Prices for plastic for the last 6 month have gone up from 40 to 50% due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, higher gas prices and insufficient amounts of raw materials. Resin, made out of natural gas, is a major raw material in plastic industry. Plastic is used as a packaging material in almost every industry.

However, consumers do not see the increase in prices for products in plastic packaging because it is the middle of the season and producers do not want to disturb the market price. That is why it is more costly now for producers to use plastic as a packaging material. Higher prices for plastic prices are decreasing producers’ income. The increase in price for plastic made out of natural gas gave a push to alternative methods of producing plastic.

Switzerland consumes on average 22 pounds of chocolate per person a year; Norway-17 pounds per peerson, America-10 pounds per person a year.
According to statistics, people usually eat chocolate between 8 p.m. and midnight. And it does seem to be logical: chocolate is usually eaten for desert.

Have you ever heard people say that they were craving for some chocolate or that they can’t imagine their lives without chocolate, or that they are very upset and need some chocolate? I’ve always wanted to know why chocolate make people happy. Why do adults love chocolate as much as children? What kind of power does chocolate have?

According to the new survey done by Grocery Manufactures of America 49% of respondents indicated that a familiar brand name was the first or the second most important element when making a purchase in the supermarket. And 67% of respondents said that they would “chase the brand” to a different store if it was not available.

"Home is where we start from, but home is also where we are bound for, the place we always seek.”
David Steindl-Rast

It is probably easy to say for people who have lived in the same area for a while where their home is. For some people it may be a place where they grew up, or a place where their parents live, or a place where they live now or where they lived at a particular time. It can be a house, a place, a country or a state. But for some people it is hard to say where their home is, or hard to say which place they consider to be their home.

U.S. Savings Rate reached zero in July 2005.

Who cares how much people spent as long as they buy different goods and services; it makes the economy work. This is a response that many people would give if they were told the fact. Well, that is partially true: there would not be as many services and goods in the stores available if we spent nothing and saved most of our income. Yes, it looks like consumption is one of the mechanisms that are causing the production to grow. But that is not the only “side of the coin.”

US trade deficit , when import of the country exceeds its export, has gone up. According to NPR in September it went more then 11% up. A lot of people may argue that it is happening due to the damage that was caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. And they are right but those disasters are not the only reasons why trade deficit went up.

According to Credit Card Debt Statistics:
-" More than 40% of American families spend more than they earn. (Federal Reserve)
- Americans pay, on average, an 18.9% interest rate on credit cards.
-Approximately 185 million American consumers have at least one credit card.
- Americans pay, on average, an 18.9% interest rate on credit cards.

According to Pew Internet & American Life Project more then half of teenagers (57%) that are using internet have created some kind of online content. It is either they created a webblog, a web page,posted a story,or ceated online video or downloaded music from the Internet.

Joe Loong in his article Teens Like Blogs says that 19% of teenagers have created blogs as opposed to only 7% of adults. A lot of teens as he says are “engaged in risky business (embedded video)” and are “revealing too much information”.

According to the article nearly one-third (29 percent) of adults ages 25 to 55 who said they were in a committed relationship ( married, engaged or living with a partner) said they had been dishonest about their spending habits. Cash was named by 26% of men and 26% of women to be the best method they are most likely to use in hiding money from the spouse.Looks like people seem to agree that financial infidelity is really bad. But do people not need some freedom? Looking at it from a different prospective may help decide whether it is correct.

There have been some research that Americans tend to stay longer and longer on the same jobs. An average 35 or 40 year old person has been on the same job for around ten years.
What is the reason for it? Competition got stronger, people stopped liking changes, job satisfaction improved, economical situation changed? Maybe a little bit of everything? This topic made me think about job satisfaction. What does it mean to be satisfied with your job?

Wingless, half a centimeter long, flat, oval-shaped body, six legs, light brown in color, changing to rust–red after a meal of blood, squat head large antennae, large mandibles, or mouth parts. This is what the bedbugs look like. They are the little creatures that people find in their homes. According to the article Bedbugs live not only in the dirty houses, but sometimes also in the clean ones.But can you imagine that the bedbugs are the only creatures that live in beds!

There have been a lot arguments about whether or not fish is harmful. Looks like people have agreed on one thing: different kinds of fish are harmful differently. But there is still a lot of discussing as to how bad it is for one’s health and what should people do about it.

What people can’t decide is which one has more influence: the negative effect of mercury or the positive effect of omega-3 fatty acids. A form of mercury, methyl mercury, is said to impair cognitive development in unborn children and lower their IQ. Omega-3 fatty acids protect adults from heart disease and strokes. Many scientists are still trying to figure out what has a bigger influence on the organism.

How many times have you heard people say that they were annoyed by their brothers or sisters? Probably many. Have you ever met siblings that live without quarrels with each other? Well, If you did, then probably not a lot of times. The most usual situation however is that siblings have trouble sharing parents' love, attention, common belongings, friends and responsibilities.

If you do have siblings then you probably wished at least ones in you life that you were the only child in the family. But in most occasions when you did wish that, you were probably mad at him or her.

