Abstract: A table is presented in this research note showing safety belt use rates in the states and selected territories for the year 2002. Hawaii, the state of Washington, and Puerto Rico joined California in reaching the 90% milestone in safety belt use. Vermont and Washington made the greatest gains, each reducing its nonuse rate by 50% or more. These results are from surveys conducted by nearly all states and territories, and reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Abstract: This paper deals with a newly discovered milestone from the area of Ajlun in north-west Jordan. The milestone commemorates the restoration of the Gerasa-Pella road during the joint reign of the co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Aurelius Verus, through the agency of (Publius) Geminius Marcianus. The milestone is dated to AD 162.

Abstract: Abstract Many children in the United States try for years to learn to read, and some never succeed. Educators talk about a fourth-grade reading level as a milestone in the process of achieving literacy. The accepted wisdom is that once students reach this level, they cross over from learning to read to reading to learn. So, on average, it would seem to take four years of schooling (not including kindergarten or pre-K education) to gain such proficiency. Gaining analogous levels of proficiency in writing skills takes even longer. The stumbling blocks in achieving literacy in English are numerous, and many people have called for spelling reform. Instances of rebellion against traditional spelling are often used in advertising, like “lite” for “light.” Chat rooms on the internet have something we can already call a tradition of simplified spellings. Indeed, they have a tradition of acronyms that exist only as spellings, such as “brb” for “be right back.” Text messaging on cell phones is another situation in which simplified spelling is found. We can expect more as technology advances, and we can expect these simplified spellings to creep into other contexts.

Abstract: Abstract Depression and war have opposite effects on the economy. One prompts efficiency, constraint, cautious investment; the other encourages industrial expansion—even a spirit of reckless gambling. If the 1930s depression sloughed off workers, making every fourth one redundant, the war gobbled them up, then searched for more. Where workers had to plead for jobs in the thirties, in the early forties industry begged for workers. And when the army had soaked up the residue of unemployed men, employers turned to women. Unprecedented opportunity now confronted women who months earlier had pleaded for work. Was this to be a breakthrough?—a turning point that would signal the end of discrimination against women in the labor market? It certainly looked like it. In many ways, this war duplicated the experience of World War I. Women found jobs in areas previously closed to them and, once there, proved to be effective workers. The statistical data reveal a dramatic influx of women-five million between 1940 and 1944—into the labor force and new openings in the heavy industries that had been tightly defended against them. Historians like William Chafe, Chester Gregory, and Sheila Tobias and Lisa Anderson have concluded, as a result, that World War II was, in Chafe’s words, “a milestone for women in America.”