card file

39 results back to index


pages: 735 words: 214,791

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Bletchley Park, book value, card file, computer age, family office, ghettoisation, government statistician, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, profit motive, stock buybacks, Transnistria

Korherr openly denigrated Hofmann’s ideas as unnecessary and duplicative.80 Shortly after the Wannsee Conference, Korherr wrote to a colleague, “I would like to mention that the understandable lack of statistical expertise at the Race and Settlement Office, coupled with their urgent wish for a large statistics office with a Hollerith system and for an SS population card file, made [recent] negotiations extraordinarily difficult. For the statistician, the best proof of an amateur is when someone wants to begin—and end—his statistical work with a card file . . . Since Reichsführer [Himmler] appointed me the sole liaison for Reich statistics . . . I see Gruppenführer Hofmann’s behavior as deliberately . . . undermining my position.”81 Korherr snidely added, “The person in charge at the Reich Statistical Office was astonished at Gruppenführer Hofmann’s plans and asked: then why did Reichsführer [Himmler] hire me and Dr.

Although a network of Jewish and non-sectarian anti-Nazi leagues and bodies struggled to organize comprehensive lists of companies doing business with Germany, from importers of German toys and shoes to sellers of German porcelain and pharmaceuticals, yet IBM and Watson were not identified. Neither the company nor its president even appeared in any of thousands of hectic phone book entries or handwritten index card files of the leading national and regional boycott bodies. Anti-Nazi agitators just didn’t understand the dynamics of corporate multinationalism.64 Moreover, IBM was not importing German merchandise, it was exporting machinery. In fact, even exports dwindled as soon as the new plant in Berlin was erected, leaving less of a paper trail.

Once in Vienna, he found an enormous punch card operation working around the clock. The Hollerith program superseded every other aspect of German preparations.19 “For weeks in advance [of the Anschluss],” remembered Eichmann, “every able-bodied man they could find was put to work in three shifts: writing file cards for an enormous circular card file, several yards in diameter, which a man sitting on a piano stool could operate and find any card he wanted thanks to a system of punch holes. All information important for Austria was entered on these cards. The data was taken from annual reports, handbooks, the newspapers of all the political parties, membership files; in short, everything imaginable. . . .


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

Your job is to tell your SRS whether or not you remember a particular card, and your SRS’s job is to build a daily, customized to-do list based upon your input. This list is designed to help you memorize as efficiently as possible, so that you can spend your time learning instead of micromanaging. A paper SRS accomplishes the same feat using a flash card file box, a carefully designed schedule, and a few simple instructions. It’s basically a simple board game. The game contains seven levels, which correspond to seven labeled sections in your file box (i.e., level 1, level 2, etc.). Every card starts on level 1, and advances to the next level whenever you remember it.

Scale up or down as needed to fit your schedule and tolerance for LCD screens. If you prefer working with your hands, you can create an SRS with physical flash cards. Named after an Austrian science journalist writing in the 1970s, the Leitner box is just a particularly clever way to use a flash card file box, some dividers, and a calendar. In the original version, your box is divided into four sections. You review section 1 every day, section 2 every two days, section 3 every three days, and so on. When you successfully remember a card—gato = [cute picture of a cat]—it moves into the next section.

You’ve also downloaded and installed my demo deck, so your main job involves finding information and recordings, putting them in the right boxes, and clicking the Add Flash Cards button. If you’ve chosen a Leitner box, you’ve read Appendix 3, gone out to your local office supply store, and purchased your materials. You have an index card file-box full of dividers, a stack of blank index cards, some pencils, and a calendar in front of you (today is day 1!). You also remember my earlier caveat: Since paper flash cards can’t talk, you’re going to take extra care to learn a phonetic alphabet and to listen to recordings of example words when you write your flash cards.


pages: 517 words: 139,824

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

"Of course, 'twould be worth a fellow's job, if he were caught at it." "Do you like your work, Mr. Tobias?" "Pay's not much. Gas-light ruins your eyes. But it has advantages." He shrugged again, and pushed his way through another door, into a clattering anteroom, three of its walls lined with shelves and card-files, the fourth with fretted glass. Behind the glass loomed a vast hall of towering Engines -- so many that at first Mallory thought the walls must surely be lined with mirrors, like a fancy ballroom. It was like some carnival deception, meant to trick the eye -- the giant identical Engines, clock-like constructions of intricately interlocking brass, big as rail-cars set on end, each on its foot-thick padded blocks.

Many's the poor innocent bastard ruined like that . . . " The tick and sizzle of the monster clockwork muffled his words. Two men, well-dressed and quiet, were engrossed in their work in the library. They bent together over a large square album of color-plates. "Pray have a seat," Tobias said. Mallory seated himself at a library table, in a maple swivel-chair mounted on rubber wheels, while Tobias selected a card-file. He sat opposite Mallory and leafed through the cards, pausing to dab a gloved finger in a small container of beeswax. He retrieved a pair of cards. "Were these your requests, sir?" "I filled out paper questionnaires. But you've put all that in Engine-form, eh?" "Well, QC took the requests," Tobias said, squinting.

