Word: adaptability
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What's certainly missing is the service's piece de resistance, the bullet train modeled on France's futuristic TGV (train a grande vitesse). Now scheduled to launch in July, the Amtrak bullet has been delayed as builders attempt to adapt European tilting technology to America's rough freight tracks. Meanwhile, Amtrak is introducing other improvements to its Northeastern service under the Acela logo--primarily a reduction of the Boston-New York trip from five hours to just under four, using newly electrified tracks. The bullet train, a.k.a. the Acela Express, will reach speeds of up to 150 m.p.h., cutting...
...package in his hands. He tossed the package into a mass grave. I asked him what he had thrown there. He said, 'My son, who died.' Then he went on chatting with his friend." From scenes like that, Salgado learned to worry about one of the greatest human capabilities, adaptation. "We can adapt ourselves to any situation," he laments, "and believe that this is a normal life...
...goals of this first stage of Project ADAPT were noble: to improve the efficiency, capabilities and performance of Harvard's financial information systems. A successful Project ADAPT would substantially increase the amount of financial information available to administrators, improving accountability, reducing duplicate data entry, and providing year 2000 compliance as well as compliance with federal and state regulations...
...implementation of Project ADAPT proceeded with more input from end users, some of these problems, such as the categorization of foreign post-doctoral fellows as "foreign national vendors," might have been avoided. Others, like the 33-digit project codes required by the Oracle software, could not. But improved communication between designers of the system and end users could have eased the pain of the transition and made the inconveniences seem more like a necessary evil and less like an insensitive imposition from above...
...that a lack of communication can cause. Low morale and inter-administration enmities can be as much of a barrier to productivity as poor software. The efforts to meet with the faculties, especially the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, should be accelerated, especially before the next stage of Project ADAPT begins. The system should not be given responsibility for handling human resources information without a general consensus among the faculties that they are comfortable with the project and are ready to use the new software. A new commitment on the part of the central administration to hearing and addressing...