Ready, Set, Invent! The Google Science Fair is Launched | MindShift
Google Science fair is open. The only Google product you have to do is to use a Google site. The science fair is open. Take a look at this if you're a science teacher.
"This year, Google is taking the “global” aspect of the contest seriously, allowing submissions in 13 different languages (last year’s were only accepted in English). The company will also select 90 regional finalists — 30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia-Pacific region, and 30 from Europe and Africa. It’s about “guaranteeing more global coverage,” says Maggie Johnson, Google Director of Education and a Google Science Fair judge."
Connecting Classrooms with Skype
How this teacher uses Skype to connect her classrooms with others. I like the preplanning - something that needs to be done to be ready for this.
Flat Classroom Projects: Applications Open Now
If you want to look into a Flat Classroom project for your school, applications are open. Our goal is to be the best collaborative learning experience where students co-create and collaborate together. We have projects for all ages and we're totally teacher run (most of us are full time and do this on the side or have classrooms in the project.) Find out more or ask me questions if you need to.
Template projects | British Council Schools Online
The British Council Connecting Classrooms program has free projects for global learning on their website. It also has a way to find links with schools. I like that you can download templates.
Projects on Skype in the classroom | Skype Education
Here are projects from Skype in the classroom. Posted by teachers. A lot of teachers are looking for people to Skype with. There should be a better way, but kudos to Skype for doing this.
Amy's Travels Project:Connecting Children Through Global Awareness Literature | Skype Education
Skype in the classroom has lists of projects that you can do with Skype. This is very innovative. Here is one using the Amy's Travel's multicultural children's book.
Partnership for Global Learning Annual Conference
This is just after ISTE. I hope that many of the ISTE people will be able to go there and vice versa.
Asia Society's Partnership for Global Learning Annual Conference will take place June 29-30 at the Brooklyn Marriott in New York City.
The two-day event connects educators, business leaders, policymakers and resource providers to share best practices, build partnerships and advance policies to ensure the next generation is ready to lead in an interconnected world.
This year's theme is "Pathways to Global Competence" and the four conference strands are:
Innovations in Teacher Practice
Exploring the Global Issues of Today
Going Global Through Technology and Media
Assessing Global Competence Through Student Work
Worldwide list of reading/literacy charities 2012 | Playing by the book
A list of reading and literacy charities worldwide for 2012. This author has spent a lot of time compiling the list and asks for your feedback. Hope you'll help. We should NEVER throw away books, there are a lot of people who need them. In fact, I tend to not want to throw them away now anyway because I'm not replacing them like I used to. It is a bit scary.
A program from Neustar to Kentucky schools about Digital Citizenship. Lots of people are jumping on this "bandwagon." I think my biggest concern is that:
#1 It needs to be "real" and not based on preachy scare-based tactics
#2 Students should talk with those who share the program - if it is just videos and worksheets, that doesn't cut it.
#3 To talk about and learn social media, you should be doing it. (That is what we do on Digiteen.)
a major new initiative to bring social media digital literacy education to students across the state of Kentucky through a program called “My Digital Life.” Neustar will partner with EverFi, Inc., a leading education technology company, to provide this innovative, online student experience to all Kentucky schools interested in teaching and certifying their students in digital literacy skills and responsibility. Most importantly, Neustar’s partnership is making the cutting-edge program available free of cost to the schools and state.
My Wish List for Education in 2012 | Education Is My Life
TEacher AJ Juliani (a Flat Classroom certified teacher) writes a beautiful and profound blog on his wish list. He understand and gets global collaboration in the classroom. Especially moving is this quote:
"My wish list for Education in 2012 is centered around the belief that it is time to try “new things in new ways”. It is time to look for “Next Practices” instead of “Best Practices”. It’s time to put ideas that are unproven into practice, learn from our failures, and celebrate our successes. Here is my wish list:"
Worth a read.
Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World
Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World. written by Veronica Boix Mansilla and Anthony Jackson is now available for free here. This is a great resource for educators who want to incorporate Global Competence into their classrooms and schools.
This is a PDF download.
Global Competence - Submit Student Work Now
The asia society would like you to submit student work relating to global competence now. Please share. There are also a lot of great links explaining this concept on this page. You can also download their free book: educating for global competence.
Harvard's components of global competence.
How High-Performing Nations Teach Global Skills | Asia Society
How high performing nations teach global skills.
Made In A Free World - Slavery Footprint
This survey is designed to educate and activate you. With the size of my house and the fact I have a lot of electronics 83 slaves"work" for me with the primary impact in Asia. This is not about guilt but facts about our world today. What can I do? We shoud advocate that businesses look ino their supply chain to determine f the good are made by people who are free or if they are, in fact, slaves. Create awareness. Let businesses know there is surging interest in abolishing slavery.
