Word: rigidness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been a torture, a purgatory out of Kafka, not Orwell, where the absence of directions becomes the scourge, and the authority becomes something you start craving, asking for. Was that the plan all along? Was all the rigid neglect of this Army Reception Battalion, all the days and weeks lost in chow lines and idle formation just a way of whetting our appetite for action...
...interpret it very narrowly. Our policy is one day a week. [It} is based on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' 20 percent policy, but we define that as a rigid one eight-hour day a week," Schauer says...
When most physicians got their training, they were taught that the adult brain is rigid, that its nerve cells, or neurons, could never regenerate themselves. If you nick your finger with a knife, the cut will heal in a few days because your skin has the ability to generate new cells. But when something bad happens to the brain, it doesn't repair itself. Why's that? "The brain is not plastic," says Snyder. "It doesn't make new cells. You are born with more brain cells than you need, and you lose them progressively and get dumber and dumber...
...path to overturning the dogma of the rigid brain was circuitous. In the early 1960s biologists discovered that new cells were being made in two areas of the adult rat brain, but the discovery was regarded as an unimportant peculiarity of the rodent brain and quickly forgotten. In the mid-1980s, Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University brought new respect to the term birdbrain by demonstrating that the brain of an adult canary has the astonishing ability to regenerate new nerve cells at a rate of up to 20,000 a day. Other researchers reported similar regenerative ability in fish...
Often, though, an administrator cannot be flexible enough. In those cases, Coleman suggests that a company make a rigid schedule more appealing by offering an attractive trade-off. For companies such as Corning and Goodyear, his consulting firm has created schedules that include 10 to 20 weeks of time off each year or that offer a seven- or eight-day break a month. Another way to make dismal shifts more appealing is to pay better. Coleman has found that many nightworkers will accept a difficult schedule if they can also work predictable overtime hours. "They could have a schedule," says...