Word: provenance
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when six people in Hong Kong died of avian influenza - the first confirmed human victims of the deadly virus - this southern Chinese city has been the front line in the fight against a potential global pandemic that scientists warn could ultimately kill millions. Unfortunately, the bird flu virus has proven a canny, and adaptable, enemy...
While the older, umbrella vaccine has proven effective in the past, Dr. Lo says it may be losing its potency as newer strains of the virus spread around the region. A new study by University of Hong Kong microbiologists of a virus outbreak earlier this year found that chickens that had been vaccinated against the H5 virus had only one-quarter as many antibodies as those vaccinated in 2001. Yuen Kwok-yung, head of the University's microbiology department and an expert on avian flu, warned recently that the vaccine may be approaching total failure...
...it’s true that we all make mistakes. And in a perfect world, we promise ourselves that we will never repeat them. But let’s face it: both history and reality have proven that the same mistakes will be committed over and over again...
...While we may not know the verdict in the case of the remaining five guards for days or weeks, it seems likely that they will be prosecuted, even made into examples, given the current strength of the prosecution. But will justice have been served if these five men, once proven guilty, are imprisoned? Or does that constitute another displacement, another failure to diagnose a systemic disorder underlying its most egregious symptoms...
...Businesses and analogous enterprises like government do right to favor candidates with proven abilities to succeed in challenging and competitive environments, and no doubt a proven track record of success at an elite university speaks highly of its holder. Education, however, traditionally has been conceived as its own end, the pursuit of truth and the acquisition of virtue—good in and of itself. Meritocrats inevitably see education as a means to an end, some merely instrumental good. Therefore, an excessive reliance on meritocracy at the cost of, say, strength of character or capacity for virtue, would seem...