First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say

From First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say:

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.
[...]
When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.
[...]
Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can't.

When you consider how many students can't find the US on a map, those stats don't look so bad.

About the study:

The survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut, is billed as the largest of its kind. More than 100,000 students, nearly 8,000 teachers and more than 500 administrators at 544 public and private high schools took part in early 2004.

Despite Violence, Iraqis Head to Polls In Large Numbers

Wow. Despite Violence, Iraqis Head to Polls In Large Numbers:

Former Gen. Uday Abdullah, a 50-year-old Sunni Muslim who commanded an Iraqi battalion until the fall of Baghdad, said he saw streams of neighbors walking to polling stations when he woke up yesterday morning. He lives in a Baghdad neighborhood with many former regime officers, and as he stood in line for an hour to vote, he bumped into former colleagues who had also come to vote.

"It felt great to vote," he said. "Like I was free."

Many Iraqi voters wore their best clothes, with whole families navigating past rolls of barbed wire and security checkpoints dressed in suits and ties, long skirts and flowery shirts, escorting children in party dresses. Handicapped voters rolled into the voting centers in wheelchairs. Children played soccer; women passed out candy and sweets to passersby. Many departed from election centers with the Arab cheer of "halhulah," traditionally shouted at weddings.

The Importance of Brad and Jennifer... and Maureen Dowd

In The Importance of Brad and Jennifer... and Maureen Dowd, James D. Miller has a few words to say about work-life balance and gender differences:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd complains that men with high-powered jobs would rather marry secretaries than their career equals. She further laments that the more a woman achieves in her career the less desirable she becomes to men. Dowd, of course, blames this situation entirely on men. But Dowd is wrong because it's women, not men, who are at fault here.

Although children are a blessing, they're also time sinks. Two married people can't both work jobs for 60 hours a week and have enough time to raise a few kids properly. Realizing this, many men who intend to have several children and time-intensive jobs often seek women who are more child- than career-oriented. But what about ambitious women? What do they need to do?
[...]
The majority of working parents can find enough time to spend with their children, but only because most of us have jobs that don't require 60+ hours of work each week. But the few who intend to climb to the very tops of their career ladders and are therefore willing to devote nearly every waking hour to their jobs face a choice of (A) not having children, (B) having neglected children, or (C) having a spouse who is willing to devote little time to his or her job. Dowd shouldn't attack ambitious men who have chosen option (C). Rather, she should convince career-oriented college women that they should stop dreaming of marrying investment bankers and start looking for men who don't want high-status, time-intensive jobs.

Tool for Thought

In Tool for Thought, writer Steven Johnson explains how he uses computer tools to aid his writing and thinking — not by simply searching, but by "riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring":

Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head — I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection — elect that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.

Unionization's Decline, a Human Capital Story

In Unionization's Decline, a Human Capital Story, Arnold Kling explains why unions haven't spread (much) outside of manufacturing:

In manufacturing, workers develop specific human capital. As someone who actually worked in a factory for a couple of summers, I can attest to this. You learn to operate the particular machinery in the plant, but that knowledge is of no value in a different plant.

In the service sector, skills are often transferable. You may have a license (to be a teacher, a nurse, or what have you) that makes you transferable. Or you may have a skill set (sales, general management, computer programming) that is transferable.

With specific human capital, there is mutual bargaining power. The company values your experience, but your opportunity cost is low, so they could try to keep your pay low and exploit you. So a union helps you out.

With generic human capital, you do not need bargaining muscle. If you are way underpaid, you simply take another job. So a union helps less.

Higher Ed, Inc.

Higher Ed, Inc. looks at the business of higher education:

Counting everything but its huge endowment holdings, Higher Ed, Inc., is a $250 to $270 billion business — bigger than religion, much bigger than art. And though no one in the business will openly admit it, getting into college is a cinch. The problem, of course, is that too many students want to get into the same handful of nameplate colleges, making it seem that the entire market is tight. It most certainly is not. Here�s the crucial statistic: There are about 2,500 four-year colleges in this country, and only about 100 of them refuse more applicants than they accept. Most schools accept 80 percent or more of those who apply. It�s the rare student who can�t get in somewhere.

An amusing analogy:

Another growth market? Foreign students. No one talks about it much, but this market has been profoundly affected by 9/11. Foreign students have stopped coming. There are enough rabbits still in the python that universities haven�t been affected yet. But they will be.

University funding in a nutshell:

Development is both PR and fundraising, the intersection of getting the brand out and the contributions in, and daily it becomes more crucial. That�s because schools like mine have four basic revenue streams: student tuition, research funding, public (state) support, and private giving. The least important is tuition; the most prestigious is external research dollars; the most fickle is state support; and the most remunerative is what passes through the development office.

Competition at the top of the pyramid has become intense:

Until 1991, the Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology met around a conference table each April to fix financial aid packages for students who had been admitted to more than one school. That year, after the Justice Department sued the schools, accusing them of antitrust violations, the universities agreed to stop the practice. As happened with Major League Baseball after television contracts made the teams rich, bidding pandemonium broke out. Finite number of players + almost infinite cash = market bubble. Here�s the staggering result. Over the past three decades, tuition at the most select schools has increased fivefold, nearly double the rate of inflation. Yet precious few students pay the full fare. The war is fought over who gets in and how much they�re going to have to be paid to attend.

