One obstacle is that like most technology companies, Nokia is accustomed to pandering to customers, suppliers, and employees and rather than the government, and Nokia considers the threat posed by competitors; while banks help governments collect corporate and individual income taxes. Are there any other obstacles to a bailout?

If international test scores are a good indicator, the Finnish education system is better than Europe and the USA and many United Statesians advocate emulating it because doing so would increase government power. What will highly educated Finns do if Nokia continues losing money? Will their schooling help them cope with a changing world?

Photo courtesy of Luca Conti via Flickr.

“Fire!” they cried, so evil must die; and yields are good, so men pull back hoods and smile.
The scapegoat blood spilled, spittled and grilled; it crackled and spat and children grew fat on the meat.
Change must be earnt, sacrificial bonfire must burn; burn up the old, ring in the new.
Assembled on high, silhouette against the sky; the smoke prayed and pranced and sparks did their dance in the wind.
Shadows wore thin with less and less skin, and the clothes that were draped was all that told man from ape.
Change must be earnt, sacrificial bonfire must reign; reign over good, banish the bad.

Scan. Point. Click. Repeat. That’s the job. Contract attorneys are paid by the hour to sit in front of a computer and review a mind-numbing sequence of uploaded documents…. Predictive coding promises to make this job much more efficient over time – and drastically reduce the amount of work and number of contract attorneys employed.

Using the technology, a senior attorney familiar with the intricacies of a specific case reviews and codes a “seed set” of documents…. Proponents say predictive coding is not only more accurate than using human reviewers, but also more efficient…. Judge Peck noted the technology will require human review of less than 2 percent of all documents in an average case.

Score one for engineering over law as the higher education bubble deflates:

U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck of the Southern District of New York (who has authorized the use of ‘predictive coding’ in a case before him) has struck a blow against the profession of law as we know it. He has condemned untold numbers of hungry lawyers to marginal economic conditions and killed the business model responsible for keeping many of the country’s law schools afloat.
It was the right thing to do. He has also opened the door to the next stage in the information revolution, a vast and many sided process that will ultimately change the way we work and live as much as the industrial and neolithic revolutions did in their day.

Readers of the Volokh Conspiracy are the smartest on the net and the best rated comment, by Chris Tompkins, opines:

It’s a pretty cruel fate to spend three years and a ton of money getting a law degree, only to end up in the mindless, low paid drudgery of permanent doc review. Better not to go to law school at all.

I wonder how this kind of software deals with handwritten documents or pictures, or other things that are easy for humans to recognize but very difficult for machines. I can also imagine all kinds of interesting litigation about what constitutes a suitable “seed” document, motions based on a failure to disclose things the software didn’t catch etc.

Still, this looks like the future for discovery and that’s a good thing overall, even if it’s bad for unemployed lawyers. Litigation is largely unaffordable, a big part of why it is unaffordable is the cost of discovery, and a big part of why discovery is so expensive is the cost of reviewing all those emails and other electronically stored documents that didn’t exist in litigation prior to about 1980.

Related posts:
Lawyers Reviewing Documents for Temp Agencies
Is Engineering a Better Career Than Law?
What Professors Refuse to Teach in Engineering and Business Schools

Intolerance in Show Low, Arizona.

I passed the sign pictured at left yesterday while riding my bike in Show Low, a small rural town in east central Arizona. The USA is a great place to travel in a recreational vehicle, but like a parent abusing a child or Hitler in his war room with his generals, governments in the USA not only are intolerant, but proudly boast and shout about their despicable attitude when they ought to be hiding it and trying to reform. After all, even Hitler ordered the removal of anti-Jewish signs before the 1936 Olympics to avoid embarrassing himself!

The attitude of functionaries and legislators in the USA is that regardless of how many innocent citizens are offended, government action is desirable when a functionary conceives of an unlikely case where crime is thwarted. It’s the reason that they perform security theater in airports and block roads for sobriety checkpoints, treating everyone as a criminal. Did you know that legislators successfully pressured Apple and other phone vendors to censor apps that inform drivers of checkpoints?

Here at Startup Chile there is a concept called a Tribe. These tribes are groups formed around general concepts, like Education, Software Technology, Enterprise Software, Finance etc. The idea of the tribe is to provide support, connections and events to assist people whose companies are based around those general concepts. Every Tribe has a leader and every 3 months the group votes for a new leader. You get 1000 RVA points for being a tribe leader.

SmartPlanet quoted entrepreneur Scott Thompson of Bungolow, reckoning that one-third of Nxtp.Labs investments participated in or are about to participate in Start-Up Chile, and that many entrepreneurs are leaving Chile in favor of Argentina and Brazil.

