There were several factors that led to the downfall of the Tughlaq Empire. The Tughlaq empire was a Turkic dynasty of Delhi sultanate, whose reign started in the fourteenth century in Delhi. Around the year 1321, Ghiyas Tughlaq ascended the throne and was given the title Ghiyath al-Din Tughlaq. The Tughlaq dynasty was able to hold its rule because it had their strong allies like the Turks, Afghans and the Muslim warriors of south Asia. The Tughlaqs established the most extensive empire among the Delhi Sultanate. Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq took advantage of a previous conquest of the south and annexed a larger part of it. His son, Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, contributed most towards the extension of the Empire both as a prince and a Sultan. But the process of disintegration began during his reign. He became notorious for ill-advised policy experiments such as shifting the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad and introducing copper coins without effective regulation against forgery. Tughluqi has as a result become a synonym for brilliant if stubborn eccentricity in the Urdu language. The annexation of the south, the failures of Muhammad Tughlaq, the weakness of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the incompetence

of his successors, the incompetence and demoralization of the nobility, and the invasion of Timur were the chief factors responsible for the downfall of this vast Empire.

Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq waged a gruesome battle against Khusrao Khan, who killed the last Khilji ruler. His successful defense against the Mongols made him an able ruler and the founder of a dynasty in India. He conquered many areas including the eastern portion of Bengal, a huge territory. In addition, Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq adopted the policy of annexing the conquered territories of the south, which was p

of his successors, the incompetence and demoralization of the nobility, and the invasion of Timur were the chief factors responsible for the downfall of this vast Empire.

Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq waged a gruesome battle against Khusrao Khan, who killed the last Khilji ruler. His successful defense against the Mongols made him an able ruler and the founder of a dynasty in India. He conquered many areas including the eastern portion of Bengal, a huge territory. In addition, Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq adopted the policy of annexing the conquered territories of the south, which was p

d Tughlaq. But this measure was against the permanent interest of the empire. Because of the lack of efficient transportation, it was difficult for the rulers of the north to keep the south under control for long. Thus the south became independent during the later period of Muhammad Tughlaq. The conquest of the south brought no advantages to the Tughlaqs. On the contrary, it adversely affected the resources and the strength of the Empire.

One of the most controversial rulers in India, Mohammed bin Tughlaq was the successor of Ghazi Tughlaq. Under his rule, the empire spread and his reign grew. Many theorize that he was a brilliant person who had full command over mathematics and medicine. Yet, he was considered crazy by members of his court. He was known to mete out very cruel and brutal punishment to people who were found guilty of even small offenses. Eventually, Muhammad Tughlaq failed both in his internal and foreign policy. While Bengal and the south regained independence and the hold of the Delhi Sultanate became weak over Gujarat and Sindh, no significant territor

on, his policies and severe measures resulted in widespread revolts and further taxed the energy and resources of the empire.

Antitrust laws — statutes that supposedly keep any one firm or group of firms from dominating the marketplace — are thought by some to be the bulwark of free enterprise. These laws are founded on the idea that without the continued vig

. Collectively, such laws not only have a negative effect on economic efficiency, but also negatively affect the appropriate distribution of wealth and income in society and the allocation of political and consumer power and rights.

Often, antitrust laws are fluid, non-objective and retroactive. Because of murky statutes and conflicting case law, companies can never be sure what constitutes permissible behavior. Normal business practices — price discounts, product improvements and exclusive contracting — can somehow morph into an antitrust violation when examined by government antitrust regulators. Companies can be accused of monopolistic price gouging for charging more than their competitors, or accused of predatory pricing for charging less, or accused of collusion for charging the same.