The top schools are largely indistinguishable:

�Diversity is the hallmark of the Harvard/Radcliffe experience,� the first sentence in the Harvard University register declares. �Diversity is the virtual core of University life,� the University of Michigan bulletin announces. �Diversity is rooted deeply in the liberal arts tradition and is key to our educational philosophy,� Connecticut College insists. �Duke�s 5,800 undergraduates come from regions which are truly diverse,� the Duke University bulletin declares. �Stanford values a class that is both ethnically and economically diverse,� the Stanford University bulletin notes. Brown University says, �When asked to describe the undergraduate life at The College — and particularly their first strongest impression of Brown as freshmen — students consistently bring up the same topic: the diversity of the student body.�

Read the whole article.

How to kick someone's ass with an umbrella

Boing Boing recently discovered How to kick someone's ass with an umbrella, or, as Pearson's Magazine titled it (in 1901), Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (PartI). It's just one of the many fascinating articles in the Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives, edited by Joseph R. Svinth. My favorite quote, from the intro:

In this way blows can be made so formidable that with an ordinary malacca cane it is possible to sever a man's jugular vein through the collar of his overcoat.

The walking-stick article, by the way, is the work of E.W. Barton-Wright, creator of bartitsu — a collection of jiu-jitsu "tricks" with a hokey pseudo-Japanese name. Bartitsu has a claim to fame though: Sherlock Holmes relies on his training in bartitsu (misspelled baritsu, which is at least conceivably Japanese, in Doyle's story) to throw Moriarty off a waterfall in Switzerland. This is how he survives what was originally supposed to be his final story.

John Stossel Takes on Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior

John Stossel's latest ABC News special covers a mix of topics. John Stossel Takes on Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior:

No. 10 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Littering
No. 9 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Extra Cell Phone Fees
No. 8 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Noise
No. 7 – MYTH – Gas Prices Are Higher Than Ever
No. 6 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Congress' Pork Barrel Spending
No. 5 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Welfare for Farmers
No. 4 – MYTH – Outsourcing Is Bad for American Workers
No. 3 – MYTH – Public Schools for Poor Kids, Not Politicians' Kids
No. 2 – MYTH – Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America
MYTH No. 1 – Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place

Software Engineering Proverbs

GeekPress led me to some Software Engineering Proverbs, including this one:

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said that, given eight hours to chop down a tree, he'd spend six sharpening his axe.

— TidBITS 654, quoted by Derek K. Miller, via Art Evans

People Against People

Most people do not think like economists and look at all of the tradeoffs involved in a "moral" decision. From People Against People:

In January, Greenpeace launched coordinated campaigns in Hong Kong and Thailand against power companies for causing global warming by generating electricity from coal. Greenpeace Hong Kong claimed global warming had killed 150,000 people. This is deeply misguided thinking. Nicola Mahncke, from Chung Hom Kok in Hong Kong hit the nail on the head in a letter to the Editor of the Sunday Morning Post, pointing out the money the anti-global warming treaty Kyoto Protocol would waste would be better spent 'saving the lives of nearly 1 billion people who do not have access to clean water'.

She might have added that electricity generated by coal saved millions in poor countries from early death from respiratory diseases caused by cooking with wood and coal.

Where Have All the Children Gone?

In Where Have All the Children Gone?, Pavel Kohou colorfully addresses declining birthrates:

In the third century AD there was a prophet called Mani. He preached a doctrine of conflict between Good and Evil. He saw the material world as the devil's creation. Marriage and motherhood was a grave sin in his view, since by bearing children people multiply the works of Satan. The Manichean ideal was to move mankind to a superterrestrial realm of Good by way of gradual extinction.

In the course of history, Manichaeism was ruthlessly eradicated as an heretical, ungodly doctrine. When looking at demographic statistics, however, one might think that the populations in developed countries have converted en masse to Manichaeism and decided to become extinct. The birth rate in most western countries has fallen bellow replacement level.

Children have shifted from being a valuable investment to being...pets:

To put it straightforwardly, and perhaps a little cynically, in the past children used to be regarded as investments that provided their parents with means of subsistence in old age. In Czech the word "vejminek" (a place in a farmhouse reserved for the farmer's old parents) is actually derived from a verb meaning "to stipulate": in the deed of transfer, the old farmer stipulated the conditions on which the farm was to be transferred to his son. Instead of an "intergenerational" policy, there used to be direct dependence of parents on their children. This meant that people had immediate economic motivation to have a sufficiently numerous and well-bred offspring — whereas today's anonymous system makes all workers pay for the pensions of all retirees in an utterly depersonalized manner.
[...]
Today, children no longer represent investments; instead, they have become pets — objects of luxury consumption. However, the pet market segment is very competitive. It is characteristic that the birth rate decline in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, was accompanied by soaring numbers of dog-owners in cities. While in the past dog-owners were predominantly retirees, today there are many young couples that have consciously decided to have a dog instead of a baby. These are mainly young professionals who have come to a conclusion (whether right or wrong) that they lack either time or money to have a child. Thus, they invest their emotional surpluses into animals.

Colors to the Mast

In Colors to the Mast, Wretchard notes that politicians and leaders have to stand by their statements, now that everything gets recorded and indexed on-line:

The emergence of the Internet has closed down the 'memory hole' within which the former apologists of Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein could hide their bad advance and from which they could emerge at whiles to offer new sage advice. The term 'memory hole' itself was coined by George Orwell who used it to describe the mechanism through which the media manipulated historical memory. One of the tenets of the Party in Orwell's 1984 was that 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past', and the key to achieving mastery over history was the liberal use of the 'memory hole'.

