A New Start

FT; Room to Read helps educate Laotian women

Room to Read helps educate Laotian women

By David Pilling

Published: December 5 2009 00:21 | Last updated: December 5 2009 00:21

Somphet Phongphachanh with pupils

It is 7.30am and Somphet Phongphachanh is already in tears. The trigger for her emotion is a reminder of the previous day’s encounter with a girl forced to live far away from home so she can attend school. The girl, Mome, had herself broken down as she explained how her family could not afford her daily transport costs to a distant school, obliging her to leave home to continue her education.

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Mome, 15, who now attends a boarding school for ethnic Laotians, is the beneficiary of a scholarship from Room to Read, an educational charity that the FT is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal. Though Mome’s circumstances are not ideal, she is flourishing at the school, which caters to girls from groups with a high risk of dropping out. Her ambition is to be a doctor.

That may sound far-fetched. But Somphet, now Room to Read’s country director, achieved exactly that. The daughter of an illiterate mother, she became a doctor after winning a scholarship to study medicine in neighbouring Vietnam. She returned to Laos in the 1990s but her real love, born of the opportunities she had received, was education. She gave up medicine to work for a Japanese educational charity before moving to Room to Read, whose operations in Laos she helped establish.

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The Laotian education system is so thinly spread that some schools are designated “complete” to distinguish them from the thousands of others that cannot offer a full complement of classes. Many “incomplete” schools teach children in multi-grade classes, where pupils from different age groups are taught together. “Some schools hardly have any textbooks. They say: ‘Somphet, this is the only textbook we have,’” she says.

Somphet, like all local Room to Read staff a native of the country she works in, was attracted to the organisation by its low overheads and insistence that it work only with committed communities. “We want our libraries to be run by the communities themselves,” she says.

In just five years, her organisation will have established nearly 700 libraries, built 140 schools and put more than 800 girls on long-term scholarships. At one school, where Room to Read worked with villagers to build new classrooms and a library, Somphet’s visit prompts a small religious festival. A priest chants over a floral display lit with candles and the villagers tie dozens of lucky threads around Somphet’s arms. She is then presented with sliced-up chicken and banana spirit. When the ceremony is over, Somphet stands and gives an impassioned speech, talking for a good 10 minutes. The women mop their reddened eyes.

When it is over, she turns to the FT and translates. “They want me to be president,” she says with a shrug of the shoulders. “But I tell them: ‘Somphet is too busy.’” It goes almost without saying that she is in tears.

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

LHZB: “为什么小六会考前二名都是中国来的？”

　中国不乏古人读书苦、读苦书、苦读书的典故，如“凿壁借光”，说的是西汉经学家，当过丞相的匡衡出身农家，自幼尝尽贫困，晚上要读书，在墙壁上凿了一个 小洞，“偷取”邻居家里的烛光。后又因看上有钱人家家里丰富藏书，而到那人家当用人，不取工资，只要主人让他读家里的藏书。这类例子体现的是，无论环境如 何恶劣，只要一心向学，意志坚定，EQ素质高，就能在书中寻找到乐趣和富足。

　　反观新加坡莘莘学子的“苦读”，到快餐馆，桌上有可乐、汉堡“陪读”；或到机场大厦，享受世界上最佳机场所提供的环境，有来往的人群“陪读”。

==

“为什么小六会考前二名都是中国来的？”

（2009-12-05）

早报导读 ● 严孟达 　　一个从小就到一个完全陌生环境求学的孩子，要出人头地，除了个人资质之外，更重要的是他们的心理素质。中国来的学生降级插班，心理素质欠佳的小孩子可能因此泄气，但对于心理素质好的小孩子则可能是一种推动力，他们因此更加倍的去学习、去弥补慢了两步的距离。 漫步 “为什么小六会考前二名都是中国来的？” 　　昨天本报交流站的一名读者的这个问题，不知有谁可以回答。 　　这样的问题应该不是冲着教育部而来，教育部官员可以放心。 　　也许有人会说，状元女当年来新加坡插班时降了一年，也就是说，状元女比其他同学大一岁，占了便宜。一岁之别能占多少便宜，读者们心知肚明。叫活了近一甲子的我去考小六，肯定考不出一个状元。年头和年尾出生的同年学生，基本上也算是相差一岁，年头生的也未必比较强。 　　今年全国状元邱碧晴四年级随家人到新加坡，根据教育部惯例，原被学校要求降两级，在她的父母要求下，启发小学特别开恩，只降她一级，从小三读起。 　　考全国第二名的陈牧禾，小三到新加坡读书，就在母亲坚持不降级的情况下，进入名校南小。这两间学校，一为邻里学校，一为名校，但都能在教育部政策下灵活处理，也才不致“走宝”。 　 　全国第一和第二的例子也许让我们看到了中国教育制度的先进，中国学生从小便有很好的数理基础，因此来到新加坡，除了英文之外，其他学科容易接轨，甚至程 度还胜一筹。从另一个角度来看，这也显示出新加坡教育的优越性，让底子好的学生来到这里也能有所发挥，否则的话，“橘越淮变枳”，再好的材料来到这里也会 变质。 其实，新加坡学生在国际上的表现一向引人注目，尤其是在数学奥林匹克比赛；我们的小学数学课本也被美国一些地方的学校引进。 　　教育部的降级规定并非没有道理，对中国学生也应该是利多于弊。一、两年的降级是一种“过渡”，让他们从原本的华文单语环境顺利转换到新加坡的以英语为主的环境。 　　一个从小就到一个完全陌生环境求学的孩子，要出人头地，除了个人资质之外，更重要的是他们的心理素质。中国来的学生降级插班，心理素质欠佳的小孩子可能因此泄气，但对于心理素质好的小孩子则可能是一种推动力，他们因此更加倍的去学习、去弥补慢了两步的距离。 　 　中国不乏古人读书苦、读苦书、苦读书的典故，如“凿壁借光”，说的是西汉经学家，当过丞相的匡衡出身农家，自幼尝尽贫困，晚上要读书，在墙壁上凿了一个 小洞，“偷取”邻居家里的烛光。后又因看上有钱人家家里丰富藏书，而到那人家当用人，不取工资，只要主人让他读家里的藏书。这类例子体现的是，无论环境如 何恶劣，只要一心向学，意志坚定，EQ素质高，就能在书中寻找到乐趣和富足。 　　反观新加坡莘莘学子的“苦读”，到快餐馆，桌上有可乐、汉堡“陪读”；或到机场大厦，享受世界上最佳机场所提供的环境，有来往的人群“陪读”。 　　所以，若要回答“为什么小六会考前二名都是中国来的？”，我的回答是，这是中国人苦读的DNA，千百年传下来，没法子！

FT: Unscientific America

Unscientific America

Review by Clive Cookson

Published: August 24 2009 04:57 | Last updated: August 24 2009 04:57

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books £15.99, 224 pages

Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, a bestseller in 2005, was one of the most powerful political books of George W. Bush’s presidency. His account of a right-wing strategy to twist scientific evidence in favour of political ideology resonated with liberal and intellectual opinion in the US.

But the author has not been sitting around complacently following the election of a science-friendly Obama administration. Mooney, a journalist, has teamed up with Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist, to write a polemic about scientific illiteracy and the dangerous gulf between science and American culture/politics. If the war is over, they say, urgent “nation building” is needed so that extreme anti-science forces can never return to power.

