Word: edisonizing
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...overscheduled Americans intent on squeezing more labor, more fun, more family time and more sheer activity from their lives, the traditional 24-hour day has become an anachronistic inconvenience, much like the sit-down evening meal. Though early-to-bed Ben Franklin might not approve, the famously sleepless Thomas Edison probably would. Why else invent the lightbulb...
...National Election Pool (NEP), a consortium of six news outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press. Veteran pollster Warren Mitofsky led a group that overhauled VNS's computer models, factoring in, for instance, voting patterns from three previous elections instead of one. Mitofsky and Edison Media Research will conduct exit polls, and the A.P. will tally votes. The networks are also using more sophisticated statistical models to interpret the data, each with its own special sauce to try to project winners as fast and accurately as possible. Overall, the system held up during the Democratic primary...
Still, states have a hodgepodge of rules for counting absentee ballots. Edison and Mitofsky sent a memo to analysts in September, warning that dealing with the absentee vote "is a very, very tricky business." In Missouri and Ohio, some counties include mail-in votes in their precinct tabulations and some don't. In certain states, the memo concluded, "as much as 15% to 30% of the total vote may not be counted on election night even when nearly 100% of all precincts have reported...
ALBERT EINSTEIN REMARKED IN 1932 THAT "THERE IS NOT THE slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Thomas Edison thought alternating current would be a waste of time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once predicted, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that airplanes would never be useful in battle against a fleet of ships. There's nothing like the passage of time to make the world's smartest people look like complete idiots. So let's look at a few more. In 1883 Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society and no mean scientist himself, predicted that...
...children all at school, Marie Valenta went to university to study primary school teaching, finishing each year in the top 1% of her class. More recently, she learned bookkeeping to make herself useful in the family's public relations business. She was clever? "Marie's a great believer in Edison's line that genius is 99% perspiration," says Valenta. "She was a super-organized person." Which is why he was quick to notice when she began behaving oddly a few years ago - leaving the front door open when she left the house, "vagueing out" during conversation, struggling with basic instructions...