Word: bigs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trouble with bots that get sold to big corporations, not surprisingly, is that they tend to get a little compromised. In junglee's case, the ability to compare prices at other book sites seems to have disappeared. Type in Tom Clancy in Amazon's All Product Search, and there's no danger of your buying Rainbow Six from Barnes and Noble or Borders...
...shopping agents moves out of the lab. Even now, folks at M.I.T. and IBM are preparing for a world in which every transaction becomes a complex trade deal between a pricing bot acting for the site and a shopping bot acting for you. "Dynamic pricing, that's the big notion," says Professor Pattie Maes, director of the software-agents group at the M.I.T. media lab. "After all, fixed prices have been around only for a couple of hundred years...
...keratectomy. They scaled off the cornea's outermost protective layer, or epithelium. Then they vaporized some of the underlying tissue with the laser, forcing the cornea to flatten or steepen, depending on the correction. Although the epithelium always grew back, the cornea retained its new shape. It was a big improvement over radial keratotomy, although the healing of the epithelium remained painful...
...Another big advance in the works could provide nearly all patients with better than 20/20 vision. Today's lasers, and the computer programs that run them, assume all corneas are more or less spherical. Scientists are developing instruments that will map the entire surface of the cornea and make point-by-point alterations to smooth out individual aberrations. Such carefully customized reshaping of the cornea could make astounding improvements in vision more of a sure thing...
...narcissist. In pursuit of the perfect body, we've tried spinning and step, aerobics and anaerobics, Pilates and Tae-Bo. But not even a hunky personal trainer and all those Kathy Smith exercise tapes can keep the lines, wrinkles and age spots away. No wonder plastic surgery is so big--with an estimated 4.9 million cosmetic procedures done last year, according to the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, up more than 800% since...