Word: commonness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardly a week has passed since the New York City meeting without reports from competing scientists -- in the popular press as well as in professional journals -- of new superconducting materials and ever higher temperature ranges. An effect that once could be detected only with sophisticated equipment has become a common sideshow at conferences: a sample of one of the new materials is placed in a dish of liquid nitrogen, and a magnet placed above it. Since superconductors repel magnetic fields, a phenomenon called the Meissner effect, the magnet remains suspended in midair...
...Bardeen, his theory can explain superconductivity up to around 40 K. But at 90 K, he says, "I think it's highly unlikely. We no doubt are going to need a new mechanism." In fact, says Schrieffer, "superconductivity may turn out to have as many causes as the common cold...
...society but not much exceeding a few thousand either. There are those who think this subject was pretty well exhausted by the time Henry James and Edith Wharton got through with it. Others argue that portraits of the genteel rich are beside the point in this century of the common man. Yet Auchincloss, 69, periodically turns out a book so sparkling and assured as to render such complaints irrelevant...
...here need no prior introductions. The book is a self-contained progression in time: the first story, A Diary of Old New York, occurs in 1875, and the last, The Takeover, sometime in the 1980s, perhaps yesterday. The pieces are connected not just chronologically and geographically but by a common concern as well: the dilemma faced by comfortable people when they must choose between honor and expediency...
...Just how common false charges have become is hotly disputed. The number of confirmed cases of sexual abuse has skyrocketed, from 6,000 in 1976 to 113,000 in 1985. But a recent study of 439 child sex-abuse reports in Denver found that 8% were plainly fictitious and another 22% unsupported by evidence. However, Captain Sharon Moody, the respected child-crimes-unit commander in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County, speaks for many police and pro-child activists when she insists, "I don't think it has increased. Blaming false reporting gives us an excuse, so we as a society...