Word: often
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know why we didn't make Dow 10,000 on our first run at it? Three letters: IBM.) There was a time in the mid-'90s when PC makers could count on ever more complicated applications requiring ever faster processors, causing consumers and businesses to upgrade PCs almost as often as Japan changed Prime Ministers. Sellers like Dell, Compaq, IBM, Gateway and Hewlett Packard got accustomed to 100% revenue-growth rates, while investors reaped heady returns: $1,000 invested in Dell in 1989 has grown to $640,000 today...
...elusive mental processes human beings use to make judgments about one another. Despite the computer's ability to calculate the trajectories of spacecraft or pick the next move in a chess game, the machines have until now been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, in whose lab the work was done: "is a survival skill humans probably...
Where the technology could go from there is difficult to say, but Sejnowski anticipates big things. Ekman often used videotapes to gauge the emotional states of subjects, once detecting a brief flicker of sadness in the face of a patient who later turned out to be suicidal. A computer like Sejnowski's could have made the diagnosis in real time. Further down the road could be a host of other emotion-measuring computer systems, ranging from smart ATMs that can shut down if they spot a suspicious patron to television systems that can determine if a finger-wagging politician...
America can be a very unforgiving place. It is not that we aren't taught to forgive. This Sunday, on Easter, millions of Christians will celebrate the embodiment of divine forgiveness, the risen Lord. The parable of the pardoning of the prodigal son is recapitulated as often on daytime soaps as in Sunday sermons. No, the problem with forgiveness has been that of all acknowledged good acts, it is the one we are most suspicious of. "To err is human, to forgive, supine," punned S.J. Perelman. In a country where the death penalty has been a proven vote getter...
...forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered...Let the SS man...go to hell." How-to books, therapy and interventions may be useful in dealing with an unfaithful spouse, gossiping colleague or even some cases of violence. But there are other practices--serial killing, torture, genocide--often regarded as unforgivable...