Word: virtual
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...week, the victory of the two ruling parties in last Saturday's provincial election in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq was never in doubt. The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have run the region in a virtual duopoly since 1991, when the U.S.-patrolled No-Fly Zone helped force Saddam Hussein's military out of the region. However, a new coalition, the Change List, is expected to make gains in the election, with polls showing that it could capture as much as a quarter of the vote. This represents the first significant challenge...
Scribd is also looking to expand into the classroom—Adler said that the company is currently developing an annotation feature, which will allow users to write notes and highlight text on the virtual books using electronic devices. Hopefully, he said, this will allow material on Scribd to compete with physical textbooks...
Buried in Facebook's new payment terms is this gem: if you spend $1 to get 10 credits at Facebook's virtual-gift shop--where you can buy icons of unicorns as well as of sock-draped doorknobs (the universal symbol for "Keep out, we're hooking up")--you have three years to use up your points. After that, Facebook reserves the right to go rogue by "sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends." This is yet another reason to rethink friending your boss, lest you one day unknowingly send her a (virtual) flaming...
...people spending real money on this stuff? Humor is clearly a big draw: a study last year by Lightspeed Venture Partners found that virtual ninjabread cookies are given twice as often as virtual chocolate. There's even a create-your-own-gift application, which has more than 300,000 users. Make yours clever enough, and you could horn in on the estimated $42 million in Facebook gift sales...
...retrenchment at individual campuses will mean fewer student jobs, fewer teaching assistants, a virtual elimination of lecturers (who often teach up to 30% of undergraduate classes in some departments) and the risk that top faculty will flee for more lucrative - and stable - ivory towers...