This is a fascinating book that's way overdue at my corporate library because i've been trying to capture some of the insights before returning it. Heuer spent almost 45 years at the CIA, first working as an analyst, and later studying and teaching the science of analysis.

The Foreword makes it clear that his contributions go beyond intelligence analysis to how we think about things in general. He's surveyed a great deal of psychological literature, distilled the lessons, and applied them in accessible ways.

For example, his chapter entitled "Perception: Why Can't We See What Is There To Be Seen?" points out that

"perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records 'reality.'"

and describe the fundamental principle: we tend to perceive what we expect to perceive.

I think there's tremendous application of this material both to personal growth (how often do i misread a situation simply because of what i expect to perceive?) and to spiritual training. Highly recommended, though not easy to get. Amazon doesn't stock it, but you can order it from the Government Printing Office. If you have the patience, you can also read it on line.

Stanford's Infomap Project provides an interesting way to look at corpus-derived word relationships. You can build your own graph from a seed word: here's a fragment of what you get from "Jesus" in the 100 million word British National Corpus. Here's a picture of the whole thing.

What i want to know is, who's Kate?

Yet another reason why text processing tools can't (shouldn't) treat names just like words: they're not.

A recent Barna Research study finds that in a typical week 4 out of 10 adults talk about "religious or spiritual matters." You can either view that as surprisingly many, or surprising few given that "85% of all adults contend that their religious faith is very important in their life". The most frequent subjects are

1. movies or TV (66% in a typical week)
2. money (57%)
3. sports (55%)

which is still much more encouraging that what you find by looking at the most popular search terms on Yahoo Buzz Index.