DLD 2012 has started today in Munich and runs until Jan. 24th. In it, people as diverse as Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington, the Dyson family and Hiroshi Mikitani share their views on what matters to them. The themes are varied and the program is packed with interesting talks and panels. In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best.
Today, on the 7th day of his passing, we remember Ruy Mendes Gonçalves, Vice-Chairman of Saraiva, who passed away on Saturday. He was a pillar of Saraiva’s success and an esteemed man for his strength of character and kindness. So on behalf of the entire team at Investidor Profissional and, we’re sure they would give us their permission to do so, on behalf of the shareholders of our funds: we’d like to send him a huge “Thank You” for all these years of dedicated service to Saraiva.
We posted some interesting links in Portuguese about Mr. Ruy Mendes Gonçalves at www.buysiders.com.br.
We present updates on two story lines we’ve published this year: Salman Khan’s very promising education initiatives deserve a large story at Wired, and George Soros’ departure was discussed further on Bloomberg and the Financial Times.
Reading an article about an interesting Education business had us thinking of regulation and, primarily, goals for Education. The current debate about Public Education in the US focuses on adjustments/ improvements to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which is all about accountability. In a separate story, Tom Friedman reminds us that the top-notch jobs of the future may require skill-sets (and individual attitude) that current education models may simply be unable to provide. But when you’re a Brazilian public education student and the debate isn’t even close to scratching the surface of the “accountability” trend, it’s definitely a scary future.
The Financial Times had a very interesting article about the differences between Chinese and Brazilian business cultures – and why it’s important that Brazilians learn about the other side, quickly. Also, Brazilian magazine Veja had a special on Amazon.com finally entering Brazil, initially via the book market. That they plan on doing so stimulating e-books for Kindle reveals challenges and opportunities for local publishers.
BigThink.com has two interesting videos on Education. We’ve written before about the future/ quality of Education, and Salman Khan is the subject of the first video, a much shorter version of the TED speech we posted before. From the first video we navigated to another one, this time with Harvard’s Louis Menand. Customization/data analytics coming to Education is great news.
There’s a wealth of good articles trying to predict the future of reading. We’ll focus on Kevin Kelly’s latest post on publishing – What Books Will Become – which tries to take the logical steps beyond the Kindle and social reading revolutions to imagine where the “book” is going (social reading here enveloping social highlighting, bookmarking, commenting, additions/corrections). We also link to “trusty Kevin Kelly reverberator” Seth Godin and to other posts.
The subject is very dear to us: Education and how technology can improve its productivity (and accountability), reduce costs, leverage social aspects and increase reach, convenience and even – dare we say it – the fun factor in education… A TED 2011 talk by former hedge-fund analyst Salman Khan almost has it all, and the technology is here now. It appears to address many – obviously not all – of our “wishlist items” for Education, not the least of it the empowerment of teachers, education managers, parents and even students themselves through data and its analysis (individually, by classroom, school, district, demographics, whatever).
High-profile article on Valor on Thursday about how Laureate Education is ready to invest R$ 1.1 billion in Brazil by 2015 (some US$ 660 million). Understandably, the part most likely to “stick” is the “we will triple enrollment” bit. We’ve been following Laureate since 2002 and even invested in the stock for a while until it was taken private in 2007, so we found the story even more interesting.
One month or so ago we received a newsletter from another asset manager with links to TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson. Today is a holiday in Rio (yet another one), and our state has been hit with torrential rain and subsequent land slides that killed over 650 people – the type of tragedy that unfortunately keeps occurring in Brazil. We can’t help but be reminded of the power of education in changing societies: it’s not all about short-term economic growth. It’s not just “any” education either, although Brazil is still at such a low level that literacy rates still matter, it’s about the quality of education as well. That’s the subject of the inspiring and often funny talks inside. We hope you will enjoy them and think about the issue as it applies to your country.
