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🔗 Biography 🔗 Disambiguation

William Adams may refer to:

🔗 Chemicals

Solanine is a glycoalkaloid poison found in species of the nightshade family within the genus Solanum, such as the potato (Solanum tuberosum), the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), and the eggplant (Solanum melongena). It can occur naturally in any part of the plant, including the leaves, fruit, and tubers. Solanine has pesticidal properties, and it is one of the plant's natural defenses. Solanine was first isolated in 1820 from the berries of the European black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), after which it was named. It belongs to the chemical family of saponins.

User:Diikiw/Wiikid, formerly Wikiid, is an article that was created on the web site Wikipedia in 2008. It is notable in its attempt to become the first Wikipedia page to gain notoriety solely for the fact that it was a page on Wikipedia; this was intended to spark a debate as to whether or not Wikipedia could be considered a source notable enough to allow a page’s permanent entry on the site. It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.

🔗 Shopping Centers 🔗 Zimbabwe

The Eastgate Centre is a shopping centre and office block in central Harare, Zimbabwe whose architect is Mick Pearce. Designed to be ventilated and cooled by entirely natural means, it was probably the first building in the world to use natural cooling to this level of sophistication. It opened in 1996 on Robert Mugabe Avenue and Second Street, and provides 5,600 m² of retail space, 26,000 m² of office space and parking for 450 cars.

Welcome to WikiProject AI Cleanup—a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly written AI-generated content on Wikipedia. If you would like to help, add yourself as a participant in the project, inquire on the talk page, and see the to-do list.

🔗 Computer science

TLA⁺ is a formal specification language developed by Leslie Lamport. It is used to design, model, document, and verify programs, especially concurrent systems and distributed systems. TLA⁺ has been described as exhaustively-testable pseudocode, and its use likened to drawing blueprints for software systems; TLA is an acronym for Temporal Logic of Actions.

For design and documentation, TLA⁺ fulfills the same purpose as informal technical specifications. However, TLA⁺ specifications are written in a formal language of logic and mathematics, and the precision of specifications written in this language is intended to uncover design flaws before system implementation is underway.

Since TLA⁺ specifications are written in a formal language, they are amenable to finite model checking. The model checker finds all possible system behaviours up to some number of execution steps, and examines them for violations of desired invariance properties such as safety and liveness. TLA⁺ specifications use basic set theory to define safety (bad things won't happen) and temporal logic to define liveness (good things eventually happen).

TLA⁺ is also used to write machine-checked proofs of correctness both for algorithms and mathematical theorems. The proofs are written in a declarative, hierarchical style independent of any single theorem prover backend. Both formal and informal structured mathematical proofs can be written in TLA⁺; the language is similar to LaTeX, and tools exist to translate TLA⁺ specifications to LaTeX documents.

TLA⁺ was introduced in 1999, following several decades of research into a verification method for concurrent systems. A toolchain has since developed, including an IDE and distributed model checker. The pseudocode-like language PlusCal was created in 2009; it transpiles to TLA⁺ and is useful for specifying sequential algorithms. TLA⁺² was announced in 2014, expanding language support for proof constructs. The current TLA⁺ reference is The TLA⁺ Hyperbook by Leslie Lamport.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment

The term 3-6-3 Rule describes how the United States retail banking industry operated from the 1950s to the 1980s. The name 3-6-3 refers to the impression that bankers had a stable, comfortable existence by paying 3 percent interest on deposits, lending money out at 6 percent, and being able to "tee off at the golf course by 3 p.m."

The implication was that the banks were less competitive during that period than in subsequent years due to tight regulations that limited the formation and location of banks as well as restrictions on interest rates that could be charged or paid. As a result, bankers had "power and prestige ... while profits were steady and certain". These regulations were loosened in the 1980s.

Richmond Federal Reserve senior economist John R. Walter argues that, although there is evidence that restrictions on banks before the 1980s did limit the competitiveness of banking markets and thereby granted some banks monopoly power, "the regulatory restrictions probably had a limited effect on competition" during the time in question. Chicago Federal Reserve researchers Robert DeYoung and Tara Rice argue that, "Like most good jokes, the 3-6-3 rule mixes a grain of truth with a highly simplified view of reality."

The rule has been noted positively following the late-2000s financial crisis as a preferable way for banks to operate following the bailout of major banks.

Australia's banking system, which was deregulated in the 1990s in a manner similar to that in the U.S., also came to be characterized in the same way as did the United Kingdom's.

🔗 Books 🔗 Maps

An Atlas of Fantasy, compiled by Jeremiah Benjamin Post, was originally published in 1973 by Mirage Press and revised for a 1979 edition by Ballantine Books. The 1979 edition dropped twelve maps from the first edition and added fourteen new ones. It also included an introduction by Lester del Rey.

To remain of manageable size, the Atlas excludes advertising maps, cartograms, most disproportionate maps, and alternate history ("might have been") maps, focusing instead on imaginary lands derived from literary sources. It purposefully omits "one-to-one" maps such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex (which merely renames places in southwest England), but includes Barsetshire and Yoknapatawpha County, which are evidently considered to be sufficiently fictionalized. The emphasis is on science fiction and fantasy, though Post suggests there exist enough mystery fiction maps to someday create The Detectives' Handy Pocket Atlas. Other maps were omitted due to permission costs or reproduction quality.

The maps are reproduced from many sources, and an Index of Artists is included.

🔗 Technology 🔗 History 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Culture 🔗 Demographics

Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, and depopulation. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.

Virtually all civilizations have suffered this fate regardless of size or complexity. But some revived and transformed, such as China and Egypt, while others never recovered, such as the Mayan Empire and the civilization on Easter Island. Societal collapse is generally a quick process, but rarely abrupt. Yet some have not collapsed but have only gradually faded away, as in the case of the British Empire since 1918.

Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, secular decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. However, complete extinction of a culture is rare; in most cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication. Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, say that of the Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death.

Societal collapse is studied by specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. More recently, they are joined by experts in cliodynamics and study of complex systems.

🔗 Greece 🔗 Songs

"Misirlou" (Greek: Μισιρλού < Turkish: Mısırlı 'Egyptian' < Arabic: مصر Miṣr 'Egypt') is a folk song from the Eastern Mediterranean region. The original author of the song is not known, but Arabic, Greek, and Jewish musicians were playing it by the 1920s. The earliest known recording of the song is a 1927 Greek rebetiko/tsifteteli composition. There are also Arabic belly dancing, Albanian, Armenian, Serbian, Persian, Indian and Turkish versions of the song. This song was popular from the 1920s onwards in the Arab American, Armenian American and Greek American communities who settled in the United States.

The song was a hit in 1946 for Jan August, an American pianist and xylophonist nicknamed "the one-man piano duet". It gained worldwide popularity through Dick Dale's 1962 American surf rock version, originally titled "Miserlou", which popularized the song in Western popular culture; Dale's version was influenced by an earlier Arabic folk version played with an oud. Various versions have since been recorded, mostly based on Dale's version, including other surf and rock versions by bands such as the Beach Boys, the Ventures, and the Trashmen, as well as international orchestral easy listening (exotica) versions by musicians such as Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman. Dale's surf rock version was heard in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.