G. Pascal Zachary is a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is also a contributing editor of the newsmagazine In These Times and a columnist for Technology Review. His first technology-related book Showstopper (1994) focused on innovation at Microsoft. His second book, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, follows the life and career of a highly controversi...

Among the controversies arising from the 2000 Presidential election was the accusation that media networks called, or projected, a winner faster in those states won by Albert Gore than in those states won by George W. Bush. We investigate this accusation by estimating a Tobit model of the length of time between states’ poll closing times and the times at which CNN projected a winner. Our result...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In the spring of 2001, President George W. Bush asked the U.S. Congress to delegate to him a 6-year chunk of Congress constitutional authority over international trade through a process called Fast Track. Bush seeks Fast Track trade authority (which his Administration is attempting to rename "Trade Promotion Authority") to expand the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (...

In an early effort to establish his credentials as a “compassionate conservative” during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush pledged that if he were elected, he would create a commission to conduct a comprehensive review of the care of people with mental illness — the first such examination to be undertaken in almost 25 years. In April 2002, in fulfillment of his campaign pledge, Bus...

Individual differences in intelligence are consistently associated with leader performance, including the assessed performance of presidents of the United States. Given this empirical significance, IQ scores were estimated for all 42 chief executives from George Washington to G. W. Bush. The scores were obtained by applying missing-values estimation methods (expectation-maximization) to publish...

The reflection of an object can be distorted by undulations of the reflector, be it a funhouse mirror or a fluid surface. Painters and photographers have long exploited this effect, for example, in imaging scenery distorted by ripples on a lake. Here, we use this phenomenon to visualize micrometric surface waves generated as a millimetric droplet bounces on the surface of a vibrating fluid bath...

MEL is a geometric music encoding language designed to allow for musical objects to be encoded parsimoniously as sets of points in pitch-time space, generated by performing geometric transformations on component patterns. MEL has been implemented in Java and coupled with the SIATEC pattern discovery algorithm to allow for compact encodings to be generated automatically from in extenso note list...