Fertility rates fall almost exactly as female literacy rises

Dominic Lawson wrote something extrememly important in the (London) Sunday Times last November (which I forgot to post then.)
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/dominiclawson/article804443.ece

With the possible (and brutal) exception of China, the UN population division’s own figures demonstrate that in countries where fertility rates have fallen markedly there has been no great difference in the rate of decline whether governments have promoted birth control or not. There are only two statistically water-tight correlations: fertility rates fall almost exactly as female literacy rises; and the more urbanised a country becomes, the smaller is the average family.

Hardware problems

Memo to self:
I'm designing a large rollout of learning software on Reliance 3G Android tablets in India.
Must remember to check the breakdown rate.
Last time we rolled out 300 laptops, they were Lenovo and the maintenance/breakdown system wasn't too bad.  We want to avoid the following.  (Excerpt from Educational Technology Debate newsletter)

Wayan - Technology and Child Development: Evidence from One Laptop per Child Program in PeruMar 08, 2012 06:19 pm | Wayan
The report says that 13% of XO laptops in Peru malfunctioned at some point, and about half of them were successfully repaired. Yet in Uruguay, which has a much more efficient XO laptop maintenance and repair system, still had 27% of the XOs under repair at any given time. This makes me think that either children in Peru are much more careful with their XO laptops, or they are using them significantly less than in Uruguay.

OLPC study reiterates - technology is not the solution, pedagogy is

From Education Technology Debate 5 Mar 2012:

So far, the IDB has issued two synopsis examining the academic achievement and impacts on cognitive skills that XO laptops facilitated in a 15-month randomized control trial with 21,000 students in 319 schools – an initial report in 2010, and a second reportearlier this year. The summary findings should not be a surprise to EduTechDebate readers:

The effective implementation of the “One Laptop per Child” program was not enough to overcome the difficulties of a design that places its trust in the role of technologies themselves. The use of technologies in education is not a magic and rapid solution through which educational problems and challenges can be solved with the simple acquisition of technological devices and systems.

The IDB did find some positive and significant results in cognitive ability – a five-month lead over non-XO students – but no overall significant differences were found on Mathematics and Language standardized tests 15 months after the implementation.

What you have to do to lose weight and keep it off

It says in the Guardian today that:

If you do plateau [in your weight loss], check that you're sticking to your plan and whether your goal is unrealistic. The ongoing National Weight Control Registry in America is the largest study of long term successful weight loss ... It finds that people who manage to keep weight off eat breakfast, weigh themselves once a week, watch less than 10 hours of television a week and exercise about an hour a day. If you do all of those things as well as cut your calorie intake, you won't need to measure if your diet is working or not. You'll know that it is.

At least I eat breakfast.

Keep speeches to 5 minutes max

By Simon Jenkins in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/23/adele-ilk-rhetoric

Research apparently shows that most audiences can recall little beyond the first five minutes of any talk. The brain simply shuts up shop, to await that ever-exhilarating phrase "and now finally". Listeners know this, yet they forget it when they become speakers. Probably the most famous speech in history, Lincoln's Gettysburg address, had just 10 sentences and 272 words. It followed a two-hour speech by a man called Everett, which no one remembers.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Economics

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/14/technocrats-europe-bad-politics-economics

And there's plenty of evidence that having an economist run your country's economic policy is no help whatsoever. Last week, Joachim Wehner of the LSE and Mark Hallerberg of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin published some research that looked at educational backgrounds of political leaders across Europe. Since 1973, 69% of Greek finance ministers and 55% of those in Portugal have had a PhD in economics; a qualification unknown to any British chancellor.
In his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang points out that in recent history economic policy in Japan, Taiwan, China and South Korea has largely been set by lawyers or engineers. In India and Pakistan on the other hand, many world-class economists have been in charge of the treasury – yet their record have been no match for the Asian tiger economies. 

The Greek/Italy economic crisis is caused by failure to tackle corruption

From today's FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/618e57d6-0937-11e1-a20c-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1dIK4XGVp

If the crises in Greece and Italy tell us anything, it is that the European Union has tolerated widespread corruption, criminality and malign governance not just in supplicants from eastern Europe but in some of its core western European members. As we Europeans lecture the world on the importance of European values – transparency, good governance and competition – too often we turn a blind eye to Mr Berlusconi’s monopoly on broadcast media, the influence of the Camorra on the politics of Campania and the chronic cronyism of the Greek economy (about which the British and German governments, to name but two, are fully informed).

If anything is to come from the catastrophe facing Europe it is essential these patterns of corruption are broken. Otherwise neither Greece nor Italy will ever be free of the institutional sclerosis that allows these practices to prosper. Before we look lovingly at northern Europe for the answer, let us remember the billions of dollars in bribes of which German companies, like Siemens and Ferrostaal, have been guilty of paying their Greek interlocutors. These were made in order to secure lucrative but overpriced contracts which have been funded by those decent Greeks who earn relatively little but, unlike the country’s super-rich, actually pay their taxes.