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🔗 Computer science

The Rule 110 cellular automaton (often simply Rule 110) is an elementary cellular automaton with interesting behavior on the boundary between stability and chaos. In this respect, it is similar to Conway's Game of Life. Like Life, Rule 110 is known to be Turing complete. This implies that, in principle, any calculation or computer program can be simulated using this automaton.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Law 🔗 United States/Ohio

Michael A. Cicconetti (born 1951) is a retired Municipal Court judge who presided in Painesville, Lake County, Ohio, United States, dispensing a unique brand of what he calls creative justice. The judge often left the choice of penalty to the defendant, who was faced with spending time in jail or undergoing one of Cicconetti's unusual punishments. These often involved placing the defendant in a similar position to that of the defendant's victim at the time of the crime.

Cicconetti's first creative sentence, which involved a violation relating to a stopped school bus, occurred in the mid-1990s. Famously he offered 26-year-old Ohio housewife Michelle Murray the option (in return for a reduced prison sentence) of spending a night in the woods for abandoning 35 kittens in a forest in wintertime; he said: "You don't do that. You don't leave these poor little animals out and, yes, I wanted to set an example for her future conduct or anybody else who was contemplating doing such a thing". On other occasions he ordered noisy neighbors to spend a day of silence in the forest or listen to classical music instead of rock. In all cases the judge attempted to place a link between the perpetrated offense and its punishment.

Due in part to the popularity of his actions, he won the presidency of the American Judges Association. He attributes his unusual approach to his background. He is an Eagle Scout, earning the award in 1964, as a member of Scout Troop 64 in Painesville, Ohio. He was the oldest of nine siblings who had to work on ore boats throughout the Great Lakes as a deckhand and deckwatch to fund himself through college. After graduating from St. Leo University, he became Clerk of the Painesville Municipal Court while attending Cleveland State University Law School at night.

Many of the victims, but also defendants, claim that his unusual approach has helped them to cope with their problems and the judge is reportedly inundated with letters from his admirers. Furthermore, where the national recidivism (repeat offender) rate is over 75%, the rate in Judge Cicconetti's court was just 10%.

His philosophy is exemplified by the following two quotations:

When you engage people and praise them for their good behavior, not unlike children, it helps their self-esteem. My judicial philosophy is really not that much different from a parental philosophy. I have five children. You can paddle them or spank them but what do you gain? Most people want to be good but for little obstacles or habits. We have to change the habits and remove the obstacles. That's our job.

Sentences such as Cicconetti's are becoming more popular across the United States, and one judge has cited him specifically as being the influence for one of her own sentences.

In February 2019 Cicconetti announced that he planned to retire later in the year. He retired from being a judge on September 20, 2019.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the empirical rule, is a shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within an interval estimate in a normal distribution: 68%, 95%, and 99.7% of the values lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean, respectively.

In mathematical notation, these facts can be expressed as follows, where Pr() is the probability function, Χ is an observation from a normally distributed random variable, μ (mu) is the mean of the distribution, and σ (sigma) is its standard deviation:

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\Pr(\mu -1\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +1\sigma )&\approx 68.27\%\\\Pr(\mu -2\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +2\sigma )&\approx 95.45\%\\\Pr(\mu -3\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +3\sigma )&\approx 99.73\%\end{aligned}}}$

The usefulness of this heuristic especially depends on the question under consideration.

In the empirical sciences, the so-called three-sigma rule of thumb (or 3σ rule) expresses a conventional heuristic that nearly all values are taken to lie within three standard deviations of the mean, and thus it is empirically useful to treat 99.7% probability as near certainty.

In the social sciences, a result may be considered "significant" if its confidence level is of the order of a two-sigma effect (95%), while in particle physics, there is a convention of a five-sigma effect (99.99994% confidence) being required to qualify as a discovery.

