At that time, a small quantity of US shale oil was being unlocked by mining the rock out of the ground, trucking it to centralized plants, and heating the rock to release the hydrocarbons.

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The algorithm could be of great interest to Twitter, which could charge a premium for ads linked to popular topics, but it also represents a new approach to statistical analysis that could, in theory, apply to any quantity that varies over time: the duration of a bus ride, ticket sales for films, maybe even stock prices.

FORBES: Twitter Trending Prediction Algorithm: Possibly Of Most Use To Journalists

By contrast, the PPI payments were, by the time of the Budget, very much a known quantity.

BBC: A welcome boost - unless you're a bank

My husband has actually contributed a great deal more of his personal time and increased both the quality and quantity of his work.

FORBES: Can Yahoo Really Be Doing This?

There are pilot projects to do this in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique, but it will take time before the quantity and quality of their production can make a real dent in the supply problem.

ECONOMIST: Treating malaria

"She has been missing now for over two days and it's not like her to not come home or contact any of us for such a long time, " the 26-year-old quantity surveyor said.

BBC: Boyfriend's appeal for missing Swindon nightclub woman

Considering the quantity of information it holds, he wrote it in an amazingly short amount of time, and a reader can feel how fully he was possessed by his project, and how much fun he found the job to be.

NEWYORKER: Silence, Exile, Punning