Although the global economic downturn no longer appears to be heading off a cliff, signs of stability or recovery are still sporadic and tenuous. As news stories look for signs of of the direction of economic indicators, photographs fill the wires of people working from all over. Once more, I've collected some of these disparate photos over the past couple of months, composing another global portrait we humans at work around the world.
1. A worker rotates a gas turbine during assembly at the Siemens gas turbine factory on January 8, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
2. A worker's face is caked with flour as he unloads bags of food aid in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. International aid flowing into Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake has been struggling with logistical problems, and many people are still desperate for food and water. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
3. Two employees (top center) check parked Hyundai cars ready for shipment at a port in the southern Indian city of Chennai on January 24, 2010. (REUTERS/Babu)
4. A worker adjusts Terracotta Warriors made of chocolate at the Chocolate Wonderland in Beijing, China on January 14, 2010. The chocolate theme park will exhibit creations such as the Great Wall, the Dunhuang Caves and Terracotta Warriors when it opens to the public on January 29, according to the organizer. (REUTERS/Grace Liang)
5. A worker prepares to destroy confiscated weapons at a steel plant in Shanghai, China on December 29, 2009. Some 13,000 illegal firearms, replica toy guns, machetes and swords that were confiscated by the police were destroyed during the campaign, local media reported. (REUTERS/Aly Song)
6. Production Manager Roberto Ramos of Sealed Air surveys giant rolls of Bubble Wrap at the company's plant in Saddle Brook, New Jersey on January 19th, 2010. Sealed Air is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bubble Wrap this month. (AP Photo/Christopher Barth)
7. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are inspected at a Cree Inc. facility in Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina, on Tuesday, January 19, 2010. (Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg)
8. Khalidah Lalie, a 7-year-old Pakistani girl, stands between bricks while arranging them with her father, unseen, as they work at a brick factory on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
9. This Jan. 11, 2010 photo shows a student at the Lung Yen Life Service Co. funeral home styling hair on a model in Taipei, Taiwan. When the funeral home recently advertised for 10 positions to help prepare dead bodies for the island's traditionally lavish funerals, it received some 2,000 applications. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)
10. An employee monitors the blast furnace at the ArcelorMittal Ostrava steel plant in Ostrava, Czech Republic, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Vladimir Weiss/Bloomberg)
11. Afghan men collect wool threads prior to being dyed at a carpet manufacturer on January 9, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan. The highly prized and typically expensive carpets and rugs are one of Afghanistan's best recognised exports. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
12. A worker checks a panel at a high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) solar energy power plant in Lujhu Township of Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan, January 22, 2010. The plant, which is the largest HCPV solar power plant in Asia, has 141 panels and is expected to produce up to 1 megawatt (MW) of energy, which officials said would save up to 670 tons of carbon emissions annually. (REUTERS/Nicky Loh)
13. A worker walks near stacked containers at the Jakarta International Container Terminal January 13, 2010. (REUTERS/Beawiharta)
14. An employee shelves books in the old books collection area at the Municipal Library of Lyon, France on January 15, 2010. The government of France is currently undertaking a 750 million euro ($1 billion) project to digitize its libraries and museums. (REUTERS/Robert Pratta)
15. An artisan carves details into the still-soft porcelain head of a figurine at the manufacturer of German luxury porcelain maker Meissen on January 20, 2010 in Meissen, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
16. A farmer arrives with his ox cart loaded with sugarcane at a sugar factory in Bagphat in Uttar Pradesh, India on January 20, 2010. (REUTERS/Reinhard Krause)
17. A Zoo employee makes a record of the number of Jellyfish in their tank at London Zoo as part of the zoo's annual stock-take on January 5, 2010 in London, England. ZSL London Zoo is home to over 650 different species which all need to be cataloged in their annual stock-taking which is a compulsory requirement for their zoo license. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
18. Migrant construction workers work opposite the Chinese pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo site in Shanghai January 6, 2010. The Shanghai World Expo 2010 is due to begin on May 1, 2010 as work on the site continues to meet its deadline. (REUTERS/Nir Elias)
19. A woman works at the Kim Jung Suk Silk Mill in Pyongyang, North Korea in this picture released by North Korea's KCNA news agency on January 12, 2010. (REUTERS/KCNA)
20. Legoland employee, Graeme Williams clears snow from model buildings representing the London landmark Big Ben and the Westminster area in Windsor, Berkshire, on January 6, 2010. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images)
21. Laborers work inside a cashew nut processing factory at Gakulnagar on the outskirts of Agartala, India on January 7, 2010. (REUTERS/Jayanta Dey)
