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π List of probability distributions
Many probability distributions that are important in theory or applications have been given specific names.
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- "List of probability distributions" | 2013-05-25 | 47 Upvotes 36 Comments
π Dark silicon
In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint. This is a challenge in the era of nanometer semiconductor nodes, where transistor scaling and voltage scaling are no longer in line with each other, resulting in the failure of Dennard scaling. This discontinuation of Dennard scaling has led to sharp increases in power densities that hamper powering-on all the transistors simultaneously at the nominal voltage, while keeping the chip temperature in the safe operating range. According to recent studies, researchers from different groups have projected that, at 8Β nm technology nodes, the amount of Dark Silicon may reach up to 50β80% depending upon the processor architecture, cooling technology, and application workloads. Dark Silicon may be unavoidable even in server workloads with abundance of inherent client request-level parallelism.
π Norwegian butter crisis (2011)
The Norwegian butter crisis began in late 2011 with an acute shortage of butter and inflation of its price across markets in Norway. The shortage caused soaring prices and stores' stocks of butter ran out within minutes of deliveries. According to the Danish tabloid B.T., Norway was gripped by smΓΈr-panik ("butter panic") as a result of the butter shortage.
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- "Norwegian butter crisis" | 2022-04-20 | 15 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Norwegian butter crisis (2011)" | 2015-05-20 | 176 Upvotes 111 Comments
π Pauli Effect
The Pauli effect or Pauli's Device Corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.
The Pauli effect is not related with the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room. Pauli himself was convinced that the effect named after him was real. Pauli corresponded with Hans Bender and Carl Jung and saw the effect as an example of the concept of synchronicity.
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- "Pauli Effect" | 2016-05-29 | 109 Upvotes 33 Comments
π Killing of Hind Rajab (2024)
Hind Rami Iyad Rajab (Arabic: ΩΩΨ― Ψ±Ψ§Ω Ω Ψ₯ΩΨ§Ψ― Ψ±Ψ¬Ψ¨; 3 May 2018 β 29 January 2024) was a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Gaza war, which also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.
Rajab and her family were fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was shelled by the IDF, killing her uncle, aunt and three cousins, with Rajab and another cousin surviving and contacting the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to ask for help while noting that they were being attacked by an Israeli tank. The cousin was later also killed and Rajab was left stranded in the vehicle for hours on the phone, as paramedics from PRCS attempted to rescue her. Both Rajab and the paramedics were later also found dead on 10 February after an Israeli withdrawal.
Israel claimed that there were not any troops present in the neighborhood and denied carrying out the attack. However, this was refuted by The Washington Post and Sky News's investigations relying on satellite imagery and visual evidence, which concluded that a number of Israeli tanks were indeed present and one had likely fired 335 rounds on the car that Rajab and her family had been in, with tank operators being able to see that the car had civilians including children in it. The Forensic Architecture investigation also concluded that an Israeli tank had also likely attacked the ambulance that came for Rajab.
In the aftermath of the killing, Western media outlets were criticized for their coverage of the incident, including for not attributing who killed Rajab and for their adultification of her. American student protestors occupied and renamed Hamilton Hall in her honor at Columbia University, drawing increased attention to the incident.
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- "Killing of Hind Rajab (2024)" | 2026-04-11 | 70 Upvotes 10 Comments
π John Boyd
John Richard Boyd (January 23, 1927 β March 9, 1997) was a United States Air Force fighter pilot and Pentagon consultant during the second half of the 20th century. His theories have been highly influential in military, sports, business, and litigation strategies and planning.
As part of the Fighter Mafia, Boyd inspired the Lightweight Fighter program (LWF), which produced the successful General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, which are still in use by the United States and by several other military powers into the 21st century. Boyd, together with Thomas Christie, created the EnergyβManeuverability theory of aerial combat, which became the world standard for the design of fighter aircraft. He also developed the decision cycle known as the OODA loop, the process by which an entity reacts to an event.
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- "John Boyd" | 2022-11-27 | 19 Upvotes 1 Comments
π List of cognitive biases
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), impact of individual's constitution and biological state (see embodied cognition), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.
A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Daniel Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, and management.
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- "List of cognitive biases" | 2008-09-23 | 36 Upvotes 25 Comments
π The Great Emu War
The Emu War, also known as the Great Emu War, was a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the latter part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis gunsβleading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. While a number of the birds were killed, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction.
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- "Emu War" | 2024-01-15 | 16 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "The Great Emu War" | 2014-11-09 | 15 Upvotes 3 Comments
π State Capture
State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage.
The term was first used by the World Bank in 2000 to describe certain Central Asian countries making the transition from Soviet communism, where small corrupt groups used their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making in order to strengthen their own economic positions.
Allegations of state capture have led to protests against the government in Bulgaria in 2013β2014 and in 2020β2021 and Romania in 2017, and have caused an ongoing controversy in South Africa beginning in 2016. Turkey is considered as a post-2002 example of state capture. The term has also been used against Elon Musk by critics of U.S. President Donald Trump.
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- "State Capture" | 2025-02-14 | 67 Upvotes 41 Comments
π Gall's Law
John Gall (September 18, 1925 β December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.
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- "Gall's Law" | 2019-03-19 | 329 Upvotes 101 Comments