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...then create a new document." If you wanted to embed some piece of information that Microsoft Word wasn't optimized for, you had to launch another application, create and modify a new element there, and then move back to your original application environment, where you could deposit the alien data object. A number of proposed interfaces - most famously, Apple's failed OpenDoc initiative, shut down shortly after the company acquired NeXT - promised to reverse the priorities: our desktops would prioritize the tasks over the tools, the documents over the applications. The user wouldn't launch documents inside an application. They...
...multitasking has been a 15-year wrong turn, and that user interfaces need to revert back to one app at a time now that the apps load instantaneously. Maybe they think closed distribution environments generate more innovation in the long run than open ones. (They have two years of data on their side on that one, thanks to the incredible run the App Store has been on.) I'm not sure I agree with those arguments, but I'd be fascinated to hear more about them...
...thing is, I already ignore all these (relatively minor) indicators. I had been hoping to learn I could skip GDP or the employment report. I should have known that professional forecasters wouldn't forgo real data. As Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com put it in an e-mail, "I cherish all economic indicators...
...favorite economic forecasters to name an indicator or two that I could afford to start ignoring. Three said they disregarded the index of leading indicators, originally devised at the Commerce Department but now compiled by the Conference Board, a business group. Forecasters want new hard data, and the index "consists entirely of already released information and the Conference Board's forecasts," says Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. (The leading-indicators index topped a similar survey by the Chicago Tribune in 2005, it turns out.) The monthly employment estimate put out by payroll-service firm ADP got two demerits, mainly because...
Most of us aren't professional forecasters. What should we make of the cacophony of monthly and weekly data? The obvious advice is to focus on trends and ignore the noise. But the most important economic moments come when trends reverse - when what appears to be noise is really a sign that the world has changed. Which is why, in these uncertain times, we jump whenever a new economic number comes out. Even one that will be revised in a month...