The Reuters article has it correctly with the necessary qualifier, Swiss Complete World’s Longest Rail Tunnel.

They fail to mention the 4 other tunnels that are quite a bit longer than the Swiss tunnel.

If you believe Wikipedia, see their article, List of longest tunnels in the world. The longest one is 85 miles compared to the puny Swiss tunnel of only 35.5 miles.

Of course, if you go by volume, perhaps the Swiss tunnel does have some bragging rights.  I don’t know the numbers for this measure.

The Reuters article, U.S. Backs Off In Currency Dispute With China, gives the details.

The decision to delay the Treasury report appears to have been taken at the last minute. Industry sources had been primed to expect it by 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Friday.

It was apparently right down to the wire, but finally someone came to their senses.  My supposition is that someone finally backed off from this politically popular measure that would have spelled disaster for the world economy.

To hear Klaus Schwab tell it in my previous post Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum, China is trying to boost internal consumption so that they won’t be so dependent on exports.  This will make it less disruptive to their own economy to let the value of their currency rise.  They have already let it rise at the rate of 1% per month over the last three months.

So it seems that China is carrying out the policy that we wish, and they are preparing to position themselves to carry it out even faster.  Would it be smart for the United States to pick a fight with its largest creditor because we want them to do something on our timetable instead of their own?  Would they be smart to disrupt their country by raising the value of their currency too fast just to please their largest borrower?

Whatever trouble we are in, we brought it on ourselves.

Perhaps 5,000 years of experience does allow the Chinese to act as the mature player in this comedy of errors.  With only a couple hundred years of history, we naturally take the part of the immature buffoon.

Charlie Rose had a fascinating Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.  The World Economic Forum is the organization that puts on the annual meeting of world leaders at Davos, Switzerland.

Among all the other interesting topics discussed, Charlie Rose got Klaus Schwab to discuss his understanding of leadership.  He defined leadership qualities as brains, heart, soul, and good nerves.

In discussing why there are fewer and fewer great leaders he said that the main deficiency was in the soul.  He went on to explain that it was understandable in the current environment because “instead of following your compass you have to find out what is the public opinion – more soul, vision, values part is sacrificed to the short term interest of gaining …”.  I couldn’t quite catch the last word.

At this point, I thought that after such a great interview and the showing of such great insight, that Klaus Schwab had somehow missed an important point.

The last sentence of the interview made me say “Hallelujah, he really does get it.”

The New Republic article Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don’t by Jonathan Bernstein promotes the article of the same name by Hans Noel of Georgetown University.

This is great article for political junkies who read this blog on a regular basis. If you are a political scientist, you probably know about all this already. After thinking about it for a while, I thought So that’s what political science is all about.

The article itself is published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, Vol. 8 (2010) / Issue 3. From here, you can download the 21 page article.

The New Republic paraphrases item 3 as Elections don’t necessarily do what we want them to do.. I found the explanation of the item to be the clearest and most succinct description of the problem of finding a voting method that does do what we want it to do.

You may or may not agree with some of the ten items, but you may also learn something in thinking about why you do or don’t agree.  For instance,  the scatter diagram of figure 1 in the article could just as easily be used to make the opposite point of much of the text for this item.