The Great Depression Was a Woman

Think about it, don't most females go through a life crisis when nearing or entering their thirties? They hide their age, obsess about wrinkles and party even harder than a college freshman from Amish country. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted through the mid-1930s. If it were a dude, it would happen when most men have their mid-life crises in 1940-45. If you still don't believe me, ask anyone who lived through it and they'd surely tell you that the G. D. was a b*tch.

Of Men and Leprechauns

For every drink you have tonight paid with your hard-earned money, I will donate twice as many drinks to the Society for the Advancement of Leprechaun Development (SALD).

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Double Standard

I guess it's my day to rant and rave, but I couldn't stop myself when bumping onto today's BBC Greek story. I'd like to turn your attention to BBC's informative graph above, which beautifully illustrates that in fact, Greece leads the EU countries with largest percentage of debt out of GDP ... (drum roll please) second only to Italy. Why is then Greece and not Italy getting the ironic "preferential treatment" in the press these days? What's so special about Greece that isn't happening in Italy? Or Spain & Portugal for that matter? Why not treat them as a unit, as the PIGS* they truly are?

*PIGS = Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain

Census in Wonderland

As soon as I eyed the bright, clear white envelope from the 2010 Census, I rushed upstairs, tore it open and hardly contained my enthusiasm to find out what all the commotion has been about. Everyone seems dissatisfied these days and there is an inexhaustible amount of opportunities to aim this discontent at the government. Here comes the Census and before even officially having been distributed, there are already outcries far and large how race-intensively the questions are molded. I couldn't help but wonder, how did they know???

 'Tis true. There is no denying it, nevertheless I felt excited to make my tiny contribution to the population census as I do believe in the principle wholeheartedly. I filled out the shiny bluish pages with a trembling hand focusing really hard not to make a silly mistake in my DOB or to misspell my name. In less than three minutes, it was all over and I sighed proudly with a sense of accomplishment such as after a long, standardized test.

Then it hit me. Oh, no! Who's going to count me in the Bulgarian Census (the next one is to be expected next year, I presume, as the last one was in 2001) when I'm not there? The blessing and the curse of having dual citizenship strike again. Well, there's nothing I can do now. I can only hope that my poor grandmother can figure out how to add us to the official record for I do not wish to be reduced to nothing. I'd much rather be a mere statistic than a nonexistent one.

Does anyone know how such questions are settled? Is the brain drain data overly exaggerated or on the contrary, quite understated? Alice understood the situation all too well: "'But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, 'to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!'"

The World of Fab.

I have been under the weather for too long so I decided to blog of something fab (for a change). I cursed myself for having forgotten to take a pen and paper (yes, I still take notes the old school way unlike you tech-savvy gurus out there) during this mind-opening lecture I attended last week. To no avail, I forcefully tried to take mental notes as I was outlining this post in my head. I have fallen behind on memory exercising and my brain is failing me today. Or perhaps it can be attributed to the weather once again or to the caffeine withdrawals I've been suffering from lately.

Anyhow, enough about me. Turning into a phenomenon slightly more Fab than myself, namely the Labs! I'll leave for you to convince yourself of the useful and innovative (although innovation is a tricky word as the creator himself, Dr. Gershenfeld, admitted) Fab Labs. Unfortunately, the program's website is still very much in progress and the wiki page is too short, but to be honest, grasping the concept is not that challenging. With the lecture hall packed to the fullest capacity with an audience ranging from toddlers to senior citizens, the overwhelming majority were information-hungry young and old adults looking for the next big thing.

I know for myself I had many questions during the Q&A session, and after the session ended, I was left with many others. Sure, there can be no clear cut solution even when answers were given in the most eloquent, evidence-full and parallel-rich manner. Needless to say, my biggest worry is how to get these labs started. It still seems that after the tough step of overcoming financial hurdles, the rest comes naturally and easy. There is no dispute over the benefits of education in all shapes and forms (and the need for education reform, but that is the topic of another blog post). Yet when underdeveloped, still backward in terms of industrialization pattern countries are faced with the question how to move beyond the backwardness and make progress a reality, there is a divide among policy makers whether to finance innovation and focus their reforms on building human capital AND/OR to let the same old catching up, conditional convergence Solow story take care of the development gaps in order to provide a sound foundation for all sectors to improve upon. According to the Fab team, gaps can be jumped over and overcome. That is their huge, central idea. But there remains the need for a broad educational and state reform and for a type of micro financing that in turn remains unattainable to most developing countries on a larger scale. And it is this larger scale debate that remains the main critic of the team. For now, economies of scale are not Fab Lab’s concern. They try to promote the acquisition of skills to build (almost) anything you won’t be able to find in the store. Cleverly, these skills are similar to if not the same as those used to create the things that are available to the mass consumer. In a sense, education bridges the gaps between developing and developed nations. In fact, many of the developed nations we often point as examples are hardly any more developed as a whole than the rest of the world they are compared to.

The question I end with today will not be how to get started and get the entire globe involved in this completely worthwhile project, but when? When will policy makers start moving in the right direction where there is no need to define space and boundaries, where accreditation of awarded degrees is not based on a single location where the studying took place, but on achievement, where innovation happens limitless in terms of resources, communication and worldwide engagement?