History Readings

The research team monitored the molecular changes closely as the disease developed. The illness was treated successfully while in its early stages, long before it might have been if Dr. Snyder had relied on a conventional visit to the doctor.

Currently, the price of human genome sequencing is typically about $4,000, said George M. Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School. But within a year, he said, it could be down to $1,000 or even less.

because he typically schedules checkups with his doctor only once every two or three years, the disease would have long remained undiagnosed had it not been for the case study. “Probably no one would have caught my glucose shooting up for at least 18 to 20 months,” he said. “By then, I could have had damage.”

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.

“access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”

d the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment.

Romney talked about amending the Constitution to require the president to have business experience. He spoke approvingly of a notion from a store owner who wanted to make anyone who does not have at least three years of business background ineligible to lead the country.“He said, ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States,’” said Romney, cheerfully summarizing this rewrite of the founders’ governing blueprint.

In a scholarly ranking of great presidents, a 2009 survey conducted by C-Span,6 of the 10 best leaders lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s rumination. This list includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, union activist and corporate spokesman, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.

By contrast, two 20th century businessmen — George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover.

why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger

I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

It is clear by now that Russia’s government has dug in against outside intervention in Syria, its longtime partner and last firm foothold in the Middle East. Less well known is the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears that Christian minorities, many of them Orthodox, will be swept away by a wave of Islamic fundamentalism unleashed by the Arab Spring.

This argument for supporting sitting leaders has reached a peak around Syria, whose minority population of Christians, about 10 percent, has been reluctant to join the Sunni Muslim opposition against Mr. Assad, fearing persecution at those same hands if he were to fall. If the church’s advocacy cannot be said to guide Russia’s policy, it is one of the factors that make compromise with the West so elusive, especially at a time of domestic political uncertainty for the Kremlin.

The issue of “Christianophobia” shot to the top of the church’s agenda a year ago, with a statement warning that “they are killing our brothers and sisters, driving them from their homes, separating them from their near and dear, stripping them of the right to confess their religious beliefs

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.

Flame is the biggest and most high-functioning cyberweapon ever discovered, various cybersecurity experts said. It is comprised of multiple files that are 20 times larger than Stuxnet and carry about 100 times more code than a basic virus, experts said.

The most alarming feature, experts said, is that Flame can be highly versatile, depending on instructions by its controller. The malware can steal data and social-network conversations, take snapshots of computer screens, penetrate across networks, turn on a computer's microphone to record audio and scan for Bluetooth-active devices.

Experts said they believe Flame reports back the information to a central command-and-control network that has constantly changed location. Analysts found servers in Germany, Vietnam, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere, but haven't located the main server.

Happiness is a cake with a million recipes. The same factors that make it so hard for the OECD Better Life Index to compare the "good life" country-by-country make it hard to devise any sort of happiness-centric public policy.

Happiness and income might have a controversial relationship. But plenty of evidence suggests that unemployment makes you miserable, no matter where you live

" It's conceivable that employment-maximizing policies might be more important, from a happynomics standpoint, than income-egalitarian policies.

when push comes to shove, Republicans are happy to fall back on Keynesian theories when it suits them.

Beyond nationalism and nonviolence, most people simply don’t know what Gandhi stood for, and his words are open to misinterpretation. Sixty-four years after the Mahatma’s assassination, anyone can claim to be a Gandhian.

in a warm, sunny climate, a white roof almost certainly doesn’t hurt on an individual basis and may help reduce the need for air-conditioning (as inhabitants of sultry climes have known for a long time)

While a white roof in the southern states will reduce cooling loads and therefore save energy even some white roof manufacturers agree that the benefits of white roofs in the northern states an especialy in most of Canada are negligible at best and even an energy negative in many areas. In the north the only minor benefit may be a slight reductioin in heat island effect, but that only applies while the roof is clean and in urban areas

While programs such as LEED promote white roofs as a blanket policy people need to think the process through, if you have 10 heating degree days for every 1 cooling degree day what is more inportant. In the north most buildings have much higher insulation values negating many of the possibile benefits of the reflective roofing

Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.

White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.

Volunteers saw that all it takes is a paint roller, some solar-reflective white coating and a little hard work to start curbing climate change.

innovations like the da Vinci robot, which costs more than a million dollars and yet has never been shown by a randomized trial to improve the outcomes of prostate surgery.

this is a pseudo-innovation — a technology that increases costs without improving patients’ health.

by providing incentives for hospitals to reduce infections, errors and readmissions, giving doctors more information on the comparative effectiveness of medical interventions and emphasizing preventive care over expensive services, the act will stimulate a panoply of true medical innovations

Romney openly repudiated the central argument his party has been making against President Obama for the last three years: that he spent too much money and therefore deepened the economic crisis.

in his Halperin interview, Romney frankly admits that reducing the budget deficit in the midst of an economic crisis would be a horrible idea:

Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression.  So I’m not going to do that, of course.

The IPO disaster simply creates an incentive to pry even deeper into the lives of users, “the one thing people hate most,” Wadhwa says. Facebook can track people even when they’re not on the site, watching where they go and what they do. That information, sliced and analyzed the right way, could be of great value to advertisers.

Placing ads next to Google search results works well because people using Google are already searching for products. Advertising on Facebook is less effective because people go to the site to talk to their friends, not look for products.

nobody would be complaining if Facebook stock had gone up instead of down, a feat the company could have accomplished so easily, just by selling fewer shares at a lower price. But Facebook didn’t want to leave money on the table. Zuckerberg and his bankers let hubris, self-delusion, and ego get the better of them.

More than 200 cities around the world have bike-share programs. We’re not the first, but ours will be one of the largest systems. The program will start with 420 stations spread through the lower half of Manhattan, Long Island City and much of western Brooklyn; eventually more than 10,000 bikes will be available. It will cost just under $10 for a day’s rental. The charge includes unlimited rides during a 24-hour period, as long as each ride is under 30 minutes

Bogotá bike use has increased by a factor of five. Significantly, the increased biking has affected the city’s economy, as Bogotá recently extended a network of bicycle paths through lower-income neighborhoods around the city’s periphery, making it easier and more affordable for those who don’t live in affluent areas to get to work. Bike paths = jobs.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.

the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users.

This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole