searching over its overall economic message, and I do mean message. As this Bloomberg article inadvertently indicates, Team Obama doesn’t see its falling numbers on the economy as a failure of policy but as a failure in messaging [...]

From an interview in Spiegel:
Volcker: The recovery is quite slow and I expect it to continue to be pretty slow and restrained for a variety of reasons and the possibility of a relapse can’t be entirely discounted. I’m not predicting it but I think we have to be careful.
SPIEGEL: What is the difference between this [...]