Word: paradigm
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...some semisuccessful attempts have been made to accommodate the events of Sept. 11 within a conventional literary novel; Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules and Nicholas Rinaldi's Between Two Rivers slink to mind. But there's something missing, something about the paradigm-pulverizing force of the war on terrorism that is simply not conveyable in the old forms. For a glimpse of the new word order, you could do a lot worse than pick up Lorraine Adams' endlessly fascinating, curiously disorienting debut thriller, Harbor (Knopf; 292 pages...
...years of feeling that they were losing the war on cancer, doctors and researchers gathered at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in New Orleans reported last week that they finally have a deep enough understanding of the molecular underpinnings of cancer to offer patients new hope. "The paradigm is changing," says Dr. David Sidransky, a cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institution. "New targeted drugs are coming, and we have to figure out how to use them...
When it works, the new paradigm can achieve dramatic results. Most of the newly approved drugs work in only 10% to 30% of patients, but in those patients, tumors routinely shrink to less than half their size. The number of new drugs that have been approved is small, their cost is high (at least $20,000 per cycle), and progress is slow. The five-year survival rate for all cancers is 63%, up from 51% in 1975, according to the American Cancer Society. But most of that improvement is attributed to the effectiveness of antismoking campaigns, not to better drugs...
...think it comes from being a lawyer; it’s the wonderful organizing paradigm of billable hours,” he says...
Common sense sticks, to some extent, with the old paradigm. A lot of things endorsed by the starlings (reality TV, politicians, best-selling books) are so moronic that they practically disprove Darwin. But Surowiecki does not claim collective perfection, only the effectiveness of a diversity of individual intelligences--like those hundreds of scientists at labs all over the world who, without overall supervision but sharing their data, succeeded in isolating the SARS virus in only a matter of weeks. The Wisdom of Crowds is a subtly intelligent book that's fun to argue with: if it becomes a best seller...