Word: falling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...premise is simple: as variously shaped groups of four blocks fall down the screen (trivia answer: they're called "tetrominoes"), a player must fit them together like a jigsaw. When a horizontal line is completed, it disappears, freeing up more space to play the game. Once the stacked blocks reach the top of the screen you're toast. But there's something about the formula that sets a hook deep in our psyche; players have even reported seeing the falling blocks in their sleep. "I believe there is some basic psychological pleasure sensor that Tetris has found that other [games...
...there such a thing as a homogeneous city - which helps to account for the Detroit metro area's (relatively) spend-happy ways. Acxiom figures that some 64% of people in Oakland County, Michigan, home to Chrysler headquarters, fall into demographic groups that are more likely to spend. In neighboring Lapeer County, that percentage is 41%. The national picture reflects the same lumpiness. In other words, there are plenty of people in the Rust Belt with tightened purse strings, just as you would expect - but in the aggregate, other pockets of the country have pulled back more. And while there...
...speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early '70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-'80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business...
...insurance than there were at the start of the recession, according to the BLS. And financial-services workers have been hit far harder in this recession than in past ones. In the 2001 downturn, employment in the banking and insurance sectors actually rose 1%. Finance-industry jobs did fall in the early-'90s recession, but just 0.3%, far less than the 1.3% drop in total employment in the same period...
...expect to begin writing legislation this month, with the House also moving forward in coming weeks with what is expected to be a more liberal version. The Democrats' goal is for both chambers to pass their versions by the end of the summer, work out their differences in the fall and have a bill on Barack Obama's desk by the end of the year. "This window between now and the August recess, I think, is going to be the make-or-break period," the President said on June 2, before a meeting with Senate Democrats. "This is the time...