Word: spurious
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true that the discoveries of the initiative are available to the public. And thanks to the electronic superhighway, the gene sequences are available on the Internet with a click of the mouse. So the possibility of a mad scientist-type downloading the information for his (or her) own spurious purposes is not all that far-fetched...
However, the spurious charge of racism obscures a greater threat. Ashcroft began his campaign against White by arguing that he had voted to overturn a death penalty 14 times. Later, the tactics became more sophisticated, and White's votes were compared to others on the court (some of whom, Ashcroft appointees, had voted against more death penalties than he), but the count-the-numbers approach betrays a cynical assumption that any vote to reverse the death penalty is suspect, that the courts should rubber-stamp death sentences instead of conducting meaningful review...
...fear of dangers that can't be quantified. Though it may sound at first uncaring, we can react rationally only to real (as opposed to hypothetical) risks. Yet for several years we postponed important experiments on the genetic basis of cancer, for example, because we took much too seriously spurious arguments that the genes at the root of human cancer might themselves be dangerous to work with...
Frankly, I am disappointed that in an effort to discredit the U.C., Oppenheim has resorted to spurious name calling...
...rankings have also become enormously controversial. Among the schools critical of the system are members of U.S. News's own top-25 club: Berkeley, Tufts, Rice, M.I.T. and Wesleyan. Critics rally around Stanford president Gerhard Casper's censure of the "specious formulas and spurious precision" of the lists. What is wrong, many say, is that the conclusions are based too much on input--the current reputation of each school and the attributes of incoming students. More helpful, they say, would be a measure of output--what consumers (that's what applicants really are) are likely to get in exchange...