Word: scheme
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Being tenured and thus no longer required to teach more than a few hours a week, he had time to conjure up a truly diabolical scheme for wrecking the lives of the happy, healthy undergraduates he saw around him. After consulting the standard texts on sado-masochism and trying out whips, chains and spikes, he came up with something even better. Why not force these carefree, beer-swilling youngsters to spend a year reading and writing about some minor point of unimportant and uninteresting esoterica, say, the role of footnotes in conveying the buried Freudian and feminist perspective...
...professor no doubt never thought of such a brilliant topic as that. Perhaps he only pictured students writing on some relatively useful subject, like the design of a good door stop or the formula for milking a cow to maximize production. Malevolent academics have refined his original scheme. Today, a criterion for thesis-writing seems to be the complete irrelevance of a topic to anything. remotely resembling real life...
...Reeves faulted the manager for failing to adequately explain the city's new public health funding scheme, in which the city will be paid an annual cost per patient, rather than the former feeper-service plan...
...financing scheme puts the city "at total risk, " O'Brien conceded, since a complex medical procedure could easily wipe out the expected $180 to $212 monthly payments...
...central network operating system that Microsoft can patent and control. Moreover, the Internet is devoted to open-that is to say, nonproprietary-software systems. A week after the Internet community discovered that the gif (Graphics Interchange Format) system used to exchange pictures over the network contained a patented compression scheme and that the patent holder was demanding royalty payments, somebody came up with an alternative: gef, a graphics-exchange format that worked just like gif but was patent-free...