In April 1981 Xerox introduced the Star 8010 workstation, the first commercial system with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the first to use the “desktop” metaphor to organize a user’s interactions with the computer. Despite the perception of huge progress, from the perspective of design and usage models, there has been precious little progress in the intervening years. In the tradition of ...

A principal observation in the study of language acquisition is that people exposed to a language as children are more likely to achieve fluency in that language than those first exposed to it as adults, giving rise to the popular notion of a critical period for language learning (Lenneberg, 1967; Long, 1990). This is perhaps surprising since children have been found to be inferior to adults in...

The melting of glacial ice that formed in the middle of the twentieth century may be a source of a cocktail of persistent, bio accumulative toxic substances that can threaten human health and the environment, according to a study by Christian Bogdal, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, and colleagues in the 1 November 2009 issue of Environmental ...