From Slate:

From PhysOrg:

When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead.
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.

These words, which open Shelley's poem “When the Lamp is Shattered,” employ visions of nature to symbolize life in decay and rebirth. It's as if he had somehow foreseen the creation of this new Gemini Legacy image, and penned a caption for it. What Gemini has captured is nothing short of poetry in motion: the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention. Polar-ring galaxies are peculiar objects. Astronomers have found only a handful of them, so not much is known about their origins. Most have an early-type spiral system, called a lenticular galaxy, as the central showpiece. But NGC 660, which lies about 40 million light-years distant toward the direction of Pisces the Fishes, is the only polar-ring galaxy known with what is called a late-type lenticular galaxy as its host. All, however, display a ring of stars, dust, and gas that extends tens of thousands of light-years across space along an orbit nearly perpendicular to the main disk.

More here.

Donald Sassoon in Berfrois:

Eric Hobsbawm outlived his short twentieth century (1917-1991) by more than twenty years. And right to the end he was still the object of scandal for having been far too long a communist. ‘You see’, he might have said, (‘you see’ was one of his habitual linguistic tics) ‘there have been many communists among major historians, but they left. Some stayed on the left (E.P. Thompson), some moved right (Annie Kriegel, François Furet). I stayed until the end, the bitter end.’

Since even the popular media agree that Hobsbawm was a remarkable historian, a great historian, and some even say that he was the greatest living historian (something which he found rather unconvincing and a little embarrassing), it begs the question: how can an impenitent communist be a great historian? Indeed, whenever Hobsbawm was interviewed, especially in Britain or the United States, sooner or later, the utterly predictable questions would pop up. And why did you support the USSR? And why did you stay so long in the communist party? (the sub-text here being ‘the producer insisted I should ask you this because it would look odd if I didn’t’). The interviewer would offer a challenge: Here is the opportunity to denounce your past, to repent, to say sorry. Take the chance. Admit it: you were wrong!

Although he has consistently refused to abjure, he freely admitted mistakes, erroneous interpretations, his belated realization of the gravity of Stalin’s crimes (Khrushchev’s speech was to him a revelation). However, on the substance: ‘are you sorry to have been a communist?’ he always remained unrepentant.

What kind of communist was he? He belonged, he explained in his autobiography, Interesting Times, to the generation for whom the hope of a world revolution was so strong that to abandon the communist party was like giving in to despair. But he must have been tempted. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary a letter was sent to the Daily Worker, then the party daily. It was signed by Hobsbawm as well as other party intellectuals such as Christopher Hill, E.P Thompson, Ronald Meek, Rodney Hilton, Doris Lessing, and the remarkable Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (who, in a somewhat eccentric way, is supposed to have rejoined the party over Hungary on the grounds that one does not desert friends in need). The letter declared that, ‘We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure of the British communists to think our political problems for themselves…The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on the false presentation of the facts….’.

Clare Carlisle in The Guardian:

“Evil” is a strong word, and a provocative one. Nowadays it tends to be reserved for acts of exceptional cruelty: the Moors murders, organised child abuse, genocide. It is not just the extreme nastiness of such acts – and their perpetrators – that makes people describe them as evil. There is something unfathomable about evil: it appears to be a deep, impenetrable darkness that resists the light of reason. To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like “unthinkable evil” or “unspeakable evil” highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable.

So how can we think about evil? Perhaps we can't, or shouldn't. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that we should remain silent about “that whereof we cannot speak” – a quotation beloved of lesser philosophers seeking a convenient way to end an academic paper. On a more practical level, most victims of evil will find that simply coping takes all their energy – and in the midst of their suffering, it may be difficult to disentangle the questions “why?” and “why me?” But the very familiarity of these questions suggests that there is something about evil that calls for thinking. And Wittgenstein's remark about remaining silent can be countered by Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the proper subject matter for philosophical thinking is precisely what is “unthought” and even unthinkable.

