The “P” Word, Thomas Kuhn, and I

 World Federation of Science Journalists

In a way, you can blame it on Thomas Kuhn. It was he who introduced too beautiful and brilliant a term in the early 1960s: paradigm shift. A term that writers of all sorts, particularly about business and information technology, have had no shame abusing since. Myself included. [I can’t help thinking that  if the editors of Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had known that the term would  be such a hit, they would have probably made it the title of the book.]

So I was reminded of my secret guilt about Kuhn’s term late in October, while attending the first conference for Arab science journalists, in Fez, Morocco. In the Q & A that followed a panel on
“Finding Science Stories in the Arab World,” a man in the audience made a comment to this effect: “This sounds to me like all you [Arab science journalists] do is market or publicize Western science and Western paradigms. Unless the departure point in your work is an Arabic and Islamic paradigm of science, he added, your efforts amount to little. 

Saudi Arabia: In Science We Trust

Saudi Arabia shows that it can go a long way in instituting policies that make the kingdom more appealing to Western academia  | IslamOnline.net

Say a Western political leader takes to heart the views of writer Ann Coulter and decides to enact an exceedingly moderate version of her recommendations – that is, to force Saudi Arabia to grant more rights to women and turning Saudi’s single-sex schools into co-ed institutions. What will it take to do this?  Nothing short of a war, and a massive disturbance to an already shaky oil market if the world’s largest producer is put out of business.

Or there is another way: help the Saudis build a university, and they may just willingly do what otherwise only an invasion might force them to.

Petrodollar Science

Can the new research and education initiatives in the Arab Gulf evolve into institutions? The New Atlantis

Oil executives are rarely assigned to establish universities. But when the unlikely call arrives, some hardly pause to ponder the unconventionality of the assignment. So, only five minutes into the meeting that brought him together with leading individuals from Carnegie Mellon University, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, vice president of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco, did not mince his words: “It is perhaps unusual that an oil executive is starting a university. But given your experience in Qatar, would your university be willing to help us build a new research university in Saudi Arabia?”

Newspapers in the Googlespace

Good news—for now—that Google is pushing major newspapers to open up their vaults | IslamOnline.com

With no fanfare the New York Times pulled the plug on its TimesSelect program this last September. Through TimesSelect, launched in October 2005, the Times started charging readers (who were not  subscribers to the print edition) for access to some sections of the online edition,fparticularly that of opinion columns. Clearly, the objective was to capitalize on the New York Times’ fame as one of the world’s best news papers to generate revenues through its online presence.

That was a fair thing to do. Why did the Times shut it down then?

The way the Times explained the closure implies it probably had to. In a short note, the Times cited “significant alterations in the online landscape” over the period TimesSelect was in operation that made it in the best interest of the New York Times readers and “brand” to grant full online access to all readers. Most important among those alterations was the fact that “[r]eaders increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources.”

The Rise of Middle East Technology Parks

The rapid growth of technology parks in the Arab world has so far created more expectations than outcomes, reports Waleed Al-Shobakky | SciDev.Net

Over the past few years, technology parks have been sprouting up all over the region: from Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia in the north, to Kuwait, Oman and Qatar in the east.

Recognising that their natural resources, particularly oil, are being fast depleted, and looking to emulate the success stories of technology parks in Asia, Europe and North America in creating jobs and successful businesses, countries like Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have constructed as many as seven or eight parks. But as the ranks swell, the question remains: will technology parks be able to prove their worth?

A Broader Cautionary Tale in the Skype Outage

Now that the dust has settled and the uproar has faded, what can we learn from the mid-August Skype outage? (Hint: A unipolar operating system world may have unforeseen weaknesses, and Microsoft is perhaps the least to blame.)  | IslamOnline.net

First, what happened? Skype, the most widely used Internet phone service (free to use from PC to PC) went black on August 16, 2007.

Now almost a household name, Skype is not merely a “chat” service for teens with plenty of time to spare. Over the past few years, Skype-in and Skype-out services that afford calls to regular land-line and mobile phones at much lower rates have already lured many businesses away from traditional telecoms.

The two-day service collapse affected thousands of businesses. Not surprisingly, the outage invited outrage.

Bridging the Medical Research Gulf

What price excellence? Qatar’s Sidra Medical and Research Centre has $7.9 billion to build a world class institution. But is money enough to bridge the gap? | ScienceBusiness.net

Of the six Gulf States, Qatar ranks second to last in size. But in investment in science and research, by contrast, the small emirate has recently become second to none -even outspending its much larger Middle Eastern neighbours, including Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Iran.   

Qatar’s newest research initiative embodies one of the tiny state’s grandest ambitions yet. Sidra, a 382-bed medical and research facility with a whopping $7.9-billion endowment, is being set up in partnership with the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) to be a regional hub of high-quality healthcare, education and research.