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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Wqbcejainx","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ1Ӻ","startOffset":0,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ4Ӻ","endOffset":436°Ӻ,"quote":"At the beginning of the sixties, before the foundation of an American Society for Cybernetics was first contemplated, I was working in Italy on a project in computational linguistics. The place where this work was being done, was called Centro di Cibernetica; but since I had only a dim notion of what cybernetics was supposed to be, I did not think of myself as a cybernetician. The fact that I was there, was due to a sequence of accidents which, in retrospect, could perhaps be regarded the result of communication and control. At the time, they seemed more like divine providence. That I was able to form my own research group in Milan, a few years later, was also due to extraordinary circumstances.\nIn those days, the Information Sciences Directorate, a division of the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, was sponsoring research in many different areas, some of which, like computational linguistics, had only the vaguest connection with military objectives. The Directorate was run by Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson, two outstanding individuals who were in many ways the opposite of what you have come to expect of administrators, let alone military administrators. They were both highly imaginative, widely read and cultivated, and enthusiastically open to new and controversial ideas. They were ready to support a project on sentence analysis based on ideas that were diametrically opposed to Chomsky, who was just becoming the high prophet of linguistics.Ӷ2Ӻ In fact, we were analyzing the relations that link words in sentences in terms of conceptual elements, i.e., semantically.Ӷ3Ӻ And we were developing a computer program that was beginning to do this, but we still did not think of ourselves as cyberneticians. \nWhen the Air Force funds for research abroad began to dry up, Harold and Rowena suggested to some of their European protégés that continuation of their work could be supported in the United States. That is how I and the small team I had assembled decided to move to Athens, Georgia.\nAthens – as Rowena put it – was to become “the M.I.T. of the South”. Warren McCulloch was to spend two months of the year in Athens, Heinz von Foerster was to run a large project there, and we were to keep the home fires burning while the giants were busy elsewhere.\nAs it turned out, Heinz came on two brief visits, Warren did not come at all, and at the end of 1969 our institute was wiped out in Mr.Nixon’s first economy drive. However, our work was apparently deemed sufficiently cybernetic for me to be invited to join the American Society for Cybernetics when it was founded. Had someone asked me why I considered myself a CYBERNETICIAN, I would have been hard pressed to find a plausible reply.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°,^"jQuery3210302923750808538062":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","category":"Narrativ2","data_creacio":1566378139910°
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