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To get my driver’s license, I had to pass the written as well as actual driving test.  I was lucky to have put extra effort on traffic cones, warning flags and traffic barricade. It was during my actual driving test when I was asked about them which really surprised me.  I told the examiner that even if they were all orange for great visibility effect, they had different purposes and were made of distinctive materials and unique by themselves.

A set of traffic cones are placed on the road to warn motorists of roads which are either under construction with workers inside that will keep them safe or the road has unsafe surface areas or badly damaged. A pair of warning flags are waved by  construction workers to direct motorists in another direction or to follow a detour.  A traffic barricade I told him is the most effective tool for traffic control because they are used for vehicle as well as pedestrian crowd safety and is made of combination wood and steel.

Still nervous about investing? Then you’ll be glad to learn that a very simple concept can help reduce risk in your portfolio. Diversification, as it’s known in the investment world, simply means not putting all your eggs in one basket. When you think about it, diversification makes complete sense. Since different investments respond differently to economic conditions, and because no one can consistently forecast which one will do best at any particular time, having a balanced mix of investments will help you stay your course.
In practical terms, this means that a smart investor doesn’t look for that one hot stock, one hot sector, or even one currently hot type of investment. If you’re still not convinced, just ask all the thousands of people who lost their nest eggs by investing vast portions of their stock portfolios in the skyrocketing high-tech sector that eventually lost its engines and came crashing back to earth. Had those investors been better diversified, their portfolios would have been much less volatile.
There are two equally important components to diversification. First, you need to invest in all three of the major asset classes: stocks, bonds, and cash-equivalents. Second, you need to be diversified within each class. This means that you need to own a mix of stocks of different size, in different sectors (such as health care and financials) and industries (such as biotechnology drugs, and insurance) as well as both domestic and international companies. It also means that you need to own different styles of investments—that is to say, growth and value. The key is having the appropriate blend of investments—or asset allocation—that fits your particular goals, time frame, and tolerance for risk.
Just as a mutual fund that focuses on a single industry isn’t going to help you with diversification, neither will owning fifty different stocks or mutual funds if they all cover the same thing. If you own shares in Coca-Cola, for example, as well as shares in a mutual fund that invests in Coca-Cola, you’ve duplicated your efforts and increased your vulnerability should Coca-Cola suddenly falter.
Therefore it’s important to take your time and do your homework when figuring out what investments best fit your goals. This is not the time to be quick, impulsive, or reactionary. Only careful consideration will help you to get where you want to go, when you want to get there.
I know that deciding which investments to buy can be difficult, if only because you have so many choices. But once you define your objectives, all those possibilities start to narrow. As you continue to discuss and analyze those investment choices, your decisions will become clearer.
The good news is that it’s never too late to start. You may have to get out of your comfort zone to grow financially, but you can do it. Lauren was forty-five when she first began to figure out how to invest in her future. If she could get a handle on all of that and make it happen, you can too.

When you’re ready to embark on an investment program, the first things you need to think and talk about are your time frame and your willingness to assume risk. These two issues are both crucial on their own—and are also inexorably linked. We all have our own individual tolerance for risk, one that changes over time and as family circumstances shift. I remember meeting a man who told me that when he was young, he’d ride his motorcycle cross-country, ski any hill he could find, and tackle any new adrenaline-pumping endeavor just for the thrill of it. But now that he has reached his forties and has three children, that has changed. “These days I think three, four times before I take on any kind of risk,” he says. That attitude didn’t confine itself to abandoning his former pastimes in favor of woodworking in his garage. It influenced how he dealt with his money as well.
Why is the concept of risk so crucial for an investor? Because as Figure 2.2 shows, the investments with the greatest potential for growth also carry the greatest potential for loss—at least in the short term.
This means that the more time you have, the more you can afford to place your money in investments—like stocks—that can be volatile in the short term but offer the best chance for your money to grow over the long term. Why? If you have ten or twenty years before you’ll need the money, you can likely ride out most market downturns. Perhaps you can even use the market dips as opportunities to invest more. But if you know that you’ll need your money in five years or less, all that changes. As many investors learned in the market decline of 2001—2002, if you assume too much risk, you may experience a significant and sudden loss. It’s wise to remember that, as your time horizon shrinks, so should the amount of risk you take on.
In practical terms, this means using different strategies for different goals. An investment that is appropriate for a long-range goal is simply not appropriate for money you may need next year. If you’re saving for your child’s college in three years as opposed to your retirement in twenty years, you’ll have to invest that money differently.
A friend recently learned this lesson the hard way: She left her son’s college funds invested in the stock market after he’d entered college. When the stock market crashed, so did her son’s tuition money. Unfortunately she didn’t have time to ride out the lows, and she was forced to sell when the tuition bill was due. “I took on too much risk considering his time frame,” she laments. She’s absolutely right.