While he found the latter infinitely more compelling than the former, it was Q C he needed today, most particularly in the person of Andrew Wakefield, the departmental Under-Secretary. The clerks of Q C were individually walled into neatly cramped cells of rolled-steel, asbestos, and veneer. Wakefield presided over them from a grander version of the same scheme, his sparse sandy head framed by the brass-fitted drawers of a multitude of card-files. He glanced up as Oliphant approached, prominent front teeth displayed against his lower lip. "Mr. Oliphant, sir," he said. "A pleasure as ever. Pardon me." He shuffled a number of punch-cards into a sturdy blue envelope lined with tissue-paper, and meticulously wound the little scarlet string about the two halves of the patent-clasp.


The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones by Kevin Purdy

car-free, card file, crowdsourcing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, John Gruber, lock screen, QR code, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer, turn-by-turn navigation

From browser, head to google.com/contacts, log into the account you set up with your phone, then get to work searching, editing, and consolidating duplicate contacts. The ins and outs are, once again, covered in our chapter on Making Calls, Sending Texts, and Managing Contacts. It Takes Forever to Get at My Music, Pictures, and SD Card Files What you want to happen when you connect your Android to your computer's USB Many phone manufacturers, HTC and Motorola included, have created Windows and Mac software apps to handle the transfer and backup of SD card files for their phones. Some, like HTC, have even taken the step of having your phone ask you what you want to use your USB cable connection for--charging, syncing media, straight-up storage access, or data connection tethering.


Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

Bookshop owner Darren Mora said, “People don’t get into the habit of reading because books are too expensive for many people. In any case, most bookshops only stock text books and literary classics.” Libraries are not exactly user-friendly either. You can’t just browse among the books, but have to fiddle through oldfashioned card files, fill in a form for each book and ask the librarian—who will probably demand your cédula (identity card) or passport—to bring the books to you. You may not remove the books from the library and can only use them for a few hours. “How are you going to read a novel in an environment like that?” asked Mora.

Website: www.flysansa.com Nature Air Tel: (506) 2299-6000 Email: natureair@centralamerica.com Website: www.natureair.com CHARTER AIRLINES AND HELICOPTERS TACSA (from Tobías Bolaños Airport) Tel: (506) 2232-1438 / 2232-1317 Aviones Taxi Aereo (from Juan Santamaria Airport) Tel: (506) 2431-0160 / 2431-0293 Paradise Air Tel: (506) 2231-0938 / 2231-8972 / 2231-8973 Helicópteros del Norte Tel: (506) 2231-7210 Helicópteros Internacionales Tel: (506) 2231-6867; fax: (506) 2231-5885 Heli-Tours Tropical Tel: (506) 2220-3940 For more information on charter flights, look up www.airchartercentralamerica.com 290 FURTHER READING Many old books and theses about local culture are out of print and only available in libraries, which are always worth a visit. However, remember that in Tico libraries (except some university libraries) you cannot just browse among the shelves—you must look for what you want in the card files, fill out a form and give it to the librarian, who will find the publication. You cannot take books out of the library. GENERAL Amcham’s Guide to Investing and Doing Business in Costa Rica. San José, Costa Rica: AmCham. Detailed run-down of the business and investment climate. The New Key to Costa Rica.


pages: 103 words: 24,033

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa

card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K

The next president, or even Obama himself, could reverse these orders without requiring approval from any other government body. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether H-4 spouses will only be allowed to work after the sixth year of the H-1B, and if the H-1B is entitled to extensions beyond the sixth year based on a green card filing. “This would be too limited. H-4 spouses should be allowed to work much earlier—from day one,” says immigration attorney Cyrus B. Mehta. To be clear, I credit Obama and other legislators on both sides of the aisle for discussing and pushing forward legislation to improve the lot of skilled immigrants and allow more of them to stay here and contribute to America.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Yet despite these analog limitations, he 14 I ntrod u ction envisioned a global network of interconnected institutions that would alter the flow of information around the world, and in the process lead to profound social, cultural, and political transformations. By today’s standards, Otlet’s proto-Web was a clumsy affair, relying on a patchwork system of index cards, file cabinets, telegraph machines, and a small army of clerical workers. But in his writing he looked far ahead to a future in which networks circled the globe and data could travel freely. Moreover, he imagined a wide range of ­expression taking shape across the network: distributed encyclopedias, virtual classrooms, three-dimensional information spaces, social networks, and other forms of knowledge that anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web.

