Word: tv
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time the bullet- riddled bodies of John List's mother, wife and three children were discovered in Westfield, N.J., in December 1971, the quiet accountant had been missing for nearly a month. It took authorities 18 years to catch up with him, and then only through a TV crime show...
...reverse itself, making authors and their agents humble again. Most of all, they talk nostalgically of the days when writers remained faithful and when publishers were not obsessed with best sellers and did not have to worry, in the words of Random House's Epstein, about "getting Faulkner on TV." Pointing to a promising first novel on his desk, he muses, "This just turned up the way these things do. But if the book is a success, we may never publish him again. His price may be too high...
...seems like something out of George Orwell: television sets souped up so they can watch viewers watching them. Last week Nielsen Media Research, purveyor of the make-or-break TV ratings, announced plans to develop just such a gizmo. The "passive people meter," a computerized camera system, would sit atop sets in thousands of households, keeping an eye on every move that viewers made...
...purpose of the system, which will not be ready for deployment for at least three years, is to get a more objective, precise measure of who makes up the TV audience. In the past, viewers in Nielsen homes either filled out diaries or identified themselves by pushing buttons on hand-held consoles. With the new system, a computer would simply spot individual household members as they came into view and record them, second by second, as they faced the TV, read newspapers or merely turned their heads...
...soul of the new machine, developed in conjunction with the David Sarnoff Research Center, is the same basic technology used by U.S. missiles to distinguish between Soviet and American warplanes. A sensor scans the space in front of the TV searching for patterns of light and dark -- the shine of a nose, the line of a mouth -- that suggest the presence of a face. A computer then makes more detailed scans at higher and higher resolutions, trying to match facial features to those of family members stored in its memory. (An unfamiliar face would be recorded as a "visitor.") When...