Growth, jobs and more

Plenty has been written about Monti’s taking charge of Italy. But there is another dimension in his appointment. A wise man will be joining the The European Council. Mario Monti was a member of the Reflection Group on the Future of Europe, also known as the Wise Men’s Group of Felpie Gonzales. I have been observing, admiring and learning from “il professore” for almost two years. Not only were his proposals intelligent. Wise was the way in which they were put forward and diplomatic the ways in which he was building support for them. His main theme at the time was a grand bargain: more single market in exchange for tax harmonization. This was back in 2010 when the debt numbers were small. Today, behind the round table of the European Council, he will need to build alliances for an even grander bargain: More solidarity in resolving the sovereign debt crisis in exchange for less sovereignty of the member states, and, here comes the carrot, greater overall economic growth. The indebted per...

Reading about Sarkzoy, Merkel to invite Van Rompuy to head Eurozone I must say I liked the idea 18 months ago. From a paper published in European View Volume 9, Number 1, 79-92 , DOI: 10.1007/s12290-010-0117-3. Enhance economic coordination. This is a logical requirement to maintain monetary integration. The crisis has shown its mechanisms should be taken much more seriously. In the enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact the Commission should take advantage of the new provisions in the Lisbon treaty. The pact should be extended with supervision of private debt and the balance of payments. Because economic coordination calls for measures in the member states, the European Council should take the lead in shaping coordinated economic policy and the Commission in overseeing it. The coordination in the Monetary Union should be particularly strong and take place at a prime ministerial level (underlined today). At the time (and now as well) the Monetary Union was handled by an almo...

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my iPhone form iOS 4.1 to iOS 4.2.1. The process nearly bricked it. It would not even restore (Figure 1). It took me some three hours to make it work again. Something to do with the etc/hosts file. The good thing was, I had phone silence for a few hours. Figure 1: And BTW, it is not an unknown error. It is error 1013! I do not get intimidated by gadgets Today, I decided to upgrade my iPad from iOS 3.something to 4.2.1. There are quite a few new apps that want iOS 4.2 and there is a long weekend in Slovenia, Tuesday being the Culture Day. Time to do a complicated and lengthy surgery. Remembering what happened yesterday, I decided to do a backup of the iPad first. I would really hate to reinstall and reconfigure all the apps or lose documents, slides, magazines, books, movies ... The backup started, but did not look like it was doing anything. The progress bar was not moving at all (Figure 2). Figure 2. On a side note: these guys at Apple a...

That Slavoj Žižek writes with sympathy about the digital Che Guevara is not a surprise. What is surprising, though, is that Assange had a lucid opinion on philosophers even before he read Žižek : It has often been said that mathematics is the cheapest university department to run, for all one needs is pencil, a desk and a waste paper basket. This is not so. Philosophy is cheaper still, since in philosophy we do not even need the basket. - Julian Assange

Now that I got everything I wanted from Santa, let me write down what I want in iPad II. Software Shared file system for (some) apps. This has in fact nothing to do with iPAD. It is an iOS thing. As it stands, iOS is lobotomized . Each app only has access to its own files. I want for example Dropbox app and Pages app to have access to the same files. I will use one to read and write documents and the other to sync them with the could. Is this really too much to ask? I mean, really! Decent Safari. I want Safari to work with "destkop" versions of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. This has nothing to do with new hardware either. It is just a wish to make iPad a better client for the cloud services. More iPAD specific features in the iOS . iPad has a larger screen. It could be managed differently then the iPhone. Like switching among apps Expose style, for example. Keyboards with smaller keys, but more of them. It is really a pain to type anything that is not...

Napolen would know how to deal with Wikileaks: “ In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake. ” Its simple. Pretend they do not exist. Here's how the Prime Minister of Slovenia Borut Pahor handled his personal dealings with the Charge d'Affairs at the US Embassy in Ljubljana to get 20 minutes in the White House with Obama: Here is the relevant part of the cable: " In a one-on-one pull-aside with CDA ((Charge d'Affairs)), Pahor linked acceptance of detainees to "a 20-minute meeting" with POTUS ((President of the US)) ...   " Pahor reiterated that he would be willing to make the case,  but in a one-on-one pull-aside with CDA, the PM gently - but unambiguously - linked success on detainee resettlement to a meeting with President Obama . He said that "a 20-minute meeting" with POTUS would allow him to frame the detainee question as an act of support for Slovenia's most important ally and evidence of a newly-r...

The recent move by LinkedIn - that lets me enter my bibliography - could mark a beginning of a new chapter of Open Access Scientific Publishing and more. It is a small step. Today they do not even allow full texts to be attached. But if they develop the idea further, add commenting, reviewing, favoring, grouping etc. it could bring all the benefits of social networks to the exchange and evaluation of scientific ideas. It is in fact absurd, that collaboration and networking tools are much better when it comes to collaborating on your hobbies (which is not col-labor-ating ... labor as in work) then collaborating on the frontiers of science and innovation.