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🔗 Medicine

A never event is the "kind of mistake (medical error) that should never happen" in the field of medical treatment. According to the Leapfrog Group never events are defined as "adverse events that are serious, largely preventable, and of concern to both the public and health care providers for the purpose of public accountability."

A 2012 study reported there may be as many as 1,500 instances of one never event, a retained foreign object, per year in the United States. The same study suggests an estimated total of surgical mistakes at just over 4,000 per year in the United States, but these statistics are extrapolations from small samples rather than actual event counts.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing

Oink's Pink Palace (frequently stylized as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police agencies. These music industry organisations described OiNK as an "online pirate pre-release music club", whereas former users described it as one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. About a month before the shut-down, music magazine Blender elected OiNK's creator, British software engineer Alan Ellis, to their The Powergeek 25 — the Most Influential People in Online Music list. Alan Ellis was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown Court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty on 15 January 2010.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Israel

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

319 Leona (provisional designation A920 HE), is a dark asteroid and tumbling slow rotator from the outermost regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 70 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 8 October 1891, by French astronomer Auguste Charlois at Nice Observatory in southwestern France. Any reference of its name to a person is unknown. On 12 December 2023 Leona will occult Betelgeuse as seen from southern Europe.

🔗 Television 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Amateur radio

Slow-scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.

A literal term for SSTV is narrowband television. Analog broadcast television requires at least 6 MHz wide channels, because it transmits 25 or 30 picture frames per second (see ITU analog broadcast standards), but SSTV usually only takes up to a maximum of 3 kHz of bandwidth. It is a much slower method of still picture transmission, usually taking from about eight seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the mode used, to transmit one image frame.

Since SSTV systems operate on voice frequencies, amateurs use it on shortwave (also known as HF by amateur radio operators), VHF and UHF radio.

🔗 Psychology

The uncertainty reduction theory, also known as initial interaction theory, developed in 1975 by Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese, is a communication theory from the post-positivist tradition. It is one of the few communication theories that specifically looks into the initial interaction between people prior to the actual communication process. The theory asserts the notion that, when interacting, people need information about the other party in order to reduce their uncertainty. In gaining this information people are able to predict the other's behavior and resulting actions, all of which according to the theory is crucial in the development of any relationship.

Berger and Calabrese explain the connection between their central concept of uncertainty and seven key variables of relationship development with a series of axioms, and deduce a series of theorems accordingly. Within the theory two types of uncertainty are identified; cognitive uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty. There are three types of strategies which people may use to seek information about someone: passive, active, and interactive. Furthermore, the initial interaction of strangers can be broken down into individual stages—the entry stage, the personal stage, and the exit stage. According to the theory, people find uncertainty in interpersonal relationships unpleasant and are motivated to reduce it through interpersonal communication.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., 88 F. Supp. 2d 116, (S.D.N.Y. 1999), aff'd 210 F.3d 88 (2d Cir. 2000), more widely known as the Pepsi Points case, is an American contract law case regarding offer and acceptance. The case was brought in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1999; its judgment was written by Kimba Wood.

In 1996, PepsiCo began a promotional loyalty program, in which customers could earn Pepsi Points; these points could, in turn, be traded for physical items. A television commercial for the loyalty program displayed the commercial's protagonist flying a McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II vertical take off jet aircraft to school, valued at $37.4 million at the time, which could be redeemed for 7,000,000 Pepsi Points. The plaintiff, John Leonard, discovered a loophole in the promotion, allowing him to purchase Pepsi Points at 10¢ per point. Leonard promptly delivered a check for $700,008.50 to PepsiCo, attempting to purchase the jet. PepsiCo initially refuted Leonard's offer, citing the humorous nature of the offer in the advertisement. Leonard then sued PepsiCo, Inc. in an effort to enforce the offer and acceptance perceived by Leonard to be made in the advertisement. In her judgment, Wood sided with PepsiCo, noting the frivolous and improbable nature of landing a fighter jet in a school zone that was portrayed by the protagonist. PepsiCo would re-release the advertisement, valuing the jet at 700,000,000 Pepsi Points.

🔗 Mathematics

In combinatorial mathematics, a superpermutation on n symbols is a string that contains each permutation of n symbols as a substring. While trivial superpermutations can simply be made up of every permutation concatenated together, superpermutations can also be shorter (except for the trivial case of n = 1) because overlap is allowed. For instance, in the case of n = 2, the superpermutation 1221 contains all possible permutations (12 and 21), but the shorter string 121 also contains both permutations.

It has been shown that for 1 ≤ n ≤ 5, the smallest superpermutation on n symbols has length 1! + 2! + … + n! (sequence A180632 in the OEIS). The first four smallest superpermutations have respective lengths 1, 3, 9, and 33, forming the strings 1, 121, 123121321, and 123412314231243121342132413214321. However, for n = 5, there are several smallest superpermutations having the length 153. One such superpermutation is shown below, while another of the same length can be obtained by switching all of the fours and fives in the second half of the string (after the bold 2):

12345123­41523412­53412354­12314523­14253142­35142315­42312453­12435124­31524312­54312134­52134251­34215342­13542132­45132415­32413524­13254132­14532143­52143251­432154321

For the cases of n > 5, a smallest superpermutation has not yet been proved nor a pattern to find them, but lower and upper bounds for them have been found.

🔗 Paranormal

The Eltanin Antenna is an object photographed on the sea floor by the Antarctic oceanographic research ship USNS Eltanin in 1964, while photographing the sea bottom west of Cape Horn.

Due to its regular antenna-like structure and upright position on the seafloor at a depth of 3,904 metres (12,808 ft), some proponents of fringe and UFO-related theories including Bruce Cathie have suggested that it might be an extraterrestrial artifact. Other authorities have suggested that the object photographed by the Eltanin was an unusual carnivorous sponge, Chondrocladia concrescens (formerly Cladorhiza concrescens).

🔗 Typography

In typography, an asterism, ⁂, is a typographic symbol consisting of three asterisks placed in a triangle, which is used for a variety of purposes. The name originates from the astronomical term for a group of stars.

The asterism was originally used as a type of dinkus in typography, though increasingly rarely. It can also be used to mean "untitled" or author or title withheld – as seen, for example, in some editions of Album for the Young by composer Robert Schumann (№ 21, 26, and 30). In meteorology, an asterism in a station model indicates moderate snowfall.