Word: gadgeteers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...world where the popular image of a spy alternates between gadget-crammed fantasy and faceless seediness, can Mata Hari, the cooch-dancing agent of World War I, carry a lavish musical on her bare shoulders...
...Concerns of their Time, whose books are eventually parsed to death in intellectual history seminars and who are very thoroughly forgotten by everyone who neither pays nor is paid to read them. Such are Barbara Garson and her skitlet MacBird (I eschew the exclamation point!)--a document, a gadget, a pseudo-cerebral mummers' play in moral blackface. The fact that MacBird's concerns are nearly as unmemorable as its era may prove to be won't modify the play's appeal for future historians; nor can it extend MacBird's predictable stage life beyond eighteen months...
...wastes no time blaming the Supreme Court for "handcuffing" policemen. He is much harder on scientists and technicians for ignoring urgent police equipment needs: tiny radios, night glasses, lightweight armor, heat sensors to detect hidden fugitives, metal sensors for frisking suspects. He also wants someone to develop a gadget to stop a fleeing car's engine and a computerized "instant lawyer" to help police field interrogators avoid unlawful procedures...
Walls and bars are not enough, said the report. They must be augmented by such modern escape foilers as "electronic proximity detectors" installed atop prison walls and "Geophone Vibration detectors" buried outside to pick up the first errant footfall. Another gadget that appealed to the committee would virtually turn every cell into a weighing machine rigged to set off an alarm when a prisoner's poundage is missing...
...interrogation, better scientific crime detection seems an absolute necessity-all of which encourages makers of polygraphs, which cost anywhere from $675 to $2,650. Polygraph theorists maintain that lying causes physical reactions detectable by a trained polygrapher. While he asks questions, ranging from the pertinent to the impertinent, the gadget graphically records the subject's pulse, blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration flow. The obvious weakness is not the machine but the man who interprets it. One study found that a good polygrapher is wrong three out of ten times. But no one really knows. A bad polygrapher can easily...