Word: groups
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Featherbedding. In the early 1950s a reform group was elected, ordered a survey of the schools' business practices. A topflight management firm found colossal waste, no proper accounting, and a great deal of featherbedding in the buildings department. The experts estimated that nearly one-fourth of the nonteaching budget was wasted, but their report was highly technical and the voters missed the point; the old group successfully pinned the label of penny pinchers on the reformers. Anti-reformers swept the 1955 elections. A grand jury has since called the next two years "as corrupt as any in the history...
Study of the eyes of beetles is already paying off. A group of scientists at Tübingen, Germany, found that a beetle's compound eyes can measure the speed of a moving background with random shadings on it. After finding out how the beetles do it, the scientists set to work building an instrument on the same principle to measure the ground speed of airplanes. It didn't need all of the compound eye, only two facets of it simulated by photocells watching the ground from the nose and tail of the plane...
...quietly amused" by what Biographer Ernest Jones describes as "one of the primitive films of those days with plenty of wild chasing." Odds are that he would scarcely be amused by a film now in the script stage and headed for the cameras next year, when an independent group led by Director John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and Producer Wolfgang Reinhardt (son of Max) go to Vienna to make a movie about Sigmund Freud...
PROXY WAR will be fought by Clint Murchison Jr. and his brother John for control of the Alleghany Corp., the holding company that controls the New York Central and Investors Diversified Services, world's largest group of mutual funds (assets: $3 billion). Murchisons were ousted from I.D.S. board by Alleghany forces, but hope to reverse setback by taking over Alleghany in which they control a potential 20% of the outstanding common stock...
...Much Pressure. Since the report steps on nearly every Frenchman's toes-except the consumer's-and since nearly every French worker or businessman belongs to an organized, articulate pressure group, the cries of outrage were predictable. Sniffed the Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises: "A perfect insignificance and a complete platitude, a collection of all the commonplaces...