The result, analysts said, is a messy patchwork of overlapping institutions that threatens to create a security vacuum.
Reding, a loyal native of the Midwest who's frankly sentimental about its past and starkly lucid about its likely future, invites his rushing readers to gaze down at the "flyover country" of America and see not a grid of farms and county roads but a patchwork of failed institutions and aspirations.
Many university professors and students say such a ranking could create a patchwork of better and worse institutions, instead of a homogenous offering across the country.
Mr. Obama will arrive pledging an overhaul of the United States' patchwork of regulations, which left institutions like A.I.G. without adequate supervision.
"Right now, University Circle is a patchwork of hospitals, universities and cultural institutions, and some beautiful but underutilized public space," said Chris Ronayne, president of University Circle Incorporated, a business improvement district founded in 1957.
After reports of chronic abuses — of detainees beaten and sometimes left to die of untreated injuries and illness — the Obama administration in 2009 vowed an overhaul of the nation's immigration detention system, the sprawling patchwork of prisons and prison-like institutions that confines nearly 400,000 people a year as they await deportation or asylum.
But three years after the overthrow of their dictator, many Libyans have become cynical about democracy, believing that real power is vested not in fledgling state institutions but in the patchwork of militias that emerged during and after the uprising of 2011.
For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not a transnational arrangement mediated by human institutions, but a hopscotching patchwork of political and economic freedom arranged by human persons responding to his teachings and empowered by his spirit.
These included relatively small programs, including one health plan and one academic medical center, and three larger programs implemented by safety-net institutions, entities that provide a patchwork of services to the uninsured, under-insured and indigent populations who would otherwise have little access to health care services.
In the absence of secure funding, a patchwork system of different institutions and assistance has emerged among the country's regions, with Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalusia being the only ones to offer organised assistance to victims' families.
