Things You Should Know

Every time you open a newspaper, a magazine or a book, you'll see some numbers and stats. They come from somewhere, may it be a national statistics office, an organization or an individual that has done research. These numbers can give a brief overview of the world surrounding ourselves. The way experts collect all the raw data to come up with all these clear-cut numbers is an important part of the process. How we see numbers through our social filter and education plays the most important role when seeing facts. It is the hardest thing to change in one's mind.

In the last years, you probably heard about supermarket mergers, this is only one example of the many changes happening in the food industry. Independent convenience stores are also slowly disappearing, making place to regional corporate-owned stores. Couche-Tard, for example, is a Canadian convenient store chains in the middle of an expansion phase that allowed the company to own over 2,000 locations and to double its revenues in 2002. The current transformations in the food industry are lead by a few powerful companies looking to control of what ultimately lands on your plate.

The United States of America are $ 3.5 trillion indebted. And it’s not finished yet. The most economically powerful country in the world, and by far, is currently going down, and runs on a very, very big Master Card. The government plans to run on deficit of a couple of years, to pay for it’s very copious campaign in Iraq. The deficit for 2005 is budgeted at about $521 billion dollars, including a 7% hike in homeland security and military spending.

One century. Sir Martin Rees thinks that’s the time remaining to humanity. We still have the time to adjust ourselves and reverse things somehow, though. Bio-tech warfare, nuclear weapons, nano-technology, super-computers taking control of our planet, environmental disasters, dangerous foods. He has even made a bet: $1000 that from here to 2020 a bio-disaster will cause death of millions.

“Buy low, sell high” is basically the only thing you have to do to make a fortune on the stock market. It’s easy, you find a company share (or stock) that is under valuated, you buy some of them, you wait for the price to go up and finally you sell and make a generous profit. Easy as one, two, three. So why is the stock market so risky if the rules are so simple?

If you’re suspecting that something is wrong with the temperature in the last few years, well your intuition wasn’t wrong. And you’re not the only one wondering why winters are now so mild and how come the months of July and August are now painfully warm. Many people from the scientific community have been analysing the question and they came up with some answers.

You go out to the grocery store, and you buy the weekly groceries you need. Of course, you don’t have all the time in the world to cook, so you buy prepared products like soups, pizzas, salad dressing, pasta sauce, etc. Then you look at the ingredients list. There are a lot of things on there that you didn’t think you’d paid for: like weird extracts or Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and ascorbic acid. These are all food additives, and everyone consumes them, because they are in almost every product in a supermarket. The real story of what you eat is not on the pretty picture in front of the box. The truth is out there… on the label that is.

Trying to control water is a thing that all the great civilizations did it the past to secure their power, and today, we need to do the same to make sure this essential resource is equally distributed and that our children will count on clean rivers and lakes.

It was the early 1980s when the Boeing Company released a report by Robert D. Dean and Kerry M. Whitaker called “Fear of Flying, Impact on the U.S. Air Travel Industry.” It revealed that almost every third adult in America is either anxious or afraid to fly. While their excuses were varied, the most common thoughts passing through air passenger’s minds are possible in-flight mechanical failures; bad weather conditions, flying at night and over oceans.