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🔗 India 🔗 Time 🔗 Hinduism 🔗 Measurement

Hindu texts describe units of Kala measurements, from microseconds to Trillions of years. According to these texts, time is cyclic, which repeats itself forever.

🔗 Cognitive science

Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language developed by Ronald Langacker, which hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. This approach to language was one of the first projects of cognitive linguistics. In this system, grammar is not a formal system operating independently of meaning. Rather, grammar is itself meaningful and inextricable from semantics.

Construction grammar is a similar focus of cognitive approaches to grammar. While cognitive grammar emphasizes the study of the cognitive principles that give rise to linguistic organization, construction grammar aims to provide a more descriptively and formally detailed account of the linguistic units that comprise a particular language.

Langacker first explicates the system of cognitive grammar in his seminal, two-volume work Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume one is titled "Theoretical Prerequisites", and it explores Langacker's hypothesis that grammar may be deconstructed into patterns that come together in order to represent concepts. This volume concentrates on the broad scope of language especially in terms of the relationship between grammar and semantics. Volume two is titled "Descriptive Application", as it moves beyond the first volume to elaborate on the ways in which Langacker's previously described theories may be applied. Langacker invites his reader to utilize the tools presented in Foundations' first volume in a wide range of, mainly English, grammatical situations.

🔗 Telecommunications

Procedure words or prowords are words or phrases limited to radio telephone procedure used to facilitate communication by conveying information in a condensed standard verbal format. Prowords are voice versions of the much older prosigns for Morse code first developed in the 1860s for Morse telegraphy, and their meaning is identical. The NATO communications manual ACP-125 contains the most formal and perhaps earliest modern (post-WW-II) glossary of procedure words, but its definitions have been adopted by many other organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Rhode Island Department of Emergency Management, Civil Air Patrol, Military Auxiliary Radio System, and others.

Procedure words are one of several structured parts of radio voice procedures, including Brevity codes and Plain language radio checks. The vast majority of the brevity codes from the U.S. military's Multiservice tactical brevity code are inappropriate for any civilian use, owing to their focus on large weapons (missiles, etc.) and other war-related issues. However, a few are used frequently enough in media to be memorable, including ABORT, BOGEY, BANDIT, FEET WET, FEET DRY, NEGATIVE CONTACT, and NO JOY.

🔗 International relations 🔗 History 🔗 Military history 🔗 Africa 🔗 Europe 🔗 Military history/African military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Colonialism 🔗 Countering systemic bias

The Scramble for Africa, also called the Partition of Africa or the Conquest of Africa, was the invasion, occupation, division, and colonisation of African territory by European powers during a short period known to historians as the New Imperialism (between 1881 and 1914). In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914 this had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Dervish state (a portion of present-day Somalia) and Liberia still being independent. There were multiple motivations for European colonizers, including desire for valuable resources available throughout the continent, the quest for national prestige, tensions between pairs of European powers, religious missionary zeal and internal African native politics.

The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonisation and trade in Africa, is usually referred to as the ultimate point of the Scramble for Africa. Consequent to the political and economic rivalries among the European empires in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning, or splitting up of Africa was how the Europeans avoided warring amongst themselves over Africa. The later years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" by military influence and economic dominance, to direct rule, bringing about colonial imperialism.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Numismatics

In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.

The law was named in 1860 by Henry Dunning Macleod, after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), who was an English financier during the Tudor dynasty. However, the concept itself had been previously expressed by others, including by Aristophanes in his play The Frogs, which dates from around the end of the 5th century BC, in the 14th century by Nicole Oresme c. 1350, in his treatise On the Origin, Nature, Law, and Alterations of Money, and by jurist and historian Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) in the Mamluk Empire; and in 1519 by Nicolaus Copernicus in a treatise called Monetae cudendae ratio For this reason, it is occasionally known as the Gresham–Copernicus' law.

🔗 Fishes

The sturddlefish is a hybrid of the American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) and the Russian sturgeon (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii), accidentally created by researchers in 2019 and announced in 2020. Obtaining living hybrids through breeding individuals from different families is unusual, especially given that the two species' last common ancestor lived 184 million years ago. The hybrids were created accidentally during attempts to induce gynogenesis, a type of parthenogenic reproduction where a sperm cell must be present to trigger embryogenesis but does not genetically contribute to the offspring. Hundreds of hybrid fish were created, of which about two-thirds survived over one month, and about 100 survived for one year. As of July 2020, all living hybrid fish are living in captivity at the research lab in Hungary. There are no further plans to create new sturddlefish.

🔗 Economics

"The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.

Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a "lemon". Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (p_avg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since p_lemon < p_avg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since p_peach > p_avg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop.

Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse.

Akerlof's paper shows how prices can determine the quality of goods traded on the market. Low prices drive away sellers of high-quality goods, leaving only lemons behind. In 2001, Akerlof, along with Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz, jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for their research on issues related to asymmetric information.

🔗 Linguistics

A synecdoche ( sin-NEK-tə-kee, from Greek συνεκδοχή, synekdochē, 'simultaneous understanding') is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa. A synecdoche is a class of metonymy, often by means of either mentioning a part for the whole or conversely the whole for one of its parts. Examples from common English expressions include "suits" (for "businessmen"), "boots" (for "soldiers") (pars pro toto), and "America" (for "the United States of America", totum pro parte).

The use of government buildings to refer to their occupants is metonymy and sometimes also synecdoche. "The Pentagon" for the United States Department of Defense can be considered synecdoche, as the building can be considered part of the department. Likewise, using "Number 10" to mean "the Office of the Prime Minister" (of the United Kingdom) is a synecdoche.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Hungary 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (German: [ˈɪɡnaːts ˈzɛml̩vaɪs]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp [ˈsɛmmɛlvɛjs ˈiɡnaːts ˈfyløp]; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had thrice the mortality of midwives' wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Poland 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Military history/Polish military history 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Katyn massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, "Katyń crime"; Russian: Катынская резня Katynskaya reznya, "Katyn massacre", or Russian: Катынский расстрел, "Katyn execution by shooting") was a series of mass executions of about 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal of 5 March 1940 to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests". The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Polish Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Polish Jews including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.

The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943. Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The USSR claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.

An investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder. The investigation was closed on the grounds the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable.

In November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre.