Word: assignations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chief Justice has only one real institutional prerogative. When he is in the majority, he can assign the task of writing the opinion. If he is in the minority, then the most senior Justice in the majority assigns the opinion. The opinion-assigning power is important, particularly when the court is narrowly divided, because the Justice who writes the court's opinion can set the terms of the debate. Burger repeatedly irked his colleagues by changing his vote to remain in the majority, and by rewarding his friends with choice assignments and punishing his foes with dreary ones. "Rehnquist...
...Rogers commission will assign its own reasons, but one former insider offers a credible theory. Contends Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation and a onetime NASA safety director: "There was social pressure: they had thousands of school kids watching for the first school lesson from space. There was media pressure: they feared that if they didn't launch, the press would unfavorably report more delays. And there was commercial pressure: the Ariane (European launcher) was putting objects in space at much lower cost. NASA was also trying to show the Air Force that they could operate...
These reprogrammable connections give the machine its name. For any particular task, the processors are electronically rearranged to suit the natural structure of the data. To simulate a computer component made up of 20,000 transistorized switches, for example, the machine would assign one processor to each switch. Then, rather than updating the state of those 20,000 switches one at a time, as in a traditional Von Neumann-type computer, the Connection Machine's software simply tells the 20,000 processors to update themselves all at once...
...after the smoke cleared, not enough freshmen had listed Quincy House, traditionally one the most popular houses and last year's first filled, as one of their three choices, a phenomenon usually experienced only by houses in the distant Radcliffe Quad. The housing office had to assign some students to live in Quincy--just one of a host of unanticipated results of this year's new housing lottery system...
...English professor routinely gives A-minuses to students who do nothing more than attend his class. A history professor allows students to skip midterms, giving A-minuses if final exams are intelligible and B-pluses if they are not. Most professors are unwilling to assign more than two papers--or one paper and a midterm--and a final exam for fear of losing students shopping for courses in an enormous catalogue...