Word: screenful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lots of people, adults and kids, are watching in the room with me. On the screen, Gandalf the Grey returns to the Fellowship as Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white light, his face hidden behind a halo. Someone blurts out, "Imam zaman e?!" (Is it the Imam?!) It is a reference, of course, to the white-bearded Ayatullah Khomeini, who is respectfully called Imam Khomeini. But "Imam" is at the same time a title of the Mahdi, a messianic figure that Muslims believe will come to save true believers from powerful evildoers at the time of the apocalypse...
Elman and Yamamoto recruited 27 volunteers - 13 men and 14 women - and sat them at computer screens where they were randomly shown pictures of 50 healthy and attractive babies and 30 others with distinct facial irregularities such as a cleft palate or a skin condition. The volunteers were told that each picture would remain on the screen for four seconds but they could shorten that time by clicking one key or prolong it by clicking another. What the researchers wanted to learn, Elman explains, is how much effort people were willing to exert to look at pictures of pretty babies...
...Perhaps women, who still must do the lion's share of childcare, are naturally more attuned to this trade-off than men are. "In general, men tend to be aesthetically oriented," Elman says, "so they'll press a lot to hold the beautiful babies on the screen. Women are more consequence-oriented." (Read "Parenting Advice: What Moms Should Learn from Dads...
...gender differences, by the way, don't let fathers off the hook. Men may not have hurried to get the unattractive faces off the screen, but neither did they linger over them the way they did the attractive faces. In both cases, this suggests bias, and when the rubber hits the road of real childcare, parents of either sex may end up having similar instincts. More clarity should come when Elman conducts the next phase of his work: running the same experiment but hooking the subjects up to brain scans throughout it. This will make it far easier...
...been beta-testing the upgrade and broadcasting its assorted charms. As the iPhone has evolved into a full-fledged pocket computer, with more than 50,000 applications, it has become a bit more cumbersome to use. I've got more than 120 apps, for instance, stacked 20 to a screen, that I have to arrange or alphabetize by hand. The upgrade addresses that problem by creating a universal search function that can scour all applications; many users are making this their home screen so they can instantly find the applications (or contacts) they want...