Religious War: East and West

Religious War: East and West opens by citing "the underground diplomats" at the New Sisyphus:

One of the most common observations about World War II was that if only Western leaders had heeded what the National Socialist Worker's Party and its leader Adolf Hitler were saying, they would have known of the grave danger facing the world. After all, it's not as if the Nazi Party or its frenzied Führer tried to hide what they were about. On the contrary, in speech after speech, newspaper after newspaper and book after book, Hitler and other senior Nazis laid out in some detail their plans for European domination, the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the elimination of the Jewish people.

And what do America's enemies say today?

In an audiotape released on January 23, 2005, Zarqawi puts forth a view which he has repeated many times in the past, but which, like Mein Kampf, some are determined never to hear. In the audio Zarqawi cursed democracy because it promoted such un-Islamic behavior as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule. Freedom of speech was particularly evil because it allowed "even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy."

A Strangely Important Figure

Andrew Stuttaford sees Ayn Rand as A Strangely Important Figure:

To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas.

Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in — oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life.

This rings true, in a darkly comic way:

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism."

Righting Copyrights

Robert S. Boynton, director of New York University's magazine journalism program, tackles copyrights in Righting Copyrights:

Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you.

Ah, irony:

The line between science fiction and reality is often difficult to discern, as exhibited by the case of the college student who received trademark #2,127,381 for the phrase "freedom of expression." Fortunately, the student was Kembrew McLeod, who applied for it in order to make a point. McLeod, now professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, is no stranger to using media pranks to exploit the absurdities of the system. In fact, he even once sold his soul in a glass jar on eBay.

Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

According to Victor Davis Hanson, Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old:

But this country is now in its third century and assurances that the United States is about through are getting old. In the early 20th century the rage was first Spengler and then Toynbee who warned us that our crass consumer capitalism would lead to inevitable spiritual decay. Next, the Hitlerians assured the Volk that the mongrel Americans could never set foot on German-occupied soil, so decadent were these Chicago mobsters and uncouth cowboys. Existentialism and pity for the empty man in the gray flannel suit were the rage of the 1950s, as Americans, we were told, had become depressed and given up in the face of racial inequality, rapid suburbanization, and the spread of world-wide national liberationist movements.

In the 1960s and 1970s we heard of the population bomb and all sorts of catastrophes in store for the United States and the world in general that had unwisely followed its profligate paradigm of consumption; yet despite Paul Ehrlich�s strident doomsday scenario, the environment got cleaner and the people of the globe richer. And then came the historian Paul Kennedy, who, citing earlier Spanish and English implosions, "proved" that the United States had played itself out in the Cold War, ruining its economy to match the Soviet Union in a hopeless arms race — publishing his findings shortly before the Russian empire collapsed and the American economy took off (again).

In the Carter "malaise years," we were warned about the impending triumph of "Asian Values" and the supposed cultural superiority of Japan, Inc., which would shortly own most of whatever lazy and ignorant Americans sold them — before the great meltdown brought on by corruption, censorship, and ossified bureaucracies in Asia.

Combat Ki and Genki Sudo

I don't understand Japanese particularly well, but I can nonetheless recommend this video of a Japanese TV show segment on juko-kai practitioners (Americans, by the way) demonstrating their combat ki by getting punched in the throat, kicked in the ribs, and kicked someplace else (even more delicate) — first by what look like American football players, then by Japanese (lightweight) puro resu fighter Genki Sudo (or Sudo Genki, in Japanese).

On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run

As Dale Bozzio used to sing, "Nobody walks in LA." Nobody (in the middle class) takes a bus or train either. On the east coast, things are a bit different. Anyway, Greyhound is now facing competition from buslines that go from one Chinatown to another. From On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run:

A bus pulled out of South Station terminal on a Friday morning and headed for New York City. Its windshield was cracked, its speedometer motionless. Orange peel graced its seat trays, and its safety warnings consisted of a single sign: "Watch your step."

The driver said not a word until he stopped the bus outside Cheng's Driving School in New York City's Chinatown. Then, as passengers gathered their bags, he stood up and screamed, "No parking here! You get out!"

The bus, according to the lettering near its luggage compartment, was owned by "Kristine Travel" and operated by "Lucky River," though the sign on its side said "Travel Pack" and its ticket agents called the company "Lucky Star." Its price for the trip from Boston to New York — 187 miles in 4 1/2 hours — was $15.

That may seem an impossibly low fare, yet another carrier on the Boston to New York run has lately started charging $15, too. The name on the side of its buses is Greyhound.

Greyhound Lines Inc. is a $1 billion company owned by Laidlaw International Inc., a $4.6 billion company. The only national bus network, "big dog" was racing along America's highways even before Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert hopped on a Greyhound in 1934's "It Happened One Night." But today, a dozen or so Chinese-owned bus lines are giving the dog a run for its money.
[...]
"If Greyhound wasn't a giant, maybe they could beat us," Shui Ming Zheng says through an interpreter. "But because they are a giant, they cannot."
[...]
"Common sense tells me that if JetBlue profits on a $79 fare to Buffalo, we can profit on a $15 fare to D.C.," says Mr. Wong, who handles management. "We copied the airline concept to a bus line." Greyhound, he adds, "really feels the pain."

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow:

Following the lead of Ireland, which dropped its rates to 12.5% from 24% between 2000 and 2003, one nation after another has moved toward lower corporate rates with fewer loopholes. The Netherlands, the second most popular European target for U.S. investment, recently joined the movement, lowering its corporate rates by three percentage points to 31.5% and simplifying its tax structure.

