Word: picks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rothschild last week as, in her capacity as mayor of the little Norman village of Reux, she prepared to wed her son David, 31, to Italian Heiress Olimpia Aldobrandini, 18. After the public town-hall ceremony and a religious service, the megamillion merger was to be toasted by the pick of tout Paris, many of them brought to the baronne's cháteau by special train. Solving such problems as whether to serve Pol Roger or Moët et Chandon (solution: serve both) and the arrangement of bushels of country flowers was at least as exhausting...
...Front Page cynic who would trade in his grandmother for a scoop. By way of a more elevated example, almost everybody (at least among journalists) remembers Jefferson's famous remark that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he would pick the latter. But few recall that Jefferson also wrote on another occasion: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper...
Ornstein and a colleague have just launched a series of experiments to determine whether individuals can be taught to use one brain hemisphere or the other at will. EEG electrodes applied to both sides of the scalp pick up the subject's alpha waves (brain rhythms of a person awake but relaxed). These are electronically converted into sounds, which are fed into each ear. The effect, says Ornstein, "is to allow the person to hear tones varying with the activity of each hemisphere." The subject can then attempt to concentrate with one hemisphere and test his success...
Brain Waves. Although Pinneo and others have experimented with computer systems that respond to voice commands, he decided that there might be a more direct method than speech. The key to his scheme: the electroencephalograph, a device used by medical researchers to pick up electrical currents from various parts of the brain. If he could learn to identify brain waves generated by specific thoughts or commands, Pinneo figured, he might be able to teach the same skill to a computer. The machine might even be able to react to those commands by, say, moving a dot across a TV screen...
Pinneo could readily pick out specific commands. But, like fingerprints, the patterns varied sufficiently from one human test subject to another to fool the computer. Pinneo found a way to deal with this problem by storing a large variety of patterns in the computer's memory. When the computer had to deal with a fresh pattern, it could search its memory for the brain waves most like it. So far the S.R.I, computer has been taught to recognize seven different commands-up, down, left, right, slow, fast and stop. Working with a total of 25 different people, it makes...