Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Updike (Knopf; $17.95). In this modern Scarlet Letter, a Massachusetts wife flees to a zany Arizona ashram, recounting her adventures in penetrating (and sometimes scarlet) letters...
...girls' school and summarily ejected the students. Meantime, a Senator could find no place to house his wife and child; so they stayed home in Missouri, while Harry Truman spent his first years in Washington living in a hotel. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, observes Brinkley, "invented the modern press conference by accepting direct questions," whereas his predecessors had demanded they be written and submitted in advance. Yet F.D.R. regarded his journalistic critics with "what seemed to be the consuming, corrosive hatred of his public life." The black opera star Marian Anderson broke the color line by singing in the D.A.R...
...this is Redfordland, and Milagro is a dream of liberal community. The developers, timid villains in a modern range war, are no match for the villagers. Here comes Ruby (Sonia Braga), the local La Pasionaria, bustling with petitions and '60s rhetoric. Sheriff Bernie (Ruben Blades, who exudes sly star quality) keeps tamping down the hot tempers of the villagers and the Anglos. And Amarante (Carlos Riquelme) fights the scourge with flaming arrows, fish heads and ancient curses. He even fires his pistol at an intruder and drives the developers' bulldozer over a cliff -- though no one in this gossipy town...
Their work has spawned a new phase of the great computer revolution that has been going on for the past 40 years or so. Whereas the early use of computers revolutionized information handling, late developments promise to better manage raw computer power and the increasing complexity of modern information technology. For the first time in history, these systems allow computers to deal with ambiguity and questions of judgment that are too subtle for conventional data processing, however powerful. After years of false starts and overblown promises, the new systems, called expert or knowledge-processing systems, have exploded onto the commercial...
...military has tapped second-wave technology in its efforts to come to grips with the complexities of modern warfare. The Navy monitors the strategic status of the Pacific fleet with a system that tracks 600 ships, submarines and aircraft and alerts the fleet commander to changes in readiness and the probable impact of those changes. The system analyzes everything that affects readiness, from firepower and fuel consumption to morale (which it estimates by keeping track of the time that has elapsed since a ship's last shore leave). Complex fleet-deployment problems that used to require several days...