The corporate-tax cutters of recent years stretch from Portugal, where the rate has dropped 10 points to about 27%, to Austria, down nine points to about 25%. Even Germany, which has Europe's highest rate and has bitterly opposed the plummeting tax rates elsewhere in the region, has done some dramatic trimming — from as high as 56% six years ago, according to data from KPMG LLP, to 38.3% last year.

At this point, you may be asking, just what is the corporate tax rate in the US?

Germany's trims leave the standard U.S. rate — about 40% including average state taxes — above that of every country in Europe, according to separate studies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and KPMG.

Sigh.

New York Post Online Edition: 'C' Sickness on the Subway

As my friend, Dan, said, "Man, who needs terrorists when you've got bums?" From 'C' Sickness on the Subway:

A fire in a subway control room has put the C line out of service for up to five years and caused serious problems on the A line that will make the commute miserable for hundreds of thousands of subway riders, officials said yesterday.

The unstaffed room containing 600 electrical devices called 'relays' that are used to power signals and switches along a segment of the vital Eighth Avenue line were destroyed Sunday in the blaze.

Cops blamed a vagrant who set a shopping cart full of wood blocks ablaze six feet into the tracks at the Chambers Street station. Cops are searching for the derelict.

The flames quickly spread across the ceiling and along a wall, igniting wires that led to the locked control room.

The blaze melted thousands of the wires and knocked out power to dozens of signals and switches.

'It's major, major damage,' said Transit Authority president Larry Reuter.

"It's a barbecue. It's black and melted."

Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori's War on Terror

Fascinating. From Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori's War on Terror:

When Ellen Perry began making her documentary 'The Fall of Fujimori,' she said, she never thought her tale of a government wielding sweeping police powers in the name of democracy would become a story with eerie parallels to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Iron-fisted Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000, before fleeing to Japan amid allegations of murder and corruption.

He was democratically elected in 1990, but used dictatorial powers throughout his reign while proclaiming that his actions were done in the name of democracy to defeat a brutal insurgency.
[...]
Even while death squads roamed Peru, his government built schools, provided food and clothes to the poor, tamed inflation of more than 7,600 percent in 1990 and ended guerrilla warfare and terrorism waged by the Shining Path and other groups.

"On paper, he was extremely successful," Perry told Reuters. "The questions lie in how he did it. (His methods) were draconian. They were unconstitutional. They were undemocratic, but do the benefits outweigh the consequences?"

AFF's Brainwash - A year's end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper

Johnny Ramone died soon after Ronald Reagon. Many people find it odd, even ironic, that a punk musician like Ramone looked up to Reagan and shared his conservative politics. From A year's end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper:

Yet it wasn't only political beliefs that Johnny Ramone had in common with Reagan. Each played a central role in a major movement once considered on the fringe.

Every movement needs a founding myth — not myth as in a belief in fantastical stories, but as in an easily retold narrative that tells us how we got where we are today, helping us make sense of the current situation. Interestingly, the oft-retold narratives of punk rock and the modern conservative movement follow a somewhat parallel story line. They go like this.

First, there is the Fall from Grace.

The Old Republic, choked by FDR's odious New Deal, gives way to a decades-long left-liberal dominance in politics. Conservatives who advocate limited government are derided as anachronistic survivors of a time that we're better to have left behind.

Rock 'n' roll, the first art form centered on youth, grows old and sclerotic by the 1970s. The chaotic excitement of The Blackboard Jungle gives way to the self-destructive decadence of Woodstock and Altamont; where there was once Buddy Holly, there was now Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Though darkness descends, a remnant of true believers thrives.

Amidst a hostile political atmosphere and an ascendant welfare state, a small reduct of conservative intellectuals and activists keep the flame of freedom alive. But they're few and dismissed by "respectable" opinion; Barry Goldwater was written off as a dangerous warmonger.

In an area marked by rock-opera excess and singer-songwriter smarminess, a few groups — the Stooges, New York Dolls, and Dictators — quixotically cling to the idea that rock is supposed to be about fun and danger and not about some higher purpose. Yet they remain confined to a few dingy clubs.

Redemption. The remnant finds a champion and finally fights back against the forces of darkness.

In 1976, conservatives, smarting from the Nixon years of wage and price controls and government expansion — Amtrak, EPA — unite behind a new champion, a California governor willing to challenge his own party's sitting president. Ronald Reagan's efforts fails that year, but four years later, he realizes the goal that was so out of reach for Barry Goldwater — the White House.

That same year, the Ramones release their eponymous first album, giving the back-to-basics rock 'n' roll revival — dubbed "punk" around this time, thanks to Punk, the magazine that chronicled it — a new flag to rally around. Ramones was unlike any else that had come before it. No one played as fast or wrote (complete!) songs as short. And no album since has inspired so many people to start their own bands, launching an entire movement.

And, finally, a look back in appreciation.

Once derided as a right-wing nut, Ronald Reagan lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union — two things his detractors said couldn't happen. He received a hero's goodbye from the country he loved, and even old adversaries paid him tribute.

After a career of incessant touring, commercial frustration, and various indignities — an early gig opening for Johnny Winter resulted in the band being pelted with garbage — the Ramones went out on top of the world, with a guest star-studded final concert, induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and a critically acclaimed film documentary of their career.

