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The recent results seem to indicate that at least in some parts of the country, the electorate is paying more attention to criminal justice issues, is more willing to hold law enforcement officials accountable and is less credulous when it comes to tough-on-crime posturing.

"While it’s refreshing to know that voters in the initiative states understand that reforms were necessary and good, I hear from prisoners every day who are being sentenced to decades behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses. We still have a very long way to go to reach the tipping point that will significantly change our national affection for over-punishment."

The conservative flagship think tank the Heritage Foundation recently launched its "overcriminalized" project, which critiques the ever-growing criminal code and the expanding power of prosecutors. A number of conservative voices have recently come out against the death penalty, including Brent Bozell, Richard Viguerie, and David Brooks.

"I think with the soaring prison population, and with groups like Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, many conservatives have started to come into contact with people who are or have been in prison," Sterling says. "Having personal contacts like that can change your views. When you're close to it, you start to realize how excessive it has become. And I think it can speak to religious values. Too little punishment is wrong. But they're seeing that too much punishment is just as wrong."

The president’s Council of Economic Advisers will not admit it, but their default strategy for growth is to let American wages drop far enough to undercut foreign competition.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a victory for corporate America. In exchange for giving up their rules against covering pre-existing conditions and agreeing to raise the age limit in which children could be covered under their parents’ policy, the health insurance corporations got the federal government to require every citizen to buy their product and commit to subsidizing those that can’t afford the price.

The largest companies now have a bigger share of the financial markets than they had in 2008 and their “too-big-to-fail safety net” is even more explicit.Perhaps most important, nothing has been done to lengthen the horizons of U.S. investors from short-term, get-rich-quick financial speculation to the long-term investment in producing things and high-value services in America.

The corruption of our governing class goes beyond just campaign contributions. It can include the hint of a future job or lobbyist contract when you leave office, a hedge fund internship for your daughter, a stock market tip. But all this depends on your remaining in power, so nothing matches the importance of raising enough money to get yourself reelected.

In response to an interviewer’s question in August, he said that “in the longer term” we may need a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United. He is right. But the “longer term” certainly means sometime after he leaves office.

Without a radical shift away from the policies of the last four years, living standards of most people in the United States will continue to drop, with potentially ugly social and political consequences.

Faucets are ways through which game currency is injected into the game. This generally involve players receiving currency from the game system itself, as opposed to other players.

Sinks are ways through which game currency is removed from the game. This generally involve players paying currency into the game system itself, as opposed to other players.

The establishment by Blizzard of a real money auction house (“RMAH”) alongside a virtual gold auction house in the game provided players with an incentive to both farm the game for real world profits and to pursue arbitrage opportunities. The RMAH was also created, at least in part, to disincentivize players from patronizing third party markets outside the game.

Although its anonymity may make it subject to skepticism, several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active 24/7 in the Diablo 3 game world, allegedly “harvesting” (producing) 4 million virtual gold per hour.[4]

The RMAH had minimum and maximum dollar amounts for in-game gold transactions: $0.25 minimum, $250 maximum. Market participants were also limited to dealing in increments of a certain size, called a “stack.” The “stack” was initially set to 100K gold. But as gold prices fell owing to rapidly building supply, the stack size was changed in August 2012 to 1 million. This practice, known as redenomination, is a fairly standard (if cosmetic) method of addressing inflation, but was viewed by some players as tacit devaluation.

To be clear, at the time at which the redenomination was introduced, gold was still trading above the floor rate. But being artificial, caps and floors not only prevent markets from clearing, but give black markets a target to undercut, to say nothing of offering players an opportunity to avoid the 15 percent fee — another intended gold sink — levied upon transactions within the auction house.

By early 2013, the gold price had fallen to the exchange floor set by the game managers — $0.25/million — and players began to show signs of concern.

Hyperinflation is the economist’s equivalent of an astrophysicist’s quasar cluster or a marine biologist’s dolphin “stampede”: a rare exhibition of a unique set of circumstances which arise infrequently and are closely studied when they materialize.

when holders of money expect the supply of money to increase — particularly without any sense of timing, bounds, or other guidance

monetary demand in the present drops in favor of surrendering money for vendibles.

If historical cases of hyperinflation — real, and now virtual — have one thing in common, it is the instinct among its victims to blame the symptoms rather than the disease.

While RMAH prices for virtual gold rallied occasionally, the prevailing direction of black market prices for virtual gold was inexorably lower as third party sellers undercut the in-game gold floor.

Several competing definitions for hyperinflation exist, with the strictest — an increase of 50 percent in one month — defined by economist Philip Cagan in his 1956 book The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation.

