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Week 16, 2006
THE BEST SELLERS (recent popular articles):
1) Business Week: Manuals for dummies [Une alternative aux modes d'emploi illisibles.]
2 ) The Economist: Attack of the Eurogoogle [Le rival européen de Google a l'air vachement intéressant.]

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THE REGULARS: Summary
3) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Tax day [Le 15 avril, c'est la date limite pour la déclaration de revenus aux USA.]
4) Puzzle: Missing house items [Un casse-tête.]
5) AUDIO/Radio National/Perspective: Historical wounds in Eurovision [Emission radio avec transcription, cette fois-ci la radio nationale australienne, sur le poids de l'histoire dans le concours Eurovision de la chanson.]

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1) Business Week: Manuals for dummies [Une alternative aux modes d'emploi illisibles.]
http://www.businessweek.com

Manuals for Dummies
Frustrated with the cryptic or flabby instruction books that accompany products, consumers are choosing reader-friendly alternatives

From hardware to software to that new robot that mops the floor and scares the cat — nobody ever wants to read the manual that comes with a new widget.

And why should you? Most product manuals are either flimsy pamphlet things with terse, tiny-type instructions in eight different languages or thick, impenetrable softcover doorstops that have all the visual excitement of a real-estate contract. Hardcore techies who read and write these things came up with a snarky, online abbreviation to smack down people who skipped the instruction book, but showed up in user forums asking obvious questions. You may have heard of it: RTFM, which stands for Read The [Really Bad Word] Manual.

Easier said than done. I write about computers and technology for a large part of my income, and I can barely get through some of the mind-numbing documentation out there. Much of it is unreadable and also boring to look at. If I want to look at walls of gray, I'll go meditate on the Munsell in a photo-retouching lab.

But whether it's deciphering Adobe Photoshop Elements or trying to set up a wireless home network, many people have ditched the official documentation and turned to a friendlier alternative: the sassy, savvy, consumer-oriented technical book that explains a program, process or product in regular ol' English — aided by slick graphic design that keeps the harried reader comforted and entertained as he or she scales the learning curve.

Hitting the shelves in 1991, DOS For Dummies was the granddaddy of the User-Friendly User Manual. With conversational chunks of text peppered with cartoons, friendly icons and jaunty typefaces, this ur-Dummies title proved that non-nerds could cuddle up with a technical tome. The series, from Wiley Publishing, now boasts 125 million books (on a gajillion topics) in print, so it's safe to say somebody out there finds the Dummies pretty darn smart.

This combination of elements gently eases the reader into the technical information. It's sort of like how people, intimidated by the columns and columns of type in The New Yorker, feel secure knowing there's a cynically whimsical Roz Chast cartoon to rest upon during the long eyeball march through an intense 10-page burst of short fiction.

In addition to the predictable interior design that anchors every book in the series, each volume in the Dummies brand screams for attention on the store shelf with its loud, proud, yellow-and-black cover. (Wiley must get some sort of yellow ink bulk discount since they also publish the Cliffs Notes literary guides, the main reason most high-school sophomores can pass a test on Silas Marner.) There's comfort in consistency.

Needless to say, the concept of the saucy, snappily designed guidebooks took off. Witness the proliferation over the years: the Complete Idiots Guides from the Penguin Group, the Visual QuickStart books from Peachpit Press and the Missing Manuals from Pogue Press/O'Reilly Media.

I was heavily biased towards the Missing Manual series even before I was asked to write one about the iPod, as it's the brainchild book line of David Pogue, who wrote Macs for Dummies before incorporating Pogue Press and joining forces with computer-book giant O'Reilly Media in 2000. If you're into graphics arts, digital video or publishing, odds are you've got at least one edition of his Mac OS X: The Missing Manual next to your computer by that can of Coke.

Thanks to designer Phil Simpson, the Missing Manual series has its own distinct look, with sidebar boxes, blurb-like tips and attention-getting graphics on just about every page. A lot of thought went into that design, particularly because most of the books in the series are printed in economical monochrome. Without the pedagogically proficient use of color within the text to call out specific points or display illustrations, the books have to make due with varying amounts of black ink on the page.

"The original idea behind Phil's design," recalled David when I called him to ask about the look of the Missing Manuals, "was how can we make it look like color just with shades of gray. If you look through the books, you'll see six or seven different, distinct shades of gray used as basically color elements to make it a little more vivid and lively." (See for yourself.)

While imparting technological wisdom in short humorous sections, the text itself also becomes something of a visual element within a Missing Manual. The discussion in any given chapter intertwines around short sidebars focused on one aspect of the topic at hand. Boxed graphics displaying captioned screenshots and brief "tips 'n' tricks" info-nuggets centered between horizontal rules also serve to enhance the main text.

"On the Missing Manual series, our idea was to let you open the book in the bookstore and stick your finger in at random and you will find three or four different entry points to the page," said David, citing the various elements mentioned above. "We never wanted to have just two pages of plain text." In a Missing Manual, the reader has plenty of graphical rest stops on the road to enlightenment.

"From my personal-training history of teaching people computers," David continued, "I know that it's wearying to be fed a nonstop river of new information in something that it's not immediately apparent to you how you need it yet. We're basically bending over backwards to keep the interest level high and the entertainment level high."

So fear not, gentle nontechnical reader. There are computer books out there that will not put you in a state of visual vegetation. With the Missing Manuals, Dummies books, Complete Idiots Guides and all the rest here to help, maybe that old techie snark will morph into a new meaning: "Read That Fantastic Manual!"

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2 ) The Economist: Attack of the Eurogoogle [Le rival européen de Google a l'air vachement intéressant.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5571496

Attack of the Eurogoogle
Mar 9th 2006

Search technology: Can an ambitious new European search engine, backed by the governments of France and Germany, challenge Google?

“WE MUST take the offensive and muster a massive effort,” said Jacques Chirac, the president of France, who went on to warn of the dangers of losing the battle for “the power of tomorrow” in a speech made last April. Standing beside him was Gerhard Schröder, then chancellor of Germany. In response to the formidable challenges posed by America, Japan and the emerging powers of China, India and Brazil, the two men announced that they had decided to step up their co-operation in a technological programme of vital strategic importance. A new fighter jet, perhaps, or a satellite surveillance system? No, the two heads of state were endorsing a plan to build a Franco-German internet-search engine, to be called Quaero (Latin for “I seek”).

The project would, said Mr Chirac, be undertaken with the help of government funds “in the image of the magnificent success of Airbus”. In a series of further speeches over the past few months, he has warmed to his theme: “We must take up the global challenge of the American giants Yahoo! and Google”; “Culture is not merchandise and cannot be left to blind market forces”; “We must staunchly defend the world's cultural diversity against the looming threat of uniformity”; “Our power is at stake.”

In July Mr Chirac noted that while French research has traditionally been good, it “now needs encouraging”. The following month the French government, the main financier and developer of Quaero, duly created the Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), based in Paris, largely to oversee the project. The AII received an initial endowment of €1.7 billion ($2 billion). Michel Lemonier, a senior administrator at the AII, refuses to discuss how much of the budget is being allocated to Quaero because, he jokes, the leaders of other AII-funded programmes would be “very jealous”. Quaero is expected to be finished before any of the other planned AII projects, and may be online before the year is out.

The magic of Quaero, say its supporters, will be in the ambitious capabilities of its tentacles. Today, internet searches are performed using keywords. Of course, search engines can retrieve image, audio and video files, in addition to text documents. But this is done by matching the user's keywords to a text description of the image, audio or video content. Quaero users will be able to search the internet with keywords in the usual way; but in addition, researchers at Quaero's public-private consortium, led by Thomson and France Telecom in France and Siemens and Deutsche Telekom in Germany, are developing technology that will allow users to perform searches using pictures and sounds as query terms. “It's beyond Google,” says Marie-Vincente Pasdeloup of Thomson.

Quaero will allow users to search using a “query image”, not just a group of keywords. In a process known as “image mining”, software that recognises shapes and colours will then retrieve still images and video clips that contain images similar to the query image. (The software is being supplied by LTU Technologies, a firm based in Paris, which already supplies the technology to law-enforcement agencies for use in sifting through surveillance footage.) When Quaero finds an image without a description that matches a properly labelled image, it will append the description from the labelled image to the unlabelled one. This technique, called “keyword propagation”, will enrich the web linguistically: image descriptions in French, for example, will spread as they are tacked on to similar images, so that those images can also be retrieved by users who type in French keywords.

Meanwhile, in Germany, researchers at the University of Karlsruhe are developing Quaero's voice-recognition and translation technology, with funding from the European Commission. The idea is that this software will find audio files—such as political speeches or radio broadcasts—and then automatically transcribe and translate them into a number of European languages. The original audio files can then be found using keyword searches. In addition, speaker-identification software will allow users (via computer microphones) to search the internet for audio clips recorded in their own voices, or those of other speakers.

These are stunningly ambitious goals, and some of the audio features may not be ready by the time Quaero is launched. Yet they show that Quaero is intended to be far more than just another would-be Google, but a leap forward in search-engine technology. “Google is so hegemonic that no one even wonders about other interfaces,” says François Bourdoncle, the chief executive of Exalead, a French search engine that has taken on the task of integrating these various technologies under the Quaero umbrella.

Even so, the most striking difference between Quaero and Google is not technological, but ideological. Quaero is a classic example of European state-funded industrial policy, while Google is the very embodiment of American free-market techno-capitalism. The use of government funds to back Quaero has raised eyebrows, even among its supporters, who worry that it might fall foul of rules that prevent governments from using state aid to give favoured firms an unfair competitive advantage.

But so far no formal complaints against Quaero have materialised. The project is a public-private partnership, and the private firms involved are also committing considerable sums to it. The government funds, meanwhile, are being carefully distributed via a complex system of favourable loans, interest-free cash advances, forgivable loans and grants for pre-competitive research, all of which are allowed under international trade rules. The project is further protected by the fact that big public-research organisations, including France's National Centre for Scientific Research and Germany's RWTH-Aachen University, are also involved.

When Angela Merkel took over as German chancellor in November, there were rumblings that she might not match Mr Schröder's commitment to the project. In fact, her dedication to Quaero is even greater, says Jean-Philippe Touffut, the secretary-general of the Cournot Centre for Economic Studies in Paris, who co-ordinates collaboration between the project's French and German participants.

How will Google respond? Brad Fallon of SEO Research, a search-engine consultancy based in Atlanta, says Google has put the development of multimedia search technology into its “as-soon-as-possible” category, since it now offers only text-based searches. At the moment, however, “Quaero appears to have the edge,” he says. But when Google and the other big American search engines unveil their multimedia search features, they are likely to provide interfaces in foreign languages, just as they do today with text-based searches. So simply by existing, Quaero will make the cut-throat search-engine business even more competitive.

Google, of course, makes its money from advertising, and Quaero's backers hope that it too will produce substantial advertising revenues. But Quaero's chief aims are cultural and political, rather than commercial. Alexander Waibel, a research leader at the University of Karlsruhe who sits on Quaero's steering committee, offers an emotional justification too. “Europe wants to secure access that does not have to be channelled through American technology,” he says. And an official close to Mr Chirac adds that “the goal surpasses by far the industrial stakes.”

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3) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Tax day [Le 15 avril, c'est la date limite pour la déclaration de revenus aux USA.]
http://www.scholastic.com

Tax Day
By Genet Berhane

It's tax time again. The filing deadline, April 15, fell on a Saturday this year, so most taxpayers have until midnight Monday to get their returns, or tax forms, postmarked. The big question is whether taxpayers will mail or "e-file" their returns. The IRS is pushing for electronic filing, but many taxpayers are resisting the idea.

According to the IRS, a mailed-in tax return costs $2.49 to process, while an e-filed return costs just 78 cents. A 1998 law gives the IRS until 2007 to switch 80 percent of taxpayers from mailing returns to e-filing. The change is happening slowly, though. In 2005, just 51 percent of taxpayers e-filed. This year, 55 percent of taxpayers are expected to file electronically.

Why aren't more people e-filing? There seem to be two major reasons: money and security concerns.

Money and Security

Last year, thanks to the IRS Free File program, any taxpayer could prepare and e-file federal returns for free. This year, however, free filing is available only to people who make less than $50,000 a year.

Nina E. Olson, a U.S. taxpayer advocate (person working for a cause), argues that free electronic filing should be available to everyone. She explained her own decision to mail her returns. "I resented the notion that I would have to pay separate fees to prepare my return and to file it," Olson said.

Security is an issue for taxpayers concerned that there are not enough safeguards in place for people who choose to e-file. However, the IRS and tax software companies have said that they've never had a security problem with the e-filing system. Another problem for some taxpayers is the fact that e-filed returns aren't submitted directly to the IRS, but through e-file providers, tax professionals who send return information to the IRS.

According to Bert DuMars, IRS Director of Electronic Tax Administration (ETA), the agency's computers are not yet ready to handle the millions of returns that would be sent directly to the agency. "Some of our systems are 20, 30, 40 years old," said DuMars. "We need to modernize them, and it's not cheap."

More Time

People in some states have a little longer to file their returns. The filing deadline is extended to Tuesday for Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. The IRS center that processes returns for these states, in Andover, Massachusetts, is closed on Monday for the Patriots' Day holiday. Taxpayers living in regions affected by Hurricane Katrina also have more time to file their returns. Their deadline has been extended to August 28.

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5) AUDIO/Radio National/Perspective: Historical wounds in Eurovision [Emission radio avec transcription, cette fois-ci la radio nationale australienne, sur le poids de l'histoire dans le concours Eurovision de la chanson.]

transcription : http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1610404.htm
mp3 : http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/perspective_20060406.mp3

John Kennedy O'Connor
Thursday 6 April 2006

Topic: Historical wounds in Eurovision

Program Transcript

For fifty years, the Eurovision Song Contest has annually proven to the whole world that while political European borders become more and more blurred, European culture remains as disparate as ever. The predictable voting en bloc from neighbourly nations often leaves viewers wondering why they bothered to perform the songs at all.

Historical wounds are often reopened by the opportunity to snub the musical efforts of one's ancient foes. Ireland and Malta have found a neat way to retaliate for centuries of British Imperialism by refusing to award the United Kingdom anything more then meagre scores, while the British in turn treat the French and Germans with similar contempt. The Nordic countries will reliably band together and, despite freeing themselves from the Iron Curtain and Russian oppression, the newly enfranchised Eastern bloc will rarely vote for anyone outside their regional alliance. Greece and Cyprus are guaranteed top marks from each other before a single note is sung, while both will ignore Turkey’s effort completely.

The politics of the voting often spills over into domestic nationalistic battles, even before the contest itself. The fractious alliance of Serbia-Montenegro made their debut in the 2004 Eurovision. Their united front was severely tested in 2005 when a Montenegrin band won glory at the ill-tempered national final, when the Montenegrin judges blanked all the Serbian songs.

This year, with Serbia hosting the local final, Montenegro’s judges did the same again, to the disgust of the mainly Serb audience. The victorious Montenegrin group were booed from the stage and bombarded with bottles and other missiles, leaving the hapless boy band with no option but to flee.

Such was the discord between the two uneasy nation partners that the state TV channels were forced to withdraw from this year’s Eurovision, somewhat poignantly just a few day’s after the death of their former leader, Milosevic, as no resolution could be found to assuage the anger of the two communities, who will be asked whether to continue this uneasy political alliance in a referendum the day after this year’s Eurovision final; another reason why each side was desperate to appear in this year’s competition.

Perhaps they should have taken a leaf from Belgium’s book. Right from the inaugural contest in 1956, the Belgians have solved the problem of their ethnic divide by alternately choosing a French entrant one year, followed by a Flemish song the next. Both sides of the Belgian community freely admit they pay no attention to the contest in the year they are not represented, but it has at least led to fifty years of domestic musical harmony.

At the end of the day, it’s just a song contest, and does any of this really matter? Well clearly to the fractured Serbian-Montenegrin populous – the undoubted answer is 'yes indeed'. Their chance to take their place on the international stage has slipped away and considerable national pride has had to take a back seat; made worse as their place in the contest is now taken by the old enemy next door – Croatia. Thankfully the Serbian viewers will have a chance to vote in the contest and snub their replacements in the process.

The Serbian-Montenegrin battle is not the only scandal to hit this year’s selection process. The organizers failed to break a three-way tie in Moldova’s heat and, to the fury of the joint winners, the contest was scrapped and run again – with a new set of songs.

Romania, the Ukraine and Lithuania all had songs disqualified from their heats, which oddly seemed to eliminate the most popular entrants in each case. A tie in Portugal was broken in favour of the song that lagged in the public telephone vote. Ireland and Greece both commissioned their leading stars to sing their entries this year. Conveniently for both singers, the apparently open public vote selected the songs the artists had written themselves.

Eurovision is one of the few opportunities that most European nations have to compete on equal terms with the mighty political and economic powers of Germany, France and Britain. No wonder they take it so seriously. Organizing the political minefield of the Olympics is nothing compared to what the Greek hosts can expect when the musical mighty from 37 nations gather in their ancient capitol on May 20th.

Meanwhile, in Germany, former contest winner and ‘Grande Diva’ Vicky Leandros protested her defeat in the German qualifier vehemently. But that’s nothing to do with politics: That’s just sour grapes.

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6) The Economist: French economic nationalism [Rappel de l'histoire d'une France colbertiste.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5662969

French economic nationalism
Colbert was here

Mar 23rd 2006 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition
The roots of “economic patriotism” go back deep into history

THE students who are marching on the streets of Paris may feel that they are re-enacting the events of 1968—or even 1789, for the truly ambitious—but in the corridors of power, the French elite are harking back to another strain in the country's rich intellectual history. Jean-Baptiste Colbert is back in fashion.

For many years, the ideas of Louis XIV's finance minister—who was convinced that international trade was a zero-sum game and pioneered state control of the economy and state intervention in industry—had been relegated to the annals of France's glorious past. But now Colbert is back with a vengeance, as Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, promotes his notion of “economic patriotism”.

Ironically, Mr de Villepin is currently being vilified by students and unionists for his proposal to liberalise French labour laws. But in the months before the student protests, his economic policies had been anything but liberal. On the contrary, hardly a week seemed to go by without Mr de Villepin announcing another measure to protect French companies from foreign ownership.

