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Como estará a economia brasileira em 2012? E nossas empresas?

jccavalcanti — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:36:49 +0000

Caríssimos leitores: está voltando ao ar no dia de hoje a newsletter da Creativante, cujo título é “Como estará a economia brasileira em 2012? E nossas empresas?“, e que você pode acessar aqui, ou no seu formato pdf, aqui!

A Revolution in Higher Education is Underway

jccavalcanti — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:00:03 +0000

Post de ontem do blog do Prof. Marl Perry (mjperry.blogspot.com):

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A Revolution in Higher Education is Underway

A few days ago, I reported on how MITx could revolutionize higher education by offering free online classes along with a new benefit: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses from MIT, and if they prove they’ve learned the material through an assessment, they can pay a fee and receive a certificate from MITx.

In a related recent development, Felix Salmon and The Chronicle of Higher Education report this week that Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students in the fall through Stanford, has given up his tenured teaching position there to go full-time with Udacity, a new start-up firm he co-founded that offers low-cost online classes.

From The Chronicle:

“Mr. Thrun told the crowd at the Digital–Life–Design conference in Munich, Germany that his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.

One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it is designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll.

Teaching the course at Stanford, Mr. Thrun said, showed him the potential of digital education, which turned out to be a drug that he could not ignore.

“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

Watch his talk here. More evidence that the revolution in higher education in underway.

Economia da Defesa na UFPE

jccavalcanti — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:44:56 +0000

Neste primeiro semestre de 2012 estaremos dando o primeiro Curso de Economia da Defesa da UFPE.

A notícia saiu hoje no informativo da UFPE (ver boletim abaixo). Infelizmente saiu com um erro, uma vez que, ao contrário do noticiado, as aulas só começam no dia 27/02 (e não 21/02, como informado no boletim abaixo).

A ementa do curso pode ser baixada aqui!

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UFPE abre inscrições para primeiro curso de Economia da Defesa

O Departamento de Economia da UFPE promoverá o primeiro curso de Economia da Defesa, a partir do dia 21 de fevereiro. O curso será voltado para alunos de graduação interessados no assunto e acontecerá nas segundas-feiras das 18h50 às 20h30 e nas quartas das 20h30 às 22h.O objetivo do curso é mostrar os principais mecanismos e instituições relacionados à economia da defesa das nações em geral e mais especificamente do Brasil e sua influência no desenvolvimento econômico mundial.

Entre os conteúdos abordados estão Economia da defesa e segurança internacional, Gastos militares mundiais, Demanda por gastos militares, Gastos em defesa e crescimento econômico, Base industrial e de serviços militar, Economia do P&D militar, Economia do comércio de armas, Economia do comércio de armas, Economia política da manutenção da paz, Economia da defesa do Brasil e Estratégia nacional de defesa.

Os interessados podem se inscrever gratuitamente através do e-mail do professor José Carlos Cavalcanti, organizador do curso, ou de seu blog. As aulas serão realizadas no próprio Departamento de Economia.

Mais informações
Professor José Carlos Cavalcanti
cavalcanti.jc@gmail.com
www.jccavalcanti.wordpress.com

Why Obama announced Pentagon budget cuts this week?

jccavalcanti — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:41:32 +0000

O Presidente Barack Obama anunciou esta semana que os EUA irão cortar os gastos de defesa do Pentágono (o quartel geral do Departmento de Defesa americano) em centenas de bilhões de dólares nos próximos 10 anos.

Qual terá sido o argumento por trás destes cortes, sabendo-se que os EUA são a nação que mais gasta em defesa?

Uma explicação pode estar aqui!

Deindustrialization

jccavalcanti — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:15:57 +0000

Post do blog do Prof. Mark Perry no dia 01/01/2012 (mjperry.blogspot.com)!

Enquanto a desindustrialização é um fenômeno mundial, aqui no Brasil ainda tem gente (tanto em governo quanto fora dele) achando que pode reverter tal fenômeno!

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“Decline of Manufacturing” is Global Phenomenon: And Yet the World Is Much Better Off Because of It

The chart above shows manufacturing output as a share of GDP, for both the “world less the U.S.” and the U.S. alone, using United Nations data for GDP and its components at current prices in U.S. dollars from 1970 to 2010. We hear all the time from Donald Trump and others about the “decline of U.S. manufacturing,” about how nothing is made here any more, and how everything that used to be made here is now made in China and other low wage countries. An underlying assumption of most of those claims is that if the manufacturing base is shrinking in the U.S. (the “hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing”), that there is an offsetting manufacturing gain that is captured elsewhere in the world, as manufacturing output supposedly shifts from the U.S. to other countries, with world manufacturing remaining constant.