On May 7th 8th, 2013, Blizzard rolled out Patch 1.0.8, which contained the seeds of the last, hyperbolic surge of gold superabundance.

In just a few hours, the already gold-swamped economy saw trillions more created: a mammoth deluge of, by then, worthless virtual gold chasing finite goods, driving prices upward in leaps and bounds.

Blizzard quickly closed the in-game auction houses and audited transactions which took place during the blowout, banning players who took advantage of the bug and donating the proceeds of certain sales to charity. The gold stack size was also moved back from 10M to 1M.

Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies.

More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets. [24]

It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.

If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.

Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.

much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.

The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.

Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.

Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.

largely because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.

The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.

Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria

Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.

2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.

A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.

Real-time data is very expensive.

It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective

even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.

That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.

That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).

The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.

Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.

From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.

it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.

Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.

Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.

In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.

Not going to happen.

as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.

Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.

So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.

But don't make it your KPI.

Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.

Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.

If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views

And it will probably get you transient traffic.

And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?

Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.

My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.

If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.

Impressions suck. Profit rocks.

If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.

You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.

This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.

Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.

We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.

Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.

Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that

The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.

Lehrer’s neuroscience in Imagine contains some obvious elementary errors—arguably more dangerous than a couple of manufactured Bob Dylan quotes. While Gladwell talks about our amazing powers of cognition in Blink, he doesn’t venture to give a detailed account of how these processes occur in the brain.

Our blogging culture is partly to blame for this. The demand of our 24/7 news cycle, first created by cable television, and now carried on by minute-by-minute updates on the Internet creates constant demand for new information that never quite satisfies the insatiable appetite of the limitless Web.

What a newspaper or magazine would call ‘A model to help cure cancer,’ for instance, could realistically only be “an adaptation of a previous model to simulate cancer tissue in order to determine if it can be used to study cancer cells and eventually help find a cure.”Want to try that for a headline? Exactly.Confirming a hypothesis or a hunch with empirical evidence is the very essence of science, whereas in journalism—like much of the humanities—theories and schools of thought can rest on their own. However, science journalism, like science, needs to be rooted in fact and observation, without which it would lose its basis.

The problem with these examples is not that they are untrue, but the helplessness and futility of the advice. What are you to do to make these “breakthrough” moments happen? Nothing, apparently, except wait for them.In a journalistic equivalent of motivational speeches, these erudite writers hail subconscious processes in the brain that we have almost no control over, stopping just short of saying, “it will happen if you believe.”

American policy became ready, fire, aim.

In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11.

Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.

an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy.

the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy.

The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush.

as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.

The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.

The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world.

Russia will strengthen its influence over former Soviet republics Belarus, Ukraine and the Central Asian “Stans” while reaching into Moldova and the Baltics to extend its influence along the European frontier.

China is often the focus of U.S. domestic politics, particularly during times of economic trouble, and the upcoming election is no different. China’s yuan policy is the most obvious target, but while Washington is unlikely to carry out any action that will fundamentally harm economic ties with Beijing, the political perception of actions could have a more immediate impact.

This sparring will continue in the fourth quarter, with one rather significant exception: Washington and Tehran are likely to reach a preliminary agreement on the factional balance in Baghdad, with a new power-sharing government for Iraq emerging.

no major strategic shift is likely to occur before the strategy review being prepared for the end of the year is completed.

consolidate gains made in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

Moscow will also assert itself in Moldova and the Baltics to prepare the ground for the future expansion of Russian influence there.

With its sights on reinforcing its leadership in Europe, Berlin will not look for a break in its ties with Russia

the two countries will prevent their relationship from fundamentally breaking down this quarter.

The battle inside the Kremlin will intensify in the fourth quarter as the tandem of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin begins to purge high-level Russian figures and the campaign season leading up to the 2011 legislative and 2012 presidential elections starts.

Islamabad will continue working with Washington in the counterinsurgency offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda-led transnational jihadists, but tensions have become evident

Recovery from the massive floods that took place in the third quarter will consume most of the Pakistani state’s focus in the fourth quarter.

Domestically, the Justice and Development Party government will focus on consolidating the gains it made with the referendum on constitutional changes approved in September.

The bigger competition is playing out between Mubarak and his allies and the army’s top brass over a presidential succession plan.

China will continue showing a strong sense of purpose in pursuing its influence in its periphery.

Beijing will continue its active fiscal stimulus and relatively loose monetary policies amid concerns of slowing growth too quickly, with the intention of carrying out those structural reforms in a way that will limit the associated negative effects on growth and social stability.

The fourth quarter will see more such appearances by the new heir apparent as he begins to build his public image and the elder Kim manages the various elite interests in North Korea to build support for his son.