22. A member of the Bridge Crew watches over a fire line, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010, in case the prescribed burn jumps the line and ignites on the other side of Kings Pinnacle in Crowders Mountain State Park in Gastonia, North Carolina. Officials at Crowders Mountain State Park conducted the burn of more than 500 acres on Kings Pinnacle near the Gaston and Cleveland County line to clear out decades of forest refuse like leaf litter and downed trees, and to assist certain species of plants like bear oak that need fire to germinate. (AP Photo/The Charlotte Observer, John D. Simmons)
23. Workers clean fish along a busy street in Manila, January 11, 2010, before they put it on an improvised wooden stove for smoking. The vendor sells the smoked fish for 80 pesos ($1.77) a kilogram. (REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco)
24. A visually impaired man works at a hi-tech call center in Moscow, Russia on December 18, 2009. Once encouraged to take dreary factory-line jobs making electric plugs and curlers, blind people in Moscow now have a new option: working at a hi-tech call center. The center in northern Moscow employs almost 1,000 blind and visually impaired people, a bold experiment in a nation where people with disabilities can struggle to find interesting jobs - or indeed any job at all. (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images)
25. Workers dig at an excavation site in front of the Giza pyramids on January 11, 2010. Egyptian archaeologists have recently unearthed a number of tombs of workers who had helped to construct the country's largest pyramid dating back to the period of the fourth dynasty (2694-2513 BC). (VICTORIA HAZOU/AFP/Getty Images)
26. Workers wait to release balloons prior to the inauguration of the expo boulevard at the World Expo 2010 site in Shanghai, China on January 22, 2010. (PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
27. A Sudanese worker uses a camel to work a traditional "Assaraa" wood presser for production of sesame oil in Khojalaab village near the capital Khartoum January 19, 2010. (REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)
28. A worker walks out of a store at a steel market in Shenyang, Liaoning province, January 21, 2010. (REUTERS/Sheng Li)
29. An employee attends to a light fitting in an unoccupied floor of "The Peak" office complex in London, U.K., on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg)
30. A Kosovo Albanian miner shows his hands as he works in the Stari Trg Trepca mine on January 21, 2010. The centrepiece mine of Trepca complex in northern Kosovo, near by the town of Mitrovica, renewed its production for the first time after the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo. During the 1980s, Trepca employed 20,000 workers and accounted for 70 percent of all the former Yugoslavia's mineral wealth. (Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images)
31. A steel mill employee works with molten rods at a mill in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. (Asad Zaidi/Bloomberg)
32. A Belarussian border guard's dog runs over the backs of soldiers some 130km northwest of Minsk in the town Smorgon on January 22, 2009 at a military dog training facility. (VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)
33. A laborer works on a loom in a textile factory in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Asad Zaidi/Bloomberg)
34. Employees of German bathroom ceramic and furniture firm Duravit, stand outside on a balcony atop of a giant lavatory bowl, at their company headquarters in Hornberg, Southwestern Germany, January 22, 2010. (REUTERS/Vincent Kessler)
35. Shiburu Shash removes weeds from young plants at the palm oil plantation owned by Karuturi Global Ltd., near the town of Bako, in Ethiopia, Africa, on Friday, Oct. 16, 2009. (Jose Cendon/Bloomberg)
36. A worker illuminates south block, government building for forthcoming Republic day celebrations, in New Delhi, India, Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
37. An employee pours molten aluminum at United Company Rusal's Bogoslovsky aluminum smelter, Russia. (Rusal via Bloomberg)
38. A front-loader is used to fill trucks with de-icing salt at a storage facility in the southern German city of Heilbronn on January 12, 2010. (SASCHA SCHUERMANN/AFP/Getty Images)
39. Indian wedding workers carry portable electric lamps as they walk beside a horse carriage during a wedding procession in New Delhi, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. The lamps are tethered together and powered by a truck that follows behind the procession. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)
40. Laborers classify coal at a coal dump site in Changzhi, Shanxi province, China on January 6, 2010. (REUTERS/Stringer)
41. Dock workers walk near a fog-enshrouded row of gantry cranes at the Yangshan deep-water port in Shanghai, China, on Monday, Jan. 25, 2010. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
42. A baby Kirk's Dik Dik antelope is fed milk in the office of Chester Zoo's curator of mammals Tim Rowlands, northern England, January 22, 2010. The antelope is being hand reared at the zoo after being rejected by its mother during the recent cold weather. (REUTERS/Phil Noble)
43. Selena, an employee of Bonham's auction house, stands next to an enormous ice age cave bear skeleton (Ursus spelaeus) which dates to about 50 million thousand years ago, in London, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010. The bear was sold at auction for $58,000 US. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
44. Technicians Eric Norman, left, and Dave Norman assemble a General Electric Co. GP7200 jet engine for a Boeing 777 at the company's Aviation Assembly & Test facility in Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. (Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg)