At the end of last year he introduced new legislation to protect businesses from foreign takeovers in 11 security-related sectors. He has also made it known that he has a list of ten of the 40 biggest French companies that he intends to keep under French ownership—including Danone, a yogurt maker, Carrefour, a supermarket chain, and Société Générale, a big bank. And to build up the nation's stake in French companies he is mobilising the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, a state-owned bank, to increase its €25 billion ($30.2 billion) investment in French equities. Meanwhile the French parliament has approved a Villepin-proposed amendment of the European Union (EU) takeover directive, making it easier to introduce “poison pill” defences to ward off hostile bids, particularly from foreigners.

“Economic patriotism”, a term coined by Bernard Carayon, a French parliamentarian, has been adopted by Mr de Villepin as his new creed. In essence, it seems to be a new term for Colbertism. And unlike his labour-market reforms, it is popular. When the prime minister recently pre-empted a hostile Italian bid for Suez, a French utility, by brokering a merger between Suez and Gaz de France (GDF), a gas giant, the public cheered. According to a survey by TNS Sofres, a pollster, 69% of those surveyed approved of the government's intervention against hostile bids from abroad. The only part of the deal that the public disliked was the fact that it involved an element of privatisation.

The origins of the affair

France's love affair with state interventionism began in the 17th century, and tends to flare up when the country feels under threat. As industrialisation in the 19th century stiffened competition between European countries, the government helped to build railways and to set up banks. In the aftermath of the 1929 stockmarket crash the Popular Front, the government of Léon Blum, nationalised the defence industry, railways and the Bank of France. After nationalising further big chunks of industry and finance after the second world war—as part of a state-run effort to get France back on her feet—the government retained a strong role in business during the trente glorieuses, the 30 years of France's economic miracle.

The oil shocks of the 1970s contributed to the Socialists' victory at elections in 1981. They promptly engaged in a frenzy of nationalisations of banks and industrial companies. Many of these were then re-privatised at the end of the 1980s, but the state's ownership of industry remains enormous—it controls Electricité de France and GDF; the post office; the rail system, the nuclear industry; big chunks of Renault, a carmaker, Thales, a defence firm, France Telecom and much more.

The highly elitist nature of the French educational system increases the temptation to treat industry as a plaything of the state. Seven of the bosses of France's biggest companies attended the National School of Administration, or ENA—a post-graduate college so exclusive that it only admits about 100 students a year. Enarques populate the top ministerial offices and boardrooms. So when Mr de Villepin called a meeting at his residence to arrange the emergency merger between Suez and GDF, it may have helped matters that all three key players, Mr de Villepin himself, along with Gérard Mestrallet, the boss of Suez and Jean-François Cirelli, the head of GDF, were enarques.

Indeed 1980, the year that Mr de Villepin graduated, was obviously a particularly good vintage at ENA. Among the other 100 or so graduates were Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, a cabinet minister; François Hollande, the Socialist leader and a presidential hopeful; Ségolène Royal, Mr Hollande's partner and another potential presidential candidate; Henri de Castries, boss of AXA, an insurance giant; and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, head of Barclays France.

But before this all gets too conspiratorial, it should be acknowledged that the inbred nature of the French elite does not always lead to agreement. After the Danone episode, Mr de Castries warned that history has demonstrated that protectionism was based on an “archaic” view of the world. Laurence Parisot, head of the French employers' association, said cautiously that economic patriotism was acceptable, as long as it did not become a new Maginot line—evoking painful memories of the French military defences that the Germans waltzed around in 1940. Ernest-Antoine Seillière, head of the European employers' club, thinks his country's neo-Colbertism is mainly theatrics: “These reactions are ridiculous: nothing will stop globalisation,” he says.

But some influential French bosses do buy into Mr de Villepin's “economic patriotism”. Jean-Louis Beffa, head of Saint Gobain, which recently acquired BPB, a British plasterboard maker, after a hostile bid worth £3.6 billion, is nonetheless no defender of the free market. The Centre Courbet, a think-tank financed by Saint Gobain, regularly produces pamphlets critical of the “Anglo-Saxon” market model. Maybe Mr Beffa feels he must remain loyal to the intellectual heritage of the founder of his company: set up to replace imports of Venetian glass with home-made wares, Saint Gobain was founded in 1665 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

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7) New York Times magazine/Domains: JJ Abrams [Questionnaire minute du créateur des séries TV US 'Alias' et 'Lost'. Et si vous répondiez au questionnaire vous-même ?]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/magazine/16wwln_domains.html

April 16, 2006
Domains
L.A. Confidential
Interview by EDWARD LEWINE

J.J. Abrams, a creator of "Alias" and "Lost" and writer and director of "Mission Impossible III," lives in a four-bedroom Cape Cod in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Katie McGrath, and their three children.

Personal hero: Rod Serling. In "The Twilight Zone," he did my favorite thing — he took outlandish situations and told them through emotional characterization. I discovered my house is 400 feet from where he lived.

What's always by his bed: My laptop and some incredibly obscure book or DVD on how to use a computer program. I geek out on those 100 percent.

His retreat: A former closet adjacent to my office that's now a recording area. I have a keyboard and guitars and a computer set up there. I love recording music.

His greatest hits: I wrote and recorded the theme songs to my television shows — "Felicity," "Alias" and "Lost." There's also a little recording I did for "Mission" with my friend the musician Thomas Dolby.

Morning routine: I wake up around 7 a.m., make breakfast for my children and take the older ones to school. Then I go to the office. Typically, I'm working on "Lost" and "Alias" at Disney, but these days I'm finishing up "M:I III" at Paramount.

Favorite item of clothing: I designed and made a T-shirt based on the distinctive 1940's-style "Do Not Disturb" signs at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. The hotel should really make those shirts themselves.

Greatest strength as a writer: I'm a fast writer.

Greatest weakness as writer: I write too quickly.

What's always in the refrigerator: Diet Snapple, Diet Coke, milk and blueberries. Those are the staples.

Favorite food: There is this restaurant in New York called Shopsin's General Store, and they have a sandwich called the Chaz. It's a baguette with turkey and cranberry sauce and coleslaw, and it just destroys me.

Collections: Lately it feels like we're collecting children. Actually, I'm fascinated by robots — my production company is called Bad Robot — and I have this small collection of old tin toy robots and a wonderful robot painting.

Best thing about robots: I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.

Best "Lost" memento: Damon Lindelof, who created the show with me, gave me a framed palm frond, which was a prop in the first episode.

