Word: conundrum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unlike such other recent works on the underclass conundrum as William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, Rosa Lee proffers neither theories nor proposals. Instead, Dash allows Cunningham's life story to speak for itself in all its depressing complexity. Cunningham's case was extreme even by the standards of the underclass, but it speaks volumes about the devastating combination of circumstance and personal flaws that condemns them to misery. By refusing to be judgmental, Dash illuminates the simplistic limitations on the far ends of the welfare debate. It is a problem, he strongly implies, for which neither side...
...Congress for their "unwavering" support and describing the agency's projects in glowing terms. As the conference drew to a close, Goldin proposed that the President and Congress appropriate more funds to resolve the scientific issues. The announcement and conference may have been the marriage of an intriguing scientific conundrum and a budget crunch. "Obviously NASA is a beleaguered agency," says TIME's Jeffrey Kluger. "In the ten years since the Challenger disaster, there has been increasing public awareness of how lean the government financial larder is, and that makes NASA look like a luxury operation. Anything that vindicates space...
...really want to appreciate the conundrum of power these days, just watch David Letterman on any night when he wincingly pronounces himself "the most powerful man in American broadcasting." Hearing the way he wraps that phrase in a cloud, its own microclimate of irony and gloom, who would be tempted to join him in the upper echelons? Whether he's the most powerful man in broadcasting is not even debatable. That title automatically goes to one of the network heads. What is certain is how badly he wishes he still held his old crown: most influential. That's what...
Still it serves as a nice metaphor for what remains a deeper conundrum about computers: despite their growing power and ubiquity, especially in modern offices, the resulting increase in productivity is almost negligible. Tenner offers some convincing reasons why this might be so (time-consuming software upgrades; downsized secretarial pools), but no reassurance that the dilemma will ever be resolved...
Over the past year, the Public Policy Institute at Radcliffe College has been studying the work-family conundrum. The project, called the New Economic Equation, conducted focus groups around the country with men and women on all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Last week the institute held a two-day conference to review the findings and propose solutions...