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π Great Britain road numbering scheme
The Great Britain road numbering scheme is a numbering scheme used to classify and identify all roads in Great Britain. Each road is given a single letter, which represents the road's category, and a subsequent number, of 1 to 4 digits. Introduced to arrange funding allocations, the numbers soon became used on maps and as a method of navigation. Two sub-schemes exist: one for motorways, and another for non-motorway roads. While some major roads form part of the International E-road network, no E-routes are signposted in Great Britain, or the rest of the UK.
The scheme applies only to Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales); a similar system is used in Northern Ireland, as well as outside the UK in the Isle of Man, Jersey and British overseas territories. These other numbering schemes use similar conventions.
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- "Great Britain road numbering scheme" | 2020-12-31 | 42 Upvotes 59 Comments
π Therac-25
The Therac-25 was a computer-controlled radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) in 1982 after the Therac-6 and Therac-20 units (the earlier units had been produced in partnership with CGR of France).
It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors, it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering. Additionally the overconfidence of the engineers and lack of proper due diligence to resolve reported software bugs are highlighted as an extreme case where the engineers' overconfidence in their initial work and failure to believe the end users' claims caused drastic repercussions.
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- "Therac-25" | 2023-09-12 | 31 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Therac-25" | 2014-02-18 | 84 Upvotes 77 Comments
- "Therac-25: When software reliability really does matter" | 2010-02-22 | 23 Upvotes 18 Comments
π XOR Linked List
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- "XOR Linked List" | 2012-05-03 | 153 Upvotes 84 Comments
- "Things you shouldn't do: Two pointers in one field." | 2010-05-16 | 42 Upvotes 20 Comments
- "XOR Linked List: A Curious List Structure" | 2007-12-03 | 10 Upvotes 3 Comments
π The German tank problem
In the statistical theory of estimation, the German tank problem consists of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement. In simple terms, suppose we have an unknown number of items which are sequentially numbered from 1 to N. We take a random sample of these items and observe their sequence numbers; the problem is to estimate N from these observed numbers.
The problem can be approached using either frequentist inference or Bayesian inference, leading to different results. Estimating the population maximum based on a single sample yields divergent results, whereas estimation based on multiple samples is a practical estimation question whose answer is simple (especially in the frequentist setting) but not obvious (especially in the Bayesian setting).
The problem is named after its historical application by Allied forces in World War II to the estimation of the monthly rate of German tank production from very few data. This exploited the manufacturing practice of assigning and attaching ascending sequences of serial numbers to tank components (chassis, gearbox, engine, wheels), with some of the tanks eventually being captured in battle by Allied forces.
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- "German Tank Problem" | 2023-11-26 | 39 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "The German tank problem" | 2016-12-03 | 64 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "German tank problem" | 2014-02-21 | 231 Upvotes 83 Comments
- "German tank problem" | 2011-03-02 | 28 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "The German Tank Problem" | 2009-06-23 | 103 Upvotes 18 Comments
π The Johari Window
The Johari window is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916β2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916β1995) in 1955, and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise. Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.
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- "The Johari Window" | 2023-05-29 | 126 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Professor Ronald Coase has died aged 102
Ronald Harry Coase (; 29 December 1910 β 2 September 2013) was a British economist and author. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
Coase, who believed economists should study real markets and not theoretical ones, established the case for the corporation as a means to pay the costs of operating a marketplace. Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms; and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase theorem). Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.
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- "Professor Ronald Coase has died aged 102" | 2013-09-08 | 27 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Volume of an n-ball tends to a limiting value of 0 as n goes to infinity
In geometry, a ball is a region in a space comprising all points within a fixed distance, called the radius, from a given point; that is, it is the region enclosed by a sphere or hypersphere. An n-ball is a ball in an n-dimensional Euclidean space. The volume of a n-ball is the Lebesgue measure of this ball, which generalizes to any dimension the usual volume of a ball in 3-dimensional space. The volume of a n-ball of radius R is where is the volume of the unit n-ball, the n-ball of radius 1.
The real number can be expressed by a expression involving the gamma function. It can be computed with several recurrence relations. It can be expressed in terms of the area of the unit n-sphere.
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- "Volume of an n-ball tends to a limiting value of 0 as n goes to infinity" | 2022-05-12 | 90 Upvotes 50 Comments
π Octopolis and Octlantis
Octopolis and Octlantis are two separate non-human underwater settlements built by the gloomy octopuses. The first settlement, named Octopolis by biologists, was found in 2009. The individual structures in Octopolis consist of burrows around a piece of scrap metal. In 2016, a second settlement was found, named Octlantis, which instead of burrows, has dens and is built with seashells.
π Law of Jante
The Law of Jante (Danish: Janteloven) is a code of conduct known in Nordic countries that characterizes not conforming, doing things out of the ordinary, or being overtly personally ambitious as unworthy and inappropriate. The attitudes were first formulated in the form of the ten rules of Jante Law by the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (En flyktning krysser sitt spor, 1933), but the actual attitudes themselves are older. Sandemose portrays the fictional small Danish town Jante, which he modelled upon his native town NykΓΈbing Mors in the 1930s, where nobody was anonymous, which is typical of all small towns and communities.
Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological term to denote a social attitude of disapproval towards expressions of individuality and personal success, it emphasizes adherence to the collective.
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- "Law of Jante" | 2024-07-31 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "The Law of Jante" | 2023-11-19 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Law of Jante" | 2023-05-23 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Law of Jante" | 2017-09-30 | 87 Upvotes 61 Comments
π Physics Envy
The term physics envy is used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as "softer sciences", liberal arts, business studies, and humanities. The term argues that writing and working practices in these disciplines have overused confusing jargon and complicated mathematics to seem more 'rigorous' and like mathematics-based subjects like physics.
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- "Physics Envy" | 2023-02-20 | 32 Upvotes 23 Comments