Still, van den Heuvel suggests that Otlet’s approach to classification as a documentary language anticipates Nelson’s concept of hypertext, insofar as it encompasses nonsequential and multidimensional relationships21 or, as Nelson put it, “text that branches and allows choices.”22 263 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D Nelson maintains that he spent his first five years thinking about interactive text systems in conceptual isolation, with no idea that others had developed similar concepts. Nelson’s earliest proto-­ hypertext experiments bore a striking resemblance to Conrad Gessner’s: using card files, notebooks, scissors, and paste. Over time he hoped to create “the dream file” (emphasis Nelson’s), a sophisticated writing and filing system designed for an author, “holding everything he wanted in just the complicated way he wanted it held, and handling notes and manuscripts in as subtle and complex ways as he wanted them handled.”23 In addition to thinking deeply about the problems of managing large collections of text, Nelson also envisioned how other forms of expression might take shape over time: “hypergrams,” “hypermaps,” and “hyperfilms” or “branching movies.”


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

That is nowhere better illustrated than in a photograph from the offices of Roosevelt’s crowning achievement: the Social Security Board (later renamed the Social Security Administration), where men in suits, suspenders, and vests leaf through card files containing wage records for tens of millions of Americans.49 Ordinary Americans could well be forgiven their fears that the government had gone dossier mad. Breathless news coverage of the new Social Security system called it “the biggest bookkeeping job in history.” By the middle of 1938—less than two years after the first Social Security numbers were issued—the card files held records for forty million workers, and almost half a million new worker records entered those filing cabinets every month.50 But critics who blamed this giant information-gathering operation on a desire for left-wing dictatorship missed the point.


pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The campaign manager, Shadegg explained in How to Win an Election, should follow Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village,” the dictator wrote, “and I will take the village.” Shadegg’s version of the technique was to pool the names of everyone in the state with whom he and his staff could claim personal association. Researchers uncovered each name’s banking, church, business, lodge, media, and family connections to create a massive card file. People on the list got a “personal” letter from the senator about some piece of legislation that was threatening to them. When recipients replied, they were added to the names on the bulk mailing list that received various campaign letters “personally” addressed from their new friend. This produced over three thousand people loyally working in concert for the campaign, none aware of any other’s efforts—spreading the right rumors, sending bits of intelligence to the office, setting up events and selling to their friends.

Clif White watched that spring as ACA sucked in thousands that might have gone to them—$6,000 alone from G.E.’s Lem Boulware, Reader’s Digest’s DeWitt Wallace, and Johnson & Johnson’s Robert W. Johnson. That was the exact amount White had already siphoned off from his children’s college fund. Again and again he returned to Washington to get his hands on the card files of Nixon delegates to the 1960 convention. He failed, with ever greater frustration, every time. In June he attended an RNC meeting in Seattle. So did a gang of Harvard kids, led by Bruce Chapman, a member of the team that had drafted the Compact of Fifth Avenue in 1960, and George Gilder, David Rockefeller’s godson, who put out a new magazine called Advance—“flaming moderates,” they called themselves.

Columnists Evans and Novak called the Goldwater boom “the closest thing to a spontaneous mass movement in modern American politics.” White canceled Uline Arena and booked the much larger D.C. Armory. It was also time to scout out first-in-the-nation New Hampshire. White met with New Hampshire YAF leaders, who bragged that they were ready to begin organizing for the primary. “Fine,” White responded. “Show me a card file of every voter in a township indicating whether each one is pro-Goldwater, anti-Goldwater, or for some other candidate.” Seeing them stunned to silence (of course they had no such thing), White continued: “When you have something close to that for every town and city in New Hampshire, let me know, and then we could announce a state Draft Goldwater committee.”


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

The Money Illusion Irving Fisher was a Yale economist, a health-food zealot, a prohibitionist, and a fitness guru who filled a floor of his New Haven mansion with exercise equipment. He coauthored a book called How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science, which sold half a million copies, the royalties of which Fisher gave to an organization he’d founded called the Life Extension Institute. He invented a card filing system to organize all his projects, then patented it, then created a company called Index Visible to sell the card system, then merged his company with a bigger company and made a fortune. Fisher was a proponent of eugenics, which was widely popular at the time but is today clearly repulsive and immoral.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

In a short essay called “Every Move Will Be Recorded,” historian Grégoire Chamayou recounts a hypothetical system of urban surveillance devised by an eighteenth-century police officer named Jacques François Guillauté. In a book about police reform written for King Louis XV of France, Guillauté proposed thoroughly and rigorously updating the Parisian address system. This would require a behemoth piece of machinery that operated a bit like an oversize index-card file—or what Chamayou describes as a “huge archiving machine linked to a map in a central room”—and some arithmetical cartography. “Paris was to be divided into distinct districts,” Chamayou writes, “each receiving a letter, and each being subdivided into smaller sub-districts. In each sub-district each street had accordingly to receive a specific name.


pages: 289 words: 80,763

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton, Peter Economy

anti-pattern, Ben Horowitz, business logic, business process, card file, index card, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, mail merge, minimum viable product, performance metric, software as a service, tacit knowledge

Your stories will work the same way; that is, you may write them on cards, keep them in a list in a spreadsheet, enter them into your favorite tracking tool, or enter them in the tracking tool your company makes you use—you know, the one everyone grumbles about. In a library, you know there’s a book out there somewhere, and if you have identified the right card filed away in the card catalog, it’s easy to find it. Similarly, with a story, you know there’s a growing amount of information out there somewhere. It grows and evolves with each conversation. And, hopefully, however your company chooses to keep track of the information, it’s easy to find, too. If you want to go really old school, keep the details of all those discussions taped onto big sheets of flipchart paper on the wall so you can keep talking about them whenever you want.


