Word: customized
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Noting that the custom of calling professors by their first names is prevalent in Bennington College, she remarked that the present formal convention of using titles is just an "arbitrary social custom...
...anyone would hurl a rock or a Molotov cocktail at another simply because of differences of color or speech or custom remains one of life's most dispiriting mysteries. But the urge to violence can be located in a sociology of causes that eastern Germany has in abundance. The main one is economic collapse. When unemployment, forced early retirement and make-work training schemes are taken together, roughly 40% of the east's labor force is out of work; nearly 3 million jobs have disappeared since unification. Although Bonn is pumping more than $100 billion a year into the east...
...they see, when they see it and what they do with it. People will be able to call up on their screen virtually everything the culture produces, from the latest Hollywood movie to lessons in chess, from an old episode of The Twilight Zone to this morning's newspaper, custom- edited for individual readers...
Naturally, every year her cancer check turned up a few malignant cells. But thanks to a century of advances in genetic engineering, that was no more threatening than a common cold. Her doctor used a computer to analyze the genetic makeup of the aberrant cells and generate a custom-made virus that would search out the wayward tissue. Then the virus would infect the malignant cells, injecting a handful of its own regulatory genes. These viral snippets would reprogram the microscopic tumor's DNA, shutting down its unruly growth pattern and transforming the cancer cells back into healthy ones...
...fact, as historian Daniel J. Boorstin recounted in The Discoverers, 500 years earlier a civil servant named Su Sung had built a remarkably accurate astronomical clock for his Emperor. But when a new ruler was crowned in 1094, officials, according to custom, decreed that his predecessor's calendar had been faulty. Su Sung's 30-ft.-tall "heavenly clockwork" was abandoned. By the 17th century, it was a legend known to only a few scholars...