Word: blinkings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cool met in their late teens and displayed natural gifts for propulsive, funny, disposable punk-pop songs about masturbation and alienation. In 1994 Dookie, their first major-label album, sold 10 million copies. Multimillionaires at 22, the members of Green Day settled into a routine of churning out blink-and-they're-over records followed closely by triumphant world tours. They were not quite criminally lucky, but they weren't exactly paragons of ambition either. Sometimes, when they got bored, they would write a song longer than 3 min. Other times they would just flash the audience their underpants...
...fact, Gladwell throws so many anecdotes at us in Blink, from so many directions, that sometimes it's a little hard to be certain what they prove. Sure, producer Brian Grazer knew right away that Tom Hanks had star potential when he auditioned for Splash. But is that kind of judgment really analogous to the split-second decision-making process of a Marine in a war game? Or of the New York City policemen who decided, incorrectly, that immigrant Amadou Diallo was holding a gun and not his wallet...
...with a section on professional food tasters, for instance, but, hey, did you know that food scientists have a 15-point scale for measuring crispiness, on which Quaker's Chewy Chocolate Chunk Granola Bars are a 2 and Kellogg's Corn Flakes a 14? What Gladwell is saying in Blink is often less compelling than the facts he uses to back himself up. Who doesn't know that tall, good-looking people get preferential treatment? But Gladwell's analysis of the political career of Warren G. Harding--who was a lousy President but (apparently) a hot, hot man--is mesmerizing...
Remember the Pepsi Challenge? It was what we can call a "Classic" example of the limits of Blink-style thinking. According to Gladwell, Coca-Cola executives were so distraught over statistics showing that Pepsi beat Coke in those blind, one-sip face-offs that they came up with New Coke. New Coke beat Pepsi in taste tests, but it flopped spectacularly in the market. The geniuses at Coca-Cola had forgotten that the real world is very different from a focus group. Nobody drinks Coke blind, nor do they just take one sip. Consumers drink a whole can, and that...
...similar functionality. AOL Desktop Search, part of an upcoming AOL browser aol.com) will be free to members and nonmembers alike. Newcomer Blinkx blinkx.com has a unique approach: it automatically refers you to files that are relevant to what you're doing on your computer at that moment. The links blink in the corner of your screen...