Word: patchwork
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Smith, a hardened veteran of Soviet life, such problems are old hat. After returning to the U.S. from three years in Moscow, he authored The Russians in 1974, an exceptionally readable patchwork of anecdotes, interviews and personal experiences of the grey life under Brezhnev...
Ever since its creation in 1969, the Public Broadcasting Service has been an unwieldy, multiheaded beast. Most PBS series are initiated and produced under the auspices of individual stations, funded by a patchwork of public and corporate sources and scheduled (in many cases) according to the whims of local program directors. That worked well enough in the days when PBS was essentially the only alternative to the three commercial networks. But cable has made life more complicated. Such channels as the Arts & Entertainment Network and Superstation TBS have appropriated the kind of programming that was once unique to PBS, from...
Vietnam veterans have long contended that the herbicide Agent Orange, which contains dioxin, has contributed to birth defects in their children, although scientists have not been able to confirm the link. Still, a patchwork of reports continues to suggest at least a minor effect. The most recent study, published last month in the American Journal of Public Health, found that the children of men who served in Vietnam were 1.7 times as likely as the babies of other veterans to suffer from major malformations, such as clubfoot or serious heart problems...
...promote the Japanese-inspired team concept at its plants has often been greeted with suspicion, if not outright hostility, and many line workers cling resolutely to the Old World: a rigid, adversarial system characterized by strict seniority rules and a crippling multiplicity of job classifications. The result is a patchwork of different systems among GM plants, many of which are light-years behind the highly efficient Buick City factory in Flint, Mich., where the Buick LeSabre is produced. Overall, GM has made virtually no gains in productivity and remains the highest-cost automaker in the U.S. In fact, the company...
...battles of American jurisprudence were being fought far away from Washington, in the supreme court houses of the 50 states. Despite the success of the Reagan and Bush administrations at placing hundreds of conservative nominees on federal benches, a growing number of state supreme court decisions have created a patchwork of liberal exceptions to federal rulings on everything from drug testing to school busing to the public distribution of leaflets. And in an ironic reversal of the states' rights ideology upheld by conservatives during the era of the activist Warren Court, liberals now look to state constitutions as among...