Rated 18 Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

In a blind taste-test, my kisses were rated as Helen Kelleresque. Women love how the only sense I keenly possess is nonsense.

R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.

Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front.

Why couldn’t her enemies die without her having to resort to her knives? She was getting tired of carefully picking all the nooks and crannies on the blades clean anytime she got into a fight…

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.” Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there. If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.

Even if we accept the Post’s typology of “unarmed” victims at face value, the per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed is 45 times higher than the rate at which unarmed black males are killed by cops. And an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.

Stiti ce fac cei care citesc ratingurile si numara cash-ul care curge din rating? Se uita la procente, la cifre, nu vad acolo nicio figura, nicio faptura, nu-ti stiu niciun vis, habar n-au cum arati, ce drama traiesti, ce grozav si tanar esti. Nu esti o fiinta, ci un numar si o categorie. Te incadrezi fortat la „18-49" sau la cei cu „venituri medii", la „urban" sau la „capi-tala". Nu existi ca individ, nu te descrie nimeni, nu te recomanda nimic. Esti o cifra. Din aceste cifre, unii primesc onoruri, altii numara banii... Din lipsa unor cifre mari, oamenii buni de televiziune, cu emisiuni destepte, pleaca acasa. Din prea multe cifre mari, facute din scandal de mahala, se instaureaza nenorocirea de a nu mai scapa de impostori.

Looking at the blood still dripping from her arms, she considered her options. Should she walk into the room full of children as she was, blood and other things oozing off of her, potentially scarring them for life? One glance down to the near gutted body at her feet made her decision for her. Nope.

ventilation:   1.       Tidal volume of 6 mL/kg PBW 2.       Rate of 14-18 breaths per minute, with a decelerating flow pattern

It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five

Recent research from the Johns Hopkins University Center on Aging and Health found that caregivers had an 18 percent lower mortality rate than noncaregivers.

Since she was actively trying not to scar the kids for life, getting rid of the body that could have passed for a morgue's failed dissection was a good step.

Green tea promotes long-term weight loss by increasing basal metabolic rate, improving glucose uptake by muscle, and enhancing fat-burning in the liver and muscle.18

His smile was grating her nerves, but she soothed herself with the knowledge that soon it’d be gone. After all, the dead didn’t make facial expressions, irritating ones or otherwise.

The important thing is that there are children that need to be saved near you and you need to hurry or there will be dire consequences. Think you can do that, Buttercup?’ - Seraphina, seer

But multiple studies have shown what is labeled overweight (BMI between 25 and 30) is actually associated with lower death rate than what is labeled normal weight (BMI between 18.5 and 25).

You knuckle-dragging swamp cunt, stop throwing fireballs at me!” While she didn’t plan to do anything fancy with her hair anytime soon, she would still like it to be on her head and not burnt, thank you very much." - Julian, Deadlocked Desires

Children in father-absent homes are five times more likely to be poor. Infant mortality rates are 1.8 times higher for infants of unmarried mothers than for married mothers. Youths in father-absent households still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those in mother-father families. Youths are more at risk of first substance use without a highly involved father. Being raised by a single mother raises the risk of teen pregnancy. Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school.

Still, she’d met this kind of man before. Nothing she said would change his mind that he was some golden knight, doing the world a service by offing her. To say she detested his type was an understatement on the same level of ‘hell was merely a sauna for the damned to relax in’. - Julian

For those who still believe structural inequality is a figment of feminists’ imagination, let’s recap some of the ways the financial odds are stacked against women. The gender pay gap sits stubbornly at around 18 per cent in Australia. (It gets wider the higher up the ladder you go, by the way). Female-dominated occupations are less well paid than male-dominated ones. Six out of ten Australians work in an industry dominated by one gender. Australia has one of the highest rates of part-time work in the world: 25 per cent of us work part time. Women make up 71.6 per cent of all part-time workers and 54.7 per cent of all casual employees. Australian women are among the best educated in the world but have relatively low comparable workplace participation and achievement rates. And just to add insult to injury, products marketed to women are more expensive than those marketed to men!

While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour – 66,600 miles – as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bullet, at the rate of 18.5 miles every second. In the time that it has taken you to read this paragraph, we have voyaged about 550 miles farther along earth’s path around the sun.3

You uppity, arrogant idiots seem to be under the impression I’ve survived this long by some kind of luck, but let me inform you to the truth that not one of you want to admit. I’ve survived through my own skills, the same ones that let me and my so-called ‘useless magic’ bury two blades into your chest before you could cast anything past a pathetic fireball spell.” - Julian

1) The overall success rate for drugs moving from early stage Phase I clinical trials to FDA approval is about one in 10 (10%). —Reuters 2) The average drug can take anywhere from 8 - 18 years from pre-clinical (development) to clinical (phase 1, 2, and 3) to FDA approval. 3) The average cost to bring a drug to market: Phase 1 $15.2 million; Phase 2 $23.4 million; Phase 3 $86.5 million (total = $125.1 million) —FDA.gov

Four children, all blonde, stared at her with open fear as they cowered in the corner. A rope tied them to the bedpost like cattle, the sight sparking wrath that she fought to suppress. No scaring the kids more than they already were, she reminded herself. Her ‘resting bitch face’ was bad even without her being in a foul mood. Adding in how stabby she felt at the moment… She was sure she could make an adult piss themselves in fear if she tried.

Filipino Americans, on average, have a low poverty rate of 6.7 percent—more than 3 percentage points lower than white Americans. But Cambodian, Laotian, Pakistani, and Thai Americans have a poverty rate of around 18 percent. Bangladeshi and Hmong Americans have poverty rates between 26 and 28 percent, matching or surpassing that of blacks and Hispanic Americans.1 Pacific Islanders have the highest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US.2

FIGURE 3–18. Homicide rates in the United States, 1950–2010, and Canada, 1961–2009 Sources: Data for United States are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1950–2010: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010b, 2011; Fox & Zawitz, 2007. Data for Canada, 1961–2007: Statistics Canada, 2008. Data for Canada, 2008: Statistics Canada, 2010. Data for Canada, 2009: K. Harris, “Canada’s crime rate falls,” Toronto Sun, Jul. 20, 2010.

Today had started with an urgent call from Sera and had so far contained nearly getting blown up by an Exitium mage, getting her knives filthy yet again, and now she had acquired four human ducklings that had imprinted on her. And the day wasn’t over yet. Briefly, she wondered when Big Foot would be making his appearance before binning the thought. With how things had gone so far, it wouldn’t surprise her if the myth actually showed up for no other reason than to hump her leg.

