Word: speare
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...colors of yellow, black and green, stood the party's VIPs. Many of the men wore Gucci and the women Prada, but mixed in with them were 60 or so people, of both sexes, in combat fatigues whose camo caps identified them as veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the ANC's disbanded guerrilla wing. A well-dressed young man whose baseball cap announced he was a fan of the Porsche World Roadshow, chatted to another in a scarlet T shirt that declared: "Let's all young people Join the Young Communist League of South Africa...
...also the cue for moviegoers the following year, when Bwana Devil, Arch Oboler's low-budget safari epic, introduced 3-D to the postwar audience. "A Lion in Your Lap! A Lover in Your Arms!" the ads read, but the big thrill was a native's spear tossed into the audience. The picture found an audience, and instantly theaters were flooded with 3-D movies - more than 100 features and shorts in the next two years. Though the most famous ones were in the genres of horror (House of Wax, Creature from the Black Lagoon) and science fiction (It Came...
...Fire Mountain" is almost an Arab town. Minarets spear the sky, houses lean against each other haphazardly, Arabic graffiti smears a few walls and broken cars litter the crooked lanes. But in fact it's an elaborate reconstruction tucked inside an Israeli military base close to Gaza. On Fire Mountain, Israeli reservists - normal men yanked out of comfortable lives at times of national crisis - get last-minute instruction on how to storm a house: one soldier lobs a grenade into a doorway while another scans the rooftops nearby for snipers...
...senior lecturer Steven Spear, a lean-manufacturing specialist who has worked on production lines at both a Detroit Three and a Toyota plant, says the problem worsened over the years as products and manufacturing inevitably got more sophisticated. Merely upgrading a Toyota, he says, requires 300 man-years of engineering. No single manager can ever understand it. "Figuring out products, markets, customers, designs, systems - what's inherent about anything complex is that it becomes impossible. You can't design it perfectly," he says. What matters, he argues, is swarming problems from every direction to create high-speed, low-cost discovery...
...Failing to cure themselves of the Not Invented Here disease, Detroit's bosses resorted to Hail Mary attempts to fix what were long-term issues. "They were constantly looking at buy, sell, hire, fire, looking to be rescued from their predicament," says Spear. On the buy side, GM CEO Roger Smith acquired Hughes Aircraft, EDS and a 50% stake in Saab. His successors bought the Hummer, 20% of Korea-owned Suzuki and 20% of Fiat with the obligation to buy it or pay to get rid of it. (The latter course was chosen, at a cost of $2 billion...