Unscientific America pays homage to novelist CP Snow, whose “Two Cultures” lecture ignited a similar debate in Britain 50 years ago. “Snow knew what really matters,” the authors write. “You might say our book is merely here to provide half a century of transatlantic updating.”

Yet, for Mooney and Kirshenbaum, the Snow era was the heyday of American science. In the late 1950s and 1960s, a scientific elite had the ear of Republican and Democrat administrations, which poured billions into research and education. After around 1970 many factors, from the rise of the religious right to growing environmentalism, undermined science’s role in public policy and esteem.

The main targets of Unscientific America are scientists themselves. On the whole they have hidden away from the public, avoided political engagement and got on quietly with their research, communicating only with their peers through specialist journals and conferences.

To make matters worse, the authors say, scientists have tended to react with jealousy and scorn to those colleagues who have made an effort to communicate through the mass media. The most glaring example is late astronomer Carl Sagan, America’s greatest scientific communicator of the late 20th century, who received as much jealousy and scorn as thanks from his fellow scientists.

But Mooney and Kirshenbaum go too far in claiming that Sagan, the hero of Unscientific America, was “persecuted” by the scientific establishment for his enthusiastic popularising. For example, they make much of the National Academy of Sciences denying him membership but ignore the award to Sagan of the academy’s top honour, the Public Welfare Medal.

More generally, my own experience suggests that the authors underestimate the improvement since the 1970s in scientists’ ability and willingness to communicate with the outside world. Researchers in the US and UK have become more prepared to answer questions, and proactive in offering information to the media. The result is a distinct improvement in the quality of science reporting.

It is a matter of debate to what extent better science coverage by the media has affected general levels of scientific literacy. Polls suggest little change over the past 30 years – most notoriously, 45 per cent or so of Americans agree that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years. But other social and educational factors are at work, too. Increased scientific activity in the media may have counteracted what would otherwise have been a decline in scientific literacy.

For the future, the authors are right to call on scientists to engage more with the outside world. Science-based issues have never been more important for human civilisation.

Ultimately, however, Unscientific America is patchy. It will interest anyone engaged in science communications – but it does not have the originality or urgency to win a readership on the scale of The Republican War on Science.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web

FT: Unsentimental Education; Falling down

An unsentimental education

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: July 17 2009 19:29 | Last updated: July 17 2009 19:29

Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. “The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime,” Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow’s jobs if you do not know what tomorrow’s jobs will be?

President Barack Obama’s call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in “community colleges” is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.

Community colleges now accommodate half the nation’s undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that “community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600).”

But this is confusing two different kinds of educational enterprise. Traditional four-year schools are primarily (and avowedly) centres of research for their faculties and secondarily (and unavowedly) providers of class credentials for their students. This is expensive. Community colleges serve a different purpose. They match would-be employees to the technology around them. This, it turns out, can be done rather cheaply.

Roughly since the start of the baby boom, US policy has assumed that four-year colleges provide more to society than two-year ones. Maybe this is correct, but the reasoning is muddled. Four-year college degrees were correlated with membership in the ruling class. So politicians have thought that, if only we could get the entire population to spend four years reading Foucault, name-dropping, learning to tell a Poussin from a Titian and passing out at beer parties, then everyone would earn a ruling-class salary. US society, in this utopian view, would resemble Latin American armies as they exist in comic novels, with 10 generals for every private.

There are some traces of this kind of magical thinking in Mr Obama’s plan. He misidentifies as a major problem the fact that half the people who start community college drop out. But the very thing he extols about community colleges – their success at matching workers to jobs – explains a good deal of the drop-out rate. If a person who enrols for retraining after losing his old-economy job finds a satisfactory new one, or gets the old one back, what do you expect him to do? Mr Obama is a dogmatic believer in more schooling. In a speech to Congress in February, he said: “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” Of course, if the bar of a high school diploma is set so low that anyone can attain it, it is hard to see why any intelligent person would hang around waiting to collect one.

It must be remembered that Mr Obama is addressing an important constituency. Community colleges constitute the bull’s-eye of the US swing vote. Roughly speaking, for the past three decades, Republicans have been the party of those whose schooling extended through college. Democrats have been the party of high school drop-outs and people with PhDs. Since the National Election Pool began breaking voters down by education this way in 1980, the most sensitive group has been those who attended “some college” but not enough to graduate. They have picked the winner in every one of the last eight presidential elections. Of all fundable institutions, community colleges are closest to capturing this demographic.

There are always problems when a society shifts its paradigm of production. But there are also training problems specific to an information economy. Old economy jobs were more collective, more social. A guy who “got inside” a factory at age 16, even as an errand boy, would soon figure out what everyone in the company did and could use his connections to rise within it. Plumbers had plumbers’ helpers, and being one was good preparation for being a plumber. But today, a lot of information technology jobs involve sitting alone in front of a computer. No one “learns the ropes” there. It takes more than just on-the-job training to operate monitors in an emergency room.

Community colleges are well suited to fill this deficit in the handing down of vocational lore. Mr Obama notes that three out of every five nurses come from community colleges. Properly funded, two-year schools can be the place to train people for jobs that do not yet exist in large numbers, from installing solar panels to repairing wind turbines. It is still not obvious that the government belongs in the business of matching workers to companies. (Why should training programmes be underwritten by taxpayers rather than the companies that profit from them?) But the president has acted in a spirit of pragmatism that has been alien to the US education establishment for a long time. If Mr Obama feels he must throw money at the education system, he has chosen the right place to throw it.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

More columns at www.ft.com/christophercaldwell

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Falling down

By Sarah O'Connor

Published: July 17 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 17 2009 03:00

Brian Gutrick travelled 1,200 miles and paid $12,000 for a fresh start.

The newly married construction worker wanted a job with better prospects and more stability, so he took out a student loan and headed from Virginia to a trade school in Alabama to study heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

Brian finished the "H-vac" programme in 2007 at the top of his class, but he landed in an economy already beginning to teeter. Before he could find a foothold, the country had slid into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

"I've been beating doors down, I've sent out at least five hundred résumés and just no answer," says the 32-year-old, who has still not found an H-vac job. "I have three kids and a wife, I have to do something."

He is persistent. He wears a suit and tie to interviews - "just for an H-vac job, some people go in dirty boots and everything!" - and takes proof of his grades and accreditation. But he is getting nowhere and he is not alone. Since he left trade school, 7.2m Americans have lost their jobs, bringing the total number number of unemployed to 14.7m. The unemployment rate now stands at 9.5 per cent and will almost certainly hit double digits before the year is out.

This blow to the labour market in the world's biggest economy caught many unawares. In 2007 the US had one of the lower unemployment rates in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, but now it has one of the highest, beaten only by Spain, Ireland, Hungary and Slovakia.

That has thrown into stark relief the fragility of the country's social safety net, as the economic disaster threatens to unleash a social cataclysm too. People who have lost their jobs are losing their health insurance and their homes. The number relying on government food stamps has risen by 6.2m since the recession started, and they now feed a near-record one in nine Americans.

Where did it all go wrong?

