Word: commonness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crash that killed 28 people in Denver last November. In a signed statement, Continental Captain Kenneth Watson said that on another flight a few weeks before the crash, he had conducted a test of Frank Zvonek, who later piloted the ill-fated DC-9. "As is my common practice," said Watson, "I advised Frank that I would intentionally make several mistakes. He caught them and corrected...
Despite these gains, current systems operate within strict limits and too often behave more like idiots savants than experts. Second-wave systems as yet have no common sense or awareness of the world outside their narrow slice of expertise. At high-tech redoubts like Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California, scientists are planning decision-making systems that will behave more like real experts. Example: an all-purpose electronic repairman that uses knowledge and common sense about electricity to diagnose any problem put before it. At Xerox and elsewhere, other scientists are examining the very foundations of artificial intelligence...
Others, however, are already thinking beyond existing technologies. Johan de Kleer, a respected knowledge-system designer at Xerox, envisions an all- purpose electrical diagnostician that would have specific knowledge, such as the various laws that govern electrical flow and conductivity. But it would also have the common sense to decide whether it was faced with a broken VCR or a broken computer. To build this system, de Kleer has spent ten years codifying what he calls "qualitative" calculus that will provide the language to build "common-sense physics." The problem with common sense is that it requires the computer...
...case of the so-called Sharpeville Six. The six were convicted in connection with the 1984 killing of a councilman in the black township of Sharpeville, even though they were not found to have had a direct role in the slaying but only to have been in "common purpose" with a murderous crowd. Earlier in the week police turned out in force in Cape Town when Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a service, attended by 2,000 people, at St. George's Cathedral. The gathering was Tutu's defiant reply to the government for banning the Committee for the Defense...
...weary of travel magazines and wary of their authority." By now the reading public may be wearier and warier than ever, since in the past seven months three major new magazines have shoved into an already crowded baggage rack full of travel publications. If there is a common theme to the new celebrators of get-up-and-go, it is that tourists are to be despised but travelers are to be exalted. The magazines, of course, promise to reveal the difference...