In one of the most brazen examples of misuse of antitrust laws for competitive and strategic benefit, Digital Equipment Corp. filed a lawsuit against Intel in 1990, when the firm`s attempt to persuade Intel to incorporate Digital Equipment`s technology as part of its next-generation chip design ended in failure. Alpha, then Digital`s flagship product, was at the time the fastest chip in the industry. In spite of Alpha`s relative superiority, more computers, including computers manufactured by Digital itself, employed Intel`s lower-powered Pentium chip than Digital`s counterpart. In 1997, Digital threatened Intel with antitrust action in a bold attempt to reposition itself in the computer industry. Robert B. Palmer, Digital`s chief executive, denied analysts` suggestions that the lawsuit was in fact a veiled strategic effort to prevent Intel from developing competing technology in the microprocessor market.

The origin of life remains one of the world's greatest mysteries even to this day. Several theories have attempted to explain this phenomenon, but thus far, there has been no conclusive evidence to support one theory over another. One of the most popular theories is the primordial soup theory. This model purports that all life on the planet was created out of a “primordial soup." Oparin and Haldane, the scientists who developed this model, hypothesized that all life forms originated in a warm pond or ocean from a combination of chemicals that created amino acids. All the building blocks of life were already available in the atmosphere. These molecules were then “energized” by lightning, and combined to form amino acids which, in turn, folded into complex proteins. The first organisms to evolve were simple heterotrophs, which survived by consuming other organisms. Theoretically, this is plausible. Miller and Urey, in 1950, carried out a rather famous experiment to test this theory. They mixed gases believed to have been present in the primordial atmosphere and then energized the mixture with an electric spark. They discovered that all 20 amino acids could be produced in this manner.

However, there are several major flaws in this theory. First, the formation of proteins from amino acids is an extremely complex process. There are over a trillion ways amino acids can combine to form proteins, and hitting upon the right protein by accident is extremely improbable. Moreover, the primordial soup would have been way too diluted to achieve anything. In short, there is just too much left to chance. As one critic put it, “What are the chances that a monkey playing with an old typewriter will accidentally type out a bestseller?” An alternative theory is that life originated deep underground, not in a water body. One could argue that “superbugs," which are present in deep soil even today, were the first life forms to evolve. They may have originated as microbes thriving on intense heat. However, there has been no satisfactory account of how these superbugs evolved from a mass of chemical compounds.

Another hypothesis is that life did not originate on the earth at all. The Panspermia theory suggests that life seeds came from outer space. This theory has found considerable support, as it explains the sudden spurt in life forms after millions of years of nothingness. Also, statistics show that 7.5% of rocks from Mars reach earth. Such rocks, from Mars or elsewhere, could have transported bacteria, which can easily survive the harsh environs of space. After all, there is evidence that meteorites contain amino acids and bacteria. Panspermia states that these meteorites carried bacteria, amino acids, methane and carbon. These substances were then deposited on earth, either in warm oceans or underground, and eventually grew into simple life forms. This theory merits further research because it has potential to explain not only the origin of life on earth, but also prove the presence of life beyond the earth.

By far the most common cause of hair loss in men is androgenetic alopecia, also referred to as “male pattern” or “common” baldness. It is caused by the effects of the male hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT) on genetically susceptible scalp hair follicles. This sensitivity to DHT is present mainly in hair follicles that reside in the front, top, and crown of the scalp (rather than the back and sides), producing a characteristic and easily identifiable pattern.

It is frequently stated that “hair loss comes from the mother's side of the family.” The truth is that baldness can be inherited from either parent. However, recent research suggests that the reasons for hair loss and balding may be a bit more complex than originally thought. Factors on the X-chromosome have been shown to influence hair loss, making the inheritance from the maternal side of the family slightly more important than the paternal one. The identification of an androgen receptor gene (AR) on the X-chromosome helps to explain why the hair loss pattern of a man resembles his maternal grandfather more often than his father. However, this is clearly not the whole story since a direct inheritance of baldness from the father is observed as well. An autosomal (non-sex) linked gene would explain this type of transmission — but this gene has not yet been found.