In 2007 the US was feeling pretty smug about its easy-to-hire, easy-to-fire labour force. It was adapting more quickly than its peers as manufacturing moved to Asia, and people like Brian were merrily shuttling from job to job in search of a better life. While continental Europe has managed to create lots of jobs this decade, its labour markets are still characterised by intransigent workers and structurally high unemployment.

"[We] may be best poised to take advantage of the coming changes on a global scale precisely because we are so good at adjusting," wrote Austan Goolsbee in The New York Times in 2007, then an economist and now a member of President Barack Obama's council of economic advisers. "The world economy may be tough on your industry but look on the bright side: you could be French."

Today, that might not be such a bad prospect. France's (albeit already high) unemployment rate has crept up just one percentage point to 9.3 per cent since 2007, according to the OECD. Germany's has actually fallen from 8.4 per cent to 7.7.

"The US labour market is extraordinarily flexible, [which] in normal times is a great asset," says Robert Reich, who was President Bill Clinton's labour secretary. "When you have an economic downdraft like this, that same flexibility can be a severe detriment." Firms on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to cut costs as demand dropped, but in the US employers have a so-called "at will" right to sack staff at any time for any reason.

When panic ripped through the country last year, firms used that right to slash payrolls, which constitute around 70 per cent of most companies' costs. Economists watched in horror as the job losses mounted: 380,000 in October, 597,000 in November, 681,000 in December.

Unlike their European peers, many Americans losing their jobs discovered they had no way to replace their lost incomes. State unemployment benefits, which pay around a third of your salary, generally require you to have worked full-time in your last job for at least a year. More than half the unemployed have turned out to be ineligible for them, Mr Gutrick included.

"The safety net . . . has become obsolete," says Prof Reich. "That has proved to be not only a surprise to people, but a painful one." Unemployment insurance was instituted in 1935 at a point when most people who lost their jobs had been in full-time work for a number of years. "Now many job losers have been in their jobs for only six months to a year, or they are working part-time, or they are independent contractors or free agents of some sort."

Sterling Taylor is a "free agent" - doing construction jobs as and when they come up, a few days here, a few weeks there. Back in the housing boom, it was a full-time job. "I remember times about two years ago you could go and apply for an ad, you get the job just like that, no questions or nothing asked, you're in," he says wistfully. "Now? Shoot, it's ridiculous. It just ain't happening."

These days the 42-year-old only scrapes together around two days of work a week. He is part of a vast group of people who are not captured by the unemployment rate. In statistician-speak, he works "part-time for economic reasons" - he works fewer than 34 hours a week because he cannot find anyone to pay him for more.

In the past year the number of people in Mr Taylor's position has more than doubled from 4.4m to 9m, or 5.8 per cent of the labour market - the highest since records began. These are not just casual workers and freelancers; many big companies have also cut hours to reduce costs. As a result, the nation famed for its long-hours culture now works an average 33 hours a week, the lowest on record.

For labour market debutants just leaving school and college, the situation is challenging. Melissa McCrumb, 23, graduated from the University of Virginia this summer and now works as a waitress, earning $2 (£1.20, €1.40) an hour plus tips. The restaurant's owners now cook four or five nights a week themselves to save paying a chef.

Ms McCrumb does not mind waitressing for a bit as she decides what to do with her life, but the clock is ticking. In December she has to start paying back her $40,000 student loan.

"I am really worried: come December, am I going to be able to find a job? A lot of my friends are not finding anything," she says. Some of them have re-enrolled in master's courses "just to bide some time" while others have moved back in with their parents. All are rethinking what jobs they are willing to do, given that they too are ineligible for unemployment benefits because they have never worked full-time.

"I have a ton of friends that are just applying for everything right now. I think maybe five years down the road everyone will re-evaluate, but for now it seems like we're not in a position to be too choosy."

The army of Ms McCrumbs charging into the labour force has helped push the unemployment rate for 20- to 24 year-olds past 15 per cent. Their influx also makes life much tougher for the generations above them.

Sabrina Johnson used to be assistant manager at a discount retail store before leaving to take care of her mother. Now the 53-year-old spends her days traipsing from mall to mall looking for another job, but she finds herself competing with youngsters.

"It's cheaper to hire two of them than me, cause they're going to work for that $6, $7 an hour," she says. She does not receive unemployment benefits either, nor does she have health insurance. "You just kind of go through your savings little by little to make it through."

The knock-on effects for communities are considerable as people cut back on spending, further contributing to economic slowdown.

Brian, Sterling, Melissa and Sabrina all live in Charlottesville, a Virginia town of 40,000 encircled by tree-lined mountains. On paper, the town looks like it is having a pretty good recession. Insulated by the economic engine of the University of Virginia, the unemployment rate might have doubled but it is still at only 6 per cent.

But the numbers do not tell the whole story. Sitting beneath a parasol by an outdoor public pool, Dave Norris, the mayor, tells a darker tale.

There has always been a big disparity between housing costs and wages in Charlottesville, because the presence of so many students and faculty drives up rents and house prices. On average Americans spend around a third of their income on housing costs; in Charlottesville it is more like 40 to 50 per cent.

So when people started losing their jobs, many quickly found they could no longer meet rent or mortgage payments. "We have a large number of families and individuals that are going homeless," says Mr Norris. "We've seen many people who never expected . . . to find themselves homeless . . . but when they lose a job it's a downward spiral and before they know it they're living in their cars. And then their car gets repossessed."

The city tries to ensure that homeless children can stay in their own schools, by paying to transport them there. "We'll even send a taxi out to the homeless shelter," says Mr Norris.

Charities and churches are also trying to catch people that fall through the flimsy government safety net. The local food bank is facing unprecedented demand, and churches have been inundated with requests for help to pay utility bills.

"Even though we do have a very strong civic sector here and the churches are also very involved, it's not enough," says Mr Norris.

For all that, Americans have so far proved stoic in the face of hardship: Ms Johnson is going to keep demanding application forms; Ms McCrumb is just glad she has a job; Mr Taylor believes things will get better.

Brian Gutrick, meanwhile, has a plan to get onto an apprenticeship so that one day his credentials are simply too good to turn down.

"We're a very resilient people," says Mr Norris, as children splash and squeal in the pool behind him. "We haven't succumbed to despair. Yet."

Social safety net

'Fire at will' labour market remains resistant to reform

The Obama administration is trying to restructure many aspects of the economy but will its efforts extend to American labour market?

So far that does not look likely. There is growing discontent about the sluggishness of the stimulus package but little popular pressure for systemic change to the way jobs are created and lost. For those who support America's flexible system and believe it will help the economy bounce back, that is a relief. "With all the bad things that are happening, this is one area where I don't see an immediate threat," says Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute, a free market think-tank.

As for improving the safety net, the administration is prioritising healthcare reform but has also paid attention to unemployment insurance. The stimulus package offered free money to states that modernised their insurance schemes by making part-time workers eligible and allowing people to use their most recent earnings to claim. But even this prompted some Republican state governors to refuse to accept stimulus funds on the basis that extending eligibility would lead to higher taxes on businesses, which fund unemployment insurance.

