Thursday, 16 May 2002

The Guardian on the impact of the US Farm Bill

"The World Bank released an assessment of the impact of [US, Japanese and European agricultural supports] on one of Africa's most desperately poor countries, Burkina Faso, where many of the rural population scrape a living growing cotton for $1 a day.

It found that if the cotton price was not distorted by (mainly US) subsidies, the number of people living in poverty there could be halved in six years."

:: 5:32:42 PM       ::

For the commonplace book ...

Some more Einsteinims ... (origin)

(During a lecture) "This has been done elegantly by Minkowski; but chalk is cheaper than grey matter, and we will do it as it comes."
[Attributed by Pólya.]
Quoted in J E Littlewood, A Mathematician's Miscellany, 1953.

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
Quoted in L Infeld Quest, 1942.

"Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht."
[God is subtle, but he is not malicious.]
Inscribed in Fine Hall, Princeton University.

"If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew."
Address at the Sorbonne, Paris.

:: 10:15:50 AM       ::

The beauty of CSS for slide presentations

Dave Winer has asked for some CSS slide designs. I thought his own design was good. Slides should be "as simple as possible", as Einstein said,"... but no simpler"(In fact the origin of this lovely quote is the Reader's Digest! Can you believe that?).

CSS is not the tool of choice for simplicity, in my view. But it's the tool of choice for flexibility.

Simplicity is good but flexibility is good, too. Here's a simple slide -- with a little too much text -- that is constructed in CSS [click the image to see the slides 'live']

Now, here's the same slide with some minor CSS changes that is still simple, but not quite so stark.

The point is that both slides are basically the same. The bonus is that both slides degrade to the same simple text that can be read in any browser (even Lynx)

:: 9:40:34 AM       ::

Deadline in the WTO negotiations on access to services markets

This presentation -- created for the UN International Trade Center's "World Tr@de Net" -- is available for download by anyone with an interest. Or you can see the presentation 'live' here.

The web-based presentation (with notes) discusses the 'request' stage of the WTO services trade negotiations. If you own a services business or are in a services industry or trade organization you should really know about these negotiations and the June 2000 deadline . Your government has until the end of June to make requests on your behalf in the WTO negotiations for access to export markets.

Get the presentation and learn all about it!

:: 8:02:20 AM       ::