Word: likelihood
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...taint by numbers. If a politician rattles off more than three statistics about his opponent's record, assume that at least one of those figures is a flat-out falsehood, yanked completely out of context and massaged by friendly computers. The more precise the number, the higher the likelihood of prevarication. Senator Joe McCarthy would never have set off the 1950s witch-hunts if he had merely claimed, "There are, I don't know, maybe 100, maybe 200 communists in the State Department...
...October 1980, Police Sgt. Arthur G. Luongo sent a letter to Behenna warning him that his record of absences was "unacceptable." If Behenna's attendance did not improve, "there is substantial likelihood that you will not be retained by this organization," he wrote...
Clearly, Harvard hasn't come up with the right ways to deal with diversity. Improving the climate of race relations on campus would certainly increase the likelihood that more Black and other minority students would choose Harvard...
AIDS patients and many other extremely ill people have a special problem: their immune systems are too impaired to fight disease efficiently. As a result, they often require repeated courses of antibiotic therapy to hold infections at bay. But the longer the treatment lasts, the greater the likelihood that resistant strains will arise. By using antibiotics in combination with drugs that enhance immune response, however, physicians may be able to reduce treatment time...
Freud, of course, was right. Modern research indicates that the tendency to develop schizophrenia is hereditary. While the average child has a 1% chance of being stricken, the child of a schizophrenic parent faces 10 times those odds, and if both parents are affected, the likelihood jumps to 40%. But genes do not tell the whole story. Children of parents with schizophrenia raised by adoptive parents who don't have the illness have a somewhat reduced risk. In addition, if one identical twin has the disorder, the odds are just 50% that the other will. Clearly, environmental factors -- stress...