Word: alertness
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...indifference." Baseball pitchers often dust back a batter with a close ball that is not intended to hit but only to signal a warning claim of dominance. The twitchings of young children too long in adult company are merely involuntary signals of short-fused patience. Any competent psychiatrist remains alert to the tics and quirky expressions by which a patient's hidden emotions make themselves known. People even signal by the odors they give off, as Janet Hopson documents in superfluous detail in Scent Signals: The Silent Language of Sex. Actually, it is impossible for an individual to avoid...
...decision, welcomed by both commercial and private aviation circles, capped a controversy over appropriate anticollision gear. The device that passed the old Marine's personal muster is a bureaucratic mouthful: Threat Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS, for short). But there is nothing complex about its goal: to avoid disastrous collisions like the one that caused the deaths of 144 people when a small private plane crashed into a commercial jet over San Diego in 1978. The risk of similar mishaps-25 occurred in 1979 (the latest year tabulated) with the loss of 34 lives-could become greater...
...planes. These radar-like pulses in effect create an electronic cocoon or bubble extending out in all directions from an aircraft for up to 22 nautical miles. If another plane pierces the bubble, its presence is almost instantly noted in the cockpit. In the cut-rate TCAS-I, an alert sounds and lights up. In the more complex TCAS-II, a cockpit screen not only displays the intruder's position (at 2 o'clock, say), distance and altitude but also tells the pilot whether to dive, climb or just remain on course to avoid disaster. The action taken...
...gathered by a jointly owned collective, the Associated Press, and its rival United Press International. At a relentless high-speed rate of 1,200 words a minute, 24 hours a day, the wire services supply the printed press, give radio disc jockeys their "rip and read" news, and alert television producers where to dispatch their camera crews...
Superficially, coke is a supremely beguiling and relatively risk-free drug-at least so its devotees innocently claim. A snort in each nostril and you're up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain. Instead, drive, sparkle, energy. If it were not classified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television...