Thanks to ever more sophisticated robotic technology, physical commuting may one day be a thing of the past. American companies have started to make “telepresence robots” that allow employees to project themselves into company offices from anywhere around the world. The AP has more: It’s all made possible by the Beam — a mobile video-conferencing machine […]

Change is coming to higher education. NYU and other medical schools are offering shorter, cheaper courses in training, as the NY Times reports: Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time […]

There’s a lot of glee in some circles at the news that Senator Michael Crapo (R-Idaho) was arrested over the weekend, failed field sobriety tests, tested at well beyond legal levels for blood alcohol and was booked on DUI charges. Here at the stately Mead Manor, the feeling is more of a “there but for […]

India and Russia announced a multibillion dollar arms deal today, Reuters reports, a story that says a lot about the new Asian power dynamics.First, this tells us India won’t be an American patsy. Buying arms from Russia is a way among other things to assert India’s independence and to ensure that it doesn’t become too […]

[It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our thirteen posts of Christmas running from Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During this holiday season in 2012-2013 we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day and on January […]

As we expected, Egypt’s new constitution, drafted by the Islamist-dominated government, was approved by voters yesterday, the Washington Post reports: Egyptians have approved a new constitution that will deepen the influence of Islamic law in their country, but will likely lead to further divisions after a month-long political crisis.Preliminary and unofficial results on Sunday from […]

This week Dan Drezner took us to task for our overuse of the word “bubble” to describe the changes under way in higher education, arguing that these changes are not come quickly enough to qualify as a true bubble. We fired back with this response: The big difference between the bubble metaphor as classically used […]

It’s the fourth Sunday in Advent today and even the crustiest and most Christmas-resistant among us are beginning to thaw. The Mead family is preparing its Christmas Day get-together and though sadly some beloved faces are no longer with us at the holiday table, new arrivals by birth and by marriage keep increasing our tribe. […]

No matter how huge America’s oil and gas bonanza is, we won’t be disengaging from the world any time soon. That’s the sage wisdom former WRM colleague Michael Levi imparts in a recent op-ed in the NYT: Instability in the Middle East would still hit motorists in the Midwest, and the United States would still […]

President Putin is doing his best to spin the numbers on Russian demography. After catastrophic declines in population since the death of the Soviet Union, Russia saw births outnumber deaths last year and, temporarily, the demographic numbers look better. As the Financial Times reports, the ebullient sounding President remarked that the solution to Russia’s demographic […]