Word: act
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...regulations have contributed to the rise in adoptions. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 shortened the time for a state to make decisions about a child's placement. In the past, federal inspectors did little more than check necessary paper work to ensure that states were following placement guidelines. Now, however, teams of inspectors will descend upon states to track specific kids and their families. States have up to one year to show, through a court order, that they have made reasonable efforts to develop a permanent plan for reunification or guardianship or adoption. The new regulations, announced...
...mirrors that are mostly hollow, with a honeycomb-like structure inside to guarantee stiffness. University of California at Santa Cruz astronomer Jerry Nelson opted instead to create a mirror not from a single huge slab of glass but from 36 smaller sheets that would, under a computer's control, act as one. And in Europe, design teams came up with yet another idea, the exact opposite of Angel's: instead of making the mirror hollow to save weight, let it be thin--about 8 in. thick for an 8-m mirror, in contrast to the 5-m Hale...
...originally developed in secrecy by the Department of Defense to help military snoops take sharp pictures of Soviet spy satellites. Largely declassified in the 1980s, it's now being adapted for major telescopes everywhere. The idea is straightforward: stars and galaxies twinkle and shimmer because turbulent pockets of air act as weak, light-distorting lenses (heat rising from a car's hood or an asphalt parking lot causes a similar effect). With adaptive optics, though, a computer can measure the shimmer and cancel it out (see diagram...
...bureaucratic foul-ups and carelessness, condemned to futures in which dreams cannot come true. President Clinton and Congress boast of new legislation and funding to move children more quickly from foster care to adoption. Indeed, there has been an increase in those numbers. Many foster parents too continue to act selflessly as important way stations for at-risk kids while their biological parents get their lives together. However, neglect and a quagmire of child-swallowing bureaucracies plague the system. And the incidence of neglect, physical and sexual abuse of children in the various foster-care systems is feared...
Even if you didn't know that John started buying pictures after he stopped drinking, you might figure it out from the pictures. They suggest the mental climate of a man cleaning up his act. The old John was a circus clown shot out of his own cannon, so you'd expect his collection to have more of the orangutan behavior and chili-pepper colors you get from, say, David La Chappelle, the celebrity photographer who pinwheeled around John three years ago. You do find some of that in the Polaroid self-portraits Lucas Samaras made in the 1970s, when...