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🔗 Rocky Mountain Basic

Rocky Mountain BASIC (also RMB or RM-BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language created by Hewlett-Packard. It was especially popular for control of automatic test equipment using GPIB. It has several features which are or were unusual in BASIC dialects, such as event-driven operation, extensive external I/O support, complex number support, and matrix manipulation functions. Today, RMB is mainly used in environments where an investment in RMB software, hardware, or expertise already exists.

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🔗 The Indian state of Kerala has a communist government and India's highest HDI

🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 India 🔗 India/Indian politics workgroup 🔗 India/Kerala

Communism in Kerala refers to the strong presence of communist ideas in the Indian state of Kerala. In addition to Kerala, the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura have had multiple democratically elected Marxist governments, and change takes place in the government by regular multiparty electoral processes. Communism of Kerala has provided Indian communist stalwarts such as M. N. Govindan Nair, C. Achutha Menon, K. Damodaran, T. V. Thomas, N. E. Balaram, E. M. S. Namboodiripad, A. K. Gopalan, K. R. Gouri Amma, P. K. Vasudevan Nair and C. K. Chandrappan

Today the two largest communist parties in Kerala politics are the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India. The Left Democratic Front is a coalition of left-wing political parties in the state of Kerala and is one of the two major political coalitions in Kerala, each of which have been in power alternatively for the last two decades. The coalition led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) consists of the Communist Party of India, the Janata Dal (Secular), the Nationalist Congress Party, the Indian National League, the Kerala Congress (Anti-merger Group), and the Indian National Congress (Socialist).

🔗 Death by Coconut

🔗 Death 🔗 Plants

Coconuts falling from their trees and striking individuals can cause serious injury to the back, neck, shoulders and head, and are occasionally fatal.

Following a 1984 study on "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", exaggerated claims spread concerning the number of deaths by falling coconuts. Falling coconuts, according to urban legend, kill a few people a year. This legend gained momentum after the 2002 work of a noted expert on shark attacks was characterized as saying that falling coconuts kill 150 people each year worldwide. This statistic has often been contrasted with the number of shark-caused deaths per year, which is around five.

Concern about the risk of fatality due to falling coconuts led local officials in Queensland, Australia, to remove coconut trees from beaches in 2002. One newspaper dubbed coconuts "the killer fruit". Historical reports of actual death by coconut nonetheless date back to the 1770s.

Another way to "die by coconut" is to suffer sudden cardiac death as a result of hyperkalemia, after consuming moderate to large quantities of coconut water, due to the high levels of potassium in coconut water.

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🔗 Aosta Valley Autonomus Region

🔗 Italy 🔗 Geography

The Aosta Valley (Italian: Valle d'Aosta [ˈvalle daˈɔsta] (official) or Val d'Aosta (usual); French: Vallée d'Aoste; Arpitan: Val d'Outa; Walser: Augschtalann or Ougstalland; Piedmontese: Val d'Osta) is a mountainous autonomous region in northwestern Italy. It is bordered by Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France, to the west, Valais, Switzerland, to the north, and by Piedmont, Italy, to the south and east. The regional capital is Aosta.

Covering an area of 3,263 km2 (1,260 sq mi) and with a population of about 128,000 it is the smallest, least populous, and least densely populated region of Italy. The province of Aosta having been dissolved in 1945, the Aosta Valley region was the first region of Italy to abolish provincial subdivisions. Provincial administrative functions are provided by the regional government. The region is divided into 74 comuni (French: communes).

Italian and French are the official languages, though the native population also speak Valdôtain, a dialect of Franco-Provençal. Italian is spoken as a mother tongue by 77.29% of population, Valdôtain by 17.91%, and French by 1.25%. In 2009, reportedly 50.53% of the population could speak all three languages.

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🔗 Chicago Principles

🔗 Freedom of speech

The Chicago principles are a set of guiding principles intended to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression on college campuses in the United States. Initially adopted by the University of Chicago following a report issued by a designated Committee on Freedom of Expression in 2014 (″Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression″), they came to be known as the “Chicago principles”, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) led a campaign to encourage other universities across the country sign up to the principles or model their own based on similar goals.

Since 2014, a number of other universities have committed to the principles, including Princeton, Purdue, and Washington University in St. Louis. As of August 2020, FIRE reported that 76 U.S. colleges and universities had "adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement."

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🔗 Teuvo Kohonen Has Died

🔗 Biography

Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 15 December 2021) was a prominent Finnish academic (Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland.

Prof. Kohonen made many contributions to the field of artificial neural networks, including the Learning Vector Quantization algorithm, fundamental theories of distributed associative memory and optimal associative mappings, the learning subspace method and novel algorithms for symbol processing like redundant hash addressing. He has published several books and over 300 peer-reviewed papers.

Kohonen’s most famous contribution is the Self-Organizing Map (also known as the Kohonen map or Kohonen artificial neural networks, although Kohonen himself prefers SOM). Due to the popularity of the SOM algorithm in many research and in practical applications, Kohonen is often considered to be the most cited Finnish scientist. The current version of the SOM bibliography contains close to 8000 entries.

During most of his career, Prof. Kohonen conducted research at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The Neural Networks Research Centre of TKK, a center of excellence appointed by Academy of Finland was founded to conduct research related to Teuvo Kohonen's innovations. After Kohonen's retirement, the center was led by Prof. Erkki Oja and later renamed to Adaptive Informatics Research Centre with widened foci of research.

Teuvo Kohonen was elected the First Vice President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition from 1982 to 1984, and acted as the first president of the European Neural Network Society from 1991 to 1992.

For his scientific achievements, Prof. Kohonen has received a number of prizes including the following:

  • IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award, 1991
  • Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1995
  • IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, 2008

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🔗 El Corte Inglés, Europe’s Biggest Department Store

🔗 Companies 🔗 Brands 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Spain

El Corte Inglés S.A. (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈkoɾte iŋˈɡles]), headquartered in Madrid, is the biggest department store group in Europe and ranks third worldwide. El Corte Inglés is Spain's only remaining department store chain. El Corte Inglés has been a member of the International Association of department stores since 1998.

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🔗 Pyongyang (Restaurant Chain)

🔗 Companies 🔗 Korea 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Korea/North Korea

Pyongyang (Chosongul: 평양관) is a restaurant chain named after the capital of North Korea, with around 130 locations worldwide. The restaurants are owned and operated by the Haedanghwa Group, an organization of the government of North Korea.

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🔗 Culinary Diplomacy

🔗 International relations 🔗 Food and drink

Culinary diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy or food diplomacy is a type of cultural diplomacy, which itself is a subset of public diplomacy. Its basic premise is that "the easiest way to win hearts and minds is through the stomach". Official government-sponsored culinary diplomacy programs have been established in Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, Peru, the United States, Cambodia, Japan, Scandinavia, Australia and Uzbekistan.

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🔗 Slaughterbots

🔗 Film

Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria. The video was released onto YouTube by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, on 12 November 2017. The video quickly went viral, gaining over two million views. The video was also screened to the November 2017 United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting in Geneva.