Web Monitor
15:17 UK time, Tuesday, 29 September 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today Web Monitor asks if being judged on your parentage is as unfair as racism, if the UK curry scene will welcome Bollywood and if we are seeing the end of the "generalist". Share your favourite bits of the web by sending your links via the letter box to the right of this page.
• Max Mosley is the president of the FIA - Formula One's governing body. However, that all anybody is interested in is his father's past as the leader of the British Union of Facists. He thinks it's discriminatory:
"You have this feeling, it's an awful thing to say you are being discriminated against.
You see it is a little bit like 50 years ago for the black man, he does not get something he should have done. But he does not know for sure whether it is because he is black, it is possible.
There is always this feeling that it is actually that, but you have to be careful not to get paranoid about it.
You see nowadays it is not acceptable to discriminate against anybody because of their religion, their race, their ethnicity, because they are handicapped in some way, but it is perfectly permissible to discriminate because of what their father did."
• Bollywood star and ex-Big Brother contestant Shilpa Shetty has bought a 33% stake in an British Indian food company which owns the curry chain Tiffin Bites.
Research Fellow at Roehampton University's Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism the UK's Curry house industry. He is not hopeful of Shetty's chances, citing a happy status quo in the independent curry house market:
"A massive 95% of the remaining Indian outlets are run by Bangladeshis who mostly hail from the Sylhet area in the north-east of the country (the pattern is a legacy from the time that Sylheti seamen became galley hands and cooks on British merchant ships and established cafes and tea-houses in waterfront areas when they settled in the UK). It is a simple fact, then, that any newcomer to the Indian food scene in the UK, including Shilpa Shetty, will find the Bangladeshis and other South Asian groups very well entrenched and difficult to displace."
• The Economist's foreign editor that people who are experts in many things - polymaths - are a dying breed as they aren't needed any more:
"It is not only the explosion of knowledge that puts polymaths at a disadvantage, but also the vast increase in the number of specialists and experts in every field. This is because the learning that creates would-be polymaths creates monomaths too and in overwhelming numbers. If you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist."
Also in general knowledge is being dealt a blow by Google and an education system which doesn't aim to teach facts anymore:
"I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work... If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration... facts are in retreat in our education system. I could find no one to dispute the proposition that young people generally learn fewer of them at school than their parents would have, and those they do learn, they may well learn in ways that mean they do not remain so long in the memory."
The 