DHT is formed by the action of the enzyme 5-alpha reductase on testosterone, the hormone that causes sex characteristics in men. DHT causes male hair loss by shortening the growth, or the anagen, phase of the hair cycle, causing miniaturization of the follicles, and producing progressively shorter, finer hairs. Eventually these hairs totally disappear.

      Despite views that globalization has reached its peak, a period beginning in the nineteenth century and extending into the early-twentieth century, in fact, is the interval during which international barriers to trade fell most steeply, as can be seen in the case of price convergence in commodities. The prices of cloves, pepper, and coffee failed to converge between Amsterdam and East Asia or between England and India from as far back as 1580 but began in 1820 to draw closer. Similarly, the difference in wheat prices in the United States and England fell from one hundred percent in the early-nineteenth century to negligible levels late in the century and to no difference at all in the early-twentieth century. A similar story unfolded during this period for bacon, cotton, and rice.

     Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have summarized the price gaps in commodity markets between continents as evolving in three phases. From 1820 to 1914, these gaps fell by 81 percent; they attribute 72 percent of this decline to cheaper transport and 28 percent to trade policies. Second, during the wartime period of 1914 to 1950, the gaps doubled, due to a reversal in trade policies. Finally, from 1950 to 2000, they fell again by 76 percent, ending up 92 percent lower than in 1820, with about four-fifths of the total change attributable to cheaper transport and one-fifth to more favorable trade policies.

     Trade data for this period are typically articulated in terms of ratio of total trade volume to gross domestic product, since commodity price information is not universally available. These ratios in many advanced economies were higher in the mid-1990s than in the early 1900s, but not by much. In Japan, notably, the percentage of GDP for which trade accounted in 1995 was 17 percent, far under its 1910 level of 30 percent, as measured in current prices. Sure enough, the ratios have risen somewhat in other economies over that same time period—by 13 percentage points in the United Kingdom, 8 points in France, and from 11 percent to 24 percent in the United States; this latter spike may explain why the attention to globalization has been especially acute in America. These increases, nevertheless, are modest given the fact that the world economy grew roughly twice as quickly in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth.

     The ratios above, and hence the substantiation for the argument that globalization peaked a century ago, grow much more dramatically if they are computed in constant prices rather than in current prices, because the prices of goods relative to services fell due to sustained increases in productivity in the sectors producing these goods. Trade has grown most in those sectors in which prices have most strikingly fallen, so the proportions of GDP in constant prices have risen more than those in current prices.

     The study of climate change has established retreating glaciers and rising global temperatures from a number of data sources. Establishing the influence of mankind upon these effects has been more difficult, because the climate is subject to oscillations that are much longer in duration than our record of direct temperature measurements, which extends back only about 150 years.      By drilling and conducting chemical and physical studies of ice cores on six of the seven continents, scientists have developed a method of estimating climatic information that had previously been thought inaccessible. Ice cores removed from the earth's crust and studied in order to draw such inferences are termed paleo-proxies. The values of various climatic variables at a particular time and place can be inferred through some form of proxy analysis in a given ice core sample. For example, deuterium excess indicates humidity levels, electrical conductivity indicates volcanic activity, beryllium levels indicate solar activity, and particle size and concentration indicate wind speeds. Temperature, in particular, can be inferred from the ratios of water molecules composed of stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen, namely 1H2H16O and 1H218O. Because molecules consisting of these isotopes have slightly different weights than their more common counterparts, their concentration in the ice core in a given epoch depends on the condensation temperature prevailing at the time. This technique enables scientists to estimate the air temperature of condensation when the snow fell and establish variations in temperature over a series of multiple samples.      One advantage of using ice cores as a paleo-proxy is that ice core samples can be extracted from across the world using different drilling techniques, for analysis either on-site or in a laboratory, with results that can be compared to each other and stitched into a coherent global picture. The primary sources of ice cores are the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, whose thickness allows scientists to extract long cores representing time spans of up to 100,000 or even 400,000 years. Nevertheless, samples representing spans of multiple centuries have been extracted more recently at low latitudes--for example, at Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes Mountains, and on the Himalayan plateau. Depending on the objectives of the project and the nature of the ice core, scientists use a variety of types of drill ranging from hand-powered auger drill to electro-mechanical drills. A limitation of using ice cores is that they represent data for conditions during snowfall only. Periods bereft of snowfall will fail to leave a record in the ice and can even disrupt the essential step of dating the samples. To mitigate this problem, multiple cores are typically extracted from nearby locations. A more critical limitation of the ice core method, one indicative of the larger problem at hand, is that as ice fields continue to retreat, the ability to measure in some locations will disappear entirely.  

