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🔗 Lists 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Organized Labour

In the majority of nations, including all industrialised nations except the United States, advances in employee relations have seen the introduction of statutory agreements for minimum employee leave from work—that is the amount of entitlement to paid vacation and public holidays. Several companies will offer contractually more time, depending on the sector. Companies and the law may also differ as to whether public holidays are counted as part of the minimum leave.

Disparities in national minimums are still subject of debate regarding work-life balance and perceived differences between nations. These numbers usually refer to full-time employment – part-time workers may get a reduced number of days. In most countries, public holidays are paid and usually not considered part of the annual leave. Also, in most countries there are additional paid leave benefits such as parental leave and sick leave that are not listed here.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 History 🔗 China 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Culture

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in China from 1966 until 1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Mao Zedong Thought (known outside China as Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the CPC. The Revolution marked Mao's return to the central position of power in China after a period of less radical leadership to recover from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which led to approximately 30 million deaths in the Great Chinese Famine only five years prior.

Launching the movement in May 1966 with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao soon called on young people to "bombard the headquarters", and proclaimed that "to rebel is justified". In order to eliminate his rivals within the CPC and in schools, factories, and government institutions, Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. He insisted that revisionists be removed through violent class struggle, to which China's youth, as well as urban workers, responded by forming Red Guards and "rebel groups" around the country. They would begin to hold struggle sessions regularly, and grab power from local governments and CPC branches, eventually establishing the revolutionary committees in 1967. The groups often split into rival factions, however, becoming involved in 'violent struggles' (simplified Chinese: 武斗; traditional Chinese: 武鬥; pinyin: wǔdòu), to which the People's Liberation Army had to be sent to restore order.

Having compiled a selection of Mao's sayings into the Little Red Book, which became a sacred text for Mao's personality cult, Lin Biao, Vice Chairman of the CPC, was written into the constitution as Mao's successor. In 1969, Mao suggested the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, the Revolution's active phase would last until at least 1971, when Lin Biao, accused of a botched coup against Mao, fled and died in a plane crash. In 1972, the Gang of Four rose to power and the Cultural Revolution continued. After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the Cultural Revolution finally came to an end.

The Cultural Revolution damaged China's economy and traditional culture, with an estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to 20 million. Beginning with the Red August of Beijing, massacres took place across China, including the Guangxi Massacre, in which massive cannibalism also occurred; the Inner Mongolia incident; the Guangdong Massacre; the Yunnan Massacres; and the Hunan Massacres. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts, as well as ransacking cultural and religious sites. The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, one of the world's greatest technological catastrophes, also occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people were persecuted: senior officials, most notably Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, along with Deng Xiaoping, Peng Dehuai, and He Long, were purged or exiled; millions were accused of being members of the Five Black Categories, suffering public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide; intellectuals were considered the "Stinking Old Ninth" and were widely persecuted—notable scholars and scientists such as Lao She, Fu Lei, Yao Tongbin, and Zhao Jiuzhang were killed or committed suicide. Schools and universities were closed with the college entrance exams cancelled. Over 10 million urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new paramount leader of China and started the "Boluan Fanzheng" program which gradually dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution, and brought the country back to order. Deng then began a new phase of China by initiating the historic Reforms and Opening-Up program. In 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic."

🔗 Computing

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are "self-replicating programs", "self-reproducing programs", and "self-copying programs".

A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language.

The name "quine" was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his popular science book Gödel, Escher, Bach, in honor of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who made an extensive study of indirect self-reference, and in particular for the following paradox-producing expression, known as Quine's paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Dentistry

Tin(II) fluoride, commonly referred to commercially as stannous fluoride (from Latin stannum, 'tin'), is a chemical compound with the formula SnF₂. It is a colourless solid used as an ingredient in toothpastes.

🔗 Computer science

In computer science, higher-order abstract syntax (abbreviated HOAS) is a technique for the representation of abstract syntax trees for languages with variable binders.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Business 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Denmark

Agner Krarup Erlang (1 January 1878 – 3 February 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.

By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.

🔗 Music theory 🔗 Classical music 🔗 Music/Music genres

Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.

The term became known to European composers through lectures by acoustician Werner Meyer-Eppler at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the beginning of the 1950s. According to his definition, "a process is said to be aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail". Through a confusion of Meyer-Eppler's German terms Aleatorik (noun) and aleatorisch (adjective), his translator created a new English word, "aleatoric" (rather than using the existing English adjective "aleatory"), which quickly became fashionable and has persisted. More recently, the variant "aleatoriality" has been introduced.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Africa/Angola 🔗 Africa

On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727, registered N844AA, was stolen at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, Luanda, Angola. Its disappearance prompted a worldwide search by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). No trace of the aircraft has since been found.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Early computers

The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956. It was used continually through the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 incorporated around 3600 Philco high-frequency surface-barrier transistors, the first transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture.

🔗 Professional sound production

The loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity, and according to many critics, listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.

With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. In extreme cases, efforts to increase loudness can result in clipping and other audible distortion. Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."