Word: coded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...summer began, for me, at the Cannes Film Festival, where I was granted a partial view seat for The DaVinci Code. I saw enough of it to be mystified at the failure of the estimable Tom Hanks and the enigmatic Audrey Tatou to generate the slightest romantic frisson (pardon my French) as they darted around Europe on their anti-clerical rounds. It ended, for me, with The Illusionist, a rather handsome gaslit period piece in which I failed to understand what Edward Norton saw in the blandly beautiful Jessica Biel, even though I did like his magic tricks...
Another innovation at the VA was a bar-code system, as in the supermarket, for prescriptions--a system used in fewer than 5% of private hospitals. With a hand-held laser reader, a nurse scans the bar code on a patient's wristband, then the one on the bottle of pills. If the pills don't match the prescription the doctor typed into the computer, the laptop alerts the nurse. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 1.5 million patients are harmed each year by medication errors, but computer records and bar-code scanners have virtually eliminated those problems...
...huge in the right project. Will Ferrell has become a major deliverer. Talladega Nights, if it keeps on motoring at its turbo pace, could end up one of the top five grossers of the year (after Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Cars, X-Men III and The Da Vinci Code); and it was made for less than half the cost of any of those films...
...college counselor at a public school in a hothouse ZIP code, and you wish you could grab the students, grab the parents by the shoulders and shake them. Twenty thousand dollars for a college consultant? They're paying for help getting into a school where the kid probably doesn't belong. Do they really think there are only 10 great colleges in the country? There are scores of them, hundreds even, honors colleges embedded inside public universities that offer an Ivy education at state-school prices; small liberal-arts colleges that exalt the undergraduate experience in a way that...
...rates of acceptance into grad school. And then there are the unquantifiable assets. At Davidson, townspeople and professors bake cakes for the winners of the freshman cake race and students boast that scattered around the campus are dollar bills held down by rocks, tangible evidence of an honor code so entrenched that if a dollar falls on campus soil, it stays there until the owner claims it. Kenyon in Ohio includes a paragraph in its acceptance letter that is entirely personal to the particular student: good job on the essay, nice season in basketball. The big schools...