Best "Alias" memento: I commissioned a caricature of "Alias" by Al Hirschfeld and then had lithos done for the cast. I hang it in my office.

Best movie-star gift: Tom Cruise gave me one of those two-wheel Segway scooter things. I'm still trying to get him back for that.

What he's always asked at parties: People want to know what is happening on the island in "Lost." Recently, it's been, "What's it like working with Tom Cruise?"

Always with him: My BlackBerry.

Favorite place in house: There's this great seating area outside by the swimming pool. It has a sofa, some chairs and an outdoor fireplace. It always feels like you are on vacation when you are out there.

Hobbies: I have this laser cutter, and I can take sketches my kids made, scan them and use the cutter to make two-dimensional renderings.

Obsession: I think boxes are an amazing art form that no one really considers. It's fascinating the way they are made. I have a bunch of books that I love on packaging and templates for boxes. Sometimes I use the laser cutter to make my own boxes.

Best recent gift: My wife got me a certificate to get a suit custom made. That sounds beyond extravagant to me. I can't wait to do that.

Fitness routine: These days I go for runs on weekends. Back when I was a human being I belonged to a gym.

Talent he covets: I wish I were a better athlete.

Evening routine: Go home around 7 p.m., give the kids a bath and put them to sleep. Then eat dinner with my wife around 8:30 p.m. Sometimes I have to edit, but I have a system set up so I can work from home with the editors in the editing room. I go to bed around midnight.

Greatest misconception about his life: That what I do is work instead of fun.

Movie he's seen most: "Jaws," simply because it's a great film that is never not on television. I'd also say "The Philadelphia Story," which is impossibly perfect.

Book he's read most: The lame answer is something you read as a kid. The honest answer is stuff that you read as a parent over and over to your kids. But I love "Our Man in Havana." It's a great novel.

Household chore he's most fastidious about: With three kids you are just trying to survive. You can't be fastidious.

Obsolete item he won't part with: I have a number of keyboards that are now, because of software, absolutely irrelevant. I probably will never play them, and yet I keep them.

Travel routine: I don't use escalators at airports. I don't know why, but I take the stairs. Now my wife and kids do it, too. It is one of the things about living with me that is a pain.

Travel nightmare: I have this recurring dream where I'm flying in a plane and there is a problem. I've actually had that dream when I was on a plane. I'll wake up from a dream of a plane crashing while in a plane. That's really disconcerting.

Superstition: I knock on wood.

Procrastination technique: Because I love doing so much stuff — design, music, sculpting and painting — there's always something I can do instead of work. Basically, I don't write unless I'm on deadline.

Biggest self-indulgence/guilty pleasure: When there is something computer- or music-related I get it.

Gadget he can't live without: My Macintosh. I use it for everything I do. I use it for writing, music, sound effects, special effects, graphic design. I use it for the Internet. I use it all day to a wildly unhealthy degree.

Prized possession: I have a mystery box from Tannen's Magic in New York. It's a cardboard box with a question mark printed on it. It's one of those things you buy for $15 and they advertise that it has at least $20 worth of stuff inside. I've never opened it. I love the fact that it has this mysterious value as long as I don't open it.

What he drives: A Toyota Prius. I used to have a Porsche, and I miss it like crazy, but the Prius is great. Also, you can't drive kids in a Porsche.

Next big purchase: For the past few years we've rented a house in Camden, Me. I'd love to buy one.

Historical figure he'd like to meet: Aristotle. Anything Rod Serling couldn't do, Aristotle had it covered.

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8) The New York Times: The DNA Age [Et maintenant les gens exploitent les tests génétiques pour prouver leur ethnicité afin de bénéficier de bourses et autres avantages.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/us/12genes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

April 12, 2006
The DNA Age: Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests
By AMY HARMON

Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry. The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid. "Naturally when you're applying to college you're looking at how your genetic status might help you," said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins' birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. "I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will."

Genetic tests, once obscure tools for scientists, have begun to influence everyday lives in many ways. The tests are reshaping people's sense of themselves — where they came from, why they behave as they do, what disease might be coming their way. It may be only natural then that ethnic ancestry tests, one of the first commercial products to emerge from the genetic revolution, are spurring a thorough exploration of the question, What is in it for me?

Many scientists criticize the ethnic ancestry tests as promising more than they can deliver. The legacy of an ancestor several generations back may be too diluted to show up. And the tests have a margin of error, so results showing a small amount of ancestry from one continent may not actually mean someone has any. Given the tests' speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities — and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.

Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights. One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money. "This is not just somebody's desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish," said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. "It's about access to money and power."

Driving the pursuit of genetic bounty are start-up testing companies with names like DNA Tribes and Ethnoancestry. For $99 to $250, they promise to satisfy the human hunger to learn about one's origins — and sometimes much more. On its Web site, a leader in this cottage industry, DNA Print Genomics, once urged people to use it "whether your goal is to validate your eligibility for race-based college admissions or government entitlements."

Tony Frudakis, the research director at DNAPrint, said the three-year-old company had coined the term American Indian Princess Syndrome to describe the insistent pursuit of Indian roots among many newly minted genetic genealogists. If the tests fail to turn up any, Mr. Frudakis added, "this type of customer is frequently quite angry." DNAPrint calls the ethnic ancestry tests "recreational genomics" to distinguish them from the more serious medical and forensic applications of genetics. But as they ignite a debate over a variety of genetic birthrights, their impact may be further-reaching than anyone anticipated.

Some social critics fear that the tests could undermine programs meant to compensate those legitimately disadvantaged because of their race. Others say they highlight an underlying problem with labeling people by race in an increasingly multiracial society. "If someone appears to be white and then finds out they are not, they haven't experienced the kinds of things that affirmative action is supposed to remedy," said Lester Monts, senior vice provost for student affairs at the University of Michigan, which won the right to use race as a factor in admissions in a 2003 Supreme Court decision. Still, Michigan, like most other universities, relies on how students choose to describe themselves on admissions applications when assigning racial preferences.

Ashley Klett's younger sister marked the "Asian" box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European. Whether it mattered they do not know, but she did get into the college of her choice. "And they gave her a scholarship," Ashley said.