How many people have ever told you that soft drinks are very harmful for your health? If it is harmful, how bad is it?
After reading some of the discussion articles people get confused as to what harms are caused by soft drinks and what harms are not. Very many people have blamed soft drinks for being one of the causes of obesity, tooth decay, caffeine dependence and bone weakening.
But are soft drinks really a cause of all those negative outcomes? Or maybe soft drinks are blamed only because there is nothing else to blame?

Hybrid cars, cars that have both electric motor and an engine, have been a center of attention of a lot of people recently. We know that hybrid cars save gas, but do they save money?

Some economists calculated the total amount a person could save on gas during a year and compared that amount (saved on the gas) to the amount of money one could spend on a hybrid car( the difference between buying a regular car and a hybrid car).

There has been done some research on how to manage pain especially of young patients in the hospitals. One of the old methods of distracting from pain is rubber ball. But because it is really hard to concentrate on the ball when there are a lot of busy doctors and nurses, worried parents, the rubber ball is not working as well as it was supposed to.

After the prices for gas have gone up a lot of people have been thinking about the issue of driving more efficiently. What can you do to be able to drive longer with the same ammount of gas?
There have been posted some driving tips that could be very halpful. Some of them are: drive sensibly, observe the speed limits, remove excess weight, avoid excessive idling and use overdrive gears. Most of them do make sense.

Last night I had a conversation with my roomate about how much water a person needs to drink a day. During my whole life I've heared a lot that drinking water is very important for you health. Every person has a certain amount of waster in his/her body. After each meal body needs water to help digestion. If the body does not get the needed amount of water it gets it somewhere else- mostly from the brain.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have changed people's lives very much. The disasters themselves brought a lot of grief and sorrow. People died, cities and towns got destroyed, lives ruined...
Every person on the planet that is aware of these events has changed one way or another.
For some poeple that change is a loss of family. For others-loss of relatves and friends, others -loss of homes. Even those who did not loss anyone or anything have been affected by the loss of others.

For some people it has always been hard to stay on the track of healthy way of eating. It is not rare nowadays to hear people say that they would like to eat healthy food but they do not really have time to cook. And we know that for a good meal to taste good one has to spent a lot of time cooking it (or maybe you can go to expensive restaurant, which does not happen everyday to most people). So we just end up cooking something fast or getting out of the freezer something frozen and putting it into the microwave.

People who like sweets find it sometimes really hard to stay away from cookies, cakes, chocolate, candy. I am one of those people. Sweets make my day. Sometimes I think of cookies as of "medicine". It always make me feel better when I am sad. It Is also a good coffee substitute. When i feel sleepy -it wakes me up. But even after all those nice things cookies are still considered to be "unhealthy".

We have been hearing a lot of complaints about the rise of the prices for gasoline. Some people are even wondering whether these companies are taking advantage of the disaster and trying to make as much profit as possible.
There has been a disscussion on the NPR about all this. A lot of economists say that the increase in price has been caused by the fact that the number of refineries were taken out of business.There is still 4 refineries that are not working yet. As the result of this we have less supply of the gas. This points out that more money should be invested into building new refineries.

How many times have you noticed that when you see someone yawning you start doing it yourself, or if even you see a picture of a yawning person you feel like yawning too? I do not know about you, but I've seen that a lot of times. It is one of the things that we kind of always knew about but at the same time do not know for sure.
Are we doing that because we are tired? If yes, than why do we yawn sometimes after waking up in the morning and feeling fresh? Or maybe the reason is that we do not breathe as deeply as we are supposed too. The other possible reason could be that it is some kind of a reflex that human beeings have and which has some kind of a function we do not know about?

People have been concerned with the prices for fuel recently.That is why we started noticing different articles about alternative fuels. One of them is about E85, which has 85 per cent ethanol and only 15 per cent gasoline in it. The number of gas station that offer this particular kind of fuel has increased. There is also a large number of cars that can use E85, even though their owners do not always know about their cars' capasity. Even though this product is not perfect it has certain advantages: E85 is about 40-50 per cent cheaper than regular gasoline and is invironmentally friendly.The fact that the car runs a shorter distance per gallon of E85 than that of per gallon of gasoline does not seem to be a big deal when you look at the advantages first. So, maybe that would not be a bad idea if tried new substitutes for gasoline. Addiyional information about E85 can be found at National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition.

Have you ever thought why people actually blog? I do not know about you but I had thought about it before taking CSem “Web of Influence” and I am thinking about it now. The only difference is that before this class started I thought that blogging was just a complete wasting of time. In my mind I searched for the reasons why I should not be doing it. I came up with a lot of ideas what a person could do instead of sitting in front of the computer and either writing about something or reading someone else’s notes . In general an average person spends at least an hour writing blogs and searching for the information.

Communities I belong to…
This does not look like a hard question but I guess I never thought about it.
I think people belonging to the same community always have something in common; there is always something they share. A community is not only a number of people that live in the neighbourood. That something that they have in common is the reason why different communities exist. The reason can be different. It can be a religion, some kind of interest, food preference, common work place… For example people that like the same kind of music or the same kind of art usually visit the same concerts; people who like coffee usually like drinking it in a company. By doing so they create new communities. People who have similar interests also create clubs. Club is an example of a community too, even though it seems to be too small. Usually those that are sharing something in common communicate with each other, stay in contact.