It’s always destruction mages. I never wind up brawling it out with Auxilio or Divinus, no that’d be too easy. I swear if it weren’t for Vladimir I could honestly say I’d see all of you dead. Luckily for you and the rest of your magic type, he’s great in bed and a great guy outside of it too. It still doesn’t redeem the rest of you idiots but at least there’s hope for better out of some of you. Though aside from him you all make the same mistake when fighting me…so maybe there isn’t.” - Julian

In 1996, investigators from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle studied 18,000 people who, because they had been exposed to asbestos, were—like those who smoked cigarettes—also at greater risk of lung cancer. Participants were given large doses of vitamin A, beta-carotene, both, or neither. The study ended abruptly when the safety monitors realized that those taking megavitamins had a dramatically higher rate of lung cancer (28 percent greater than those not receiving vitamins) as well as heart disease (17 percent greater).

I’m hoping that you will look at the larger picture and think about what it takes to live ethically in a world in which 18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year. That’s a higher annual death rate than in World War II. In the past twenty years alone, it adds up to more deaths than were caused by all the civil and international wars and government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today’s even larger toll, and all the misery that it involves?

Indeed, the only conservative Protestants I knew who attended church regularly were my dad and his family.17 In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low.18 Despite its reputation, Appalachia—especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio—has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South. This

To understand this better, we need to know that the cycle of zero to 16% partial reflection by two surfaces repeats more quickly for blue light than for red light. Thus at certain thicknesses, one or the other or both colors are strongly reflected, while at other thicknesses, reflections of both colors is cancelled out (see Fig. 18). The cycles of reflection repeat at different rates because the stopwatch hand turns around faster when it times a blue photon than it does when timing a red photon. In fact, that's the only difference between a red photon and a blue photon (or a photon of any other color, including radio waves, X-rays, and so on)-the speed of the stopwatch hand.

Another misnomer concerned the relationship between audience size and advertising rates. One common interpretation propounded that programs with higher ratings produced higher revenues - a logical fallacy insofar as it flagrantly disregarded crucial influencing factors (notably, content and demographics). In 1994, to cite one illustrative example, Seinfeld commanded $390,000 for a 30-second spot - $40,000 more than Home Improvement - despite attracting fewer overall viewers. Its ability to draw more young viewers (often defined as the ‘highly desirable’ 18-49 demographic) instead made all the difference. In sum, as industry experts realized, advertisers bought ‘demos’ before they did households.

Many ordinary Americans believe that “large differences in income are necessary for America’s prosperity,” as one standard survey question puts it.18 However, economists who have studied the relationship between inequality and economic growth have found little evidence that large disparities in income and wealth promote growth.19 There is not even much hard evidence in support of the commonsense notion that progressive tax rates retard growth by discouraging economic effort. Indeed, one liberal economist, Robert Frank, has written that “the lessons of experience are downright brutal” to the notion that higher taxes would stifle economic growth by causing wealthy people to work less or take fewer risks.

You Play the Game How You Act How You Think How You Brand & Market Yourself How You Sound How You Look How You Respond   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. Category Total Category Total Category Total Category Total Category Total Category Total Category Total Overall Total INTERPRETATION OF YOUR SCORES Overall Score of 159–196 or A Category Score of 22–28 You go, girl! Your score indicates you must already have the corner office or are well on your way to getting it. To stay on track, focus on those questions where you rated yourself “1” or “2.” Also, remember to pay it forward by mentoring other women. Overall Score of 110–158 or A Category Score of 14–21 Fine-tuning is the name of your game! Although you often engage in behaviors worthy of a winning woman, there are times when you don’t get your due because you get caught up in nice girl syndrome. First read the chapters that correspond with your lowest category scores, then go back and read the rest as a refresher course. Overall Score of 49–109 or A Category Score of 7–13 Danger! You are falling into the trap of acting like the nice little girl you were taught to be in childhood. You frequently wonder why you’re not achieving the success you’ve worked so hard for. This book was written for you, so take out your pen and start making notations for what you commit to doing differently.

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors.

In the period following birth, the human brain, unlike that of the chimpanzee, continues to grow at the same rate as in the womb. There are times in the first year of life when, every second, multiple millions of nerve connections, or synapses, are established. Three-quarters of our brain growth takes place outside the womb, most of it in the early years. By three years of age, the brain has reached 90 percent of adult size, whereas the body is only 18 percent of adult size. This explosion in growth outside the womb gives us a far higher potential for learning and adaptability than is granted to other mammals. […] Greater reward demands greater risk. Outside the relatively safe environment of the womb, our brains-in-progress are highly vulnerable to potentially adverse circumstances.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

It were indeed meet for us not at all to require [15] the aid of the   written Word, but to exhibit a life so pure, that the grace of the   Spirit should be instead of books to our souls, and that as these are   inscribed with ink, even so should our hearts be with the Spirit. But,   since we have utterly put away from us this grace, come, let us at any   rate embrace the second best course.    For that the former was better, God hath made manifest, [16] both by   His words, and by His doings. Since unto Noah, and unto Abraham, and   unto his offspring, and unto Job, and unto Moses too, He discoursed not   by writings, but Himself by Himself, finding their mind pure. But after   the whole people of the Hebrews had fallen into the very pit of   wickedness, then and thereafter was a written word, and tables, and the   admonition which is given by these.    And this one may perceive was the case, not of the saints in the Old   Testament only, but also of those in the New. For neither to the   apostles did God give anything in writing, but instead of written words   He promised that He would give them the grace of the Spirit: for "He,"   saith our Lord, "shall bring all things to your remembrance." [17] And   that thou mayest learn that this was far better, hear what He saith by   the Prophet: "I will make a new covenant with you, putting my laws into   their mind, and in their heart I will write them," and, "they shall be   all taught of God." [18] And Paul too, pointing out the same   superiority, said, that they had received a law "not in tables of   stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart." [19]    But since in process of time they made shipwreck, some with regard to   doctrines, others as to life and manners, there was again need that   they should be put in remembrance by the written word.

how tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release.18 With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. Death rates were shockingly high, for the private contractors had no interest in the health and well-being of their laborers, unlike the earlier slave-owners who needed their slaves, at a minimum, to be healthy enough to survive hard labor. Laborers were subject to almost continual lashing by long horse whips, and those who collapsed due to injuries or exhaustion were often left to die. Convicts had no meaningful legal rights at this time and no effective redress. They were understood, quite literally, to be slaves of the state.

In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic– marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding. When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.

