Apple has just warned investors of a pre-Christmas profits fall. Competition in the tablet market is putting pressure on Apple's gross margins. Notably, Noah Smith has an interesting post which compares Sony and Apple. I like this comparison as I can remember Sony as the Apple of its day. Like Apple, Sony's rise to prominence was with a portable music device - the Sony Walkman (for my younger readers, the Sony Walkman played these things known as cassettes). Like Apple, Sony had an iconic and visionary founder in Akio Morita. Noah Smith suggests that Sony's decline was partially due to the death of Morita in 1999. Will post-Jobs Apple go the same way?
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.