Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities.

Participation will also hone poverty reduction programmes towards the real needs of the poor and ensure respect for cultural practices.

And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue.

Increased competition is leading organizations to hone their marketing skills, looking for quot niche quot and quot competence quot in determining their primary focus.

NEW YORK Barack Obama s election was historic on many levels. Between now and his inauguration on January 20, he will need to hone his policies.

Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree.

Winston Churchill often attributed his success to his mastery of the English sentence. The ancient Greeks had schools of rhetoric to hone their skills for the assembly.

Although universities develop and hone the skills of these professionals, primary and secondary education ignite the interest of, and lay the foundation for, pupils to pursue these professions.

They pledged to further hone and develop their processes for monitoring, measuring and reviewing individual governments' implementation of the critical areas of concern, and specific actions taken to ensure adequate financial resourcing.

Further efforts must be made to hone this function and re create the required capacity, as both the need for policy analysis and the acknowledgement that UNHCR currently lacks this capacity are widely recognized both inside and outside the organization.

Reaffirming that this historic occasion calls for coordinated efforts to develop, strengthen, and hone existing consensus building mechanisms, an idea which led the General Assembly in Lima to define the OAS as the foremost instrument for consolidating a new hemispheric relationship characterized by partnership for development,

We want to act sooner, more decisively, and in a more substantial manner not just when crises become acute, but also by focusing on conflict prevention and post conflict management. This requires that we hone our tools and develop new ones, ranging from early warning mechanisms to enhanced means of international cooperation.

To enforce the statute, regulators periodically examine banks for CRA compliance. To hone in on the regulatory enforcement effect, the recent study compares the behavior of banks that are undergoing examination (which takes place over several quarters) to that of banks that are not undergoing examination in a particular tract in a particular month.

Twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from Libya, 50 percent of those from a single town in Libya, hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent. It also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al Libi, a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group.

The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system all the species, all the links and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most.

For now, increased engagement in multilateral institutions seems likely to change China more than it changes the institutions, even as China s voting power increases to reflect better its growing contributions. A closer look at the experiences of long standing institutions including working with civil society groups and promoting local ownership of policies will help China hone its strategy for engagement in Africa and elsewhere.

After almost two years on the Security Council we are more convinced than ever of the urgent need to build political commitment for preventive measures and to develop, hone and refine preventive instruments. It is a question of political will. It is a matter of allocating resources. It is about looking for solutions that are sustainable over the long term, even when strong forces want to focus on short term needs alone.