In reality, the chart above shows that the decline in U.S. manufacturing as share of GDP between 1970 and 2010 is really a global phenomenon as the entire world becomes increasingly a service-based economy. The manufacturing/GDP ratio in the U.S. fell from 24% to 13% between 1970 and 2010, while the world ratio fell at almost the same rate, from 27% to 16%.

As a share of GDP, manufacturing has declined in most countries since the 1970s. A few examples: Australia’s manufacturing/GDP ratio went from 22% in 1970 to 9.3% in 2010, Brazil’s ratio went from 24.5% to 13.5%, Canada’s from 19% to 10.5%, Germany’s from 31.5% to 18.7%, and Japan’s from 35% to 20%.

Bottom Line: When we hear claims that “nothing is made here anymore,” it’s not really the case that somebody else is making the stuff Americans used to make as it is the case that we (and others around the world) just don’t manufacture as much “stuff” any more in relation to the growing levels of national income, which the graph above clearly shows.

The main reason that the manufacturing/GDP ratio has declined in the U.S. and around the world is that productivity gains for durable goods have significantly lowered the price of those goods relative to: a) the prices of services, and b) household incomes, as I pointed out in this CD post on the “miracle of manufacturing.” In other words, the declining manufacturing/GDP ratio reflects declining prices for manufacturing goods, which is a sign of economic progress, not regress. The standard of living around the world today, along with global wealth and prosperity, are all much, much higher today with manufacturing representing 16% of total world output (including the U.S.) compared to 1970, when it was almost twice as high at almost 27%. And for that progress, we should celebrate, not complain about the “decline of manufacturing.”

Os números de 2011 deste blog

jccavalcanti — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:50:08 +0000

Os duendes de estatísticas do WordPress.com prepararam um relatório para o ano de 2011 deste blog.

Aqui está um resumo:

A sala de concertos da Ópera de Sydney tem uma capacidade de 2.700 pessoas. Este blog foi visitado cerca de 52.000 vezes em 2011. Se fosse a sala de concertos, eram precisos 19 concertos egostados para sentar essas pessoas todas.

Clique aqui para ver o relatório completo

China racing to expand data center capacity

jccavalcanti — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:18:07 +0000

Do blog http://www.kurzweilai.net!

China racing to expand data center capacity

December 29, 2011

Source: Network World

China is building dozens, maybe hundreds of large data centers and vast “cloud cities” — industrial zones that aim to provide the foundations to support as many as 20 data centers — to support the needs of its fast-growing online population, estimated now at close to 500 million.

The data centers will help to meet escalating demand from telecom providers, and for services such as e-commerce, online banking and e-government, and will also provide computing infrastructure for overseas firms looking to expand in China.

The boom is providing opportunities for outside firms such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM. “We have more people in China focused on data center development and strategy than, I believe, in any country in the world,” said Rick Einhorn, worldwide director for HP’s Critical Facilities Services group.

Some are skeptical that companies will pick China as a base for providing IT services internationally. “There are questions around ownership rights for data and other assets,” said IDC analyst Michelle Bailey.

A former security consultant who worked on data center projects in China said foreign companies have three main areas of risk: local employees absconding with data, traffic being monitored or interfered with, and the loss of equipment during sudden “inspections” by Chinese police.

Margareth Thatcher

jccavalcanti — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:45:06 +0000

Este vídeo, que acabo de ver no site do Prof. Mark Perry (mjperry.blogspot.com), diz respeito a uma transmissão do Parlamento Britânico que tive a oportunidade de ver, ao vivo, de Manchester/UK, e nunca mais me esqueci do desempenho da Primeira Ministra Margareth. Vou ficar no aguardo deste novo filme!

Abaixo a transcrição do que o Prof. Perry escreveu no seu post:

“Meryl Streep was interviewed tonight on “60 Minutes” about her new leading role – as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the upcoming movie “The Iron Lady.” That reminded me of the classic video clip above of Margaret Thatcher’s last House of Commons Speech on November 22, 1990, where she addresses income inequality and expresses her opposition to a single European currency.”

Boas Festas e um Próspero 2012

jccavalcanti — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:10:17 +0000

2011 está acabando e 2012 está quase à nossa porta. Por esta razão, nós que fazemos este blog há 5 anos, que produzimos a newsletter da Creativante (www.creativante.com.br), e desenvolvemos nesta empresa serviços ligados à economia da inovação e das tecnologias de informação e comunicação- TICs, queremos desejar a todos Boas Festas e um Próspero 2012!

Did Coffee Fuel the Age of Enlightenment?

jccavalcanti — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:11:00 +0000

Dica do blog do Prof. Greg Mankiw: