Word: lockstepping
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...vanished. Possible, says Callenbach, when people have freed themselves from large corporations and from cars and TV -- what he * calls "isolating technologies." Americans, he complains, have become a nation of emotionally detached creatures. "Humans like to play and mess around, and yet we are trying to live in the lockstep mode of modern society. No other species would put up with having to sit at a desk all day. And yet here we are trying to live according to bizarre economic and institutional social rules that seem to contradict our species nature...
Conventional computers function by following a chainlike sequence of detailed instructions. Although very fast, their processors can perform only one task at a time. This lockstep approach works best in solving problems that can be broken down into simpler logical pieces. The processors in a neural- network computer, by contrast, form a grid, much like the nerve cells in the brain. Since these artificial neurons are interconnected, they can share information and perform tasks simultaneously. This two-dimensional approach works best at recognizing patterns...
George Bush followed lockstep in his father's path: prep school, Yale, stalwart of the baseball team, Skull and Bones. Dukakis, on the other hand, broke with the expected pattern, deciding against Harvard in favor of Swarthmore, a small Quaker college near Philadelphia. A D in physics dissuaded him from studying medicine. Instead, he threw himself into politics, working for the 1951 election of Philadelphia reformist Mayor Joe Clark, his first taste of squeaky-clean government. Dukakis still did not have much of a social life -- no one remembers a steady girlfriend -- and he did not join any fraternities because...
...were, he recalls, "a decisive turning point in my own intellectual and political development . . . I never suspected that ((Stalin)) and the Soviet regime were prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life." Some friends and colleagues remained lockstep Stalinists, and Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini...
...Chinese have been trying to normalize relations with Eastern Europe since 1977. Until now, Soviet leaders have blocked the way by insisting that Moscow's clients march in lockstep with improvements in Sino-Soviet relations. All that may be changing. Observed a Western diplomat in Peking last week: "This trip and Jaruzelski's constitute a major Soviet concession to the Chinese...