Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.

Procrastination also can be a way of self-handicapping: if you don't do a great job, you can always say to yourself, "If I'd only started sooner, I'd have been able to produce something excellent."

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.