Pearl Duncan has grander ambitions: she wants a castle. A descendant of Jamaican slaves, Ms. Duncan had already identified the Scottish slave owner who was her mother's great-great-grandfather through archival records. But the DNA test confirming her 10 percent British Isles ancestry gave her the nerve to contact the Scottish cousins who had built an oil company with his fortune. "It's one thing to feel satisfied to know something about your heritage, it's another to claim it," said Ms. Duncan, a writer in Manhattan. "There's a kind of checkmateness to the DNA."

The family's 11 castles, Ms. Duncan noted, were obtained with the proceeds of her African ancestors' labor. Perhaps they could spare one for her great-great-great-grandfather's black heirs? In case the paper records she had gathered were not persuasive, she invited male family members to take a DNA test that can identify a genetic signature passed from father to son. So far, no one has taken her up on the offer. Her appeal, Ms. Duncan said, is mostly playful. Less so is her insistence that the Scots stop referring to their common ancestors as simply "Virginia and West India merchants." "By acknowledging me, the Scots are beginning to acknowledge that these guys were slaveholders," she said.

Other slave descendants, known as the Freedmen, see DNA as bolstering their demand to be reinstated as members of the Indian tribes that once owned their ancestors. Under a treaty with the United States, the "Five Civilized Tribes" — Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles and Cherokees — freed their African slaves and in most cases made them citizens in the mid-1800's. More recently, the tribes have sought to exclude the slaves' descendants, depriving them of health benefits and other services.

At a meeting in South Coffeyville, Okla., last month, members of the Freedmen argued that DNA results revealing their Indian ancestry underscore the racism of the tribe's position that their ancestors were never true Indians. "Here's this DNA test that says yes, these people can establish some degree of Indian blood," said Marilyn Vann, a Cherokee Freedwoman who is suing for tribal citizenship in federal court. "It's important to combat those who want to oppress people of African descent in their own tribe."

As the assets of some tribes have swelled in the wake of the 1988 federal law allowing them to build casinos, there has been no shortage of petitioners stepping forward to assert their right to citizenship and a share of the wealth. Now, many of them are wielding genetic ancestry tests to bolster their claim. "It used to be 'someone said my grandmother was an Indian,' " says Joyce Walker, the enrollment clerk who regularly turns away DNA petitioners for the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which operates the lucrative Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. "Now it's 'my DNA says my grandmother was an Indian.' "

Recognizing the validity of DNA ancestry tests, some Indians say, would undermine tribal sovereignty. They say membership requires meeting the criteria in a tribe's constitution, which often requires documenting blood ties to a specific tribal member. DNA tests cannot pinpoint to which tribe an individual's ancestor belonged. But if tribes are perceived as blocking legitimate DNA applicants to limit payouts of casino money, experts say, it could damage their standing to enforce the treaties conferring the financial benefits so many covet. "Ancestry DNA tests are playing a part in the evolution of what the American public thinks matters," said Kim Tallbear, an American Indian studies professor at Arizona State University. "And tribes are dependent on the American public's good will, so they may have to bend."

Under no such pressure, Israeli authorities have so far denied John Haedrich what he calls his genetic birthright to citizenship without converting to Judaism. Under Israel's "law of return," only Jews may immigrate to Israel without special dispensation. Mr. Haedrich, a nursing home director who was raised a Christian, found through a DNA ancestry test that he bears a genetic signature commonly found among Jews. He says his European ancestors may have hidden their faith for fear of persecution.

Rabbis, too, have disavowed the claim: "DNA, schmeeNA," Mr. Haedrich, 44, said the rabbi at a local synagogue in Los Angeles told him when he called to discuss it. Undeterred, Mr. Haedrich has hired a lawyer to sue the Israeli government. As in America, he argues, DNA is widely accepted as evidence in forensics and paternity cases, so why not immigration? "Because I was raised a gentile does not change the fact that I am," Mr. Haedrich wrote in a full-page advertisement in The Jerusalem Post, "a Jew by birth."

Shonda Brinson, an African-American college student, is still trying to figure out how best to apply her DNA results on employment forms. In some cases, she has chosen to write in her actual statistics — 89 percent sub-Saharan African, 6 percent European and 5 percent East Asian. But she figures her best bet may be just checking all relevant boxes. "That way, of the three categories they won't be able to determine which percentage is bigger," Ms. Brinson said.

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9) International Herald Tribune: French find the villain in protests [Les Français s'insurgent contre le traitement de la presse étrangère au mouvement anti-CPE.]
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/29/news/press.php

French find the villain in protests: The media
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2006

PARIS
Even Christine Lagarde, France's trade minister, has received phone calls from concerned friends in Chicago and Washington to check whether she was safe. As scenes of vandalism and violence in central Paris flicker across television screens abroad and major newspapers speak of riots and anarchy in France, people here are grumbling that the media coverage of three weeks of mass protests against a labor law - especially in the English-language press - has unjustly distorted France's image.

A CNN anchor, Kyra Phillips, likened clashes between young vandals and riot police officers at the end of a march Tuesday in Paris to the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing that led to the deaths of hundreds of pro-democracy activists. Three days earlier, the British tabloid The Sun advised its readers "Don't go to Paris," saying that they would be safer in Baghdad than in the French capital right now.

A week before she embarks on a four- city trip to the United States with the ambition of countering the negative images, Lagarde complained Wednesday that media coverage had been "excessive." "We're meeting with the French community and with investors and are trying to explain that despite the fact that they see people on the street all the time and nothing else, it's not every day and it's not the whole of France," she told reporters Wednesday.

Defense Minister Michèle Alliot- Marie put it more starkly: "We're not in Baghdad," she said in a statement to the International Herald Tribune. "Some foreign columnists amplify and exaggerate the situation in France, just as they did during the unrest in the suburbs," she said, referring to three weeks of rioting last autumn in immigrant suburbs outside France's big cities.

Most newspapers in Continental Europe, where other governments also struggle with painful labor reforms in reluctant societies, focused on the turnout at the march, the reasons for the discontent and the difficulties of reforming the French economy.

German newspapers were as divided on the French reform as they are on labor market measures at home. The left-leaning Tageszeitung expressed sympathy with the protesters for fighting against "the dismantling of social and labor rights," while the free-market daily Die Welt accused the French strikers of spreading "the virus of reality denial."

