Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BIOFEEDBACK. For mechanistic Westerners, this is the mystical in gadget form. By looking at dials on a machine that measures skin temperature (stress cools, relaxation warms) or electrodermal response (similar to an electrocardiogram), the patient, wired with sensors, learns to control what is usually involuntary: circulation to the extremities, tension in the jaw, heartbeat rates and even pupil size (for advanced students). "If you studied yoga for years, you might be able to get the same effect," says Dr. Elliot Wineburg, assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan...
...station of its varied and often contradictory functions. No longer was it to be a truck stop or observation platform or metallurgical factory. The sole stated scientific rationale left for the station was to conduct biological research on weightlessness, but the plans originally omitted a centrifuge, the most important gadget needed to do that work. The National Academy of Sciences concluded that the space station had no scientific use at all. Which left as the main purpose of the station what cynics have suggested it was all along: to be a sort of WPA for the aerospace industry...
...rivals, Motorola was selected to provide the digital voice technology for the Japanese telephone network's next generation of cellular equipment. One of Motorola's prime selling points is believed to be its pocket-size Micro-TAC cellular telephone. Introduced last year, the tiny device is already a coveted gadget in Japan. Motorola's breakthrough sent the electronics company's stock to 80 3/4, up 4 1/8 points for the week...
...this would-be Pygmalion is teaching JL's works in Abu Dhabi, where the college was hoping for classes on Dickens or Galsworthy. In a final attempt at revenge, he tries his own hand at fiction but cannot find "the gadget that makes it all work, the crystal, the chip, the formula . . ." Five synonyms later, he desists. The trick...
...Stewart do not overexplain (or underexplain) either its technology or the intricacies of its far-darting plot. We know all we need to know to keep our bearings and not a monosyllable more. And director John McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect...