Word: silicones
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Instruments, a pioneer in "talking" computer chips, is the leading producer of these less expensive aids. (Others: Mattel, Coleco, Milton Bradley.) In 1978 TI introduced Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid, which imitated the human voice-questioning, coaching and correcting the user -with an integrated circuit on a single silicon chip. On a later machine, called Speak & Read ($75), a child can complete sentences at three levels of difficulty by pressing letters on a keyboard to spell out the correct words. For example, the machine slowly enunciates, "I want to try to-"and then flashes three choices: "Bag," "Over," "Read...
...Jose, Calif., an imported-car dealer offers a cash bounty of $100 to any customer who brings in a Mediterranean fruit fly, dead or alive. The hot novelty item in San Francisco gift shops is a Medfly encased in a clear plastic apple. From Silicon Valley's computer whizzes comes a new video game called Medfly Mania: to stem a tide of electronic insects, the players must choose among competing insect-killing strategies while dealing with such all too real obstacles as bad weather, helicopter failures and the accidental release of fertile male flies...
Nowhere is the venture capital pace faster than in Santa Clara County, Calif., where genetic-engineering firms are growing up alongside already successful semiconductor manufacturers. The area once known as Silicon Valley has now been dubbed Siliclone Valley. Over the past ten years 28% of all U.S. companies that received venture capital financing were based in California...
...California's booming Silicon Valley, the center of the computer and genetic-engineering industries, companies actively raid each other's employment rolls. Says Art Young, corporate benefits manager of Hewlett Packard, the electronics firm: "Everyone's concerned about losing people." Hewlett Packard's answer is a program that puts 10% or so of its pretax profits into a long-term profit-sharing plan that pays out fully to workers only after they are on the job for 13 years...
...from the air with a pesticide, Malathion. President Reagan's Agriculture Secretary, John Block, agrees, and his department threatened to quarantine all California produce susceptible to infestation unless aerial spraying was immediately approved. But residents of fly-plagued Santa Clara County, which includes the high-income communities of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, have vehemently opposed that approach. Noting that Malathion is suspected by some scientists of causing cancer and birth defects, they raised protest placards at town meetings and wrote angry letters equating the spraying with the use of the defoliant Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. Said...