Word: pinneo
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Brainchild of S.R.I. Researcher Lawrence Pinneo, a 46-year-old neurophysiologist and electronics engineer, the computer mind-reading technique is far more than a laboratory stunt. Though computers can solve extraordinarily complex problems with incredible speed, the information they digest is fed to them by such slow, cumbersome tools as typewriter keyboards or punched tapes. It is for this reason that scientists have long been tantalized by the possibility of opening up a more direct link between human and electronic brains...
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...
...adult mice died. Then in June, Casals fell ill. His first symptoms did not suggest what Frame had now christened Lassa fever. But at Presbyterian Hospital this diagnosis was confirmed. What to do? No known treatment was effective, but Patient Casals was more fortunate than his predecessors. Nurse Pinneo was convalescing, and there should still be antibodies in her blood. She flew to New York and gave two pints of blood. The cells were returned to her veins; only the plasma, containing gamma globulin with its antibodies, was given to Casals by transfusion. The technique was highly effective; he recovered...
...similar illness in Guinea, 1,500 miles west of Lassa, when she worked there as a teacher in 1965. Although Mrs. Moore recovered, her fever left her stone-deaf. Her quarters, she recalls, were infested with mice that left their droppings all over her room and the kitchen. Nurse Pinneo also remembers mice droppings in the mission hospital at Jos. If mice are indeed carriers of the disease, the virus may well be wafted into the air by dust when the droppings are swept away...