Word: useless
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...income from a $19 million endowment given to it by New Jersey Department Store Owner Louis Bamberger and his sister, Mrs. Felix Fuld. They did so at the suggestion of Medical Education Reformer Abraham Flexner, the Institute's first director, who convinced them of "the usefulness of useless knowledge." It now has 23 permanent "professors," each of whom was selected by the vote of the other professors and who get about $24,000 for a seven-month academic year. In addition there are 100 "members" who stay at the Institute only a year or two. Also chosen...
...House subcommittee on Government information was created-with Moss as chairman. The subcommittee quietly launched an exhaustive investigation that yielded countless case histories of secretive bureaucracy. The subcommittee discovered, for instance, that a bow-and-arrow weapon devised by a Pentagon civilian employee during World War II had proved useless-but by 1958 was still classed as a military secret. Moss forced many agencies to discard meaningless security precautions and marshaled bipartisan support for revision of the 1946 law that permits federal officials to clam up merely by decreeing that disclosure of data is not "in the public interest...
...Quang's response to that was another press conference. "If I were an American," he railed, thrusting his jaw forward like an emaciated Mussolini, "I would be ashamed of the President for this statement that the immolations are useless." But in point of fact, unlike 1963 the grisly suicides thus far have proved largely useless in advancing Tri Quang's campaign to topple the Ky government. The reason: the great majority of Vietnamese Buddhist laymen are clearly unconvinced that the immolations are either justified or necessary, and horror has given way to exasperation and even ennui...
...many unnecessary operations are performed-at attractive fees. After a study of 6,248 hysterectomies, Dr. James C. Doyle concluded that one-third "seemed to be unwarranted." Harvard's Dr. Osier Peterson, assistant visiting professor of preventive medicine, notes that tonsillectomies, "which most academicians agree is a useless operation," make up 6% of all U.S. operations-while they comprise only a fraction of 1% in Sweden...
...anti-missile defense system. We have depended, since the beginning of the nuclear race, on the threat of retalliation to deter potential aggression. Both the U.S. and the USSR have relied on increasing offensive capacity to cause nuclear stalemate. Defensive systems such as Nike-X have been considered useless in view of bipolar balance, for the very practical reason that such a system would probably be in effective in case of an all-out attack by hundreds of enemy ICBMs...