At that moment, remarkably, there was a man in the expansive reactor hall of Unit 4 who witnessed all this.121 Night Shift Chief of the Reactor Shop Valeriy Perevozchenko saw the top of the reactor - a 15-meter-wide disk comprised of 2000 individual metal covers which cap safety valves - begin to jump up and down. He ran. The reactor’s uranium fuel was increasing power exponentially, reaching some 3,000°C, while pressure rose at a rate of 15 atmospheres per second. At precisely 01:23:58, a mere 18 seconds after Akimov pressed the SCRAM button, steam pressure overwhelmed Chernobyl’s incapacitated fourth reactor. A steam explosion blew the 450-ton, 3-meter-thick upper biological shield clear off the reactor before it crashed back down, coming to rest at a steep angle in the raging maw it left behind. The core was exposed.122 A split second later, steam and inrushing air reacted with the fuel’s ruined zirconium cladding to create a volatile mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, which triggered a second, far more powerful explosion.123 Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

Hump, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, moral pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of the darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down on travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Colllie Knox says 1/8 of the world's population speaks 'English', and that is the biggest language group. if true, damn shame__ say I. May the curse of Babel strike at all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

In short, the combined effects of lower infant mortality, higher longevity, and increased fertility have fueled an explosion in the world’s population, as figure 18 graphs. Since population growth is intrinsically exponential, even small increases in fertility or decreases in mortality spark rapid population growth. If an initial population of 1 million people grows at 3.5 percent per year, then it will roughly double every generation, growing to 2 million in twenty years, 4 million in forty years, and so on, reaching 32 million in a hundred years. In actual fact, the global growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.2 percent per year and has since declined to about 1.1 percent per year,60 which translates into a doubling rate of every sixty-four years. In the fifty years between 1960 and 2010, the world’s population more than doubled, from 3 to 6.9 billion people. At current rates of growth, we can expect 14 billion people at the end of this century. FIGURE 21. The demographic transition model. Following economic development, death rates tend to fall before birth rates decrease, resulting in an initial population boom that eventually levels off. This controversial model, however, only applies to some countries. One major by-product of population growth plus the concentration of wealth in cities has been a shift to more urbanization. In 1800, only 25 million people lived in cities, about 3 percent of the world’s population. In 2010, about 3.3 billion people, half the world’s population, are city dwellers.

Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.1 When the Enlightenment began, a third of the children born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today, that fate befalls 6 percent of the children in the poorest parts. Their mothers, too, were freed from tragedy: one percent in the richest countries did not live to see their newborns, a rate triple that of the poorest countries today, which continues to fall. In those poor countries, lethal infectious diseases are in steady decline, some of them afflicting just a few dozen people a year, soon to follow smallpox into extinction. The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across the world’s countries and people. The proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90 percent to less than 10 percent, and within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book it could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in most of human history, has vanished from most of the world, and undernourishment and stunting are in steady decline. A century ago, richer countries devoted one percent of their wealth to supporting children, the poor, and the aged; today they spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed, and sheltered, and have luxuries like smartphones

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

On her second screen, there were the number of messages sent by other staffers that day, 1,192, and the number of those messages that she’d read, 239, and the number to which she’d responded, 88. There was the number of recent invitations to Circle company events, 41, and the number she’d responded to, 28. There was the number of overall visitors to the Circle’s sites that day, 3.2 billion, and the number of pageviews, 88.7 billion. There was the number of friends in Mae’s OuterCircle, 762, and outstanding requests by those wanting to be her friend, 27. There were the number of zingers she was following, 10,343, and the number following her, 18,198. There was the number of unread zings, 887. There was the number of zingers suggested to her, 12,862. There was the number of songs in her digital library, 6,877, number of artists represented, 921, and based on her tastes, the number of artists recommended to her: 3,408. There was the number of images in her library, 33,002, and number of images recommended to her, 100,038. There was the temperature inside the building, 70, and the temperature outside, 71. There was the number of staffers on campus that day, 10,981, and number of visitors to campus that day, 248. Mae had news alerts set for 45 names and subjects, and each time any one of them was mentioned by any of the news feeds she favored, she received a notice. That day there were 187. She could see how many people had viewed her profile that day, 210, and how much time on average they spent: 1.3 minutes. If she wanted, of course, she could go deeper, and see precisely what each person had viewed. Her health stats added a few dozen more numbers, each of them giving her a sense of great calm and control. She knew her heart rate and knew it was right. She knew her step count, almost 8,200 that day, and knew that she could get to 10,000 with ease.

RAIN IN MEASURED AMOUNTS Another item of information provided in the Qur'an about rain is that it is sent down to Earth in "due measure." This is mentioned in Surat az-Zukhruf as follows: It is He Who sends down water in measured amounts from the sky by which We bring a dead land back to life. That is how you too will be raised [from the dead]. (Qur'an, 43:11) This measured quantity in rain has again been discovered by modern research. It is estimated that in one second, approximately 16 million tons of water evaporates from the Earth. This figure amounts to 513 trillion tons of water in one year. This number is equal to the amount of rain that falls on the Earth in a year. Therefore, water continuously circulates in a balanced cycle, according to a "measure." Life on Earth depends on this water cycle. Even if all the available technology in the world were to be employed for this purpose, this cycle could not be reproduced artificially. Even a minor deviation in this equilibrium would soon give rise to a major ecological imbalance that would bring about the end of life on Earth. Yet, it never happens, and rain continues to fall every year in exactly the same measure, just as revealed in the Qur'an. The proportion of rain does not merely apply to its quantity, but also to the speed of the falling raindrops. The speed of raindrops, regardless of their size, does not exceed a certain limit. Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1905, found that the fall speed increased with drop diameter until a size of 4.5 mm (0.18 inch). For larger drops, however, the fall speed did not increase beyond 8 metres per second (26 ft/sec).57 He attributed this to the changes in drop shape caused by the air flow as the drop size increased. The change in shape thus increased the air Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 113 resistance of the drop and slowed its fall rate. As can be seen, the Qur'an may also be drawing our attention to the subtle adjustment in rain which could not have been known 1,400 years ago. Harun Yahya Every year, the amount of water that evaporates and that falls back to the Earth in the form of rain is "constant": 513 trillion tons. This constant amount is declared in the Qur'an by the expression "sending down water in due measure from the sky." The constancy of this quantity is very important for the continuity of the ecological balance, and therefore, life.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.

