Word: phenomenon
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...what the future holds for Becker? No question about it, he is an authentic phenomenon on at least three indisputable counts. He is, at 17, the youngest man ever to win Wimbledon, which may be media frazzled but is still by irrational common consent the world's premier tennis tournament. He is also the first unseeded player to do so and the first from Germany. Other unheralded players have used this great stage to announce their arrival at the threshold of greatness (Bjorn Borg, who reached the quarter finals in 1973 at 17; John McEnroe, who gained the semis...
Even more daunting than the sheer size of the program is the requirement that it run flawlessly the first time out, a phenomenon unprecedented in the short history of computers. Says M.I.T. Physicist Herbert Lin, who last month published a critique of the Star Wars software problem: "No program works right the first time." A computer system as complex as Star Wars' can be expected to contain tens of thousands of errors. Some of these could be eliminated by testing component parts one at a time. But when these components are finally put together, new bugs inevitably turn...
...become a grim reality of life in some Mexican border towns. Upstart groups like the Zetas have emerged largely as a result of the Mexican government's recent crackdown on the big cartels that have long monopolized the country's $25 billion-a-year drug trade. Experts call the phenomenon "atomization": as the large Mafias decompose, more reckless "microcartels" spin off or move in. In their heyday in the 1980s and '90s, Mexico's biggest kingpins ran networks that employed thousands of people; now gangs like the Zetas, whose members number at most in the low hundreds, are waging vicious...
...also classifies nonphysical, nonverbal behaviors, including gestures and making faces, as bullying. "They happen quite a bit and can have an effect as well," Nishina says. "But they're very subtle and very difficult for us to capture and assess well." Even tougher to assess is the growing phenomenon of cyberbullying--vicious text messages or e-mails, or websites on which kids post degrading rumors. A recent survey of more than 5,500 teens found that 72% of them said online bullying was just as distressing as the face-to-face kind...
...roommates’ and my attempt to capitalize on the Harvard mystique is hardly original. You could probably trace the phenomenon back to boys’ books of the ’teens and ’twenties, such as Fuller at Harvard, but it certainly reached its flowering in Erich Segal’s shamelessly treacly Love Story. The fact that such a conventional story of improbable cross-class love achieved widespread popularity is attributable in large part to its setting...