Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...others through the huge radio telescope at Goldstone, Calif. One series of shots of Venus' surface shows a vast, troughlike depression about three-quarters of a mile long and 200 yds. wide; another shows, on an otherwise smooth plain, a cluster of 15 to 20 peaks in a pattern strongly reminiscent of volcanoes on earth. A third view further strengthens suspicions that Venus, whose high temperatures (around 900° F.) suggest a medieval theologian's idea of hell, may possess a recently active volcano. It shows a mountain measuring 279 miles by 186 miles at its base...
...unions of electrical workers have already informed General Electric they will accept no cap in a new agreement, and will require big raises besides to catch up with past inflation. The G.E. contract expires on June 27, and Westinghouse's two weeks later. "Once you get a pattern established, it can be hard to stop," muses an Administration labor official. "When the rank and file in one union see another union strike and get a good settlement, they start agitating to do the same. We're just hoping it doesn't get contagious...
...Your story says I referred to "a worldwide pattern towards a general extension of democracy, which had resulted in non-democratic ends." In fact, what I referred to was an extension of political participation, which may be one aspect of democracy but clearly not co-extensive with it, since there can also be widespread non-democratic participation (as in totalitarian systems...
...good deal of the concern about "grade inflation" derives from simple ignorance of statistics. All college teachers have had to learn about the bell-shaped curve, that symmetrical pattern formed by the grades of a large, representative population, and in the minds of many that frequency distribution, intended to be descriptive, has become normative. Whether a teacher uses a precise formula or a rough estimate, he tends to think that the largest number of grades in his course ought to cluster around an average (a "C"), with roughly equal numbers of grades above and below that average. But these days...
...quite satisfactory to many citizens, but another aspect of police work was quite disagreeable. The state legislature kept trying to control or ban the sale of liquor in rowdy Boston, and the police were instructed to enforce the unpopular laws. As one might expect, there soon developed a pattern of sporadic, selective enforcement accompanied by charges of corruption and harassment met by countercharges of hypocrisy and stupidity...