You've got the correlation right, but you've got cause and effect back to front.

The way it works in reality is this:

Some people are born cleverer than others. The clever ones (most of them) do well in school, pass exams, get into professional and managerial jobs, and accumulate wealth. They move to affluent neighbourhoods and have kids. Those go to schools that are full of the kids of other clever people. The schools get a reputation of being "good" schools, but really they're just schools full of clever kids who inherited their cleverness from their parents.

Meanwhile, the less clever ones (most of them) do badly in school, finish early, and wind up in low skill, low wage jobs or unemployment. They don't earn enough to live in affluent neighbourhoods, so they congregate in the less salubrious parts of the city where property prices are lower. Their children do badly in school because they didn't have the luck to inherit clever genes.

Wealth does not cause cleverness, and poverty does not cause the lack of it. Rather, cleverness and the lack of it (as well as other talents and their lack) cause individuals to be rich or poor.

This is how the correlation is caused.

Zamyatin isn't as underrated as Jerome K. Jerome, since the latter invented the template that the former copied, but Zamyatin usually gets the credit for the invention. Also, while Zamyatin's novella was inspired by Soviet Communism, Jerome's short story ("A New Utopia", published in 1891) predicted it.

The fact that Android tablets are taking so long to eat into Apple's market share is down to Google.

About a year ago, Google announced that Froyo was "not optimized for tablets", and that vendors should not sell Android tablets until Honeycomb came out. As a result, device makers and software developers delayed their tablet projects, and customers delayed their tablet purchases. Google made sure that Froyo tablets would not succeed by prohibiting them from accessing Android Market. (The Galaxy Tab was exempted.) This wouldn't have been so bad if the release of Honeycomb had not been several months later than originally expected, and if the first release had not been buggy. It's only in the past couple of weeks that Honeycomb 3.2 came out, giving us a Honeycomb that's truly ready for market.

As it happens, Froyo works pretty well on tablets, so Google's announcement was a disastrous, and I dare say rather stupid, mistake. They shot themselves in the foot, and postponed the development of the Android tablet market by about a year, giving the iPad time to become much more entrenched than it would have been otherwise.

Imitation is not proof of lack of imagination. Have you guys never heard the phrase "imitate to surpass"? It's something they understand in Japan, China and Korea. Imitation is just a step along the way. After you have successfully imitated the best, you are ready to surpass them.

They even copied the idea of copying a town - from the Japanese. Huis Ten Bosch near Nagasaki is an uncannily accurate Japanese copy of a Dutch town.

Actually, there is a big shift. There has recently been a huge jump in numbers enrolling at the Open University, especially in the younger age bracket. In the 1970s, there was no internet, and students at bricks-and-mortar universities not only paid no fees, but also were given a grant. Obviously, in that climate, the Open University was something of a niche operation. Not any more. It's now the biggest university in the UK by a country mile. The reason for the absence of a similar institution in the US is that the Department of Education had a policy until recently of providing federal assistance only to courses where at least 50% of the tuition was face-to-face (i.e., no loans or other government help if your course is online) - a big disincentive to American colleges that might be thinking of delivering their courses online. That rule changed in 2006, and I notice that just in the past two or three years a lot of US colleges have started experimenting with providing online courses in a big way.

I am shocked and dismayed by the fogeyish attitude exhibited in most of these posts.

Bill Gates is right. University in its traditional form is already obsolete, and the delivery of learning materials via the internet will replace most traditional higher education in less than ten years. Any university that has not made a major shift towards internet delivery will be in crisis about five years from now, with dramatically falling enrollment.

Why should a professor deliver a class to just a few hundred students in a lecture hall, when they can deliver the same lecture to millions of people at probably a lower total cost (as lecture halls don't come cheap)? Why should a university maintain a huge library building groaning with books, when a hard disk the size of one book could contain the entire contents of all of them? And it's not as if these cheaper forms of course delivery are worse - they're actually better. If lectures are supplied in mp3 or video format, students can listen to them on a flexible timetable, and listen again to bits that they didn't understand the first time. If books and journals are delivered in digital format, they are much easier and quicker to search, and there's no inherent limit to the number of people who can view a given text at a time. Students will be able to fit learning around their busy lives. Existing universities will be able to sell most of their buildings, or rent them out to business.

Some on here have asked, what about social interaction, mutual support among students, and personal support from tutors? All of these can be organized via the internet, using a combination of forums, email, voip, chat and clubs. Personal tuition could be an optional extra, which would allow some self-motivated and bright students to save money by doing without.

If all these things are implemented, the cost of a university degree could be reduced by anything from 50% to more than 90%, depending on the course. Some courses, such as mechanical engineering, chemistry, and medicine, will still have face-to-face classes, but even in these subjects the required number of hours of such classes can be significantly reduced by the use of videos and simulation software.

With such huge potential savings, traditional university will not be able to compete.

You may have heard of the Open University. It has more than 160,000 enrolled students, who all study remotely using the internet. Its degrees are respected, and surveys indicate a high level of student satisfaction. On in addition to enrolled students, untold numbers of people use the learning materials it gives away free (22 million downloads from iTunes U, so far). The Open University is in Britain. There are similar institutions in Japan and a few other countries. Why none in the USA? I suspect that the reason is that until recently (2006), the Department of Education operated a rule stipulating federal aid and federal student loans were not available for online courses. Obviously, such a rule would be a disincentive to colleges thinking of developing such courses. Now that it has gone, we can expect to see a rapid expansion of online education in the USA.