pages: 305 words: 73,935

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

No meeting may be convened without two thirds of the member households represented in person but the meeting may continue despite the withdrawal of enough members to leave less than a quorum. At the start of the meeting, a dated 5” x 8” index card shall be signed by all the members present and used to divide the card file into a section for each meeting. APPENDIX: SAMPLE DOCUMENTS 3. All members may participate in decision-making and voting on proposals. 4. Only one person has the right to speak at any one time during a meeting. Anyone else wishing to speak shall so indicate nonverbally and the recorder shall list them in the order they will be called. 5.


The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching by Donald Ervin Knuth

card file, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, linked data, locality of reference, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, p-value, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, sorting algorithm, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

." = "United States" Ignore space after prefix in surnames Ignore initial article Ignore apostrophe in English Surname begins with upper case letter (Most of these rules are subject to certain exceptions, and there are many other rules not illustrated here.) If you were given the job of sorting large quantities of catalog cards by computer, and eventually maintaining a very large file of such cards, and if you had no chance to change these long-standing policies of card filing, how would you arrange the data in such a way that the sorting and merging operations are facilitated? 18. [M25] (E. T. Parker.) Leonhard Euler once conjectured [JVova Acta Acad. Sci. Petropolitanas 13 A795), 45-63, §3; written in 1778] that there are no solutions to the equation 6 I 6 u +v 6 w 6 i 6 6 x +y =z in positive integers u, v, w, x, y, z.

This may be called an inclusive query, because it asks for all records that include a certain set of attributes, if we assume that l's denote attributes that are present and O's denote attributes that are absent. For example, the recipes in Table 1 that call for both baking powder and baking soda are Glazed Gingersnaps and Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies. In some applications it is sufficient to provide for the special case of inclusive queries. This occurs, for example, in the case of many manual card-filing systems, such as "edge-notched cards" or "feature cards." An edge-notched card system corresponding to Table 1 would have one card for every recipe, with holes cut out for each ingredient (see Fig. 46). In order to process an inclusive query, the file of cards is arranged into a neat deck and needles are put in each column position corresponding to an attribute that is to be included.

Conf. 22 A967), 41-49; Jerome A. Feldman and Paul D. Rovner, CACM 12 A969), 439-449; Burton H. Bloom, Proc. ACM Nat. Conf. 24 A969), 83-95; H. S. Heaps and L. H. Thiel, Information Storage and Retrieval 6 A970), 137-153; Vincent Y. Lum and Huei Ling, Proc. ACM Nat. Conf. 26 A971), 349-356. A good survey of manual card-filing systems appears in Methods of Information Handling by C. P. Bourne (New York: Wiley, 1963), Chapter 5. Balanced filing schemes were originally developed by C. T. Abraham, S. P. Ghosh, and D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri in 1965; see the article by R. C. Bose and Gary G. Koch, SIAMJ. Appl. Math. 17 A969), 1203-1214.


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

He was a pragmatist who had learned the fine art of extracting whatever he needed from guilt-ridden northerners or poorly credentialed but powerful segregationists who wouldn’t want him living next to them but might grant him a concession or donate to his cause, the colored graduate school Atlanta University. He was so vigilant as to his place in the colored hierarchy that he kept a card file near his desk, Time magazine reported, on every black person in the United States that he considered “worthy of a high position in Government and education” in case he got a query from Washington.202 Without trying, Rufus Clement had become an unwitting rival of Robert, not only for the affections of Robert’s wife and children but in both men’s unspoken effort to prove that where each man had ended up was the better place for colored people.

., p. 26. 199 Mahalia Jackson: Mahalia Jackson and Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 119. 200 “Shall we sacrifice”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 176. 201 The top ten cities: Isabel Wilkerson, “Study Finds Segregation in Cities Worse than Scientists Imagined,” The New York Times, August 5, 1989, an article on the findings of a five-year study of 22,000 census tracts conducted by University of Chicago sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton. 202 kept a card file: “The Extracurricular Clout of Powerful College Presidents,” Time, February 11, 1966, p. 64. 203 “in addition to his widow”: “Dr. Rufus Clement of AU Dies Here,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1967, p. 45. 204 The evening was unusually cool: Earl Caldwell, “Martin Luther King Is Slain in Memphis; White Is Suspected; Johnson Urges Calm: Guard Called Out; Curfew Ordered in Memphis, but Fires and Looting Erupt,” The New York Times, April 5, 1968, p. 1. 205 “About 74 percent”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 6.


pages: 307 words: 97,677

The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski

Buckminster Fuller, card file, human-factors engineering, industrial robot, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman

The best features these most popular paper clips possess individually are combined in the spread-legged Universal (also known as the Imperial) Clip, whose “unique design … allows for easy application with tremendous gripping power.” As we all know, putting even the best-looking of paper clips on cards can be tricky and, once achieved, makes a pile of them awfully bulky. Thus the Nifty Clip was “designed for holding thicker grades of papers such as card or index stock [and is] flattened to conserve card file space.” The Peerless (Owl) Clip, whose “rounded eyes prevent catching and tearing,” not only “holds more than Gems” but with “greater tension than Gems.” Ring Clips, essentially copies of the old Rinklips, are “used when holding only a few sheets,” come in five sizes, and possess the advantages of having “less thickness than Gems” and using “less space in files.”


