Word: effective
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year litigation, Atanasoff testified that Mauchly cribbed ABC's key features during a five-day visit in 1941. Mauchly indignantly denied the accusation. But the judge took a different view. In a 1973 decision that was never appealed, he invalidated Eckert and Mauchly's patents and in effect declared Atanasoff the winner. Historians, however, interpret the ruling more broadly, viewing it as an effort to keep competition alive in a fast-growing industry...
...tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in air. Recognizing that a propeller isn't like a ship's screw, but becomes, in effect, a rotating wing, they used the data from their wind-tunnel experiments to design the first effective airplane props--a pair of 8-ft. propellers, carved out of laminated spruce, that turned in opposite directions to offset the twisting effect on the machine's structure. And when they discovered that...
Fermi died prematurely of stomach cancer in Chicago in 1954. He had argued against U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb when that project was debated in 1949, calling it "a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide." His counsel went unheeded, and the U.S.-Soviet arms race that ensued put the world at mortal risk. But the discovery of how to release nuclear energy, in which he played so crucial a part, had long-term beneficial results: the development of an essentially unlimited new source of energy and the forestalling, perhaps permanently, of world-scale...
Shockley, a very competitive and sometimes infuriating man, was determined to make his imprint on the discovery. He searched for an explanation of the effect from what was then known of the quantum physics of semiconductors. In a remarkable series of insights made over a few short weeks, he greatly extended the understanding of semiconductor materials and developed the underlying theory of another, much more robust amplifying device--a kind of sandwich made of a crystal with varying impurities added, which came to be known as the junction transistor. By 1951 Shockley's co-workers made his semiconductor sandwich...
...widespread it still is. IQ tests are more consequential in schools and the military, where large numbers of people have to be processed quickly, than they would be at work, where it's easier to demonstrate ability through performance over time. They also have a more pronounced effect on the lives of people who score very low or very high than on the lives of people in the middle. Still, it's hard to grow to adulthood in the U.S. without ever having taken an IQ-derived standardized test (any test that has words like "ability" or "aptitude" or "reasoning...