45. A worker shows his hand at a cement workshop in Zangoio, a neighbourghood of Cabinda, Angola on January 14, 2010. (REUTERS/Rafael Marchante)
1. A worker rotates a gas turbine during assembly at the Siemens gas turbine factory on January 8, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
2. A worker's face is caked with flour as he unloads bags of food aid in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. International aid flowing into Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake has been struggling with logistical problems, and many people are still desperate for food and water. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
3. Two employees (top center) check parked Hyundai cars ready for shipment at a port in the southern Indian city of Chennai on January 24, 2010. (REUTERS/Babu)
4. A worker adjusts Terracotta Warriors made of chocolate at the Chocolate Wonderland in Beijing, China on January 14, 2010. The chocolate theme park will exhibit creations such as the Great Wall, the Dunhuang Caves and Terracotta Warriors when it opens to the public on January 29, according to the organizer. (REUTERS/Grace Liang)
5. A worker prepares to destroy confiscated weapons at a steel plant in Shanghai, China on December 29, 2009. Some 13,000 illegal firearms, replica toy guns, machetes and swords that were confiscated by the police were destroyed during the campaign, local media reported. (REUTERS/Aly Song)
6. Production Manager Roberto Ramos of Sealed Air surveys giant rolls of Bubble Wrap at the company's plant in Saddle Brook, New Jersey on January 19th, 2010. Sealed Air is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bubble Wrap this month. (AP Photo/Christopher Barth)
7. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are inspected at a Cree Inc. facility in Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina, on Tuesday, January 19, 2010. (Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg)
8. Khalidah Lalie, a 7-year-old Pakistani girl, stands between bricks while arranging them with her father, unseen, as they work at a brick factory on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
9. This Jan. 11, 2010 photo shows a student at the Lung Yen Life Service Co. funeral home styling hair on a model in Taipei, Taiwan. When the funeral home recently advertised for 10 positions to help prepare dead bodies for the island's traditionally lavish funerals, it received some 2,000 applications. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)
10. An employee monitors the blast furnace at the ArcelorMittal Ostrava steel plant in Ostrava, Czech Republic, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Vladimir Weiss/Bloomberg)
11. Afghan men collect wool threads prior to being dyed at a carpet manufacturer on January 9, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan. The highly prized and typically expensive carpets and rugs are one of Afghanistan's best recognised exports. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
12. A worker checks a panel at a high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) solar energy power plant in Lujhu Township of Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan, January 22, 2010. The plant, which is the largest HCPV solar power plant in Asia, has 141 panels and is expected to produce up to 1 megawatt (MW) of energy, which officials said would save up to 670 tons of carbon emissions annually. (REUTERS/Nicky Loh)
13. A worker walks near stacked containers at the Jakarta International Container Terminal January 13, 2010. (REUTERS/Beawiharta)
14. An employee shelves books in the old books collection area at the Municipal Library of Lyon, France on January 15, 2010. The government of France is currently undertaking a 750 million euro ($1 billion) project to digitize its libraries and museums. (REUTERS/Robert Pratta)
15. An artisan carves details into the still-soft porcelain head of a figurine at the manufacturer of German luxury porcelain maker Meissen on January 20, 2010 in Meissen, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
16. A farmer arrives with his ox cart loaded with sugarcane at a sugar factory in Bagphat in Uttar Pradesh, India on January 20, 2010. (REUTERS/Reinhard Krause)
17. A Zoo employee makes a record of the number of Jellyfish in their tank at London Zoo as part of the zoo's annual stock-take on January 5, 2010 in London, England. ZSL London Zoo is home to over 650 different species which all need to be cataloged in their annual stock-taking which is a compulsory requirement for their zoo license. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
18. Migrant construction workers work opposite the Chinese pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo site in Shanghai January 6, 2010. The Shanghai World Expo 2010 is due to begin on May 1, 2010 as work on the site continues to meet its deadline. (REUTERS/Nir Elias)
19. A woman works at the Kim Jung Suk Silk Mill in Pyongyang, North Korea in this picture released by North Korea's KCNA news agency on January 12, 2010. (REUTERS/KCNA)
20. Legoland employee, Graeme Williams clears snow from model buildings representing the London landmark Big Ben and the Westminster area in Windsor, Berkshire, on January 6, 2010. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images)
21. Laborers work inside a cashew nut processing factory at Gakulnagar on the outskirts of Agartala, India on January 7, 2010. (REUTERS/Jayanta Dey)
