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Untitled. Last year was not a propitious one for the prediction industry. Against all expectations, dictators across the Arab world succumbed to the power of crowds. No one could have forecast the epic natural disasters in Asia. Few anticipated the expensive unraveling of the euro. And who saw Kim Kardashian's marital meltdown coming? Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it One Week Digital Pass — $4.99 Monthly Pay-As-You-Go DIGITAL ACCESS — $2.99 One Year ALL ACCESS — Just $30! Untitled. The past year has been filled with tumultuous events--the Arab Spring, the euro-zone crisis. But the most striking trend of 2011, one that will persist in 2012, was one that got little notice: the emerging powers that weren't.

By now everyone knows that a new and rising group of nations, including China, India, Brazil and Russia, are reshaping the globe. Yet if 2011 demonstrated anything, it was the inability of these countries to have much influence beyond their borders. They continue to grow their economies, but they all face internal and external challenges that make them less interested and less capable of exercising power on an international or even regional scale. Let's start with China. Chinese growth continues to be robust, though clearly the government is worried about the inflationary effects of the massive stimulus program it implemented after the financial crisis, which has created a boom-bust cycle and inflationary pressures across the country. Could the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher Have Handled the Euro Crisis? Anyone who experienced the events depicted in The Iron Lady recalls the smells of that period. 1978 heralded the Winter of Discontent — public-sector strikes that blanketed British cities in rotting drifts of uncollected trash and helped seal Margaret Thatcher's election victory the following May.

Her 11 years on Downing Street ushered in a new set of pungencies: the acrid tang of riots, a whiff of cordite drifting from the Falkland Islands, the aromas of wealth and despair. Thatcher wrenched Britain from its economic malaise — but at considerable human cost. Her biopic fleetingly acknowledges this cost but fashions a feel-good movie from the unlikely material. Nostalgia sure isn't what it used to be. The dis-United Kingdom of 2011 looks ripe for a similar treatment.

Yet just as Cameron is proving to be no Thatcher — for one thing, he's less ideological than his predecessor — the differences between the current turbulence and the world Thatcher inhabited are profound. A Separate Peace? - Bullying: What Kids, Teens and Adults Need to Know. The taunting started four years ago, when Dylan Huegerich was 10. Back then, he didn't know what being gay meant, and even today the soft-spoken teenager isn't sure where he fits on the spectrum of sexual orientation.

He knows he's different. He knows that his sense of style — his chin-length hair, his dabbling with makeup — caught the eyes of school bullies in Saukville, Wis. In seventh grade he was pelted with snowballs and shoved into lockers. Everywhere he went on campus, students shouted anti-gay slurs and pointed and stared. "It hurt so bad," he says. "I hated my life. His mother Amy tried to intervene. So instead of sending Dylan back to a school that was a 10-minute drive from his house, his mother opted for the publicly funded Alliance School, an hour and a half away in downtown Milwaukee.

The Alliance School is a radical solution to a much debated problem. Parents want to protect their kids, but is wrapping them in an Alliance-style cocoon of tolerance the best solution? Euro Zone's Debt Crisis. What Keeps Obama Up at Night. A year out from election day, Barack Obama's strongest policy suit is the one that matters least to the public--foreign policy. He hasn't been perfect. His naive attempts to negotiate the Israel-Palestine question have been an embarrassing failure. But he has succeeded at the most important thing, fighting al-Qaeda. In the spring of 2011, he overruled his generals twice--and rightly so: he decided to have SEAL Team 6 go after Osama bin Laden and secure his document stash, rather than bombing the compound from the air; and he decided to begin drawing troops out of Afghanistan.

Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it One Week Digital Pass — $4.99 Monthly Pay-As-You-Go DIGITAL ACCESS — $2.99 One Year ALL ACCESS — Just $30! On the Precipice: Can Greece Save Itself — and the Dream of a United Europe? Athens these days feels not just like the center of an economy in crisis but also like the capital of a society that is coming undone. Thefts and armed robbery are up, and unemployment has spiked from 9.5% to 17.6% in two years. Greeks are pulling their money out of the country's banks, and right-wing politicians talk darkly about the police siding with protesters when the next round of economic austerity measures kicks in. Achilleas Giraud, a 53-year-old former real estate executive who now works as a gardener in the public park of Kifissia, his upscale Athenian neighborhood, says that rather than pulling together, his neighbors are growing isolated and looking out for themselves. "Right now, we're at the precipice," he says.

Even when it looked as if a financial apocalypse might be averted earlier this month, the country's leaders managed to instill more fear than trust. Even if the interim government pushes through the E.U.' The iPhone's Next Frontier: Porn. Apple may be golden because of the iPhone, but the soon-to-be-updated device is also increasingly the source of forbidden fruit. Steve Jobs' company is keeping a civil, if embarrassed, silence on one of the potentially most lucrative and controversial uses of its handheld jewel: porn. The technological feats of the 3G iPhone are key to the coming pornucopia. To date, mobile porn has consisted largely of still images, racy text services and "moan tones," which are sultry-sounding ringtones. In Europe there is an active market for video chatting; customers pay on average $50 a month to exchange dirty messages with actresses. But now, thanks in large part to the iPhone's video dexterity, short clips are becoming a staple of the mobile porn business.

Leading porn purveyors see the iPhone as a dream come true. Sensing the start of a profitable new era for pocket porn, the adult entertainment industry is investing heavily and feverishly broadening its marketplace of iPhone porn. 10 Questions for Daniel Kahneman. In your book Thinking, Fast and Slow, you frame the way we think as two different systems. What are they? Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate. It gives you a sense of agency.

You say we often believe we're thinking slow when we're not. We are normally blind about our own blindness. What's your favorite experiment that demonstrates our blindness to our own blindness? It's one someone else did. What about experts? There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Does behavioral economics explain the financial crisis?

Overconfident optimism on the part of people who were speculating or buying houses that they couldn't afford played a role. You endorse a kind of libertarian paternalism that gives people freedom of choice but frames the choice so they are nudged toward the option that's better for them. What psychology and behavioral economics have shown is that people don't think very carefully. Such as? Has your research changed the way you live? Physics?