Word: effective
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...settings that the contagion of happiness is spreading. Christakis and Fowler noticed that people who are smiling on their Facebook pages tend to cluster together, forming an online social circle like a delirious flock of cyberbirds. And while some of this joy can certainly be traced to the copycat effect--if your friends post smiling pictures, you might feel like a grouch if you don't too--Christakis and Fowler are analyzing the clusters to see if something more infectious might be at work...
Skeptics raise other concerns, ones that go beyond the copycat effect. Couldn't happy people simply be exposed to similar lifestyles or social factors that explain their shared joy, such as favorable weather, low unemployment rates or a winning baseball team? If that were the case, argue the authors, then happiness would spread more uniformly among all the relationships; instead, it varied depending on whether the friendship was mutual or merely one-sided. As the investigators teased out these factors, they found that environment didn't have nearly the power that relationships...
...these cases, there's a predictable topography to how people influence one another, one that can be reduced to a sort of social map. People who are central to their networks--who in effect are the hub through which most of the other relationships or information flows--may have the most influence on others and in turn are the most influenced by them. But just because you start off at the center of your web does not guarantee that you'll stay there. In the 1970s, smokers were more likely to occupy that focal position in their network of friends...
...9/11 suspects at Guantánamo--terrorists aren't prone to making their captors' tasks easier. But on Dec. 8, in a hushed and heavily guarded courtroom, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his co-defendants abruptly offered to confess to coordinating the attacks--in effect, pleading guilty to the murder of 3,000 people. With family members of some of the 9/11 victims looking on, Mohammed told the judge he had no faith in the Guantánamo trials, in his Pentagon-appointed legal adviser or in the judge himself. "I don't trust you," Mohammed said...
FICA is, in effect, a tax on job creation. It applies to the very first dollar earned by a minimum-wage worker, but most of it tops out at an annual income of about $100,000 and doesn't apply at all to income from investments. For most Americans holding jobs, FICA now takes a bigger chunk of their income than the income tax itself. And yet it rarely enjoys the tender concern of tax-cutting Republicans, who prefer to concentrate on tax breaks for capital gains. Cutting the FICA tax in half, for workers and for employers, would make...