A weaker three-sigma rule can be derived from Chebyshev's inequality, stating that even for non-normally distributed variables, at least 88.8% of cases should fall within properly calculated three-sigma intervals. For unimodal distributions, the probability of being within the interval is at least 95% by the Vysochanskij–Petunin inequality. There may be certain assumptions for a distribution that force this probability to be at least 98%.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Project-independent assessment

"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Popularly known as the Secret Speech (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), this is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organisations across the country. Khrushchev's speech was sharply critical of the rule of the deceased General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism.

The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the government and the figure of Stalin. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. The speech was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which received it from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski. It politically devastated organised communists in the West; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication.

The speech helped give rise to the period of liberalisation known as the Khrushchev Thaw, and the process of de-Stalinization. It was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) and Albania (under First Secretary Enver Hoxha), who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin. In North Korea, factions of the Workers' Party of Korea attempted to remove Chairman Kim Il Sung, criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, developing a personality cult, distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's leadership.

🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.

English spelling began to become standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often considerably deviate from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.

🔗 Buses

A bus trap (car trap in the UK) is a metal grate placed over a ditch or pit in the road with tines (sides) spaced far enough apart that small (shorter axle) vehicles fall between the tines but close enough that larger-diameter-wheeled vehicles, such as buses, may pass. Cycles may cross broader sided examples.

Different versions exist for restricting access. The tines cross the path of the road, not parallel with the road direction. Small-wheeled vehicles bottom out in between the tines, preventing the vehicle from continuing over the obstacle.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Software

In computing, a Parallel Sysplex is a cluster of IBM mainframes acting together as a single system image with z/OS. Used for disaster recovery, Parallel Sysplex combines data sharing and parallel computing to allow a cluster of up to 32 systems to share a workload for high performance and high availability.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Korea 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Organized crime 🔗 Gender Studies 🔗 Feminism 🔗 Sexology and sexuality/Sex work 🔗 Tambayan Philippines 🔗 Military history/Korean military history

During and following the Korean War, the United States military used regulated prostitution services in South Korean military camptowns. Despite prostitution being illegal since 1948, women in South Korea were the fundamental source of sex services for the U.S. military as well as a component of American and Korean relations. The women in South Korea who served as prostitutes are known as kijichon (기지촌) women, also called as "Korean Military Comfort Women", and were visited by the U.S. military, Korean soldiers and Korean civilians. Kijich'on women were from Korea, Philippines, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, specifically Russia and Kazakhstan.

🔗 Mathematics

A wallpaper group (or plane symmetry group or plane crystallographic group) is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art, especially in textiles and tiles as well as wallpaper.

The simplest wallpaper group, Group p1, applies when there is no symmetry other than the fact that a pattern repeats over regular intervals in two dimensions, as shown in the section on p1 below.

Consider the following examples of patterns with more forms of symmetry:

Examples A and B have the same wallpaper group; it is called p4m in the IUC notation and *442 in the orbifold notation. Example C has a different wallpaper group, called p4g or 4*2 . The fact that A and B have the same wallpaper group means that they have the same symmetries, regardless of details of the designs, whereas C has a different set of symmetries despite any superficial similarities.

The number of symmetry groups depends on the number of dimensions in the patterns. Wallpaper groups apply to the two-dimensional case, intermediate in complexity between the simpler frieze groups and the three-dimensional space groups. Subtle differences may place similar patterns in different groups, while patterns that are very different in style, color, scale or orientation may belong to the same group.

A proof that there were only 17 distinct groups of such planar symmeries was first carried out by Evgraf Fedorov in 1891 and then derived independently by George Pólya in 1924. The proof that the list of wallpaper groups was complete only came after the much harder case of space groups had been done. The seventeen possible wallpaper groups are listed below in § The seventeen groups.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

occam is a programming language which is concurrent and builds on the communicating sequential processes (CSP) process algebra, and shares many of its features. It is named after philosopher William of Ockham after whom Occam's razor is named.

occam is an imperative procedural language (such as Pascal). It was developed by David May and others at Inmos (trademark INMOS), advised by Tony Hoare, as the native programming language for their transputer microprocessors, but implementations for other platforms are available. The most widely known version is occam 2; its programming manual was written by Steven Ericsson-Zenith and others at Inmos.