Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pictures pouring out of Taiwan last week that told the real story. Buildings were peeled open like dollhouses, with walls stripped away and still furnished rooms absurdly exposed to the air. Tall buildings leaned drunkenly against smaller neighbors. Taipei's Sungshan hotel-apartment complex accordioned from 12 floors to just four, but a temple nearby remained standing, its paper lanterns hanging from the perimeter of the roof...
Just which buildings survived was partly determined by which ones conformed to Taiwan's sometimes laxly enforced construction codes. Puli was especially hard hit because many of its buildings are made of mud and straw. The Sungshan complex might have survived except that earlier this year, a bank on its first two floors reportedly stripped steel beams of concrete reinforcement during renovations...
Quirky and unusually personal, The Big Test begins as a history of standardized testing and the SAT, but necessarily, it becomes a history of America's philosophy of education, exposing the direct and divisive conflict between our country's sacred values of opportunity and justice for all. A complex, interconnected web of personalities, Lemann's book follows the lives and accomplishments of a series of figures ranging from the early proponents of standardized testing to a few of the first women and minorities accepted into the educational elite on the basis of their performance on the exams...
...salt. But this approach is still more useful than statements of fact, and less boring. Through personal stories, Lemann is able to address the problems arising from American values without mounting direct and unfounded attacks on the beliefs themselves. He is, therefore, able to present a subtle and complex argument, recognizing both the merits and the problems with different social constructions without sounding indecisive...
...hard to convince you that I like this routine, but I do. From the day the course book arrives at my doorstep (or doesn't, in the case of this year, so I read it on the Web), I read it cover to cover, pen in hand, marking a complex pattern of courses and their relative rank in my mind. I create a database which I sort by semester, exam group, Core, concentration or elective credit, of literally hundreds of courses. I boil down to a final list that numbers in the teens and hit the ground running during shopping...