22. A member of the Bridge Crew watches over a fire line, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010, in case the prescribed burn jumps the line and ignites on the other side of Kings Pinnacle in Crowders Mountain State Park in Gastonia, North Carolina. Officials at Crowders Mountain State Park conducted the burn of more than 500 acres on Kings Pinnacle near the Gaston and Cleveland County line to clear out decades of forest refuse like leaf litter and downed trees, and to assist certain species of plants like bear oak that need fire to germinate. (AP Photo/The Charlotte Observer, John D. Simmons)
23. Workers clean fish along a busy street in Manila, January 11, 2010, before they put it on an improvised wooden stove for smoking. The vendor sells the smoked fish for 80 pesos ($1.77) a kilogram. (REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco)
24. A visually impaired man works at a hi-tech call center in Moscow, Russia on December 18, 2009. Once encouraged to take dreary factory-line jobs making electric plugs and curlers, blind people in Moscow now have a new option: working at a hi-tech call center. The center in northern Moscow employs almost 1,000 blind and visually impaired people, a bold experiment in a nation where people with disabilities can struggle to find interesting jobs - or indeed any job at all. (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images)
25. Workers dig at an excavation site in front of the Giza pyramids on January 11, 2010. Egyptian archaeologists have recently unearthed a number of tombs of workers who had helped to construct the country's largest pyramid dating back to the period of the fourth dynasty (2694-2513 BC). (VICTORIA HAZOU/AFP/Getty Images)
26. Workers wait to release balloons prior to the inauguration of the expo boulevard at the World Expo 2010 site in Shanghai, China on January 22, 2010. (PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
27. A Sudanese worker uses a camel to work a traditional "Assaraa" wood presser for production of sesame oil in Khojalaab village near the capital Khartoum January 19, 2010. (REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)
28. A worker walks out of a store at a steel market in Shenyang, Liaoning province, January 21, 2010. (REUTERS/Sheng Li)
29. An employee attends to a light fitting in an unoccupied floor of "The Peak" office complex in London, U.K., on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg)
30. A Kosovo Albanian miner shows his hands as he works in the Stari Trg Trepca mine on January 21, 2010. The centrepiece mine of Trepca complex in northern Kosovo, near by the town of Mitrovica, renewed its production for the first time after the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo. During the 1980s, Trepca employed 20,000 workers and accounted for 70 percent of all the former Yugoslavia's mineral wealth. (Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images)
31. A steel mill employee works with molten rods at a mill in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. (Asad Zaidi/Bloomberg)
32. A Belarussian border guard's dog runs over the backs of soldiers some 130km northwest of Minsk in the town Smorgon on January 22, 2009 at a military dog training facility. (VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)
33. A laborer works on a loom in a textile factory in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. (Asad Zaidi/Bloomberg)
34. Employees of German bathroom ceramic and furniture firm Duravit, stand outside on a balcony atop of a giant lavatory bowl, at their company headquarters in Hornberg, Southwestern Germany, January 22, 2010. (REUTERS/Vincent Kessler)
35. Shiburu Shash removes weeds from young plants at the palm oil plantation owned by Karuturi Global Ltd., near the town of Bako, in Ethiopia, Africa, on Friday, Oct. 16, 2009. (Jose Cendon/Bloomberg)
36. A worker illuminates south block, government building for forthcoming Republic day celebrations, in New Delhi, India, Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
37. An employee pours molten aluminum at United Company Rusal's Bogoslovsky aluminum smelter, Russia. (Rusal via Bloomberg)
38. A front-loader is used to fill trucks with de-icing salt at a storage facility in the southern German city of Heilbronn on January 12, 2010. (SASCHA SCHUERMANN/AFP/Getty Images)
39. Indian wedding workers carry portable electric lamps as they walk beside a horse carriage during a wedding procession in New Delhi, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. The lamps are tethered together and powered by a truck that follows behind the procession. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)
40. Laborers classify coal at a coal dump site in Changzhi, Shanxi province, China on January 6, 2010. (REUTERS/Stringer)
41. Dock workers walk near a fog-enshrouded row of gantry cranes at the Yangshan deep-water port in Shanghai, China, on Monday, Jan. 25, 2010. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
42. A baby Kirk's Dik Dik antelope is fed milk in the office of Chester Zoo's curator of mammals Tim Rowlands, northern England, January 22, 2010. The antelope is being hand reared at the zoo after being rejected by its mother during the recent cold weather. (REUTERS/Phil Noble)
43. Selena, an employee of Bonham's auction house, stands next to an enormous ice age cave bear skeleton (Ursus spelaeus) which dates to about 50 million thousand years ago, in London, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010. The bear was sold at auction for $58,000 US. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
44. Technicians Eric Norman, left, and Dave Norman assemble a General Electric Co. GP7200 jet engine for a Boeing 777 at the company's Aviation Assembly & Test facility in Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. (Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg)
45. A worker shows his hand at a cement workshop in Zangoio, a neighbourghood of Cabinda, Angola on January 14, 2010. (REUTERS/Rafael Marchante)
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