In making the case that she would be a better President than Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton never forgets to summon the argument that she has more experience. But experience doesn't always help. In fact, three decades of research into expert performance has shown that experience itself — the raw amount of time you spend pursuing any particular activity, from brain surgery to skiing — can actually hinder your ability to deliver reproducibly superior performance.

The Science of Experience

There has been a firestorm about the war inside the Pentagon. It’s been raging for several months now, but the mainstream media, which can find plenty of space to report on Hollywood starlets and their substance-abuse problems, and any candidate’s garbled lines on the campaign stump, can’t find its way fit to report a single line on this.

Yet the smoke from this firestorm has been everywhere. Why did Admiral James Fallon suddenly resign following the publication of a portrait piece on him in Esquire? The word spread about the media, which covered this, as usually, dismissively as “another personnel flap.” In their reporting, it had something to do with the CENTCOM commander’s opposition to launching a new war against Iran.

When I tested this with my Pentagon sources, I was told “wrong.”

The War Over the War Inside the Pentagon

While every computer these days comes pre-loaded with an adequate number of fonts, sometimes you want to create your own. Maybe there's a special project like a family cookbook or class assignment that requires a personal touch. Or maybe your kid wants some AC/DC-esque Trapper Keeper lettering to show his classmates how much he rocks. Whatever the reason, here's how to make your own font.

Create Your Own Font

Brian Dettmer carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures.

Book Autopsies

BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. Do you like Stephen King’s It, but thought it was too long? The technology behind BookLamp allows you to find books that are written with a similar tone, tense, perspective, action level, description level, and dialog level, while at the same time allowing you to specify details like... half the length. It’s impervious to outside influences - like advertising - that impact socially driven recommendation systems, and isn’t reliant on a large user base to work.

BookLamp

While most of the nation’s top universities—including Harvard—still slant their curricula heavily toward the liberal arts, the effect is that many students spend their college days reading about everything from dinosaurs to Descartes, but then leave Cambridge for jobs completely unrelated to their course work. This dichotomy of the education and subsequent lives of Harvard students begs the question: amid the growing emphasis on professional preparation, just how relevant are the liberal arts to the lives of undergraduates?

What's The Use?

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New bass and beats plus live guests (musicians, DJs, poets) and an ear for the global south. Cumbia. Dubstep. Gangsta synthetics. Sound-art. Maghrebi. International exclusives.

A shantytown unfolds in radiophonic space.

Mudd Up! with DJ/Rupture

Samantha Power in conversation with Howie Kahn

Akhmatova in Azerbaijan

Perhaps nothing has hurt America's standing in the world so much recently as the media stories related to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, secret detention centers abroad, and extraordinary renditions. All are related to interrogation as a means of intelligence collection. Any research team that looks seriously into the topic of interrogation should pay closer attention to this broader picture. Interrogation methods are not just about what works best to gather information; they are also about what can stand the light of day from a moral point of view in the eyes of American citizens and people around the world. For the next iteration, the Intelligence Science Board may wish to have an ethicist on board, and perhaps an expert or two who can look at the wider foreign policy implications that flow from the choices America makes about how to question detainees.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art — Central Intelligence Agency