1 Cornell melds technology, management (Melissa Korn in The Wall Street Journal) Can coders become business leaders? Cornell University is betting they can. Next spring, the university's Johnson Graduate School of Management will launch a one-year MBA designed to give engineers and software developers a grounding in management skills. The combination is crucial, employers say, as information technology shifts from a back-office function to a core business strategy.
While the school is investing only a "modest" amount in the venture, officials say, the program, part of Cornell's New York City tech campus, is reimagining the MBA, dropping monthslong lecture courses in favor of learning by doing. Cornell went directly to startups and tech companies such as LinkedIn Corp. and Deloitte Services LP for advice on what to teach. Faculty and staff asked employers about the skills they are struggling to find, and how a person might go about acquiring those skills, says Doug Stayman, associate dean for MBA programs at Johnson. As a result, the proposed curriculum will include courses on software development, and leadership instruction will have a special focus on persuasion.
Unlike a traditional MBA, where courses last a semester, faculty will teach subjects such as design thinking and digital marketing in short bursts. Those will be followed by hands-on work exploring a startup project or pitching in on a company-sponsored assignment. Business students will work alongside engineering and computer-science students to prepare them for the group dynamic of life in technology. The MBA students will spend the first part of the year on Cornell's main campus in Ithaca, NY, taking summer courses in accounting, strategy and finance, with the rest in Manhattan. In January, they will spend a few weeks in Israel pursuing a hands-on project and learning about the regional tech industry.
The experiment has its risks. It could tarnish the reputation of Cornell's traditional b-school offerings if it falls flat or takes longer than expected to scale up. And if it does prove successful, there is little to stop other schools from simply copying the model. If the program pans out, it might help tech companies warm to the idea of hiring MBAs. Other schools are skeptical that what Cornell is doing is something new. "We're very happy that the world is finally coming around to what we've always been doing," says Michael Trick, senior associate dean at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. He contends that its existing MBA has already successfully married technology and business skills.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527023046071045792144322755278842
2 Pakistan -- Young country, old laws (Nadeem M Qureshi in Khaleej Times) It sounds like something out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Pakistan, in the scheme of things, is a young country. But the laws which govern it are old. Very old. Consider for example the country’s criminal law known as the Pakistan Penal Code. It was enacted in 1860 by the British Raj. Then called the Indian Penal Code, it was renamed when Pakistan was created in 1947. Or consider the Code of Criminal Procedure — the regulation that regulates the functioning of all criminal courts in Pakistan. It was enacted in 1898.
Other
laws include: The Code of Civil Procedure — 1908. The Income Tax Act — 1922. The
Frontier Crimes Regulation — 1901. Companies Act — 1923. Contract Act — 1872.
Charitable Endowment Act — 1890. Electricity Act — 1910. Destructive Insects
and Pests Act — 1914. Dramatic Performances Act — 1876. The list goes on and
on. The Raj ended in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned creating the
new nations of India and Pakistan. It made sense at the time for Pakistan, as
it found its feet, to retain the legal and administrative structure left by the
Raj. Today, 67 years later, the same laws remain. Yes, some minor modifications
have been made. These are largely superficial, to do with definitions,
terminology and temporal adjustments. But in essence, the entire legal system
of Pakistan remains as the British left it.
Especially
outrageous is the Frontier Crimes Regulation known widely by its acronym — FCR.
The FCR applies to the areas that are now called FATA — Federally Administered
Tribal Areas — homelands to the fiercely independent Pashtun. The British
discovered early — 1848 to be precise — that they would not be fully able to
control the Pashtun. So the FCR was born — a set of laws that allowed the
Pashtun limited independence to live according to their Islamic and tribal
traditions. But at the same time it gave the British the right to intervene
brutally and vindictively as needed in FATA.
In 2011 —
a full 110 years after it was enacted — it dawned on Islamabad that the FCR
needed to be updated. But except for some changes, it remains as it was. While
FCR is especially odious, the quality of one-sidedness it reflects, of
imbalance between the power of the state and that of the citizen, permeates the
entire legal structure of the Raj. That this structure should continue to
remain the law in Pakistan today when it has been free for 67 years is
unconscionable.
3 Amateur 3D printing for circuit boards (Caleb Garling in San Francisco Chronicle) Some Kickstarter projects to design and sell the gadgets of the future really catch the imagination. So far, Australian tech outfit Cartesian's campaign has raked in more than four times its stated goal of $30,000, still with two weeks to go. What do they want to produce? A 3D printer that prints circuitry for another 3D printer, and another, and another. Cartesian’s EX¹ takes design schematics and prints silver onto a substrate to make a new, albeit rough, circuit board. Sometimes this can be done in just about an hour.
To the uninitiated, 3D printing’s benefits are still abstract — how much value is there, really, in being able to print off another garden gnome. 3D printers have taken hold of the imagination of tinkers and hackers, but have yet to noticeably alter our day to day. Cartesian is not printing microprocessors, or resistors and capacitors. If a circuit board is the interstate system of a computer, microprocessors are something like the cars and passengers. Building those staggeringly complicated little brains with what amounts to a refined ink jet is still a long way off.
And while prototyping is an important part of research and development, Cartesian, like most 3D printer makers, seems to have a long way to go before its printers are churning out production grade products. Also, to acknowledge the semantics, Cartesian’s printer only operates in two dimensions as it lays down the silver — the “3D” aspect of it is really more the idea that its churning out a physical good rather than a term paper.
Even still, technological evolutions move in small increments and this is a notable one. Previously this process had often been done via the time consuming process of etching. Consumers and those small engineering companies will still have to wait until next year to get their hands on the EX¹. At that point, we can judge it for ourselves.
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/11/25/cartesian/
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