Vivek Wadhwa | I have found that Silicon Valley, generally speaking, doesn’t build apps to save the world or lift people out of poverty. It builds them to sell Angry Bird t-shirts and generate lots of virtual currency. The folks at Centro de Innovación in Santiago, Chile, aim to change that.
Nearly everyone, including the President, is excited about a coming boom of tech IPOs ushered in by Facebook. But everyone should be prepared for a big disappointment.
I don’t endorse Gingrich’s often-extreme views. But on this issue, I believe he is right. Gingrich is doing something rare in politics: He’s thinking outside of the box, and this type of thinking is what is needed to get the U.S. back on track….
Parents in Boston complained bitterly about the needlessly complex enrollment process for public schools. To sign up their children for school, parents were forced to navigate a Byzantine 28-page pamphlet seemingly designed to confuse. What’s more, the process made it difficult for parents to make smart choices about schools based on criteria they considered important, such as proximity and user ratings.
(Source: Washington Post)
The top talent in countries around the world have a new suitor: the Chinese government.
China has a severe shortage of skilled talent and, in a policy reversal, has decided to open its doors to talent from around the world. This could mean that the brilliant NASA scientiststhe U.S. laid off, could find new employment — and a new home — in Shanghai or Beijing.
This piece originally appeared in VentureBeat. The Indian government thinks the $35 Aakash Android tablet has the power to change the world. After testing one out, we’d tend to agree.
VIVEK WADHWA | Eliminating these innovation black holes could do more to improve our lives and the economic future of our country than the latest Web-based social-networking applications. These long-standing problems are, for the most part, not sexy. But they exist in critically important sectors of the economy, such as chemical refining and automotive technology. Imagine a cleaner, more efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine….
Dear Peter: I want to congratulate you and political scientist and author Charles Murray on winning the debate in Chicago Wednesday against Northwestern University President Emeritus and Rasmussen College Chairman Henry Bienen and me on whether too many Americans go to college. I should not have been surprised considering Washington Post readers declared you the winners even before the debate had started.
What surprised me was how much we agreed on.
The Washington Post’s Vivek Wadhwa will debate PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel Wednesday evening regarding a subject the two have disagreed on for some time: Whether America’s youth should attend traditional colleges? Wadhwa argues that America’s next generation cannot afford to abandon the nation’s colleges and universities for customized, self-directed education. Thiel, who has offered 20 individuals $100,000 to drop out of college, argues that college has become overly expensive while providing students with few — if any — of the tools they need to become entrepreneurs.
But what do you think? Is it time to do away with the traditional college experience? Or, as countries such as India and China begin to see rapid expansion, is it time to push harder for more widespread, traditional schooling?
