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🔗 Computer science 🔗 Time

In computer science, time formatting and storage bugs are a class of software bugs which may cause time and date calculation or display to be improperly handled. These are most commonly manifestations of arithmetic overflow, but can also be the result of other issues. The most well-known consequence of bugs of this type is the Y2K problem, but many other milestone dates or times exist that have caused or will cause problems depending on various programming deficiencies.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Military history/Military biography

The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam War—specifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 London 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Beer

The London Beer Flood was an accident at Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, London, on 17 October 1814. It took place when one of the 22-foot-tall (6.7 m) wooden vats of fermenting porter burst. The pressure of the escaping liquid dislodged the valve of another vessel and destroyed several large barrels: between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons (580,000–1,470,000 L; 154,000–388,000 US gal) of beer were released in total.

The resulting wave of porter destroyed the back wall of the brewery and swept into an area of slum dwellings known as the St Giles rookery. Eight people were killed, five of them mourners at the wake being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict that the eight had lost their lives "casually, accidentally and by misfortune". The brewery was nearly bankrupted by the event; it avoided collapse after a rebate from HM Excise on the lost beer. The brewing industry gradually stopped using large wooden vats after the accident. The brewery moved in 1921, and the Dominion Theatre is now where the brewery used to stand. Meux & Co went into liquidation in 1961.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Wisconsin 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Cape Cod and the Islands

Rose Marie "Rosemary" Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the eldest daughter born to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She was a sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. and Ted Kennedy.

In her early young adult years, Rosemary Kennedy experienced seizures and violent mood swings. In response to these issues, her father arranged a prefrontal lobotomy for her in 1941 when she was 23 years of age; the procedure left her permanently incapacitated and rendered her unable to speak intelligibly.

Rosemary Kennedy spent most of the rest of her life being cared for at St. Coletta, an institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin. The truth about her situation and whereabouts was kept secret for decades. While she was initially isolated from her siblings and extended family following her lobotomy, Rosemary did go on to visit them during her later life.

Rocky Mountain BASIC (also RMB or RM-BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language created by Hewlett-Packard. It was especially popular for control of automatic test equipment using GPIB. It has several features which are or were unusual in BASIC dialects, such as event-driven operation, extensive external I/O support, complex number support, and matrix manipulation functions. Today, RMB is mainly used in environments where an investment in RMB software, hardware, or expertise already exists.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 India 🔗 India/Indian politics workgroup 🔗 India/Kerala

Communism in Kerala refers to the strong presence of communist ideas in the Indian state of Kerala. In addition to Kerala, the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura have had multiple democratically elected Marxist governments, and change takes place in the government by regular multiparty electoral processes. Communism of Kerala has provided Indian communist stalwarts such as M. N. Govindan Nair, C. Achutha Menon, K. Damodaran, T. V. Thomas, N. E. Balaram, E. M. S. Namboodiripad, A. K. Gopalan, K. R. Gouri Amma, P. K. Vasudevan Nair and C. K. Chandrappan

Today the two largest communist parties in Kerala politics are the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India. The Left Democratic Front is a coalition of left-wing political parties in the state of Kerala and is one of the two major political coalitions in Kerala, each of which have been in power alternatively for the last two decades. The coalition led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) consists of the Communist Party of India, the Janata Dal (Secular), the Nationalist Congress Party, the Indian National League, the Kerala Congress (Anti-merger Group), and the Indian National Congress (Socialist).

🔗 Death 🔗 Plants

Coconuts falling from their trees and striking individuals can cause serious injury to the back, neck, shoulders and head, and are occasionally fatal.

Following a 1984 study on "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", exaggerated claims spread concerning the number of deaths by falling coconuts. Falling coconuts, according to urban legend, kill a few people a year. This legend gained momentum after the 2002 work of a noted expert on shark attacks was characterized as saying that falling coconuts kill 150 people each year worldwide. This statistic has often been contrasted with the number of shark-caused deaths per year, which is around five.

Concern about the risk of fatality due to falling coconuts led local officials in Queensland, Australia, to remove coconut trees from beaches in 2002. One newspaper dubbed coconuts "the killer fruit". Historical reports of actual death by coconut nonetheless date back to the 1770s.

Another way to "die by coconut" is to suffer sudden cardiac death as a result of hyperkalemia, after consuming moderate to large quantities of coconut water, due to the high levels of potassium in coconut water.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Geography

The Aosta Valley (Italian: Valle d'Aosta [ˈvalle daˈɔsta] (official) or Val d'Aosta (usual); French: Vallée d'Aoste; Arpitan: Val d'Outa; Walser: Augschtalann or Ougstalland; Piedmontese: Val d'Osta) is a mountainous autonomous region in northwestern Italy. It is bordered by Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France, to the west, Valais, Switzerland, to the north, and by Piedmont, Italy, to the south and east. The regional capital is Aosta.

Covering an area of 3,263 km² (1,260 sq mi) and with a population of about 128,000 it is the smallest, least populous, and least densely populated region of Italy. The province of Aosta having been dissolved in 1945, the Aosta Valley region was the first region of Italy to abolish provincial subdivisions. Provincial administrative functions are provided by the regional government. The region is divided into 74 comuni (French: communes).

Italian and French are the official languages, though the native population also speak Valdôtain, a dialect of Franco-Provençal. Italian is spoken as a mother tongue by 77.29% of population, Valdôtain by 17.91%, and French by 1.25%. In 2009, reportedly 50.53% of the population could speak all three languages.

🔗 Freedom of speech

The Chicago principles are a set of guiding principles intended to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression on college campuses in the United States. Initially adopted by the University of Chicago following a report issued by a designated Committee on Freedom of Expression in 2014 (″Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression″), they came to be known as the “Chicago principles”, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) led a campaign to encourage other universities across the country sign up to the principles or model their own based on similar goals.

Since 2014, a number of other universities have committed to the principles, including Princeton, Purdue, and Washington University in St. Louis. As of August 2020, FIRE reported that 76 U.S. colleges and universities had "adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement."

🔗 Biography

Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 15 December 2021) was a prominent Finnish academic (Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland.

Prof. Kohonen made many contributions to the field of artificial neural networks, including the Learning Vector Quantization algorithm, fundamental theories of distributed associative memory and optimal associative mappings, the learning subspace method and novel algorithms for symbol processing like redundant hash addressing. He has published several books and over 300 peer-reviewed papers.

Kohonen’s most famous contribution is the Self-Organizing Map (also known as the Kohonen map or Kohonen artificial neural networks, although Kohonen himself prefers SOM). Due to the popularity of the SOM algorithm in many research and in practical applications, Kohonen is often considered to be the most cited Finnish scientist. The current version of the SOM bibliography contains close to 8000 entries.

During most of his career, Prof. Kohonen conducted research at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The Neural Networks Research Centre of TKK, a center of excellence appointed by Academy of Finland was founded to conduct research related to Teuvo Kohonen's innovations. After Kohonen's retirement, the center was led by Prof. Erkki Oja and later renamed to Adaptive Informatics Research Centre with widened foci of research.

Teuvo Kohonen was elected the First Vice President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition from 1982 to 1984, and acted as the first president of the European Neural Network Society from 1991 to 1992.

For his scientific achievements, Prof. Kohonen has received a number of prizes including the following:

• IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award, 1991
• Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1995
• IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, 2008