Word: performer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...robot industry's plight. Although industrial robots account for only 2% of the $24 billion factory-automation business (such items as computers and other electronically controlled industrial machinery make up much of the rest), the mechanical menials have drastically altered many sectors of the American workplace. Robots perform more than 98% of the spot welding on Ford's highly successful Taurus and Sable cars. At Doehler-Jarvis, a major Ohio metal fabricator, robots load and unload die-casting machines, trim parts and ladle molten metal. At IBM factories across the country, robots insert disk drives into personal computers and snap...
...manufacturers was the hydraulic- robot technology pioneered by Unimation. The company's robots, which became the American industry standard, were large (up to 4,000 lbs.), powerful, multipurpose and expensive, ranging in price from $30,000 to $200,000 apiece. But these bulky hydraulic machines, originally programmed to perform tasks by means of magnetic tape similar to that used in tape recorders, were often inaccurate and susceptible to breakdowns. Says Raj Reddy, director of the Robotics Institute at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University: "U.S. companies dragged their feet on innovation because they wanted to squeeze every last penny...
...competitiveness caused by the falling dollar. Struggling American manufacturers have begun to adopt the electronic robot technologies of the Japanese and, like U.S. automakers, are moving their own assembly plants overseas to help cut costs. Above all, U.S. robotmakers have adjusted their own expectations of how the industry will perform in the future. "We're in a solid business with solid growth," says Bruce Haupt, a marketing manager in the division that oversees robotmaking at IBM. "Our early expectations were out of line, but they have been altered...
There are other contexts in which the Constitution offers little guidance: in genetic engineering, in the issues of the right to die and the right to life. At a time when doctors can perform surgery on a fetus before delivery, when exactly does the law consider that life has begun? Does that fetus have constitutional rights? What is death? Who has the right to be alive, and who has the right to choose death...
...knack of sounding like a Minnesota-born Henry Kissinger discussing the dangers of excessive arms control. Asked whether he might play a part in the Wobegon film, he went into his Kissinger mode and said, "That has not been discussed." O.K., did he expect to do any sort of performing? Here he brightened, for he likes the risk of live performance. "You have to perform now and then, to keep stage fright under control." He waves away the idea of a talk show as "death by interview." What does interest him is the kind of television variety show Sid Caesar...