This is meant to make the German system compatible with others in Europe (and encourage students to move around), and to award more useful degrees.
The Friends of Hamas farce, coupled with the Polk Award, represent useful bookends when measuring the widening gulf that separates liberals and conservatives online, and how one side has completely lapped the other.
Random points are awarded and useful facts emerge occasionally, but the true appeal is its useless waffle masquerading as sound advice.
The Tonys represent only Broadway, ignoring swaths of regional, Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway productions, but commercial and nonprofit producers alike covet the awards as useful tools for marketing, subscriber and capital campaigns and launching pads for lucrative national tours.
Since Oscar is the premiere entertainment award, it is useful to look at how being nominated and winning contributes to the success of all those involved in making and distributing the movies being awarded.
Other prizes at the annual awards, considered a useful early bellwether for Oscars success, were split between an array of budding awards season contenders.
So in this case, talk about awards is really useful".
High-profile events such as the BBC awards perform a useful function by giving a boost to new talent like Soweto Kinch.
Locus magazine's annual publicly voted awards are a useful guide to the best recent science-fiction writing, with William Gibson's The Peripheral, Hannu Rajaniemi's The Causal Angel and Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire among the titles that reveal the rough outline of science fiction and fantasy in 2015.
For these reasons, competitive awards are a useful way to help measure the quality of outputs of a college/university and are thus granted a 16 2/3 % weighting in the overall rating of America's best colleges and universities.
