In case you've been worrying about how the war in Iraq will end, or the coming of avian flu, or the extinction of the universe as we drift into the cosmic void, well, relax. Here's something you should really fret about: the future of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization.

Will Your Job Survive?

Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group talks with Steve Inskeep about President Bush's characterization of the threat to American forces in Iraq. Malley and his colleagues recently published a review of propaganda by Iraq's insurgents.

Surveying the Security Conditions for American Forces in Iraq

Interesting movies this week include Capote, The Squid & the Whale, and Paradise Now.

New Releases for March 21st, 2006

The dark thriller with contemporary political overtones was adapted by the Wachowski brothers, of Matrix fame. But the authors of the graphic novel, written in the 1980s, have distanced themselves from the film, which follows a masked rebel battling a fascist state.

'V for Vendetta' or 'W for Wachowskis'?

Thumb suckers of the world unite, the most hotly anticipated film of the, er, week, "V for Vendetta," has arrived, complete with manufactured buzz and some apparently genuine British outrage. Concocted by the same team behind the "Matrix" franchise, this future-shock story about a masked avenger at war with a totalitarian British regime was drawn along the usual Orwellian lines but is clearly meant to have more than a passing resemblance to our current political environment.

Is the man in the mask who wants to make Parliament go boom Osama bin Laden or Patrick Henry? Or just a Phantom of the Opera clone who likes to kick back to the cult sounds of Antony and the Johnsons? Your guess is as good as mine, and I've seen the film.

V for Vendetta - Review: Who Is This Masked Avenger?

Amazon says it likes Text Stats because it keeps readers at the site longer comparing and contrasting books. "It is definitely a feature that we view as having a 'sticky' aspect," said Brian Williams, the senior product manager in charge of the Text Stats functions at Amazon.

Book, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words

MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X.

Raging Menace - MenuMeters

the IRS may be revising its rules to allow tax preparers to share or sell customer information to third parties and database brokers, as part of a sweeping change to its privacy regulations.

IRS May Let Tax Preparers Sell Customers' Information

Martin calls it "community space", but some of the tools (e.g. IM) are primarily one-to-one tools... Wondering if/how we should take into account binary relations between people within the "community cloud" (also: degrees of trust in the community "in general" and between specific people may differ substantially).

Collaboration tools in relation to the level of trust

We'll start by looking at some universal patterns, which are the broad trends powering the paradigm, and then get into specific web patterns for elements like the use of tagging and folksonomies, Ajax, and so on.

What Web 2.0 is not

As with any trendy idea that can be used to produce a bag of investment money, some quarters are promoting the artifacts of Web 2.0-ishness in place of the stronger underlying ideas. Do not be confused by this. Using rounded boxes and Ajax do not alone make something useful.

Web 2.0: A Pattern Library