In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they're paying for data speeds as advertised.

"Once again, the F.C.C. is putting service providers on the spot," said Julien Blin, a telecommunications consultant at JBB Research.

Mr. Lereah would acknowledge that he had gotten it wrong. But from the perspective of many real estate agents, it is always a good time to buy.

"What they are really saying is that it is a good time to be involved in a transaction that generates a commission," says Barry Ritholtz, C.E.O. and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He's also author of "The Big Picture," an irreverent blog on markets.

If agents are always motivated to make a deal, buyers are often asking an impossible question: "Will the price of this house go up?"

Although the National Association of Realtors said for many years that home prices historically don't fall, actually they do, and sometimes quite sharply. The housing market is complicated, and the future unknowable. Still, for clues to the overall direction of prices, Mr. Ritholtz advises buyers to look at three metrics: the ratio of median income to median home prices, which suggests whether people can afford a house; the cost of ownership versus renting; and the value of the national housing stock as a percentage of gross domestic product.

All those measures were aberrationally inflated during the housing bubble. And they still aren't back to historical norms. We can get back to the norm in either of two ways, Mr. Ritholtz says: home prices can either drop an additional 50 percent or go sideways for seven years or so, while G.D.P. and income presumably grow.

To complicate matters, even if home prices rise or fall nationally, they may not follow that pattern in Las Vegas or South Florida or Maine, to say nothing of the neighborhood where you want to buy.

There may be a better way, however, for potential buyers to approach the problem. "Predicting interest rates is a whole lot easier than predicting home prices," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a multistate discount online real estate brokerage company based in Seattle. "Before you buy the house, you buy the money," he says.

It's a little like walking into a dealership to buy a car, and finding the saleswoman immediately jotting down what your monthly payments will be and starting the negotiations there. That's absolutely the wrong way to buy a car. But for a prospective homeowner, it's a good place to start the analysis to determine how much house you can buy.

Instead of betting on home prices, you make a bet on whether money will become cheaper or more expensive, allowing you to buy more or less house.

Melissa Cohn, the president of Manhattan Mortgage, said, "The biggest issue that we have is that a large number of buildings in the city don't meet Fannie Mae guidelines."

Over the last two years, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have tightened the regulations that govern the loans they buy from lenders.

Fannie now requires that some condominiums carry more insurance, for example, and a new I.R.S. requirement keeps the agency from acquiring mortgages made in buildings where more than 20 percent of the square footage is commercial -- space that is used for, say, a hotel or a doctor's office.

But many of the guidelines that New York City apartment buildings don't meet have been in place for years. Fannie and Freddie guidelines have long held, for example, that no single person or entity can own more than 10 percent of the units in an established condo or co-op building. During the boom, that didn't matter much. Investors were hungry to buy bundled residential mortgages, and banks could bypass Fannie and Freddie and sell the loans elsewhere. Now, Fannie and Freddie are by far the biggest game in town, so on conforming loans, their rules are gospel.

Andrea Mottola ran into the problem of a building cold-shouldered by banks last year, when she was trying to sell her daughter's two-bedroom apartment in a condo on West 58th Street.

Still, Mr. Leocata maintains that borrowers default on these loans less frequently than those with conventional mortgages. Borrowers must pay monthly mortgage insurance premiums. For a 3 percent down payment, the monthly premium is 0.8 percent of the loan amount; for 5 percent, it's 0.67 percent; and for 10 percent, 0.42 percent.

Borrowers must also fall within the household income limits -- $107,520 in Manhattan, $142,520 in Long Island and $146,420 in Westchester -- and the purchase price cannot exceed $637,640.

I think it's obvious....that the answers are "no." For if the answers were "yes" it would have been a huge story! No fair description of the current situation, nothing in what the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times has picked up from its reporting, would support a characterization like "impending tyranny."

In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so-- despite the fact that they must have spent over $100,000 on this one story. And whatever that thing is, it's not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the "narrative of impending tyranny" is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism's "sense of reality" as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That's what created the pattern I've called "regression to a phony mean." That's what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.

