Word: expectance
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BLUE-SKY INVESTING Your mutual-fund manager may start betting on the weather, literally. This month two energy firms are expected to issue some $100 million in "weather bonds," whose returns are based solely on average temperatures. These new bonds, rated in the BB range, allow weather-sensitive businesses--utilities, ski resorts--to hedge against losses caused by extreme temperatures. If Mother Nature behaves, holders can expect 10% to 30% returns; but a mild winter or scorching summer could melt profits and principal. On another front, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange started trading weather futures in September. Along with pork bellies...
While the purveyors of this voodoo medicine today point with pride to the fact that most U.S. medical schools, influenced by research grants and public opinion, have launched courses in alternative medicine, the result will not be what they expect. Legitimate medical schools--and most of them are--will dispassionately dissect the alternatives and evaluate their effectiveness. In so doing, they will breed new generations of doctors who will urge patients to be skeptical about false claims and bogus science...
That, says Lifset, is where nanotechnology plays a role. In this emerging field, which employs just about every kind of scientific and engineering discipline, researchers expect to create products by building them from scratch, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. This bottom-up nanotechnological way of making things differs from the traditional drilling, sawing, etching, milling and other fabrication methods that create so much waste along...
...statistics--like the scales--don't lie. And it doesn't take an actuary to figure out that with Krispy Kreme going public next year and planning to open hundreds of new stores, America will continue gaining weight in the 21st century. Which means more and more people can expect to hear the antifat refrains that I've become so familiar with: "You won't live as long," "Your quality of life will be diminished," "Society will reject you," "You won't be able to keep up in the protest marches." (That was just in my family.) Let's take...
...Microsoft is the same company it ever was - one of the greatest concentrations of brainpower on the planet," says Quittner. "That's not going to change, and the company shouldn't be worth any less Monday than it was on Friday. Moreover, most investors had good reason to expect this ruling." Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's finding of fact, which strongly suggested he would find the company in breach of antitrust legislation, will likely spur Bill Gates to cut a deal. "Microsoft has to settle really quickly," says Quittner, "because a company of this size and importance can't afford...