Word: yardsticks
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...believe this dramatic spike in digital participation is, for the most part, sharpening the minds of Generation M, not dumbing them down. But it's hard to see that improvement without the right yardstick. The skills they're developing are not trivial. They're learning to analyze complex systems with many interacting variables, to master new interfaces, to find and validate information in vast databases, to build and maintain extensive social networks crossing both virtual and real-world environments, to adapt existing technology to new uses. And they're learning all this in their spare time...
...almost impossible to decipher, so bewildering is its language. At first glance, it looks like nothing more than a technical amendment to clarify some arcane section of tax law. But one clause offers a clue. It says the synfuel credit will be based not on current oil prices--the yardstick used in the past--but on "the amount which was in effect for sales in calendar year...
...from a sure thing. At last week's close of $363 a share, Google's P/E ratio (stock price divided by earnings per share, a measure of expected profits) is a whopping 76. Compared with the average of about 20 for S&P 500 tech stocks, Google, by that yardstick at least, is way overvalued. "People should not assume that Google will succeed at and dominate whatever it pursues," says Scott Kessler of Standard & Poor's Equity Research. "The company has been trying to diversify but hasn't done a great job at monetizing its new offerings...
Perhaps the best yardstick to assess the outlook for the later years is the defined-benefit pension, long the gold standard for retirement because it guarantees a fixed income for life. The number of such plans offered by corporations has plunged from 112,200 in 1985 to 29,700 today. Since 1985, the number of active workers covered in the private sector declined from 22 million to 17 million. They are the last members of what once promised to be the U.S.'s golden retirement era, and they are fast disappearing. From 2001 to 2004, nearly 200 corporations...
...overturned. In a 1989 case she explicitly rejected an attempt to overturn Roe, but said restrictions on abortion were fine as long as they didn't place an undue burden on the right to choice. And most important, in 1992, that "undue burden" test became the court's yardstick for measuring abortion restrictions in the majority opinion O'Connor co-authored. Though it weakened Roe's standard for analyzing limitations on first-trimester abortions, Roe still stands...