Word: boxes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Effective & Efficient. Despite McNamara's performance, the clamor over Cuba continued, and with good cause (see box). Nor is Cuba the only problem afflicting McNamara. For under Robert Stranre McNamara, 46, perhaps the most efficient, effective Defense Secretary the U.S. has ever had, the role of U.S. weaponry in the defense of the free world and the roles allotted to its allies have become a subject of deep dispute. At some points, the questions turned on diplomacy, not weaponry, and what blame there was to be meted out did not belong to him. Nevertheless, since he has become...
Harvard Psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner has taught pigeons to play pingpong, invented teaching machines for people. But for sheer practicality, nothing he has yet devised beats his "Skinner baby box"-a household incubator for human chicks...
Invented in 1944 for his daughter Debbie, Skinner's box is a combination crib-playpen that a baby can call home for as long as two years. It has Plexiglas windows, and inside, the temperature is kept at 80° or so and the humidity at 50%. The baby is free of confining clothes and "prisonlike" crib bars. He wears only a diaper, sleeps on a trampoline-like plastic mesh that drains away any leakage. The idea is to let him thrash about, play better and develop faster. Pop saves on baby clothes, and with less lifting, laundry...
...This thing is a crusade with me," says John M. Gray, a Long Island electronics engineer, who raised his own son (now a 16-year-old Explorer Scout) in a Skinner box and custom-builds them under the trademark Aircrib ($335). To cut the price, Gray aims for mass production and dreams of the day "when half the babies in America will be bred in boxes." He adds: "Even if just the nuts buy it, there's still a sizable market...
...conceives all learned patterns of human behavior as games, involving roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values. While he, or at least his associates, claim to be playing the "game" of science, one which certainly uses the mind, he says: "The mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-box complex. It is the game-playing fragment--a useful and entertaining tool but quite irrelevant to survival... We over-value the mind--that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections; the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we eschew the non-mind...