Can We Take Much More Good News?
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By Peter Johnson  In this celebrity- and lifestyle-obsessed age, it's no surprise that last month NBC said it will add a fourth hour of Today in September mostly devoted to lighter fare: The third hour, hosted by Al Roker, Ann Curry and Natalie Morales, has done just fine in the ratings.
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Favorable earnings boost shares -- but are they too high already?
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We unquestionably live better than we used to, but there are real reasons to worry whether the economic gains can continue at anything like their recent pace.
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I wish this could be a good news/bad news kind of a column, but the problem is that there isn&#39;t much good news to report when it comes to AIDS.
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Out of death may come a rebirth. The alternative is much more likely to happen. And if it does the consequence will be a living hell that will go on and on and on.
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One idea promises to make a good thing even better.
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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The future is tantalizing. But is it within reach?
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Investors rally on the good news, but what does fast-track status really mean?
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Headlines can tell you both more -- and less -- than they intend.
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It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong, and it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
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What you don't say can be as important as what you report. It's all in the delivery.
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Americans know a good deal when they see it. Today a group of  leading scientists and practitioners from several fields -- agriculture,  medicine, economics, education, engineering -- is making a proposal to  the world. If  rich and poor countries will follow through on the promises  they have made over the past five years  to fight extreme poverty and disease -- and rely on the best science and technology in doing  so -- the world can save millions of lives and extricate hundreds of millions of  its poorest people from the trap of extreme poverty. The cost is a mere 50 cents out of every $100 of rich-world income in the coming decade.
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If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
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Do the right thing -- for humanity and your heirs' wallets.
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There's more to growth than just a high growth rate.
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By Scott Richardson  Lots of good stuff has been happening while Ive been "off work" recovering from cancer surgery. Ive been trying to keep up from home so I can keep you informed.