Word: functionality
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That noisy part of a symphony orchestra where big men thump, rumble, tinkle and crash away at drums, gongs, cymbals and triangles is known as the battery, or percussion section. Orchestra players call it the "kitchen." Like pepper in soup, the kitchen's function is usually to supply seasoning for the climaxes of a symphony. Only once in a blue moon, as in the cannon shots of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, does the kitchen get a chance to put on a solo...
Such detective work is not precise enough for Professor Isaac Starr of the University of Pennsylvania. Says he: "The function of the heart is to pump blood, and an engineer investigating a pump which was not working properly would ... begin by estimating the output of the pump directly...
...every "blow" from the heart, after-vibrations warp part of the record. Hence Dr. Starr believes that his machine will never attain "highest precision." Nevertheless it is good enough to: 1) detect early, hitherto invisible cases of heart disease; 2) show the relation between high blood pressure and heart function; 3) differentiate between various types of heart disease...
...production found its political form in the Bolshevik state. In Fifty Years Hence Churchill forecast the rise of fascist states whose power would far exceed the intelligence of their rulers, whose intelligence would far exceed their morals. But he would not write off democracy. Democracy, he insisted, is a function of morality...
Historian Allan Nevins acknowledges the earnestness and honesty of Muckrakeress Tarbell's book. But he has long thought that the time was ripe for a reappraisal of John D. Rockefeller Sr. in line with later, less emotional understanding of the nature and function of trusts. Last week he made this appraisal in an exhaustive, intelligent, scrupulously just, lucidly written biography of John D. About half of Volume I describes his poor but honest boyhood in Tioga County, N. Y., his thrifty, God-fearing young manhood in Cleveland, Ohio. About half of Volume II describes his closing years of good...