History tells us that the very best way for your money to grow over the long term—and to capture the power of compounding—is to invest in the stock market. If  in January 1926 you had invested just one dollar in a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500 Index (which includes five hundred of the country’s largest companies), that dollar would have grown to about $1,775 by the end of 2002. By contrast, if you had instead put your money into intermediate-term U.S. bonds, it would have grown to $59—or if you had invested in thirty-day Treasury bills (T-bills), only to $17. Clearly, over these seventy-seven years, stocks have outperformed both bonds and T-bills by a huge margin. In fact, going back to 1926, the worst forty-year period for stock returns was still better than the best forty-year period for U.S. Treasury bonds. So yes, the stock market certainly has its ups and downs day to day, month to month, and year to year. But the long-term historical trend has demonstrated that stocks offer the greatest upside potential.
If you still aren’t convinced that you should invest your money in the stock market, think about inflation. Again, the rate of inflation can vary widely from decade to decade—or even year to year— in the last fifty-three years it has averaged 3.9% per year
So let’s say you started with $100 in 1950. Based on average inflation rates, it would have had to grow to $765 to have the same purchasing power in December 2002. Groceries (or anything else) worth $100 in 1950 cost $765 in December 2002. By next year they may cost $800. Fifty years from now they may cost $3,500.
Looking to the future, let’s say you have $200,000 that you put in a can and bury in your backyard. When you dig it up in twenty years, that money will be worth far less, perhaps only $100,000 in purchasing power. That’s why stuffing your cash under the mattress is such a poor idea, even if it doesn’t get stolen!

In such a situation the birds are completely unable to satisf’ one of the most basic and intense priorities of their nature, which is to develop a sense of social order and their place within it.
The results aren’t very pretty. Unable to establish any kind of social identity for themselves, the cooped-up animals fight constantly with each other. They are driven berserk by the lack of space and the complete frustration of their primal need for a social order. In their frustration they peck viciously at each other’s feathers, frequently try to kill one another and even try to eat each other alive. The industry takes note of these developments, but only in terms of its effect on profits.
“Feather-pecking and cannibalism easily become serious vices among birds kept under intensive conditions. They mean lower productivity and lost profits.”
Any behavior among chickens which threatens profits is known in the trade as a “vice,” a term that truly gives me pause. Where is the virtue in keeping birds in these conditions?
Since the animals insist on behaving like the proud and sensitive creatures they are, and trying even under these bizarre conditions to express their natural urges, the experts who manage today’s factory farms have to respond. They have to do something, because if very many of the birds kill each other money is lost, and that is the one thing they can’t let happen. They knowthat the birds’ berserk behavior arises out of the unnatural ways in which the birds are kept. So what do the factory managers do? Make the conditions even more unnatural, of course.
The preferred method in the industry today is to cut off part of the chickens’ beaks, a process known as “de-beaking.”6 This does nothing to reduce the conditions which drive the chickens so mad that they attack each other viciously. But it renders them incapable of doing much harm to company profits.
The people who run today’s poultry factories are not concerned that the process of cutting off part of the chickens’ beaks requires cutting through highly sensitive soft tissue, similar to the tender sensitive flesh under human fingernails and causes the animals severe pain. Nor do they mind the fact that they are crippling the animals, and cutting off the animals’ most important member. Today’s poultry producers are highiy satisfied with de-beaking. Employed almost universally in the industry today, this practice helps the producers to keep the chickens alive under the stressful, inhumane and overcrowded conditions which are the cause of the animals unnatural aggression and cannibalism in the first place.