-- Jay Rosen

One reason some people are willing to pay a full-time planner is that they know they can call at any time without being on the clock. Mr. Richards, who runs the Behavior Gap site, said his clients had told him they called him first when they had a question or a calamity because they knew he wasn't "starting a stop watch."

"You don't fix emotional problems with logic, you fix them with trust," he said. "And that is really difficult to do, to build that over the phone if you aren't having an ongoing relationship."

Using credit bureau data, consultants at Oliver Wyman calculated how many borrowers went straight from being current on their mortgage to default, rather than making spotty payments. They also weeded out owners having trouble paying other bills. Their estimate was that about 17 percent of owners defaulting in 2008, or 588,000 people, chose that option as a strategic calculation.

"I don't think an insurance commissioner should tread on the toes of the banking industry," said Karen Weldin Stewart, the commissioner in Delaware. "This started out as a bank product."

Her special deputy for examinations, John Tinsley, explained the reasoning. "In insurance, you're putting together a pool," he said. Each customer would be charged a premium based on the total risk of the pool.

A credit-default swap cannot be insurance, Mr. Tinsley said, because it does not involve a pool. There is just one seller and one buyer for every contract.

"It's an investment product," he said. "It's closer to buying an option."

Not everyone agrees. Eric R. Dinallo, New York State's insurance superintendent when A.I.G. imploded, said he believed credit-default swaps were insurance and should be regulated as such.

The original Title VII, in 1964, prohibited "disparate treatment" on the basis of race. In 1991, Congress amended the law to prohibit employment policies that have a "disparate impact" as well. The question for the Supreme Court last June was whether, in trying to avoid the racially disparate impact of the exam, New Haven had made the successful white firefighters the victims of disparate treatment.

The court ruled against the city; Justice Kennedy wrote for the 5-to-4 majority that New Haven's concern about liability for the racially disparate impact of the exam was overblown and insufficient to justify withholding promotions from the successful white test-takers.

The decision avoided a tricky question: suppose the racially disparate impact of a municipal employment policy is so grave that the Civil Rights Act requires a remedy that itself takes race into account - in other words, a remedy for disparate impact that requires disparate treatment.

The court's current majority has made clear that for the government to count individuals by race for almost any purpose is a violation of constitutional magnitude. So how could a statute that could require such an outcome be constitutional? In the New Haven case, Justice Kennedy left it to Justice Scalia to observe sarcastically in a concurring opinion that the court's resolution of the firefighter dispute "merely postpones the evil day on which the court will have to confront the question" of the Civil Rights Act's constitutionality.

Finding the law unconstitutional would be an astonishing step, all the more so because the Civil Rights Act's current form is a Congressional response to a series of Supreme Court decisions in the late 1980's that gave the law a reading that Congress thought was too narrow. The 1991 amendment codified a unanimous opinion of the Burger court, which in 1971 interpreted the original Civil Rights Act to bar employment policies that had a racially disparate impact, such as education requirements that were unrelated to the actual job.

-- Linda Greenhouse

"You may trust your friends and roommates, but you don't have to," said Jeffrey E. Levine, the chairman of Douglaston Development and its construction arm, Levine Builders. "And every medicine cabinet has a keyed lockbox for pharmaceuticals. Viagra, Vioxx, Vicodin -- nobody needs to know but you."

The smallest studio is just under 400 square feet and it's $1,850 a month and one month free rent. The smallest two-bedroom apartment is just under 900 square feet and it's $3,590 and one month free.

The solution: a checklist like psychologists use to determine if someone is suffering from, say, depression. So here is Mr. Shiller's checklist.

• Sharp increases in the price of an asset like real estate or dot-com shares
• Great public excitement about said increases
• An accompanying media frenzy
• Stories of people earning a lot of money, causing envy among people who aren't
• Growing interest in the asset class among the general public
• "New era" theories to justify unprecedented price increases
• A decline in lending standards

Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.

A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration -- 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.
Older women are generally less likely than others to do strength training, even though it can promote bone health and counteract muscle loss, said Teresa Liu-Ambrose, a researcher at the Center for Hip Health and Mobility at Vancouver General Hospital and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Jan. 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

-- RONI CARYN RABIN