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Shortly before he traveled to Philadelphia with Hew Crane to present his ideas on scaling in January 1960, Engelbart began organizing a series of informal seminars at SRI on the idea of augmenting the human intellect. Although they did not have computers with which to explore their ideas, members of the group had been fiddling with proto-PC applications. At the time, the most efficient simple sorting techniques were card-file systems. Data were entered by hand on cards, the outside edges of which were ringed with punched holes. Cutting notches to match various attributes made it possible to retrieve information by sliding a knitting needle through a stack of cards and shaking. The cards with the notched holes would fall out of the deck; it was thus possible to perform simple statistical operations this way.


pages: 442 words: 110,704

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

This resource, begun in 1897 by a former assistant, already consisted of fifteen thousand cards listing every published reference to the approximately five hundred known variables, culled from bulletins, journals, and reports of observers all over the world. Miss Cannon could read both French and German, the other two languages of science. She fattened the decks of cards in the existing bibliography and created new card files as new variables came to light. In mid-April, when Mrs. Fleming fully recovered her strength, and no longer needed to take a carriage to the observatory, she reviewed her time-capsule diary with a pang of contrition. “I find that on March 12 I have written at considerable length regarding my salary.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Often they are exploited by bosses from their home countries who try to intimidate workers by threatening to harm family members living abroad. In spite of this, restaurant workers in the Bronx and Queens, warehouse workers in Brooklyn, and retail workers in Manhattan have repeatedly struck since 2012, signed union cards, filed court complaints, and brought cases before the NLRB. And they have won. A 2012 campaign led by Mexican immigrant Mahoma Lopez to organize the Hot & Crusty bakeries, and a 2016–17 union drive at the B&H photo warehouse, resulted in new unions, no small feat.4 Still, Aran and Rodriguez say that the most radical work they do is psychological.


pages: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

For one thing, her indicator did not originate in the modern corporation, even if that was to be its first resting place. Ever the devoted child, she had launched her design of the indicator just as her mother had launched her cosmic laboratory of baby training: in the comfort and safety of her home. With the same deck of 3˝ × 5˝ index cards and the same card file that Katharine had once used to chronicle Lyman’s dreams of dark Spanish girls and embarrassing pecks, she proceeded by typing every member of her family. At the top of each card, she wrote the name of the family member and, under that, what she believed to be their Jungian type and their type’s most salient characteristics.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

In the limit of what we might now imagine, this could be a computer, with which individuals could communicate rapidly and easily, coupled to a three-dimensional color display within which extremely sophisticated images could be constructed, the computer being able to execute a wide variety of processes on parts or all of these images in response to human direction. The displays and processes could provide helpful services and could involve concepts not hitherto imagined (e.g., the pregraphic thinker would have been unable to predict the bar graph, the process of long division, or card file systems). . . . we might imagine some relatively straightforward means of increasing our external symbol-manipulation capability and try to picture the consequent changes that could evolve in our language and methods of thinking. For instance, imagine that our budding technology of a few generations ago had developed an artifact that was essentially a high-speed, semiautomatic table-lookup device, cheap enough for almost everyone to afford and small enough to be carried on the person.


Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

Griffith’s Manual was reprinted in 1930, then revised in 1932, and reprinted seven times by 1944, before coming out in a new edition in 1952. Clearly it was invaluable, and it remained in wide use for over two decades. Nonetheless, none of Griffith’s works appears in the main catalogue of one of Britain’s three deposit libraries – they appear only in supplementary material card file boxes. Her books were seen as inconsiderable by librarians, despite being published by an academic press, despite their popularity in their day and despite the subcutaneous effect such works had on the nation’s attitude to repair in the mid-twentieth century and beyond: mere ‘women’s work’. The impact of her work was still felt long after.


pages: 390 words: 125,082

Years of the City by Frederik Pohl

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, pattern recognition

The first upturn in his amative fortunes was when he came home almost on time one night and found the apartment full of cooking smells. Heidi was in good spirits. She made them both drinks while the microwave finished their baked bluefish and, responding to the look on his face, laughed. “You haven’t noticed anything special about this week?” she asked. He pursed his lips while he ran through his mental card file. Not Christmas and not Valentine’s Day. Not their anniversary— “Your birthday!” he exclaimed. “But that’s not until Sunday.” She grinned and shook her head. “That’s not what I mean, although there’s something I’d like from you. You really haven’t noticed?” “Noticed what?” “I haven’t thrown up for a week!”


pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

A French engineer named Henri Liber established a company called Flambo in 1919 to market a secretarial chair with a backrest adjustable up and down along a U-shaped metal track. Meanwhile, postwar Germany turned its drive for standardization and public health to seating. In the later 1920s, the office supply manufacturer Fortschritt of Freiburg im Breisgau, best known for state-of-the-art card file systems, marketed a Fortschritt-Stuhl (“Progress Chair”) with a spring-loaded back support system—unlike the rigid Tan-Sad and Flambo—and a lever under the seat for adjusting the height of the chair without rising, fifty years before this feature became common. An advertisement noted proudly that the Prussian Ministry of Welfare (Volkswohlfahrtsministerium) had awarded the chair a winning ninety-point score in an evaluation of seating that must have been one of the first conducted by any government.


pages: 555 words: 119,733

Autotools by John Calcote

Albert Einstein, card file, Debian, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Free Software Foundation, place-making, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Valgrind

You can define the CLEANFILES variable to contain a whitespace-separated list of files (or wild-card specifications) to be removed. I used a clean-local target in this case, because the CLEANFILES variable has one caveat: It won't remove directories, only files. Each of the rm commands that removes a wild-card file specification refers to at least one directory. I'll show you a proper use of CLEANFILES shortly. Regardless of how well your unit tests clean up after themselves, you still might wish to write clean rules that attempt to clean up intermediary test files. That way, your makefiles will clean up droppings from interrupted tests and debug runs.[122] Remember that the user may be building in the source directory.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

After the IDF occupied the Strip, Rehavia Vardi sent some of his men from Unit 504 to search the Egyptian intelligence building in Gaza City, where Mustafa Hafez had been killed a few months before. In a cellar they found a hidden treasure, one that the desperately fleeing Egyptians had neglected to destroy: the intact card file of all the Palestinian terrorists that Hafez and his men had deployed against Israel in the five years preceding the Sinai Campaign. It was as if the Egyptians had left a hit list. Vardi met with chief of staff Dayan and asked for his permission to begin killing the Palestinians named in the card file. Dayan, in turn, received Ben-Gurion’s approval. Vardi then ordered Natan Rotberg—and his vat of explosives—to go into overdrive. Rotberg’s special formula was poured into wicker baskets, cigarette lighters, fruits, vegetables, even pieces of furniture.


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

One man sitting in the back of the room is using field glasses to examine a change that has just been made on the display board. Clerks and messengers carrying cards and sheets of paper hurry from files to automatic machines. The chatter of teletype and sound of card sorting equipment fills the air. As the departure date for a flight nears, inventory control reconciles the seat inventory with the card file of passenger name records. Unconfirmed passengers are contacted before a final passenger list is sent to the departure gate at the airport. Immediately prior to take off, no-shows are removed from the inventory file and a message sent to downline stations canceling their space.40 Of all the carriers, American Airlines had the most innovative reservation operations.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

During a visit to Michigan, a local reporter asked him if the title of the 1923 hit song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” was correct English. In typically earnest fashion, Fisher responded, “Yes, it would be correct, if the statement was preceded by the question ‘Have you no bananas?’”27 By the second half of the 1920s, Fisher had also become a big financial success. Years before, he had devised a card-filing system to help him keep track of his many endeavors. Fisher’s “Index Visible” filing cards, cut so that the first line of each was visible at a glance (similar to the Rolodex, which came along decades later), were a significant advance in information storage and retrieval. In 1913 he launched a company to manufacture and market his filing system, and in 1925 he sold it to office equipment maker Kardex Rand, which merged with typewriter titan Remington to create one of the hot technology stocks of the 1920s, Remington Rand.


The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

Moses considered it money well spent; he was a self-admitted information freak and he considered Ira one of the world’s best sources of news of the mind. Soon Hallett cleared the way for Bell to pay the duplication costs of the network. As the project evolved, he and Ira arrived at a protocol. The names of the members of the network were kept in a card file maintained by Hallett’s secretary. The list eventually grew to more than 350 names in more than twenty countries. Each time Ira came with a mailing, usually once or twice a week, he would specify which people would receive this particular set of materials. His list was usually written on a yellow, lined cover page, the names scrawled in Ira’s unmistakable block lettering.


East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, British Empire, card file, foreign exchange controls, nuremberg principles

From the city archives: Government Archive of Lviv Oblast. Only Leon was born: Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. Stanisław Żółkiewski: Born 1547, died 1620. Alex Dunai gave me: Digital copy on file. “at the far end”: Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (Granta, 2001), 25. It lay at the western: Card file of Żółkiew landowners, 1879, Lviv Historical Archives, fond 186, opys 1, file 1132, vol. B. A peace treaty was signed: Treaty of London, signed May 30, 1913, by Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Yet just a month later: Treaty of Bucharest, signed Aug. 10, 1913, by Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

To deal with any of these requests, the reservations clerks would have to refer to a series of well-lit boards displaying the availability of seats on each flight scheduled to depart over the next few days. For flights further ahead in time, the agent would have to walk across the room to consult a voluminous card file. If the inquiry resulted in a reservation, a cancellation, or a ticket sale, the details of the transaction would be recorded on a card and placed in an out-tray. Every few minutes these cards would be collected and taken to the designated availability-board operator, who would then adjust the inventory of seats available for each flight.


Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

., “Billy the Kid”) should find other “same” things (e.g., “William Antrim,” one of his aliases). Semantically reconciled directories recognize when a newly reported entity references a previously observed entity. Directories that contain semantically reconciled data can be thought of much like a library card file, with one big difference: cards relating to like entities are rubber-banded together. This means if a search locates one card, as a bonus, all other related cards are discovered without any additional effort. Most notably, some of the cards in the rubber-banded clump of library cards may not even contain the original data item being searched.


pages: 744 words: 142,748

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

“Beckley lived in a plush Miami Beach apartment house, five or six stories up, well insulated. There was no way to get in and do anything,” Sharp says. “We were pretty well restricted to phone record checks.” But the phone records were a treasure trove. Over a period of months Sharp amassed a 3x5 index card file—some twenty thousand cards’ worth—of every long-distance number Beckley called. “We didn’t know the term then,” Sharp says, “but what we really needed was a computer database.” Painstakingly, Sharp and his colleagues built a detailed map of Beckley and his associates. By combining this with other intelligence they formed a solid picture of his bookmaking operation.


pages: 647 words: 161,908

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess, Paul Haney

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, card file, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, Neil Armstrong, out of africa

This safety measure had nothing to do with actuating the explosive feature of the hatch that was soon scheduled to come into play. Apart from this minor annoyance, everything was going according to plan. While Liberty Bell 7 continued its descent Grissom heard from the pilot of the radio relay airplane, designated Card File 23. "We are heading directly toward you," the pilot announced, as the spacecraft passed three thousand feet. Then the first of the rescue helicopters, flying under the code name of Hunt Club-1, was in contact. Pilot Jim Lewis told Grissom they were about two miles southwest of the projected splashdown site.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Revealing informants would not increase accuracy, Burge insisted but, because of fear of harassment, “sources [would] alter their stories.”174 The intensely personal information revealed through investigators and services like the Welcome Wagon were important because Burge believed that “the care with which a person exercises the premises of his home seemed to be carried over into other habits of his life.”175 Despite his claims to the contrary, the Retail Credit Company manual instructed investigators “to investigate in such a manner that the applicant or insured will not learn of the investigation.”176 The decentralization of the information in card files and 300 branch offices offset, Burge felt, the Orwellian possibilities of the information’s misuse. The very inefficiency of the qualitative, noncomputerized systems made Retail Credit Company’s services not nearly as sinister as detractors like Westin claimed. The older filing systems still allowed for privacy breeches, however, even without being centralized.


pages: 477 words: 165,458

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, card file, centre right, data acquisition, Eratosthenes, Gene Kranz, invention of gunpowder, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

No wonder they spoke in the mood-smashed, random-item sequences of the modern world, where the depth of the thought was not nearly so important as the ability to brook interruption, and then interruption upon interruption, to live in an environment so formless and externally directed that weightlessness was the next and logical step, to suffer shortwave radio and the life of static like deaf people communicating in a factory which produces nothing but noisemakers and celebration horns, yes, let us quit this accounting of their third day, let us dispense with their next television show, their LM Delta P, their O2 flow alarm, their platform realignments and further water dumps, their Delta H updates, their cryo checks, their reports on the docking latches, the disassembly and reinstallation of the probe, drogue and hatch to the Lunar Module, their entrance into the Lem, their examination, their television humor—now near to the humor at a drunken party, “Hello, there, earthlings,” let us pass over the new data for the Alternate and Contingency checklist, the switch positions on the high-gain antenna, the changes in the glycol flow for the radiators, the small shifts in the Lunar Module mission rules, the supper and the music played, the check on the placements of the landing site obliques, the correction of typos on the APS DPS fuel card, the listing of three adjustments in the Mission Rule’s GO–NO GO card file, the check on the gyroscope drift, the discussion of abort programs above or below low gate with consequent loss of thrust axis, the status report, the Delta P again, it all comes in with lists and pieces and interrupted parts, comments on the tone in the alarm signals and the ubiquitous use of the word “great” for anything that works as well as it was designed to work, great, great, great, the television show was great, and the last waste-water dump, the Saturn performance and the Service Propulsion Motor performance, the burps and the bursts of the thrusters.