Don't complain about slavery in America over 100 years a go when ou are willing to do nothing now. Provocative test.
Organizing Your iPad Home Screen: A case Study - Lessons
This is a video I made in just 2 minutes on my iPad. I didn't have to go to educreations' website first but did everything on my iPad. I cannot watch the web version, however as it is flash based. You can create public or private classes and easily share the videos. Very cool implementation of simple screencasting. This would be great for ll schools with 1:1 iPads. Need to get if you can view class content from their app without going to web. Very easy. Wow.
Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.
Silvia Tolisano shared this with me on the podcast last night we recorded for Curriculum 21. This takes projects and outlines and relates it to the global competencies from the Asia society.
Why Steve Jobs isn’t Time’s Person of the Year - The Washington Post
Lots of conversation about why Steve Jobs wasn't named the Time Person of the year. This would be a fascinating discussion for a social studies or current events class. Who would you name as the person of the year and why.
Going Global: Reflections of a Flat Classroom Judge | Engaging Educators
Great reflection from Ben about what it means to judge Flat Classroom and what he learned. Thank you for joining in!
Get a virtual seat at ted talks
Ted live subscription for your school? You can get a virtual seat at TED talks (it includes a Kindle fire - no one is sure why.) This is a great overview from Edudemic.
Christmas Jeopardy for Literature or Culture Class
This Powerpoint based jeopardy game includes The Night Before Christmas and other Christmas classics as well as a piece on Christmas films. You can download the powerpoint and customize it to your current lessons and play it near the end of the term. A fun way to finish and summarize. Remember, keep teaching!
Tons of printable holiday Puzzles
Crosswords, scramblers, work to do in pairs or together. If you need just one more thing just in case, go here. Created by a teacher.
A CSI Lesson PLan for High School Math
I love this lesson plan which includes algebra, ratios, angles, and stastics that most 9th and 10th graders I know could compute. This could be a very fund summary activity. Look at this PDF and powerpoint and create your own. If you do, please share it with me in the comments or email it to me, I'd like to share what you do.
The shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.
Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia...[continue reading]
Science Centres, cafe scientifique's, Maker Faires and Hackerspaces should be seen as mutually self reinforcing. The former more hierarchical and the latter primarily bottom-up. New York Hall of Science's relationship with Maker Faire being an example of such a complementary and symbiotic relationship.quoting Mohamed Hassan, formerly of the Academy of Sciences...whoScience centres have grown rapidly in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe, as the value of hands-on experiential learning in science has been recognised. But Africa has yet to see a similar expansion. Of 54 African countries, only four have science centres, and these are not as advanced as elsewhere.
image courtesy of IMLS called for establishing science centres in every African country, especially those lacking scientific capacity, and linking them with academic institutions."[Science] academies are usually the homes of the grandfathers and grandmothers," Hassan said. "Science centres are the places that delight the young. Linking these is key to creating solutions that will sustain us across the generations."
“Among the non-western economic blocs, East Asia has the highest intraregional trade, comprising largely intermediate goods, underpinning the region’s global trade and competitiveness agenda, and attracting ample FDI. In other words, Factory Asia has worked well. Factory Southern Africa has not. Southern Africa remains the least integrated region in the world despite the presence of a customs union and a free trade area.”Report co-author Sandeep Mahajan says a successful Factory Southern Africa requires dynamic trade based on nimble networks of multi-national firms. Formal and informal trade barriers have to be removed. “South Africa,” he says, “needs to open up, as well as integrate its own rural and advanced regions.” Current policy, he says, “tends towards mercantilism, at the cost of much larger gains from trade based on the principles of comparative advantage."More here
Here is the time to grow Keynote that Julie and I did not so long a go. Was listening to it and I think the message is still relevant. It is about change and a willingness to grow.
"A new way of learning
Augmented Reality in School Environments
- A European Research Project -
Technological advances in the field of information and communication technologies enable innovative ways to mediate knowledge. Among them, Augmented Reality (AR) becomes increasingly a field of interest.
Integrated in e-learning systems, AR will provide innovative ways to transfer knowledge in education. This is the purpose of the project Augmented Reality in School Environments (ARiSE). The aim is to create an innovative teaching aid, enabling teachers to develop, with a moderate effort, new teaching practices for teaching scientific and cultural content to school classes in an easy to comprehend way. "
T.S. Eliot's masterpiece is now an app. An expensive app, topping at $13.99 but it has literary experts abuzz. It includes the poem, perspectives, sychronized performances from Eliot (at two points in his life) and other readers, the original manuscripts showing the process of editing the document, and lots of resources and readings. Created by Faber digital it is part of "Faber's mission to re-imagine poetry for the digital age."
