Word: indexes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Your book includes an index of more than 500 invented languages, though you're quick to point out that no one really knows how many there are. How did you decide which languages to explore? I knew more about the famous ones, like Esperanto and Klingon. But the others I discovered in libraries. Every library you go into will have these little pamphlets self-published by some dreamer with a plan. I got very curious about the lives of the people who devoted themselves to these doomed projects...
...What a difference a financial crisis makes. After the worldwide economic boom went bust, demand abruptly evaporated for many commodities. The Dow Jones - AIG commodity price index has shed more than half its value since mid-2008. The most visible turnaround has been in oil. A year ago, Western governments were pleading with Persian Gulf oil states to ramp up production as oil sped toward $150 a barrel; today, OPEC is twisting off the spigot in an attempt to support crude prices around $50. Some experts believe prices may stay depressed for years to come, due to greater energy efficiency...
...Vanguard Emerging Markets, bringing the value of that investment to over $54 million, up from the less than $1 million invested there in the previous quarter. The largest holding listed in the latest 13F filings continued to be the $205 million invested in the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund. But both the value of that investment and the number of shares owned have declined since the last filing, which showed University holdings as of Dec. 31. Harvard then had $224 million invested in the fund—a substantial dollar value reduction from the $463 million it had invested...
...some of the elements in the index were more surprising. The research team found, for instance, that patients who were underweight, did not drink alcohol and took longer to put on and button a shirt were also at high risk for dementia. Barnes speculates that fine motor skills, such as those required to button a shirt, may be one of the first things to suffer as neural connections in the brain succumb to dementia. As for the alcohol connection, she suggests that people who drink alcohol may simply be healthier overall and therefore less vulnerable than others to mental decline...
...protect themselves from future memory loss. "This study has taken a number of earlier findings on risk factors and combined them into a fairly impressive predictor of risk," says Dr. Ralph Nixon, vice chair of the medical and scientific advisory council for the Alzheimer's Association. The new index accurately predicts dementia in 81% of cases. (The midlife tool predicts dementia accurately 78% of the time...