Monthly Archives: January 2011

grapes/ sex

         For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex. This unnatural abstinence threatens to sap the grape’s genetic health and the future pleasure of millions of oenophiles. [Italics added.] . . . [M]erlot is intimately related to cabernet franc, which is a parent of cabernet sauvignon,  whose other [...]

union workers

            11.9: The percentage of American workers in unions last year, the lowest proportion in more than 70 years, according to the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of workers in unions fell by 612,000 last year, to 14.7 million. About 20 percent of workers were in unions in 1983; the figure was [...]

BRIC

acronym for the four large, rapidly growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China          Jim O’Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management . . . is perhaps best known as the economist who nearly a decade ago coined the acronym BRIC — for Brazil, Russia, India and China — developing economies that, [...]

Dodo effect

when two or more psychotherapies seem to yield results with little or no difference.        [W]hen two different types of psychotherapies [for the same condition] have been directly compared -- and there are more than 100 such studies -- it has often been hard to find any differences between them.   Researchers aptly call [...]

Apple/ cash

       [Some Apple investors have] deep frustrations over Apple's cash pile, a $50 billion lode that is expected to swell to $70 billion by year-end. The vast sum exceeds the gross domestic product of two-thirds of the world's countries—and all but 36 of the market values of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock [...]

Disney/ divorce

       Pity poor Hannah, who received a startling text message on her cellphone, sent from her father: "Your mom and I are going to divorce next month." After Hannah registered her alarm, her father quickly texted back: "I wrote 'Disney,' and this phone changed it.  We are going to Disney." Welcome to the world [...]

bad-boy guarantee

a provision in a commercial real estate loan agreement that holds individual developers personally liable for the loan if their borrower company should file for bankruptcy.        The commercial real estate market is being hobbled by billions of dollars in distressed debt, and some experts are pointing to a provision in many loans — [...]

Steve Jobs/ consumers

  Shortly before the iPad tablet went on sale last year, Steven P. Jobs showed off Apple's latest creation to a small group of journalists. One asked what consumer and market research Apple had done to guide the development of the new product. “None,” Mr. Jobs replied. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what [...]

Go to Top