If you teach literature or are an edtech professor, it is time to get this on your ipad and put in some serious academic reviews as to the quality of content here. Academicians now have a new place: writing reviews on the iTunes store. We may have an app-full textbook-free future.
Wordle - Chapter 7 of the Upcoming Clat Classroom Book
A wordle I made of the upcoming Flat Classroom book - chapter 7 of student choice. If you want to know when the book comes out (we'll only use your email to let you know the publish date) you can go to www.flatclassroombook.com - if you're into social media or doing book reviews, you can apply to be put on our reviewers list. (Sorry not everyone can be selected, but please apply if this fits you.)
TakingITGlobal - TIGed - Projects - DeforestACTION
The DeforestAction project has sstudents create local, national and international entrepreneurial initiatives that protect and regrow endangered forests and create local projects to promote awareness and action.
Asia Connections - Collaboration with schools in Asia
A ning promoting connections with schools in Asia.
From Library To Learning Commons.Ny.Slideshare
Lovely slideshow by Valerie Diigs on her school's transformation from library to learning commons. She's been featured in several books and in school library journal.
I think every librarian should be familiar with the learning commons concept to see if there are elements that will work to make your environment more relevant to learners. It isn't whether you like the concept yourself - for libraries to stay funded they must stay relevant. I think learning commons is just one way to do that. Valerie knows far more than me on this topic, so look at what she's done.
WinDirStat Portable | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives
Why is your hard drive full? Why does it keep filling up? I use this to help me find those pesky video files that keep FILLING UP MY HARD DRIVE.
As poverty recedes, a new global middle class is emerging. Twenty years ago, the middle class – those who make between $10 and $100 a day – made up one-third of the world population. By 2006, it was closer to three-fifths, estimates economist Surjit Bhalla. That increase represents the crossing of a crucially important threshold: Disposable income has gone from the exception to the rule. For the first time ever, most people around the world can now make meaningful choices about their material surroundings.More here
Filling bellies, fulfilling egos
The rise of the global middle class will have a profound impact on the center of economic and political gravity, shifting it eastward and southward, from North America and Europe toward Africa, Latin America, and Asia. But just as important is the global cultural revolution that is now under way.
More hereThere's a not-unreasonable assumption, based mainly on the experience of east Asia, that building up low-skilled manufacturing industries, such as clothing or electronics, would create jobs that reduce poverty. And the creation of export-processing zones have often been recommended by donors to attract investors to these sectors. But, to reduce poverty, jobs in agriculture or services are just as important. In China, it was agricultural growth that really kick-started poverty reduction; manufacturing jobs actually contributed less. In many countries it's the services sector – providing haircuts, selling food, cleaning houses – that is the real growth area for jobs. The potential for expansion in any sector is finite, and too much focus on any one sector is almost certain to reach a dead end before too long. The key is a mix of sectors and the ability to move people and money easily between them.
A worker moves brass tubes at a factory in Zhuji, Zhejiang province. In China, it was agricultural growth that started to reduce poverty; manufacturing jobs actually contributed less. Image: AP
Over the last few posts I've been critical of Obama, not because of who he is, but because of the incompetence of his administration. Here is just one more small example of this incompetence, from the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute:
How to evaluate the results of last week’s China-U.S. summit in Washington? Improbably, the key for the entire event may lie in what is usually the least memorable portion of these carefully choreographed occasions: the cultural program at the concluding state banquet.Although I don't blame Obama for not knowing that the song he was so approving of was an anti-US song, I do blame Obama for surrounding himself with people who didn't know it and weren't able to let him know that he was being insulted. America is being played as a fool too much by this administration, and it might be because we have a fool in the White House.
During the dinner’s musical interlude and following a duet with American jazz musician Herbie Hancock, Chinese pianist Lang Lang treated the assembled dignitaries to a solo of what he described as “a Chinese song: ‘My Motherland.’” (You can watch this on YouTube.)
The Chinese delegation was clearly delighted: Chinese President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao, stone-faced for many of his other photo ops in Washington, beamed with pleasure upon hearing the melody and embraced Lang Lang at the song’s conclusion (see it on YouTube too). President Obama, for his part, amiably praised Lang Lang for his performance and described the event as "an extraordinary evening."
But what, exactly, is this “gorgeous” and “beautiful” (Hu’s words) tune that so entranced China’s visiting leadership?