The Christian tradition offers huge resources for our thinking about the nature, origin and meaning of evil. This is partly because the history of western philosophy is intimately bound up with Christianity, so that supposedly secular debates on morality and human nature usually involve theological ideas even if these remain implicit. But more specifically, the Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

My grandmother was one of the first women to study mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. When she graduated, in 1905, the university nominated her for its highest distinction, an award marked by the presentation of a ring engraved with the initials of the emperor. But no woman had previously been nominated for such an honor, and Emperor Franz Joseph refused to bestow the award upon one.

More than a century later, one might have thought that by now we would have overcome the belief that women are not suited to the highest levels of education, in any area of study. So it is disturbing news that more than 30 Iranian universities have banned women from more than 70 courses, ranging from engineering, nuclear physics, and computer science to English literature, archaeology, and business. According to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the restrictions are part of a government policy to limit women’s opportunities outside the home.

The bans are especially ironic, given that, according to UNESCO, Iran has the highest rate of female to male undergraduates in the world. Last year, women made up 60% of all students passing university exams, and women have done well in traditionally male-dominated disciplines like engineering.

It may well be female students’ very success – and the role of educated women in opposing Iran’s theocracy – that led the government to seek to reverse the trend. Now, women like Noushin, a student from Esfahan who told the BBC that she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, are unable to achieve their ambitions, despite getting high scores on their entrance exams.

Some claim that the ideal of sexual equality represents a particular cultural viewpoint, and that we Westerners should not seek to impose our values on other cultures. It is true that Islamic texts assert in various ways the superiority of men to women. But the same can be said of Jewish and Christian texts; and the right to education, without discrimination, is guaranteed in several international declarations and covenants, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which almost all countries, including Iran, have agreed.

“Post-secular” is a rather nebulous term, as Mohamed admits. It is supposed to cover recent theoretical turns towards taking faith seriously, whether through theological movements such as Radical Orthodoxy or Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism”. Alain Badiou in particular, an avowed atheist, allows us to “glimpse” what Mohamed (himself a Muslim atheist) calls, in his convoluted way, “the possibility of an unreligious turn away from a secular view of belief”. This appears to mean that we must now consider faith in romantic love, or Cubism, say, as equivalents for what used to be associated with the divinity (so perhaps “I saw her face; now I’m a believer”?). Milton gets into the act in strained ways because he provides a “pre-secular” parallel to the post-secular present, and each illuminates the other. An ambitious intellectual leap brings the plain style of God or Abdiel in Paradise Lost – where grace, for example, “Comes unprevented, unimplor’d, unsought” – into a supposedly productive dialogue with modern Messianism, the appeal to a faithful few, and then, oddly enough, with the plainer still style of the internet – the medium through which both jihadists and supporters of Barack Obama communicate.

more from Neil Forsyth at the TLS here.

Now that this tremendous whatzit has had a few weeks to pound and roar through the theaters, and maybe wash away some of the prerelease publicity, I hope that people have become more interested in what The Master puts on the screen, and less in the question of whether it’s a history of Scientology with the names disguised. The so-called Master of the title, a character known to the legal authorities as Lancaster Dodd, is a peddler of psychotherapeutic claptrap and pseudoscientific mythology in post–World War II America—so, yes, he has a lot in common with L. Ron Hubbard. Dodd, too, has a fat book to sell (it’s called The Cause, rather than Dianetics) and travels with a wife named Peggy (Hubbard’s first wife was named Polly), with whose aid and incitement he teaches that we must awaken to our true nature as billion-year-old spirits.

more from Stuart Klawans at The Nation here.