The Long Tail: Maximum City

From Maximum City:

One of the complaints I used to have as a foreign correspondent was how hard it is to find places in the world that still feel foreign. What's foreign? How about this: 2am, driving back from a state-of-the-art call center in the middle of Bombay, my driver is slaloming through rubble in a scene that would look like Fallujah but for the Brahman cows grazing in the fast lane. On the shoulder a half-naked five year old girl is squatting to pee on a huge slab of broken concrete, lit by a fire of burning garbage. The billboard behind her advertises the latest BlackBerry. India!

Wired News: Improvised Bombs Baffle Army

Improvised Bombs Baffle Army reports on a number of high-tech efforts to detect and destroy improvised explosive devices. The PING project can find weapons caches:

Another Pentagon microwave project, code-named PING, is already in the country, and has been 'very successful' at finding insurgent weapons caches, said Billy Mullins, an associate director of strategic security for the Air Force. The machine, which fits inside a Humvee, sends out waves, looking for metal that will bounce the signals back. Concrete won't stop the microwaves, so PING can examine a building's interior.

'When you find a large amount of metal in a country that doesn't use a lot of metal in its construction, you have an idea that there's something there that there shouldn't be,' Mullins told a military research conference last week.

Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary and Stop Signs

Roger Ebert has a tongue-in-cheek Movie Glossary with entries for various movie tropes and clichés. I didn't know this bit of trivia though:

All movies set before 1955 should have yellow and black stop signs.

From the Wikipedia:

Stop signs originated in Detroit, Michigan in 1915. The first had black letters on a white background and were somewhat smaller than the modern one. As they became more widespread, a committee supported by AASHO met in 1922 to standardize them, and it selected the octagonal shape that has been used in the US ever since.

The unique eight-sided shape of the sign allows drivers facing the back of the sign to identify that oncoming drivers have a stop sign and prevent confusion with other traffic signs.

In 1924, the sign changed to black on yellow, the predominant color until 1954. Another competing group, the NCSHS, simultaneously advocated an even smaller, red-on-yellow stop sign. All of these signs were typically mounted only two or three feet above the ground.

These two organizations conflicted but eventually combined into the Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which in 1935 published the famous Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD) detailing the stop sign's appearance. The MUTCD stop sign was altered eight times between 1935 and 1971, mostly dealing with its reflectorization and its mounting height; the most drastic change came in 1954, when the sign gained its white-on-red color. Red is also the color for stop on traffic signals, unifying red as stop signal for drivers worldwide.

The mounting height reached its current level of seven feet in 1971.

Shattered Glass

I finally saw Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass, the reporter who fabricated "Hack Heaven" and other colorful stories for The New Republic. I had been meaning to catch it ever since I heard NPR's interview with Charles Lane, the editor who fired Glass, and it definitely pulled me in. It's amazing what a compulsive liar can get away with...for a while.

Exploring the law of unintended consequences

Exploring the law of unintended consequences shares a number of anecdotes about...unintended consequences:

Bruce Schneier, in his excellent Beyond Fear, reports that drivers in Russia have made interesting choices that have not always resulted in improving their situations. Crime is a large and growing problem in Russia, and one of the biggest threats is in the area of auto theft. To combat car theft, automobile owners installed car alarms. The result? Thieves waited until the owner approached the car to turn off the alarm, and then shot him, took his keys, and drove away in the car. Round one to the bad guys. Fine. So car owners quit using alarms, and instead installed security systems that made cars virtually impossible to hotwire. Ah ha! Round two to the good guys. Not so fast — since cars were extremely difficult to hotwire, thieves turned to carjackings instead, which is far more likely to result in injury or death to the car owner. Round three to the bad guys, and once again we see how 'security' sometimes serves only to make things easier for the criminals.

This one's beautiful:

Microsoft has touted its Windows Media Player (or WMP) as an industy- and DRM-friendly app that supports so-called "protected" media files. Basically, if you try to play a DRM-laden Windows media file, WMP checks to see if you have a valid license to do so. If you do, the file plays; if you don't, WMP heads off to a web site specified by the media file to acquire and download (and often purchase) a license.

But guess what? WMP doesn't check to see where it's going, or even what it's downloading, so individuals up to no good simply redirect it to sites where users end up with spyware, viruses, and other nastiness on their Windows machines.

Many safety measures simply convince people to take more risks.

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy reports on a hard-to-believe discovery:

A forgotten workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy, researchers said on Tuesday.

The details:

The find was made in part of the Santissima Annunziata convent, which let out rooms to artists centuries ago and where the likely muse of the Renaissance artist's masterwork, the Mona Lisa, may have worshipped.

"It's a bit absurd to think that, in 2005, we have found the studio of one of history's greatest artists. But that is what has happened," said Roberto Manescalchi, one of three researchers credited for this month's discovery.

"The proof is on the walls."

Frescos adorning part of the workshop were left undisturbed over the centuries and gradually forgotten. The wing of the convent was eventually split by a wall and is partially claimed today by the Institute of Military Geography.

In a slide-show presentation to media, Manescalchi pointed to one colorful fresco with a character conspicuously missing from the foreground.

The white silhouette bore a striking resemblance to da Vinci's painting of the archangel Gabriel, who appears in his "Annunciation" hanging in Florence's Uffizi gallery.

Manescalchi, who refers to the silhouette as "The Ghost," told reporters it was not clear to him whether the angel was removed or perhaps never completed.

The walls were also adorned with paintings of birds, one of which strongly resembled a sketch from da Vinci's "Atlantic Codex," a 1,286-page collection of drawings and writings by the painter, sculptor, inventor and scientist.