“My Motherland” is not a “Chinese song” in any ordinary meaning of the term. Instead, it is a Mao-era propaganda classic: the theme from "Triangle Hill" (Shangganling), a film in which heroic Chinese forces fight, kill, and eventually beat Americans in pitched battle during the Korean War.
“My Motherland” epitomizes the “Resist America, Aid [North] Korea” campaign that Beijing embraced during and after the Korean War. It celebrates Sino-American enmity.
“My Motherland” is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day. Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently unknown to the many members of the administration’s China team—the secretary and deputy secretary of State, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, and the National Security Council’s top two Asia experts—who were on hand at the state dinner and heard this serenade. Clueless about the nature of the insult, they did not know to warn the president that he would embarrass himself and his country by not only sitting through the song, but by congratulating Lang Lang for it afterward.
Although Americans are often tone-deaf to cadences of symbolism in international relations, the Chinese are not. And for Chinese audiences, the symbolism of performing “My Motherland” to a host of uncomprehending barbarians in the White House itself hardly required explanation. This was a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy. The episode has reportedly already gone viral over the Chinese Internet, where the buzz on this crude and deliberate snub is overwhelmingly and enthusiastically positive. Hu can thus return home confident his visit to America will widely be regarded as a success domestically— for reasons his American counterparts do not yet seem to comprehend...
...If American policy makers are to avoid unpleasant surprises in their dealings with China in the years ahead, they must pay far more attention to official Chinese pronouncements, commentary, and doctrine. All too often, American security specialists—and even China watchers—are inclined to disregard official Chinese speechifying as so much boring palaver. The problem is that in a controlled society, official words matter. Sometimes, even songs do.
In the Economist:
MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the shift in economic power eastward as Asia outruns the rest of the world. But the surprising success story of the past decade lies elsewhere. An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa...[continue reading]
Merry Christmas everyone! Here is something you probably didn't know about Christmas:
On December 25, Christians around the world will gather to celebrate Jesus’ birth. Joyful carols, special liturgies, brightly wrapped gifts, festive foods—these all characterize the feast today, at least in the northern hemisphere. But just how did the Christmas festival originate? How did December 25 come to be associated with Jesus’ birthday?The first theory is popular (based on existing pagan celebrations) but doesn't hold up under further analysis- early Christians rejected pagan connections and tried to be different, and there isn't even a hint mentioned that Christmas was based on pagan traditions until the tenth century. So I reject this theory and instead point you towards the second (lesser known) one:
The Bible offers few clues: Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season; in the cold month of December, on the other hand, sheep might well have been corralled. Yet most scholars would urge caution about extracting such a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical.
The extrabiblical evidence from the first and second century is equally spare: There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices—a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time. As far as we can tell, Christmas was not celebrated at all at this point.
Finally, in about 200 C.E., a Christian teacher in Egypt makes reference to the date Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all. Clement writes: “There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place on (May 20 in our calendar), or (March 21), or (April 21), or (April 15), or (April 20 or 21).”
Clearly there was great uncertainty, but also a considerable amount of interest, in dating Jesus’ birth in the late second century. By the fourth century, however, we find references to two dates that were widely recognized—and now also celebrated—as Jesus’ birthday: December 25 in the western Roman Empire and January 6 in the East (especially in Egypt and Asia Minor). The modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6; for most Christians, however, December 25 would prevail, while January 6 eventually came to be known as the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem. The period between became the holiday season later known as the 12 days of Christmas.
So, almost 300 years after Jesus was born, we finally find people observing his birth in midwinter. But how had they settled on the dates December 25 and January 6?
Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.So, there you have it- the reason why we today celebrate Jesus' birth on December 25. Merry Christmas!
This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which appears to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Based on this, the treatise dates Jesus’ birth to the winter solstice.
Augustine, too, was familiar with this association. In On the Trinity (c. 399–419) he writes: “For he [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”
In the East, too, the dates of Jesus’ conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar—April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6—the eastern date for Christmas. In the East too, we have evidence that April was associated with Jesus’ conception and crucifixion. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis writes that on April 6, “The lamb was shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin, he who took away and takes away in perpetual sacrifice the sins of the world.” Even today, the Armenian Church celebrates the Annunciation in early April (on the 7th, not the 6th) and Christmas on January 6.
Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus’ birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6).
Innovation Africa reports:
Timely access to information and advice about how to manage plant health problems can make the difference between success and failure. Since 2003, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have introduced community-based plant health clinics as a way of providing this advice to small-scale farmers.Continuing:
Plant clinics have spread rapidly because they offer a cheap and practical alternative to more conventional approaches that can help only limited numbers of farmers. They operate in easily accessible public places and are widely used to identify the causes of plant health problems and to find solutions.