The Argentine government philosophy is very different. Rather than stealing money from domestic taxpayers, transferring the loot to many foreign and a few Chilean techies, Argentina steals from foreigners to ease the burden of domestic taxpayers, especially the expropriation of the YPF oil company from Spanish investors.

Mary O’Grady, Latin American columnist of the Wall Street Journal, explains how Latin America can become wealthier.

Venkatesh Rao of Forbes magazine describes the omissions of business schools in his article, GitHub and the Democratization of Programming.

Over the past few months, I’ve received one comment several times: “I didn’t expect to read something like this on Forbes.” To me the comment reflects a rather unfortunate and growing divide between the worlds of technology and business. The two worlds are getting increasingly intertwined, but at the same time, business people are getting increasingly disconnected from technology. As a result, their intuitions about technological evolution are getting weaker, and people with pure business backgrounds are getting blindsided with increasing frequency by technology developments they didn’t see coming.

Many people believe that engineering schools waste less student time, but engineering schools ignore the marketing of engineering services necessary to succeed as an engineer. Bob Delaney, author of High-Value IT Consulting: 12 Keys to a Thriving Practice describes his book.

Back in 2003, I co-authored a book called “High-Value IT Consulting” that takes on the topic of marketing in depth. Most software developers come from a background of “how to do the work.” The book approaches business development from a direction of “how to get the work.” It is not about writing good code, it is about how to figure out the high-value market in order to get the contract that enables you to write good code. We may have pitched the topic at too high a level, because in its day, it didn’t set the world on fire. It remains, however, a full-spectrum analysis of how to get a software development contract.

Fortunately, 250 lucky computer science students are learning the business of engineering from Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal. It’s a pity that there aren’t thousands of students, as at the Stanford course in artificial intelligence taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

A groundbreaking change has struck academia, and its reverberations may be felt for years to come. One of Stanford’s first full courses to ever be openly made available online has gone viral. In a matter of weeks it has signed up more than 100,000 students from around the world!

All business students should learn to develop software but many are scared away by the widespread myth that programming requires deep math knowledge. Al Sweigart writes the truth in his blog.

Many people think that you have to be good at math or made good grades in math class before you can even begin to learn programming. But how much math does a person need to know in order to program?

Not that much actually. This article will go into detail about the kinds of math you should know for programming. You probably know it already.

Entrepreneurs are working on Brydge, a keyboard case and speakers for an iPad. It’s seeking $90,000 in funding and, if complete, it will produce an aluminum cover that weighs 1.3 pounds (2.74 when connected to the iPad) and is 0.33 inches think…. Apple has already said it won’t be making a product like this. During its earnings call, Tim Cook said, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going be pleasing to the user.”

I bought a Samsung Series 7 at the Microsoft Store in Scottsdale after the hard disk on my laptop died two weeks ago. The Series 7 is a laptop with solid state memory like a MacBook Air or Intel ultrabook or iPad, no moving mechanical parts like a hard disk, making it more reliable. It snaps off the docking station for use as a tablet that Microsoft and Samsung call a slate, providing most of the functionality of an iPad. The Brydge seems to include better speakers than the Series 7. The Series 7 can’t zoom in and out based on finger gestures, but the user can use fingers to press buttons and scroll. The Series 7 includes a stylus that is better than an iPad for some apps.

I love this machine because it combines the best of the tablet and laptop worlds, or as Samsung claims, it is an amazing marriage of power and design. The Series 7 has a USB port in the main unit and another in the docking station, plus HDMI ports so that I can attach a nig monitor at my desk. I stopped using my iPad and foresee Apple being forced to offer a competitive product within the next two years. The biggest disadvantage of the Series 7 is that it requires a fan to cool the x86 processor, adding significant audible noise. Many people have written off Microsoft but their demise is greatly exaggerated.

What did the foreigners do?
Probably went pale, gripped their chair tightly and considered running out of the room screaming something nobody here would normally understand though which due to its tone can be universally translated along the lines of “I am scared shitless”.

For $100, A DIY Kit for Watching Roach Neurons
Over the past two years, Backyard Brains has been selling SpikerBox—a small, $100 gadget that lets you witness the neuronal activity of a roach’s leg…. Tim Marzullo, one of Backyard Brains’s co-founders, explains that the company began as a way to perform nervous-system and brain experiments in front of high school and college students at a low cost…. Backyard Brains has relied on sales of its machines and a grant from the National Institute of Health to fund the company. Of late, Marzullo finds himself in Chile, responding to government interest in the project….

People can purchase a completed kit, which has built-in transistors, resistors, capacitors, and electrodes to help capture and amplify the sound of the roach’s leg. Or they can purchase parts and assemble the kits themselves to learn about electronics in addition to neural circuitry. Hobbyists make up about 10 percent of the sales, high schools account for 20 percent, and the rest of the units have gone to colleges.

