Word: attempting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sputniks should serve to stimulate scientific research, even as Korea shocked the United States out of a total military lapse. Any attempt to diminish the shock effect should have been carried out with more attention to its beneficial aspects. If people are somewhat disturbed about the possibility of Soviet air and space superiority they will be more willing to pay for programs to regain a lead. If, however, they are allowed or encouraged to slip back into apathy, Russia's margin which does not depend on her public psychology, will increase...
Since Russia's successful satellite launching was completely unheralded, and since the U.S. had not slated its attempt until next spring, the Smithsonian found itself partially unprepared on the night of October 4. Moonwatch teams had been organized, but with no advance warning their personnel was scattered and had to be hastily assembled for spotting duty. Programming schemes had not yet been fully worked out with which to prepare MIT's IBM machines to calculate the satellite's orbit from observational data. And a special telescopic camera, especially designed for the photographic tracking of a satellite, had just been dismantled...
This left the main burden of the early tracking operations up to the Naval Research Laboratories, located in Washington, which by prior arrangement was to attempt to get a "fix" on the satellite by radio. It had established special "Minitrack" stations across the country for this purpose. Unfortunately, however, these stations were geared to receive signals on 108 megacycles, the frequency the Russians had promised to use in their satellite's transmitter. They had to be completely overhauled in order to pick up the 20 and 40 megacycle signals which the Soviets decided to use instead...
Robert Frost intones flippantly in his latest attempt to still the clatter of the Machine Age and to put man in his proper place. Summer Slichter, not in the realm of morality, but certainly in the musty halls of tradition, takes a well-aimed iconoclastic swing at Keynesian economics. If his argument is not convincing to the conditioned minds of the New Deal, it represents a refreshing conservatism, too seldom well expounded...
...recent history of the Institute there are two striking examples of this educational theory in practice. The first is the Institute's abandoning the Electronic Computer Project. This project was begun in 1946 by John van Neumann as an attempt to give the mathematician and physicist a high speed computer. At first the task was novel and presented many high-level problems which only a mathematician and physicist of van Neumann's maturity and brilliance could cope with. In 1952, the machine was completed, and applied physicists in various companies began to improve upon the original until the Institute decided...