people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

"These are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "

The Kruskal count shows how seemingly unconnected or unrelated chains of events can lock together after a while. Such counterintuitive processes underlie many amazing coincidences and startling predictions. They're what the magician has up his sleeve.

for all the talk of an information economy, ultimately an economy must serve consumers -- and consumers don't want information, they want tangible goods. In particular, the billions of Third World families who finally began to have some purchasing power as the 20th century ended did not want to watch pretty graphics on the Internet -- they wanted to live in nice houses, drive cars, and eat meat.