In Virginia, the Republican state legislature used this argument to reject $125m (£75m, €90m) in funds for unemployment benefits, prompting outcry from Democrats. The state will elect a new governor this year, and the extent to which that incident becomes a campaign issue should provide some clues as to the strength of public opinion. Harold Folley of the Virginia Organising Project tries to persuade the unemployed to meet their elected politicians and push for change but says it is like "pulling alligator's teeth".

Back in 1996, President Bill Clinton pledged to "end welfare as we know it" and reformed the system to give responsibility for welfare programmes to the states, and limit the length of time people could claim. Any attempt to expand the safety net would likely be seen as rowing back from that. Many would charge that it would hamper competitiveness and move the US closer to "socialism".

Robert Reich, Mr Clinton's labour secretary, believes the trajectory of the recession will determine whether reform takes place. Americans "have optimism in our gene pool, and if this recession looks like it is coming to an end . . . this year or early next, I doubt we will have structural reforms," he says. But a growing number of economists predict the economy will remain in bad shape for much of next year and that any recovery will leave the labour market lagging behind, as was the case following the previous recession.

Professor Reich believes the recession will be deeper than many assume, stretching into next year. "At that point there will be much more political support for expanding social safety nets, not only because the recession will have proven to be so long and deep - claiming so many Americans - but because the midterm elections of 2010 will be coming up. Many members of Congress will have heard from constituents who are desperate."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: Encouraging Competitiveness - Psyched Out

Encouraging competitiveness

Psyched out

Jul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The fewer the competitors, the harder they try

Alamy

Calculate the answer when n approaches infinity

WHAT relationship there is between the number of participants in a competition and the motivation of the competitors has long eluded researchers. Does the presence of a lot of rivals stimulate action or lead someone to give up hope? It is more than an academic question. Or, rather, it is a very academic question indeed, for it may affect the way that examinations are conducted if they are to be a fair test for all.

To investigate the matter two behavioural researchers, Stephen Garcia at the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor at the University of Haifa in Israel, looked at the results of the SAT university entrance examination in America in 2005. This test generates a score supposedly based on the test-taker’s verbal and analytical prowess.

The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased. And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.

These results are intriguing, but lend themselves to more than one explanation. To find out whether they were caused by a psychological effect related to the number of perceived competitors, or were merely a consequence of the greater distraction produced by crowding more people together, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor conducted an experiment. They asked 74 university students to take a timed, easy general-knowledge quiz which they were asked to finish as quickly as possible without compromising accuracy. Each student completed the test alone, but half were told they were competing against ten other people and the other half that they were competing against 100. All were informed that those whose completion times were in the top 20% would receive $5.

The results backed up the psychological hypothesis. Students who believed they were competing against only ten people finished in an average of 28.95 seconds. Those who believed they were competing against 100 averaged 33.15 seconds.

Curious as to why mere belief that he was facing more competitors would alter an individual’s performance, the two researchers ran a second experiment. They asked students to imagine they were running a five-kilometre race against 50 people and then against 500 (or, in half of the cases, the other way round). In both notional races the top 10% of competitors would get a $1,000 prize. The researchers told the students to rate, on a seven-point scale, how much faster than normal they would run in each notional race, with a one being slightly faster than normal and a seven being the fastest of their lives. The average value in the competition against 50 others was 5.43; in the competition against 500 it was 4.89—a result consistent with the other two parts of the study.

When that bit of the test was over, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor then asked the participants a series of questions commonly used by psychologists to evaluate an individual’s tendency to compare himself with others in a social environment. They found that those with the highest tendency to make such comparisons had the lowest scores in the notional race against 500 others. These socially aware individuals are, as it were, looking around, assessing the situation and thinking that it is not worth trying too hard.

In their report on the matter in Psychological Science, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor dub their discovery the “n-effect” since “n” represents any numerical value in mathematics. If confirmed, it may mean not only that examination halls should be kept small— or, at least, the same size for all participants so that the playing field is level—but also that other competitive activities should be scaled down for best results.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Just Plane Fun

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/mayjun/pc/icon.html

PURSUITS

Just Plane Fun

Kirk Hawkins's company gives sport flying a lift.

by John Maas

STYLE POINTS: Hawkins, with his prototype, credits Stanford for Icon's design philosophy.

Brad Hines

Kirk Hawkins’s invention has much in common with the European roadsters Hawkins has long admired. It has an elegant interior, leather bucket seats, and a sleek, aerodynamic design. Even its name, Icon A5, suggests a sports-car pedigree. But whereas a Porsche is merely fast, the A5 can really fly.

An amphibious airplane with a 34-foot wingspan and a 100-horsepower engine, the A5 is part of the first generation of a stylish class of “light-sport” aircraft designed for casual pilots. According to Hawkins, founder and CEO of Icon, the plane “allows people who were intimidated by aviation to say, ‘I can do this.’”

Hawkins, MS ’95, MS ’05, says the inspiration for the A5 runs back a long way. “I was a power-sports kid,” enthralled with ATVs and Jet Skis. His interest in motor sports led him to aviation: he spent eight years flying F-16s in the Air Force. Then, while Hawkins was a student at the Graduate School of Business in 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced a “sport-pilot license,” allowing virtually anyone with a valid driver’s license and 20 hours of training to fly.

Hawkins believed that sport flying provided a viable business model for the plane he was dreaming up. Adventurous high-end consumers might become pilots if the right airplane could convince them to get certified. He recruited Steen Strand, whom he had met in a course in Stanford’s product design program, and the two incorporated Icon in 2006. Engineering began that same year, and a flying prototype took off in summer 2008. The company is looking for a permanent manufacturing facility, and expects to begin mass production soon after flight testing is completed later this year.

Hawkins’s flying experience shaped the A5’s functionality, but it was his exposure to the product design program that influenced the plane’s look and feel. Hawkins credits the program’s multidisciplinary nature and consumer-oriented approach for Icon’s product strategy. “We wouldn’t exist without Stanford,” he says. Strand, Icon’s chief operating officer, agrees, pointing out the company’s signature accent color. “That’s why it’s red,” he jokes.

IN DEMAND: Orders for the A5 are strong despite the recession.

Courtesy Icon

The FAA has 13 design stipulations for the planes sport pilots are allowed to fly: no more than one passenger in addition to the pilot, for example, and a relatively plodding top speed of 120 knots. Established companies and upstarts alike hurried to produce light-sport designs, although their approaches varied. “Most of the companies were making less-expensive versions of their current aircraft,” Strand says. “I wanted to make an airplane look cool.”

The A5 design team saw the restrictions as an opportunity. The plane’s low operating speed demands less aerodynamic precision and therefore allows greater aesthetic freedom. Thus, features like the crease on the nose that Strand points to as a choice made purely for appearance’s sake.

Strand, when asked about the design inspirations for the A5, rattles off Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche and BMW. Many Icon designers first worked in the auto industry, and it shows in features like the A5’s instrument panel—an easily readable set of dials more like a dashboard than the intimidating array of knobs and gauges in a traditional cockpit.

• Icon Aircraft: Sport Flying Revolution

The A5’s wings fold flat against the fuselage, making it small enough to store in most garages, and it can be towed behind a car or truck—in an Icon-designed trailer.

