(a.) Depending on will or discretion; not governed by any fixed rules; as, an arbitrary decision; an arbitrary punishment.
(a.) Exercised according to one's own will or caprice, and therefore conveying a notion of a tendency to abuse the possession of power.
(a.) Despotic; absolute in power; bound by no law; harsh and unforbearing; tyrannical; as, an arbitrary prince or government.
Example Sentences:
(1) This developed concept of "valve only" energy loss has the potential of standardising the findings of different research groups by removing the arbitrary selection of measurement points from reported results.
(2) 'Vertical' sections are plane sections longitudinal to a fixed (but arbitrary) axial direction.
(3) In the microtitre plate assay only 45% of specific IgE was immobilized and it was necessary to express the results in arbitrary units.
(4) It is concluded that renin levels in hypertension are influenced by several factors and that any attempt to subdivide patients into renin subgroups is therefore arbitrary.
(5) In his letter Abd El Fattah highlights the arbitrary nature of many of their detentions, the torture to which thousands have probably been subjected – and the apathy towards, and often enthusiasm for, such malpractice among the public.
(6) Although the diagnosis of hyperlipidemia is somewhat arbitrary, in that the upper limits of normal are not universally agreed upon, it is clear that the risk of atherosclerosis increases with plasma cholesterol concentration; it may also increase in hyperglyceridemia.
(7) Several arbitrary definitions have been used, some related to visual estimates of coronary stenosis and others to quantitative angiographic techniques.
(8) More than 60% of the residents' working hours in this program exceeded the arbitrary 80-hour limit, emphasizing the challenge of complying with the imposition of maximum work hours.
(9) Practically, serially accumulated images with sequentially prolonged accumulation times are weighted by two arbitrary functions.
(10) While somewhat arbitrary, the number of drug-affected newborns, adjusted for underreporting, was about 38,000 (95% confidence interval: 30,000-45,000).
(11) The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979 [...] I cannot imagine a more "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary invasion" than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.
(12) For the chain with arbitrary values of characteristic times of individual stages the maximal possible degree of the chain stability and corresponding value of the feedback coefficient are estimated.
(13) The cellular total polyamine (spermidine + spermine) concentration on the slides varied between 4 and 15 nmol per mg protein (MCF-7 cells) and 5 and 26 nmol per mg protein (HeLa cells) and the corresponding microfluorometric results between 60 and 115 arbitrary units (MCF-7 cells) and 80 and 160 arbitrary units (HeLa cells).
(14) A general purpose computer program, PROPAGATE, has been written to allow addition, deletion, and modification of the beam line elements used in the calculation and to provide a convenient means of repeating such calculations for arbitrary beam lines.
(15) The current government should learn from past mistakes and not expand the programme too quickly in pursuit of arbitrary targets, and, above all else, not overclaim for free schools.
(16) The device consists of a motor-driven shaft which moves the record past a fixed cursor, and an electronic counter which records the movements of the shaft, thereby providing a cumulative tally of the distance of the current position of the cursor from some arbitrary origin on the record.
(17) Analysis of total radioligand binding was found to be a better procedure because it eliminates the use of an arbitrary concentration of unlabelled ligand and improves the accuracy of the assay.
(18) Water ferns (Salviniaceae) and seed ferns (Pteridospermae) are known as the arbitrary type of Lycopsida which did not reach the state of shot structure of the body.
(19) Methods are reviewed for estimating the transverse relaxation time T2 and the pseudodensity (PD) from spin-echo measurements acquired at an arbitrary set of echo times [TEi].
(20) The response of the resting (fully formed) hair follicle to irradiation was studied using an arbitrary 6 unit scale of epilation as an endpoint.
Luminary
Definition:
(n.) Any body that gives light, especially one of the heavenly bodies.
(n.) One who illustrates any subject, or enlightens mankind; as, Newton was a distinguished luminary.
Example Sentences:
(1) Later in the day, both presidents joined Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton at another Democratic luminary’s birthday party.
(2) Granta is rushing out 100,000 extra copies of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries to capitalise on the first Booker prize win for the publishing house.
(3) Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute – employer of such luminaries as Iraq War stooge Judith Miller, invariably wrong William Kristol and racist hack Charles Murray – was willing to go even further than Marshall in placing the blame for women’s economic travails on alienation from “the family” and then further blaming women’s thoughts for turning women against where they belong.
(4) He has, after all, been such a boxing luminary for 17 years, as loud and bright as an atomic bomb, that only the purblind or the ignorant could have failed to notice the fire in his gloves, the wings on his heels.
(5) A no campaign that emphasised those shared experiences would have struck a deep chord: "This is a very loyal British country in its soul," the SNP luminary said to my astonishment – hastily stressing that Scots' attachment was to an emotional Britishness, not the British state.
(6) The consensus at the RSA conference, where luminaries from the security community are gathered, is that Washington will have a hard time convincing Silicon Valley engineers to invent a technical solution to resolve the standoff between Apple and the FBI .
(7) The Russian tycoon has said he wants to have an editorial board comprised of luminaries such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev's personal friend, and Tony Blair.
(8) The Webby awards, often described as "the Oscars of the internet", are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities.
(9) She does not make things easy for herself: she has organised her 800-page epic according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens, while each of the novel's 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle.
(10) Australian film producer Jan Chapman has said she is “devastated” after her photo was mistakenly used in the Oscars’ In Memoriam montage, which celebrates film industry luminaries who have died in the past year.
(11) The artist turned film-maker, whose only feature film to date is the acclaimed 2009 John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, reportedly beat out luminaries of the calibre of Joe Wright, Bennett Miller and Gus van Sant.
(12) Eleanor Catton's life swerved off its expected course almost exactly 12 hours before our meeting, the morning after her novel The Luminaries – a virtuoso work set amid the 1860s New Zealand gold rush – was named the winner of the 2013 Man Booker prize .
(13) Eleanor Catton is second favourite to win the Man Booker prize with her 823-page novel, The Luminaries, behind the favourite, Jim Crace.
(14) Criminals learning from NSA Intelligence agency hacking techniques will also be adopted by criminals, according to security luminaries speaking with The Guardian.
(15) But running for president can be tough, as political luminaries such as Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and George HW Bush have found.
(16) It's been suggested The Luminaries might be the Great New Zealand Novel, an idea that makes her uncomfortable.
(17) Cliff Richard was a supporter while other luminaries included Mary Whitehouse, Salvation Army leaders and senior clergy.
(18) It's been suggested recently that we've entered a new era of big books, with some highly praised novels, including The Luminaries and fellow Man Booker nominee The Kills , by Richard House , getting on for as much as 1,000 pages.
(19) She learned from the luminaries of the age: JB Priestley (whom she charges with taking an idea for a play from one she wrote), Bernard Shaw, Sybille Bedford, EM Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Ian Fleming, Cyril Connolly, Charlie Chaplin, Stephen Spender, Muriel Spark, who observed an argument at dinner "expressionlessly – like a bird witnessing a road accident".
(20) From these results we speculate that reserve cells located in the intercalated small ducts of Bartholin's gland may have the potential to differentiate into two cell types, myoepithelial and luminary cells, the former forming the pseudocysts.