Nigeria will not see a sustained militant campaign this quarter, but there will still be an increased level of unrest in the Niger Delta, as well as in other parts of the country, as militants’ political patrons use their proxies to intimidate and undermine their political opponents.

Preparations for the referendum on Southern Sudanese independence will be the primary focus for both the north and the south this quarter.

High levels of violence between Islamist insurgents and African Union (AU) Mission in Somalia/Transitional Federal Government forces will continue, but neither side will be able to tip the scales enough to achieve a strategic victory.

Germany will continue using the economic crisis to impose its vision for more stringent European economic requirements on its neighbors.

A key issue that the two are already cooperating on is the debate on the European Union’s next budget period (2014-2020), which is set to intensify in the fourth quarter.

Central Europeans, including the Baltic States, will continue attempting to re-engage the United States in the region, particularly via ballistic missile defense and military cooperation.

After losing its two-thirds legislative majority, the ruling party now has an imperative to push through as much legislation as it can to expand the executive branch’s powers before the legislative session concludes at the end of the year and more opposition lawmakers are seated in January.

The more vulnerable Venezuela becomes, the harder-pressed it will be to find an external ally willing to provide the economic and political capital needed to sustain the regime.

Brazil will have a presidential runoff election Oct. 31, but the country’s attention is primarily occupied with its currency crisis.

Brazil will continue its military modernization plan and will play a more proactive rol

the coming quarter will see a more defined balance of power emerge among the drug-trafficking organizations within Mexico

Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile.

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research.

He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.

“I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.

“I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.” It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

“I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.

The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.

Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up.

nd these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).

And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome.

Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.

Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).

Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.

The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings.

Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.

patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.

Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.

being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary

Every so often, our intestines find their way through these holes—in the way that noodles sneak out of a sieve—forming an inguinal hernia.

As a consequence, in those moments in which the epiglottis does not have time to cover the trachea, we choke.

I'm sorry to say this, but it doesn't work that way. If you want to create your dream life and live out your passion(s), you will first have to find your passion and then take action to make it happen.

3. Waiting for Perfection

You don't have to wait for the stars to align or for someone to give you permission to go after your dreams.

4. Failing to Listen to Your Heart

Your mind worries, it analyzes, it judges, and it does all those things that can easily take over your life.

In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.

If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.

The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.

Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.

Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.

Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.

So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.

Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.

Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.

It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.

Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.

A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.

Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.

He had mastered the politics of trust.

Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.

If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.

The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.

Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.

Since "reason" must always operate with the assistance of emotion (i.e., Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis), it is pointless to gripe about a clash between "reason" and emotion. A clash between "reason" and emotion is really a clash between two emotions, one of which is in league with "reason."

There are 80M people in Egypt, 10% unemployment and 40% in poverty, as defined as  less than $2/day.  About a third don't know how to read.  None of those people are in the picture.  None of those people want the same things as those in the picture.  None of them will ever listen to those in the picture.

"What's wrong with coming out in support?"  Well, go ahead and ask Time: "what's wrong with putting them front and center?"  Because if I was agnostic about unions, and interested in really deciding who I supported in this fight, one look at that picture guarantees I side with whoever they're yelling at.   If you want to know exactly what is wrong with the "political discourse in America today," it's that we are trained to pick a side against something we hate.

It's a narrative that existed long before the nights of Saddam, get rid of the dictator and things will get better.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and if your country has oil in it it usually doesn't.

It's so easy to get distracted by the Evil Despot that we aren't horrified that Egypt's chaperons of future democracy are the military.   Really?  "They didn't turn on their own people!"  Wow, that's your metric?  Do you think they're just going to step aside when the kids show up to sell off the tanks to pay for education?  

The media likes the Mad Despot narrative because, again, it's easy, but, again, it's wrong and manipulative. And it backfires.  When George Bush pulled the Mad Despot card, the media reacted against it-- but that was itself a manipulation, because they wanted the Mad Despot to be Bush himself.  Offered no other choices than "one of these guys is utterly, completely, evil," America was forced to choose who they thought was actually the Mad Despot; and-- tip for the media-- most Americans will think it's the foreign guy.

It's fairly obvious why media companies would push the idea that the media itself is responsible for puppies and Reese's Pieces cookies, but when the medium becomes the message, there's no message.

The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America

Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest

East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians.

North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil.

The continent’s final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other’s development.

Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.

The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region’s usefulness and potential economic and political power.

This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river.

First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one).

Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure.

Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports.

First are the severe indentations of North America’s coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports.

Second, there are the Great Lakes.

Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent’s East and Gulf coasts.

There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well

The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.

What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports.

Canada’s maritime transport zones

Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States.

The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers.

The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region’s southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.

In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast.

So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.

On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island.

It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning

Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.