pages: 1,243 words: 167,097

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Although there was no guarantee that these vessels would be portside on the morning of an attack, the constant reading of their message traffic through Ultra gave Bletchley a good sense of the rhythm and routine of German channel traffic which increased the odds that a few would be berthed in the outer harbour with only skeleton crews to defend them. If not, Godfrey had another – fail-safe – plan. Since the summer of 1940, Naval Section had cobbled together a card file on German communications establishments in the Channel (and elsewhere) based on information from all possible sources – Ultra, captured documents, photo-reconnaissance, agent reports and prisoners of war. As the US Navy’s report on British pinch policy revealed: ‘Gradually, the locations of all these establishments became known, at least approximately, and precisely what codes and ciphers they all held.’14 All of this targeting information was ‘posted on a large chart, pins of different colours and shapes being used to indicate the different codes and ciphers held at the various locations.


pages: 914 words: 270,937

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, affirmative action, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, card file, disinformation, operational security

Ritter paced around his office until they arrived, then walked over to see Mrs. Cummings. "Did Ryan call in or anything?" "No, and I didn't see him at all. Do you know where he is?" Nancy asked. "Sorry, I don't." Ritter walked back and on impulse called Ryan's home, where all he got was an answering machine. He checked his card file for Cathy's work number and got past the secretary to her. "This is Bob Ritter. I need to know where Jack is." "I don't know," Dr. Caroline Ryan replied guardedly. "He told me yesterday that he had to go out of town. He didn't say where." A chill went across Ritter's face. "Cathy, I have to know.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

activist lawyer, business cycle, call centre, card file, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, job satisfaction, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero day

I would make phone calls to—God forgive—advertising agencies, radio stations. If you concentrated on the placeables, you made money. These were the girls who came off the production line of high schools, particularly the Catholic schools. They seemed to be tractable young girls. They went into banks as filing clerks in those days. You called the banks and you had your card file and you sent the girl over to the job. You could be a mass production worker yourself, working these girls into the system. There were no tough corners, nothing abrasive. One of my colleagues made two hundred dollars a week shoveling people into these slots. I wasn’t doing what the other girls at the desks were doing.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

Irina helped her mother sort through her sociological questionnaires, which Raisa spread out on the floor. According to Lydia Budyka, Raisa didn’t worship order for its own sake, but loved her home and wanted it to be warm and welcoming. But some of her efforts went beyond that. For example, Raisa asked her daughter to prepare a card file for the hundreds, if not thousands, of books the Gorbachevs had collected, many of them philosophical tomes reflecting Raisa’s academic specialty. By the 1960s, with her husband’s help, she had managed to obtain copies of the Bible, the Gospels, and the Koran, none easily available in an atheistic state.


Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Far apart as they were, Bush and Cheney found their campaigns playing out in similar ways. They both had to show they were homegrown, they both had to translate what they had seen at the national level to the local level, and they both had something to learn about themselves. Bush tapped his parents’ card file of supporters for campaign cash, including Rumsfeld, while striving to be his own man. Still mastering the art of the stump, he was driving home from a speech one day and asked Laura how it had gone; not well, she answered, shocking him so much that he crashed the car into a garage. Cheney, for his part, drove around the state listening to eight-track tapes of the Carpenters.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort.42 Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.43 Because The Westchester had so much turnover in wartime, Warren’s biggest dread was customers who skipped out and didn’t pay, leaving him stuck with the cost of their papers.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

.” Wilmer had helped establish the eye institute in Riyadh, and Bernie had stayed five months to do some clinical instruction. “He performed surgery on a cousin who was injured in a plane crash. He's back flying. And those are your children over there?” “Yes, Your Highness.” This one went into the card file as a good guy. “Would you mind if I spoke with them?” “Please.” The Prince nodded and moved off. Caroline Ryan, he thought, making his mental notes. Highly intelligent, highly perceptive. Proud. Will be an asset to her husband if he has the wit to make use of her. What a pity, he thought, that his own culture utilized its women so inefficiently-but he wasn't King yet, might never be, and even if he were to become so, there were limits to the changes he could make under the best of circumstances.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

At this point they know the first byte of the MAC value, and can repeat the process for the second byte, the third byte, and so on until they’ve got the correct MAC value, at which point they’re fooled you into believing that you’re getting untampered data [449][450] [451][452] (note that they’re not actually generating MACs for the data, they’re just appending different values until they get one that passes the check). This sort of byte-at-a-time attack isn’t limited to guessing MAC values, you can also use it to extract private keys from some smart cards. The keys are typically stored in card files that can’t be read from outside the card, but it’s still possible to write to them since you need to create the key in the first place. To perform the attack, you encrypt some data with the key and record the result. Then you set the first byte of the file to zero and check whether an encryption with the resulting modified key matches the original encryption.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

If Moses refused to accept ideas from public, experts or aides—from, in general, anyone at all—the source of his ideas, his concept of public works for New York City, could be only his own mind. The mind was brilliant, but even a brilliant mind is only as good as the material—the input—fed into it. It was at about this time that Lazarus, planning to write a book about government and public figures and keeping a card file of impressions, wrote on a card he filed under the name "Robert Moses": Bob Moses has climbed so high on his own ego, has become so hidebound in his own arbitrariness, that he has removed himself almost entirely from reality and has insulated himself within his own individuality. This difficulty could to some degree have been overcome by sheer mental ability.