Word: elmer
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Preparing a special issue of TIME like the one you're holding takes careful planning. The biggest problem, says PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT, the assistant managing editor who supervised the project, is the issue's sheer size. "I realized straight off that if I had to edit 92 pages all at once, I'd burst," he says. So he, deputy chief of reporters ANDREA DORFMAN, and TIME's science staff began working on it nearly a year ago; by last fall their list of the greatest minds of the century had been boiled down to a few dozen names. In November...
Deciding who got those assignments took some creative thought. Elmer-DeWitt was determined to find writers who brought a special expertise to their subject and could also produce graceful prose. NEIL POSTMAN for example, who wrote on TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth, is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, an acclaimed study of the impact of television on society. RICHARD RHODES, who profiled nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, wrote a Pulitzer-prizewinning tome on the making of the atom bomb. Paleoanthropologist DONALD JOHANSON, who discovered the fossil called Lucy, had a long and bumpy relationship with the Leakey family and used...
...private sector has all the incentive to get the job done right, but the government has none of those incentives. Bureaucrats get paid whether the government works or not, " says TIME assistant managing editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Nor is the government so red-faced with shame over its Y2K slip-up that it has resolved to turn over a new leaf -- or even name another self-imposed deadline. Still, don't let visions of muddled air traffic controllers dampen your New Year 2000 celebration plans yet. Cars will still run on highways, and planes -- knock on wood -- will still take...
...meltdown of services, but there will be glitches. Some of the systems that could suffer minor disruptions include those involved in food and energy distribution, medical records and financial records. "The Senate report underscores the fact that the Y2K problem is serious," says TIME assistant managing editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "but it is not the end of the world...
...ubiquitous nature of computers these days "makes it hard to pin down all the bugs," says Elmer-DeWitt. Which is why it is probably good advice to prepare for the Y2K problem as one would for a good storm, in the words of Senator Christopher Dodd. For instance, says DeWitt, it may be useful to put away "some extra cans of food for New Year's Day 2000." But computers or not, trucks will still roll on the highways come January 1, and any disruptions in food distribution will be minor. "The real problem," says Elmer-Dewitt, "is panic -- fear...