Word: mean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Changing policy priorities in Latin America shouldn't be that tall an order. Nor should the more symbolic gestures - like Obama's plans to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo or lift Bush's draconian restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to Cuba - which mean a lot in a region where Monroe Doctrine is a dirty term. If Obama demonstrates that he's more interested in helping Haiti with green-energy projects like jatropha-seed oil than he is in making Bolivia eradicate more and more coca bushes, or more committed to steering U.S. aid toward...
...though Wyeth might occasionally paint a dog sleeping sweetly on a bed, the comical cheer of Rockwell is not for him. What people mean when they accuse Wyeth of sentimentality is not that he gets cute, but that the world we see in his paintings seems like a place we might long to inhabit sometimes but don't actually live in. And the people he shows us - with their Yankee rectitude, the weathered parchment of their faces and their Nordic inwardness - seem to inhabit some prelapsarian America, the one that existed before automobiles and television. Wyeth's popularity coincided with...
...Charles Darwin noted this phenomenon in the 19th century, and Matsumoto's mentor, a famous psychologist named Paul Ekman who traveled the globe in the 1960s, proved that both isolated tribesmen and urban Westerners identified pictures of facial expressions in the same way. Ekman demonstrated that a frown means unhappiness the world over; wide eyes mean fright or surprise; a wrinkled nose means disgust. But no one has yet found the source of these universal expressions: Do we all learn the expressions through our culture, or are facial configurations genetically coded for everyone...
...Most commercial airlines are now replacing older three- and four-engine planes with more-efficient double-engine aircraft. Because these newer engines are quieter, birds are less likely to detect and avoid them. Worse still, fewer engines mean fewer backups should a plane and a flock of birds cross paths...
...this four-alarm economic emergency (nearly 2 million jobs have vanished in four months), it's easy to forget that shovel-ready doesn't necessarily mean shovel-worthy. Many projects are shovel-ready now only because they failed to clear the spectacularly low bar Congress set for pork in the past. Even if we're freaking out about today - and we should be - we can't afford to leverage tomorrow to build the infrastructure equivalent of buried banknotes, not when the deficit is a record $1.2 trillion and the debt a staggering $10.6 trillion. A depression would make both problems...