Word: assignment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wimbledon's determination not to assign a top women's seed before the world's toniest tennis tournament represented an equal kindness to Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd. That meant, for nearly a fortnight, neither was No. 2, and the peace was wonderful. "Once you've been No. 1," as Evert Lloyd says with a cool stare (she could stare for a living), "you can never be satisfied with less...
...publication's love of hierarchy and invoking authority. Worse, I hope the statement "something as innocuous as a magazine for undergraduate scholarship" is also an attempt as humor. What's harmless about the way we think, or the structures we use to display that thought, or the values we assign to one kind of thought over another? It seems to me deadly. To try to say this thought is innocuous is to insulate the status quo from its effect--it is to lend an unexamined life...
...apparent clockwork regularity of the celestial barrages. Some suggest that a companion star to the sun periodically comes close enough to nudge comets gravitationally out of their natural habitat--a cloud of comets that circles the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto--sending them hurtling toward earth. Others assign that role to Planet X, while some insist that the slow, bobbing ride of the sun and its planets around the Milky Way galaxy is responsible. Whatever the details, declares Paleontologist J. John Sepkoski Jr. of the University of Chicago, the evidence for periodic mass extinctions "very strongly implicates...
...personal computer. Those who were unfamiliar with these machines received special instruction in their use Software was distributed to enable students to manipulate financial data. Word processing programs were provided to assist students in preparing their reports. Because of the formidable powers of the personal computer, teachers could assign more complicated problems than before, problems that more closely resembled situations confronting corporate executives in real life...
...seemed such a nice, harmless idea. A Moscow school principal was casting about for a topic to assign as a theme to 300 youngsters ages ten to 13. He came up with the sturdy standby: "How I Would Like to Live When I Grow Up." Perhaps there would be evidence that the students had absorbed the aspirations of New Soviet Man, an idealized citizen devoted to the good of society and for whom the Communist Party has searched since 1917. Only 18 months ago, President Konstantin Chernenko reminded the nation that "the molding of the New Man is an imperative...