The protests were also front-page news in Spain's major newspapers. El País ran an editorial titled "The French Psychodrama" in which it mused about the French "going to extremes to preserve a social model in need of profound reforms." By contrast, in Sweden, a country with some of the strongest unions in Europe, the coverage has been more sympathetic to the grievances of the demonstrators.

But in Britain's Daily Mail, a conservative newspaper, the main article on the protests in the Wednesday edition had this headline: "Demo mobs spread anarchy across France." In the Belfast Telegraph on Friday, the headline on a march the day before read: "Gangs set Paris on fire in law protests."

Contrary to what some reports and editorials appeared to suggest, the violence that has routinely erupted at the end of demonstrations in recent weeks did not spread across cities. Last Thursday, which saw the worst incidents so far, cars were torched, shop windows broken and students attacked with bats only on the Esplanade des Invalides, the large square outside the golden-domed tomb of Napoleon. On Tuesday the clashes were largely confined to the central Place de la République. Still, as foreign journalists point out, if cars were burning in their own capital cities, it would be front-page news.

One explanation, sociologists say, for the widespread French incomprehension and outrage at seeing the violence so widely covered in some countries is that they themselves have long become accustomed to sporadic outbreaks of vandalism and violence in suburban housing projects across the country. During the rioting, the toll of burned vehicles topped 1,400 on one night; when the number dropped to 90, the police declared the situation back to normal. "The French have got a bit used to this phenomenon," said Erwan Lecoeur, research director at the Observatory for Public Debate, which analyzes the impact of media coverage on society. "Our Anglo-Saxon friends love showing that things are going badly here and the reaction on CNN is emblematic of that," he said. But he added that it was "hypocritical" of the French to complain about coverage when French TV was also airing plenty of violent images.

The coverage in France has focused less on violence and unemployment and more on the political battles ahead. The conservative newspaper Le Figaro asked whether the center-right government should stand firm on the new labor law: "Why hold out today only to realize in 2007 that one is definitively cut off from the young and the middle classes?" The left-leaning daily Le Monde argued that the crisis has become a lose- lose situation for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. In an editorial entitled "Lost Bets," the paper says: "If he backs down, he loses. If he doesn't and slams the door, it's even worse."

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Jan 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Consumers fail to measure up to economists' expectations

“WE MUST accept the consumer as the final judge,” wrote Frank Taussig, a former president of the American Economic Association (AEA), in 1912. His view was once an article of faith of the economics profession: the consumer was sovereign, the market his servant. It fell to economists only to explain the consumer's decisions, not to second-guess them.

The AEA's latest annual meeting, held last weekend, made one thing abundantly clear: this ritual deference to consumer sovereignty is slipping. Among the opening sessions was one entitled “The economics of paying too much”, a rich genre that spans gym memberships, banking fees and inkjet cartridges. The next day, John Campbell, president of the American Finance Association (AFA), dwelt on the failure of households to hold enough shares, diversify their assets fully or refinance their mortgages promptly. Meanwhile, Daniel McFadden, the AEA president, argued that the unshackling of markets, which has proceeded apace since the 1980s, would fall short of its promise if consumers were not similarly freed from the fetters of ignorance, self-deception and intemperance.

Mr McFadden's speech leaned on the work of neuroeconomists, who claim to prove what Adam Smith long ago asserted: man's “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” runs deep in our nature. According to brain scans, it lurks in the same primitive, limbic vaults of the cerebrum as our instinct to fight, flee and feed ourselves. Indeed, “shopping and sex share the same neurotransmitters and receptors,” Mr McFadden jokes.

But if trading turns some people on, it puts others off. Markets can be “rough, murky, tumultuous places”. Consumers may doubt themselves, the products on display and the people flogging them. Losing out—paying too much—is an ever-present danger. This can be character-building, of course. By punishing a consumer's mistakes and inconsistencies, the market may whip him into shape, so that he more closely resembles the rational actor an efficient market deserves. But Mr McFadden worries that consumers may instead develop an aversion to markets: “Opportunities for choice may be interpreted as opportunities for mistakes, embarrassment and regret.” He calls this agoraphobia. In common parlance, this is a fear of open spaces; translated literally from Greek, it means “fear of the marketplace”.

In his class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr McFadden randomly handed out pencils, embossed with the course's name, to half of his 345 students. He then held a sealed-bid auction, designed so that no one had any reason to lie about how much a pencil was worth to them. Since the pencils were distributed at random, there was no reason to think pencil-owners should be any more eager to hold on to their pencils than bidders were to buy them. Whatever value the median student places on a pencil, about half the pencil-holders should value them less, and half of those without pencils should value them more. Thus 86 pencils should change hands.

In fact, only 32 pencils were traded. This might be the result of what economists call the “endowment effect”: we value what we own more highly, simply because we own it. But Mr McFadden reckons that another explanation is also at work. Even for something as trivial as a pencil, fear of overpaying or selling too cheaply inhibits trade: “Consumers find trade an edgy experience...and resist trading for small gains.”

This reluctance to face the market may also apply to much weightier matters. Listening to Mr Campbell's AFA address, it is easy to conclude that agoraphobia reigns over the American housing market. Most American mortgages offer fixed interest rates, but can be refinanced without penalty should the household so wish. The steep decline in interest rates between 2001 and 2003 prompted many households to do just that. But a large fraction fell victim to inertia. In 2003, Mr Campbell estimates, most households were still paying interest at more than a percentage point above the market rate; an eighth were paying a spread of more than three points.
Financial flossing

What to do? Mr Campbell is inspired by the example of dentistry. The big gains in oral health, he points out, stemmed from straightforward advice and easy-to-use products. Economists should promote the financial equivalent of brushing twice daily with toothpaste. Such simple, effective ideas are surprisingly rare in an otherwise competitive financial industry. Why, for example, does a mortgage lender not offer a fixed-rate mortgage that refinances automatically whenever the market rate falls too far below the rate the customer is paying?

Mr Campbell speculates that the agoraphiles profit at the expense of agoraphobes. Those households that do refinance their mortgage enjoy a better rate precisely because the remainder do not. As a consequence, lenders who wanted to introduce a self-refinancing mortgage would face a conundrum. Naive householders would benefit from such a product, but if they knew that, they would no longer be naive (and would not need it).

