abstract

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Related to abstractness: arrivederci
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abstract idea

An idea or thought that is intangible or outside the constraints or possibilities of the real world. Some regard love as but an abstract idea, as it is impossible to define what makes love real.
See also: abstract, idea

abstract (something) from

1. To take something without permission. Despite all of the company's security measures, hackers abstracted classified information from the server.
2. To extract key information from a longer document or text. I had to abstract all of the relevant information from that lengthy report and then present it to management.
See also: abstract

in the abstract

In a manner that is intangible or outside the constraints or possibilities of the real world. Love is something that exists in the abstract—it's very hard to define what makes love real.
See also: abstract

abstract something from someone or something

to steal something from someone or something. (Formal.) The officer was found guilty of abstracting a rather large amount of money from the company.
See also: abstract

abstract something from something

to take the important information from a longer document; to extract the essentials or the gist from a piece of complicated writing. Can you abstract a shorter article from this material?
See also: abstract

in the abstract

In a way that is conceptual or theoretical, as opposed to actual or empirical.
See also: abstract
References in periodicals archive ?
Hypothesis 1: Event abstractness will amplify differences in self-other risk perception, such that the differences will be smaller when people estimate the risk of a concrete, versus abstract, event.
SELF-OTHER RISK PERCEPTION BIAS: FUNCTIONS OF EVENT ABSTRACTNESS AND SOCIAL DISTANCE
An examination of the subsequent univariate tests for the dependent variables indicates that the instructional model has a significant effect on Originality, Abstractness of Titles, and Elaboration and does not have a significant effect on Fluency or Resistance to (Premature) Closure.
Fostering creativity in tablet-based interactive classrooms
interpretation of abstractness applied to software, software patents are
Software, abstractness, and soft physicality requirements
The abstractness and ambiguity of different norms and concepts enshrined in the provisions of the Rome Statute constitute a challenge to the whole legal process and lead to inconsistent decisions.
The International Criminal Court and Complementarity
The five creative thinking abilities include: Fluency (the number of meaningful responses), Originality (the number of responses that are statistically infrequent); Elaboration (the ability to expand or embellish ideas, based on the number of additional details used in the development of the response beyond what was strictly necessary to express the basic idea); Abstractness of Titles (the ability to assign a title that synthesizes the drawing and that goes beyond specifically labeling it); and Resistance to Premature Closure (the ability to keep the mind open long enough to let original ideas arise) (Torrance et al.
Medication and creativity in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)/ Medicacion y creatividad en el trastorno por deficit de atencion con hiperactividad (TDAH)
There may be no obvious functionality to something, and yet its abstractness reveals a fundamental sense of the ever-changing, ever-moving and ever-wondrous natural world.
Forms and patterns: Hideaki and Ryoichi Suzuki in Tokyo
This quality of purposeful abstractness makes everything sound and seem contrived.
The queen travels by van
The Court articulated a rule to determine whether an invention was invalid due to abstractness under Section 101:
In patent cases, transformation is the key: software validation stems from invalidation in supreme court case
He turns to Gillian Rose's reading of Hegel to diagnose "the cause of the abstractness of contemporary philosophy and social theory (and theology, by extension) as the unacknowledged influence of bourgeois property right, which surreptitiously determines our experience of the world" (2-3).
Waiting and Being: Creation, Freedom, and Grace in Western Theology
This is partly due to the abstractness of structure and partly due to the fact that associative organization is given by the score.
A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization
Most of the presentations shared a kind of abstractness, discussing animals in general or in principle or in imagination.
Among animals
PAI also recommended caution in expanding the view of abstractness and obviousness in the awarding of patents.
Partnership for American Innovation lends support to White House crowdsourcing initiative
Note that the word 'bullying' and all its variations have been placed in quotes over the course of this article--the purpose is to highlight the abstractness of the term and to provoke thought about its validity.
Taking a small step back to take a giant leap forward: proactively emphasizing and teaching positive expectations and values such as respect, acceptance, empathy, positivity, cooperation and peaceful coexistence can serve to establish a new climate
This model includes four linguistic categories along a dimension of abstractness to concreteness, with descriptive-action verbs being the most concrete and adjectives being the most abstract.
Como el tiempo verbal afecta a la interpretacion de las acciones: El pasado simple conduce a las personas a un nivel de representacion abstracto
The authors readily acknowledge that these abstractions have their limits, but it's that very abstractness that makes them useful lodestars for navigating real-life conflicts, in which it's easy to get bogged down in the immediate circumstances and lose sight of larger trends that may be at work.
Better together: everybody loves ensembles--but how they actually work can be complicated
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