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๐ De Bono's Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats was written by Dr. Edward de Bono. "Six Thinking Hats" and the associated idea parallel thinking provide a means for groups to plan thinking processes in a detailed and cohesive way, and in doing so to think together more effectively.
In 2005, the tool found some use in the United Kingdom innovation sector, where it was offered by some facilitation companies and had been trialled within the United Kingdom's civil service.
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- "De Bono's Six Thinking Hats" | 2010-07-02 | 24 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Gรถdel, Escher, Bach
Gรถdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gรถdel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how, through self-reference and formal rules, systems can acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.
In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter emphasized that Gรถdel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and musicโbut rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. One point in the book presents an analogy about how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.
The tagline "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" was used by the publisher to describe the book.
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- "Gรถdel, Escher, Bach" | 2019-11-17 | 56 Upvotes 37 Comments
- "Gรถdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" | 2014-05-16 | 65 Upvotes 72 Comments
๐ Proxy Firm
A proxy firm (also a proxy advisor, proxy adviser, proxy voting agency, vote service provider or shareholder voting research provider) provides services to shareholders (in most cases an institutional investor of some type) to vote their shares at shareholder meetings of, usually, quoted companies.
The typical services provided include agenda translation, provision of vote management software, voting policy development, company research, and vote administration including vote execution. According to their websites, not all firms provide voting recommendations and those that do may simply execute client voting instructions.
The votes executed are called "Proxy Votes" because the shareholder usually does not attend the meeting and instead sends instructions - a proxy appointment - for a third party, usually the chairman of the meeting to vote shares in accordance with the instructions given on the voting card.
๐ St. Petersburg paradox
The St. Petersburg paradox or St. Petersburg lottery is a paradox related to probability and decision theory in economics. It is based on a particular (theoretical) lottery game that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value (i.e., infinite expected payoff) but nevertheless seems to be worth only a very small amount to the participants. The St. Petersburg paradox is a situation where a naive decision criterion which takes only the expected value into account predicts a course of action that presumably no actual person would be willing to take. Several resolutions are possible.
The paradox takes its name from its resolution by Daniel Bernoulli, one-time resident of the eponymous Russian city, who published his arguments in the Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli 1738). However, the problem was invented by Daniel's cousin, Nicolas Bernoulli, who first stated it in a letter to Pierre Raymond de Montmort on September 9, 1713 (de Montmort 1713).
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- "St. Petersburg paradox" | 2015-09-04 | 144 Upvotes 74 Comments
- "St. Petersburg paradox" | 2013-08-27 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Fosbury Flop
The Fosbury flop is a jumping style used in the track and field sport of high jump. It was popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City brought it to the world's attention. The flop became the dominant style of the event; before Fosbury, most elite jumpers used the straddle technique, Western Roll, Eastern cut-off, or scissors jump to clear the bar. Though the backwards flop technique had been known for years before Fosbury, landing surfaces had been sandpits or low piles of matting and high jumpers had to land on their feet or at least land carefully to prevent injury. With the advent of deep foam matting, high jumpers were able to be more adventurous in their landing styles and hence more experimental with jumping styles.
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- "Fosbury Flop" | 2024-03-07 | 20 Upvotes 14 Comments
๐ Top Secret Rosies: The Female โComputersโ of WWII
Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII is a 2010 documentary film directed by LeAnn Erickson. The film is focused on recognizing the contributions of women during WWII, serving as human computers and six of whom went on to program one of the earliest computers, the ENIAC. Their work helped the United States improve the accuracy of weaponry as most conducted ballistics analysis. The film officially premiered on November 1 on PBS.
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- "Top Secret Rosies: The Female โComputersโ of WWII" | 2022-08-10 | 66 Upvotes 33 Comments
๐ Milk Bag
A milk bag is a plastic bag that contains milk. Usually one of the corners is cut off to allow for pouring, and the bag is stored in a pitcher or jug.
A typical milk bag contains approximately 1ย L (1.8ย impย pt) of milk in South America, Iran, Israel, and continental European countries, while in Canada they contain 1+1โ3 litres (2.3ย impย pt), and in India, 0.5ย L (0.9ย impย pt).
In the Baltic rim countries, e.g., Estonia, and some Eastern European countries, the similar bags may also be seen used for packaging yogurt or kefir.
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- "Milk Bag" | 2023-08-28 | 71 Upvotes 125 Comments
๐ Nanoscale Vacuum-Channel Transistor
A nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor (NVCT) is a theoretically visioned transistor in which the electron transport medium is a vacuum. In a traditional solid-state transistor, a semiconductor channel exists between the source and the drain, and the current flows through the semiconductor. However, in a nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor, no material exists between the source and the drain, and therefore, the current flows through the vacuum. However, experimental realization of such a transistor has not been demonstrated.
Theoretically, a vacuum-channel transistor is expected to operate faster than a traditional solid-state transistor, and have higher power output. Moreover, vacuum-channel transistors are expected to operate at higher temperature and radiation level than a traditional transistor making them suitable for space application.
The development of vacuum-channel transistors is still at a very early research stage, and there are only limited study in recent literature such as vertical field-emitter vacuum-channel transistor, gate-insulated planar electrodes vacuum-channel transistor, vertical vacuum-channel transistor, and all-around gate vacuum-channel transistor.
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- "Nanoscale Vacuum-Channel Transistor" | 2019-04-29 | 20 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ Sulfur Lamp
The sulfur lamp (also sulphur lamp) is a highly efficient full-spectrum electrodeless lighting system whose light is generated by sulfur plasma that has been excited by microwave radiation. They are a particular type of plasma lamp, and one of the most modern. The technology was developed in the early 1990s, but, although it appeared initially to be very promising, sulfur lighting was a commercial failure by the late 1990s. Since 2005, lamps are again being manufactured for commercial use.
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- "Sulfur Lamp" | 2019-11-30 | 64 Upvotes 31 Comments
๐ Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside FRS (; 18 May 1850 โ 3 February 1925) was an English self-taught electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques for the solution of differential equations (equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science.
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- "Oliver Heaviside" | 2014-12-26 | 100 Upvotes 25 Comments