One might assume the biggest barrier to success for the fledgling company would be the cost of the airplane—$139,000—at a time when even wealthy potential customers have been hammered by the recession. And the potential market is relatively small—although growing, the number of licensed sport pilots is less than 5,000. Yet Icon’s order book continues to fill, and Hawkins and Strand report strong interest, especially from overseas. At press time, Icon held deposits on more than 300 planes, enough orders to carry the Los Angeles-based company from the first delivery in late 2010 through 2013. And Icon has no immediate plans to move beyond the light-sport category. “There are so many to be made and sold,” Strand says. “Why bother?”

As for Hawkins, the tough business climate is just another challenge to relish and overcome. “We set extremely high bars for ourselves,” he says. “You’re always pushing it.”

JOHN MAAS, ’08, is a freelance writer in Berkeley.

FT: A crash course in emerging technologies

A crash course in emerging technologies

By David Gelles

Published: April 24 2009 11:27 | Last updated: April 24 2009 11:27

Singularity n. A point of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General Relativity. According to the big bang theory, a gravitational singularity existed at the beginning of the universe. Singularities are also believed to exist at the centre of black holes.
– The American Heritage Science Dictionary

In a spare one-room office at Nasa’s Silicon Valley campus, a small band of futurists is plotting to save the world. The means are not a revolutionary technology or a new world order (though both may be byproducts). Rather, a new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity ­University is going to solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change. Among others. Through a combination of techno-optimism, wide-eyed idealism and belief in the perfectibility of human beings, these well-connected geeks are creating an institution meant to legitimise their most extreme thinking.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

Forgive them for dreaming big. We’re in, after all, the cradle of the personal computer industry, the neighbourhood that brought forth Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Intel. The Googleplex is just north of SU’s office, Yahoo’s campus just south. Nasa tests the wings of its spacecraft here. Stanford University is up the road. And the Singularity team has landed some of these titans as partners in its endeavour.

Nasa offers more than office space: it’s the host, and will grant access to its specialists and facilities. Pete Worden, the director at Nasa’s Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Centre, is an enthusiastic supporter and brought the university on campus. Meanwhile, Google, the first corporate partner, has contributed $250,000 – and Google co-founder Larry Page attended the first meeting on the university last autumn. As one Singularity staffer said: “Here in Silicon Valley, we’re at the centre of the vortex.”

On a crisp February morning, I made the 45-minute drive south from San Francisco to Ames, hoping to understand how Singularity University might change the world – and why it had backing from such an illustrious group of supporters. After passing through a heavily fortified guard booth, I steered into the heart of the Ames campus, a tranquil collection of sandy, Spanish colonial-style buildings with well-manicured lawns. The stateliest of these structures, topped with a bell tower, is the Lunar Sciences building, where (funnily enough) scientists study the moon. Singularity University is coming together on the ground floor.

. . .

The office has all the trappings of a technology start-up: frisbees and footballs scattered about, a corner full of free snacks and drinks, and a communal table around which all members of the team work. Salim Ismail (his blog’s title: “You’ve Got Ismail!”) is the school’s executive director and a veteran of several technology-based start-ups. Forty-something with a bald pate and an easy smile, Ismail describes himself as “passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine [and] tennis” with “a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy”. In other words, he’s the archetypal Silicon Valley male.

The Singularity University’s founders at the Lunar Science Institute

Ismail and his team are scrambling to get ready for Singularity University’s first nine-week course, set to commence on June 29. More than 1,200 applicants have expressed interest in attending; 40 will be selected for the first term; $25,000 a person covers tuition, room and board. The inaugural class will be a mix of graduate students and businessmen and women with time to spare. Classes are eight hours a day, six days a week.

During the first three weeks of the programme, students will receive an introduction to the school’s 10 main areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and futures studies and forecasting. In the same way that a liberal arts education delivers an overview of literature, history and social theory, Singularity University intends to give students a crash course in subjects such as neuroscience and “human enhancement”. The second three weeks of the programme will give students a chance to study, in-depth, a subject new to them. An expert in nanotechnology, for example, might take on energy and the environment. “The biggest innovations in the world happen when you cross two disparate fields,” Ismail says. “[Johannes] Kepler looked at the moon and the tides and thought they may be connected. Today, people are doing 3D ‘printing’ of human organs using stem cells.” Linking early astronomy to stem cell technology is a bit of a stretch, but sure, intellectual cross-pollination can spur on innovation.

Will this model really vary so vastly from ordinary higher education? “Unfortunately, today’s graduate education is very narrow,” says Peter Diamandis, one of the school’s founders and the chief executive of the X Prize Foundation – which administers multimillion-dollar prizes for advancements in space, automotive and genomics technologies. “You become an expert on a particular channel on a nerve cell. That’s great, it allows you to go down deep, but there’s no place that allows you to step back, look at the big issues, and think.”

During the final three weeks of the programme, students will reconvene and focus on “one of the big, hairy challenges facing mankind”, such as hunger, climate change or energy scarcity. One lead contender for the first year’s challenge was how to administer telemedicine in remote parts of the world – but that has been eclipsed by the vaguer, Miss America-esque question: “how can you positively impact one billion people in a decade?”

As part of my tour, Ismail takes me around the Ames campus, or at least those few parts of it we are allowed to enter. At the west end of the complex, Nasa’s kilometre-long wind tunnels (the largest in the world) test the aerodynamics of aircraft and spacecraft. Nearby, control centres support Nasa missions such as the Kepler project, which is searching for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

A former zeppelin hangar and retired aircraft at the Nasa Ames campus which houses the Singularity University

But beside these high-tech marvels stand some true technological relics, reminders of how quickly the future becomes the past. To the east, flanking a runway, are three gargantuan zeppelin hangars. The largest is a Modernist revival behemoth and one of the biggest freestanding structures in the world, decrepit after years of disuse. On the edge of these installations is a series of dilapidated offices; next to one, the nose of a retired military jet rusts in the California sun.

Singularity University was inspired by the success of the International Space University, founded in 1987 in Strasbourg, France – by Diamandis. Through a similar series of courses and projects, the ISU aims to prepare students for work in the space industries – everything from space engineering to space policy and law. What began as a quirky programme for aspiring astronauts has evolved into a well-respected, accredited institution. A few years ago, Diamandis and the inventor Ray Kurzweil, a longtime friend, wondered if they could do the same trick again, with a school educating students about emerging technologies. Using Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near as a sort of founding document, they got to work, and last year secured a lease at Nasa and a team of three full-time employees and 30 largely volunteer faculty members. It is set up as a non-profit-making organisation, with Kurzweil as the chancellor and Diamandis the executive director.

A few days before visiting Ames, I caught up with Diamandis at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Diamandis was attending the Cleantech Forum, a gathering of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hoping to cash in on green technology. Diamandis also sees a market here – who doesn’t? – and hopes SU can contribute. Yet he may be a bit more extreme than his fellow forum-goers: technology won’t just solve our energy needs, Diamandis argues, but all the world’s problems. “People think there is always going to be hunger,” he said. “Well, no. That’s not true. There doesn’t always have to be hunger.” Rather, in the near future, nanobots – minuscule robots capable of performing exceptionally complex tasks – will be able quickly and cheaply to produce food from raw materials, say algae or dirt.

