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🔗 Numbers 🔗 Canada 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Canada/Canadian Territories 🔗 Alaska

Kaktovik numerals are a featural positional numeral system created by Alaskan Iñupiat.

Arabic numeral notation, which was designed for a base-10 numeral system, is inadequate for the Inuit languages, which use a base-20 numeral system. Students in Kaktovik, Alaska, invented a base-20 numeral notation in 1994 to rectify this issue, and this system spread among the Alaskan Iñupiat and has been considered in other countries where Inuit languages are spoken.

The image at right shows the digits 0 to 19. Twenty is written as a one and a zero (\ɤ), forty as a two and a zero (Vɤ), four hundred as a one and two zeros (\ɤɤ), eight hundred as a two and two zeros (Vɤɤ), etc.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Literature 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Barbara Newhall Follett (March 4, 1914 – disappeared December 7, 1939) was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in January 1927, when she was twelve years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D.w, received critical acclaim when she was fourteen.

In December 1939, aged 25, Follett reportedly became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment, never to be seen again.

🔗 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.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Bangladesh 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Skyscrapers 🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Illinois

Fazlur Rahman Khan (Bengali: ফজলুর রহমান খান, Fozlur Rôhman Khan) (3 April 1929 – 27 March 1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer and architect, who initiated important structural systems for skyscrapers. Considered the "father of tubular designs" for high-rises, Khan was also a pioneer in computer-aided design (CAD). He was the structural engineer of the Sears Tower working with Architect Bruce Graham, since renamed Willis Tower, the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998, and the 100-story John Hancock Center.

Khan, more than any other individual, ushered in a renaissance in skyscraper construction during the second half of the 20th century. He has been called the "Einstein of structural engineering" and the "Greatest Structural Engineer of the 20th Century" for his innovative use of structural systems that remain fundamental to modern skyscraper design and construction. In his honor, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat established the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal, as one of their CTBUH Skyscraper Awards.

Although best known for skyscrapers, Khan was also an active designer of other kinds of structures, including the Hajj airport terminal, the McMath–Pierce solar telescope, and several stadium structures.

Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, would usually lead to the Philosophy article. As of February 2016, 97% of all articles in Wikipedia eventually led to the article Philosophy. The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. This has gone up from 94.52% in 2011.

There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain." According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy, nicknamed "the mother of all sciences".

🔗 Engineering

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.). Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources. The concept has been embraced by those who argue against Malthusian philosophy. The subsequently coined economics term "dematerialization" refers to essentially the same concept as also does eco-economic decoupling.

🔗 Time 🔗 Geology

Before Present (BP) years is a time scale used mainly in archaeology, geology and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred in the past. Because the "present" time changes, standard practice is to use 1 January 1950 as the commencement date (epoch) of the age scale, reflecting the origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. The abbreviation "BP" has been interpreted retrospectively as "Before Physics"; that refers to the time before nuclear weapons testing artificially altered the proportion of the carbon isotopes in the atmosphere, making dating after that time likely to be unreliable.

In a convention that is not always observed, many sources restrict the use of BP dates to those produced with radiocarbon dating; the alternative notation RCYBP is explicitly Radio Carbon Years Before Present.

🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, with Solutreans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream academic narrative that the Americas were first populated by people crossing the Bering Strait to Alaska by foot on what was land during the Last Glacial Period or by following the Pacific coastline from Asia to America by boat.

The Solutrean hypothesis posits that around 21,000 years ago a group of people from the Solutré region of France, who are historically characterized by their unique lithic technique, migrated to North America along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. Once they made it to North America, their lithic technique dispersed around the continent (c. 13,000 years ago) to provide the basis for the later popularization of Clovis lithic technology. The premise behind the Solutrean Hypothesis is that the similarities between Clovis and Solutrean lithic technologies are evidence that the Solutreans were the first people to migrate to the Americas, dating far before mainstream scientific theories of the peopling of the Americas.

Originally proposed in the 1970s, the theory has received some support in the 2010s, notably by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter. However, according to David Meltzer, "[f]ew if any archaeologists—or, for that matter, geneticists, linguists, or physical anthropologists—take seriously the idea of a Solutrean colonization of America." The evidence for the hypothesis is considered more consistent with other scenarios. In addition to an interval of thousands of years between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, the two technologies show only incidental similarities. There is no evidence for any Solutrean seafaring, far less for any technology that could take humans across the Atlantic in an ice age. Genetic evidence supports the theory of Asian, not European, origins for the peopling of the Americas.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Databases

In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into two categories:

• Agglomerative: This is a "bottom-up" approach: Each observation starts in its own cluster, and pairs of clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy.
• Divisive: This is a "top-down" approach: All observations start in one cluster, and splits are performed recursively as one moves down the hierarchy.

In general, the merges and splits are determined in a greedy manner. The results of hierarchical clustering are usually presented in a dendrogram.

Hierarchical clustering has the distinct advantage that any valid measure of distance can be used. In fact, the observations themselves are not required: all that is used is a matrix of distances. On the other hand, except for the special case of single-linkage distance, none of the algorithms (except exhaustive search in ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(2^{n})}$) can be guaranteed to find the optimum solution.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal, or Abram Hannibal or Abram Petrov (Russian: Абра́м Петро́вич Ганниба́л; c. 1696 – 14 May 1781), was a Russian military engineer, major-general, and nobleman of African origin. Kidnapped as a child, Gannibal was taken to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great, where he was freed, adopted and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson.

Gannibal eventually rose to become a prominent member of the imperial court in the reign of Peter's daughter Elizabeth. He had 11 children, most of whom became members of the Russian nobility; he was a great-grandfather of the author and poet Alexander Pushkin.