Word: data
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...considered the anti-competitive aspects of the consolidation. Last week's unanimous court decision rejected all those objections. In a somewhat lyrical burst of prose, Federal Appeals Judge Charles Fahy took the occasion to lament: "The romance of railroad building is all but lost in the welter of data before us. The merger will bring about changes in vast enterprises that took over from the pony express, the stagecoach and the covered wagon...
Computer maps can also combine pollution data with facts about distribution of income groups, and location of housing and industry...
...they are demanding taskmasters. Insatiable gluttons, they need a stream of billions of data to fill their maw. Their hunger for constant attention has caused the development of time-sharing systems that will let as many as 300 servants work for them simultaneously...
...effects." Isolating a particular cause for any single "effect" is the great Western error. It is like ripping a thread out of a tapestry and calling that the "key" thread in the fabric. And this is what we do whenever we try to "make a decision based on the data." One must give up trying to isolate cause and effect, and see that the process of the universe is an infinitely complex one, that every particle -- including one's consciousness -- is part of every other mote. If you see this, if you can intuit the flow of the universe...
LIFTON'S approach, then, has a certain intuitive and empirical weight. But in seeking to pinpoint one key symbol and stretch it into a foundation for China's chaos, he strains his hypothesis. Lifton has an exceptional command of the data on the Cultural Revolution, and his scheme explains most of its history. But few of his observations (as he readily admits in the introduction) cannot be explained by political, sociological and economic theses. This would not argue against his approach if it were not for one thing: the tremendous difficulty of verifying generalizations about the psychological make...