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1.Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage.
2.It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers.
3.For example, some early societies ceased to consider certain rites essential to their well-being and abandoned them; nevertheless, they retained as parts of their oral tradition the myths that had grown up around the rites and admired them for their artistic qualities rather than for their religious usefulness.
4.Yet a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century consisted in large part of newspaper reviews.
5.We are even farther removed from the unfocused newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of World War I, at a time when newsprint was dirt-cheap and stylish arts criticism was considered an ornament to the publications in which it appeared.
6."So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism," Newman wrote, "that I am tempted to define ‘journalism' as ‘a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are'."
7.Curbs on business-method claims would be a dramatic about-face, because it was the Federal Circuit itself that introduced such patents with its 1998 decision in the so-called State Street Bank case, approving a patent on a way of pooling mutual-fund assets.
8.The Federal Circuit issued an unusual order stating that the case would be heard by all 12 of the court's judges, rather than a typical panel of three, and that one issue it wants to evaluate is whether it should "reconsider" its State Street Bank ruling.
9.In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that "social epidemics" are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well-connected.
10.The researchers' argument stems from a simple observation about social influence: with the exception of a few celebrities like Oprah Winfrey—whose outsize presence is primarily a function of media, not interpersonal, influence—even the most influential members of a population simply don't interact with that many others.
11.These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and regulators would like them to fetch.
12.The IASB says it does not want to act without overall planning, but the pressure to fold when it completes its reconstruction of rules later this year is strong.
13.Charlie McCreevy, a European commissioner, warned the IASB that it did "not live in a political vacuum" but "in the real world" and that Europe could yet develop different rules.
14.And dead markets partly reflect the paralysis of banks which will not sell assets for fear of booking losses, yet are reluctant to buy all those supposed bargains.
15.The FASB and IASB have been exactly that, cleaning up rules on stock options and pensions, for example, against hostility from special interests.
16.The child who is raised in an environment where there are many stimuli which develop capacity for appropriate responses will experience greatly intellectual development.
17.But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
18.At the end of adolescence, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.
19.It is a wise father that knows his own child, but today a man can boost his paternal (fatherly) wisdom—or at least confirm that he's the kid’s dad.
20.More than 60,000 people have purchased the PTKs since they first became available without prescriptions last year, according to Doug Fogg, chief operating officer of Identigene, which makes the over-the-counter kits.
21.Among the most popular: paternity and kinship testing, which adopted children can use to find their biological relatives and families can use to track down kids put up for adoption.
22.This DNA can reveal genetic information about only one or two ancestors, even though, for example, just three generations back people also have six other great-grandparents or, four generations back, 14 other great-great-grandparents.
23.Critics also argue that commercial genetic testing is only as good as the reference collections to which a sample is compared.
24.Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong.
25.We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations.
26.Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts—a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job.
27.More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry's work.
28.To take this approach to the New Englanders normally means to start with the Puritans' theological innovations and their distinctive ideas about the church—important subjects that we may not neglect.
29.Besides the ninety or so learned ministers who came to Massachusetts churches in the decade after 1629, there were political leaders like John Winthrop, an educated gentleman, lawyer, and official of the Crown before he journeyed to Boston.
30.While few craftsmen or farmers, let alone dependents and servants, left literary compositions to be analyzed, it is obvious that their views were less fully intellectualized.
31.Sexual confusion, economic frustrations, and religious hope—all came together in a decisive moment when he opened the Bible, told his father that the first line he saw would settle his fate, and read the magical words.
32.Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affect the stress response, causing females under stress to produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions.
33.The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family members, and they tend not to be one-shot deals.
34.I was living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better.
35.The Internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making access to scientific results a reality.
36.The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits.
37.The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the years, and managers have been more than willing to adjust team uniforms to fit the growing numbers of bigger, longer frames.
38.Though typically about two inches taller now than 140 years ago, today's people—especially those born to families who have lived in the U.S. for many generations—apparently reached their limit in the early 1960s.
39.But as diet and health improved, children and adolescents have, on average, increased in height by about an inch and a half every 20 years, a pattern known as the secular trend in height.
40.Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture and cannot easily withstand repeated strain imposed by oversize limbs.
41.They have been spurred in part by DNA evidence made available in 1998, which almost certainly proved Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings.
42.While Washington and Jefferson privately expressed distaste for slavery, they also understood that it was part of the political and economic bedrock of the country they helped to create.
43.The three-fifths formula handed Jefferson his narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 by inflating the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College.
44.Washington, who had begun to believe that all men were created equal after observing the bravery of the black soldiers during the Revolutionary War, overcame the strong opposition of his relatives to grant his slaves their freedom in his will.
45.If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months.
46.This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one.
47.It's not obvious how the capacity to visualize objects and to figure out numerical patterns suits one to answer questions that have eluded some of the best poets and philosophers.
48.Super high scores like Vos Savant's are no longer possible, because scoring is now based on a statistical population distribution among age peers, rather than simply dividing the mental age by the chronological age and multiplying by 100.
49.In his article “How Intelligent Is Intelligence Testing?”, Sternberg notes that traditional tests best assess analytical and verbal skills but fail to measure creativity and practical knowledge, components also critical to problem solving and life success.
50.Research has found that IQ predicted leadership skills when the tests were given under low-stress conditions, but under high-stress conditions, IQ was negatively correlated with leadership—that is, it predicted the opposite.
51.Steelworkers, airline employees, and now those in the auto industry are joining millions of families who must worry about interest rates, stock market fluctuation, and the harsh reality that they may outlive their retirement money.
52.For much of the past year, President Bush campaigned to move Social Security to a savings-account model, with retirees trading much or all of their guaranteed payments for payments depending on investment returns.
53.Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen—and newly fashionable health-savings plans are spreading from legislative halls to Wal-Mart workers, with much higher deductibles and a large new dose of investment risk for families' future healthcare.
54.Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a weak elderly parent—and all the attendant need for physical and financial assistance—have jumped eightfold in just one generation.
55.From the middle-class family perspective, much of this, understandably, looks far less like an opportunity to exercise more financial responsibility, and a good deal more like a frightening acceleration of the wholesale shift of financial risk onto their already overburdened shoulders.
56.Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity.
57.Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss's agenda in businesses of every variety.
58.Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
59.Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.
60.Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.
61.Rodriguez notes that children in remote villages around the world are fans of superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Garth Brooks, yet “some Americans fear that immigrants living within the United States remain somehow immune to the nation's assimilative power”.
62.But particularly when viewed against America's turbulent past, today's social indices hardly suggest a dark and deteriorating social environment.
63.It is the playgoers, the RSC contends, who bring in much of the town's revenue because they spend the night (some of them four or five nights) pouring cash into the hotels and restaurants.
64.That matters because theory suggests that the maximum sustainable yield that can be cropped from a fishery comes when the biomass of a target species is about 50% of its original levels.
65.In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms.
66.Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it.