Word: linearities
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Modern prison design has been evolving since the late '60s, when the federal Bureau of Prisons first tried replacing dangerous linear tiers of steel cages with rectangular modules of cells built around common rooms manned by officers. The results were dramatic: violence among inmates and between inmates and officers decreased. Prisoners no longer controlled the jails. Some state prisons, wary of exposing guards directly to inmates, modified the design, positioning guards as observers in secure booths. The results were less successful: inmates, still isolated, remained in control. In 1981 California's Contra Costa County jail was the first county jail...
Altman may be a genius, but linear analytical rigor is not his thing. He lives and works amid a genial hurly-burly, with room for all kinds of stray inspirations and serendipitous touches to worm their way into his movies. What Altman pursues is not looseness for its own sake, but surprise -- both for himself and for moviegoers: he didn't know beforehand the tics and shadings performers like Lyle Lovett and Whoopi Goldberg (who play police officers) would bring to their characters, for instance, and the movie-within-a-movie surprise he gives the audience near...
...result, the image hovers strangely between the inorganic, mineral fixity of stone and the fluid life of paint. The banner on its pole outside the tent and the whipping linear rhythms of Judith's head ribbon seem blown by an actual wind. And the undercurrent of strangeness is increased by the way Mantegna reduces Holofernes to two anatomical fragments: his head, which the avenging Jewess is placing in a bag, and the sole of his foot, which sticks up above the horizon of the bed end. Mantegna had a liking for feet -- the same dead soles confront your...
...determine the risk of disease from trace amounts of dioxin, researchers had to assume that if it caused cancer in laboratory animals, then it could cause cancer in humans. In addition, because no one completely understands how toxins trigger cancer, scientists chose a mathematical model that assumes a linear relationship between the amount of toxin consumed and the incidence of malignancy. In other words, if a pound of dioxin caused cancer in 50 out of 100 subjects, then half a pound would trigger 25 cases...
...believe in the cyclical theory of Russian and Soviet history: every interlude of reform inevitably gives way to a resurgence of repression; the good Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev's accommodations with the right accomplish nothing except to render...