Another painting was similar to a drawing in da Vinci's codex on the flight of birds.

Manescalchi speculated that da Vinci had assistants in his workshop and probably used a "secret" corner room for his dissections of human corpses, aimed at improving his understanding of anatomy.

BBC NEWS | Health | Untidy beds may keep us healthy

If only I'd known this argument when I was little. From Untidy beds may keep us healthy:

Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies.

A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed.

Wired News: Many Faces of the Mac Mini

According to Many Faces of the Mac Mini, "Apple's new Mac mini computer appears to be something of an omnia omnibus — all things to all people":

Lots of sites, like (PVRblog or MacMerc, are detailing how to turn a mini into a living-room digital video recorder.
[...]
In Austin, Texas, a colocation company is building a low-cost data center out of dozens of Mac minis.

Underwriters Technologies' Mac mini colocation is housed in Austin's Data Foundry facility, a former bank vault where space is at a premium.

Because the Mini measures only 6.5 inches square and is 2 inches high, Underwriters can cram a standard server rack with three times as many minis as full-size servers.

"Size is a huge advantage," said Patrick Dayton, a senior project manager at Underwriters. "By taking into consideration remote power, we can get approximately 100 units in a single cage, as opposed to 30."
[...]
Benzaquen said the mini is the ideal size for a standard car stereo compartment, and it's 18-volt power supply is easily fed with standard 12-volt auto power. And because Mac OS X has voice recognition built in, the mini can be controlled hands free.

Benzaquen said the Mac mini could be a high-end stereo, storing as many as 16,000 songs on an 80-GB drive. Add an LCD screen, and passengers can watch DVDs or play games.

Wired News: Wild Things Are on the Beach

Wild Things Are on the Beach presents the work of Theo Jansen: "immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind," and built from cheap plastic tubes:

"I was making animals with just the tubes because they were cheap but later on they turned out to be very helpful in making artificial life because they are very flexible and multifunctional as well. I see it now as a sort of protein — in nature, everything is almost made of protein and you have various uses of protein; you can make nails, hair, skin and bones. There's a lot of variety in what you can do with just one material and this is what I try to do as well."

The "animals" are enthralling:

"I think they are absolutely beautiful," said Bruce Shapiro, robotic artist. "He has figured out a way to use inexpensive materials to construct wind-powered walking machines. What makes them so compelling is the wave of actuators, like the motion of a centipede's legs. I suspect that, as humans, we recognize this action as specific to living things, hence our fascination with Jansen's 'organisms.'"

You can see this in the videos, especially Animaris Geneticus and Animaris Currens Ventosa walking.

He keeps improving his animals:

Currently Jansen is working on giving the seventh generation of these creatures, comprising a herd of seven animals, the ability to move even in the wind's absence. His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterwards. Eventually he plans to increase the efficiency so that they can go on for days or even years.

"They have a food source in the wind so they can store energy and use it later on," said Jansen. "The downside is that they might have to wait for days, for the wind hopper to move on and on and then be able to move for maybe five minutes. They are just like snakes. Snakes also lie in the sun for days digesting their food. On the beach the animals have to catch the wind and wait for a long time before they have enough wind in their stomach to go for a walk."

Yingzi

Mark Rosenfelder's Yingzi attempts "to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system." He sketches out an English-based alternative to Chinese characters (hanzi), applying the same concepts:

• the limited role of pictograms
• the clever compound pictures (indeed all three examples are from Chinese)
• the phonetic-and-radical system (97% of Chinese characters work this way)
• the inclusion of radicals as part of the character (rather than as separate symbols, as in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing)
• the relative information content of radicals and phonetics
• compounds used as secondary phonetics
• the handling of multisyllabic and foreign words
• the handling of subsyllabic morphemes (the model here is Mandarin -r, represented by ér)
• the organization of dictionaries (in fact, the graphic at the top of the page shows part of the radical index for a Chinese dictionary, organized by stroke count)
• the psychological effects.

New Scientist Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills

Only academics would find this conclusion controversial. From Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills:

Gladiators' combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium, according to a controversial theory based on reconstructing the fighters' tactics from Roman artefacts and medieval fight books.

In fact, it should be obvious that the ancient gladiator was only a step away from the modern pro wrestler:

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented."

In the past couple decades, the western martial arts have been rediscovered:

To try to better understand what these scenes show, he turned to the pages of fighting and martial arts manuals produced in Germany and northern Italy in medieval and Renaissance times. These manuals provided instruction in everything from sword-fighting to wrestling. They are a good parallel for gladiatorial combat, Tuck argues, in part because opponents were professionals who used similar arms and armour. "And they're incredibly important because they show sequences of moves, and have accompanying descriptions," he says.

Most people see a fight as an exchange of blows, but a trained fighter sees closing, disengaging, and grappling:

From the manuals and art, Tuck infers that there were often three critical moments in the course of a gladiatorial bout. The first was initial contact, with both gladiators, fully armed, moving forwards and going for a body shot. The second was when one gladiator is wounded and seeks to distance himself from his opponent. In the third both gladiators drop their shields, seemingly undamaged, before grappling with each other, he says.

In the fight books, this act of throwing down weapons and shields to grapple was a common way to conclude a fight, without necessarily intending to finish off an opponent. Judging from the Roman art, the same happened during gladiatorial bouts, says Tuck.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)

Going with the Crowd

Going with the Crowd introduces a familiar scenario:

A few weeks ago, my family and I were wandering about in an unfamiliar part of the city where we live. We were getting hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. We happened upon a block that had three restaurants in a row.

