Word: agora
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dell Computer Corp. has followed a particularly effective mix of policies. It originally prospered largely by cutting out the middleman and selling custom-built products directly to buyers. That strategy was probably old in the agora of ancient Athens, but it was new to the computer industry in 1983, when Michael Dell started selling hand-built PCs out of his dormitory room at the University of Texas. As it grew into a giant, Dell Computer insisted on keeping only a six-day inventory, vs. a six- to eight-week supply for most of its competitors. That not only lowered costs...
Beyond research, the Web is a genealogists' agora, invaluable for trading information and connecting with living relatives. Dave Distler, who works at an electronics firm in Greenwood, Ind., lost track of a great-great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Jakob Distler, who was born in 1814 in Germany, Prussia, Rhineland or Northern Bavaria, according to vague records. Surfing the Net, he found an organization, Palatines to America, which referred him to a German genealogist who found his grandfather's hometown, Hinterweidenthal. When he entered the village name in a search engine, he found a private e-mail address. Three weeks after...
...could be living in any number of alternate variations of the present condition. Moreover, it becomes stifling, where it was once comforting, to conceive of the city as a unified whole, the Venice of light and reason as opposed to the wilds of Cyprus, the Greek agora standing as a proud refuge in a wilderness where only beasts reside...
...traditional town meeting has its roots in the agora of ancient Athens, a place for sober, if contentious, deliberation. The Clintonized town meeting has a rather less noble lineage. It is the offspring of Phil Donahue, who, true to his format, once wore a dress to enliven the proceedings. The President hasn't gone that far--not quite. But who can forget his town meeting on MTV in 1993? "Boxers or briefs?" asked a budding Walter Lippmann in the studio audience. The President could have turned the question aside. "Madam," he might have said, "that is a private matter between...
Travel suits the peripatetic nature of the narrative. The world is an agora through which Moores and McPhee amble and learn. Whenever their exchanges seem about to burst with an excess of ophiolites, abyssoliths and subduction zones, McPhee relieves the pressure with anecdotes and historical nuggets. Included is a tectonic dish of special interest to Californians. During the past 2,000 years, part of the San Andreas Fault near Los Angeles has been wrenched by 12 major earthquakes. On average they occurred 145 years apart. The most recent Big One hit in 1857. McPhee makes no predictions but figures...