In the buzz of web 2.0, I had heard about a service called del.icio.us for some time now—actually for a very long time. And I had gone to their website several times to see what this was about, but every time I found myself leaving their website, because of lack of intuitive design, explanation of purpose, and clarity of contribution to the user. Well, call me a late adapter or whatever you want, but now I finally signed up. And I love it.

• del.icio.us is a web service where you save all of your bookmarks online, so you can access them from any computer. That’s not new. What’s great about the service, however, is:del.icio.us makes it extremely easy to find your bookmarks again, because you “tagged” them with a number of keywords of your choice and saved them in a flat hierarchy. The easy retrieval of your bookmarks is one of the real advantages.
• Super fast and easy saving of bookmarks is also a huge advantage, because saving a bookmark, then, does not become an obstacle. Further, if you run Firefox and install the del.icio.us extension, you are really rolling.
• You can browse everyone else’s bookmarks—on the fly. So you really know what moves the web (and/or the world, for that matter) the second you surf. This can also be done by keywords, of course.

So I like this web service a lot. It also makes it a lot easier for me to do my links page, right here on my blog. If you visit it, you will see a lot of output coming directly out of my del.icio.us bookmarks, most notably the tag cloud. The tag cloud contains all the different keywords I have assigned to my bookmarks. The biggest and brightest are the keywords that have been assigned to bookmarks most often. Go explore it on my links page.

Chairman of the board of Risø National Laboratory (and also CEO of Danfoss—one of the biggest industrial companies in Denmark), Jørgen Mads Clausen, recently wrote a letter to the Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation, Helge Sander. In brief, the contents of this letter discussed the making of a Danish MIT-like institution by merging my school, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences (DFU), the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), and Risø themselves.

Let me be the first to say that I am extremely thrilled about this idea, the vision, and the potential upside of such a merger. However, I also feel there are some substantial pitfalls that need to be avoided in order to make this a success for all parties involved.

• Learn from others, but do not walk in their footsteps
  The title of this post—Danish MIT in the making—is taken from the press release of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation. While I think it is important to look at lessons learned elsewhere in the world, it is equally important not just to imitate, but innovate. If you walk in other people’s footsteps, you will never pass them. If this vision is to succeed, we need to define what will take us in front of others, not just how we catch up.
• Two lemons do not make a lemonade
  (Cliché borrowed from Fred Wilson, albeit I use it a bit differently). CBS is light-years ahead of the proposed partner universities (Risø is not a university, and I hold it out of this comparison), at least when it comes to internationalisation and international recognition. Merging CBS with other institutions will not necessarily spill over the positive image and global competencies that CBS possesses on to the other institutions. In fact, the risk is that our competencies and international recognition can deteriorate. In fact, what CBS is unique and very good at (read my recent post: Best Nordic Business School) is what the other institutions are not so good at, in my opinion, and merging all this will not necessarily make a nice lemonade. At the least, a very clear plan for this including risk management must be laid out.
• Synergies must be clearly visible and attainable
  I see the clear synergy in merging DTU and CBS—it is very common in, e.g., Germany to take joint engineering and business degrees. I see great potential for business students to get more exposure to the natural sciences, and I see great potential for engineering students as well. Where DFU synergies come into the picture is not at all clear to me.
• Rome was not built in one day
  Why should we make the mega-merger all at once? In my eyes there is a great rationale in merging the two or three most obvious candidates first, learn from the lessons in that process, and then continue as one sees fit. Comparing this to the business world, it seems a bit rash to do a mega-merger like that in one gigantic step. If we look at it from an acquisition perspective (which is wrong due to the nature of this project—it needs to be a merger of equals), it still is a big step, which many executives would chunk into smaller pieces.

That said, I would like to quote myself from the top: “I am extremely thrilled about this idea, the vision, and the potential upside of such a merger.” And while I discussed some of the pitfalls in this post, there are also upsides, which should be clear to everyone.

I am very interested in your views on this topic, so please comment.

The school I study at—Copenhagen Business School (CBS)—has been ranked as the best Nordic business school by the Financial Times. In conjunction with the latest ranking of master programmes, the FT also wrote a nice piece on our school.

