Word: culprit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...while online communications are often a time-stealing culprit, some companies are finding relief in them. All the employees at Basex, an information-technology research firm in New York City, use instant messaging. A simple switch to DO NOT DISTURB status signals that coworkers shouldn't phone, email or stop by to chat. "There was never a memo on it. We all just started using the technology," says CEO Jonathan Spira. Finding peace and quiet should always be so easy...
...What if homework is taking the place of family conversation and games? Homework isn't necessarily the culprit. For children shuttled from lesson to lesson or for kids who have hockey practice every afternoon, homework is just part of a high-pressure package. "If you're going to send kids to a highly academic school or enroll them in advanced classes, you have to make that the priority," advises Michael Thompson, author of The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Find Success in School and Life (Ballantine; 272 pages). "You can't pile on activities; the child will...
When the New York Times reported the story of Helen Hernandez in early August, fraud wasn’t the culprit cited. Rather, the paper underscored the technical mistakes plaguing election administration in this country. Indeed, according to a CalTech/MIT study, as many as 1 million votes may have been lost in 2000 due to such polling place errors...
...enamel. Diet sodas were just as bad as regular sodas, and canned iced tea caused 30 times the damage of fresh-brewed tea or coffee. The worst offenders were noncolas like Mountain Dew, which caused two to five times as much damage as the cola drinks. The main culprit in this dental destruction, says Fraunhofer, is the presence of chemicals, such as citric, malic and tartaric acids, that are added to impart tartness to the drinks. Of the soft drinks tested, the one that caused virtually no harm to teeth was A&W root beer. Reason: it has the fewest...
...even minor signs of trouble. Today more than one-quarter of U.S. births are by C-section (up from 5% in 1970), though fear of malpractice suits is just one factor in the trend. Meanwhile, medical research has been challenging the conventional wisdom that birth trauma was the principal culprit in cerebral palsy. "There seems to be no scientific question that most of that injury [cerebral palsy] occurs prenatally and is not related to the delivery," says Dr. H. David Bruton, whose partner was a defendant in a lawsuit argued by Edwards and who later served as North Carolina...