Word: desk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Nicaragua to help collect customs payments and make sure that some of the money went to service foreign debts. In the unabashed days of dollar diplomacy, that was one way the U.S. saw to it that a troubled Caribbean republic's obligations were met. At his rolltop desk in a musty corner of the wood-and-adobe Managua customhouse, Irving A. Lindberg did an honest and efficient job. More important, as the years passed, he made friends with a rising young National Guard officer named Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza...
...there is no reduction in thievery soon, the Library will have to consider preventive, as well as punitive, action. This would include herding many of the shelf books behind the closed reserve desk, and making students show their Bursar's Cards before they could sign out any of the volumes...
...police station he identified himself as an elementary-school teacher, 45 years old. He had thought only to bring home a tiny chip of the mounting for his family to see. When no one appeared to press charges against him, he was released. "Señor," said a wondering desk sergeant, "you would have risked less by jumping off the top of the cathedral...
When not more urgently engaged, Bessie grinds out whole books of useful mathematical tables. One of them has 290 pages solidly packed with figures. A skilled operator, working with a desk calculator (an elaborate "adding machine"), might have completed the task in several years of steady, grueling labor. Bessie took twelve days...
...machines are very expensive at present; Mark III cost $500,000. But they are becoming simpler, as well as more intelligent, and their cost can be cut enormously by commercial production methods. It is almost certain that they will come into wide use eventually. On Professor Aiken's desk are sheaves of letters from corporations eager to learn about the computers' potentialities...