Word: growth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia's growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages. "When we first noticed it, we thought it was a blip," says Ed Chi, a computer scientist at California's Palo Alto Research Center whose lab has studied Wikipedia extensively. But Wikipedia peaked in March 2007 at about 820,000 contributors; the site hasn't seen as many editors since. "By the middle of 2009, we realized that this was a real phenomenon," says Chi. "It's no longer...
What stunted Wikipedia's growth? And what does the slump tell us about the long-term viability of such strange and invaluable online experiments? Perhaps that the Web has limits after all, particularly when it comes to the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing. Wikipedians - the volunteers who run the site, especially the approximately 1,000 editors who wield the most power over what you see - have been in a self-reflective mood. Not only is Wikipedia slowing, but also new stats suggest that hard-core participants are a pretty homogeneous set - the opposite of the ecumenical wiki ideal. Women, for instance...
...however, Borlaug found a wheat strain with a unique genetic trait: the stalk became stubby, but the seed heads would stay large. When Borlaug transferred the gene into tropical wheat, he created a plant that could yield huge heads of grain while maintaining stable growth rates. Using Borlaug's seeds, farmers could produce four times as much wheat per acre. The discovery ignited the Green Revolution that helped eradicate famine in much of the world and earned Borlaug the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. His work saved hundreds of millions of lives, and today half the world eats grains descended from...
...year, according to one study - and promised to bend the cost curve down in the future. He has described changes to the health-care system that could bring down costs for families and long-term government deficits. But his numbers are hypothetical. "If we are able to slow the growth of health-care costs by just one-tenth of 1% each year," he announced in a recent address to Congress, "it will actually reduce deficits by $4 trillion over the long term." (See pictures of the angry health-care debates...
...government's grim fiscal prognosis. According to the CBO, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is projected to quintuple, from 4% of the economy in 2007 to 19% in 2082, if nothing changes. At the same time, the government is projected to run unsustainable deficits larger than the growth in the economy for the foreseeable future...