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🔗 Languages 🔗 Anthroponymy

An aptronym, aptonym or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 United Kingdom

A toast sandwich is a sandwich made with two slices of bread in which the filling is a thin slice of toasted bread, which can be heavily buttered. An 1861 recipe says to add salt and pepper to taste.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. It is generally considered to represent a classic clash between two schools of moral thought, utilitarianism and deontological ethics. The general form of the problem is this:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:

1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?

Philippa Foot introduced this modern form of the problem in 1967. Judith Thomson, Frances Kamm, and Peter Unger have also analysed the dilemma extensively.

Earlier forms of the problem predated Foot's publication. Frank Chapman Sharp included a version in a moral questionnaire given to undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in 1905. In this variation, the railway's switchman controlled the switch, and the lone individual to be sacrificed (or not) was the switchman's child. The German legal scholar Hans Welzel discussed a similar problem in 1951. In his commentary on the Talmud, published long before his death in 1953, Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz discussed the similar question of whether it is ethical to deflect a projectile from a larger crowd toward a smaller one.

Beginning in 2001, the trolley problem and its variants have been used extensively in empirical research on moral psychology. Trolley problems have also been a topic of popular books. The problem arises in discussing the ethics of autonomous vehicle design, which may require programming to choose whom or what to strike when a collision appears to be unavoidable.

🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Invention

This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Board and table games

The fog of war (German: Nebel des Krieges) is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems. The term has become commonly used to define uncertainty mechanics in wargames.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Lists 🔗 Countries

This is a list of countries by hospital beds per 1000 or 100,000 people, as published by the local governments, international organisation (OECD, E.U.), academic sources or others. The number of beds per people is an important indicator of the health care system of a country. The basic measure focus on all hospital beds, which are variously split and occupied. The classic hospital beds are also called curative beds. For severe patients with risk of organ(s) failure, patients are provided intensive care unit beds (aka ICU bed) or critical care beds (CCB).

Among OECD countries, curative beds' occupancy rate average was 75%, from 94.9% (Ireland) to 61.6% (Greece), with half of the OECD's nation between 70% and 80%.

In 2009, European nations, most of them also part of OECD, had an aggregated total of 2,070,000 acute beds and 73,585 (2.8%) critical care beds (CCB) or 11.5CCB/100,000 inhabitants. Germany had 29.2, Portugal 4.2.Aging population leads to increased demand for CCB and difficulties to satisfy it, while both quantity of CCB and availability are poorly documented.

🔗 Science

Literature-based discovery is a form of knowledge extraction and automated hypothesis generation that uses papers and other academic publications (the "literature") to find new relationships between existing knowledge (the "discovery"). The technique was pioneered by Don R. Swanson in the 1980s and has since seen widespread use.

Literature-based discovery does not generate new knowledge through laboratory experiments, as is customary for empirical sciences. Instead it seeks to connect existing knowledge from empirical results by bringing to light relationships that are implicated and "neglected". It is marked by empiricism and rationalism in concert or consilience.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology

In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when he or she works in a group than when working alone and is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals. Research on social loafing began with rope pulling experiments by Ringelmann, who found that members of a group tended to exert less effort in pulling a rope than did individuals alone. In more recent research, studies involving modern technology, such as online and distributed groups, have also shown clear evidence of social loafing. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from individual members feeling their individual effort will not matter to the group.

The French professor of agricultural engineering called Max Ringelman demonstrated what “social loafing” was in the 1890s. Ringelman, who was also considered one of the founders of social psychology, made people pull on ropes separately and in groups, and he measured and compared how hard they pulled. After collecting the results he realized that members of a group tended to exert less effort in pulling a rope than did individuals alone. In more recent research, studies involving modern technology, such as online and distributed groups, have also shown clear evidence of social loafing. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from individual members feeling that his or her effort will not matter to the group. This is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals, but should be distinguished from the accidental coordination problems that groups sometimes experience.

Several studies found, a lack of an understanding of individual contributions, unchallenging tasks given to the individual, low personal satisfaction from the task, and a lack of a united group to be the most prevalent motivational origins of social loafing. Theories investigating why social loafing occurs range from a group member feeling their contribution will not be noticed to a group member realizing their efforts are not necessary. In a work setting, most managers agree if a task is new or complex employees should work alone. While tasks that are well known and have room for individual effort are better when done in groups.

In order to diminish social loafing from a group, several strategies could be put forward. Social loafing primarily happens when an individual unconscious or conscious exerts less effort due to a decrease in social awareness. In order to counteract the likelihood of this happening, Miguel Herraez, conducted a study on students where he used accountability and cooperation when unequal participation is found. The students were encouraged to do provide equal participation in the work and to point out sources of conflict that could arise. The conclusion of the study found that providing support to the group members lacking in commitment and creating options for independence among group members lowered social loafing. The support for the weaker students improves their standing while also benefiting the other students.

Social loafing should be distinguished from the accidental coordination problems that groups sometimes experience.

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Telecommunications

The Iridium satellite constellation provides L-band voice and data information coverage to satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over the entire Earth surface. Iridium Communications owns and operates the constellation, additionally selling equipment and access to its services. It was originally conceived by Bary Bertiger, Raymond J. Leopold and Ken Peterson in late 1987 (in 1988 protected by patents Motorola filed in their names) and then developed by Motorola on a fixed-price contract from July 29, 1993, to November 1, 1998, when the system became operational and commercially available.

The constellation consists of 66 active satellites in orbit, required for global coverage, and additional spare satellites to serve in case of failure. Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 781 km (485 mi) and inclination of 86.4°. Orbital velocity of the satellites is approximately 27,000 km/h (17,000 mph). Satellites communicate with neighboring satellites via K_a band inter-satellite links. Each satellite can have four inter-satellite links: one each to neighbors fore and aft in the same orbital plane, and one each to satellites in neighboring planes to either side. The satellites orbit from pole to same pole with an orbital period of roughly 100 minutes. This design means that there is excellent satellite visibility and service coverage especially at the North and South poles. The over-the-pole orbital design produces "seams" where satellites in counter-rotating planes next to one another are traveling in opposite directions. Cross-seam inter-satellite link hand-offs would have to happen very rapidly and cope with large Doppler shifts; therefore, Iridium supports inter-satellite links only between satellites orbiting in the same direction. The constellation of 66 active satellites has six orbital planes spaced 30° apart, with 11 satellites in each plane (not counting spares). The original concept was to have 77 satellites, which is where the name Iridium came from, being the element with the atomic number 77 and the satellites evoking the Bohr model image of electrons orbiting around the Earth as its nucleus. This reduced set of six planes is sufficient to cover the entire Earth surface at every moment.

Because of the shape of the original Iridium satellites' reflective antennas, the first generation satellites focus sunlight on a small area of the Earth surface in an incidental manner. This results in an effect called Iridium flares, where the satellite momentarily appears as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and can be seen even during daylight. Newer Iridium satellites do not produce flares.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Stanford University/SRI International 🔗 Stanford University

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.