Word: objects
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...charge. Trachoma was the most common medical reason for sending immigrants back to their native countries. (In fact, out of 12 million or so people who came to Ellis, most during the peak years of 1900-24, only 250,000 were turned away.) Sophie may have been the unwitting object of another American worry: that young single women would become prostitutes. So great was that concern that if a woman claimed she was engaged, immigration officials actually hunted up her fiance and saw to it that they were mar ried before relinquishing control over the newcomer. Authorities wired Sophie...
N.C.P.A.C.'s main object was to expose the incumbent's voting record for the citizens back home. The Senators tended to vote to the left of their constituents while playing down this fact in their campaigns. Says Viguerie: "N.C.P.A.C. went up to the doorsteps and left the dead cats...
...robots are learning to "see" and "touch," and report to their computer brains what their new senses tell them. To see means to decipher what appears before a TV camera; to touch means to measure not only the size and shape but the temperature, softness or vibration of the object grasped by the claw. Robots can also hear, and could presumably be taught to taste and smell, but these would be mainly indulgences, not necessary to their work ethos. On the other hand, robots are now being outfitted with senses that no human being has: the perception of infrared light...
...stupid to the engineers trying to educate them. A robot can cope with complex mathematical formulas, of course, but when it sees something through its TV camera, it has a hard time translating the two-dimensional image into three-dimensional reality. A robot instructed to look for a triangular object will waste valuable time fingering cubes and cylinders before
...computer scientist working on the Navy's underwater explorer: "We humans have been manipulating things ever since we were children, so we're extremely good at it. But if you analyze everything that's going on when you do a simple thing like picking up an object, it's really very complicated." Adds David Grossman, I.B.M.'s manager of automation research: "It's like trying to write down how to tie a shoe...