Word: phenomena
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Black Friday. Notebook-computer prices dropped 26%, to $500, and unit sales of computers increased a whopping 63%. Prices for netbooks, the lighter, more portable cousin to traditional laptop computers, also dropped. Camcorder prices fell 33%. And these days, the deals extend beyond Black Friday. "One of the phenomena we are seeing is that retailers are really stretching the promotional period," says Ross Rubin, consumer-electronics analyst at NPD. "Retailers are looking to prime the pump for 2010 by getting consumers in the store. They're driving momentum while trying put 2009 far behind them...
...Movie phenomena are supposed to occur once in a blue moon, or a new one. Yet for the past couple of weeks, two films, released the same day, targeting similar demographics, have had folks cheering and sobbing and clogging the plexes. Everyone expected The Twilight Saga: New Moon to be a smash, and it has not disappointed, piling up nearly half a billion dollars in less than a fortnight. But few were prepared for The Blind Side. The movie, made for just $29 million, has flummoxed Hollywood by earning about $105 million. On Thursday and Sunday, it sold more tickets...
...shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in Paranormal Activity, which had the added benefit of being a good movie. The real touchstones here are the "documentaries" about psychic phenomena on the "History" Channel, and of the Alien Autopsy fraudumentary that Fox ran a few times to high ratings in 1995. All of these mix reenactments with grainy, blurry purportedly true footage, and score neither as science nor as entertainment...
...very phenomena or processes instinctive to a five-year old child that are key to how that child learns has been driven out of our institutions,” says Edwards. “We need to create sandboxes in our institutions that allow us to be children again in the sense that we are encouraged to move from one corner of the sandbox and not have to justify why we go from one corner to another...
...Superfreakonomics, he and Dubner detour from small puzzles (can you find a terrorist by using financial data? How much money do prostitutes make?) to tackle the big, big issue of global warming. This is partly an opportunity for Levitt to express his skepticism of models of complex phenomena such as the global economy or, in this case, the global climate. Mainly, though, it's an excuse to tout the mind-blowing ideas for combatting global warming that he and Dubner learned about while hanging out with former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold and his merry band of inventors (Myhrvold...