Word: apparatus
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...lynched, Nazis freed, where's our democracy?" chanted a crowd outside Manhattan's city hall. Pickets, led by Author Howard Fast, turned up in the snow before the White House, carrying black-bordered signs: "Seven Negroes framed and condemned by all-white jury." The well-greased Communist apparatus was making propaganda hay out of the Martinsville Seven-with suitable adjustments in the facts...
...Chamber of Deputies, by an overwhelming vote, rejected the Deputies' resignation. The Red vilification apparatus clawed at the heretics: They were "traitors . . . automatically expelled." They were trying to smear "the patriotic and peace-defending line of the Communist Party in order to slander the Soviet Union." Party goons threatened Magnani and Cucchi on a train from Rome. Anti-Communist groups gleefully plastered up slogans: "Magnani and Cucchi Chose Italy...
...cybernetics (the science of control mechanism) is to look for similarities between the human nervous system and the brighter man-made machines. One of these is the feedback: some means by which either the brain or a machine keeps track of what it has accomplished. Without proper feed-back apparatus a ship-steering mechanism, for instance, does not know how much it has succeeded in turning the ship. Therefore it cannot decide accurately when to stop turning. It is likely to send the ship into wild zigzags...
...cannot easily be tinkered with. The feed-back of speech is more accessible. The brain normally keeps track of speech by means of reports, which it gets through the ears and by bone conduction, upon the pronunciation of each syllable. As each report arrives, the brain tells the vocal apparatus to go ahead and speak the next syllable. The whole thing happens so rapidly and smoothly that the speaker is rarely conscious...
...Fairbanks' gadget, which consists chiefly of a microphone, a tape-recorder and a playback amplifier, delays the reports on their way to the brain. Normally a speaker hears each syllable about a thousandth of a second after he has spoken it. By adjusting his apparatus to introduce delay, Dr. Fairbanks can lengthen this interval as much as he wants to. He can also make the sounds from the amplifier so loud that they drown out the sounds that reach the brain through the normal channels...