The Alabama Department of Environmental Management reported the Alabama Recycling Fund Grants program has received grants totaling $1.1 million.The Alabama Recycling Fund was created after Gov.
An August 2009 study by the Retirement Systems of Alabama concluded if people with Prepaid Affordable College Tuition accounts were paid full benefits, the funds would be depleted by 2016 if the economy continues as predicted.However, the study said the funds could be depleted as early as 2014.Established in 1990, the PACT program promised benefits to all account holders through 2032.There are currently more than 45,000 account holders, and almost 20,000 are eligible to use the benefits.The most recent actuarial study showed the liabilities for the program are $917 million, and the assets are only $571 million, which leaves a $345 million deficit.Liabilities refer to how much money PACT needs to operate."An actuarial report is a snapshot of a situation where you are measuring assets and liabilities on a given day," said Alabama State Treasurer Kay Ivey.Ivey said on any given day the fund could pay for only 62 percent of students with its current assets."There will never be enough money in this moment to provide for tuition for all of those students without some kind of funding mechanism to pay the tuition over the short time until the corpus of $571 million can grow when the market grows," Ivey said.PACT was pioneered in 1990 by Lt.
A study by the Parents Television Council found that TV violence against women has increased by 120 percent since 2004, while TV violence in general has only increased 2 percent during the same time period.PTC analysts reviewed hundreds of hours of videotapes, observing trends in prime-time television from February 2004 to May 2009.Most major networks, such as CBS, NBC and Fox, showed dramatic increase in violence against women, 92 percent of which was graphically depicted instead of described or implied.ABC was the only network that did not show a significant increase in violence against women during the last five years.Although most female victims were adults, the depiction of teen girls as victims increased 400 percent on all networks.Melissa Henson, PTC's senior director of programs, said she thinks these findings were unsurprising."We did a study from 1998 to 2006 that showed there had already been a huge jump in violence on TV," Henson said.Henson said she thinks the sudden increase in violence could be the result of a general migration of TV programs away from the traditional 30-minute shows toward longer-lasting, higher-intensity reality shows and dramas.Advances in technology and special effects make it more appealing to implement violence into TV shows, Henson said."They are including more violence because they're able to take advantage of these technologies," Henson said.
The results of a study conducted at University College London said when a group of people are placed in a dark, silent room, many start hallucinating after just a few minutes.The study, which was published in the "Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease," attempted to differentiate the subjective experience of different people undergoing sensory deprivation, depending on how predisposed they were to hallucinating.Celia Morgan, a research fellow at the university, described the process of the investigation.Morgan said participants were first given a questionnaire to determine psychotic personality expressions and other unusual perceptions.From the results of the questionnaire, researchers selected two groups, those who were more prone to hallucinations in daily life and those who were not.
Whoever said water is free was a liar.Although it may cost only a fraction of a penny to pour a glass of water from the kitchen sink, the expense is much greater to purchase a bottle of water from the grocery store or the Student Center.The tap vs.