All three restaurants served types of food that we enjoy. Although it was early in the evening, one was already quite crowded. Another had a couple at one table near the window. The third appeared to have no customers.

In such a situation, many people might think that there must be some reason why no one is at the third restaurant. Maybe there's something wrong with it. The restaurant with just one couple might also appear questionable for the same reason.

I think you see where this is going:

So, in the absence of any additional information, the natural thing to do would be to join the crowd in the first restaurant. It must be a good, well-known restaurant. Higher quality brings more customers. Right?

Suppose that the likelihood of someone choosing a restaurant is proportional to the number of people already in the restaurant. Given that all the restaurants are initially empty and that the first customer chooses randomly, what happens to the number of people that end up in the different restaurants?

Statistician Susan Holmes of Stanford University has created a Java applet that allows you to simulate such a situation.

Attack of the Machines - Is your stockbroker a robot?

Attack of the Machines - Is your stockbroker a robot? opens with an observation my brother pointed out to me years ago:

Every day, hundreds of reporters from CNBC, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and other outlets concoct a story about the stock market. From the chaos of the New York Stock Exchange, they discern rational human behavior to explain why the S&P 500 rose precisely 11.46 points today.

Tech stocks up? Why, it's because Intel's CEO made positive comments. Oil stocks down? A respected analyst issued a bearish forecast. When stocks fall across the board, it is frequently attributed to investors 'taking profits.' (Strangely, in the zero-sum game of investing, stocks never seem to rise due to investors 'taking losses.')

Choose a phenomenon that's supposed to affect the market (either up or down), then choose either "because of" or "despite" to describe the market's behavior that day.

The article's focus is on how human decisions are being slowly replaced by computer-based decision-making, but those narrative rationalizations about the market are meaningless even if human's are in charge; the market's a complex system with many, many actors.

Anyway, program trading has increased in volume over the years (as you'd have to expect):

According to the New York Stock Exchange, program trading for all of 2004 was a record 50.6 percent of volume, up sharply from 37.5 percent in 2003.

This all sounds vaguely familiar...

Then there are the trading geeks, guys with black boxes in Lower Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., who have written ultra-secret algorithms that dictate the purchase or sale of stocks whenever prices hit certain tripwires. In the past few years, quantitatively driven hedge funds have proliferated. And every day, the code on which they rely can trigger a buy and a sell on the same groups of stocks�sometimes several times a day. Thanks to program trading, a relatively small quantitative firm with only several hundred million dollars in capital can nonetheless account for a big chunk of the NYSE's daily volume on a given day.

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask) opens with this summary of human sleep (and sleep research):

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider "normal" today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.An excellent quote from Robert Heinlein:

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

This is so true:

The "owls" are constantly being treated as lazy, though they are more likely to be sleep-deprived (cannot fall asleep until the wee hours, then being rudely awoken by the alarm clock after just a couple of hours) and spend more hours awake (and presumably productive) than "larks" do. If you are asleep, this means you need it.

I didn't realize these accidents were sleep-related:

People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents — all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.

Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims

From Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims:

Indian pictorial texts known as "codices," as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.

Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.

Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.

"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming," said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.

There's more:

"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims," Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized."

While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people — apparently alive — being held down as they were burned.

The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.

"We have found cooking dishes just like that," said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones." However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.

In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.

All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.

"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice," which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.

Untangling ultrawideband

Untangling ultrawideband describes a technology that could make even video cables unnecessary:

The two incarnations of UWB are variations on the same highly unusual technological theme. Unlike conventional radio transmitters, which transmit on a particular frequency and which cannot be picked up if the receiver is slightly mistuned, UWB devices broadcast at very low power over an extremely wide band of frequencies. This has the advantage that UWB signals can be picked up by suitably designed receivers, but resemble background noise to conventional radio receivers, which are listening on one particular frequency. Conventional and UWB radios can therefore coexist. And that is why America's telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ruled in February 2002 that UWB devices could operate across a broad swathe of the radio spectrum, from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz, without requiring spectrum licences.

Move over, Big Brother

Move over, Big Brother looks at the democratization of surveillance:

The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-based cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tennessee, used his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later. Other similar stories abound: in Italy, a shopkeeper sent a picture of two men who were acting suspiciously to the police, who identified them as wanted men and arrested them soon afterwards, while in Sweden, a teenager was photographed while holding up a corner shop, and was apprehended within an hour.

Playing to win

Playing to win looks at video games as training tools, and, as an aside, looks at (American) football as a training tool for war:

Other sports, especially baseball, offer a greater wealth of data. However, no other sport seems to match the set of psychological and physical skills needed on a battlefield so well. Vince Lombardi, probably the most famous coach in American football's history, enjoyed comparing the football field to a battlefield. But the more important comparison is the converse — that a battlefield can seem like a football field, according to Lieutenant-Colonel James Riley, chief of tactics at the Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Indeed, Colonel Riley says his commanding general makes this very analogy constantly. In football, as in infantry combat, a player must be aware of both the wider situation on the field, and the area immediately surrounding him. The situation changes rapidly and the enemy is always adapting his tactics. Physical injuries abound in both places. Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives.

Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives. I love the smell of pigskin in the morning!