“What is food?” he pondered, lounging on a sofa in one of the hotel’s dining rooms. It was early in the morning, but Diamandis, a short, muscular man with wavy hair and eyes that fix on you like a tractor beam, declined coffee or breakfast. “It’s the rearrangement of atoms in a form the body can take in.” Design a machine that can rearrange dust into an apple, and voilà! – hunger is eradicated.

The term “the Singularity” was popularised by Kurzweil and is now a catchphrase, in tech circles at least. It describes “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”, according to The Singularity is Near, which has become a veritable bible among futurists. In it, Kurzweil speculates that by the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will surpass human intellect, and enhanced humans will work in concert with super-smart machines to manage the world’s resources.

Singularity University founder Ray Kurzweil believes that one day the world will be dominated by robots – perhaps successors to “QA” (for Question/Answer), pictured here, the new telepresence robot from Anybots

Kurzweil, a 61-year-old former whizz kid from New York City, has a rosy view of world domination by machines. Tiny robots will create abundant energy and food while reversing pollution and climate change. A technological utopia will ensue. Some critics – those who concede he might be right about technological change transforming the human experience – worry that smarter-than-human robots will turn on their creators, and that a malicious artificial intelligence will wipe out mankind (Kurzweil doesn’t rule out the possibility, but thinks it unlikely). Other critics read about his desire to achieve immortality (he takes hundreds of dietary supplements a day), or his questioning of whether the speed of light is an immutable limit (he thinks not), and decide they’d rather not engage in the argument.

And yet while a race of intelligent robots to rival humans is still the stuff of fantasy, machines are advancing at impressive speeds. Earlier this month, a robot at Aberystwyth University in Wales formulated a hypothesis about the genetics of bakers’ yeast – without intervention by its creators. Then, the robot carried out experiments to test its theory. Back at the Singularity offices, Ismail says: “This is going to happen in an increasing way, but how are we going to manage it? We need to be a step ahead of it. SU’s mandate is to understand and manage it in a more proactive way.”

Every year, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation, hosts a summit focused on the future. Mainstream academics, professionals, entrepreneurs and pundits attend. More mainstream yet, The Singularity is Near is now being made into a film (directed by Kurzweil – who also stars in it). But many people who preach the Singularity are involved with more controversial movements. Transhumanism, which aims to “extend human capabilities”, takes the Singularity as one of its intellectual pillars. Many “Singulartarians” are also advocates of cryonics, the process of freezing a recently deceased body in the hope that future medical technologies will be able to revive it. Kurzweil is signed up to be frozen at his death.

Diamandis takes great pains to say that the school is a stand-alone ­venture, not affiliated with any of the other books, groups or events that also claim the Singularity moniker. “The term ‘singularity’, for me, is a catch-all phrase meaning that we’re dealing with exponentially growing technologies that have huge and powerful implications for humanity,” he tells me. “I am not promoting or predicting what people might call ‘The Singularity’.” Ismail and his team also try to distance themselves from the diehard Singulartarians, despite their many overlapping affiliations.

The week I visited Singularity University’s offices, technology seemed to have let down both Nasa and Google. On the Tuesday, a Nasa satellite meant to study global carbon dioxide emissions failed to reach orbit, scuttling the $278m mission – just when the government institution needed to persuade the new US president of its merits. The next day, Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, experienced a two-hour outage in the middle of the European workday, disrupting productivity and calling into question an increasing reliance on web services.

Technology, as if people outside Silicon Valley need reminding, remains unreliable, and machines, even when running smoothly, remain subject to human error. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has spoken out against rapid technological change, told me he was reserving judgment on Singularity University until it was under way. But he seemed sceptical of its ability to effect serious change. He said its success would largely depend on whether “the students who end up there want to solve actual human problems, which can sometimes benefit from technology, usually in tandem with lots of other changes. Or if they are sci-fi, afraid-of-dying types dreaming of the next big score to be made.”

. . .

McKibben also cautions against overlooking ethical concerns amid the heady frenzy of innovation that Singularity University hopes to cultivate. “It’s important to have real, meaningful debates before we cross important lines – germline genetic manipulation, for instance,” he said. “The technical ability to do this stuff confers no special insight on whether it should be done. I trust the visceral revulsion against ‘designer babies’ more than the smooth assurances of the boosters of the sleek future.”

McKibben is certainly not alone in his reservations – and since Singularity University was first announced to great fanfare this winter, both Google and Nasa seem to have begun shying away from their involvement with the school. Worden, the director of the Ames center, one of the University’s founders and the man who got it housed on Nasa’s campus, turned down repeated requests to be interviewed for this piece. In fact, no one from Nasa would speak on the record about Singularity University.

Google, meanwhile, denied repeated requests for an on-the-record interview with a spokesperson. Finally, after encouragement from the SU team, the company offered up Chris DiBona, a specialist in open-source computing and Google’s point person for dealings with the school. DiBona seemed excited about the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group. He felt like his speciality, network computing, really could help deliver telemedicine in remote parts of the world. But even DiBona was mindful of the university’s strange pedigree. “Some of the stuff feels very science fiction to me,” he said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s an idealism that speaks well of the university. When you try to work on the future, you’re going to be wrong sometimes. A little zaniness goes a long way.”

For all the sci-fi overtones, the projects that come out of Singularity University will be well-intentioned, and it seems unlikely that any malicious artificial intelligence will be designed in the halls of Ames Research Center – or at least in SU’s corner. When pressed, Ismail backed away from the assertion that Singularity University would be delivering deployment-ready solutions to problems like hunger and energy scarcity. “If we do nothing else,” he says, “just to bring people up to speed on all these advances is an accomplishment and a full-time job.”

What Singularity University can do with certainty, he says, is create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. “You can’t pre-script innovation,” he said. “You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.” But that begs a question: is Silicon Valley a place where anyone is really afraid to dream big? Must you pay $25,000 for the privilege? The big dreamers, it seems, may be the Singularity University team, hitching a ride on a popular catchphrase and harnessing it to corporate funding, government aid and a steady revenue stream from wealthy students.

Before I left Ames, Ismail loaded me up with swag. He gave me a calendar from Nasa showing pictures of the cosmos, a copy of The Singularity Is Near signed by Kurzweil, and a handful of Singularity University refrigerator magnets – a refreshingly simple technology, reliable, very human, and timeless.

David Gelles is a reporter in the FT’s San Francisco bureau

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Lunch with the FT: Lang Lang

This focus on education is not surprising. Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial role... At four, Lang Lang had his first lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”

.... The two lived off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame on the family, the boy refused to play for four months...the stand-off between father and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen, unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.

...what ultimately shines through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son – and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”

Lang Lang tells me his father said to “a [Chinese] journalist that he was very touched by the book because he thought it showed I had grown up. I feel proud that he didn’t get upset or anything.”

In 1997, at 15, Lang Lang won a scholarship to the US and studied under Gary Graffman, whose own career had been cut short by an injury to his hand. Like other piano students at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute, Lang Lang was given an apartment of his own, which he shared with his father, with its own seven-foot Steinway. Lang Lang woke in the middle of his first night there and went to touch the piano to make sure it was real. “It was just like heaven,” he recalls with so much feeling it might have been yesterday. “The smallest school in the world. The whole school is like one class of the (Beijing) conservatory. In the conservatory you used to have five or six people fighting over a little, stupid upright piano. You needed to have a ticket to play.”...

