Increasingly, prosopagnosia is also the subject of books, Web sites, and support groups, where people with face blindness or topographical agnosia are able to share experiences and, no less important, strategies for recognizing faces and places when the usual "automatic" mechanisms have been compromised.
Interchangeability becomes an issue when the traceability of a biologic product is compromised through automatic substitution or switching.
But, he added, both spending cuts and tax increases have to be threatened — so that both parties have an incentive to compromise and forestall automatic action.
January's budget compromise had delayed automatic cuts on military and social spending for two months, but, when the new March 1 , 2013 deadline passed without Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement on an alternative approach to deficit reduction, sequestration began.
But disagreements with Republicans over the government's borrowing levels led to a compromise that meant automatic spending cuts and tax rises would be triggered on 31 December 2012 if no broader deal was reached.
For Republicans, the president wanted automatic tax increases to force a compromise on the broader tax code.
The succession of showdowns mirrors to a great degree those that played out tumultuously in 2011, leading to the ungainly compromise that produced this week's automatic spending cuts.
With the White House also keen to avoid going into the New Year without an agreement, at which point the Bush tax cuts would expire and the automatic spending cuts would kick in, a compromise is the logical outcome.
The money-saving steps, announced Thursday by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, are designed to be reversible should a compromise be reached to avoid automatic reductions in federal spending set to begin in March.
The 2011 compromise included a series of automatic budget cuts known as the "sequester" which came into effect earlier this year.
