Word: sifting
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...idea is to sift through all that data, using a process called link analysis, searching for patterns--a burst of calls from pay phones in Detroit to cell phones in Pakistan, for instance. The NSA can whittle down the hundreds of millions of phone numbers harvested to hundreds of thousands that fit certain profiles it finds interesting; those in turn are cross-checked with other intelligence databases to find, perhaps, a few thousand that warrant more investigation. "That data can be extremely useful, even if you never know who is on the other end of the phones," says Bryan Cunningham...
...heroes, if there are any at all, sit behind gray desks in Moscow; Langley, Va.; and London. There they must sift through tons of material provided by hundreds of different sources before they can, with luck, piece together a picture of, say, the locking mechanism on a swing-wing fighter ... It is work that occupies tens of thousands of mathematicians and cryptographers, clerks and military analysts, often with the most trivial-seeming tasks. Yet it is work that no major nation feels it can afford to halt ... In the U.S., espionage was grossly neglected until the advent of the cold...
Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, our readers should be able to hold us accountable. You should be able to sift through court records and assess the accuracy of our articles. And other newsgathering organizations should be able to verify—or second-guess—our reporting. Indeed, after the LSD arrest, the weekly Harvard Independent chose to follow up on our coverage—and to include more background information about the Quincy sophomore than The Crimson had initially provided. In order to thoroughly double-check our facts—in order to search court records...
...bottle? After developing the drink with the help of a "flavor house" in New Jersey, Vultaggio dispatched his sales force to Manhattan. "Some of those guys couldn't sell lemonade in Saudi Arabia in the summer, and they come back with orders," he says. Vultaggio would sift through Dumpsters and shake Arizona cans to see if consumers were gulping it down, and he still uses the tactic, which he calls the garbage survey. "You talk about the latest data," he says. "Garbage is usually cleaned every day." From 1992 to '94, Arizona grew from $20 million to $300 million...
...assured that some most unfortunate snapshots won’t surface on this insanely popular website. Thankfully, the facebook offers a mechanism to “untag” pictures in case a student happens upon an unflattering or damning photograph, but it requires a bit more vigilance to sift through every picture that might come up under a simple search. We encourage students to be thoughtful as to what pictures they tag of their friends...