Word: failings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Skilled performances and atmospheric cinematography fail to save Joel Schumacher's Flawless, a predictable array of overwrought clichs and meddling sideplots...
...Shemmer's eventual goal is to found his own company as well. But he keeps a laser-like focus on planning. "Am I envious?" he says. "Of course I'm envious--you can't help but be when you see kids making billions." Nevertheless, most Internet startups fail, especially when founders lack business sense. "I've learned so much in this year and a half," Shemmer says. "I'm maximizing, A, my probability of getting to one of those startups, and B, being of value to those startups...
...eloquence to steel the British people in 1940 against the most ferocious force ever to walk the earth? Churchill never flinched when he and Britain stood alone in June 1940. "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. [I]f we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties...
...results have been mixed. This fall, in an online contest at www.instantnovelist.com, Brutus.1 competed against four humans who wrote short stories on the same topic. The computer's entry, "Self-Betrayal," was unremarkable; its first sentence, "Dave Striver loved the university--at least most of the time," seems to fail the "Call me Ishmael" test, and the protagonist's name is clumsily allegorical. In fact, the story came in last in a poll of visitors to the site; the literary field is for now safe from a deluge of machine-produced prose...
...massive infusion of effort would cause scores to improve so substantially that very few students would fail the exam, then perhaps the proposed high stakes system would be reasonable. However, overall scores rose only very slightly from the first time the test was taken to the second time. In some areas, scores fell despite classroom emphasis on test preparation. It seems clear that scores on this test, like the quality of education in general, can change only gradually. Three years is not enough time to improve a 40 percent failure rate to a reasonable success rate...