Even so, awareness of the new law is so high that Parven Pomper Vice President Alixandria Lapp, for one, made sure to run its reception menu by a lawyer before taking it to the caterers. Under what is known as the “toothpick rule,” a reception can offer only food and refreshment of a nominal value. “We are just following the guidelines of the ethics committee, and we are completely staying within what they have deemed appropriate,” Lapp said.

Ms. Kroll also urges students to search their name on search engines—a practice known as “narcisurfing”—to see what’s in cyberspace for anyone to read.

It’s refreshing to read about a discovery that isn’t just a tiny increment. Today’s scientists are under pressure to publish something new, leading to what some cynically call the LPU, or Least Publishable Unit. You find some new detail and publish it, showing the boss that you’re in a science journal, even though the “discovery” is just a tweak of stuff already known. (Nothing new here. The best description of this is from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, about a clueless young lecturer desperate for a job in 1950s England.)

Whipsawing is a term for the corporate tactic of pitting employees at one plant against workers at another plant of the same company. Workers who produce similar vehicles or components find themselves in competition to get new work into their plant. When one group of workers agrees, under intense pressure, to certain concessions, the second group will often agree to give up even more to hold on to their jobs. It’s a vicious downward spiral, and only the bosses come out on top.

Even if you have not used credit much and therefore don’t have an extensive credit history, known in banking as a “thin file,” you could still qualify for a home mortgage.

That complexity is why he and other Northeast foresters are increasingly being called on by private landowners to help them manage their wooded acreage, commonly called “family forests.” Many of the owners have civic motives, wanting to protect their forests and ensure that invasive plant species and insects do not get a foothold.

Because the format of the data in the current database is “complex, undocumented, and brittle,” some significant data will be lost when the system is replaced by Railhead, according to the congressional report. For example, scraps of information such as phone and credit-card numbers found when law-enforcement and intelligence officials empty a suspect’s pocket, often called “pocket litter,” will not be moved to the new system.