College students were instructed to sit by themselves for up to fifteen minutes in a sparsely furnished, unadorned room and “entertain themselves with their thoughts.” They were allowed to think about whatever they liked, the only rules being that they should remain in their seat and stay awake. Before they entered the room they were obliged to surrender any means of distraction they had about their person, such as cell phones, books, or writing materials. Afterward, they were asked to rate the experience on various scales. Unsurprisingly, a majority reported that they found it difficult to concentrate and their minds had wandered, with around half saying they didn’t enjoy the experience. A subsequent experiment, however, revealed that many found being left alone in an empty room with nothing to occupy their minds so unpleasant (this is, after all, what makes solitary confinement such a harsh punishment in prisons) that they would rather give themselves electric shocks. In the first part of this experiment, the volunteers were asked to rate the unpleasantness of a shock delivered via electrodes attached to their ankle and say whether they would pay a small amount of money to avoid having to experience it again. In the second part, during which they were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes, they were presented with the opportunity to zap themselves once again. Amazingly, among those who had said they would pay to avoid a repeat experience, 67 percent of the men (12 out of 18) and 25 percent of the women (6 out of 24) opted to shock themselves at least once. One of the women gave herself nine electric shocks. One of the men subjected himself to no fewer than 190 shocks, though he was considered exceptional—a statistical “outlier”—and his results were excluded from the final analysis. In their report for the journal Science, the researchers write, “What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.” This goes a long way toward explaining why many people initially find it so hard to meditate, because to sit quietly with your eyes closed is to invite the mind to wander here, there, and everywhere. In a sense, that is the whole point: we are simply learning to notice when this has happened. So the frustrating realization that your thoughts have been straying—yet again—is a sign of progress rather than failure. Only by noticing the way thoughts ricochet about inside our heads like ball bearings in a pinball machine can we learn to observe them dispassionately and simply let them come to rest, resisting the urge to pull back the mental plunger and fire off more of them. One of the benefits of meditation is that one develops the ability to quiet the mind at will. “Without such training,” the psychologists conclude drily in their paper, “people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.

axis, all of those straight-ish lines would look like the first graph above of Andy’s tribble family—horizontal most of the way, then suddenly close to vertical at the end. And there would really be no way to graph them all together—the numbers involved are just too different. Logarithmic scaling takes care of these issues and allows us to get a clear overall picture of improvement in digital gear. It’s clear that many of the critical building blocks of computing—microchip density, processing speed, storage capacity, energy efficiency, download speed, and so on—have been improving at exponential rates for a long time. To understand the real-world impacts of Moore’s Law, let’s compare the capabilities of computers separated by only a few doubling periods. The ASCI Red, the first product of the U.S. government’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, was the world’s fastest supercomputer when it was introduced in 1996. It cost $55 million to develop and its one hundred cabinets occupied nearly 1,600 square feet of floor space (80 percent of a tennis court) at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.10 Designed for calculation-intensive tasks like simulating nuclear tests, ASCI Red was the first computer to score above one teraflop—one trillion floating point operations* per second—on the standard benchmark test for computer speed. To reach this speed it used eight hundred kilowatts per hour, about as much as eight hundred homes would. By 1997, it had reached 1.8 teraflops.

1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point. 2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion. 3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them. 4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty. 5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.” 6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are. 7. Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool. 8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked. 9. Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others. 10. Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward. 11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success. 12. Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it. 13. Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else. 14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly. 15. Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others. 16. Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues. 17. Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners. 18. Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us. 19. Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves. 20. An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) In 2013, the first year of the new administration, the ACRC focused on the areas in which the government’s attention was more needed, such as complaints related to people’ s daily lives, and sought to find a new way to realize the protection of rights in quality rather than quantity. As a result, it recorded the highest performance since 2010, reaching 18.0% in acceptance rate, and the satisfaction rate (75.5 points) also exceeded the original goal (by 6.9 points), bearing the fruit of its active efforts in solving the difficulties of the people

Respiratory Nursing   Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Diagnosis: Ineffective Breathing Pattern related to airflow restriction Desired Outcome: Following intervention, the patient's breathing pattern improves, as evidenced by absence of dyspnea and oxygen saturation >94%, pH >7.35, and PaCO2 <60 mm Hg. Assessments and Interventions Rationales Assess respiratory rate and depth q6h. Restlessness, dyspnea, tachypnea, use of accessory muscles of respiration are signs of respiratory distress, which should be reported. Auscultate breath sounds q6h. A decrease in breath sounds or an increase in wheezes is a sign of respiratory failure. Administer bronchodilator therapy with albuterol metered dose inhalers 2-4 puffs every 4 to 6 hours as needed. Albuterol increase expiratory volume by decreasing airway smooth muscle constriction. Administer ipratropium (Atrovent) 80 mcg, three times per day. Formoterol (Foradil) 12 mcg every 12 hours. Or administer tiotropium (Spiriva) 1 capsule (18 mcg) inhaled once daily by HandiHaler device Inhaled anticholinergics

Mortgages 18-month low for loan rates The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage fell this week to 3.89 percent, an 18-month low, from 3.97 percent last week, according to Freddie Mac’s survey of lenders. The average for a 15-year fixed-rate home loan fell to 3.1 percent from 3.17 percent. Initial rates for adjustable mortgages also eased, Freddie Mac said Thursday in its widely watched weekly report. Freddie Mac chief economist Frank Nothaft said “underwhelming” economic news was a factor in depressing rates. Home sales and job growth have been weaker than expected, he said.

With modern Western diets, the body must work hard to keep the blood from becoming overly acidic from the excess animal protein being eaten. To do this, it uses alkaline bone tissue substances such as bicarbonates and calcium. This can lead to the loss of bone density and helps explain the high rates of osteoporosis in cultures where people eat large quantities of acidifying animal foods. Osteoporosis rates among the Eskimo people, who eat an almost completely flesh-based diet, are among the highest in the world.18 Next are northern Europeans and North Americans, who eat high quantities of flesh, eggs, and dairy products.19 While there are other factors that may affect bone health, such as vitamin and mineral intake, levels of loadbearing exercise, and mental and emotional factors, there is evidence that brittle bones and osteoporosis are correlated with eating the large amounts of animal protein typical of our meals.

If a seven pound human baby grew at the same rate that today's turkeys (and broiler chickens) grow, when the baby reached 18 weeks of age it would weigh 1,500 pounds.

It should be noted that even if the high-end estimate of fatalities directly or indirectly attributed to the Boko Haram insurgency were accepted at face value, they would still represent a small percentage of the overall violent deaths that have occurred in Nigeria over that same period of time.... According to UNODC data, Nigeria had 18,422 intentional homicides in 2008, the year after the violently contested elections.... Based on those numbers remaining relatively constant, Boko Haram would constitute approximately 5 per cent of all violent deaths in Nigeria since their peak in fatalities in 2009.

So we should not be surprised when The Economist tells us that “in Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh or even Gaza City, small technology firms are multiplying.”18 We should not be surprised that in many Middle East cities women comprise 35 percent of Internet entrepreneurs, three times the global rate for such startups.19 We should not be surprised that in high-growth industries twice as many entrepreneurs are over fifty as are under twenty-five.20 Entrepreneurs are everywhere. Opportunities to nourish them are everywhere, too.

