Hoffman's train set donated to Yesteryear Village's new exhibit

Two Palm Beach County staples - Yesteryear Village and Hoffman's Chocolate - are combining forces for a new exhibit at the village that combines history and nostalgia for its guests. Recently Hoffman's Chocolate donated its train collection to Yesteryear Village to be part of its new railroad museum exhibit, which is slated to open by next year's South Florida Fair, said Yesteryear Village manager Paige Poole. "We are always looking to expand Yesteryear Village; last year we added the dental office exhibit," she said.

annuity 2016

Fixed-income annuities have never paid out so little, and yet had so much appeal. These annuities, which provide a lifetime of guaranteed income, are paying out 12% less, on average, than in 2011, and 25% less than in 2007. And yet sales jumped 17% last year, to their highest level in five years.  

The appetite for guaranteed retirement income is reshaping the industry, and drawing investors away from the enormously popular variable-annuity market. Sales of variable annuities usually rise with the stock market, but they have declined steadily for three consecutive years and are 24% below their 2007 highs. Why this new hunger for fixed annuities? As investors get real about how to turn their nest eggs into lifelong income, they’re discovering what academics and analysts have been preaching for years: fixed income annuities outshine all other income-producing options.

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Assume that total ecosystem productivity is determined by dominance of the most productive species, and all species responses are independent of each other and obey the same stochastic process. Further assume that the mean of the response is 1/2, as in the β-distribution (Fig. ​(Fig.33A), in which case the variance of the species response may be viewed as a measure of a species’ contribution to maximum ecosystem productivity (in this case, 1). This is because a greater variance means a greater probability of a species taking on the maximum productivity at each time. The results are summarized in Fig. ​Fig.33B. For a given species richness, as the variance of the species response increases, the temporal mean of ecosystem productivity is elevated, that is, the effect of species richness is enhanced. But as a result, the species richness beyond which the ecosystem is redundant also decreases.