From John Gurdon’s school report when he was 15 years old:

“I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”

Today, it was announced that Gurdon is to share this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine with a Japanese researcher, Shinya Yamanaka, for their work on stem cells.

Very interesting analysis of the Digger’s recent moves by Anatole Kaletsky.

Outside shareholders of News Corp have long dreamt of the company ridding itself of scarcely profitable newspaper businesses to become a pure TV and movie business. This move was considered impossible under Murdoch, because of his sentimental attachment to print. But that was almost certainly a misunderstanding. Murdoch did not build the world’s greatest media empire through sentimentality. The reason why he loved papers, even when they suffered big losses, was because they gave him political power. For News Corp shareholders, in turn, Murdoch’s power brought business benefits.

Murdoch’s political influence allowed News Corp to overcome regulatory and political obstacles that defeated other media companies. The obvious case was News Corp’s recent attempt to take full control of BSkyB, the British satellite broadcaster, but there were many other cases. In fact, Murdoch’s ability to overcome obstacles – whether erected by politicians, regulators, unions or business rivals – that thwarted other moguls has been the key to his success.

Kaletsky argues that even when the newspapers lost money, they were still useful.

Throughout Murdoch’s career, his bold personality and vision have been usefully supplemented by the political influence derived from newspaper ownership. This ingredient in the Murdoch formula has now been transformed.

Once the phone-hacking scandal sabotaged the BSkyB bid, the business calculation behind newspaper ownership completely reversed. The papers were suddenly transformed from an asset into an albatross – and the arguments for keeping a print business within News Corp vanished. In July, Murdoch duly conceded this, announcing that all his publishing businesses would be split off into a separate company.

Smart piece. It’ll be interesting to see who lines up to buy the Times.

25 years ago today, IKEA opened its first UK store (in Warrington).

Interesting observation by Paul Krugman in today’s NYT.

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

wonder if it applies to the UK also?

My review of James Flynn’s new book – from the Guardian.

Not many academics have a phenomenon named after them, and when it happens they’re mostly hard scientists. In physics there’s the Bose-Einstein Condensate, for example, and the Josephson Effect. Eponymous phenomena are much rarer in the social sciences, for the obvious reason that consensus is harder to reach: the social world doesn’t provide the unambiguous yardstick of a meter reading. All of which makes James Flynn such an interesting exception to the rule, as even in the argumentative world of psychology, the “Flynn Effect” is recognised as an accepted fact…

There’s a lovely, reflective review by Michael Dirda of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life on the Barnes & Noble Review site.

I was struck by this quotation from Hofstadter about the philistinism of 19th-century US business, and thinking that nothing much has changed in the last hundred years.

The more thoroughly business dominated American society, the less it felt the need to justify its existence by reference to values outside its own domain. In earlier days it had looked for sanction in the claim that the vigorous pursuit of trade served God, and later that it served character and culture. Although this argument did not disappear, it grew less conspicuous in the business rationale. As business became the dominant motif in American life and as a vast material empire rose in the New World, business increasingly looked for legitimation in a purely material and internal criterion — the wealth it produced. American business, once defended on the ground that it produced a high standard of culture, was now defended mainly on the ground that it produced a high standard of living.