The Hegel that Zizek loves is not the not the good patriot, not the philosopher brought to Berlin by Frederick William III to reconcile democrats to absolute rule, not the consoling thinker who showed how the apparent contingency of events concealed the inner logic of history. The Good Hegel is, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, a kind of hedgehog—a stubborn dialectician for whom every event, no matter how momentous or accidental, can be reduced to the cosmic three-step dance of thesis, antithesis, synthesis: “The Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form.” The Hegel that Zizek loves is much like Zizek himself: a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths. Zizek’s Hegel is a kind of cosmic prankster.

more from Adam Jasper at Bookforum here.

From Herald:

“It took the government over 60 years to accept us as humans and that too only after the Supreme Court (SC) passed the order that we should be registered as khwaja siras,” says Bindiya Rana, the president of the Gender Interactive Alliance, a non-government organisation working for the rights and uplift of the transgender community. She is happy with the SC order but says more needs to be done. “At least the judiciary is listening and doing its bit, but we have yet to see the government come forward without the SC nudging it,” she tells the Herald. “So far, only directions are being issued.” Khwaja siras, as they are now called in the official parlance (see Identity Crisis), have long been one of the most marginalised communities in South Asia. Although there is no specific data about their numbers, estimates suggest that Pakistan has a population of around 800,000 transgender people. “You might say that it is an overestimate but many members of our community have been registered as male or female in the national identity database. Now that the SC has issued a directive for us to be registered as khwaja siras, a better picture will emerge,” Rana explains.

The SC’s directive was issued after a 2009 petition filed by advocate Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki and this after an incident in Taxila where policemen maltreated and sexually abused transgender persons returning from a wedding. “The Taxila incident motivated me to speak for transgender people. They are as human as us and, according to the Constitution, the state has a duty to protect its citizens regardless of their gender,” says Khaki. The SC agrees. A judgement issued on March 22, 2011 states, “Their rights, obligations including right to life and dignity are equally protected … The government functionaries both at federal and provincial levels are bound to provide them protection of life and property and secure their dignity as well, as is done in case of other citizens.” In addition to ordering the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) to register transgenders as the third sex, the court has asked provincial social welfare departments to work for the community’s support and development.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The 2012 presidential election will be won by the candidate who can convince voters that he has the vision to lift the nation out of the economic doldrums. The economy is the right topic, but the discussion neglects the true driver of the country's prosperity: scientific and technological enterprise. Half of the U.S. economic growth since World War II has come from advances in science and technology. To neglect that power—and the government's role in priming the pump—would be foolish. The auto industry is a case in point. President Barack Obama makes much out of having rescued Detroit's carmakers from bankruptcy. This achievement won't hold up, however, unless the thousands of small auto-parts manufacturers down the supply chain stay globally competitive. One way to help them would be to foster initiatives like the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium, which is providing independent manufacturers potent information technology at Purdue University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. By harnessing this science and technology strength, we can generate a competitive advantage for small businesses.

President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney ought to be talking about how to use programs like this to bring about the kind of success that Germany has achieved. The German government encourages a close partnership between technical universities and industrial manufacturers; it supports centers where scientists and engineers pursue fundamental research in close proximity to industrial colleagues investigating more applied technologies. German battery makers, for instance, work with technical universities on nanotechnology, while textile makers contribute to research in carbon fibers for composite fabrics. Could there be a grander vision for harnessing U.S. research talent in this way? On this, both candidates have been silent.

More here.

Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen

C. M. Naim in The South Asian Idea:

On Tuesday, September 11, 2012, a horrific fire in a garment factory in the BaldiaTownship in Karachi killed at least 259 persons, male and female. As I read about it on subsequent days I was reminded of another fire that occurred a century earlier—to be exact, on Saturday, November 25, 1911—in New York City. It too was in a garment factory, and took 146 lives, mostly young females. Named after the shirtwaist factory where it occurred, it is known in American history as the Triangle Fire. To refresh my memory I took to the books and soon realized that the Triangle Fire had a few lessons for the present day Pakistan.*

