Word: nostrums
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Clearly, the producers of Julia are following the old nostrum: "If you can't lick the problem, sweeten it to death." By the standards of TV, this sort of treatment works; Julia is currently ranked No. 6 in the Nielsen ratings. Analyzing those numbers, NBC statisticians report that Julia attracts an "upscale" audience -more urban, wealthier and better educated than the average. There are no indications of either a boycott by Southern whites or heavier tune-in among blacks. Predictably, though, Negro militants are outraged. And, to be sure, Julia is rarely confronted with the tough problems of being...
...irreverent study of the numbers game called How to Lie with Statistics, Author Darrell Huff coined the word "statisticulation"-the art of lying with statistics while seeming objective. One trade that statisticulates regularly is advertising. A nostrum for piles or pyorrhea is endorsed by eight cut of ten physicians because the ad agency has tirelessly spent time and money assembling panel after panel until it finds one that shows an eight-out-of-ten result...
...space nearly a decade-and thousands of trespasses-later. No established rules exist in space, and no method has yet been found to make rules effective there. No one has devised a way to station a traffic cop or patrol vessels to guard the boundaries of some theoretical mare nostrum of space. A canon of space law can thus be created only by mutual consent...
...their only important enemy. Passenger pigeons were good to eat, fun for sport shooting, and almost entirely salable: their dried gizzards were thought to cure gallstones; their powdered stomachs were a nostrum for dysentery; and their feathers were in great demand for use as ticking. During the 1870s, when the slaughter reached its peak, hard-working hunters could net 15,000 birds in a single day-at a market value of $1,250. News of a nesting was spread by telegraph; hunters came from miles around, and the pigeons were trapped, bludgeoned or shot (a single shotgun blast once brought...
...American economy moving again, Myrdal offers a familiar nostrum: the coordination of greater public spending with more long-range economic forecasting. But this, Myrdal insists, does not mean more federal controls over the economy. In fact, he feels that there is already far too much federal intervention in the day-to-day working of the American economy...