◆ SpookStack

Memo to Mr, White Re: HEARNAP 7-15200 ‘Dr. Miron - He specializes in communications involving mentally disturbed individuals. His initial studies involved suicide notes, but he has since expanded into other areas of aberrant behavior. He advises he has served as a consultant to CIA and FAA, the former involving physical and psycho- logical profiles of foreign personalities and the latter involving hijackers, The Hearst case presents an excellent opportunity to test his conclusions since we will undoubtedly apprehend the culprits, He expressed the desire to serve as a paid consultant to us. It is noted that he is presently - attempting to get Federal funding to continue and expand his studies. Methodology ; His is a blend of intuition and empiricism, the latter involving considerable automatic data processing. He employs the Semantic Differential Technique pioneered by the University of Illinois. Basically this technique uses the notion that the meaning of any concept can be represented as a point in an n-dimensional space. The origin of this space is defined as "'meaninglessness, '' and the vector from the origin to any concept point represents by its length the degree of meaningfulness and by its direction the quality of meaning. The dimensions of this space, . represented geometrically by straight lines through its origin, are defined by polar qualifiers (adjectives), and it is the clusterings among these _ qualifiers, as determined from the similarities of their usage in rating —__ - substantives (nouns), that characterize the underlying semantic structure.. This technique readily lends itself to multivariate statistical methods such as factor analysis (feature discovery) and distance analysis (similarity or dissimilarity in meaning). Location of the concept point is derived through ~~. - use of a specialized dictionary, developed by Harvard University, which . quantifies’ words according to how they are used in context. Miron has made soine adjustments to this dictionary and as this discipline develops many more changes may be anticipated. _ Although there was insufficient time to explore Dr. Miron’'s methodology in detail, his mathematical methods would appear sound and he uses an accepted technique. Since this is such a new field, validation of results must await the test of time. ign SRST oy aad