Clyde Prestowitz:

Nevertheless, the weakness of the United States is that it constantly underestimates the efforts and capabilities of its competitors. This means there will be surprises because China is making tremendous efforts and has tremendous talents. Over the past twenty years, its investment in R&D has doubled from .73 percent of GDP to 1.77 percent and the plan is to reach the European level of 2.5 percent by 2020. Just in the past decade, the volume of Chinese investment in R&D has grown by more than 600 percent, according to Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professor Marc Laperrouza of the Evian Group at IMD, HEC, the University of Lausanne, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. As a result, they say, China will soon go from being the world’s biggest factory to being its biggest laboratory.

They also note that China is graduating more than 700,000 engineers annually compared to about 60,000 in the United States. Of course, numbers like these can be misleading. What is an engineer? The standards vary greatly from country to country. We must also keep population sizes in mind when making comparisons. If we ask what percentage of students around the world are earning degrees in science and engineering, the answer in Europe , Asia, or the United States, the answer everywhere is 10-13 percent, according to former MIT President Charles Vest.

Sam Byford:

Craig Mod is a writer and designer who splits his time between Japan and the US. Formerly of Flipboard, much of his writing is concerned with ebooks and digital publishing — the pitfalls the industry falls into, and how best to avoid them. His most recent essay, Subcompact Publishing, sparked a lot of online chatter last November over its vision for a minimal, service-oriented publishing future. I sat down with Mod in December during his latest stopover in Tokyo to talk about these ideas, Japan, and more.

Chantal Tode:

Mobile campaigns leveraging location targeting outperformed non-location targeted campaigns by a factor of two times, according to a new report from Verve Mobile.

The Location Powered Mobile Advertising Report found that all location-based strategies exceeded the industry average click-through rate of 0.4 percent, with geo-aware campaigns leading with a one percent click-through average. For the report, Verve reviewed over 2,500 mobile campaigns run across its location-based ad platform in 2012, with the findings reflecting the state of premium location-based mobile ads.

Richard Milne:

Einar Már Gudmundsson tells the story of a telephone call he received that morning. His friend told him about a theft the previous night: “It was the first burglary we had heard of in a little shop where all the person took was bread. Not money, nothing else, just bread. He must have been hungry.”

In a land famous for its Sagas, even a tale of stolen bread has resonance, emblematic of the struggles Icelanders now face. For Mr Gudmundsson, a well-known Icelandic author, the burglary adds a human detail to the story of how the Nordic island perched on a volcanic hotspot in the mid-Atlantic has recovered from being one of the earliest and biggest victims of the financial crisis in 2008.

Much has been written about its economic recovery. The island has been held up as a model pupil by the International Monetary Fund, whose help it received in 2008 after the collapse of its three main banks plunged Iceland into a financial maelstrom. Growth may have plunged by more than 10 per cent but it has rebounded in the past two years and industries such as fishing are thriving again. A victory in the Icesave court case has buoyed the national mood.

Douglas Adams:

I came across the name Hotlblack Desiato when I was driving along Upper Street in Islington, and there it was on a house For Sale sign. It was the name of a new (real) estate agent . I thought it was the most wonderful name I’d ever seen, and wished I could come up with names as good as that.

I couldn’t get the name out of my mind, and when I was trying to figure out the name for the rockstar who was spending a year dead for tax reasons, every name I thought of was not nearly as good as Hotblack Desiato. So in the end I gave up and phoned the agency and spoke – as it happened – to Geoff Hotblack. I asked him if I could use their name and he was, as you might imagine, quite surprised but said I certainly could.

Via Russell Beattie.

Clive Irving:

The special chemistry of Boeing was one part the men and their originality of thought; one part a kind of corporate innocence that more than once left them outwitted by competitors with sharper elbows and lobbying skills in Washington, D.C.; and one part a stubborn adhesion to a place. Boeing Field resonated with the thunder of their own perfected science, the machines that increasingly became familiar at every airport around the world. This seemed like fulfillment enough: no need to swagger and strut, they seemed to feel; the jets are truly sexy and we own them.

It couldn’t last.

Tom Gara:

Anonymity: “Some governments will consider it too risky to have thousands of anonymous, untraceable and unverified citizens — “hidden people”; they’ll want to know who is associated with each online account, and will require verification at a state level, in order to exert control over the virtual world.

Schmidt has had an interesting relationship with privacy questions.