There’s a lot of angst over whether Apple can continue to lead the pack after Steve Job’s death. There’s something strange about all this: many people outside Apple are worried on Apple’s behalf. They’re rooting for Apple as if they themselves somehow depend on Apple.
Thing is, outside Apple’s walls, what happens to Apple doesn’t matter. Arguably, Apple will stop being successful when someone else starts to out-perform them. As a consumer, this is just awesome: someone has come along producing better products! Better things produced through competition.
Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that companies with at least one women on the board perform better than those without. Reasons for this are often framed in terms of “increased diversity”. This implies female directors bring along with them some mysterious female quality which is based on the belief that being a woman provides one with a different built-in set of traits than being a man.
This article stems from my alternative hypothesis which doesn’t require such assumptions: companies with more even distributions of women and men on their boards do better because their institutional culture does not encourage discarding a portion of their talent based on factors such as gender.
As with many things in computer science, the answer is: it depends.
Back in the depths of time, computing as we know it was invented by scientists who didn’t think so much about the unlikely possibility that our the lives of people the world over would become inexorably twined with our computing devices. Computers were mostly thought to be useful as glorified calculating machines, and so representing text wasn’t thought to be so important. Therefore we ended up stuck with the letters which would fit into just under a byte comfortably — 128 different characters. As much of this work was done in the US, this was fine because the Latin alphabet contains few characters. And so we ended up with a laughably bad way of representing characters for most of the world.
New wrinkle cream helps fight the signs of scientific evidence
Dean Burnett deconstructs the bunkum afflicting “beauty” products and their presentation to the public.
Now, I’m sure this experiment was completely thorough and conformed to rigorous scientific standards. I wouldn’t wonder why the “miracle” ingredient (A-F33, or Amino Fill 33) is only seemingly referenced in other, parroted press releases from Avon, the company that could make millions from this “breakthrough”. I’d have thought that a protein that can penetrate the protective epidermis and increase collagen and elastin output, effectively but safely altering the processes of the extracellular matrix, would be of substantial scientific interest. But no, no sign of it in any journals I could find. Odd, that.
This is why, especially in our capitalist society, education must not be primarily for training workers or consumers (both tools of capitalism, as Marxists might say). Rather, schools should aim to produce self-determining agents who can see through the blandishments of the market and insist that the market provide what they themselves have decided they need to lead fulfilling lives. Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil. But it becomes evil when it controls our choices for the sake of profit.