     Two historians of the First World War both depict women as taking up roles previously reserved for men, but they differ slightly in the significance they ascribe to these unprecedented but temporary wartime duties. Gail Braybon describes the war as a liberating experience for many women. Although women working in munitions factories were subject to new dangers, such as explosions and trinitrotoluene poisoning, they were mindful of and proud of supporting the war effort, whether or not they considered the broader significance of their actions. Joshua Goldstein too describes a sense of freedom in women but emphasizes that it was short-lived. Although the war bent gender roles, it did not lessen hostility to women in traditionally male jobs, increase compensation for female labor, or uproot the notion that home life was a strictly female responsibility. Braybon might reply by noting that, while other changes were slower in coming, some women suffragists supported the war and women's role in it to further their cause, and this may indeed have contributed to the advent of women's right to vote after the war, even by Goldstein's account. Perhaps more central to Braybon's position is that the liberation that women experienced during the war was one of sentiment and therefore made no less real by the lack of accompanying widespread reform. Furthermore, even though the spirit of liberation must have faded with the end of the war, it might have lived on in a latent form and ultimately contributed to the formation of the women's movement.    

     One strain of historical thought that achieved popularity in the 1950s forwarded the notion that immigration - more than the frontier experience, or any other specific event or factor - had been and continued to be the defining element of United States history. In this depiction, the 30 million immigrants who entered the country between 1820 and 1900 had common experiences regardless of their national, religion, or race: namely, in experiencing hardship and alienation, they themselves changed, but they also carried on the development of the nation itself.      Both casual and formal students of history should, however, be careful in equating the experiences of different groups of immigrants, especially under the somewhat blurring concept of "hardship." The description that all immigrants experienced hardship and immigration fails to account properly for the fact that in the 17th and 18th century millions of Africans were forcibly shipped to the United States and sold into slavery. While this group of people should not be excluded from any full reckoning of the nation's migrants, its alienation and hardship was of a substantially different character from that of the other populations, who migrated more willingly and independently and who arrived under and lived in vastly different conditions. If it is, indeed, the degree of hardship and alienation experienced by the different groups of our nation's migrants that have above all shaped both themselves and their nation, then to ignore these distinctions would be to distort an important element of what our nation has been shaped to be.    

     The release of accumulated stress at a particular point during an earthquake alters the shear and normal stresses along the tectonic plate boundary and surrounding fault lines. According to geophysical theory, the Coulomb Failure Stress Change, which is the estimated alteration and resultant transfer of shear and normal stresses along a plate margin, is a function of change in shear stress along a fault and secondarily the change in normal stress along a fault and the change in pore pressure in the fault zone, the latter two factors scaling according to the friction coefficient characteristic to the plate margin.     By measuring and calculating the stress transfer following seismic activity, it is possible to subsequently construct basic contour maps of regions where there have been positive stress changes and are therefore of higher risk of being potential epicenters of future large earthquakes. Calculations have revealed that when an earthquake occurs, approximately 80% of the energy is released as seismic waves, whereas the remaining 20% is stored and transferred to different locations along the fault, making those specific regions more susceptible to future earthquakes.     Predicting earthquakes by using the theory of stress transfer has important potential applications. The main rival technique for forecasting, the statistical analysis of patterns in seismic activity, suffers from a contradiction. Foreshocks are deemed evidence of the potential for a future high-magnitude earthquake, but the lack of foreshocks along faults known to be active has been considered an equally plausible potential precursor for large events.     The stress transfer theory has been used to predict the location of a magnitude 7.4 earthquake that occurred two years later in the port city of Izmit, Turkey, killing more than 30,000 people. A limitation of the theory as currently applied, due to insufficient understanding of plate kinematics, is that refining predictions with temporal constraints appears to be far more problematic; the team that gave the Izmit prediction had forecast an event near the city within thirty years.    

