Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...masters -- Durer, Grunewald, Picasso. His indirectness and liking for allusion coexist with something akin to physical rage: the body parts in his paintings speak of dismemberment, not mere anatomy. His diagonal cross-hatchings are both subtle and banal, for Johns' scrutiny flickers in a perplexing, teasing way between simple pattern recognition and active, probing attention -- so that something quite unremarkable as an image can swell up into a ravishing pictorial event. Sometimes one is excluded; it is like eavesdropping on a man who, half asleep at 4 in the morning, combines and recombines the obsessive contents of his semiconscious mind...
Dukakis' multilateral outlook is most evident regarding Latin America. He often cites the summer of 1954, when he was living with a family in Peru at the time the CIA overthrew the left-leaning elected government of Guatemala. It was part of a pattern, he says. "Every time we intervened, we did so in the name of democracy. And almost without exception, the legacy of our intervention has been tyranny." The reasons: "We put ourselves above the law. We tried to go it alone. We tried to impose our views, instead of helping to build a democratic tradition...
...took off from the Iranian airport of Bandar Abbas, on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Within moments the radar received enough information about altitude, speed and flight path for Captain Will Rogers III to reach a conclusion: the plane was a hostile fighter flying an attack pattern. An IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) signal bounced back by the approaching aircraft seemed to confirm that conclusion. Two missiles launched by the Vincennes were electronically guided precisely to the target. A mere seven minutes after the plane had been detected, it was blown to bits before coming close enough...
...then, can the Aegis system or its operators tell what kind of aircraft they are tracking? One method is flight pattern. Although the Pentagon at first asserted that the Airbus was outside the normal pathway for airline flights over the gulf, it has since conceded that the plane stayed within the 20-mi.-wide corridor all the time. The Pentagon claimed, however, that the pilot had wandered toward the western edge of the corridor and corrected that by veering back east toward the center line. As fate would have it, that turn headed the plane in the direction...
...considering the situation in the Persian Gulf, and the Aegis system apparently worked as it was supposed to. The tragedy seems to have resulted from a collision of random events (an airliner taking off at the moment a naval battle was beginning, for example) with inflexible technology in a pattern that could conceivably happen again. The Navy immediately began searching for ways to guard against that possibility, including the obvious step of feeding information about scheduled civilian air flights into military computers...