Word: assess
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Even if the mission proved to be completely successful, it was much too soon to assess its true significance. Historian James MacGregor Burns was not impressed. "It's a very proud and fine day for all Americans," he said, "but it's an event apart from the main flow of history." Stanford Physicist Robert Hofstadter, a Nobel prizewinner, disagreed: "In a thousand years there will be few things remembered, but this will be one of them...
Firmly Established. Most mental-health experts still need to be convinced. For one thing, the exhaustive follow-up studies required to assess the possible limitations of behavioral therapy are just beginning. Psychiatrists wonder how thorough and long-lasting any behavioral treatment-reinforcement or otherwise-can be. To them, "sick" or unusual behavior is a sign of underlying psychosis; no matter how many external symptoms are extinguished, they fear that the deeper problem will keep rising to the surface. Reinforcement experts answer that they have yet to see such "symptom substitution" in their patients...
Specialists in these related sciences have begun to seek a common language to describe the many varieties of pain, to chart its pathways from the burned finger or the stubbed toe to the brain, to assess its total impact, and to find better ways of relieving it. Mind doctors and body doctors are at last recognizing that in their evolving concern with pain they are really talking about the same thing in different terms. Increasingly, they realize that even the most obviously real and physical pain, as from a burn or a fracture, is processed in the mind...
Next week the Museum of Modern Art unveils the most engrossing display of all: more than 175 examples from Nelson Rockefeller's unparalleled collection of 1,500 modern paintings and sculptures. It is almost impossible to assess such an exhibition. It begins with landmark works of Picasso, Miró, Matisse, Mondriaan, Moore, Maillol and just about every famous name from the first half of the 20th century. But Rockefeller's tastes have not stagnated or calcified. Particularly in sculpture, he has cheerfully moved on to buy many younger minimal artists. Among his newest purchases...
...that there are genetically determined differences at birth, and that these may contribute to the enormous diversity of the human intellect, is at least as old as Plato. But, as Geneticist Lederberg observes, "it remains just a hypothesis, and we are not much better equipped than Plato was to assess...