Word: data
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Seeing into the Future. The publishing firm of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., which bought SELECT last fall for an undisclosed sum plus royalties, now has a full-time five-man staff at work in New York keeping the 2,000,000 items of data on the colleges up to date. SELECT is already producing a potentially valuable byproduct for the colleges. The abundance of information that is available from student answers to those 283 searching questions should help college administrators estimate future needs for faculty and facilities. It will also help in the design of courses that will be responsive...
Finally, from Houston came the message that everyone had awaited: "We've acquired a signal but no voice contact yet. We are looking at engine data and it looks good. Tank pressures look good. We got it! We've got it! Apollo 8 is in lunar orbit...
Navigational data that the astronauts gathered will help NASA scientists plot Apollo's orbit more precisely than they could by tracking it from earth. Once the rises and dips in Apollo's orbital path have been identified, the scientists will be able to map their cause: variations in the lunar gravitational field believed to be caused by concentrations of massive material beneath some craters and seas. With better knowledge of the gravitational field, NASA will be able to plan more accurately the paths of future landing missions, on which errors of only a few feet could be dangerous...
...service, called Dynabank, is a form of computer time sharing that ties smaller banks into a large IBM storehouse of money-management data. By operating a special electric typewriter connected by telephone line to a computer center, a small-town banker can get a printout of information about conditions in distant bond and money markets, as well as economic forecasts for the nation or his region, and other data. If he is thinking of buying bonds, Dynabank will quote prices and yields of issues. If he wants to sell, the computer can tell him the market value...
...ways of thinking and talking about evil have altered. The fine old dramatic metaphors, from the Serpent in the Garden to Gustave Doré's sulfurous Lucifer, have lost their power to terrify. Yet modern substitutes are equally unsatisfying. Social scientists reduce evil to data. Intellectuals expose its banality. The public seems able to consider the demonic only in the harmless guise of Rosemary's Baby. Like nearly everything these days, evil clearly could do with a new image...