Word: hitting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...microloans taking a hit due to the recession? Katie Malone, Point Marion, Pa. We use very local money that is going to the local poor, so there is no way the hit taken by the financial centers of the world could be transmitted to us. We don't see fluctuations in repayment rates or anything like that. We are O.K. (Read "People Who Mattered: Muhammad Yunus...
...Wikipedia's joyride to last forever. Since its inception in 2001, the user-written online encyclopedia has expanded just as everything else online has: exponentially. Up until about two years ago, Wikipedians were adding, on average, some 2,200 new articles to the project every day. The English version hit the 2 million - article mark in September 2007 and then the 3 million mark in August 2009 - surpassing the 600-year-old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia as the largest collection of general knowledge ever compiled (well, at least according to Wikipedia's entry on itself...
There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia's slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else - well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial" - making sure that articles are well formatted and readable...
...joined the Rockefeller Foundation's effort to conquer hunger in Mexico. At the time, agricultural researchers were enhancing crop yields by bombing plants with nitrogen fertilizer. But they eventually discovered that the process made seed heads grow so big they would collapse in the field. Nature seemed to have hit a wall...
...help with the mortgage, a movement to make supersize homes cozier is bubbling up. Architect Sarah Susanka, a small-house advocate, is finding that people are interested in making modifications, like lowering ceilings, to create more intimacy. Mathieu Gallois, who came up with the McMansion-splitting project in Australia, hit on the idea while visiting a 4,000-sq.-ft. home and feeling that with everyone in his or her own room, the family had been "atomized" - and that someone should do something about...