Word: contact
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Teachers are generally given basic guidelines on which kinds of personal contact with children are acceptable, but adults who volunteer to work with children on an informal or infrequent basis often don't realize that we are living in a new world in which a well-intentioned hug can become a criminal offense...
...have done such a thorough job of sensitizing our children to the horrors of sexual abuse that they often know better than their elders what is now considered inappropriate personal touching. Physical contact of the sort that parents have with their children--the tickling and other affectionate horseplay--is inappropriate when dealing with other people's children. Some standards may seem overly careful or even ridiculous, but the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, an organization that counsels nonprofit groups on legal liabilities, says everyone who works with children--whether as a Sunday-school teacher or school-dance chaperone--should be vigilant...
...have downloaded SETI@home, a free screen saver (available at setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu that uses your computer's downtime to help sort through the reams of noisy static gathered by radio telescopes. The odds of pulling a Jodie Foster (who snared the elusive extraterrestrial signal in the 1997 sci-fi flick Contact) are a zillion to one. But if you fail--or even if you succeed--nobody's going to burn you at the stake...
...visual images or spoken words--but "where" is not the same as "how." We don't know how the brain holds the logical connections among ideas that spell the difference between "Burr slew Hamilton" and "Hamilton slew Burr," between the image of a person winking to realign a contact lens and that of a person winking to flirt. These distinctions don't appear as blobs in a brain scan. They arise from the microcircuitry of the living human brain, and most people don't want to donate their brains to science until they're dead. (As Woody Allen said...
...purely theoretical, though, since there's no conceivable way to make contact with even one of these alternate universes. So while each of us may spawn an uncountable number of parallel selves as the particles within us split and re-split, the chance of tapping into our other histories is precisely zero--and so, alas, is the chance of figuring out whether this interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct...