Word: digesting
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...three networks installed elaborate computer systems programmed to digest early returns and forecast winners at the earliest possible moment. At CBS, the setup was VPA (Vote Profile Analysis). NBC offered EVA (Electronic Vote Analysis); ABC produced RSVP (Research Selected Vote Profile). Like wire-service leg men still dedicated to the old-fashioned proposition that beat ing the opposition by a matter of minutes is a major victory, each network was determined to be first to call the winners. Fragmentary returns from key precincts were fed into the computers; comparisons were made with past voting patterns; projections of the uncounted votes...
...fast-proliferating journals that report on assorted scientific specialties, few are even remotely comprehensible to the average layman. And many a literate scientist admits to being all but stupefied by their jargon-filled contents. One notable exception among such somber publications is the sprightly Worm Runner's Digest, which serves up its well-edited and important scientific papers along with side dishes of humorous satires, poems and cartoons...
...even the seven-year-old Digest has had to retreat before the tide of scientific conformity. Beginning next year, its editor announced last week, the name of the Digest will be the Journal of Biological Psychology...
...sure, has already been earned. A 1961 W.R.D. article by McConnell's students was the first to report that memory could be inherited by one planarian from another; it started the current controversy about the role of the RNA molecule in the transfer of memory and learning. The Digest later published the first complete account of the original study of memory transfer in a higher animal, the rat. It also reported the first study of behavioral changes in plants-experiments in which the tropical mimosa was actually "taught" to change its response to specific stimuli...
McConnell vows that he will retreat no farther in his battle with the conformists. The new Journal of Biological Psychology will still contain an upside-down humor section and a back cover with Worm Runner's Digest printed defiantly across it. "It seems to me," says the embattled psychologist, "that anyone who takes himself or his work too seriously is in a perilous state of mental health. I believe that the Digest is proof that a great many scientists can appreciate humor even when it's pointed at their own life's work, and that a scientist...