Ikosmos

Can lawmakers who don’t have the courage or intelligence to outlaw texting while driving really be expected to create a saner tax structure? Hmmm. Developing a fairer tax environment is much less an economics problem than it is a political dilemma and, as many of you observed, it is unlikely that anything “tax” will be improved upon until there is some serious facial (and cultural) change in Washington. Politicians focus on one issue at a time, and pretend to have problems dealing with inter

The Western film industry, which has traditionally viewed India merely as a market for its movies, is suddenly keen to tap into Indian capital and talent. In early summer, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks closed a whopping 5 million co-production deal with Indian industrialist Anil Ambani’s Reliance Big Entertainment. And Charles Darby, the legendary British special effects artist who worked on epic movies like Titanic and Matrix, is building a special effects studio in Mumbai that he hopes wi

I’m posting up some work-in-progress entitled Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production (link to full pdf) . Below I’ve excerpted the introduction plus list of motivational questions. Comments (and critique) very welcome! Introduction In what follows the term ‘knowledge’ is here used broadly to signify all forms of information production including those involved in technological innovation, cultural creativity and academic advance. Today, thanks to rapid advances in IT, we have av