My friend and former Haas School of Business colleague Janet Yellen is likely to be the new Fed vice chair. Here she is with her husband (and frequent co-author) George Akerlof on the day he won the Nobel in economics.
Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are both happy.
Me, too.
Steve Benen in The Washington Monthly takes note of a growing movement in the House and Senate to include reform of student loans in the same reconciliation package with health care. It has a certain logic in terms of bringing House liberals aboard, and Nebraska’s Sen. Ben Nelson won’t like it one bit.
The New Republic’s health care blog, The Treatment, has become indispensable to understanding what’s happening in the health insurance reform macro debate and the details of the politics involved.
Three recent items from Jonathan Cohn’s self-described “must-read guide to health care reform:”
Australia Can Wait. Health Care Cannot. (3/12)
The American Journalism Review examines James O’Shea’s startup, the Chicago News Cooperative.
Marisa Meltzer, in the latest issue of The American Prospect, analyzes Tumblr as a significant Web trend.
Google’s translating skill leads the New York Times technology section today. The essence of a remarkable article by Miguel Helft:
Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.
But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.
It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.
Over on the Times’ Bits Blog, Helft interviews a Maori scholar who believes the technology may help to save his and other dying languages.
Google Translate is now working in 52 languages, and “the company recently released the toolkit in 345 languages, from Abkhazian to Zulu,” Helft writes.
I pasted a favorite Russian poem, “Parus” by Mikhail Lermontov, in the translator and got a B-/C+ literal translation with no soul.
To my surprise, below the translation, appears a request: “Contribute a better translation." And so I did. Not something I was planning to do when I picked up my Times this morning.
Stanford’s Abbas Milani’s article in The New Republic, The Mousavi Mission: Iran finds it Nelson Mandela, answers the question and explains more about contemporary Iranian politics than any piece I’ve seen in the past 10 months.
CJR profiles Vivian Schiller and the changes in tone and substance she has brought to NPR after her first year as president. Jill Drew reports in depth how NPR is emerging from financial troubles and dealing with all the challenges of new media, competition and collaboration with its affiliate stations and PRI, and finding new resources to cover its declining deficits and ambitious plans.
Bali Arts 