"If this is not civil war," he said, "then God knows what civil war is."

On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success

Don't expect big thinking here ...

"Companies need to respect the time it takes to do strategic thinking," he says. "Task-oriented thinking is important too, of course. But bigger thinking is slow."

Be smarter at work, slack off - Mar. 17, 2006

Brookings drops the numbers.

These statistics may point to the possibility of a troop drawdown strategy for the United States — but while a strategically passable outcome still seems within reach, it is increasingly hard to believe that there are the makings of a major success for American foreign policy in Iraq.

The State of Iraq: An Update

Can anyone explain why Mark Bowden is reviewing Tom Wolfe?

In one of many deft set pieces in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, a group of student journalists at the fictional Dupont University hold a meeting in the "lumpen-bohemian clutter" of their campus newsroom. The editor wants a firm story list for the next issue's fast-approaching deadline, but the discussion bogs down over an item that might just be important breaking news—they're not sure.

Cry Wolfe

Considering how "Rising Above The Gathering Storm" was accepted here, this probably won't be seen as good news.

Several scientists probably did a double take when President Bush announced a plan to double funding for basic research over the next decade during January's State of the Union address. In recent years, the Oval Office couch had been cold to government scientists suggesting that the President request more funds for research. Instead, a grim trend of neglect for science ensued, culminating last year in the National Institutes of Health choking down their first budget cut since 1970.

Seed: Going Where No Report Has Gone Before

"This research is based on the idea that people's preferences for music and other activities reveal a great deal about their personalities, lifestyles, and values."

ABSTRACT—How is information about people conveyed through their preferences for certain kinds of music? Here we show that individuals use their music preferences to communicate information about their personalities to observers, and that observers can use such information to form impressions of others. Study 1 revealed that music was the most common topic in conversations among strangers given the task of getting acquainted. Why was talk about music so prevalent? Study 2 showed that (a) observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions on the basis of targets’ music preferences, (b) music preferences were related to targets’ personalities, (c) the specific cues that observers used tended to be the ones that were valid, and (d) music preferences reveal information that is different from that obtained in other zero-acquaintance contexts. Discussion focuses on the mechanisms that may underlie the links between personality and music preferences.

This looks like an interesting research area.

The Role of Music Preferences in Interpersonal Perception

How many have you read?

Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men
On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright
The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith
The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare

TWELVE BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Of interest in the press conference held by the Department of Energy to announce the new contractor, was a bit of discussion about what would have happened if Lockheed had won the contract. Lockheed already runs Sandia National Laboratories, which create all the mechanisms in a nuclear weapon aside from the actual "nuclear package" - the core of the warhead. And a lot of these non-nuclear components are tres sophisticated and classified. If Lockheed had managed Los Alamos as well, it would also have been building nuclear components. The company would have been in a unique position - unique at least since the nuclear labs split into subsidiary operations decades ago - of working with designs for entire nuclear weapons.

And the winner is...

This is timely, given the recent release of "Intuition", blogged here last week.

The whirlwind pace of innovation in the 21st century conceals a dark secret of science: Research is generally at least a year old before it appears in scientific journals.

Publishing a study is often a downright lethargic process: Researchers with a hot new result submit an article to a journal, wait a minimum of three months for experts in the field to review the findings and then spend another few months revising to the reviewers' recommendations. When a paper is finally accepted, it is edited again and checked by the authors, only to linger—often for several more months—for its turn at the printer.

The process can take so long that some scientists have decided to avoid it altogether.

Seed: Skipping Peer Review

Subterranean shifts in basaltic magma are changing the face of Yellowstone, meaning eventually we may have to toss out some of those Ansel Adams calendars.

Seed: The Changing Face of Yellowstone