Word: functions
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bank vaults. The international prices of everything from crude oil to cocoa beans are denominated in dollars. The dollar is a universal medium of exchange because it is liquid, readily available and backed by the largest economy in the world. There has been little reason for global commerce to function any other way. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...president and Congress by scrutinizing Bill Clinton’s schemes against Newt Gingrich. But Cameron reduces these highly personal exchanges to utility maximization problems. “The utility of any point in the policy space to either the president or Congress can be read from their utility functions,” he drones. His observations are nearly impossible to use: How do you find Barack Obama’s utility function...
...with more staff and felt more expendable, the package would have presented a greater dilemma.“I don’t think anyone will be feeling very confident saying that in this environment, but...I simply and honestly can’t imagine how the office would function,” Coontz said.But fears of the harsh economic reality of joblessness have convinced some staffers that they may be better off taking their chances and staying where they are—for now, at least.“I’m not taking...
...Such alertness may not seem like a bad thing, except that in a second paper in the same issue of Science, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin found that sleep appears to function as a critical shutoff valve for the fruit-fly brain. After a period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit...
...Hazards of Love” is best enjoyed as the sum of its parts, but its individual peaks are manifold. With its creative mix of styles, “Annan Water” is multifaceted enough to be able to fit eloquently into the overall theme and still function effectively as a self-contained statement. As the rhythmic bellows of the accordion and the acoustic guitar in the verse suddenly stop to make way for a chorus of singers accompanied by organ, the song gains a sense of completion and cohesion that some of the other tracks lack. It ends...