Interesting Articles: Nov 1st-7th 2005

Business and Economics:
* Why Vote? (New York Times). The Freakonomics guys provide a short overview of the economic analysis of voting.
* How to Build a Breakaway Brand (Fortune). Filed here simply because of all the examples. If I have to write a paper at some point and need some branding examples, I'll know where to look.

History:
* 'The Chosen': Getting In (New York Times). Although technically a book review, provides an intriguing picture of how scholarly merit and leadership skills have been valued over the years (as displayed through college admission standards).

Politics:
* Court Choice Is Conservative by Nature, Not Ideology (New York Times). An affectionate portrait of Alito's life and training.
* Every State Left Behind (New York Times). In addition to the complaints leveled in the opinion piece, having each state have its own tests and testing standards is more expensive (lacking economies of scale) and indirectly prevents unified curriculums, preventing acquiring wide-scale best practices in teaching.

Science?
* Science Journal: Brains strive to see the good, leading to god (The Wall Street Journal). This piece starts with a simple psychological phenomenon involving rationalization (in psychology terms, cognitive dissonance) and stretches it to an (absurd?) degree, relating it to how people view fate, God, and religion.

Technology:
* Beware Your Trail of Digital Fingerprints (New York Times). A number of tales about why one should beware of (or, be aware of) document meta-data. The article could also be subtitled, "Or, why plain text and printed out documents are better."
* Artificial Artificial Intelligence (Amazon Web Services). What a neat idea! Amazon is trying to be a broker for tasks that humans can do trivially but computers cannot do (e.g., is there a pizza parlor in this picture?).