The renowned English ethologist, Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, has written about today’s methods of raising hens in cages (also called “batteries”).
“Anyone who has studied the social life of birds carefully will know that theirs is a subtle and complex worl4 where food and waler are only a small part of their behavioral needs. The brain of each bird is programmed with a complicated set of drives and responses which set it on the path to a life full of special territorial, nestin&
roosting, grooming, parental, aggressive and sexual activities, ii
addition to the feeding behavior. All of these activities are totally denied the battery hs.”
Chickens are by nature highly social animals. In any kind of natural setting, be it a farmyard or the wild, they develop a social hierarchy, often known as a “pecking order.” Every bird yields, at the food trough and elsewhere, to those above it in rank, and takes precedence over those below.
The social order is extremely important to these birds. According to studies published in The New Scientist, chickens can maintain a stable pecking order, with each bird knowing all the others individually, and aware of its place among them, in flocks with up to 90 chickens.’ 3 Beyond 90 birds, however, things can get out of hand. Of course, in any kind of natural setting, flocks would never get nearly that large. But in today’s “chicken heavens,” flocks tend to be larger than the 90 bird limit.
How much larger? Poultry Digest reports that the flock size in a typical egg factory is 80,000 birds per warehouse!

Established in 1879 as the archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology, the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) is now a unit of the Department of Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History. It preserves papers of anthropologists, records of anthropological organizations (including certain Smithsonian units) and other documents of use to anthropologists. The Archives’ 7000 linear feet of field notes, photographs, correspondence, journals, sound recordings, and works of art are available for use through visits to the reading room and, as possible, through correspondence. Many Native Americans use the collection to study their cultural past.
Highlights include ethnological and linguistic documents concerning North American Indians collected by the Smithsonian Institution since the 1850’s and by federal geological surveys during the 1870’s.
George Gibbs, John Wesley Powell, and Franz Boas are among the very many anthropologists who contributed to the collection. Archaeological documents include materials of Cyrus Thomas’ survey of mounds east of the Rocky Mountains, periodic reports of the Work Projects Administration, and the records of the River Basin Surveys, as well as materials of individual archaeologists and a collection of so-called “grey” literature. There is also a large photograph collection of original glass film negatives and vintage prints, a relatively large collection of American Indian ledger book drawings, and other works of art, as well as a small but important collection of sound recordings, including material collected by John P. Harrington, James Henri Howard, and John Lyle Fischer.

Come to this great web site for complete information on anthropologist Margaret Mead and her centennial. Mead (1901 to 1978) contributed vastly to the field of anthropology. Her 44 books (among them the classic Coming of Age in Somoa) and more than 1 ,000 articles have been translated into virtually all languages. Her data has been carefully catalogued and preserved. She was the first anthropologist to study childrearing practices. Her work on learning theory and “Learning Through Imprinting,” a method by which children learn, is currently being studied further.  One of the founders of the “Culture and Personality School of Anthropology”, she was the first to conduct psychologically-oriented field work. She was instrumental in forging interdisciplinary links between anthropology and other fields. Her writings and lectures covered a vast array of important topics, what she called “Unmapped Councuments try”. She wrote on subjects ranging from mental and spiritual health to ethics and overpopulation. A strong proponent of family, she believed
that “Children are our vehicles for survival-for in them there is hope, and through them what has been, and what will be will not only be perly), petrated, but also united.” In addition to a full biography and bibliography, this site also includes links to online resources relating to Mead’s research, a guide to print and film archives, and more.

This web site hosted by the University of Kent’s Center for Social Anthropology and Computing (CASC) provides an extensive collection of resources and brilliantly crafted research studies. One highlight are the web pages belonging to Stephen Lyon—a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of Kent—was, until September 1999, doing fieldwork in a village in Pakistan. His web pages include an archive of weekly updates and monthly reports about his research and portions of his fieldnotes, together with music and other documents
created by villagers. Other resources include CSAC’s Resources for Anthropologists, CSAC’s Online Reading for Anthropologists, the IEFCE-funded “Experience Rich Anthropology Project,” the RAI Anthropology Today Calendar of Events (updated hi-monthly), and Paul Stirling’s “45 Years in the Turkish Village Archives.” Here you will also find interesting information on other CASC research projects including those that address sustainable semi-arid development, traditions of the Cook Islands, VIMS: The Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies, BLERBS: British Library Ethnographic Research on Bibliographic Services, texts of exploration, TAP: The Text Analysis Project, the Contrade System for exploring territory and identity, culture as distributed cognition, and the 1999 Eclipse Anthropology Project. The webmasters are Michael D. Fischer (an anthropologist who has worked mainly in the Punjab and Swat in Pakistan) and David Zeitlyn (Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Kent).