Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 -- I might be ready to try it again.

Having used Dragon and other speech-to-type software in the past, this post by Xavier at MIDStories caught my interest and impressed me. You have to watch this video if you have ever used speech-to-type software. I will have to give Dragon Naturally Speaking another try at Nuance.com.

Since I use a Tablet PC, I did a search and found a few interesting reviews, most on earlier versions. Here are a few:

From MedicalTabletPC.com, gizmag.com (today and pretty funny), and GottaBeMobile.com.

Mobile Internet Devices or MIDs

Xavier Lanier from GottaBeMobile.com (my favorite mobile site) announces a new site called MIDStories.com and ... well read about it here and see the video about watching baseball. Where was that when I was a kid trying to tune in a distant analog broadcast? If you convince them how you will use it, you might win a MID too.

Akron, not doing so badly (relatively speaking)

Sometimes one needs to put things in perspective. Akron's high unemployment isn't so terribly out of line with Ohio and not all that much more than the national level. What this means is the unemployment is likely mosly cyclical and not structural. Another great graph from FRED.

A Brilliant Read

In a previous post I highlighted the cool scribd.com technology for reading online. That started a summer of reading economic basics. In this day of troubled economic times and the political decisions that necessarily follows, I have been trying to retreat from the discourse from time to time to reaffirm the basics. I think one of the best explanations of what is going on today was written in 1946 and last updated in 1979, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt.

At the risk of you not buying and devouring this book, here is the lesson in one sentence courtesy of the author. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups (p. 17). He goes on to say on the same page that (n)ine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today... stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group of the neglect of other groups (p. 17).

I have always had this maxim of Fredrich Bastiat in my mind, but in reading Hazlitt I see how easy it is for me to be swayed by conventional wisdom. While I would never fall into the broken window fallacy (when I recognize it), it is the art of recognizing it that is the art of economics. While I can easily apply the broken window fallacy to war, why did I so easily accept that bombed out factories in Germany and Japan allowed them to grow faster since they could rebuild with the latest and greatest technology and leap frog the west in their growth. The truth is it was their economic policies, not the bombed out factories that led to the growth, but see how easy it is to attribute actual growth to the wrong cause when we see what is seen and not what is unseen.

Read this book and you will be pondering current events with renewed enthusiasm.