Word: stress
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even the Enlightenment did not do the Devil in. Just as ancient Romans flocked to mystery cults in the days of religious and political decay, so do more modern men seek out the occult in times of stress or excessive pragmatism. The Victorian period saw one such flowering, the 1920s another. Now an occult revival has come to the space...
...political leaders and voters, businessmen and customers. It could sharply reduce the output of talk all over by making everyone think twice before speaking. It could also bring closer the Orwellian society of 1984. The remarkable but ominous device that might cause these changes is the P.S.E. (for Psychological Stress Evaluator) which, its inventors believe, can use voice recordings to detect lies without the cooperation or even the presence of the speaker...
...traced on a chart by a pen linked to the machine. It is the capacity to detect and reproduce these tremors-apparently produced by the freely undulating throat muscles of a relaxed speaker-that gives the P.S.E. its awesome powers. For the throat muscles of a person under stress are so tense that they produce practically no microtremors...
P.S.E.'s reliability still has not been proved. No independent agency has double checked the company's TV experiment. Moreover, some lie detector experts caution that the weakness of the stress evaluator may lie in its dependence on a single measure of bodily function (the polygraph, or conventional lie detector, records several: pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration and sweat-gland activity). Besides, experts agree that although both the old and new devices can spot stress, neither can prove absolutely that the stress results from lying. The most serious objection to the P.S.E. is ethical. As the company itself...
...system is so constructed in theory and practice as to provide good teaching only by accident. On the one hand, those hired for permanency are not hired with an eye to their teaching ability. On the other hand, those who are junior faculty teach under conditions of such stress, overwork and career anxiety, knowing the odds are 99 to 1 that they won't be kept here, that they put their energy into getting their theses and other publications into print to get themselves jobs elsewhere...