The Triangle Waist Factory (TWF) was situated on the top three floors of a ten-story building in the Washington Square area in Manhattan. The neighborhood was far from being a slum; though it had a several buildings with similar factories, it also had a few mansions of the rich, and some buildings of the New York University. TWF was owned by two Jewish men, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who were related to each other through marriage. They had immigrated to the United States only a couple of decades earlier, and through hard work as well as exploitation of immigrant labor in the garment industry—most of them were women, and a large number also Jewish—the two, by 1911, had become millionaires. Their success had come in particular from the popularity of a new female garment called “shirtwaist,” i.e. a shirt or bodice that reached only to the waist and was could be worn with any tailored skirt. It allowed more choice and freedom to its wearer, while adding a modish flair to otherwise more sober costumes. Shirtwaists were mostly made of sheer cotton fabrics. Unfortunately, the latter were also highly combustible.

More here.

Morgan Meis on Eric Hobsbawm, in The Smart Set:

I studied briefly with Eric Hobsbawm, the English Marxist historian who died October 1st at the age of 94. I studied with him in the early 1990s at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Hobsbawm was just completing his book The Age of Extremes, the third in a trilogy that included The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. Hobsbawm was not an inspiring teacher. He would shuffle into the classroom in his baggy suit and sit down at a table at the head of the class. Then he would open up a folder and begin to read us chapters from the book he was trying to finish. That was it. Hobsbawm didn't read very well. A strange-looking man, his mouth was always screwed up to the right. He mumbled out of the side of his face. The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas would sometimes show up for a lecture or a conference at The New School during those days as well. Due to Habermas' severe lisp, you could barely understand him either. I suspect a generation of grad students formed the opinion that academic greatness and the inability to speak were somehow related. I recently read a passage from one of Hobsbawm's books where he reflects on his love of jazz. The book is called Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life. In it, Hobsbawm wrote:

Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most, I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, 16 or 17. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolised by words and the exercises of the intellect.

Thinking back to the man in his early 70s reading to his students from his then soon-to-be-published book, it occurs to me that Hobsbawm was still that 16- or 17-year-old kid. I ran into him once at the A&P supermarket on Union Square. He had a few items in his shopping cart and was wandering around in the aisles. When I spoke to him he looked at me shyly from under his brow. I asked him a few questions about the Third International. He looked relieved. Yes, let us speak of the Third International. Why is it that I will forever associate Eric Hobsbawm with the feeling of embarrassment?

Jennifer Saul in The Philosophers' Magazine:

In the UK, women are 46% of undergraduate students in philosophy, but only 24% of permanent staff. Women are approximately 21% of professional philosophers in the US, but only 17% of those employed full-time. These figures are very unlike those for most fields of the humanities, in which women tend to be near or above parity with men. Indeed, they more closely resemble mathematics and physical sciences (biological sciences are much closer to parity). One recent study by Kieran Healy showed philosophy to bemore male than mathematics, with only computer science, physics and engineering showing lower percentages of women.

What’s the explanation for this? It used to be thought that women were simply unsuited to philosophy. As Hegel puts it: “Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts …. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant.”

This view is, for obvious reasons, less popular now. However, quite a few people, both feminist philosophers and philosophers of psychology, have drawn on the importantly distinct idea that women approach things differently, and that philosophy is the poorer for not fitting well with women’s ways of thinking. One version of this idea can be found in Carol Gilligan and another in very recent work by Wesley Buckwalter and Steve Stich. These claims of women’s difference, however, have never held up well empirically, as Louise Antony argues eloquently in her “Different Voices or Perfect Storm”.

Another commonly floated explanation is that women’s family commitments make it more difficult for them to progress professionally. This may well be true (studies do show that women continue to do the majority of housework and childcare). But it fails to explain why philosophy should show such a different profile than other fields of the arts and humanities, which have achieved (or surpassed) parity. If anything, one would expect it to be easier to thrive as a mother and philosopher than as a mother and scholar of French literature, who is far more likely to need to travel to archives and the like.

