At first glance, when you buy a house for, say, $500,000, you are increasing the left side of your personal balance sheet (your assets) by $500,000 dollars. If you used $50,000 as a downpayment, which came from your own assets, the increase in assets was only $450,000.

On the right side of the personal balance sheet, you had to finance the purchase of this house with debt, so if you made a 10 per cent down payment and financed the other $450,000, your liabilities have increased by $450,000 in total. The important thing to remember is that the equity on your personal balance sheet has not changed. You have $450,000 more in assets and $450,000 more in liabilities–and you’ve converted financial capital into a down payment.

Now let’s examine what your personal balance sheet will look like in five years, ignoring human capital considerations. If you have been carefully paying down your mortgage debt, perhaps the remaining liabilities have been reduced to $400,000. And, even if housing prices have not increased at all, you have created $50,000 more in equity in your home, for total equity of $100,000. (This is the original downpayment of $50,000 plus the $50,000 in total payments over the last five years.) So far, so good.

But now let’s imagine that housing prices fell by 20 per cent over that same five-year period. This isn’t inconceivable–and is exactly what just happened in many regions of the United States over the last five years, as shown in Table 6.1. In that case, a 20 per cent drop in the value of a $500,000 house leaves you with a balance sheet asset of $400,000. This is exactly what you owe in debt (mortgage) on the house, and you have no equity. The $50,000 you originally invested in the house is gone, and all the payments you have made in the last five years could essentially be considered rent.

You are no further ahead now, financially, than you were five years ago. All you did was consume housing.

The CRTC has acknowledged that [the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is] subject to the same revenue pressures as private conventional broadcasters and that our financing model is unsustainable given the service that the Broadcasting Act required us to provide. This is the same conclusion that repeated parliamentary committees and commissions have also come to over the last decade. The difference is those reports have no practical effect, while the CRTC is empowered to actually make these changes.

The usual challenge to our case is to say that we receive $1.1-billion in public funding and that should be enough. The fact is we, with our billion dollars, operate 28 services and broadcast in two official languages and eight aboriginal ones across six time zones. The BBC has public funding of $7.5-billion a year, France Television and Radio France together receive $4-billion, Germany $10.7-billion and PBS and NPR in the U.S. receive $1.2-billion from government sources (Nordicity study, fiscal 2007 numbers).

For a planet at a constant temperature, the amount of energy absorbed as sunlight and the amount emitted back to space in the longer wavelengths of the infra-red must be the same. In the case of the Earth, the amount of sunlight absorbed is 239 watts per square metre. According to the laws of thermodynamics, a simple body emitting energy at that rate should have a temperature of about –18ºC.

You do not need a comprehensive set of surface-temperature data to notice that this is not the average temperature at which humanity goes about its business. The discrepancy is due to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which absorb and re-emit infra-red radiation, and thus keep the lower atmosphere, and the surface, warm (see the diagram below). The radiation that gets out to the cosmos comes mostly from above the bulk of the greenhouse gases, where the air temperature is indeed around –18ºC.

Web search is a multipart process. First, Google crawls the Web to collect the contents of every accessible site. This data is broken down into an index (organized by word, just like the index of a textbook), a way of finding any page based on its content. Every time a user types a query, the index is combed for relevant pages, returning a list that commonly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The trickiest part, though, is the ranking process — determining which of those pages belong at the top of the list.

That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious.

These days, when the employee-employer relationship goes sour, the employee knows it. Most companies follow standard protocols for warning employees if they don’t shape up they will be fired. Employees should be careful how they deal with such situations. Here are a few things to heed:

Don’t demand finality. When you are told you have no future with the company, the instinct is to demand resolution and request specifics, including your last day of employment. That is short-sighted. Dismissals must be, as the courts put it, “specified, definite and unequivocal.” It’s in your interest to delay the day of reckoning. The severance clock does not start ticking until you are given a termination date.

Don’t defame your employer, manager or co-workers. It’s imperative you do nothing that provides your employer with an opportunity to fire you for cause and pay no severance. No matter how tempting revenge is, this is when you are most reliant on your employer’s goodwill and generosity regarding severance and references.

Spend an hour in Santander City and it’s easier to understand Banco Santander’s unlikely march during the last quarter century from sixth biggest bank in Spain to largest bank in the euro zone. Since Emilio Botín took over from his father in 1986, Santander has spent more than $60 billion buying banks in Spain, Latin America, Europe and, more recently, the U.S.

But it’s not just about being the biggest. By sticking to old-fashioned banking practices, while shrewdly employing the firm’s sophisticated banking software, Botín has also made Santander the most profitable bank in the world outside China, earning close to $25 billion in the last two years, even as the world’s economies teetered on the brink.

In Santander City the functional is exalted and the fancy eschewed. The bank runs the same way, thanks to Botín’s commitment to banking’s stodgiest virtues: conservatism, patience and the sort of loans that don’t need to be sliced and diced into nonsensical instruments like those that caused the meltdown on Wall Street.