Word: digit
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Just three years ago all the leading industrial nations were in a boom; living costs soared everywhere. Then oil producers quintupled prices, causing huge trade deficits for most consuming countries and sending global inflation flaring to double-digit levels. To curb runaway prices, one government after another cut spending and tightened up credit. Now these measures seem at long last to be slowing the pace of price increases in most countries, but at a heavy cost in lost output, joblessness and social unrest...
...Combined with the tax cut, they could produce a hair-curling federal budget deficit of $100 billion or more for the next fiscal year (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Ford said that any such deficit would be "too dangerous to permit," since it would "threaten another vicious spiral of runaway double-digit inflation." He vowed to resist any attempt by Congress to pass spending programs that would produce a deficit any higher than $60 billion...
...made perfect sense. It read, in full: "We have been informed by DEC that a bug in the normalization algorithm used in three MACRO instructions (FADL, FSBL and FMPL) can cause a FORTRAN double precision compare to give incorrect results. A double precision compare should be accurate to 16 digits. This bug can cause the compare to give incorrect results in the ninth digit. We will notify all Users as soon as we receive a solution to the problem from...
Ordinary mortals might blanch at such howlingly incomprehensible computerese, but the message turned out to be, if not altogether graspable, at least mildly approachable. The errant computer in question was built by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and installed at Harvard five years ago, presumably reliably analyzing data at a steady, comforting clip. No one discovered until early this month that it was inaccurate in, of all places, the ninth digit -still quite serviceable for run-of-the-mill computer wizardry, but not the very best the machine was fully capable of. Some infinitesimally remote calculation was slipping ever so slightly...
Sophomore Sue Williams, the only double-digit scorer against Yale, will try to do it again tonight at Brandeis. Help should come from the able-bodied Guyton and Muscatine, and a cluster of other regulars...