Topic: United States (Page 28)
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🔗 Network (1976 Film)
Network is a 1976 American satirical black comedy-drama film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. It is about a fictional television network, UBS, and its struggle with poor ratings. The film stars Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch (in his final film role), Robert Duvall, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty, and Beatrice Straight.
Network received widespread critical acclaim, with particular praise for the performances. The film was a commercial success, with nine Oscar nominations at the 49th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, that led to four wins: Best Actor (Finch), Best Actress (Dunaway), Best Supporting Actress (Straight), and Best Original Screenplay.
In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2002, it was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has "set an enduring standard for American entertainment". In 2005, the two Writers Guilds of America voted Chayefsky's script one of the 10 greatest screenplays in the history of cinema. In 2007, the film was 64th among the 100 greatest American films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI had given it ten years earlier.
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🔗 Kentucky in Africa
Kentucky in Africa was a colony in present-day Montserrado County, Liberia, founded in 1828 and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves. A state affiliate of the American Colonization Society, the Kentucky State Colonization Society raised money to transport people of color from Kentucky—freeborn volunteers as well as enslaved individuals set free on the condition that they leave the United States for Liberia. The Kentucky society bought a 40-square-mile (100 km2) site along the Saint Paul River (quite near the site of the present-day capital city of Monrovia) and named it Kentucky in Africa. Clay-Ashland. named after Henry Clay's Ashland Plantation, was the colony's primary settlement.
Notable residents of Kentucky in Africa include Alfred Francis Russell, the 10th President of Liberia, and William D. Coleman, the 13th President of Liberia, whose family settled in Clay-Ashland after emigrating from Fayette County, Kentucky.
Kentucky in Africa was annexed by Liberia in about 1847.
🔗 Madman Theory
The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of U.S. president Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile communist bloc countries think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the U.S. in fear of an unpredictable response.
The premise of madman theory is that it makes seemingly incredible threats seem credible. For instance, in an era of mutually assured destruction, threats by a rational leader to escalate a dispute may seem suicidal and thus easily dismissible by adversaries. However, a leader's suicidal threats may seem credible if the leader is believed to be irrational.
International relations scholars have been skeptical of madman theory as a strategy for success in coercive bargaining. Prominent "madmen", such as Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi failed to win coercive disputes. One difficulty is making others believe you are genuinely a madman. Another difficulty is the inability of a madman to assure others that they will not be punished even if they yield to a particular demand. One study found that madman theory is frequently counterproductive, but that it can be effective under certain conditions. Another study found that there are both bargaining advantages and disadvantages to perceived madness.
🔗 The Calutron Girls
The Calutron Girls were a group of young women, mostly high school graduates who joined the World War II efforts in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1945.
Although they were not allowed to know at the time, they were monitoring dials and watching meters for a calutron, a mass spectrometer that separates uranium isotopes. The enriched uranium was used to make the first atomic bomb.
Calutron Girls were trained and employed at the Y-12 National Security Complex. Wartime labor shortages forced the Tennessee Eastman Corporation to hire women to work at the Y-12 plant.
According to Gladys Owens, one of the few Calutron Girls, a manager at the facility once told them: "We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!"
🔗 List of Largest US Bank Failures
This is a list of the largest United States bank failures with respect to total assets under management at the time of the bank failure (banks with $1.0 billion or more in assets are listed here). Assets of the banks listed here are figures provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
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🔗 Salyut 7 space station salvage mission
Docking and berthing of spacecraft is the joining of two space vehicles. This connection can be temporary, or partially permanent such as for space station modules.
Docking specifically refers to joining of two separate free-flying space vehicles. Berthing refers to mating operations where an inactive module/vehicle is placed into the mating interface of another space vehicle by using a robotic arm. Because the modern process of un-berthing needs more labor and is time-consuming, berthing operations are unsuited for rapid crew evacuations in the event of an emergency.
🔗 Ronald Read – Philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant
Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant. Read grew up in Dummerston, Vermont, in an impoverished farming household. He walked or hitchhiked 4 mi (6.4 km) daily to his high school and was the first high school graduate in his family. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Italy as a military policeman. Upon an honorable discharge from the military in 1945, Read returned to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for about 25 years. Read retired for one year and then took a part-time janitor job at J. C. Penney where he worked for 17 years until 1997.
Read died in 2014. He received media coverage in numerous newspapers and magazines after bequeathing US$1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library and $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. Read amassed a fortune of almost $8 million by investing in dividend-producing stocks, avoiding the stocks of companies he did not understand such as technology companies, living frugally, and being a buy and hold investor in a diversified portfolio of stocks with a heavy concentration in blue chip companies.
🔗 KFC's Original Recipe
The KFC Original Recipe is a secret mix of ingredients that fast food restaurant chain KFC uses to produce fried chicken.
By the very late 1930s, Harland Sanders' gas station in Corbin, Kentucky was so well known for its fried chicken that Sanders decided to remove the gas pumps and build a restaurant and motel in their place. While perfecting his secret recipe with 11 herbs and spices, Sanders found that pan frying chicken was too slow, requiring 30 minutes per order. Deep frying the chicken required half the time but produced dry, unevenly done chicken. In 1939, he found that using a pressure fryer produced tasty, moist chicken in eight or nine minutes. By July 1940, Sanders finalized what came to be known as his Original Recipe.
After Sanders formed a partnership with Pete Harman, they began marketing the chicken in the 1950s as Kentucky Fried Chicken; the company shipped the spices already mixed to restaurants to preserve the recipe's secrecy. He claimed that the ingredients "stand on everybody's shelf".
Sanders used vegetable oil for frying chicken. By 1993, for economic reasons, many KFC outlets had chosen to use a blend of palm and soybean oil. In Japan, the oil used is mainly the more expensive cottonseed and corn oil, as KFC Japan believes that this offers superior taste quality.
🔗 The Overton Window
The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
🔗 Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was an Indian-American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
Born in British India, Khorana served on the faculties of three universities in North America. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966, and received the National Medal of Science in 1987.