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🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 United States/Colorado

Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a large United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

On April 22, 2010, CenturyLink announced it would acquire Qwest in a stock transaction. The merger closed on April 1, 2011. Qwest began doing business as CenturyLink in August 2011.

Qwest provided voice, Internet backbone data services, and digital television in some areas. It operated in three segments: Wireline Services, Wireless Services, and Other Services. The Wireline Services segment provided local voice, long-distance voice, and data and Internet (DSL) services to consumers, businesses, and wholesale customers, as well as access services to wholesale customers. The Wireless Services segment was achieved by a partnership with Verizon Wireless. Qwest also partnered with DirecTV to provide digital television service to its customers. In Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, and Omaha, Qwest offered Qwest Choice TV (later also known as Qwest Digital Television), an IPTV service over DSL. This service was retired in October 2008 (after being no longer available to new customers in May 2008), leaving DirecTV as the only TV service Qwest provided. Qwest Choice TV customers were moved to DirecTV. The Other Services segment primarily involved the sublease of real estate assets, such as space in office buildings, warehouses, and other properties.

Qwest Communications also provided long-distance services and broadband data, as well as voice and video communications globally. The company sold its products and services to small businesses, governmental entities, and public and private educational institutions through various channels, including direct-sales marketing, telemarketing, arrangements with third-party agents, company's Web site, and partnership relations. As of September 13, 2005, Qwest had 98 retail stores in 14 states. Qwest Communications was headquartered in Denver, Colorado at 1801 California Street, in the second tallest building in Denver at 53 stories. The majority of Qwest occupational or non-management employees were represented by two labor unions; the Communications Workers of America and in Montana, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Qwest also had software development centers in Bangalore and Noida (New Delhi), India called Qwest Software Services.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

A saddle chair uses the same principles in its design as an equestrian saddle. It is equipped with a chair base on casters and a gas cylinder for adjusting the correct sitting height. The casters enable moving around and reaching out for objects while sitting. Some saddle chairs have backrests, but most do not.

Riding-like sitting on a saddle chair differs from sitting on a conventional chair. Saddle chair users sit 20–30 cm higher, which puts the hips and the knees into a 135° angle, compared to the 90° angle typically associated with sitting on a traditional chair.

Because the saddle chair is higher than a normal office chair, the desk has to be higher as well. For this purpose there are desks that can be electronically or mechanically adjusted to fit the user. A saddle chair can also be used with a normal office desk, but then the desk has to be lifted up with height extension pieces.

The saddle chair seat is either solid or divided. A divided seat reduces pressure on the perineum and lowers the temperature in the genital area. A divided seat is thought to be healthier, especially for men, than a solid seat.

Some saddle chairs include not only height adjustments but also a tilt mechanism. There is also a divided saddle chair model on the market that has an adjustable gap between the two seat parts. Accessories, such as elbow and wrist supports, are available for saddle chairs to make different work tasks easier.

Adapting to a saddle chair takes time and requires a new kind of attitude towards sitting. The most common reason for using a saddle chair is that the users feel it is healthier for the back and legs than a standard chair. An intervention study on schoolchildren found that initially saddle chairs were liked better, but the difference leveled off over time.

🔗 Languages 🔗 Melanesia 🔗 Melanesia/Papua New Guinea

Manam is a Kairiru–Manam language spoken mainly on the volcanic Manam Island, northeast of New Guinea.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire

Lagâri Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman aviator who, according to the account written by traveller Evliya Çelebi, made a successful crewed rocket flight.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Education

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Scotland

Scottish man Angus Barbieri (1939 – 7 September 1990) fasted for 382 days, from June 1965 to July 1966. He lived on tea, coffee, soda water, and vitamins while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, and frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation. He lost 276 pounds (125 kg) and set a record for the length of a fast.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Rule of three ("Three strikes and you refactor") is a code refactoring rule of thumb to decide when similar pieces of code should be refactored to avoid duplication. It states that two instances of similar code don't require refactoring, but when similar code is used three times, it should be extracted into a new procedure. The rule was popularised by Martin Fowler in Refactoring and attributed to Don Roberts.

Duplication is considered a bad practice in programming because it makes the code harder to maintain. When the rule encoded in a replicated piece of code changes, whoever maintains the code will have to change it in all places correctly.

However, choosing an appropriate design to avoid duplication might benefit from more examples to see patterns in. Attempting premature refactoring risks selecting a wrong abstraction, which can result in worse code as new requirements emerge and will eventually need to be refactored again.

The rule implies that the cost of maintenance certainly outweighs the cost of refactoring and potential bad design when there are three copies, and may or may not if there are only two copies.

🔗 Insects 🔗 Insects/Ant 🔗 Fungi

Ant–fungus mutualism is a symbiosis seen in certain ant and fungal species, in which ants actively cultivate fungus much like humans farm crops as a food source. In some species, the ants and fungi are dependent on each other for survival. The leafcutter ant is a well-known example of this symbiosis. A mutualism with fungi is also noted in some species of termites in Africa.

🔗 Law 🔗 Royalty and Nobility

Lèse-majesté ( or ;), a French term meaning "to do wrong to majesty", is an offence against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state.

This behaviour was first classified as a criminal offence against the dignity of the Roman Republic of ancient Rome. In the Dominate, or Late Empire period, the emperors eliminated the Republican trappings of their predecessors and began to identify the state with their person. Although legally the princeps civitatis (his official title, meaning, roughly, 'first citizen') could never become a sovereign because the republic was never officially abolished, emperors were deified as divus, first posthumously but by the Dominate period while reigning. Deified emperors enjoyed the same legal protection that was accorded to the divinities of the state cult; by the time it was replaced by Christianity, what was in all but name a monarchical tradition had already become well-established.

Narrower conceptions of offences against Majesty as offences against the crown predominated in the European kingdoms that emerged in the early medieval period. In feudal Europe, some crimes were classified as lèse-majesté even if they were not intentionally directed against the crown. An example is counterfeiting, so classified because coins bore the monarch's effigy and/or coat of arms.

With the disappearance of absolute monarchy in Europe (with exception of Vatican City), lèse-majesté came to be viewed as less of a crime. However, certain malicious acts that would have once been classified as the crime of lèse-majesté could still be prosecuted as treason. Future republics that emerged as great powers generally still classified as a crime any offence against the highest representatives of the state. These laws are still applied as well in monarchies outside of Europe, such as modern Thailand and Cambodia.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Languages

The Swadesh list is a classic compilation of basic concepts for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists".