Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...level, the videotape machine enables a psychologist to record a baby's wriggling and demonstrate that it often moves in rhythm with its mother's voice. At the most complex levels, surgeons at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago can diagnose prenatal hydrocephalus (a brain-damaging excess of cerebrospinal fluid) in a fetus, then introduce a plastic tube into the mother's uterus and into the fetus' head to drain off the surplus fluid inside its brain. Guiding many of these technological innovations is the ubiquitous computer, which can synthesize a mother's voice...
...last thing that the gentle and unassuming Frank Reynolds did for television was to rescue it from its selfimportance, poor taste and excess. It was a close call, but the constant reminder that Reynolds the man was the heart of the reason for the ABC spectacle marking his death gave his funeral, which almost gained the electronic dimensions of a national crisis, at least a touch of the natural dignity and modesty that he possessed...
...scheme at once grandiose and controversial: shrinking the national debt by selling off excess federal buildings and land. Announced with some fanfare by the Reagan Administration last year, the plan had the goal of raising $17 billion over five years. But the stuffily named asset-management program has been a conspicuous flop from the beginning. By the middle of this year, it had succeeded in peddling only $150 million worth of buildings and a scanty 4,600 acres of land worth $4.8 million. Even worse, it has proved a disaster politically, antagonizing conservationists and even some of the Administration...
Japan today claims a cumulative total of religious adherents well in excess of its actual population: 201 million, vs. 119 million. As in centuries past, the two dominant faiths are Shinto (98 million) and Buddhism (88 million...
...Just a few years ago, in an excess of hubris, I predicted we were nearly finished with the problem of infection," Dr. Lewis Thomas, noted biologist and prize-winning author (The Lives of a Cell), observed recently. "I take it back." Through the heroic struggle of medical sleuths, most diseases faced today can be controlled, as some day AIDS will be. But microbes, which have existed on this planet far longer than man, show no signs of being unconditionally conquered. Amid the billions that exist harmoniously around us, there will always be some that become unexpectedly disruptive, mysteriously virulent. Said...