Since 2000, motor vehicle deaths only really changed between 2007 and 2009, when deaths fell by more than 20 percent. Why the sudden drop? It wasn’t because of any safety regulations suddenly going into effect in late 2007. The explanation is much more prosaic: during the recession and anemic recovery, people drove a lot less. There is a more basic problem with comparing motor vehicle deaths to firearm deaths. The causes of death are very different (Figure 4). In 2014, 99.4 percent of car deaths were accidental in nature. By contrast, only 1.8 percent of gun deaths were accidental. A staggering 65 percent of gun fatalities are suicides. Although murders and accidental gun death rates have fallen, the firearm suicide rate has risen by 14 percent since 2000 (Figure 5). But the non-firearm suicide rate rose by 49 percent during the same period. The motor vehicle suicide rate went up 53 percent.15 Something is causing a general rise in suicide.

Since the four types of startups have very different rates of customer adoption and acceptance, their sales and marketing strategies differ dramatically. Even more serious, each Market Type has radically different cash needs. A company creating a new market might be unprofitable for five or more years, while one in an existing market might generate cash in 12-18 months.

One very simple way to compare the workloads of farmers, hunter-gatherers, and modern postindustrial people is to measure physical activity levels (PALs). A PAL score measures the number of calories spent per day (total energy expenditure) divided by the minimum number of calories necessary for the body to function (the basal metabolic rate, BMR). In practical terms, a PAL is the ratio of how much energy one spends relative to how much one would need to sleep all day at a comfortable temperature of about 25 degrees Celsius (78 degrees Fahrenheit). Your PAL is probably about 1.6 if you are a sedentary office worker, but it could be as a low as 1.2 if you spent the day in a hospital on bed rest, and it could be 2.5 or higher if you were training for a marathon or the Tour de France. Various studies have found that PAL scores for subsistence farmers from Africa, Asia, and South America average 2.1 for males and 1.9 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.4), which is just slightly higher than PAL scores for most hunter-gatherers, which average 1.9 for males and 1.8 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.2).38 These averages don’t reflect the considerable variation—daily, seasonal, and annual—within and between groups, but they underscore that most subsistence farmers work as hard if not a little harder than hunter-gatherers and that both ways of life require what people today would consider a moderate workload.

What explains the rise of racialized mass incarceration? It’s not racial differences in crime rates. To measure crime rates we must take into account poverty and age. Poverty correlates with criminal activity, both because those without resources are more likely to commit crimes, and also because the poor spend more of their hours in public spaces intensively policed by the state. Another factor associated with crime is youth, with young men in particular likely to engage in high-risk and anti-social behavior. Paying attention to these factors, when one compares crime rates across poor males in the high-crime ages of 15 to 18, it turns out that poor youth of color almost across the board are less likely to commit crimes than their white counterparts.37 Poor white youths typically report committing more crimes of all sorts than do minorities. Still, this means that, because blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor and young relative to the population as a whole, they are disproportionately involved in crime, and perhaps this modest disproportion—not in the propensity to commit crime, but in the likelihood of being poor and young—explains arrest and conviction patterns. It does not. Young men of color are far, far more likely than young white men to be swept into the maw of the American crime control system, even when taking into account youth and poverty.

C18: A child is autistic or has Asperger's syndrome. Should we use one language only with the child? Children diagnosed with a specific autism spectrum disorder have a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour, with delays in social and emotional development. Such children use language in restricted ways, expecting much consistency in language and communication, and are less likely to learn through language. However, such children may experience the social and cultural benefits of bilingualism when living in a dual language environment. For example, such children may understand and speak two languages of the local community at their own level. Like many parents of children with language impairment, bilingualism was frequently blamed by teachers and other professionals for the early signs of Asperger's, and a move to monolingualism was frequently regarded as an essential relief from the challenges. There is almost no research on autism and bilingualism or on Asperger's syndrome and bilingualism. However, a study by Susan Rubinyi of her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, provides insights. Someone with the challenge of Asperger's also has gifts and exceptional talents, including in language. Her son, Ben, became bilingual in English and French using the one parent–one language approach (OPOL). Susan Rubinyi sees definite advantages for a child who has challenges with flexibility and understanding the existence of different perspectives. Merely the fact that there are two different ways to describe the same object or concept in each language, enlarges the perception of the possible. Since a bilingual learns culture as well as language, the child sees alternative ways of approaching multiple areas of life (eating, recreation, transportation etc.) (p. 20). She argues that, because of bilingualism, her son's brain had a chance to partly rewire itself even before Asperger's syndrome became obvious. Also, the intense focus of Asperger's meant that Ben absorbed vocabulary at a very fast rate, with almost perfect native speaker intonation. Further Reading: Rubinyi, S. (2006) Natural Genius: The Gifts of Asperger's Syndrome . Philadelphia & London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

One of the benefits of the national police force was the inception of national crime statistics. Although these represent only crimes recorded by the police, they offer real figures to work with, if only to map trends. Despite all the usual caveats about their unreliability, most historians have endorsed the official picture. The homicide rate for England and Wales was as high as 2 per 100,000 only once during the century, in 1865; otherwise it was about 1.5 per 100,000 and occasionally as low as i per 100,000, a record low.81 Between 1857 and 189o there were rarely more than 400 homicides reported each year, and in the 189os the average was below 350.82 In 1835-1837 9 percent of all English crimes were violent crimes, and from 1837 through 1845 the share declined to 8 percent.83 Even that 8 percent is inflated by the fact that of the crimes against the person some 25-33 percent were cases of infanticide, which would not have involved firearms. Crimes committed with guns were rare. Between 1878 and 1886 the average number of burglaries in London in which firearms were used was two per year; from 1887 to 18g1 this rose to 3.6 cases a year.84 "It was a rough society," David Philips concluded after examining Victorian crime, "but it was not a notably homicidal society. The manslaughter cases do not show a free use of lethal weapons."85 On the other hand, ordinary citizens were free to use lethal weapons to defend themselves. And as the difficulties of imposing restrictions on private firearms indicate, members of Parliament and their constituents were vigorously opposed to such attempts.

In fact these statistics record an astonishingly low rate of gun-related violence in the late nineteenth century. The Home Office reported the results of three separate inquiries: hospital figures throughout England for fatal and nonfatal wounds arising from handguns in 189o-92; coroners' inquests on such accidents; and the number of burglars found carrying firearms over five years ending with December 31, 1892.121 In the course of three years, according to hospital reports, there were only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million people. Of these, 19 were accidents, 35 were suicides, and only 3 were homicides-an average of one a year. The report noted that in the 189o pistol homicide both the murderer and the victim had been foreigners.122 The number of injuries treated in hospitals for revolver or pistol wounds over the three years was 226.123 The coroners' inquests relative to the use of both pistols and other firearms for the same three years was 536, of which 443 were suicides, 49 were accidents, 32 were homicidal, and 12 not known. As for armed burglaries, no policeman had been shot dead, although several had been wounded by gunfire. Over the five-year period only 31 burglars had been found carrying arms, and only 18 had escaped by the use of guns.124 On the basis of these modest figures the bill was objected to as "absolutely unnecessary ... and that it attacked the natural right of everybody who desired to arm himself for his own protection and not to harm anybody else." Hopwood suggested that the government legislate with regard to knives and daggers, since the number of murders and suicides committed by them was "infinitely greater ... than those committed by means of revolvers." As with the 1870 licence statute, this bill was attacked as class legislation. Mr. Conybeare thought it would be better to drop it "so that the efforts of the Government might be devoted to some more worthy measure."121 The debate was adjourned until the next day, but in light of its reception it was prudently withdrawn. Behind the scenes, however, a House of Lords standing committee was at work during 1894 to produce a more acceptable bill.

