Word: constructive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surface events largely conform to the dictates of plausibility. No one ascends bodily into heaven; the famous plague of insomnia that swept through Solitude here becomes literal, recurrent ravages of cholera morbus. The bizarre and outlandish are relegated to the domain of private lives, to characters who must construct for themselves elaborate fictions to follow in order to stand the shocks and tedium of being alive...
...memorable music. Gogol's irresistible tale of the scheming Chichikov (the splendid high baritone Igor Morozov), who would "buy" dead serfs in order to build a bogus prosperity on their collateral, holds the stage splendidly. The handsome duplex set by Designer Valery Levental is a sky- above, mudslinging-below construct. But beyond the "aria portraits" that graphically limn each of the principal characters, Dead Souls contains every cliche in the state manual, including the obligatory lament for the suffering people that has been a staple at least since Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. The opera has just enough technique to work...
While Weizenbaum and other critics insisted on measuring Mycin against human intelligence and knowledge, others looked at the system and saw a computer- handling expertise that had previously resisted automation. No one, however, was going to build expert systems if they took several years to construct. Solution: create a Mycin without medical knowledge -- in effect, construct an empty shell into which programmers could pour all kinds of different expertise. In 1977 a team of Stanford researchers under Feigenbaum dubbed the new shell Emycin (for Empty Mycin) and used it to build several more expert systems. Emycin spurred a number...
...opportunity today is to construct a united position on Nicaragua policy for the first time in eight years," said Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), a sponsor of the Democratic package...
...insight of Socrates, argued Leo Strauss, was that the rule of philosopher-kings was both necessary and impossible. The Republic, by this account, is really a massive excercise in irony, a lesson less in how to construct a utopia than in the limits of what we can reasonably expect from politics. Stone, attributing this interpretation to one "Alan [sic] Bloom", writes that, "Plato could hardly have spent his life spoofing himself...