Supercharging the brain

Supercharging the brain looks at cognitive enhancers:

For an indication of what might happen if a safe and effective cognitive enhancer were to reach the market, consider the example of modafinil. Manufactured by Cephalon, a biotech company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and sold under the names Provigil and Alertec, the drug is a stimulant that vastly improves alertness in patients with narcolepsy, shift-work sleep disorder and sleep apnea. Since it first reached the market in America in 1999, sales have shot through the roof, reaching $290m in 2003 and expected to grow by at least 30% this year.

Much of the sales growth of modafinil has been driven by its off-label use, which accounts for as much as 90% of consumption. With its amazing safety profile — the side-effects generally do not go beyond mild headache or nausea — the drug is increasingly used to alleviate sleepiness resulting from all sorts of causes, including depression, jet lag or simply working long hours with too little sleep.
[...]
Modafinil has already surfaced in doping scandals. Kelli White, an American sprinter who took first place in the 100-metre and 200-metre competitions at last year's World Championships in Paris, later tested positive for the drug. Initially she insisted that it had been prescribed to treat narcolepsy, but subsequently admitted to using other banned substances as well. As a result, she was forced to return the medals she won last year and, along with a handful of other American athletes, was barred from competitions for two years.

Brain-boosting drugs are hardly new though; in fact, they can be so commonplace we don't even think of them as brain-boosting drugs:

"It's human nature to find things to improve ourselves," he says. Indeed, for thousands of years, people have chewed, brewed or smoked substances in the hopes of boosting their mental abilities as well as their stamina. Since coffee first became popular in the Arab world during the 16th century, the drink has become a widely and cheaply available cognitive enhancer. The average American coffee drinker sips more than three cups a day (and may also consume caffeine-laced soft drinks).

How do Provigil, amphetamines, and caffeine stack up?

Last year, Nancy Jo Wesensten, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, compared the effects of three popular alertness drugs — modafinil, dextroamphetamine and caffeine — head to head, using equally potent doses. Forty-eight subjects received one of the drugs, or a placebo, after being awake for 65 hours. The researchers then administered a battery of tests. All of the drugs did a good job restoring wakefulness for six to eight hours. After that, says Dr Wesensten, the performance of the subjects on caffeine declined because of its short half-life (a fact that could be easily remedied by consuming another dose, she points out). The other two groups reached their operational limit after 20 hours — staying awake for a total of 85 hours.

When the researchers looked at the drugs' effects on higher cognitive functions, such as planning and decision-making, they found each drug showed strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Caffeine was particularly effective in boosting a person's ability to estimate unknown quantities. When asked 20 questions that required a specific numeric answer — such as "how high off a trampoline can a person jump?" — 92% of volunteers on caffeine and 75% on modafinil showed good estimation skills. But only 42% on dextroamphetamine did so — the same proportion as the sleep-deprived subjects who had received a placebo.

Why the future is hybrid

Why the future is hybrid describes the different kinds of hybrid "petrol-electric" car:

The simplest kind is the "stop-start" or "micro" hybrid, which is not generally regarded as a true hybrid because it relies solely on an internal-combustion engine for propulsion. As the "stop-start" name implies, the engine shuts off when the vehicle comes to a halt. An integrated starter-generator restarts the engine instantly when the driver steps on the accelerator. All of this increases fuel efficiency only slightly, typically by around 10%. But few modifications to a conventional design are required, so it costs very little. In Europe, PSA Peugeot Citroën has just introduced a stop-start version of the Citroën C3, which sells for roughly the same price as a similarly equipped conventional C3.

Next come so-called "mild" hybrid designs, such as Honda's Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) — the hybrid configuration found in the Insight, the Civic and the new Accord. In addition to a stop-start function, an electric motor gives the engine a boost during acceleration. During braking, the same motor doubles up as a generator, capturing energy that would otherwise be lost as heat and using it to recharge the car's batteries. Since the electric motor is coupled to the engine, it never drives the wheels by itself. That is why this system is called a mild hybrid, much to Honda's dismay. The design is less expensive than Toyota's more elaborate approach, but can provide many of the same benefits, says Dan Benjamin of ABI Research, a consultancy based in Oyster Bay, New York. The hybrid version of the Civic achieves 48 miles per gallon, a 37% improvement over a comparable conventional Civic.

Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive, a "full" hybrid system, is much more complex. (The Ford Escape hybrid uses a similar system; Ford licenses a number of patents from Toyota.) Using a �power split� device, the output from the petrol engine is divided and used both to drive the wheels directly and to turn the generator, which in turn drives the electric motor and also drives the wheels. The distribution of power is continuously variable, explains David Hermance of Toyota, allowing the engine to run efficiently at all times. When its full power is not needed to drive the wheels, it can spin the generator to recharge the batteries. The batteries also get replenished when the car is coasting or braking. During stop-and-go traffic and at low speeds, when the petrol engine would be most inefficient, it shuts off and the electric motor, powered by the battery, takes over. That explains why the Prius has a better fuel economy rating for urban driving (60 miles per gallon) than for motorway driving (51 miles per gallon) — the opposite of a conventional vehicle.

Gadgets with a sporting chance

Gadgets with a sporting chance reports on some new, high-tech sporting equipment:

Victor Petrenko, an engineer at Dartmouth College's Ice Research Lab in New Hampshire, has invented some smart ski-brakes that, he believes, will increase the popularity of cross-country skiing by making the sport less challenging for beginners. The brakes, currently being tested by a ski manufacturer in the Alps, offer the necessary friction for a bigger "kick-off force" and make the skis less likely to slide backwards in their tracks. To make this happen, an electric current from the bottom of the skis pulses through the ice, melting a thin