So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive.

If choices of compensation structures can be expected to affect financial firms stability, regulating these choices can also be useful for protecting this stability.

As a result, commodity resource constraints that we once expected to face in the middle of the twenty first century are hitting us today.

Although the report of the Council opens with an analytical segment, we had expected more substantive information rather than a historical recounting of the events as they happened in the Council during the year.

And sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, you see wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, be respected, before the change, and much more post materialist values after.

Even if we project a relatively rapid economic recovery, by the time this lesser depression is over, the US will have experienced an investment shortfall of at least 4 trillion.

We were plenty aware that we were messing with media, and on the surface, it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things, but we also missed an awful lot. Let's take a look.

It was easier than we expected to recruit good people for Securum, because working in the public interest for this pioneering state owned bad bank was perceived as a unique challenge.

The criminals are almost all dead now. Their descendants and successors in Germany have done and are doing better than anyone could have expected at grappling with and mastering the nation s unmasterable past.

Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things from alien abductions to dowsing rods boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.

For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day the massive Vauban style fortifications and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe.

As Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou put it last week in his powerful letter to the head of the Eurogroup, Luxembourg s Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker, The markets and rating agencies have not responded as we had all expected.

We had anticipated this moment and agreed in advance that, while we would never ask to meet with Karadzic and Mladic, if Milosevic offered such a meeting, we would accept but only once, and only under strict guidelines that would require Milosevic to be responsible for their behavior.

Until we get our hands on those fugitives it will be very difficult to predict the length of the mandate, unless we can foresee now that those individuals still at large may never be arrested, in which case it would be necessary to try them in absentia.

Even if there is further bad news for Europe from Greece, for example, or from a sharper than expected slowdown in China the eurozone could begin to move out of crisis mode this month.

Second, whereas democracy and market capitalism appeared as clear if more fragile than expected winners in 1989, it is difficult in 2009, with the spread of the global crisis, to distinguish winners from losers.

While there was less American leadership than one would have hoped, indeed expected under the circumstances, many participants were simply relieved that America did not put up obstacles to reaching a global consensus, as would have been the case if George W. Bush were still president.