HALF-LIVES Radioactive elements are emitting energy all the time, and their existence is measured by half-life — how long it takes for half of a given amount to give off its radiation and decay into a different material.
Several current and former diplomats told me that what was happening at the State Department — the unfilled ambassadorships, the conferences not attended, the foreign aid not given — amounted to a slow degradation of America's global leadership.
The idea favored by current CV practice is to ask each respondent a closed from question, namely whether they would accept to pay a given amount to obtain a given change in their status quo.
Parents remain able to give amounts to their children which remain tax-free, providing the income does not exceed £100 per year per parent.
But the long term goal should be to match the US, where individual giving amounts to 1.75% of GDP, or $183bn a year.
Giving to faith-based organizations in other sectors such as education, health care, international or social services are counted within those sectors, so religious giving amounts to much more than the total attributed to religion.
Unfortunately, in real life charitable giving amounts to about 2percentt of the GDP.
Using the figures released yesterday, Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University, calculated that giving amounted to 0.69percentt of the nation's wealth last year -- down from 0.71percentt in 1998, although slightly ahead of the 0.68percentt of 1997.
And the top 10% - which includes that mega-rich 1% - own more than half of all of wealth but fare little better in the generosity stakes, contributing just over a fifth of giving, amounting to a parsimonious £1.1bn.
These approaches maximize the stiffness for a given amount of material to be used.