Emily Witt in the LRB:

This service is called OK Cupid Locals. An OK Cupid Locals invitation has to start with the word ‘Let’s’:

Let’s smoke a joint and hang out ☺

Let’s grab a brunch, lunch, beer or some such for some friendly Saturday revelry.

Let’s get a drink after Koyaanisqatsi at the Castro.

Let’s meet and tickle.

Let’s enjoy a cookie.

Let’s become friends and explore somewhere.

‘Let’s go now you and I’ always comes into my mind, but I’ve never broadcast an OK Cupid chat signal, I just respond. That night I scrolled until I found a handsome man who had written a benign invitation: ‘Let’s get a drink.’ I looked at his profile. He was Brazilian. I speak Portuguese. He played the drums. ‘Tattoos are a big part of my friends’ and family’s life,’ he wrote. Every era has its own utopian possibilities: ours is the chance to make our lives more bearable through technology.

The man generally held responsible for internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen, but Kremen was out of the internet dating business altogether by 1997, just around the time people were signing up for the internet en masse. Today he runs a solar energy financing company, is an elected official in Los Altos Hills, California and is better known for his protracted legal battle over the ownership of the pornography website sex.com than he is for inventing internet dating.

Valeriu Nicolae in Eurozine:

On 24 September this year, over 30,000 people in the Romanian National Arena, joined by millions more on TV, watched the football match between Steaua and Rapid Bucharest. During the game, over 20,000 people repeatedly chanted, “We have always hated and will always hate the Gypsies.” Calls of “die Gypsies” could also be heard throughout the game.

Before the game, the owner of Steaua, Gigi Becali, a member of the European Parliament, had stated that he was not afraid the other team would win since it was a well-known fact that “they drown just before reaching the shore”.

The phrase derives from a punishment visited on Roma/Gypsies during the many hundreds of years Roma were slaves of the Romanian aristocrats and the Romanian Orthodox Church. Roma were covered in tar, rolled in feathers and then thrown into a river. Romanian aristocrats would watch them drown while trying to reach the shore. It may also relate to incidents during the Holocaust when Romanian officers shot at boats transporting Roma over the river to Transnistria – many Roma drowned before reaching the shore. Many more died of starvation.

The justification for the lack of official response to these racist chants in past years is that the fans of Rapid are nicknamed “the Gypsies”.

However, on this occasion, among the racist banners displayed was one with the text “Respect Eugen Grigore”. Grigore was a mass murderer who killed 24 Roma in 1970. In addition, during and at the end of the game, Steaua officials incited the fans to racism and even joined them in their chants.

Throughout September, a number of incidents across Europe demonstrated yet again the appalling levels of anti-Gypsyism prevalent within the European Union. The Policy Centre for Roma and Minorities in Bucharest reported the Romanian incident to the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the Fundamental Rights Agency, the OSCE and all intergovernmental bodies that have significant budgets dedicated to addressing Roma issues. We have reported similar or worst incidents in the past.

We also reported it to UEFA, the governing body of European football, and to the Romanian Football Federation (RFF), where we talked to people at the highest level. As soon as they received our report they called us to discuss the next steps. Two days later, the President of the RFF condemned anti-Roma racism in Romanian football in the strongest declaration of its kind ever issued by an influential institution in Romania.

It is hard to do justice to the brilliance and complexity of this book, which provides no less than a complete re-evaluation of the origins of perspective in Western art. Hans Belting, an internationally recognised authority on the theory of art from Hieronymus Bosch to Marcel Duchamp, argues that the scientific and artistic genesis of linear perspective did not come out of the Florence of Giotto and Brunelleschi as we are usually told by art historians, but instead first emerged in eleventh-century Baghdad in the work of Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040), a mathematician born in Basra who became known in the West as Alhazen, ‘the Arab Archimedes’. Educated in Baghdad, Alhazen spent most of his life in Cairo, where he invented the camera obscura and wrote his Kit?b al-Man?zir, or Book of Optics, begun in 1028. The book circulated under the title Perspectivae before it was printed in Latin in 1572, and exerted an enormous influence on Western science, from the work on optics by Roger Bacon (1214-94) to the rediscovery of the camera obscura by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).

more from Jerry Brotton at Berlin Review of Books here.

