1. Economic Inequality
For the past thirty years, the United States has been conducting what one observer (Samuelson 2001) has called “a massive social experiment” regarding the political and social consequences of increasing economic inequality. The share of national income going to families in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution declined by about one- fifth, from 17.4% in 1973 to 13.9% in 2001, while the share going to families in the top 5 percent increased by more than one-third, from 15.5% to 21.0% (Mishel, Bernstein, and Boushey 2003). Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top one-tenth of one percent quadrupled between 1970 and 1998, leaving the 13,000 richest families in America with almost as much income as the 20 million poorest families (Krugman 2002). The economic causes of these trends — technological change? demography? global competition? — are a matter of some scholarly controversy. But the important political point is that, whereas most rich democracies have significantly mitigated increasing economic inequality through government action, the United States has mostly been content to let economic trends take their course, doing “less than almost any other rich democracy to limit economic inequality” through employment and wage policies, taxes, and transfers (Jencks 2002, 64).
2. The Emperor Penguin
The emperor is the giant of the penguin world and the most iconic of the birds of Antarctica. Gold patches on their ears and on the top of their chest brighten up their black heads. Emperors and their closest relative, the king penguin, have unique breeding cycles, with very long chick-rearing periods. The emperor penguins breed the furthest south of any penguin species, forming large colonies on the sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent. They are true Antarctic birds, rarely seen in the subantarctic waters. So that the chicks can fledge in the late summer season, emperors breed during the cold, dark winter, with temperatures as low at – 50°C and winds up to 200 km per hour. They trek 50–120 km (30–75 mls) over the ice to breeding colonies which may include thousands of individuals. The female lays a single egg in May then passes it over to her mate to incubate whilst she goes to sea to feed. For nine weeks the male fasts, losing 45% of his body weight. The male balances the egg on his feet, which are covered in a thick roll of skin and feathers. The egg can be 70°C warmer than the outside temperature.
3. Pullman Historic District
Built in 1880 on 4,000 acres of land outside of the Chicago city limits, Pullman, Illinois, was the first industrial planned community in the United States. George Pullman, of the Pullman railroad Car Company, built the south residential portion of the company town first, which contained 531 houses, some of which stand today more or less as they did originally.
4. The Roman people
The Roman people had at first been inclined to regard the French Revolution with either indifference or derision. But as the months went by and the emigres who remained in the city were less and less hopeful of an early return home, the mood of the Romans became increasingly antagonistic towards the ‘assassins of Paris’.The nationalization of Church property in France, the confiscation of papal territories, the dwindling of contributions and the paucity of tourists and pilgrims all contributed to an exacerbation of this antagonism. When the French Convention, determined to gain international recognition for the Republic, dispatched envoys to Rome, the people turned upon them in fury.
5. Gauss
Gauss was a child prodigy. There are many anecdotes concerning his precocity as a child, and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager.
At just three years old, he corrected an error in his father payroll calculations, and he was looking after his father’s accounts on a regular basis by the age of 5. At the age of 7, he is reported to have amazed his teachers by summing the integers from 1 to 100 almost instantly (having quickly spotted that the sum was actually 50 pairs of numbers, with each pair summing to 101, total 5,050). By the age of 12, he was already attending gymnasium and criticizing Euclid’s geometry.
6. Biological Systems
Since biological systems with signs of complex engineering are unlikely to have arisen from accidents or coincidences, their organization must come from natural selection, and hence should have functions useful for survival and reproduction in the environments in which humans evolved.
7. Psychoanalytic and Behaviorist
Elements of both the psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories arrange in modern approaches to personality Advances in neuroscience have begun to bridge the gap between biochemistry and behavior, but there is still a great deal that needs to be explained. Without a consistent understanding of personality, how can we begin to categorize risk takers? If we cannot, we will be unable to compare their genes with those of others.
8. Well-being
Life in the UK 2012 provides a unique overview of well-being in the UK today. The report is the first snapshot of life in the UK to be delivered by the Measuring National Well-being programme and will be updated and published annually. Well-being is discussed in terms of the economy, people and the environment. Information such as the unemployment rate or number of crimes against the person are presented alongside data on people’s thoughts and feelings, for example, satisfaction with our jobs or leisure time and fear of crime. Together, a richer picture on ‘how society is doing’ is provided.