Ever since the mainframe era of the 1960s, marketers have been fantasizing about the statistics they could pluck from a data warehouse.
The art of taxation, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), the comptroller general of finances, told Louis XIV before that king's spending got really out of hand, is to pluck from the goose the most feathers with the least hissing.
We do get plenty of description on commands though, with some pretty thorough response tables and examples of "anchor text" -- something that the automated assistant tries to pluck from your ramblings in order to make sense of them.
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Workers pluck parts from prestocked boxes already arranged in the order they need them.
To pluck them from the ocean, Bezos used Remotely Operated Vehicles (underwater drones) operated from a command ship on the surface.
Only time will tell if the Indian peacekeepers will now pluck success from the jaws of what was for the UN a humiliating defeat.
At CES, expect to see digital picture frames that use wi-fi to pluck photos from e-mail and RSS feeds without going through a personal computer.
How ironic would it be to see the Pirates pluck players from big-market teams like the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers or the Chicago Cubs?
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Citigroup executives say it was Mr. Buiter's strong views that caused them to pluck him from academia in 2009, when he was a professor at the London School of Economics.
In the evening, members and guests are invited to pluck a stogie from the walk-in humidor in the grand plantation house.
And Music Catch is a great, and creative, way to chill out: Players pluck musical notes from the air and create some real downbeat tunes.
Just to pluck one example from what is an embarrassing array of unnecessary upgrades: I still have the first ski pack I ever purchased, in the 1990s.
With their whips in their teeth, the riders try to manoeuvre their mounts through the scrum of horses, leaning down among the stamping hooves to pluck the carcass from the ground.
The heavy lifting was then left to space station resident astronaut Susan Helms who used the station's new robot arm to pluck the Quest from the shuttle's cargo bay.
In the body shop, vehicles begin to take shape as some of the plant's 850 robots, processing data scanned from each serial number, pluck large stamped pieces of steel from nearby conveyor belts and weld them together.
The moments where Artyom has to fend off a monster that has pinned him to the ground, or pluck a mutant spider from the glass of his gasmask, are satisfyingly visceral.
He decided to teach squirrel monkeys to pluck small pieces of food from inside a plastic cup.
Robotic elevators pluck 500 cars a day from their sky-high perches and present them to their waiting owners down below.
If the Americans agree to pluck more of the feathers from their farmers' beds, the next move will fall to the Europeans.
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Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin's low-budget indie about a little girl from Louisiana whose pluck helps her survive a devastating Delta disaster, is unquestionably one of the former.
Once embryos are created by in-vitro fertilisation and still growing in the laboratory, it is possible to pluck a cell or two from them and use molecular probes to pinpoint defective genes.
The center is trying to do what it could not do before: pluck obscure bits of information from the flood of often irrelevant or insignificant data and connect the dots to foil a major new attack.
To compete with hand-picking, robot harvesters will need to twist, pluck, cut or suck produce from stems and handle it as gently as possible.
Perhaps it should establish a fund to pluck some of its less adept patrons from life-or-death circumstances.
It did not pluck this idea out of thin air: this was advice from the august Institute of Medicine.
The Siamese crocodile, which used to pluck picnicking princesses off the riverbank, according to French explorers, has already disappeared from the main river.
Dirks showed that some of the immature-looking cells from his patients could form tumorlike clumps in the test tube, unlike most other cells from the tumors, but he didn't have a method to pluck out the stem cells.
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