Word: predictabilities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...itinerant street photographer. Depending on which story you believe, his nickname was either a smudged version of squeegee--one of his first jobs as a darkroom assistant involved wiping down prints as they came from the developing bath--or he gained it because, like a Ouija board, he could predict where the news would happen and get there first. For a while he played violin accompaniment in theaters that showed silent films. "I loved playing on the emotions of the audience as they watched," he once wrote--an interesting admission, since Fellig would eventually give up the fiddle...
Back in his school days, when Grove was studying fluid dynamics, he might have been able to tell you. As a young chemist, Grove had to master probability theory--it was the only way to predict how some molecules and atoms will behave. One of the ideas that holds probability theory together is that it is possible to understand the odds of an enormously complex event as a series of yes-or-no questions. The theory works by taking the most complicated series of events and boiling them into binary choices: either this can happen or that can happen. This...
...Roller Coaster Cyberspace's No. 1 online service was one long busy signal last winter, leading critics to predict gleefully the pre-Web relic's demise. Well, if you bought AOL stock in, say, January, you would have nearly quadrupled your money by Thanksgiving. Could AOL chairman Steve Case be the new Michael Eisner...
...main thing was rejecting authority in every way I could," he says. "I had zero interest in science. I got out of every science class I could, there was nothing that could predict my becoming a scientist. I rejected academia, I rejected everything. I mean, it was the '60s. When I graduated from high school, I swore up and down that I would never go to college--so, I always felt it was ironic that I ended up in science...
Family fortune, though, doesn't predict campaign success. Some of the more profligate self-financers in recent years spent tens of millions on doomed candidacies, including Steve Forbes ($43 million in '96), Ross Perot ($68 million in '92) and Senate candidate Michael Huffington ($28 million in '94). In the past congressional campaign, only 21 of the 145 biggest spenders eventually won seats. One problem for well-heeled candidates is that they sometimes succumb to hubris. In 1994 Millner turned off some rural Georgians by jokingly asking a local farmer, "Do you work for a living, or are you in farming...