Word: romers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Roy Romer, 71, former Governor of Colorado, was appointed to what might be the second most difficult job in America: superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Only a month ago, another educational outsider, Wall Street lawyer Harold Levy, 47, was officially named New York City schools chancellor, No. 1 on the mission-impossible list (he had been serving as interim chancellor since January). The two had never met, so last week TIME introduced them through an early-morning conference call. Excerpts...
...also hard to believe some producers' claims of high-minded purpose, as when executive producer Paul Romer calls Big Brother "a mirror to society." (Last we checked, society consisted of folks allowed to leave the house.) Scoffs Burnett, comparing Survivor with Multi-Millionaire: "There is a big difference between taking 16 adventurers to an island and 50 morons lining up to get married after meeting a stranger on TV." Of course, 23 million people watched Multi-Millionaire. He'd better hope there's not that much difference...
People will put a higher value on their time off as well as on the job, Romer continues, and this will promote and be aided by the accelerating growth of the Internet. Clearly, shopping online takes far less time than driving to five different stores...
...poor and minority groups to make IT the great equalizer between economic haves and have-nots foreseen by some would-be prophets? At best, there is a long way to go. Right now, says Varian, "educational institutions are moving in fits and starts" to integrate computers into classroom work. Romer asserts that education is "probably the worst laggard in coming up with better ways to do things," and it will have to change because the skills of the workforce can no longer be improved just by increasing "seat time," the number of years a person stays in school...
...more leisure. In sum, a better, richer life for almost everyone. To realize the promise of IT, and minimize the risks, we must experiment with new policies and new institutional structures, make provisional decisions about where we should be headed and then experiment some more. The bright side, says Romer, is that it's doable: "We control this process." Both present and past may be prologue, and indeed we ain't seen nothin' yet, but the story line after the prologue will be determined not by the inexorable commands of a technological god, but by plain old humans...