Tax havens like to pose as financial centres but they are in fact better understood as mechanisms for facilitating evasion and avoidance elsewhere.
Today's prime-time television families tend to exist as mechanisms for adult characters to wrestle with their personal distress, existential and otherwise.
Caravaggio is determined to snap men as mechanisms, men as heaving and sweating job-doers.
Amnesties are appealing as mechanisms of political expediency, not as a method for assessing or absolving guilt.
In addition, clans were important as mechanisms of social control, as vengeance for serious crimes was frequently a clan responsibility.
In the process of exercising we become more aware of our own bodies as mechanisms to be fine-tuned: exercise, he writes, "makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself".
These auctions would serve as mechanisms for setting the price the government would pay; private bidders would participate because, in a certain percentage of cases, the government would step aside and the highest private bid would win.
Burke's argument belongs to a largely pre-democratic age – before general elections fought on national issues, with parties acting as mechanisms for aggregating the views of millions of voters.
In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers.
The government's grip over higher education was never to be relaxed: it became, over the following decades, ever tighter and more bureaucratic, as mechanisms were invented to measure teaching and research "quality".
Ontologies are used as mechanisms to unify concepts to provide interoperability between systems and organizations.
