Word: basic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there's obviously a lot more riding on it. AIDS activists are painting the trial as a moment of truth in a clash between the wretched of the earth and corporate behemoths looking to grow larger still by profiteering from human misfortune. Drug companies are seeing it as a basic challenge to the principle of patent and profit, which they see as essential to their industry's capacity to develop new drugs capable of saving lives...
...basic problem is a growing mutual incomprehension, like a middle-aged married couple losing touch with why they used to love each other. One American diplomat calls it a "tectonic shift" of values and expectations. Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, says that "the security threats applying to each side of the Atlantic are increasingly varied, and not of high salience to the other. The Americans worry about missiles raining down from rogue states. The European governing classes worry about the mess they made of the Balkans in the '90s and want to do better...
...molten goo that comes out of furnaces. It's in the finishing process-when the goo is turned into billets (two tons that can be formed into beams or cables) or slabs (up to 50 tons that can be pressed into strips and rolled into coils). These are the basic divisions between long products and flat products, and each steelmaker has its forte. "There are only a few players in each product," Dupont says. "Most steel beams are made by Corus [itself formed two years ago through the merger of British Steel and the Netherlands' Hoogovens], Salzgitter or Arbed...
High-speed Internet connections, Web-enabled cell phones and billion-pixel-per-sq.-in. TV monitors are water 2.0. Not only don't they work (except for certain rumored customers in certain districts in certain unnamed cities), they're also substitutes for those things that do work (hard drives, basic long-distance service) but have come down so far in price over the years that these products are now known as "commodities," and no one can make money selling them...
...three biggest school-textbook publishers) develop nearly all K-12 tests, and there is a severe shortage of psychometricians - specialists trained in educational measurement and test design. Last spring National Computer Systems (later purchased by textbook giant Pearson for $2.5 billion) mistakenly failed 7,930 Minnesota students on a basic-skills math test. Yet when Minnesota awarded its latest $3.4 million contract to develop new tests for middle and high schools, the state again turned to NCS Pearson. "I couldn't find a company with the accuracy rate that I think is high enough for high-stakes testing," complains Minnesota...