Word: diagnosticians
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Thank you for introducing your readers to Ralph Reed, a tough and winsome advocate of a particular kind of theocracy [COVER STORY, May 15]. The trouble with Reed and the Christian Coalition is that while he is a very good diagnostician of the country's ills, he is a menace when it comes to public policy. There is no greater pathology in religion than that of confusing one's own will with God's. As for Americans, for whom so many presume to speak, we need to be wary of the God-is-on-our-side rhetoric. Politicians who worship...
...book represents a diagnostician's exhaustive checkup of his new community, in which he finds as many hidden fears and lesions as in any of his patients. He meets a preacher who has "penile, rectal and pharyngeal gonorrhea." He hears of macho truck drivers who have quick liaisons with men because they don't charge, and he learns of married men in church making dates with the gay men they know. Most of all he listens with sympathy to the woman who begs him to keep her son's disease a secret so she won't have to endure "faggot...
Others, however, are already thinking beyond existing technologies. Johan de Kleer, a respected knowledge-system designer at Xerox, envisions an all- purpose electrical diagnostician that would have specific knowledge, such as the various laws that govern electrical flow and conductivity. But it would also have the common sense to decide whether it was faced with a broken VCR or a broken computer. To build this system, de Kleer has spent ten years codifying what he calls "qualitative" calculus that will provide the language to build "common-sense physics." The problem with common sense is that it requires the computer...
...diagnostician's new colleague needs no coffee breaks...
This legislative preoccupation with the trivial, which is confirmed in almost every state capital, goes by the term microphilia. Though the ailment was named only a few years ago (by a justly obscure political diagnostician), it has been in evidence as long as state legislatures have existed-though sometimes upstaged by more dramatic defects such as procrastination, carelessness and venality. These larger historic faults were undoubtedly in the mind of John Burns when he wrote in The Sometime Governments (1970): "We expect very little of our legislatures, and they continually live up to our expectations." In fact, many state legislatures...