Numbers: Billions, trillions, ga-zillions. When's a number too big, too little, appropriate, effective? I mean, who gets numbers?

It's like gaggles of 3rd graders accelerating every conversation with their own numerical system:
"My dad has a million!"
"My mom saw a ka-zillion in New Jersey!"
"Well, I'm gonna have a ka billion ga zillion when I grow up!"

What would the grown up version be?
"Before you know it, she'll want a googol (10 followed by 100 zeros) of 'em!"

Even smart adults struggle with really big numbers. Particularly as they relate to money, people and sex. Trillions of dollars, billions of people, oh yeah, and sex - the multiplier.

Read more of Amy's third blog entry for The Huffington Post!

Elizabeth Leahy is a Research Associate with PAI.

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden’s recent identification of population growth as one of three top destabilizing trends currently facing the world has received extensive media coverage. The director’s comments seem to have taken many by surprise by singling out demographic trends, rather than religious extremism or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as meriting a top spot on the intelligence community’s radar screen.

Speaking in the Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University, the same forum where Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last fall advocated for increasing the use of “soft power,” Gen. Hayden highlighted the challenges that will be faced by some of the poorest and weakest states in the world—among them Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Yemen—in providing for the needs of their citizens, particularly young people, in the coming years. The populations of these countries are projected to double and in some cases triple by mid-century, magnifying already heavy demands on health care, education facilities and the job market.

Carolyn Vogel, Vice President of Programs, and Karen Hardee, Vice President for Research, report on the Strategic Workshop "SRHR-Population-Environmental Degradation-Climate Change" in Istanbul, Turkey.

We met in Istanbul for two more or less unstructured days of discussion around the emerging issue of population, environmental degradation and climate change. Coming together as like-minded organizations in support of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including voluntary family planning, we struggled to get our heads around the complicated linkage between these pressing and timely issues. That we all felt compelled to talk and needed to voice our ideas, confusions, and brainstorms was evident when at the end of each and every session, facilitators struggled to close and wrap-up (we wouldn’t stop talking). Those discussions then dominated our “out of meeting time” in local restaurants and cobbled streets of the Sultanahmet. In Istanbul, every conversation and presentation was completely new territory for many of the participants.

There are always complicated issues around mothers. Being one, having one, not having one, wanting one, losing one, not being one.

Personally, we love our mothers even when we don't. Culturally, we revere them. Globally, we say how important mothers are, but still a woman dies every minute of every day from a pregnancy-related cause. Each of those deaths is preventable and at very little expense. There's been little help for those young women -- dying to be mothers -- over the past two decades. It's not just bad, it's sinful!

Read more of Amy's second blog entry for The Huffington Post!