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On 29 sep 2007, at 21.49, Chuck Silva wrote: > A long time ago our wise Fore Father's had the prudence to see the > importance of having a single common language to hold our adverse > country together. Forgive me for simply cutting out a part of Chuck's post here, but I just want to jump in on this one because yesterday I happened to learn a good example of what good comes with the common language for the US. This was a Swedish radio documentary on scientific research and the particular issue "Why do all Nobel prices go to USA?". Here in Europe we have good scientists too but the universities and private financing of research projects don't bleed over much between language zones. As a result very bright people can waist time working on almost similar problems, just because the happen to be in different countries. While in the US scientists are free to move between universities all over the continent to form collaborative teams based on scientific interest. The career path in Europe is difficult to understand for a young student, while in the US everything is clearly lined out as the universities share the same language and similar administration. All this given Europe and USA are about the same size. An interesting figure here is that China is coming up strongly, thanks to low costs. The same research budget in nanotechnology keeps twenty chinese scientists working on a project while in USA the same amount of money can only support one scientist for a project. And almost the same figures seems to apply to development speed; chinese research and product development is twenty times faster. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international)