Word: feed-back
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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Many deferment proposals came to the committees. For an instance, President Conant advocated a "feed-back" system developed by the Association of American Universities. This would defer a limited number of men for completion of their education, with all the rest going into service immediately. Those deferred would have to serve later, but this plan would keep colleges from being wrecked altogether when UMST first goes into operation, taking all healthy students into the army. The "feed-back" program would stop after the first few years of UMST, by then enough men would be coming back into civilian life...
...methods of 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...
Reports on Speech. Most human feedback systems are built into the nerves or into the brain itself, where they 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...