Word: grounding
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...which the committee strove to generate as many ideas as possible. At its first fall meeting in early September, the committee moved into a phase of “convergent thinking,” during which it scrapped ideas deemed unfeasible. “The ground rules for the first phase was you could think of everything. Nothing is sacrosanct because you could have ideas that spin off of those,” Kosslyn said. “Now we’re beyond that...
...There are hints that the young man began to change after 9/11. He dropped out of school and took his place working at a family coffee cart near Wall Street, not far from ground zero. Though gregarious with customers, Zazi grew stern with his friends, chastising them for their interest in popular music and expressing other fundamentalist views. On certain occasions, he replaced his Western clothing with a traditional tunic, and he let his whiskers grow. "Najib is completely different," a neighborhood man told Sherzad a few years ago. "He looks like a Taliban. He has a big beard...
...getting the money is only half the battle; how well it works - and whether it helps to change strong anti-American sentiment - depends on getting it to the right people and projects on the ground. That job principally falls to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and many critics say its performance isn't very encouraging. "When you are spending large amounts of money at arm's length, operating in hostile environments, it is very easy for money to get spent corruptly and/or badly, and that is what I have seen in our health programs," says Roger Bates...
Well-informed Pakistanis say this dismal performance is all too typical. Worse, they insist, it hints at the structural problems that are plaguing America's aid programs. "I don't mean to be unnecessarily harsh on [US] AID, but I have spent the last eight years on the ground there in Pakistan and feel very disillusioned and extremely bitter that when American taxpayers and the public thought they were helping, their money was not put to good use. It did not reach the people - I saw it with my own eyes," says Nasim Ashraf, a Pakistani American who directs...
...director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, the core of USAID's shortcomings is that it has outsourced "its thinking, planning and local interactions with the recipients" to Beltway contractors who are more incentivized to keep money flowing than getting results on the ground. In one case, a firm that was contracted to provide special surgical lights and other advanced technology to hospitals and clinics in the country reportedly failed to take into account the fact that there was no source of electricity to power the new equipment. (See pictures of the Red Cross...