     How aquatic vertebrates evolved into land vertebrates has been difficult for evolutionary biologists to study, in part because the shift from water to land appears to have occurred rapidly and has thus has yielded a scarce fossil record. Prior to the advent of DNA sequencing, the primary guideposts in tracing the emergence of tetrapods had been morphological considerations, which highlighted the coelacanth and the lungfish as species of interest.      Coelacanths and lungfish are distinct from other fish in that they are lobe-finned species. Lobe-finned species, like ray-finned fishes such as tuna and trout, possess not cartilage but a bony skeleton, a key prerequisite for survival on land. Lobe-finned fish species are distinguished from ray-finned species by fins that are joined to a single bone, and which thus have the potential to evolve into limbs. Coelacanths and lungfish are two of the only lobe-finned species that are not extinct, and since they have evolved minimally since the time of the appearance of tetrapods, they are sometimes referred to as "living fossils." In fact, the first live coelacanth was discovered more than 100 years after the species had been discovered in fossilized form.      Whether the coelacanth in particular is rightly called a living fossil and whether it is the closest living relative of the original tetrapods are two questions that have been illuminated recently by genetic analysis. The coelacanth's sequenced genome, and this analysis has led to the conclusion that the lungfish is the closer relative of tetrapods. Moreover, coelacanth DNA has shown evolution over time, although at a rate much slower than that of most animals. The fish's morphology and its environment deep in the Indian Ocean may have created favorable conditions, allowing a more slowly evolving species to have survived for the last 400 million years.    

     Physical theory implies that the existence of astronomical entities above a certain mass is evidence for the existence of black holes. The Earth does not itself collapse upon itself under gravitational force because gravity is countered by the outward pressure generated by the electromagnetic repulsion between the atoms making up the planet. But if these forces are overpowered, gravity will always lead to the formation of a black hole. Assuming the validity of general relativity, we can calculate the upper bound for a star, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, to be 3.6 solar masses; any object heavier than this will be unable to resist collapse under its own mass and must be a black hole.     The search for entities more massive than the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit brings us to the examination of X-ray binary systems. In an X-ray binary, two bodies rotate around their center of mass, a point between them, while one component, usually a normal star, sheds matter to the other more massive component known as the accretor. The shedding matter is released as observable X-ray radiation. Since binary stars rotate around a common center of gravity, the mass of the accetor can be calculated from the orbit of the visible one. By 2004, about forty X-ray binaries that contained candidates for black holes had been discovered. The accretors in these binary systems did not appear visible, as is to be expected of black holes, but that fact alone does not distinguish them from very dense and hence less luminescent stars, such as neutron stars. More to the point is that these accretors were of mass far in excess of 3.6 solar masses. Famously, Cygnus X-1, an X-ray binary in the constellation Cygnus, has an accretor whose mass has been calculated to be 14 solar masses, plus or minus 4 solar masses. While it does not rule out other phenomena without further interpretation, it provides strong proof that black holes exist.     The conclusion that black holes exist depends on the reliability of the general-relativistic calculations involved. If more generous assumptions are made, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit can be calculated to be as high as 10 solar masses. The finding also establishes plausibility, if not direct evidence, for the existence of supermassive black holes hypothesized to exist at the center of some galaxies.  

