Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nothing is more appealing than a simple solution to a complex problem. That is why so many people have eagerly embraced the notion that eating right can prevent heart disease. Following the advice of the U.S. Government's National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP), millions of Americans have lined up to get their cholesterol checked and have purged their refrigerators of fatty foods. Food manufacturers are pumping up sales simply by touting their products as "cholesterol free." Rarely has a health campaign so quickly become a national obsession...
Unfortunately, heart disease is a hideously complex phenomenon. Diet is just one of a panoply of risk factors, which also include heredity, smoking, high blood pressure and obesity. Even the idea that cholesterol is "bad" is seriously flawed, since the chemical is produced naturally in the body and is vital to the functioning of human cells. It is carried in the bloodstream by two types of molecules: low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and high-density lipoproteins (HDL). Too much LDL is harmful because it contributes to the accumulation of fatty deposits that block arteries, but large amounts of HDL are thought...
...SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. Many new acquirers start lecturing too soon. "You think because you have been successful in your own company abroad, you can run a U.S. firm the same way just because you have acquired the company," says Michel Besson, the French chief executive of CertainTeed, a maker of building materials based in Valley Forge, Pa. "You tend to underestimate their strengths and overlook your own weaknesses." An executive of a West German- owned U.S. subsidiary recalls a dramatic showdown: "Their people would come here and put down our people, our work ethics. I had a little problem with that...
SKEPTICS take heart. Remember that last year the council forged a consensus on a broad range of divisive and complex issues for the first time in recent years. It condemned the socially elite, discriminatory final clubs; it organized credible student support for minority and women hiring reform at the University; it defined previously unvoiced anxieties over campus security. The council also came out (belatedly) in opposition to house assignment changes and backed the clerical and technical worker's union. These were not negligible accomplishments...
...natural superiority of baseball can be expressed in two electric words: pennant races. The daily games through September and the all-or-nothing arithmetic of a sport still unsullied by complex playoff pairings give baseball a dramatic structure without parallel. Last week, as the California Angels gamely struggled to overtake the Oakland A's, Bert Blyleven, the bearded 38-year-old ace of the pitching staff, said, "This is what everybody plays for, to go into the last week of the season and have the games make a difference...