Word: answerable
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Networks may trumpet the latest figures in full-page ads; Madison Avenue may study them in a grey flannel funk. But for the average televiewer, ratings remain a mathematical mystery. Do they really tell whether one show is better than another? Or more popular? Or both? The answer, said Oklahoma's Democratic Senator Mike Monroney last week, is that the ratings add up to a statistical tyranny that fleeces the public of quality shows...
Machine Creation. Many of the speakers tackled the question: "What is intelligence?" None of them had a wholly satisfactory answer. Dr. Marvin L. Minsky of M.I.T. felt that the problem is unduly complicated by irrational human reverence for human intelligence. "We can often find simple machines," he said, "which exhibit performances that would be called intelligent if done by a man. We are, understandably, very reluctant to confer this dignity on an evidently simple machine...
...answer is not as evident as it may seem. It is a fact that until two years ago, the language departments at Harvard had allowed themselves to stagnate simply because, as Edward Geary, coordinator of Languages puts it, "no one had ever taken the trouble before." But besides this obvious answer, there is one other somewhat nebulous reason for the college's emphasis on old systems. Harvard's approach to language teaching has always been on the "literary" level. That is to say, when a professor was teaching a class how to speak French, he was really teaching his students...
...Harvard elementary language teacher is the question of time: "This Monday-Wednesday-Friday strait jacket," one instructor feels, "is particularly injurious to the study of an elementary language. We need continuity in our teaching process, and somewhat the same setup as the scientific courses enjoy would be a good answer." Last year, for the first time, an elementary language course was allowed four hours a week--German A. This new course was quite popular and the "Aural-Oral" (Cornell) method of teaching is proving to be a success. "There is no guarantee that we'll stop at 4 hours...
...Democrats," he continued, "have been talking about depression since 1932, and the only answer they have is war; but now I'm getting into classical philosophy...