The Pentagon on Monday will unveil its proposed 2009 budget of $515.4 billion. If it is approved in full, annual military spending, when adjusted for inflation, will have reached its highest level since World War II.

This is in absolute dollars; measured as a percentage of GDP, the current figure is much smaller.

Budget of the United States Government, FY09

Issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Budget of the United States Government is a collection of documents that contains the budget message of the President, information about the President’s budget proposals for a given fiscal year, and other budgetary publications that have been issued throughout the fiscal year. Other related and supporting budget publications, such as the Economic Report of the President, are included, which may vary from year to year.

Proposed Military Spending Is Highest Since WWII

The U is for You.

Now that Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have finished congratulating themselves for not having been alarmists–in other words, for failing to recognize that a recession was looming–they are now facing up to the onset of a U.S. recession and a rapidly spreading financial crisis. Having been late to reach that conclusion, they now grudgingly admit that we may have a brief “V-shaped” recession and are apparently hoping that Fed rate cuts and a fiscal stimulus package will quickly solve the economy’s problems.

The more likely situation, however, is that the recession of 2008 will be a longer, “U-shaped” affair, driven by an unusual, persistent drop in consumption and investment. Underlying the intensity and persistence of the cyclical weakness emerging in the U.S. economy and manifest in weaker investment and consumption spending is an “endogenous” risk appetite cycle, one that is tied to the fundamental problem facing the U.S. economy: the build-up and subsequent implosion of the housing bubble.

See also, Housing Meltdown: Why home prices could drop 25% more on average before the market finally hits bottom, from a recent issue of Business Week. The full text spends a lot of time hedging, taking a he-said, she-said approach to coverage so as to avoid being called out as 'wrong' down the road. Still, the simple act of repeating the 25% figure lends more credence to it.

The Risk Cycle

This is a good list.

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. THE ONLY RULE IS WORK. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

From the archive:

Rumsfeld's Rules

Powell's Rules

Eleven Lessons from Robert McNamara

Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues

Creative thinking rules

Although technological change is vital for economic growth, the interaction of finance and technological innovation is rarely studied. This pioneering volume examines the ways in which innovation is funded in the United States. In case studies and theoretical discussions, leading economists and economic historians analyze how inventors and technologically creative entrepreneurs have raised funds for their projects at different stages of U.S. economic development, beginning with the post-Civil War period of the Second Industrial Revolution. Their discussions point to intriguing insights about how the nature of the technology may influence its financing and, conversely, how the availability of funds influences technological advances.

These studies show that over the long history of American technological advancement, inventors and innovators have shown considerable flexibility in finding ways to finance their work. They have moved to cities to find groups of local investors; they have worked for large firms that could tap the securities market for funds; they have looked to the federal government for research and development funding; and they have been financed by the venture capital industry. The studies make it clear that methods of funding innovation--whether it is in the auto industry or information technology--have important implications for both the direction of technological change and the competitive dynamism of the economy.

Financing Innovation in the United States, 1870 to Present

Philip Meza:

Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long been uncomfortable bedfellows. Out of fear of pirating and lost profits, entertainment companies have historically resisted technological changes. Conversely, high-tech companies, more concerned with technological progress, have largely ignored the needs of the entertainment industry. Nevertheless, those products that we now take for granted, such as DVDs, MP3 players, and the Internet, are all due to the synergy of technology and entertainment.

The switch to digital and web formats for entertainment represents huge potential market opportunities for both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It has opened up new possibilities for entertainment and expanded the way content is created, distributed and consumed. Consider the phenomenon of YouTube and its wildly popular user-created content, or the ability to download movies and TV shows from sites such as iTunes and watch them on your iPod or computer, anytime and anywhere.

The dual forces of consumer demand and rapidly changing content distribution are combining in new ways to create changes that will strike at the very foundations of the entertainment and technology industries. Depending upon how entertainment and technology companies respond, these changes can help them prosper or put them out of business. Media companies will have to become more like technology companies; and technology companies will need to change too. Because content creation, distribution and consumption are ever more tightly linked, Hollywood will need to understand what’s happening in Silicon Valley and vice versa; changes in one industry will reverberate through the other. Some companies such as AOL and Time Warner have tried and failed (at least so far) to harness these forces, while a few companies such as Disney, Intel, and Google have recently taken the initial steps. But many more companies wait, afraid to change but knowing they cannot conduct business as usual.