Mr McFadden takes all this a step further. The “consumer may need to be coaxed and wheedled into responding to market choices with sufficient diligence,” he says. For his predecessors, such as Taussig, this is heresy. The consumers' choices are the data—the given things—of economics. It is only by observing a consumer's choices that economists can infer his preferences. Thus to argue that we know what's best for consumers, independent of what they have chosen for themselves, is a failure of logic as well as the height of presumption. If our theory fails to explain their behaviour, it is our problem, not theirs. Mr McFadden seems tempted by the opposite conclusion. If economic theory fails to reflect consumer behaviour, perhaps consumers can be remoulded, better to serve the theory.

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11) St Louis Post-Dispatch: Unwed couple face boot [Une ville du Missouri veut interdire de séjour une famille dont le crime c'est que les parents ne sont pas mariés.]
http://www.stltoday.com/

Unwed couple, kids face boot by Black Jack
By Eun Kyung Kim
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
21/02/2006

Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack's definition of a family. Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child. "I was basically told, you can have one child living in your house if you're not married, but more than that, you can't," she said.

The couple appealed the denial of an occupancy permit last week at a hearing before Black Jack's board of adjustment. Shelltrack said board members asked her and Loving personal questions about their relationship, their children and their previous home in Minneapolis, from where they moved, for nearly an hour. Then the board denied the couple's appeal. The case now goes before Black Jack's municipal court. At the hearing, Shelltrack said, one board of adjustment member, Norma Mitchell, even pointed at her and asked, "I don't understand why you as a woman didn't exercise your right to marry that man," before being hushed by another board member. Mitchell refused to comment. She referred all calls to Black Jack Mayor Norman McCourt, who defended the ordinance. "This is about the definition of family, not if they're married or not," he said. "It's what cities do to maintain the housing and to hold down overcrowding."

The ordinance has been challenged before. In 1999, the unwed parents of triplets challenged the city's denial of an occupancy permit. It is unclear how that case was resolved.

Shelltrack said she and her family live in a 2,300-square-foot home, providing plenty of space for her family. But McCourt said the city can't differentiate its treatment to residents. "You have laws on the books to preclude any situation," he said. "That's why it's there. It's kind of like a speed limit. You say you go 30 miles an hour. If everybody drives 30 miles an hour, why keep it on the books? It's the same situation."

In 1985, the city of Ladue sued a couple for violating a city ordinance prohibiting an unmarried man and woman from living together if they were not "related by blood, marriage or adoption." A year later, the Missouri Court of Appeals upheld the ruling against the couple, who had lived in the home since 1981.

Many municipalities in the region do have "these ridiculous ordinances about what's considered family," said Katina Combs, a fair housing specialist with the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing Opportunity Council. The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination involving race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability and families with children, Combs said. Most states often will include additional protected classes, such as marital status. Illinois is one such state. Missouri is not.

"I have to believe in my heart that the people who live in Black Jack wouldn't try to make us leave the city and our home that we own simply because we have too many children out of wedlock," Shelltrack said. "We've had a stable home as long as they've been alive. We are a family. (My kids) are not children of an unmarried couple, they're children of two loving parents," said Shelltrack.

Shelltrack, 31, could appeal Black Jack's decision to the St. Louis County Circuit Court, but she said that would involve legal fees that she and Loving can't afford because of the money they poured into buying their home. She said, however, the couple has filed a complaint with the U.S. Housing and Urban Department. "I refuse to run down to the courthouse and get married just so I can live in my own home," she said. "I love my house. I love the area. I love the schools. We wouldn't have bought the house if we didn't think it was what we wanted."

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12) The Economist: Health care for everyone [Aux USA, le Massachussetts innove en imposant l'assurance santé pour tous.]
http://www.economist.com

Massachusetts: Health care for everyone

Apr 6th 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC

Hillary Clinton couldn't do it. Can Mitt Romney?

AS WAS discovered by Hillary Clinton a decade ago, it is politically impossible to fix America's health-care system all at once. Congress is too angrily divided, and the federal government lacks the muscle to impose a grand vision on unwilling states. The riddle of how to provide health insurance for the 46m Americans who lack it will have to be solved by trial and error in the states. This week, Massachusetts offered an intriguing proposal.

The state legislature passed a bill that would make health insurance compulsory. Just as everyone who drives a car must insure it, so everyone with a body must insure that, too. The only exceptions are those who can prove they are so rich that they can pay for major surgery themselves. The bill had near-universal support. Governor Mitt Romney, on whose proposal it is based, says he will sign it.

To make the plan work, Massachusetts will offer a mix of penalties and subsidies. Individuals will be allowed to buy health insurance with pre-tax dollars, just as firms currently can. Those who don't will be penalised through the tax code, and then fined. At the same time, private insurers will receive subsidies to offer bare-bones insurance to those who cannot afford fancier packages.

Of the 6.2m people in Massachusetts, about 500,000 lack insurance. They fall into three overlapping groups. Some are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but have not enrolled. Some are not quite poor enough for Medicaid, but get no insurance from their employers and cannot afford to buy it themselves. Others could afford it, but just don't buy it, perhaps because they are young and healthy.

Massachusetts has already done a good job of reducing the size of the first group. A new computer system uses the Social Security numbers of those who show up at hospital to see if they qualify for Medicaid, and automatically enrolls them if they do. The other two groups will be shrunk by imposing a levy on firms with more than ten employees that do not offer health insurance, and by forcing everyone who still lacks insurance after that to get some.

With more healthy people in the pool, average premiums should fall, or at least rise less quickly. The burden on emergency rooms should be reduced, because insured people are more likely to go to a doctor before a problem becomes critical. Overall, the plan will cost no more than the state currently spends on the uninsured—about $1 billion a year, says an optimistic Mr Romney.

A novel aspect of the plan is the creation of a health insurance “exchange”, to relieve small firms of the need to conduct complex negotiations with insurers. Employees will be able to choose any plan approved by the state-backed exchange, and their premiums will be deducted from their pay cheques.

If the scheme works, other states will copy it. But that will depend on how much it ends up costing. No one wants to use the word “rationing”, but this is what happens in every country with universal health coverage. That said, Mr Romney's plan has more chance of success than Hillarycare ever did—which could help Mr Romney in 2008, when he will be seeking the Republican presidential nomination and then, perhaps, facing Senator Clinton.

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