Word: randoms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easy availability of guns may be a necessary component of the Littleton phenomenon, but it's not a sufficient explanation. After all, firearms have been widely available for decades, but random mass shootings by high schoolers are a comparatively recent phenomenon. And in a country such as Israel, where a large proportion of the population is almost permanently armed from its teenage years, gun crime is almost negligible. A second common explanation for alienated teenagers' venting their anger in shooting sprees is the glamorization of violence in American popular culture. "Hollywood, TV and and videogames have spearheaded a cult...
Dotalk through possible topics with professors, TF's, other students and friends. Even consider keeping a thesis journal as you go. Don't scan aimlessly through old magazines and random books looking for inspiration to strike. I tried it, and it was an entertaining waste of time. You're much more likely to run across a topic while researching a paper for a class in your area of interest. Which brings up an important method for choosing a topic...
...take seminars, tutorials and lecture courses requiring research papers early on in your Harvard years in fields that interest you. That is, don't fill up your sophomore schedule with Cores and other random large lecture courses--when thesis time rolls around, all that cocktail-party knowledge will seem more useless than ever. Once you have a topic...
John Pierpont Morgan is usually "depicted...as a ruthless predator who robbed America's farmers and workers to line his own pockets," writes Jean Strouse. But halfway through her first draft of Morgan: American Financier (Random House; 796 pages; $34.95), she realized that the picture she was getting from plowing through a mass of Morgan documents, many of which no previous biographer had seen, was far more complex. Starting over, she has produced a more balanced and crisply written--though at times unnecessarily detailed--portrait than her subject could ever have drawn. History, Strouse observes, is written by "the articulate...
Natural selection, Orr points out, applies beautifully to random processes such as gene mutations but would fall apart if animals could deliberately upgrade their young. Ideas, on the other hand, are often consciously modified before they're transmitted. Meme evolution, unlike gene evolution, isn't random. "When Newton invented calculus," says Orr, "he didn't do it by generating a million random ideas and choosing the best one." Darwinism, say the critics, has no relevance under these conditions...