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Schizophrenia is often confused with multiple personality disorder yet is quite distinct from it. Schizophrenia is one of the more common mental disorders, considerably more common than multiple personality disorder. The term "schizophrenia” is composed of roots which mean "a splitting Line of the mind," but it does not refer to a division into separate and distinct personalities, as occurs in multiple personality disorder. Instead, schizophrenic behavior is generally characterized by illogical thought patterns and withdrawal from reality. Schizophrenics often live in a fantasy world where they hear voices that others cannot hear, often voices of famous people. Schizophrenics tend to withdraw from families and friends and communicate mainly with the “voices” that they hear in their minds.

It is common for the symptoms of schizophrenia to develop during the late teen years or early twenties, but the causes of schizophrenia are not well understood. It is believed that heredity may play a part in the onset of schizophrenia. In addition, abnormal brain chemistry also seems to have a role; certain brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters, have been found to be at abnormal levels in some schizophrenics.

With Robert Laurent and William Zorach, direct carving enters into the story of modern sculpture in the United States. Direct carving — in which the sculptors themselves carve stone or wood with mallet and chisel — must be recognized as something more than just a technique. Implicit in it is an aesthetic principle as well that the medium has certain qualities of beauty and expressiveness with which sculptors must bring their own aesthetic sensibilities into harmony. For example, sometimes the shape or veining in a piece of stone or wood suggests, perhaps even dictates, not only the ultimate form, but even the subject matter.

The technique of direct carving was a break with the nineteenth-century tradition in  which the making of a clay model was considered the creative act and the work was then turned over to studio assistants to be cast in plaster or bronze or carved in marble.

Neoclassical sculptors seldom held a mallet or chisel in their own hands, readily conceding that the assistants they employed were far better than they were at carving the finished marble.

 With the turn-of-the-century Crafts movement and the discovery of nontraditional sources of inspiration, such as wooden African figures and masks, there arose a new urge for hands-on, personal execution of art and an interaction with the medium. Even as early as the 1880's and 1890's, nonconformist European artists were attempting direct carving. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans — Laurent  and Zorach most notably — had adopted it as their primary means of working.

Born in France, Robert Laurent (1890-1970) was a prodigy who received his education in the United States. In 1905 he was sent to Paris as an apprentice to an art dealer, and in the years that followed he witnessed the birth of Cubism, discovered primitive art, and learned the techniques of woodcarving from a frame maker.

 Back in New York City by 1910, Laurent began carving pieces such as The Priestess, which reveals his fascination with African, pre-Columbian, and South Pacific art. Taking a walnut plank, the sculptor carved the expressive, stylized design. It is one of the earliest examples of direct carving in American sculpture. The plank's form dictated the rigidly frontal view and the low relief. Even its irregular shape must  have appealed to Laurent as a break with a long-standing tradition that required a sculptor to work within a perfect rectangle or square.

The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologists long regarded it as an example of adaptation by natural selection, but for physicists it bordered on the miraculous.

Newton's laws of motion assume that the total amount of spin of a body cannot change  unless an external torque speeds it up or slows it down. If a cat has no spin when it is released and experiences no external torque, it ought not to be able to twist around as it falls.

In the speed of its execution, the righting of a tumbling cat resembles a magician's trick. The gyrations of the cat in midair are too fast for the human eye to follow, so the  process is obscured. Either the eye must be speeded up, or the cat's fall slowed down for the phenomenon to be observed. A century ago the former was accomplished by means of high-speed photography using equipment now available in any pharmacy. But in the nineteenth century the capture on film of a falling cat constituted a scientific experiment.

 The experiment was described in a paper presented to the Paris Academy in 1894. Two sequences of twenty photographs each, one from the side and one from behind, show a white cat in the act of righting itself. Grainy and quaint though they are, the photos show that the cat was dropped upside down, with no initial spin, and still landed on its feet. Careful analysis of the photos reveals the secret. As the cat rotates the front  of its body clockwise, the rear and tail twist counterclockwise, so that the total spin remains zero, in perfect accord with Newton's laws. Halfway down, the cat pulls in its legs before reversing its twist and then extends them again, with the desired end result. The explanation was that while no body can acquire spin without torque, a flexible one can readily change its orientation, or phase. Cats know this instinctively, but scientists  could not be sure how it happened until they increased the speed of their perceptions a thousandfold.

The organization that today is known as the Bank of America did start out in America, but under quite a different name. Italian American A.P. Giannini established this bank on October 17, 1904, in a renovated saloon in San Francisco’s Italian community of North Beach under the name Bank of Italy, with immigrants and first-time bank customers comprising the majority of his first customers. During its development, Giannini’s bank survived major crises in the form of a natural disaster and a major economic upheaval that not all other banks were able to overcome.

One major test for Giannini’s bank occurred on April 18, 1906, when a massive earthquake struck San Francisco, followed by a raging fire that destroyed much of the city. Giannini obtained two wagons and teams of horses, filled the wagons with the bank’s reserves, mostly in the form of gold, covered the reserves with crates of oranges, and escaped from the chaos of the city with his clients’ funds protected. In the aftermath of the disaster, Giannini’s bank was the first to resume operations. Unable to install the bank in a proper office setting, Giannini opened up shop on the Washington Street Wharf on a makeshift desk created from boards and barrels.

In the period following the 1906 fire, the Bank of Italy continued to prosper and expand. By 1918 there were twenty-four branches of the Bank of Italy, and by 1928 Giannini had acquired numerous other banks, including a Bank of America located in New York City. In 1930 he consolidated all the branches of the Bank of Italy, the Bank of America in New York City, and another Bank of America that he had formed in California into the Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association.

A second major crisis for the bank occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although Giannini had already retired prior to the darkest days of the Depression, he became incensed when his successor began selling off banks during the bad economic times. Giannini resumed leadership of the bank at the age of sixty-two. Under Giannini’s leadership, the bank weathered the storm of the Depression and subsequently moved into a phase of overseas development.

The changing profile of a city in the United States is apparent in the shifting definitions used by the United States Bureau of the Census. In 1870 the census officially distinguished the nation's “urban” from its “rural” population for the first  time. “Urban population” was defined as persons living in towns of 8,000 inhabitants  or more. But after 1900 it meant persons living in incorporated places having 2,500 or more inhabitants.

Then, in 1950 the Census Bureau radically changed its definition of “urban” to take account of the new vagueness of city boundaries. In addition to persons living in incorporated units of 2,500 or more, the census now included those who lived in  unincorporated units of that size, and also all persons living in the densely settled urban fringe, including both incorporated and unincorporated areas located around cities of 50,000 inhabitants or more. Each such unit, conceived as an integrated economic and social unit with a large population nucleus, was named a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA).

 Each SMSA would contain at least one central city with 50,000 inhabitants or more or  two cities having shared boundaries and constituting, for general economic and social purposes, a single community with a combined population of at least 50,000, the smaller of which must have a population of at least 15,000. Such an area included the county in which the central city is located, and adjacent counties that are found to  be metropolitan in character and economically and socially integrated with the county of the central city. By 1970, about two-thirds of the population of the United States was living in these urbanized areas, and of that figure more than half were living outside the central cities.

While the Census Bureau and the United States government used the term SMSA,  by 1969 there were 233 of them, social scientists were also using new terms to describe the elusive, vaguely defined areas reaching out from what used to be simple “towns” and “cities”. A host of terms came into use: “metropolitan regions,” “polynucleated population groups,” “conurbations,” “metropolitan clusters,” “megalopolises,” and so on.