Word: professors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thinking up business possibilities, in fact, was Bezos' job at D.E. Shaw, an unusual firm that prides itself on hiring some of the smartest people in the world and then figuring out what kind of work they might profitably do. David Shaw, a former professor of computer science at Columbia University, had been wooed to Wall Street by Morgan Stanley, where he specialized in the arcane field of quantitative analysis--using computers to spot trends in the market. He formed his own company in 1988, initially to carry on that kind of work, but with so much brainpower around...
...nation of collectors. Matchbook covers, cast-iron witches' cauldrons, Pez dispensers, pneumatic grease pumps from the 1920s, Three Stooges memorabilia--you name it, some American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes we wear, by the stuff...
Suppose, for example, that the black intellectuals who have been burning up the Internet to castigate the alleged shortcomings of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s television series Wonders of the African World were to devote an equal amount of brainpower to publicizing the AIDS epidemic. They might come up with ways to make drugs more available to impoverished Africans or to build support in Congress for California Democrat Barbara C. Lee's proposal for an anti-AIDS "Marshall Plan." They might develop strategies for changing the promiscuous sexual behavior that allows the disease to spread so rapidly...
...according to Professor of English and American Literature Daniel G. Donoghue, England might have missed the millennium. The king's scribes, he said, kept faulty records, and may have thought the date was 1049 or 1069, when it was actually 999. The error was not discovered until it was already 1000, he said lightheartedly...
...Professor of Medieval History Thomas N. Bisson noted that relatively few people knew what the date was in 1000, and few people cared. The time of the new millennium was already a time of crisis, with a rapid increase in the numbers of castles and knights, Bisson said...