In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best. You can keep track of it live on Livestream.com, check out the event’s blog on Tumblr, its Twitter feed or Facebook page. Enjoy!

We posted some interesting links – in Portuguese – about Mr. Ruy Mendes Gonçalves at Buysiders.com.BR.

On George Soros: We posted a few days ago, but these are worth mentioning: Bloomberg expands its first article and calls his departure from the money management arena the end of the “golden era of rock star traders”. The Financial Times’ James Mackintosh wonders why he didn’t stop long ago and compares Mr. Soros’ returns to Warren Buffett’s – who’s just 18 days older than Soros, amusingly. Mr. Mackintosh’s videos are always interesting to watch.

The business is a credit-recovery company that provides low-cost, online courses for students who have fallen behind in that subject. The schools/ districts pay for it because it’s a low-cost investment to improve graduation rates, and they do so because if they don’t improve such rates they lose Federal funding as per the No Child Left Behind Act. We have followed that law since it was first proposed by the Bush administration but also kept up with its renewals, which included renegotiations, adjustments, cuts and expansions. The main aspect of the law is to tie funding to improved performance in selected metrics, such as graduation rates and improved scores in standardized tests. It introduces a level of accountability not seen before in US public education. The main criticism regards the “what to measure and how”, but the main point of accountability is not at stake.

Now let’s introduce Tom Friedman’s article “The start-up of You“, about an upcoming book by LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman discussing the new demands on the “jobs” available in the future. The type of people most likely to succeed in Business in the future can almost certainly NOT be produced by the current public education models available in the US, so much of the burden is on individuals.

It’s a scary future for those currently enrolled in Brazilian public education, the debate of which hasn’t even gotten close to the “accountability” theme. When is this country going to get even half-serious about education?

About the “Amazon.com” in the subject: the widely read Brazilian magazine Veja had a special (so far only in Portuguese) 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.

Another highlight from the FT.com article on Brazil/ China cultural differences:

The Chinese could not be more different. ‘They take so long to make a decision, but that’s not the problem,’ he says. ‘The problem is that when they do finally decide, they want it done in two days, but by that point the Brazilians have given up any hope of a deal and are totally unprepared. Many partnerships have fallen through because of this’.”

Customization/data analytics coming to Education is great news.

Salman Khan’s 2:32 video on BigThink:

Louis Menand’s 4:13 video at BigThink:

As a teaser, here’s a story that seems small but strikes deep (Publishers Weekly): Kindle owners in the US are now enabled to borrow e-books from some 11,000 public libraries over there. The stats of e-book borrowing are staggering, growing insanely and worth the read.

So much material, so little time. We wish we could bundle all this in a PDF and print it – OK, maybe that’s passé, so we’d read the PDF in an iPad.

Meanwhile, Europe is apparently playing catch-up in e-books, according to the NYT. Interesting to try to draw conclusions about Brazil.

Kevin Kelly’s 2008 post “The Fate of The Book” predicted much of the debate. Very interesting and full of links to other interesting people, although to read it all you’d need a constant flow of Brazilian-style holidays such as the one starting tomorrow (it’s a double-holiday joining with a weekend starting tomorrow – more accurately tonight).

He also wrote a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue. The issue (Aug. 2010) had 40 pieces with views of the future, and to check out the other 39 texts click here. Some seem interesting.

Mr. Kelly spoke at the 2011 TOC (Tools of Change) Conference, which he thinks is a great place to discuss the future of the ebook. Here’s the 26-minute talk:

Finally, this post has KK staring at a real library and having “second thoughts”.

Here’s the video – don’t click away after the “Thank you” and applauses because Bill Gates comes onstage and asks relevant questions.

First, we know by covering the company that Laureate, as the Brazilian CEO Luis López says in the article, really does focus on assets of higher quality than those currently operated or sought out by most of the Brazilian listed players in the field. We’ve even visited some of those colleges run by Mr. López at a time when the Mexican and Chilean operations were the company’s largest and best. In fact, when Mr. López started running the Brazilian operations, we saw it as a telling sign of Brazil’s importance to the group.

That fact combined with the company’s declared spend amount and mandate could make acquisition prices soar, even though the company focuses on assets that may not be on the local players’ sights. Think of Laureate’s growth-by-M&A focus as a tide that could lift all ships. What’s more, the tide must already be pretty high given that listed Brazilian players have been raising capital and expanding their war chests with the very specific mandate of delivering growth by acquisitions…

The point? Paraphrasing that famous question: “At what price growth?”

Sir Ken Robinson’s latest book is called “The Element”, and this Bloomberg review (plus the videos, of course) had us looking for time to read it.

TED Talk 2006 (almost 20 minutes):

TED talk 2010 (bit less than 18 minutes):

RSA Animate of another of his talks – gotta love these animations. The message is much more powerful, though.