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🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Documentary films 🔗 Film/British cinema

The Up series of documentary films follows the lives of ten males and four females in England beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old. The first film was titled Seven Up!, with later films adjusting the number in the title to match the age of the subjects at the time of filming. The documentary has had nine episodes—one every seven years—thus spanning 56 years. The series has been produced by Granada Television for ITV, which has broadcast all of them except 42 Up (1998), which was broadcast on BBC One. Individual films and the series as a whole have received numerous accolades; in 1991, the then-latest instalment, 28 Up, was chosen for Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films of all time.

The children were selected for the original programme to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the expectation that each child's social class would determine their future. The first instalment was made as a one-off edition of Granada Television's series, World in Action, directed by Canadian Paul Almond, with involvement by "a fresh-faced young researcher, a middle-class Cambridge graduate", Michael Apted, whose role in the initial programme included "trawling the nation's schools for 14 suitable subjects". About the first programme, Apted has said:

It was Paul's film ... but he was more interested in making a beautiful film about being seven, whereas I wanted to make a nasty piece of work about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.

After Almond's direction of the original programme, director Michael Apted continued the series with new instalments every seven years, filming material from those of the fourteen who chose to participate. The aim of the continuing series is stated at the beginning of 7 Up as: "Why did we bring these together? Because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old." The most recent instalment, the ninth, titled 63 Up, premiered in the UK on ITV in 2019. A special episode featuring celebrity fans of the series, 7 Up & Me, also aired on ITV in 2019. Apted is reported to have said, "I hope to do 84 Up when I'll be 99"; however, he died in 2021.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Christianity/Calvinism

The Protestant work ethic, also known as the Calvinist work ethic or the Puritan work ethic, is a work ethic concept in scholarly sociology, economics and historiography. It emphasizes that diligence, discipline, and frugality are a result of a person's subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism.

The phrase was initially coined in 1905 by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber asserted that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of capitalism. It is one of the most influential and cited books in sociology, although the thesis presented has been controversial since its release. In opposition to Weber, historians such as Fernand Braudel and Hugh Trevor-Roper assert that the Protestant work ethic did not create capitalism and that capitalism developed in pre-Reformation Catholic communities. Just as priests and caring professionals are deemed to have a vocation (or "calling" from God) for their work, according to the Protestant work ethic the "lowly" workman also has a noble vocation which he can fulfill through dedication to his work.

The concept is often credited with helping to define the societies of Northern, Central and Northwestern Europe as well as the United States of America.

🔗 History 🔗 France 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Dance

The Dancing Plague of 1518, or Dance Epidemic of 1518, was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the empirical rule, is a shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within an interval estimate in a normal distribution: 68%, 95%, and 99.7% of the values lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean, respectively.

In mathematical notation, these facts can be expressed as follows, where Pr() is the probability function, Χ is an observation from a normally distributed random variable, μ (mu) is the mean of the distribution, and σ (sigma) is its standard deviation:

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\Pr(\mu -1\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +1\sigma )&\approx 68.27\%\\\Pr(\mu -2\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +2\sigma )&\approx 95.45\%\\\Pr(\mu -3\sigma \leq X\leq \mu +3\sigma )&\approx 99.73\%\end{aligned}}}$

The usefulness of this heuristic especially depends on the question under consideration.

In the empirical sciences, the so-called three-sigma rule of thumb (or 3σ rule) expresses a conventional heuristic that nearly all values are taken to lie within three standard deviations of the mean, and thus it is empirically useful to treat 99.7% probability as near certainty.

In the social sciences, a result may be considered "significant" if its confidence level is of the order of a two-sigma effect (95%), while in particle physics, there is a convention of a five-sigma effect (99.99994% confidence) being required to qualify as a discovery.

A weaker three-sigma rule can be derived from Chebyshev's inequality, stating that even for non-normally distributed variables, at least 88.8% of cases should fall within properly calculated three-sigma intervals. For unimodal distributions, the probability of being within the interval is at least 95% by the Vysochanskij–Petunin inequality. There may be certain assumptions for a distribution that force this probability to be at least 98%.

🔗 Film 🔗 Television 🔗 Novels 🔗 Screenwriters

In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for film, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, and later extended to a similar device in other fiction.

The MacGuffin technique is common in films, especially thrillers. Usually, the MacGuffin is revealed in the first act, and thereafter declines in importance. It can reappear at the climax of the story but may actually be forgotten by the end of the story. Multiple MacGuffins are sometimes derisively identified as plot coupons.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Energy 🔗 Africa/Djibouti 🔗 Yemen

The Red Sea dam is a speculative macro-engineering proposal put forward in 2007 by a group of scientists and engineers. Although the authors' intentions are to explore "the ethical and environmental dilemmas and some of the political implications of macro-engineering", the proposal has attracted both criticism and ridicule.

🔗 Amateur radio

A QSL card is a written confirmation of either a two-way radiocommunication between two amateur radio or citizens band stations; a one-way reception of a signal from an AM radio, FM radio, television or shortwave broadcasting station; or the reception of a two-way radiocommunication by a third party listener. A typical QSL card is the same size and made from the same material as a typical postcard, and most are sent through the mail as such.

QSL card derived its name from the Q code "QSL". A Q code message can stand for a statement or a question (when the code is followed by a question mark). In this case, 'QSL?' (note the question mark) means "Do you confirm receipt of my transmission?" while 'QSL' (without a question mark) means "I confirm receipt of your transmission."

🔗 United States 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Politics/Gun politics

"'No Way to Prevent This', Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is the title of a series of articles perennially published by the American news satire organization The Onion satirizing the frequency of mass shootings in the United States and the lack of action taken in the wake of such incidents.

Each article is about 200 words long, detailing the location of the shooting and the number of victims, but otherwise remaining essentially the same. A fictitious resident—usually of a state in which the shooting did not take place—is quoted as saying that the shooting was "a terrible tragedy", but "there's nothing anyone can do to stop them." The article ends by pointing out that the United States is the "only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years," and that Americans view themselves and the situation as "helpless".

🔗 Australia 🔗 Languages 🔗 Australia/Indigenous peoples of Australia

Avoidance speech is a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a special restricted speech style must be used in the presence of or in reference to certain relatives. Avoidance speech is found in many Australian Aboriginal languages and Austronesian languages as well as some North American languages, Highland East Cushitic languages and Southern Bantu languages. Chinese naming taboo prohibits speaking and writing syllables or characters that appear in the names of esteemed people, such as emperors, parents, and ancestors.

Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than in normal speech since the styles are only used for limited communication.

🔗 Biography

Frank Rosenblatt (July 11, 1928 – July 11, 1971) was an American psychologist notable in the field of artificial intelligence. He is sometimes called the father of deep learning for his pioneering work on neural networks.