Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...their increasing versatility, machines lack a vital quality that even the lowliest mutt possesses: they cannot understand their master's voice. This situation may soon change. Last week International Business Machines Corp. demonstrated a small, innocent-looking gadget that may some day permit machines to follow spoken orders, and even eavesdrop on human conversations...
...cartridge and needle assembly that you so casually drop onto your records is an extremely intricate "electro-acoustic transducer." An electro-transducer is a gadget, of which speakers, cartridges, and microphones are the most common examples, which converts acoustic energy into electrical energy into mechanical, acoustice form...
...seems to me that the American people are being tricked into accepting nuclear war as the only solution of the Berlin crisis. The construction of fallout shelters is a red herring being used to engage the attention of the gadget-loving, do-it-yourself, construction-happy American...
...research strategy is to interrupt thought processes and study them in parts. For example, visual perception involves seeing many things simultaneously. Bruner breaks down this process with a gadget called an "ambiguitor," which brings a picture into focus so gradually that a viewer gets trapped into false hypotheses about what he is seeing. Result: embryo techniques for perceiving more astutely. The Center bustles with other odd projects, from teaching quadratic functions to young children to time-lapse photographs of tots drawing (the best way to see how they see). All this is pure research, but out of it may someday...
...those whose means are evil though their ends be good, and the world goes happily back to war. The paper-airplane crowd may find the ethics of the film a bit confusing, but they are bound to get a bang out of The Albatross, which is indeed a gorgeous gadget. Made entirely of impregnated paper, it checks out at 200 m.p.h. and looks like a cross between a blimp, a helicopter, a giant bat and a 19th century resort hotel. It even has a side porch...