Word: rafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when about 15 Houses send boats to descend on the Charles for this Sunday's Undergraduate Council raft race, the winner will be the boat that finishes second. Organizers say they want to give the boats a greater challenge on the muddy waters instead of encouraging a quick race to the finish line...
Official rules state that all of the rafts must be constructed by the contestants and that no motors are allowed. A popular flotation strategy has been to use kegs or inner tubes, and for propulsion, past participants have used pieces of wood attached to dining hall trays as oars. Raft designs have included crude constructions of planks, an elaborate Viking raft, and last year's Eliot House entry--a preppy raft complete with putting green...
Officials at G.D. Searle must have watched with concern three years ago when a raft of lawsuits forced bankruptcy on A.H. Robins, maker of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine birth-control device. With good reason: from 1974 to 1986 Searle sold in the U.S. the Copper-7, an IUD that, like the Dalkon Shield, has been suspected of causing serious illnesses or injuries in some users...
...officials probably knew they were in trouble years ago, when consumers began to use the terms VHS and VCR interchangeably. The company had made a crucial mistake. While at first Sony kept its Beta technology mostly to itself, JVC, the Japanese inventor of VHS, shared its secret with a raft of other firms. As a result, the market was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the VHS machines being produced. In just the first year of VHS, Sony lost 40% of the VCR business to the upstart competition. By 1987 VHS accounted for more than 90% of the $5.25 billion...
...Ethics in Government Act formalized the terms of the job a decade ago. One day before the conviction, a reluctant Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill extending the counsel provisions of the ethics measure for five years. Meanwhile, Washington was bracing itself for the possibility of a raft of criminal indictments in another probe by a special prosecutor: the Iran-contra investigation...