His sunny persona is unaffected, and Lang Lang is on to an anecdote about his former teacher, Graffman. “We live across the street from each other in New York and we have parties together.” Lang Lang took a mobile phone photo of Graffman’s flat and sent the photo to Graffman, who immediately called back. “He said: ‘Show me, show me’ [how to take pictures]. He’s really cute. He’s 81 and he’s into technology.” Lang Lang’s easy melding of American slang and informality with a typically Chinese reverence for a teacher is touching. If this is what it means to be a global citizen, we need more like him.
===

Lunch with the FT: Lang Lang

By Rahul Jacob

Published: April 11 2009 01:29 | Last updated: April 11 2009 01:29

The worldwide celebrity that the pianist Lang Lang enjoys makes my initial reception at the Chinese restaurant in Paris he has chosen a little disconcerting. The waitress appears not to understand when I say the table is booked in the name of Lang Lang. As I am led to a small table at the front of the restaurant, I fret that I have mangled the tones – so crucial when speaking Cantonese and Mandarin – in pronouncing his name. While the two words look identical in English, his given name means “happiness and sunshine” and his surname means “educated gentleman” in Chinese.

Happily, Lang Lang, 26, soon arrives, dressed soberly by his flashy standards in a black jacket, black shirt and jeans. The glow of his fame and his friendliness transforms the scene. The manager greets him warmly and leads us to a table at the back of the restaurant, where a bamboo screen gives us the effect of a private room. This is a fixture at all good restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai. I ask him if he finds it hard to dine out in China because he is so well-known. “It is extremely hard – fortunately and unfortunately,” he says. That remark, I later realise, reflects his level-headed approach to being a famous pianist. He may be out of practice ordering at Chinese restaurants, however, because our small square table is soon heaving with a deep-fried aubergine starter, sweetcorn soup, delicious sautéed pork and a pot of jasmine tea – and the food keeps coming until there is barely enough room for my notebook.

No sooner is a dish placed on the table than Lang Lang’s chopsticks are flying over the plates as if he were conducting an orchestra, deftly lifting food on to my plate. (At one point, he lifts a strand of pork that I have dropped on my notebook and puts it on a side plate. He intermittently chides me for taking notes instead of eating.) “This restaurant is so good that every time I am in Paris I come here with friends and relatives,” he says. He’s in town for a concert. I am just off the Eurostar from London to meet him. He laughs when I tell him that when I first moved from Hong Kong to London some years ago, I looked for flats near Queensway in west London because the local restaurants have some of the best Chinese food in the city.

I struggle with my digital recorder for a minute and he can’t resist a joke – “It must be British-made” – a rebuttal of the cracks people sometimes make about the quality of Chinese-made products.

Chinese exports have begun to move upmarket – and Lang Lang has become one of the most public faces of the new China. He first burst into the international consciousness in a fairy-tale debut in 1999, aged 17, when he stood in for André Watts in front of 17,000 people at the Ravinia festival near Chicago. He had dreamed the night before that his piano was “a rocketship orbiting the globe”. When he finished playing the explosive first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 to wild applause, his career went stratospheric. The assembled musical luminaries, including the conductor Christoph Eschenbach, the violinist Isaac Stern, the festival’s musical director and others, prolonged the night by asking him to play Bach’s difficult Goldberg Variations from memory, in a private recital that began after 2am.

Ten years on, with endorsement contracts ranging from Audi and Montblanc to Sony and Adidas, Lang Lang is often referred to as a crossover star, a classical musician who has rock star appeal. (Adidas now sells a Lang Lang trainer, bearing his name and gold stripes, for $125.) He played at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, and has a huge following in both the east and west, with much-watched appearances on YouTube. Today more than 30m Chinese people are learning to play the piano – a popularity at least partly attributable to his meteoric career.

With the recorder finally on, I ask him about this month’s series of concerts and programmes with the London Symphony Orchestra. He is particularly excited about a masterclass on April 18, which will climax with a performance of Schubert’s March Militaire for 100 pianists of all abilities from schools in east London. This is part of an effort he makes in several cities to make music fun for young people.

“What I find is the problem is the image of our work. The kids think that we are very boring people; never talk, like a robot, and are very arrogant. [They think] we are the elite. Actually, we’re not. We’re just a normal person. And that is the first thing we need to change when we go to all the schools, to inspire them and to say, ‘Look, guys, we are a normal person.’ ” Being closer to the age of students helps as well: “Many parents say, ‘Can you say something to my kids because if you say something they will listen.’ If you have learned wonderful things from other people then it is important to share that with young people.”

Lang Lang is evangelical in his efforts to spread the popularity of classical music. For a man who does as many as 130 concerts a year at about $50,000 each (according to figures published in The New Yorker), he still spends a lot of time in schools. Last November he started the Lang Lang Foundation to promote musical education in the US, Europe and China. He is also chairman of the Montblanc Cultural Foundation, which gives patrons of the arts €15,000 to donate to their favourite cultural cause.

This focus on education is not surprising. Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial role. Lang Lang was born in June 1982 in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. His mother was a telephone operator; his father was a policeman by profession and a musician by vocation. Lang Guoren, who played a two-stringed Chinese fiddle called the erhu, started his son playing the piano at three. At four, Lang Lang had his first lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”

When Lang Lang was nine, his father gave up his job and took his son to Beijing so he could study for a place in the prestigious conservatory there. The two lived off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame on the family, the boy refused to play for four months.

His autobiography reads like an Amy Tan novel: the stand-off between father and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen, unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.

The book details his father’s outbursts and high-handedness but is dedicated to him and to his mother, Zhou Xiulan. I say that what ultimately shines through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son – and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”

Lang Lang tells me his father said to “a [Chinese] journalist that he was very touched by the book because he thought it showed I had grown up. I feel proud that he didn’t get upset or anything.”

In 1997, at 15, Lang Lang won a scholarship to the US and studied under Gary Graffman, whose own career had been cut short by an injury to his hand. Like other piano students at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute, Lang Lang was given an apartment of his own, which he shared with his father, with its own seven-foot Steinway. Lang Lang woke in the middle of his first night there and went to touch the piano to make sure it was real. “It was just like heaven,” he recalls with so much feeling it might have been yesterday. “The smallest school in the world. The whole school is like one class of the (Beijing) conservatory. In the conservatory you used to have five or six people fighting over a little, stupid upright piano. You needed to have a ticket to play.”

In spite of such fine schools as the Curtis and the Julliard, the crisis in music education, Lang Lang says, is in the US, not in China. Perhaps mirroring Asia’s ascendancy, while classical music audiences in London and New York seem to be greying rapidly, in Taipei or Hong Kong it sometimes seems as if the average age of the audience is about 10. Lang Lang replies that in the US, budget deficits mean that “the first thing they cut is music and art and many of the schools don’t have a music programme any more. There’s no training really for how to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. It’s [as] if you are a student and you don’t learn Hugo and Shakespeare. You can’t expect someone who has never listened to classical music to suddenly start listening to it when he is 30 years old.”

