Many consumers take this system for granted, but it was not always so.
Though most residents take the 911 system for granted, it began in Westchester only nine years ago.
The pipeline agency said it is in the process of altering its system for granting special waivers.
While some take a functioning financial system for granted, in the same way they view highways or indoor plumbing, others see a system in crisis.
While at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Masland also helped create the agency's peer-based review system for grants, which is still in use today.
"These two incidents combined suggest to me a very flawed system for granting security clearances," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who called for a Congressional investigation into the granting of security clearances to government contractors.
In California, a similar assessment system for granting new teaching licenses was started a decade ago, but the one being adopted in New York and the other states is newer and has different elements, including a new grading system.
HEALTH-CARE activists have long maintained that the system for granting patents on drugs denies the poor access to essential medicines and discourages pharmaceutical firms from collaborating to develop new ones for neglected diseases.
Americans pretty much took this self-perpetuating system for granted until about 20 years ago, when a series of alarming studies, above all the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk," called attention to how far American students lagged behind the rest of the developed world in virtually all subjects.
This paper describes an adaptive system for granting exemptions, consisting of six major components: target species selection procedure, port-to-port RA, monitoring, information support, administrative decision and review process.
