Word: unfamiliar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...examples of people doing nothing at all. He was even able to re-create the effect in his lab. He found that about 45% of people in his experiment shut down (that is, stopped moving or speaking for 30 sec. or often longer) when asked under pressure to perform unfamiliar but basic tasks. "They quit functioning. They just sat there," Johnson remembers. It seemed horribly maladaptive. How could so many people be hard-wired to do nothing in a crisis...
...something highly unusual. While waiting for takeoff, he studied the 747's safety diagram. He looked for the closest exit, and he pointed it out to his wife. He had been in a theater fire as a boy, and ever since, he always checked for the exits in an unfamiliar environment. When the planes collided, Heck's brain had the data it needed. He could work on automatic, whereas other people's brains plodded through the storm of new information. "Humans behave much more appropriately when they know what to expect--as do rats," says Cynthia Corbett, a human-factors...
...diving veterans came in force, but the swimmers at Baton Rouge were unfamiliar faces, for now. A big, knobby 16-year-old named Jeffrey Olsen, from Austin, won four individual races and anchored a winning relay team, and well before he was through he was a TV fixture, peering at the world through water-splotched glasses and grinning a big, happy grin. Molly Magill, 14, became another instant darling, winning the 1,500 freestyle and sharing in the 800 freestyle relay victory as her coach lumbered along the poolside yelling encouragement...
...subject most women will relate to and most men will find chilling in its bluntness. The ladies exchange one fascinating horror story after another of deadbeats, cheaters, grifters, psychopaths and dirty old men. While these woeful tales will elicit international sympathy, western readers will find some of the problems unfamiliar. Cultural institutions such as arranged marriages, even for girls of 13, and the premium on female virginity only add to the women's problems. In one shocking discussion, the women debate the merits of "embroidery," the Iranian euphemism for suturing the vaginal opening to "restore" virginity. Bringing us such glimpses...
...squatters' camp outside Cape Town, where 18 blacks were killed by the police last February, authorities helped the first of up to 12,000 black residents make a voluntary move to a nearby government housing area called Khayelitsha. There, in otherwise bleak surroundings, the new settlers are finding such unfamiliar amenities as outhouses, water taps and access to schools, clinics and a community center. They also are being given 18-month residency permits, which allow them to seek employment in the area. Such concessions, however, are being countered by continuing bloodshed in other townships and mounting evidence of police brutality...