CBS is also part of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS). CEMS offers the Master in International Management, which is ranked no. 3 in Europe.

I would—of course—like to stress the fact that we also have a case competition (for which I write the case). If I have to describe it—continuing the beer slogan thing the FT has going on in their before-mentioned piece—our case competition is probably one of the best organized competitions in the world.

So things are moving nicely along for CBS, which was an almost purely domestic school a couple of decades ago. To make a very bold comparison, one could say that this resembles the story of NYU a bit.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

I read this at a visit to The Quotations Page. Ellen Goodman, American Journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, on normal life. I do not agree with this rather pessimistic view–you should love what you do and be passionate about it. But I like the irony of the quotation, and it does stress the point that if you do not like what you do, then irony catches up on you.

My good friend, Stefan Jung, has a new blog post on happiness, where he uploads a lot of pictures of happiness from a photography competition.

I thought that was a very nice idea, so I just dug up a few pictures from my archives.

All the pictures are from a camp near Mullsjo, Sweden, except no. 3, which is from Bryant Park, NYC.

According to DrinksMixer, a dry martini takes 1 2/3 oz gin, 1/3 oz dry vermouth, and an olive. The quality, of course, depends on the brands you choose. There is hardly any news in that.

Being a James Bond fan, I browsed the internet to see if it actually is a dry martini, he drinks. No. It is a vodka martini - from the first book (Casino Royale, 1953): “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.”

The reason why it is shaken, and not stirred as the normal dry martini, is to promote the gin flavour, and to get it very, very cold. In a dry martini, bruising the gin (getting the flavour out) is strictly prohibited. Also, the smoothness of the vermouth is preserved when not shaking.

One final word: James Bond’s drink is NOT a dry martini, but a vodka martini (I think I already mentioned it). It is hardly ever confused, except by James Bond himself, who orders a dry martini, and specifies the above mentioned recipe. I guess you have to be James Bond in order to be able to let that one slip.

Read much more about the stuff behind the James Bond (dry) martini at StraightDope.

This is probably not the first thing you read about whether we are in a bubble or not when it comes to house prices. It is as emergent an issue in the US as it is in Europe:

• Fidelity: Are you prepared for a real estate bubble?

The Economist has a recent article on German economy, which explains how German real estate is undervalued compared to the rest of the Euro Zone, and, complementary, shows us how Euro Zone house prices have increased over the past decade and a half:

• The Economist: The darkest hour before dawn

This article has a very interesting figure on house prices to income, which makes comparison between countries possible–but also tells us whether house prices grow more than income. That is actually the case in the Euro Zone, but not in Germany, according to the Economist article. I wanted to see what this looked like in Denmark, and with the (free and available) data I could find, the figure looks like this:

The way to interpret the figure is that house prices have increased much more than income in the 90’s, in fact so much, that the house price to income ratio has increased by more than 30% in the time period. This is hardly any breaking news, but–nevertheless–interesting. I would really love to have find source data, that would enable me to copy the methodology of the Economist, so we could compare those findings with the Euro Zone, but so far I had to pay for the data. If anyone has anything on this, let me know.

Note: Source Statbank Denmark. Income is taxable income per taxable individual and not inhabitant and thus not directly comparable to the Economist figure that rely on other assumptions. Further, income has not been adjusted for purchasing power parity. I disclaim all responsibility for this figure and any actions by any individual following this figure.

The buzz these days–if you read a just a little on evolution and particularly that theories of Darwin–is flowers.

The New York Times wrote about it; it also hit the Danish science media. Two American scientists (Jan Salick, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Wayne Law, a graduate student, Washington University) have been researching on the snow lotus. It appears, that one species of the plant has been decreasing in height over time. Why is that?

The basic reasoning is, that people like to pick the taller, more beautiful flowers. So in areas where tourists (and other flower-picking people) are dense in number, the lower and/or more unattractive flowers will survive. In fact, the snow lotus lost 10 centimeters of its height over 100 years.

This is at the very essence of natural selection. Go to the NYT story I linked on top, to read more on this.