“Sell Globally” and “Shop Globally” have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have not been many such services. In this paper, we use a case study of global price dispersion to illustrate the need and the value of a global price comparison service. Then we identify and discuss several technology challenges, including semantic heterogeneity, in providing a global price comparison service. We propose a mediation architecture to address the semantic heterogeneity problem, and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture by implementing a prototype that enables global price comparison using data from web sources in several countries.

Enabling Global Price Comparison through Semantic Integration of Web Data

Recent polls of economists by leading financial publications have predicted a less than 50-percent chance that the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2008. But the media’s coverage of “recession” makes it seem inevitable.

“Everyone’s talking about a recession,” Amy Robach reported on the “Today” show January 12.

The broadcast media mentioned the economy or a recession in 54 stories during the first two weeks of 2008. The segments predicted a recession or reported fears of a looming recession four times as often as they reported optimism about the New Year, even though recent surveys of economists put the chance of recession at 40 percent to 42 percent.

The media says this?

Media Nearly Unanimous: 'Recession' Inevitable

Data are now available from MNF-I and the Iraqi government that provide a much clearer picture of the trends in violence and casualties in Iraq. The attached report provides maps and graphics on the levels of killings in Iraq, the levels of violence by type, and the trends in terms of violence in key provinces and in Baghdad. It presents both MNF-I and Iraqi data through early January 2008.

The Evolving Security Situation in Iraq: The Continuing Need for Strategic Patience

The United States must shift its counterterrorism policy towards Pakistan away from a reciprocal approach—requiring Islamabad to perform desirable actions to receive support—towards one encouraging Pakistan to enact effective counterterrorism policies, not for an immediate payoff, but to strengthen institutionalized trust with the U.S. over time, according to a new report from the Carnegie Endowment.

In Pakistan and the War on Terror: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance, Carnegie Senior Associate Ashley J. Tellis points to growing dissatisfaction in the United States with the Musharraf regime’s commitment to counterterrorism operations, given the influx of U.S. aid. But while Pakistan’s performance in the “war on terror” has fallen short of expectations, Islamabad’s inability to defeat terrorist groups cannot simply be explained by neglect or lack of motivation. U.S. policy makers must take into account the specific and complex counterterrorism challenges facing Pakistan and move away from their current unsustainable policies.

Pakistan and the War on Terror: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance

Pew:

With the economy slowing and the stock market reeling, there is greater agreement among Republicans and Democrats that strengthening the nation's economy should be a top priority for the president and Congress in the coming year. By contrast, partisan differences over the importance of other domestic issues – such as dealing with global warming, helping the poor and providing health insurance to the uninsured – have all increased substantially over the past year.

An Even More Partisan Agenda for 2008

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that after three years of declining budget deficits, a slowing economy this year will contribute to an increase in the deficit. Under an assumption that current laws and policies do not change, CBO projects that the budget deficit will rise to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008 from 1.2 percent in 2007. Enactment of legislation to provide economic stimulus or additional funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could further increase the deficit for this year.

The state of the economy is particularly uncertain at the moment. The pace of economic growth slowed in 2007, and there are strong indications that it will slacken further in 2008. In CBO’s view, the ongoing problems in the housing and financial markets and the high price of oil will curb spending by households and businesses this year and trim the growth of GDP. Although recent data suggest that the probability of a recession in 2008 has increased, CBO does not expect the slowdown in economic growth to be large enough to register as a recession. Economic performance worse than that suggested in CBO’s forecast could significantly decrease projected revenues and increase projected spending. Furthermore, policy changes intended to mitigate the economic slowdown would, by design, tend to increase the budget deficit in the short term.

The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2018

Here are the nominations for the Golden Guy:

80th Academy Awards

It will be very hard to pick winners here ... most of them are very well matched.

The Oscar Gun Goes Off

It's like SMS.

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint, the critics now say. It takes immense amounts of raw material and energy to make all those plastic bottles. At the other, postconsumer end of the product life cycle, hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles end up in landfills, in an era when it is increasingly difficult to find new waste-disposal sites.

And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap.

Customers pay maybe a thousand times as much as they would pay for the same amount of water from the tap. They get little or no benefit for the extra expense, while society as a whole incurs the environmental costs. No wonder we are seeing something of a backlash.

...

We need to encourage technological innovations that provide us with adequate amounts of material goods while dumping lower levels of hazardous materials into our environment. For that, we will need a new, more vibrant, more adamant kind of environmental activism. That will happen, in turn, only if Americans reject the mirage of inverted quarantine, reject the seductive but false idea that there are purely individual solutions to our collective problems.

The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'

When "stand-up philosopher" Slavoj Zizek calls for "repeating Lenin" or praises Robespierre's defence of terror, some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is not just some kind of act. No, says John Clark. "It's not just a pose; it's a position."

Acting up

This week in the magazine, Steve Coll writes about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the growing violence in Pakistan. Here Coll talks with Matt Dellinger about the country’s insurgency, the influence of the Taliban, and Musharraf’s changing role.

Listen to the mp3.

Audio: Armed and Dangerous: Online Only: The New Yorker