Community-based plant clinics have the potential to help farmers and contribute to making agriculture a successful business, especially in resource-poor countries where advisory services are often scarce, underfunded and beyond the reach of millions of smallholders. Plant clinics provide an opportunity to coordinate the efforts of extension, research, government regulation and input supply, to reach more people and to use existing resources more efficiently.More here
Paul Collier in Foreign Policy writes:
Sure, some of Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries that I call the bottom billion -- quite a number of which crowd the upper reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build the economy, they actively avoid doing so.He contends that:
Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker. And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distinguishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in democracies, changing the leader does not change growth -- all leaders are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances that make good leaders redundant.More here
Based on figures from a 1999 report by the GAO, Bill Clinton's trip to Africa cost $42.8 million dollars. He took 1,300 individuals (not including the Secret Service) and was gone 12 days. That works out to roughly $3.57 million a day. Based on this information, we can take some guesses at how much President Barack Obama's upcoming trip to India is going to cost US taxpayers.
First, Obama will only be traveling around Asia for 10 days (3 days in India, rest in Indonesia where he grew up, South Korea, and Japan), so let's lower the cost down to $35.7M. But he is taking over 3,000 people (including Secret Service), so let's guess on the lower side and just double the cost, to give us a price tag of $71.4M. Let's now adjust for inflation from 1999 to today- that will give us a price tag of about $91.07M.
It is reasonable to assume that the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Obama plans to stay, is considerably more expensive than wherever Clinton stayed in 1999, and it is also reasonable to assume that the cost of moving warships off the coast of India for protection and hiring people to knock down coconuts so they don't fall on the President's head are costs that Clinton did not incur. Plus, we know that President Obama and his wife and retinue have a taste for the finer things (see my post Barack Obama's Wagyu Steaks) that Bubba did not really flaunt. Obama will probably try to get in a round of golf while he is there or maybe take in a cricket match, so add those costs to the total too. I'm not an economist, I think it would be reasonable to put a price tag on this trip of $200 million.
So the White House is correct and the Republicans are wrong. It is not going to cost US taxpayers who are battling a recession $200 million dollars a day that we don't have to send the President on a globe-trotting trip with all his buddies to live it up in 5-star hotels. It will only cost us $200 million overall.
For fun, check out Trillion with a T: How to Spend $1,000,000,000,000.00.
Suman Bery writing in the Economist:
With the two exceptions of Malaysia and Indonesia these countries did not enjoy rents from significant mineral resources. As such they were not subjected to the so-called “resource curse” of a struggle for control of these rents, the problems of an appreciated real exchange rate, and lack of competitiveness of the tradables sector. Also, at the time of their fast growth episodes, most of the Asian countries were well into their demographic transition, with the dependency ratio declining as the labour force expanded. This led to a rise in their saving rates, complemented in many cases by significant foreign aid.More here
As Angus Maddison pointed out a decade ago (in his "The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective") Africa’s underlying circumstances are much less favourable. (His discussion includes Mediterranean Africa, while I will restrict myself to sub-Saharan Africa.) Several of its major economies enjoy enormous mineral riches, which the world over pose tremendous problems for economic management. The prices for these minerals fluctuate violently in global markets causing volatility in revenues; the easy availability of mineral revenues inhibits the growth of a domestic taxation culture essential for the development of accountability to the citizenry; the struggle for illegal control of the mineral resources has been a source of fierce conflict and corruption; while the easy foreign exchange revenues the mineral exports make available boost the real exchange rate. This inhibits the growth of labour-intensive manufacture, which was the source of Asia’s growth.
This is Africa reporting on efforts to bolster regional integration. A bugbear if there ever was one:
Africa accounts for just 3 percent of world trade today, and just 12 percent of that is internal. Underdeveloped transport and power infrastructure, as well as cumbersome regulatory environments and corruption also make it the world’s most expensive business environment. Dominated by fragmented and small economies, the continent lags well behind the likes of Asia, Europe and North America in terms of competitiveness – and as a consequence – struggles to attract large scale private investment outside of the extractive minerals and oil and gas industries.Addressing these challenges will invariably focus attention on Africa’s regional economic communities. While each geographical part of the continent has its own REC, one has quickly emerged as a model for integration; the East African Community. Having broken up in 1977, the EAC was re-established in 1999, and has since then taken significant strides towards building an effective economic and political framework for integration across its five member states – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda.More here
