Going forward, the WEF wants to include data from outside organizations such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, as well as from companies and academic researchers in its computations.

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Using Intel's "dual core" technology, in which computations are done within two "brains" on a single chip, Otellini predicted that next year notebooks would run at five watts, desktops at 65 watts and servers at 80 watts--a drop from today's wattage.

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We make microprocessors so small that their walls are bumpy with molecules and that can perform ten billion computations in a second.

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Still, the arcane computations in defined benefit pension plans make it hard for most employees to predict how much they will suffer in a freeze.

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Early in my career I worked at a company called MasPar which relied on thousands of processors to conduct massive amounts of coordinated computations in parallel.

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In the rare cases where CNN samples and computations do not agree with the VNS computations, CNN's analysts will be even more cautious in our projections.

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In theory, this would allow the computer to perform many different computations simultaneously at a much quicker rate than conventional computers.

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"The clients are doing trades in their accounts and sweeping money in and out continuously, so you can imagine what those kind of computations look like, " she said.

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The computations involved could be done, checked, double checked and triple checked in a day.

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Dubious computations also helped to usher the Uruguay round of global trade talks to a belated conclusion in 1994.

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