     In the realm of the psychology of decision-making, the role of expert intuition is under attack. People's inclination is to trust intuition and to point to many examples, across various disciplines, in which experts are able to make difficult judgments in seemingly negligible amounts of time. But this trust of intuition has been undermined by the research of other psychologists who have taken care to expose and document thoroughly the cognitive biases that can impede both our use of intuition and our ability to judge the use of intuition in a broader sense. How, then, can we know when expert intuition is to be trusted?      Gary Klein's research has provided a basis on which to establish how expert intuition, also known as naturalistic decision making, works at its best, which it does according to a recognition-primed decision model. One of his studies examined the thought process of experienced fireground commanders, the leaders of firefighter teams. One finding was that fireground commanders do not only consider a small number of options in deciding how to approach a firefighting situation; they tend to consider only one option. When presented with a situation, the commander was observed to think of one option spontaneously and then mentally simulate acting on that proposed course of action to see whether it would work. More specifically, Klein formulated the recognition-primed decision model as occurring in two steps. In the first step, a tentative plan comes to the mind of the expert by an automatic function of associative memory; the situation provides one or more clues recognized by the expert. Second, the plan is mentally simulated to see whether it will work.      When, then, can expert intuition be tested? Klein's model implies that the successful application of expert intuition will be limited to circumstances in which situational clues are reproduced and can be recognized over time. Situational regularity and individual memory are critical components of success. Reliable intuition is primarily — and, arguably, nothing more than — recognition. By this somewhat controversial inference, intuition is essentially memory. Consequently, all cases in which we might anticipate expert intuition to be valid are not equally conquerable by this faculty. Some environments may not be sufficiently regular to be predictable, and, of course, even in regular environments, the presumed expert must draw on a sufficient depth of practice. We can conclude, for example, that if a dedicated stock picker is to make judgments as skilled as those of a dedicated chess player, that person will do so not by relying primarily on intuition. One might note that, with or without intuition, it is incumbent on any true expert to know the limits of his or her knowledge.    

     The outsourcing of production factories to locations overseas from companies' home countries has been a hallmark practice of multinational brands since the 1990s and is lauded by some economists as advancing the well-being of people in both the home country and the production country. However, not all of the benefits attributed to this globalization practice necessarily accrue, and there are concerns about outsourcing that are not readily addressed within the formulations of economic theory. First, a home company that separates its brand and its product as completely as possible and places the brand as paramount hardly sends a message that product quality is central to its operations; more likely, all of its innovation attempts will focus on branding, and such a company will settle with a product that is merely (and maybe barely) good enough. Dismissing this point, economists may cite the law of comparative advantage: outsourcing allows both companies involved to pursue greater profit and well-being according to their capabilities. Specifically, workers in the companies of manufacture should be paid more than they would be paid otherwise, even if they are paid less than factory workers in the original country; meanwhile, workers in the home country should be pushed to increase their skills and education and move to higher-skill jobs that are less available in the country of manufacture. Whether displaced workers in the home country acquire skills and make this shift in any reasonable timeframe is hardly demonstrated, however, and while outsourcing may create value by lowering costs, it has been asserted that workers in the countries of production are making no more after outsourcing than previously and hence in effect are enjoying none of the new profit. The CEO of one outsourcing company, when pressed on this point by a reporter, explained that, as the employees of those factories were not employees of his company, he could not be responsible for them. He asked the reporter whether journalists should be expected to know, and be responsible for, the manufacturing conditions of the paper on which their articles are printed. This comment, as much as it defends corporations, highlights the broadest form of worry about outsourcing: in global supply chains with increasingly distant and opaque connections, responsibility is too easy to shirk and maybe even impossible to determine.  

