The Republican Spending Explosion

When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, they promised to eliminate the deficit and reduce wasteful spending. For several years, the GOP partly upheld its commitment by modestly curtailing spending growth and balancing the budget. Unfortunately, the balanced budgets of the late 1990s created an "easy money" mindset in Congress, which began a spending spree that continues unabated today. Total federal outlays will rise 29 percent between fiscal years 2001 and 2005 according to the president's fiscal year 2005 budget released in February. Real discretionary spending increases in fiscal years 2002, 2003, and 2004 are three of the five biggest annual increases in the last 40 years. Large spending increases have been the principal cause of the government's return to massive budget deficits. Although defense spending has increased in response to the war on terrorism, President Bush has made little attempt to restrain nondefense spending to offset the higher Pentagon budget. Nondefense discretionary outlays will increase about 36 percent during President Bush's first term in office. Congress has failed to contain the administration's overspending and has added new spending of its own. Republicans have clearly forfeited any claim of being the fiscally responsible party in Washington. Looking ahead, Republicans need to rediscover the reforming spirit that they brought to Washington after the landmark 1994 congressional elections. Fiscally conservative Democrats should challenge big-spending Republicans and work to cut unneeded programs from both the defense and nondefense parts of the budget. In command of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, Republicans are primarily responsible for the current budget mess, and it is Republicans who have the power to pare back spending to get the federal budget under control once again

Muscle coordination is habitual rather than optimal

When sharing load among multiple muscles, humans appear to select an optimal pattern of activation that minimizes costs such as the effort or variability of movement. How the nervous system achieves this behavior, however, is unknown. Here we show that contrary to predictions from optimal control theory, habitual muscle activation patterns are surprisingly robust to changes in limb biomechanics. We first developed a method to simulate joint forces in real time from electromyographic recordings of the wrist muscles. When the model was altered to simulate the effects of paralyzing a muscle, the subjects simply increased the recruitment of all muscles to accomplish the task, rather than recruiting only the useful muscles. When the model was altered to make the force output of one muscle unusually noisy, the subjects again persisted in recruiting all muscles rather than eliminating the noisy one. Such habitual coordination patterns were also unaffected by real modifications of biomechanics produced by selectively damaging a muscle without affecting sensory feedback. Subjects naturally use different patterns of muscle contraction to produce the same forces in different pronation-supination postures, but when the simulation was based on a posture different from the actual posture, the recruitment patterns tended to agree with the actual rather than the simulated posture. The results appear inconsistent with computation of motor programs by an optimal controller in the brain. Rather, the brain may learn and recall command programs that result in muscle coordination patterns generated by lower sensorimotor circuitry that are functionally "good-enough.

Enhanced crosslimb transfer of force-field learning for dynamics that are identical in extrinsic and joint-based coordinates for both limbs.

Humans are able to adapt their motor commands to make accurate movements in novel sensorimotor environments, such as when wielding tools that alter limb dynamics. However, it is unclear to what extent sensorimotor representations, obtained through experience with one limb, are available to the opposite, untrained limb and in which form they are available. Here, we compared crosslimb transfer of force-field compensation after participants adapted to a velocity-dependent curl field, oriented either in the sagittal or the transverse plane. Due to the mirror symmetry of the limbs, the force field had identical effects for both limbs in joint and extrinsic coordinates in the sagittal plane but conflicting joint-based effects in the transverse plane. The degree of force-field compensation exhibited by the opposite arm in probe trials immediately after initial learning was significantly greater after sagittal (26 ± 5%) than transverse plane adaptation (9 ± 4%; P < 0.001), irrespective of whether participants learned initially with the left or the right arm or via abrupt or gradual exposure to the force field. Thus transfer was impaired when the orientation of imposed dynamics conflicted in intrinsic coordinates for the two limbs. The data reveal that neural representations of novel dynamics are only partially available to the opposite limb, since transfer is incomplete even when force-field perturbation is spatially compatible for the two limbs, according to both intrinsic and extrinsic coordinates.Support for this work was provided by the Australian Research Council (Grant DP1093193), Trinity College, Wellcome Trust, Human Frontier Science Program, and Royal Society Noreen Murray Professorship in Neurobiology (to D. M. Wolpert).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the American Physiological Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00485.201

Tractability Frontier of Data Complexity in Team Semantics

Peer reviewe

Se repérer au Tonkin. Usage d’un croquis vietnamien par les Français lors de la conquête, 1883-1886

S’il n’est pas rare, au XIXe siècle, que les explorateurs européens sollicitent leurs interlocuteurs autochtones pour obtenir des renseignements ou des représentations graphiques du territoire, il est peu fréquent que ces documents nous soient parvenus. L’un d’entre eux, un croquis vietnamien conservé au Service historique de la Défense, fournit des informations essentielles sur la manière dont les militaires français ont procédé pour se repérer sur le terrain au moment de la conquête du Tonkin (1883-1886).In the 19th century, European explorers often solicited their indigenous interlocutors to obtain information or graphical representations of the territory, but these documents have rarely been preserved until now. One of them, a Vietnamese sketch kept at the Service Historique de la Défense, provides essential informations on how the French soldiers managed to find their way on the ground during the Tonkin conquest (1883-1886).Im 19. Jahrhundert baten europäische Entdecker häufig ihre eingeborenen Gesprächspartner um Informationen oder grafische Darstellungen des Territoriums, jedoch sind diese Dokumente zumeist nicht überliefert. Eines von ihnen, eine vietnamesische Skizze, die im französischen Militärarchiv aufbewahrt wird, liefert wichtige Informationen darüber, wie sich das französische Militär zur Zeit der Eroberung von Tonkin (1883-1886) vor Ort zurecht fand