With an insider’s knowledge, researcher and consultant, Philip Meza insightfully clarifies what managers and investors in media and technology companies will need to do in order to successfully navigate today’s tricky environment. Coming Attractions? Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of Entertainment discusses the history of the key forces driving the relationship between entertainment and technology today and into the future.

Coming Attractions?: Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of Entertainment

From the 2007 Clarendon Lectures in Finance:

What causes a financial crisis? Can financial crises be anticipated or even avoided? What can be done to lessen their impact? Should governments and international institutions intervene? Or should financial crises be left to run their course? In the aftermath of the recent Asian financial crisis, many blamed international institutions, corruption, governments, and flawed macro and microeconomic policies not only for causing the crisis but also unnecessarily lengthening and deepening it. Based on ten years of research, the authors develop a theoretical approach to analyzing financial crises. Beginning with a review of the history of financial crises and providing readers with the basic economic tools needed to understand the literature, the authors construct a series of increasingly sophisticated models. Throughout, the authors guide the reader through the existing theoretical and empirical literature while also building on their own theoretical approach. The text presents the modern theory of intermediation, introduces asset markets and the causes of asset price volatility, and discusses the interaction of banks and markets. The book also deals with more specialized topics, including optimal financial regulation, bubbles, and financial contagion.

Table of Contents:

1. History and institutions
2. Time, uncertainty and liquidity
3. Intermediation
4. Asset markets
5. Financial fragility
6. Intermediation and markets
7. Optimal regulation
8. Money and the prices
9. Bubbles and crises
10. Contagion

See also, from the authors, An Introduction to Financial Crises, a freely available working paper on the subject; more here.

Understanding Financial Crises

This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e., visual communication.

The History of Visual Communication

Do we grow old because of natural cellular mechanisms or because of gradually accumulated environmental toxins, like lead?

Growing old in the age of lead

A unique robotic snake developed by Plymouth-based Merlin Robotics working alongside Nottingham Trent University is to go on display at the London Science Museum’s DANA centre in April 2008.

The vertical snake, designed to function as an interactive artwork, includes two technologies which Merlin claims are a world first. The muscle activation technology uses built-in air valves which enable greater control and scope for movement. The snake’s absolute optical position linear sensors are bus addressable and less susceptible to magnetic interference. The mechanism can also be implemented into commercial applications.

The snake was first unveiled at the Emergent Objects & Performance Design Symposium, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Dr Philip Breedon of the College of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University said: ‘Merlin Robotics have been excellent partners to work with. Their approach and experience related to soft robotics enabled us to explore and develop challenging new ideas and concepts in advanced robotics. Merlin continues to provide excellent technical support as we further refine and develop this project.’

Robot snake goes on display

In every ISP's engineering group there invariably lurks a list of those tasks that lie just a little a bit beyond the normal day to day activity of reacting to events as they happen. For many the item "IPv6??!! has been on this "to do" list for some years, if not for the entire lifetime of the ISP itself! This particular task falls into the category of being large enough that there's never normally enough time to put aside to work on it in between all the other day to day tasks, but its not important enough on any day to push the task to the top of the priority stack. So instead it resides on this "to do" list for year after year. This seemingly endless deferral of core engineering for IPv6 appears to be a pretty typical scenario at the moment across the Internet. A look at the IPv6 inter-domain routing table at the moment reveals some 900 unique Autonomous System numbers (AS's), or 900 networks that are publicly routing IPv6, while there are some 27,300 equivalent AS entries in the IPv4 Internet. So there are still a fair number of networks for whom turning on IPv6 remains something to do tomorrow, or possibly the day after.

But is switching on IPv6 support in the network really such a hard task? What does it take to turn on IPv6 in your network?

You might be asking, before you've clicked through, what is Tui?

Tui is an appliance for Internet connected networks to use to connect their IPv6 cloud to other IPv6 clouds over IPv4 best paths.

Tui is also a Teredo and 6to4 relay, to provide efficient tunnelled connectivity to end users of an IPv4-only access network.

Also:

The Tui (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) is an endemic passerine bird of New Zealand. It is one of the largest members of the diverse honeyeater family.

IPv6 Transition Tools and Tui