Jonathan

Don Luskin links to this warning about long-term interest rates.

The Fed, as the Times article points out, is plainly determined that this time nothing will get in the way (as 9/11 and Enron did in the recent past) of economic recovery. Therefore the Fed has been cutting rates and expanding the money supply. The desired results are economic expansion, which is already occurring, and a stock-market rally, which seems to be happening in fits and starts. But costs of the Fed’s manipulation include a weaker dollar, and an overvalued bond market that will collapse once it becomes clear that the Fed has finished cutting rates. Buy puts.

Somebody (Instapundit?) linked to this piece by David Gelernter, who has some interesting ideas about online newspapers. Gelernter thinks they could be radically improved by introduction of a cardfile-like user interface that he describes in detail. He also links to Scopeware, a company he’s involved with that develops and markets UI software of the type he discusses.

The Scopeware UI paradigm seems like a natural. It also looks likes an evolutionary improvement on the UI designs we use in blogs. (Which raises a question of why Gelernter didn’t mention blogs as precursors and prototypes for the new newspaper paradigm he envisions.)

I’m eager to see if Gelernter’s UI comes eventually to be used by online newspapers, but I’d be more interested in seeing it applied to blogs right now. Blogging software such as Movable Type already makes it easy to aggregate data feeds, search posts and categorize them by theme — features Gelernter says are important (and they are, though most bloggers fail to make efficient use of them). How hard would it be to create a MT main index template and style sheet to display posts as an over-the-horizon cascade of index cards in the way Gelernter suggests? Not very, I’d bet. Maybe someone will do it, and maybe then, if it becomes a popular blog UI, newspapers will consider using it. I doubt the newspapers will be the first to introduce it, though.

Thomas Sowell writes:

Insurance companies are in the business of reducing given risks and transferring them, for a price. Non-profit advocacy groups are in the business of maximizing fears from given risks, in order to attract the donations that keep them going. Yet because the latter’s income is not called by the dreaded word “profit,” they are considered to be doing something more noble.

Columbia man John Coumarianos raises questions about the state of liberal education in the U.S.

Since Robert Maynard Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago, no major American university, with the possible exception of Boston University under the rule of John Silber, has had a president who has had an inkling of what liberal education is all about. This is staggering to contemplate, but it is the awful truth.

Strong words. It’s been a [cough] while since my own experience at the U of C, so I don’t know how Chicago stacks up today. John’s thoughts are worth reading.