Word: optic
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...five American elementary schools -- two in Massachusetts and three in New York -- such experiments already exist. Called "Microsociety," these programs bear as much resemblance to the standard neighborhood school -- with its traditional textbooks, work sheets and lesson plans -- as fiber-optic communication does to sending smoke signals. At a time when reformers, corporate leaders and politicians are all heralding the need for "break the mold" schools, Microsociety puts the radical rhetoric to the test...
Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist...
...cable-TV systems are jockeying for position in what each views as a potentially vast market but which neither is ready to create. Stuart Brotman, a communications specialist in Lexington, Mass., estimates that cable operators would have to spend $20 billion to $30 billion on digital-compression and fiber-optic technology to prepare their systems for interactive programming. The telephone companies, for their part, would have to invest $300 billion to $500 billion in fiber-optic networks before they could deliver TV-quality pictures into every American's home...
Network technology, linking computers via fiber optic cables or satellite so that they can transmit and share data, has in recent years accounted for many of the most significant advances in academic computing...
...laparoscope (when used in the abdomen), an arthroscope (when applied to the joints), a thoracoscope (when the chest is involved) and an angioscope (when the target lies inside blood vessel walls). But apart from differences in length and thickness, all these scopes are fundamentally alike: slender fiber-optic tubes that can be inserted deep inside the body through minute (1-cm-long or less) incisions. With the addition of a tiny telescopic lens, a miniature light source and a palm-size video camera, these tubes are transformed into videoscopes that project images of the patient's internal organs and, even...