On November 16, 1930, in Nnobi, near my hometown of Ogidi, providence ushered me into a world at a cultural crossroads. By then, a longstanding clash of Western and African civilizations had generated deep conversations and struggles between their respective languages, religions, and cultures. Crossroads possess a certain dangerous potency. Anyone born there must wrestle with their multiheaded spirits and return to his or her people with the boon of prophetic vision; or accept, as I have, life’s interminable mysteries. My initiation into the complicated world of Ndi Igbo was at the hands of my mother and my older sister, Zinobia, who furnished me with a number of wonderful stories from our ancient Igbo tradition. The tales were steeped in intrigue, spiced with oral acrobatics and song, but always resolute in their moral message. My favorite stories starred the tortoise mbe, and celebrated his mischievous escapades.

more from Chinua Achebe at Guernica here.

One need not know Hebrew to get a sense of how revolutionary Dolly City is. The prose pummels the reader. Dolly, by turns apathetic and enraged, is articulate and perhaps overly perceptive. “Madness is a predator,” she observes. “Its food is the soul. It takes over the soul as rapidly as our forces occupied Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. [. . .] And if a state like the State of Israel can’t control the Arabs in the territories, how can anybody expect me, a private individual, to control the occupied territories inside myself?” (95–96). She explicitly relates the chaos within her to the political mayhem that plagues her environment. Violence reigns in her city. And a strange city it is: dystopic, fantastic, phantasmagoric, nightmarish—Dolly City is unlike any other setting in Hebrew literature. At once Tel Aviv and every other city in the world, Dolly City recalls the alienating metropolis that is by now a familiar setting of modernist writing, at the same time adding terrifying new features to this landscape.

more from Karen Grumberg at Context here.

Tim O Reilly in Edge:

I've been thinking a lot lately about a piece I read in Stuart Brand's, CoEvolution Quarterly back in 1975. It's called the “Clothesline Paradox.” The author, Steve Baer, was talking about alternative energy. The thesis is simple: You put your clothes in the dryer, and the energy you use gets measured and counted. You hang your clothes on the clothesline, and it “disappears” from the economy. It struck me that there are a lot of things that we're dealing with on the Internet that are subject to the Clothesline Paradox. Value is created, but it's not measured and counted. It's captured somewhere else in the economy. I started thinking about this first in the area of open-source software, or for that matter, the Web. You think about how much value Tim Berners-Lee created and how he didn't actually capture very much of it. It was captured by companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook. You also think about the other extreme, where companies like Goldman Sachs managed to extract a great deal of value from the economy, but as the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, they did so while actually destroying value for the overall economy. So that got me thinking about how value creation and value capture are not the same thing. Our economics tends to measure value capture. If we're going to get 21^st century economic policy right, or even just correctly model what's working and why, we have to start moving to a model that measures value creation rather than value capture.

One really great example of the distinction between value creation and value capture comes from open-source software. A few months ago, I had a conversation with Hari Ravichandran, the founder and CEO of Endurance International Group, the largest web hosting firm in the US. They include brands like Bluehost. Hari said, “Our business is built on open-source software, and I'd like to give something back.” In the course of our conversation I realized that most people don't even think of the Web-hosting industry or ISPs as being dependent on open-source software. But when you think about it, of course Web domain hosting is a simple business model wrapped around the open source internet domain system. They're essentially offering the DNS, Apache, MySQL, and WordPress to their customers. Hari said something that really struck me, which is that there was a McKinsey study that showed that small businesses that have a Web presence have ten percent greater productivity than those without.

More here.