Paragraph of the week:

From Paul Krugman's column of Aug. 29th (New York Times)

"Still, even the government of a superpower can't simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world's evildoers — single-handedly because we've alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it's not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they'll have quite a mess to clean up. "

The paragraph of the week award is made to the paragraph that in the estimation of the editor says the most in the fewest number of words.

The importance of context in genetics.

New York City policy of charging genetic material in lieu of a person raises technical and ethical concerns

Attorney General John Ashcroft is doing a road show for the Patriot Act.
Ashcroft kicked off a nationwide tour Wednesday in an attempt to garner
support for the widely unpopular Patriot Act. The act was passed only six
weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and gives police the ability to
monitor e-mail and Web activity without a judge's approval in some cases.
The ACLU's Laura Murphy questions the wisdom in Ashcroft's attempt to drum
up support: "Is the attorney general's road show political in nature,
designed to shore up flagging conservative support in swing states, and is
it prudent to have the attorney general give up his official duties to hit
the huskings for an unpopular piece of legislation? Safety and freedom
will both suffer if the answers are what some expect."
From Corante

"At a moment when we're all fretting about whether we'll be blown up tomorrow by nuclear terrorists, it may seem odd to worry instead that we'll someday survive forever. But just to give you something new to bite your lip about, let me tell you about roundworms."
Where Is Thy Sting?

Nifty phrase: :“continuous partial attention.” It comes from a piece by Henry Jenkins, Digital Renaissance, in Technology Review. Linda Stone, credited as a “digital community builder” coined the phrase to describe . . .“a growing tendency for people to move through life, scanning their environments for signals, and shifting their attention from one problem to another. This process has definite downsides – we never give ourselves over fully to any one interaction. It is like being at a cocktail party and constantly looking over the shoulders of the person you are talking with to see if anyone more interesting has arrived. Yet, it is also adaptive to the demands of the new information environment, allowing us to accomplish more, to sort through competing demands, and to interact with a much larger array of people.

". . .Our classic notions of literacy assume uninterrupted contemplation in relative social isolation, a single task at a time. Some have characterized the younger generation as having limited attention spans. But these young people have also developed new competencies at rapidly processing information, forming new connections between separate spheres of knowledge, and filtering a complex field to discern those elements that demand immediate attention. Stone argues that for better or worse, this is the way we are all currently living. Therefore, she claims, we had better design our technologies to accommodate continuous partial attention, and we had better evolve forms of etiquette that allow us to smooth over the social disruptions such behavior can cause."