According to the UAA Justice Center, 18 percent of sexual assaults reported to the Anchorage Police Department from 2000 to 2003 were prosecuted, and 11 percent resulted in a conviction. As for the U.S., the National Violence Against Women Survey showed a prosecution rate of 37 percent and a conviction rate of 18 percent. 

In 2010, UCLA researchers conducted a survey of more than 25,000 people ages 18–75 and found that the majority rated their own attractiveness as about a seven out of ten. This suggests that the average person thinks he is a little better looking than the average person. About a third of the people under 30 rated themselves as somewhere around a nine. That sort of confidence is fun to think about considering that it is impossible for everyone to be better-looking than half the population.

Food tastes better 2.               My skin has a sheen and radiance to it 3.               I sleep better 4.               Sex is better 5.               I don’t get winded as easily 6.               My sense of smell has improved one hundred fold 7.               My concentration is better 8.               My heart rate is normal 9.               My blood pressure is normal 10.           My clothes don’t stink 11.             My hair and skin doesn’t stink 12.           My eyes are clearer and less bloodshot 13.            My automobiles don’t smell 14.           My bank account is healthier 15.           I exercise more 16.           I drink less alcohol 17.            My stress levels are more manageable 18.           I work longer and harder 19.           My blood work and screening is much better 20.          My appetite is much better 21.           My hands and feet don’t get as cold in the winter 22.          My overall wellness and health is much better

Box points out that Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere.” Six years ago, it had retreated 1.8 miles and was losing 130 feet annually. But for the past two years, it has been growing at the same rate, which means it could soon be back to its original size. “At first we didn’t believe it,” said Ala Khazendar of the NASA lab. “We had pretty much assumed Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the past 20 years.”20

Ethereum initially planned to issue 18 million ether each year in perpetuity. The thinking was that as the underlying base of ether grew, these 18 million units would become an increasingly small percentage of the monetary base. As a result, the rate of supply inflation would ultimately converge on 0 percent. The Ethereum team is currently rethinking that issuance strategy due to an intended change in its consensus mechanism. Choosing to change the issuance schedule of a cryptoasset from the plan at time of launch is more the exception than the norm, though since the asset class is still young we are not surprised by such experimentation.

ust discrimination,” in other words, “preference based on merit” is conspicuously absent in a process which, in our society, has a deep and wide influence as a sanctified example—political elections. Whether it is a genuinely democratic election in the West or a plebiscitarian comedy in the East, the one-man-one-vote principle is now taken for granted. The knowledge, the experience, the merits, the standing in the community, the sex, the wealth, the taxes, the military record of the voter do not count, only the vegetable principle of age—he must be 18, 21, 24 years old and still “on the hoof.” The 21-year-old semiliterate prostitute and the 65-year-old professor of political science who has lost an arm in the war, has a large family, carries a considerable tax burden, and has a real understanding of the political problems on which he is expected to cast his ballot—they are politically equal as citizens. Compared with a 20-year-old student of political science our friendly little prostitute actually rates higher as a voter.

Ted Turner, American media mogul and founder of CNN, said the world’s population should be reduced to 250 million to 350 million. In 1981, England’s Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and a prominent globalist, told People magazine that overpopulation is humanity’s biggest long-term threat to survival. “If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation, and war.” In 1988, he opined, “In the event that I’m reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”18 It’s difficult to believe that many of the elite think this way, but they do. Ominously, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, warned recently in an interview with the Telegraph that “intentionally caused epidemics could kill hundreds of millions of people thanks to genetic engineering advances proceeding at a “mind-blowing rate.”19 Occult Invasion of the Church and Society In the first century, the apostle John warned believers that in the centuries ahead the “spirit of antichrist” would work to undermine and deny the truth about Christ. In 1979, Willis W. Harman, a “metaphysical

As a result, tax revenues and state budgets shrink, at least in relative terms per capita. National debt inevitably grows in order to at least partially cover the shortfall. Of course, it grew enormously after governments bailed out the banks in the wake of the financial crash. The British government did so to the tune of 136.6bn and has admitted that it will never recoup at least £27bn of that amount. In the US the bailout cost at least $14.4 trillion.[56] At the start of of 2019, the US’s national debt stood at nearly $22 trillion, having increased by 10% since Trump took office two years earlier. Under his predecessor Barack Obama, the national debt increased 100%, from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. National debt has to be repaid to the government’s creditors: bondholders, ie people, companies and foreign governments; international organisations such as the World Bank; and private financial institutions. If debt is not or cannot be repaid it becomes increasingly difficult to attract creditors. US national debt when the Great Depression kicked off stood at 16% of GDP and rose to 44% when the depression ended at the end of World War Two. Before the The Great Recession it stood at 65% and by 2013 had exploded to over 100%.[57] Gross national debt and household debt have been at record highs at the same time for the first time ever. Austerity, the socialisation of national debt, therefore becomes an economic necessity, not simply an unfair and immoral ‘political choice’, as is claimed by democratic socialists. That public spending as a share of national income in Britain in 2017 (39.6%) was at the same level as in 2007 (39.6%) after seven years of debt servicing via savage cuts to state welfare and public services suggests national income must have fallen per capita. Indeed, official forecasts suggest that GDP per adult in 2022 will be 18% lower than it would have been had it grown by 2% a year since 2008 – it has averaged 1.1% – broadly the expected rate of growth at that time.

Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

Sabre’s Load-Out Omnitron III Class II Personal Assault Vehicle (Sabre) Core: Class II Omnitron Mana Engine CPU: Class D Xylik Core CPU Armor Rating: Tier IV (Modified with Adaptive Resistance) Hard Points: 5 (5 Used) Soft Points: 3 (3 Used) Requires: Neural Link for Advanced Configuration Battery Capacity: 120/120 Attribute Bonuses: +35 Strength, +18 Agility, +10 Perception Inlin Type II Projectile Rifle Base Damage: N/A (Dependent Upon Ammunition) Ammo Capacity: 45/45 Available Ammunition: 250 Standard, 150 Armor Piercing, 200 High Explosive, 25 Luminescent Ares Type II Shield Generator Base Shielding: 2,000 HP Regeneration Rate: 50/second unlinked, 200/second linked Mkylin Type IV Mini-Missile Launchers Base Damage: N/A (dependent on missiles purchased)

No such luck. Long-term rates mirrored the short-term rise. And the short rates soon reached our so-called upper limit. After some discussion, we didn’t intervene. Neither did we when subsequent upper limits, set in each meeting, were breached. The rate on three-month Treasury bills eventually exceeded 17 percent, the commercial bank prime lending rate peaked at 21.5 percent, and, most sensitively, mortgage rates surpassed 18 percent. Those rates had never been seen before in our financial history.

The global cloud computing market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. According to cloud computing growth stats, the industry will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18% during the forecast period. Global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market is expected to grow with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.9% over the forecast period from 2020-2026. Cloud computing holds great potential for organizations that choose to stay agile and empower rapid scaling-up through partnerships and access to flexible and accessible resources. With the cloud, IT is no longer a product, it is a service. The pay-as-you-go model holds the promise of saving money using the cloud. Efficiency and savings can be achieved, given, the attention is paid to cloud cost optimization. With inevitable rapid changes and challenges of an evolving digital landscape, recognizing the complexity of the organization, having a long-term focus and strategic objectives is vital.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 1 in 17 people in America lives with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder.  Approximately 20% of youths ages 13 to 18 experience a severe mental disorder in a given year.  The community services available for these people are disappearing at an alarming rate.

In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, did a deep dive on LexisNexis, the world’s largest database of publicly available documents, including media reports. He found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere.18 What does this mean? That the mainstream media is framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites. It

South Africa presently has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world; 7 million South Africans in a population of 48 million are HIV-positive, for a prevalence rate of 12.9 percent—a figure that rises to 18 percent if one excludes children.

The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts. The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11 We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen.

Pair 3: American Home Products Co. (drugs, cosmetics, household products, candy) and American Hospital Supply Co. (distributor and manufacturer of hospital supplies and equipment) These were two “billion-dollar good-will” companies at the end of 1969, representing different segments of the rapidly growing and immensely profitable “health industry.” We shall refer to them as Home and Hospital, respectively. Selected data on both are presented in Table 18-3. They had the following favorable points in common: excellent growth, with no setbacks since 1958 (i.e., 100% earnings stability); and strong financial condition. The growth rate of Hospital up to the end of 1969 was considerably higher than Home’s. On the other hand, Home enjoyed substantially better profitability on both sales and capital.† (In fact, the relatively low rate of Hospital’s earnings on its capital in 1969—only 9.7%—raises the intriguing question whether the business then was in fact a highly profitable one, despite its remarkable past growth rate in sales and earnings.) When comparative price is taken into account, Home offered much more for the money in terms of current (or past) earnings and dividends. The very low book value of Home illustrates a basic ambiguity or contradiction in common-stock analysis. On the one hand, it means that the company is earning a high return on its capital—which in general is a sign of strength and prosperity. On the other, it means that the investor at the current price would be especially vulnerable to any important adverse change in the company’s earnings situation. Since Hospital was selling at over four times its book value in 1969, this cautionary remark must be applied to both companies. TABLE 18-3. Pair 3. CONCLUSIONS: Our clear-cut view would be that both companies were too “rich” at their current prices to be considered by the investor who decides to follow our ideas of conservative selection. This does not mean that the companies were lacking in promise. The trouble is, rather, that their price contained too much “promise” and not enough actual performance. For the two enterprises combined, the 1969 price reflected almost $5 billion of good-will valuation. How many years of excellent future earnings would it take to “realize” that good-will factor in the form of dividends or tangible assets? SHORT-TERM SEQUEL: At the end of 1969 the market evidently thought more highly of the earnings prospects of Hospital than of Home, since it gave the former almost twice the multiplier of the latter. As it happened the favored issue showed a microscopic decline in earnings in 1970, while Home turned in a respectable 8% gain. The market price of Hospital reacted significantly to this one-year disappointment. It sold at 32 in February 1971—a loss of about 30% from its 1969 close—while Home was quoted slightly above its corresponding level.*

Rock concerts, baseball games, and even church gatherings would all be canceled in fear of sparking new outbreaks. Those who would venture out for food or medicine would only do so clad in rubber gloves and surgical masks. The economic impact to the country would be devastating. Wholesale industries would be forced to shut down overnight. Furloughed and laid-off workers would spike unemployment rates to double that of the Great Depression.

Ascension Island Along the western coast of the Sahara desert, about half way between the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands, lies a sand spit called Cape Barbas. In 1441, ships attached to Estêvão da Gama’s fleet were sent by Prince Henry to explore the coastline south of Cape Barbas, which, five years earlier, was the farthest point reached by any of Prince Henry’s captains. Although there are some conflicting stories regarding the discoveries of the mid-Atlantic islands, it is safe to assume that in 1501 João da Nova discovered Ascension Island. The desolate island remained deserted until it was rediscovered two years later on Ascension Day by Alfonso de Albuquerque. He was also the first European to discover the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Having been to most of these exotic locations I know that Ascension Island is the very top of a mostly submerged mid-Atlantic mountain. It is part of the mid-ocean ridge which is by far the longest mountain range on earth. As an active fault line it starts north of Iceland becoming the Reykjanes Ridge as it crosses the northern Island Nation and finishes in the Indian Ocean south of the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. Because of this active ridge, South America and Africa are 1,600 miles apart and dovetail each other, spreading apart at an annual rate of about 1 1/8 inches.

Two-thirds of imprisoned women in the U.S. are women of color. Black women represent 30 percent of all incarcerated women, and their incarceration rate since 1986 has increased by 800 percent, more than twice the increase of 400 percent for women of all races. Only 36 percent of all women imprisoned in 2009 were for violent crime; the rest are enduring the violent ordeal of imprisonment for nonviolent offenses. The vast majority of incarcerated women are mothers to over 1.8 million children. With

