David Brooks:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.

The Great Seduction by Debt

For months, economic Pollyannas have looked beyond the dismal headlines and promised a quick recovery in the second half. They're dead wrong.

The Economy: Why It’s Worse Than You Think

Google Reader recognizes the Contra cheat code.

This paper proposes a new method for displaying large-scale tag clouds. We use a topographical image that helps users to grasp the relationship among tags intuitively as a background to the tag clouds. We apply this interface to a blog navigation system and show that the proposed method enables users to find the desired tags easily even if the tag clouds are very large, 5,000 and above tags. Our approach is also effective for understanding the overall structure of a large amount of tagged documents.

You can still read the full paper without an ACM Digital Library subscription.

Topigraphy: visualization for large-scale tag clouds

What if warriors -- or prisoners of war -- could selectively disable their pain sense -- or their sense of decency ...

The tasking for this study was to evaluate the potential for adversaries to exploit advances in Human Performance Modification, and thus create a threat to national security. In making this assessment, we were asked to evaluate long-term scenarios. We have thus considered the present state of the art in pharmaceutical intervention in cognition and in brain-computer interfaces, and considered how possible future developments might proceed and be used by adversaries.

Freeman Dyson was a member of this JASON study team.

From the recent archive:

That Sabrina Harman, for one, was often disgusted with what she saw at Abu Ghraib is indeed clear from her letters to her partner, Kelly. And even Graner, the baddest of the bad apples, was apparently taken aback when he was told by "Big Steve" Stefanowicz, a contract civilian interrogator, just how roughly prisoners were to be "broken." Graner was reminded of 24, the popular television series, starring Kiefer Sutherland, about the necessity of using any means, including torture, to stop terrorists. Graner claims that he told Big Steve: "We don't do that stuff, that's all TV stuff."

And from last year:

“24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors — cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Human Performance

There is a stretch of North Glebe Road, in Arlington, Virginia, that epitomizes the American approach to road safety. It’s a sloping curve, beginning on a four-lane divided highway and running down to Chain Bridge, on the Potomac River. Most drivers, absent a speed limit, would probably take the curve at 30 or 35 mph in good weather. But it has a 25-mph speed limit, vigorously enforced. As you approach the curve, a sign with flashing lights suggests slowing further, to 15 mph. A little later, another sign makes the same suggestion. "Great! the neighborhood’s more cautious", residents might think.

We’re being protected. But I believe policies like this in fact make us all less safe.

Distracting Miss Daisy

Gas prices are high throughout the country, but how hard they hit individual families depends on income levels, which vary widely.

The Varying Impact of Gas Prices

This paper describes a distributed collaborative wiki-based platform that has been designed to facilitate the development of Semantic Web applications. The applications designed using this platform are able to build semantic data through the cooperation of different developers and to exploit that semantic data. The paper shows a practical case study on the application VPOET, and how an application based on Google Gadgets has been designed to test VPOET and let human users exploit the semantic data created. This practical example can be used to show how different Semantic Web technologies can be integrated into a particular Web application, and how the knowledge can be cooperatively improved.

VPOET: Using a Distributed Collaborative Platform for Semantic Web Applications

The fields of neuroscience, psycho-pharmacology, and cognition are in rapid flux because new scientific tools have provided the capability to develop fundamental understanding of linkages among brain activity, electrical and chemical stimulation, and human behavior. Applications to human performance modification are being driven primarily by medical needs, e.g., “cognitive repair,” and there are significant new technological developments in this area. As a result, there is popular excitement about, and thus commercial markets for possible applications in “cognitive enhancement.” This area is certain to be investigated extensively over the next decade. Awareness of developments in cognitive performance enhancement, including cultural differences in adoption, will be important because these may affect the behavior and effectiveness of opposing military forces in both symmetric and asymmetric warfare. The findings and recommendations of our study fall under three categories, evaluation of military effectiveness, brain plasticity, and brain-computer interface as outlined below.

Human Performance

Read a lot of news articles or blog postings online? Have trouble keeping your place in long articles, or switching between articles and forgetting how much you've read? Get annoyed at having to slam repeatedly on the down arrow, or click on the scroll bar every few seconds?

Introducing Paragrasp, an extension for Mozilla Firefox, to alleviate your problems. It adds a highlight to the current paragraph you're reading, and allows you to use simple keyboard shortcuts to navigate forward or backward, moving the highlight and automatically scrolling the window to focus your reading attention to the center of the screen. Each window and tab has their own highlighter, which allows you to switch between them while still keeping your place. Try it now!

Paragrasp