What an Engineer Learned from Reading the Financial Times

From the February 26, 2013 edition - -

• ". . . researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, said that progress in lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so rapid since 1900 that life expectancy has risen faster in that time than it did in the previous 200 milennia, since modern man began to evolve form hominid species."
• "For the first time since 2003, Saudi imports accounted for more than 15 percent of total US oil imports.  The Gulf as a whole accounted for more than 25 percent, a nine-year high."
• "In Star Trek the gadgets were great, but it was doing the right thing that really counted."
• "In the US, focus on the federal deficit threatens to blind leaders in Washington to an essential truth about our economy: we have a growth problem."
• "Juha Akras, Nokia's head of human resources says one side-effect of becoming smaller is greater co-operation.  To his surprise, internal measures of staff satisfaction have continued to improve, even during the gloomy first half of 2012."
• "More than half of the tracking devices on major websites are not deployed by the sites' owners, a survey has shown, in results that raise privacy, security and regulatory headaches for online publsihers."