     Billions of people in the world suffer from water scarcity. The problem is not a lack of suitable water in the world; it is an uneven distribution of that water—an uneven distribution, to be more exact, of the resources and facilities needed to manage water, as well as the natural sources of water themselves. It has been estimated that a billion people lack access to potable water, and 2.4 billion lack access to the basic sanitation that is necessary for basic water usage.      In the case of the domestic shortage of water, which is small in demand relative to commercial uses of water, the problem is not so much that there are no water resources, but that those without water lack the political and financial capital to access that water. Granted, natural forces do play a role. In regions of need, terrestrial water resources may be distributed quite unevenly, leaving large populations at great distances without such sources, and rainwater may fall only sporadically throughout the course of a given year. In such regions, making water accessible is costlier and may require considerable investment in infrastructure.      I would like to propose a radical measure to address water shortage, especially in African countries. I suggest that multinational soft drink companies be given incentives to enter the countries afflicted by water shortage and invest in the development of the water infrastructure. This proposal is not as absurd as it may first sound. First of all, most major soft drink companies nowadays are also in the business of selling bottled water; they have expertise in purification and other relevant knowledge areas. Second, the soft drink industry is among the very first industries to penetrate and profit in emerging markets, because of the general appeal and low price of their product. Moreover, the more a given economy develops, the more that particular soft drink provider stands to profit. In other words, soft drink companies have both the capability to help and some interest to operate in a given country that needs assistance.      You may object that soft drink companies already would have entered a country to help if they had seen benefit in doing so. That critique may be true, but it does not necessarily mean that a company could not be driven to action through direct financial incentives, partial ownership of constructed infrastructure, assistance from international organizations and pressure from more developed neighboring countries in which that company already has an entrenched interest. Moreover, to the criticism that infrastructure building is the work of governments, not companies, there is a valid response: partnerships between governments and corporations have thrived for centuries in major projects and could benefit both the people and involved corporations in this case, as well.

     The stock market tends to move in response to the monthly release of the U.S. consumer confidence index (CCI), signaling that individuals make investment decisions on the basis of this information. Such behavior is mostly irrational. The CCI is generally understood to be a lagging indicator; by the time the CCI has been released, the stock market should have already reflected the latest adjustments to its prices based on consumer sentiment. Furthermore, the CCI, to the degree that it reflects on the stock market, reflects only on the stock market as a whole, not on individual stocks. The questions that make up the CCI, indeed, gauge individual levels of confidence about factors, such as employment rates, that should have little direct bearing on most individual stocks relative to other factors. To dampen the influence of the CCI on the stock market, the Conference Board, the nonprofit group that reveals the information each month, should adjust its timetable in order to publish the CCI outside of stock market hours. In that case, the impact of the CCI on stock market prices would be smoothed and would be more likely to reflect individual investors' business estimates, rather than their animal whims.    

   M31, M32, and M33 are members of the Local Group, an assemblage of more than 54 galaxies in the neighborhood of the Milky Way, the galaxy which contains our solar system. Like the Milky Way, M31 and M33 are spiral galaxies, whereas M32 is a dwarf elliptical galaxy. Of the three, M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is the largest, with a mass that has been estimated in recent studies to be equal to or greater than that of the Milky Way. Comprised primarily of older faint stars, M32 is a substantially smaller galaxy and a satellite of Andromeda. M33, known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is more distant and less massive than Andromeda and is believed to have collided with that galaxy in the past.      The attributes of these four galaxies may reflect their past interactions and are likely to shape future encounters. For example, astronomers are not currently sure how M32's compact ellipsoid shape took form, but they suspect that M32 may have had a spiral shape earlier that was transformed by a tidal field from Andromeda into its current elliptical shape. Meanwhile, Triangulum and Andromeda are connected by a stream of hydrogen and stars, which is evidence that the two galaxies have interacted in the past between 2 and 8 billion years ago. Finally, among the trio M31, M33 and the Milky, every pair is potentially on a collision course compelled by gravity. Triangulum might be ripped apart and absorbed by M31, it might collide with the Milky Way before the latter has any violent interaction with Andromeda, or it might participate in the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is expected to occur in about 4 billion years.