Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Americans, Harvard attempted to justify its abnormally low acceptance rates for Asian-American applicants by arguing that few of them fall into its "preferred categories.' One of these "preferred categories" is the children of graduates. In other words, Harvard University openly acknowledges that its legacy policy is effectively an instrument of racial discrimination...
...funding for the $10 million to $20 million instrument must first be found before astronomers can search the skies, said project proponent Paul Goldsmith of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...hundred fourteen years ago, Bell's instrument began the electronization of the earth. The telephone system has amounted to the first step toward global mental telepathy. The telephone and its elaborations (computer modems, fax machines and so on) have endowed the planet with another dimension altogether: a dissolution of distance, a warping of time, a fusion of the micro (individual mind) and macro (the world). Charles de Gaulle declined to have a telephone, undoubtedly because he had already fused micro and macro -- Le monde...
...ring cannot be subtle. Its mission is disruption. The phone is the instrument we were issued for a march into the age of discontinuity. The telephone call is a breaking-and-entering that we invite by having telephones in the first place. Someone unbidden barges in and for an instant or an hour usurps the ears and upsets the mind's prior arrangements. Life proceeds in particles, not waves. The author Cyril Connolly wrote lugubriously about the sheer intimacy of intrusion that a telephone can manage. "Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide...
...information that it has enabled, has proved to be a promiscuously, irrepressibly democratic force, a kinetic object with the mysterious purity to change the world. The telephone, like the authority to kill, might have been legally restricted to kings and dictators. But it is in a way the ideal instrument of freedom -- inclusive, unjudging, versatile, electronic but old-fashioned (here so long no one really fears it). The telephone, like democracy, is infinitely tolerant of stupidity; it is a virtual medium of stupidity, a four-lane highway of the greedy and false and brainless. But it is (unless tampered with...