NBA 2K18 Wishlist - Good Badges To Deal Problems In 2K17 The NBA 2K18 release date has basketball fans hyped. The new game in the series will be the definitive way for fans to take control of their favorite franchises and players on the Xbox One and PS4. As of the features player wish to be added into NBA 2K18, we can compare it with NBA 2K17. Today, we'll list the best badges players would like to see in the latest NBA franchise. Flashy Dunker 2K Sports has spent a large amount of time recording flashy dunk animations that look great when they trigger. Unfortunately players do not equip any of these because they get blocked at a higher rate than the basic one and two hand dunk packages. NBA 2K17 has posterizer to help with contact dunks but Flashy Dunker would be for non-contact animations. The badge would allow you to use these flashy dunk packages in traffic while getting blocked at a lower rate in NBA 2K18. Bullet Passer Badge Even with a high passer rating and Hall of Fame dimer you can still find yourself throwing slow lob passes inexplicably. These passes are easy to intercept and give the defense too much time to recover. Bullet Passer would be an increase in the speed of passes that you throw, allowing you to create open looks for teammates in 2K18 that were not possible in NBA 2K17. A strong passing game is more important than ISO ball and this badge would help with that style of play. 3 And D Badge The 3 and D badge would be an archetype in NBA 2K18 ideally but a badge version would be an acceptable substitute. This badge would once again reward players for playing good defense. The badge would trigger after a block, steal, or good shot defense and would lead to an increase in shooting percentage on the next possession from behind the 3 point arc. Dominant Post Presence Badge It's a travesty that post scorer is one of the more under-utilized archetypes in NBA 2K17. Many players that have created a post scorer can immediately tell you why they do not play it as much as their other MyPlayers, it is incredibly easy to lose the ball in the post. Whether it is a double team or your matchup, getting the ball poked loose is a constant problem. Dominant Post Presence would trigger when you attempt to post up and would be an increase in your ability to maintain possession of the ball as long as NBA 2K18 add this badge. In addition the badge would be an increase in the shooting percentage of your teammate when you pass out of the post to an open man. The Glove NBA 2K17 has too many contested shots. The shot contest rating on most archetypes is not enough to outweigh the contested midrange or 3 point rating and consistently force misses. It's obviously that height helps you contest shots in a major way but it also slows you down. However, the Glove would solve this problem in NBA 2K18. This badge would increase your ability to contest shots effectively, forcing more misses and allowing you to play better defense. Of course, there should be more other tips and tricks for NBA 2K18. If you have better advices, tell us on the official media. The NBA 2K18 Early Tip-Off Weekend starts September 15th. That's a total of four days for dedicated fans to get in the game and try its new features before other buyers. The game is completely unlocked for Early Tip-Off Weekend. Be sure to make enough preparation for the upcoming event.

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other

Organ donation is the stuff of which dreams are made,” he began. “Literally. In a given year, there may be 4,000 people waiting for 2,000 donated hearts, and 4,000 people waiting for 1,000 donated lungs. Livers? Probably 18,000 people will wait, 6,000 will get, and another 2,000 will die waiting. And the numbers are even higher when we talk about kidneys—60,000 people waiting, 15,000 getting, 4,000 dying while they wait. By the way, the survival rate for these transplants is impressive, often up in the 85 percent range.

Usually, when gun control researchers do a study, only a small set of countries are used in any comparison, typically limited to so-called “civilized,” as David Hemenway or Piers Morgan calls them, or “developed” countries.18 It isn’t clear what is meant by “civilized” countries, so what can Americans learn from these other “developed” nations? First, here is how homicide rates vary across developed countries. Currently, thirty-four countries are in the OECD, though the agency also includes Brazil and Russia in its statistical data, as they meet the definition of “developed.”19 (Both countries have been negotiating for membership, but Russia has had talks suspended because of the Crimea crisis.)

We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.

Individual admirals and captains made their fortunes from their share of prize money, which was divided according to prize law of an extreme complexity that testified to its importance in the system. Ships’ captains of a victorious squadron divided 3/8 of the total value of captured ships and cargoes, depending on whether the squadron was under the orders of an admiral, with 1/8 reserved for a captain who was a flag officer if one was on board. Lieutenants, captains of marines, warrant officers, chaplains and lesser officers divided 1/8. Another 1/8 went to midshipmen and sailmakers, and the remaining 2/8, or 25 percent, to seamen, cooks and stewards. Prize law allowed an intricate adjustment based on size and armament to equalize the share of larger and smaller ships, on the theory that the stronger ships did most of the shooting and had more numerous crews. The adjusted rate was worked out by applying to each ship a factor calculated by multiplying the number of the crew by the sum of the caliber of the ship’s cannon. Clearly, prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals. As

Fake seafood is not a Florida problem or a Massachusetts problem or a New York City problem - it is an everywhere problem. Oceana took its study national in 2013 and found that mislabeling in violation of FDA regulations was often much worse in the biggest cities. A summary released with the report noted that "Oceana found seafood fraud everywhere it tested, including mislabeling rates of 52 percent in Southern California, 49 percent in Austin and Houston, 48 percent in Boston, 39 percent in New York City, 38 percent in Northern California and South Florida, 32 percent in Chicago, 26 percent in Washington, DC, and 18 percent in Seattle."... Dr. Warner's most recent project for Oceana was a global "study of studies," in which she and her colleagues did a comprehensive analysis of fake fish studies conducted by many different entities in different countries, including sixty-seven peer-reviewed studies, seven government reports, and twenty-three news articles. The results are pages and pages of more disturbing fraud information, but she was able to sum up the results for me in two sentences: "All studies that have investigated seafood fraud have found it. The take-home message is that anytime someone looks for mislabeling and species substitution in the marketplace, anywhere, they find it.

A well-organized revolt by the major members of its hard side can kill a product entirely. Twitter once bought an app called Vine for a reported $30 million. It let users create and view six-second looping video clips—it was ahead of its time, and not dissimilar from the insights behind TikTok. Like many social apps, the most popular content creators became very successful, and they were important to attract an audience. Unfortunately, a few years in, more than a dozen of the top content creators organized a revolt: Led by creators Marcus Johns and Piques, the group pitched an idea: If Vine paid each star $1.2 million and changed certain features of the app, each creator would post 12 Vines per month. Otherwise, all 18 would leave the platform. “We were driving billions of views—billions—before we left,” DeStorm Power explained of the monetary request.69 Vine turned down the plan, and a few years later, the service was shuttered. The hard side is worth the effort to cultivate. The most successful and prolific members of this side of the network also provide the highest level of service, are willing to make the investments to scale their impact, and ultimately become the defensible backbone of the network—assuming they can be retained. In Uber’s case, the power drivers represented the top 15 percent of drivers but constituted over 40 percent of our trips. They were also among the safest and most highly rated drivers—after all, it was their primary source of income.

The world was changing at an ever-increasing rate and that was a trend that couldn’t be stopped. These people were the ones who had been left behind. The ones who steadfastly refused to leave the dead cities they had been born in. The ones who saw themselves as America’s backbone but who survived on government aid and disability checks. Drug addicts, drunks, and halfwits incapable of performing anything but the simplest of tasks. Ironically, it was those self-destructive traits that made them so useful. Their inflated sense of worth and victimization was easy to manipulate. When asked what exactly it was they wanted, they either didn’t know or weren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it. What they did know—with burning certainty—was what they hated: the world that had stolen everything from them.