', '250 ml' and '75kg'.
Some imperial units are appealing for their practicality: a foot is the length of an adult foot (ish). These units were usually broken down into sub-units that made division easy. The Latin word for twelfth, uncia, is the origin of two measurement words: inch (one twelfth of a foot) and ounce (originally one twelfth of a pound) - the nice feature of the number 12 being that it is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. But while individual units often make intuitive sense, viewed as a whole, the imperial system is a quirky mishmash. There's nothing practical about a 14 pound stone, or a 1760 yard mile. It's no surprise that units such as the gill, quart, chain and league are almost extinct - though the chain (22 yards) lives on in spirit, as the standard length of a cricket pitch.
A huge buttress supporting imperial units is that the world's richest and most technologically advanced country, the USA, still stubbornly sticks to imperial units. Most American recipes still refer to pounds, cups and ounces, while US engineers routinely talk about foot-pounds of energy.
But I wonder if there's another easily overlooked factor that's keeping imperial units in our language: the shortness of the words. The most common imperial units all have a single syllable: inch, foot, yard, mile, pint, ounce, pound, stone. Compare that with centimetre, kilometre, millilitre and kilogram - multi-syllable words that (unsurprisingly) have not entered the lexicon of most poets or lyricists.
We may be inching towards a fully metric world, but it'll be a long time before our language goes the whole nine yards.
SOME IMPERIAL MNEMONICS
A metre measures three foot three,
It's longer than a yard, you see.
Two and a quarter pounds of jam
Weigh about a kilogram
A Litre of water's
A pint and three quarters
George III said with a smile
"1760 yards in a mile" *
And this one is apparently popular in the USA (where they say tom-ay-to, while we say tomato)
The number of feet in a mile is 'Five Tomatoes' 5-2-8-0.
* 1760 was the year George III became king.“
I knew that if Make-A-Wish sent me there, the memories would be awesome.
”
When the door to the plane opens, the first sensation Chris experiences is the heat. In January, the average temperature in Oahu is 80 degrees, 33 degrees warmer than his hometown in Livermore.
His battle with leukemia took a big toll on him. Missing more than a year of school made him feel isolated and depressed; their life “was turned upside-down” says his mom, Michelle. The wish “gave him something good to look forward to and something special to dream about. It would have been so much harder if he didn’t have that distraction to help him through the worst of things.”
Hawaii was the perfect antidote to a grueling year. Chris spent a whole day just building sandcastles, which he loves. After all that hard work, he refueled with a “double cheeseburger in paradise” at Jimmy Buffett’s Restaurant. Snorkeling in a coral reef and a luau followed the next day, but the highlight of his trip came at Sea Life Park. The park is home to the only two wholphins in captivity. Don’t know what a wholphin is? It is a cross between a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale. And Chris hitched a ride with one of them. Says Chris, “It meant a lot to me that Make-A-Wish sent me to Hawaii. It was a light in the dark when I had to go through all my treatments.”
This story makes me feel
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Click to register for our e-newsletter and receive inspiring wish stories, news and updates.While the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests that its form and content differ at least somewhat from country to country, it has not begun to address whether CSR practices converge or diverge over time as countries benefit from higher levels of economic development, or whether these practices relate to specific cultural values and institutional structures. This paper proposes an initial conceptual model and propositions to begin to assess whether and how the different levels of economic development, cultural values, and institutional structures influence CSR behaviors. Mediating variables related to industry sector and executive moral development are also included in the model. The paper begins to lay the groundwork for empirical country and regional studies that cancontribute to a greater understanding of the factors that influence CSR behaviors.
Conflicts of interest can lead experts to give biased and corrupt advice. Although disclosure is often proposed as a potential solution to these problems, we show that it can have perverse effects. First, people generally do not discount advice from biased advisors as much as they should, even when advisors’ conflicts of interest are disclosed. Second, disclosure can increase the bias in advice because it leads advisors to feel morally licensed and strategically encouraged to exaggerate their advice even further. As a result, disclosure may fail to solve the problems created by conflicts of interest and may sometimes even make matters worse.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been a subject of broad public and academic discussion in Russia for several years now. The author argues that the key criterion for CSR is direct (non-market-based) cooperation among all stakeholders, cooperation that to a large extent shapes the behavior of the firm and therefore includes ethical and social concerns in the decision-making process. On the basis of this criterion, three levels of CSR are distinguished. The main factors that are gradually shaping the Russian model of CSR are emphasized. It is shown that lack of state social expenditure and a coherent system of benefits for socially responsible firms, coupled with the persistence of paternalistic relations, hinder and bias the development of socially responsible behavior at all levels.The author argues that CSR practices can be effectively realized only if accompanied by a coherent state social policy.
Greatly aided by an information age in which protesting laborers in a remote offshore outpost can capture front page headlines around the globe, theSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SARBOX) has made corporate transparency the linchpin for good corporate governance. Under a SARBOX-enhancedregulatory framework, publicly traded corporations are required to rapidly disclose material changes in their financial conditions or operations—changes such as impairments to goodwill, a trademark, or some other intangible corporate asset. Especially challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) with far-flung corporate empires is the need to stay abreast of the ebb and flow of goodwill, at a time when transnational human rights groups are aggressively mobilizing world opinion against the sweatshop labor conditions that abound at the offshore production sites favored by MNCs. The author explains why the convergence of a digital age of free-flowing information and the advent of SARBOX, a legislative enactment of paraenetic design, is causing the boards of MNCs to more critically evaluate the long-term costs of their offshore operations.
This paper describes the results of several large empirical studies that investigated the impact of social product attributes on consumer purchase intentions. Our results show that some consumers are willing to pay for more socially acceptable products, but that most of those consumers do not think about the social product features of the products they purchase. Furthermore, our analyses demonstrate that consumers can be segmented based on their preferences for (or against) social product features and that these segments are not country-specific.
This article argues that the key crisis that has overtaken today’s global economy is the classical capitalist crisis of over-accumulation. Reaganism and structural adjustment were efforts to overcome this crisis in the 1980s, with little success, followed by globalization in the 1990s. The Clinton administration embraced globalization as the “Grand Strategy” of the United States, its two key prongs being the accelerated integration of markets and production by transnational corporations and the creation of a multilateral system of global governance, the pillars of which were the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The goal of creating a functionally integrated global economy, however, stalled, and the multilateral system began to unravel,thanks among other things to the multiple crises created by the globalization of finance, which was the main trend of the period. In response partly to these crises, partly to increasing competition with traditionally subservient centre economies, and partly to political resistance in the South, Washington under the Bush administration has retreated from the globalist project, adopting a nationalist strategy consisting of disciplining the South through unilateralist military adventures, reverting to methods of primitive accumulation in exploiting the developing world, and making other centre economies bear the brunt of global adjustments necessitated by the crisis of over-accumulation.
Despite the attention given to China’s rising importance in the international marketplace, I argue that corresponding attention has not been given to the sustainability dimensions—the social and environmental dimensions of this economic development trajectory. Specifically, what type of business strategy can and will best serve the economic, environmental, and social needs of China, and what role, if any, can the private sector play to facilitate the development of such a strategy? In exploring this question, I first examine the evolving relationship between business and sustainable development. I then outline the sustainability challenge within the regional context in the Asia-Pacific region. Finally, I analyze sustainability challenges posed by China’s rise in the global