Plans to farm Patagonian toothfish in the extreme south of Chile
The University of Magallanes in the extreme south of Chile have developed an innovative project to start farming Patagonian toothfish or Chilean sea bass (Dissostichus eleginoides) in the region. With a budget equivalent to 1.1 million US dollars the promoters of the initiative expect that within ten years, private entrepreneurs will begin cultivating the species, said the aquaculture engineer Pablo Gallardo.

Currently, the main markets for Patagonian toothfish are the US and Asia. This fish is high in healthy omega fatty acids-3 and 6, and is being trading abroad at around 15 US dollars per kg, compared to the 4 US dollars paid for salmon.

The Economist discusses Salvador Allende 4 days after the 1973 coup d’etat
What happened in Santiago is not an everyday Latin American coup. The armed forces had tolerated Dr. Allende for nearly three years. In that time, he managed to plunge the country into the worst social and economic crisis in its modern history. The confiscation of private farms and factories caused an alarming slump in production, and the losses in state-run industries were officially admitted to have exceeded $1 billion last year.

Inflation rose to 350 per cent over the past twelve months. Small businessmen were bankrupted; civil servants and skilled workers saw their salaries whittled away by inflation; housewives had to queue endlessly for basic foods, when they were available at all. The mounting desperation caused the major strike movement that the truck-drivers started six weeks ago.

Related posts:
Chile Articles: Chapter 1
Chile Articles: Chapter 2
Chile Articles: Chapter 3

Opened last October, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, known as ALMA, will have spread 66 radio antennas near the spine of the Andes by the time it is completed next year. Drawing more than $1 billion in funding mainly from the United States, European countries and Japan, ALMA will help the oxygen-deprived scientists flocking to this region to study the origins of the universe.

How to Keep Seniors Working: Lessons from Chile
American workers live longer each decade but they continue to retire early. They often begin receiving Social Security benefits, quit working and stop contributing to national output well before age 65. Reversing these trends must be an important objective when designing long-term reforms to balance revenues and expenditures on elderly entitlements.

Chile faced similar problems prior to 1981. It had a traditional pay-as-you-go defined benefit system, like Social Security in the United States. Workers had strong incentives to start their retirement benefits as soon as possible, because postponing pensions and adding contributions did not increase benefits commensurately. Labor force participation dropped dramatically when workers became eligible for pensions.

Chilean olive oil
“The Chilean olive oil industry continues to achieve even greater excellence in product integrity, which has translated into fabulous market growth,” states Felix de Vicente, Director of ProChile, the Trade Commission of Chile, whose mission is to make Chile a global food powerhouse with a tantalizing variety of wholesome products. “There has been a 1,000% increase in tons exported from 2007 to 2011 and total orchard size has quintupled since 2005. We’re very proud of our producers and partners and excited for the future in the U.S. and in the 40 other countries our olive oil is sold.”

Chile stops use of mercury in vaccines:
Chile has become the first developing country to stop the use of mercury in vaccines.

In meetings with the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs (CoMeD) held last week in Santiago, Chile, the current Vice President of the Chilean Senate, Alejandro Navarro Brain, committed to adopting legislation in the Senate that would prohibit the mercury-based preservative Thimerosal from vaccines.

Thimerosal, which is 49% mercury by weight, continues to be used as a preservative in vaccines and other drugs worldwide, despite the fact that it is a human neurotoxin and that safer, less toxic alternatives are readily available.

Chilean Engineer’s Designs Help Santiago’s Skyscrapers Endure Earthquakes
Juan Carlos de la Llera was sleeping soundly with his wife in the early morning of Feb. 27, 2010, when the earth off the coast of central Chile convulsed in the sixth-largest quake ever recorded. As the temblor broke windows and tossed books and dishes from the shelves, he, his wife and their 14-year-old daughter sheltered in a fortified area that de la Llera, a civil engineer, had built in the center of their two-story home outside Santiago. The quake lasted almost two minutes. De la Llera, safe with his family, feared the worst for Chile’s capital. “I thought the whole city was down,” he says.

The 8.8-magnitude quake left more than 520 people dead and wrought $30 billion in damages, equal to 17 percent of Chile’s gross national product. Later that morning, de la Llera, president and co-founder of engineering company Sirve, drove to Santiago to see if the quake-resistant technology his company designed had saved what was then the city’s tallest skyscraper, the 52-story, $200 million Torre Titanium La Portada office building. Although the tower had swayed three feet from side to side, it suffered no structural damage other than a balcony that had separated — but not fallen — from the building.

Related posts:
Chile Articles: Chapter 1
Chile Articles: Chapter 2

The biggest reward you enjoy when you emigrate from the USA may be avoiding the income tax.