Word: autodidact
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...Ever since FDR laid out the first installment of his New Deal, every President has had to pass the 100-days test; Bush's 100th falls on Sunday, April 29. Rove, an autodidact and amateur historian, insists that presidents should be judged on a 180-day timetable, since the legislative calendar follows one. That theory won't stop the barrage of analysis that will begin this week, so, to feed the media beast, Rove and Hughes met with GOP surrogates in the Old Executive Office Building last Thursday to hand out a script. The central message: Bush will not overhype...
...smart card was invented by a former French journalist and technological autodidact, Roland Moreno, in the 1970s. Initial applications centered on ID cards, but by the 1980s--in another example of state-led adoption of new technology--France Telecom introduced prepaid telecartes that rendered coins in phone booths obsolete. Applications quickly blossomed as the association of Carte Bleue debit cards ordered their banks to fight fraud by issuing only chip-embedded cards, and as France Telecom issued the Minitel with smart-card readers to enable online purchase of everything from opera tickets to train reservations--well before anyone had heard...
...everyone agreed, one of the planet's best dinner companions. At once sardonic and curiously boyish, he was both autodidact and polymath--his curiosity and his information equally boundless. To a film critic he might recommend some recondite movie that he had caught but that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty...
...plenty of incentives to pump up his role in Asia and Russia, he has remained mum. In particular, that meant resisting the temptation to "talk up" the dollar or the stock market or bash the Fed for interest-rate moves. And Clinton has, in typical style, been an aggressive autodidact. Aides recall the time last fall when, nursing an aching back, Clinton spent an afternoon stretched out on a White House couch with one eye on the TV and the other on George Soros' complex new book on the risks of capitalism. He finished it in a day and quickly...
...prolific writer and autodidact who authored eight books and 70 magazine articles, Carnegie was a voluble, if sometimes naive, adherent of the Victorian faith in mankind's progress. His quixotic ideals often clashed, however, with the brute realities of his steel mills, where men toiled 12-hour days, seven days a week. If Carnegie fancied himself the friend of the workingman, he had to face the ultimate comeuppance in 1892 when his associate Henry Clay Frick brutally suppressed striking workers in Homestead, Pa., in the bloodiest clash in U.S. labor history...