For all his technical fluency, Lang Lang has been criticised for “self-indulgent” playing. In part to help rein himself in, he has enlisted the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim – a former boy wonder himself – to be his latest mentor. (Lang Lang asked the legendary Israeli musician to teach him on their first meet ing.) Every few months Lang Lang visits Barenboim in Berlin. “He teaches me how to control myself ... and not to let the emotion take over the knowledge. But the thing is, you need to have the fantasies – otherwise everyone plays the same.”

Lunch winds down and the table is cleared away speedily – sautéed mutton, Chinese scrambled eggs and heavy fried bread go back almost untouched – to make room for a huge platter of exotic fruit, which we pick at until it is time for him to go and have a nap before the evening’s concert.

Lang Lang’s conversation roams from Beijing’s transformation into an outward-looking city as a result of its hosting the Olympics to the Sichuan earthquake last May. The pianist helped organise a concert to raise money for victims. I ask about the plight of Huang Qi, an activist jailed for championing the cause of parents of some of the 10,000 children who died when shoddily made schools collapsed. He glides past this political question, saying he doesn’t know about it; as a Chinese superstar, he probably deems it unwise to answer.

His sunny persona is unaffected, and Lang Lang is on to an anecdote about his former teacher, Graffman. “We live across the street from each other in New York and we have parties together.” Lang Lang took a mobile phone photo of Graffman’s flat and sent the photo to Graffman, who immediately called back. “He said: ‘Show me, show me’ [how to take pictures]. He’s really cute. He’s 81 and he’s into technology.” Lang Lang’s easy melding of American slang and informality with a typically Chinese reverence for a teacher is touching. If this is what it means to be a global citizen, we need more like him.

Lang Lang is at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra from April 20; www.barbican.org.uk

FT: Outside Edge: An easy answer to grade inflation

Outside Edge: An easy answer to grade inflation

By Tim Harford

Published: March 20 2009 19:54 | Last updated: March 20 2009 19:54

The news that Cambridge university is to demand A* rather than A grades at A-level has provoked yet another frenzy of concern about grade inflation – the name normally given to the process by which C grades become B grades and then A grades and, before you know it, all shall have prizes.

Grade inflation, like real inflation, seems widespread, afflicting not just UK schools but the Ivy League. Stuart Rojstaczer, who maintains GradeInflation.com, reckons that grades at US private universities have risen from an average of 2.3 out of 4.0 in the 1930s to 3.3 today. That rate of inflation, by itself, would be manageable – 22-year-olds do not need to compare grades with 92-year-olds. (Grade hyperinflation would be another matter entirely: students would have to take examinations, be awarded marks and then apply for jobs or university places within a matter of hours, before their grades were devalued.)

Alas, grade inflation is a misnomer. True grade inflation would mean each grade was equally devalued, with A grades superseded by AA, AAA and AAAA as new labels for superlative performance became necessary. One hundred per cent would become 110 per cent.

Yet examiners are reluctant to award 110 per cent and there are no AAAA grades. What we see is not inflation but a classic price distortion. Eventually all students will get A grades and they will be meaningless. A* grades are a small, belated step in the right direction.

Grade distortion is a serious affair. Students and their teachers are forced to switch to grey market transactions denominated in alternative currencies: the letter of recommendation, for example. Like most alternative currencies, these are a hassle.

Grade distortions, like price distortions, destroy information and oblige people to look in strange places for some signal amid the noise. Students are judged not on their strongest subjects – A grade, of course – but on whether they also picked up A grades in their weakest. When excellence cannot be displayed, plaudits go instead to those who deliver pat answers without stumbling – politicians in training, presumably.

The obvious solution to grade distortion is to ration grades so that no matter whether standards are high or low, only the better students can receive the top grades. Unfortunately, like any competitive system, such policies can create ill-feeling towards high-flyers, and even sabotage.

If grade rationing is unacceptable, perhaps grade distortion should be replaced with true grade inflation, freeing grades from the worldly confines of a maximum 100 per cent or A*. As long as everyone understands the game, what harm if the typical student of tomorrow is awarded an AAA grade? The rating agencies might even find a new line of business here – handing out an AAA for nicely packaged dross is something they should be able to master.

The writer is the FT’s Undercover Economist. His most recent paperback is ‘The Logic of Life’

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: What Tesco knows and Woolies forgot

What Tesco knows and Woolies forgot

By John Kay

Published: January 6 2009 19:34 | Last updated: January 6 2009 19:34

The cab driver was bemoaning the closure of the local Woolworths. “The problem, guv, is Tesco.” That company, he explained, offered better quality and value in the goods people used to buy at Woolworths.

I suggested this was a problem for Woolworths, but not for him. He would only repeat that Tesco was too powerful. I tried to respond that the failure of Woolworths demonstrated the opposite: that the power of a giant retailer lasted only as long as its customers wanted it to. Then we arrived at the station.

The abrupt end to the argument let me feel I was winning. I did not think I was winning when I talked to a group of health and education professionals, upset about recent reforms. They explained that what people wanted from medicine was good treatment, not choice of treatment. Having your appendix out was not like buying a dress, where some people wanted one thing and others another. All parents want to send their child to a good school, and choice just means that the best schools are oversubscribed.

I countered that this did not make choice a bad idea: it was evidence of failure to act on the very obvious signals that choice was giving. If there are queues at Tesco and the Woolworths stores are empty, then Tesco expands and Woolworths closes. But when some schools outperform others, nothing much happens. Choice is not an end in itself, but a means to the good services everyone seeks. Choice is working best when no one wants to exercise it.

But those who defend the market system are often the system’s worst enemies. I recently listened to a group of businessmen deploring the anti-capitalist tone of much of what is taught in schools. They had a point. But they spoiled it by promoting a description of capitalism that was at once repulsive and false.

They talked about “wealth creation”, although most of what they described seemed to be a diversion of wealth for the benefit of particular individuals rather than the creation of new wealth. They thought private sector activities – such as securities trading and automobile manufacture – created wealth; while public sector activities – such as health and education – used wealth up. They stressed that financial rewards were the mainspring of innovation, apparently unaware that material gain was not even at the back of the minds of those who invented computers, discovered antibiotics or created green revolution crops.

They explained that in addition to the considerable salaries senior managers receive, large financial incentives were needed to persuade them to perform the duties that were attached to their jobs. In contrast, people who worked in the public sector mostly did so because they were too lazy or ineffective to get jobs in large corporations. They professed surprise that teachers did not relay these opinions to their charges. I understood why, and was relieved they did not.

The complacent sense of personal entitlement these corporate politicians expressed was deeply unattractive: as unattractive as the similar sense of personal entitlement displayed by the lazy teacher who knows he will not be fired. I do not think children should be taught that greed is the most powerful human motivation, because it is not, and if children are taught that greed is the most powerful business motivation we should be pleased, not disappointed, when business does not attract them.

Young people looking towards the world of work should understand that the greatest reward from a job is the satisfaction of doing it well. The people who are most successful in business in the long run are people who are passionate about business – whose aspirations are to bring new products and services to market, to serve customers better, to motivate their staff to greater efforts. And, by the way, you can make a lot of money in the process. That is why Tesco is prospering and Woolworths has failed. That is the lesson we should teach our kids, and which our cabbies should have learnt. It is a lesson that is as relevant to the public sector as to the private.

John Kay’s new book, The Long and the Short of It, is published on January 20