Diplomatic history of World War II

Japan Japan had conquered all of Manchuria and most of China by 1939 in the Second Sino-Japanese War, but the Allies refused to recognize the conquests.  Japan joined the Axis with Germany, but shared little information.  Japan depended on imports from the Allies for 90% of its oil, and the cutoff of oil shipments in mid-1941 left Japan with supplies for only a year or two of serious combat by its warships and warplanes unless it came to terms regarding China, or seized oil fields controlled by Britain and the Netherlands. The latter course meant war, and was urged by army officials who had been bloodied in border conflicts and were reluctant to engage the Soviets. Some admirals and many civilians, including Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, believed that a war with the US would end in defeat. The alternative was loss of honor and power. Diplomats proposed political compromises in the form of the "Amau Doctrine", dubbed the "Japanese Monroe Doctrine" which would have given the Japanese free rein with regard to  China. These proposals were rejected by the US; the Imperial Japanese Army now demanded a military solution.
Imperial conquests
Japan launched its own blitzkriegs in East Asia. In 1937, the Japanese Army invaded and captured most of the coastal Chinese cities such as Shanghai. Japan took over French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), British Malaya (Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore) as well as the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Thailand managed to stay independent by becoming a satellite state of Japan. In December 1941 to May 1942, Japan sank major elements of the American, British and Dutch fleets, captured Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, and reached the borders of India and began bombing Australia. Japan suddenly had achieved its goal of ruling the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

1945

1945 marked the end of World War II and the fall of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. It is also the year concentration camps were liberated and the only year in which atomic weapons have been used in combat.
Events
World War II will be abbreviated as “WWII”
January
January 1 – WWII:
Germany begins Operation Bodenplatte, an attempt by the Luftwaffe to cripple Allied air forces in the Low Countries.
Chenogne massacre: German prisoners are allegedly killed by American forces near the village of Chenogne, Belgium.
January 6 – WWII:  A German offensive recaptures Esztergom, Hungary from the Soviets.
January 9 – WWII: American and Australian troops land at Lingayen Gulf on western coast of the largest Philippine island of Luzon, occupied by Japan since 1942.
January 12 – WWII: The Soviet Union begins the Vistula–Oder Offensive in Eastern Europe, against the German Army.
January 13 – WWII: The Soviet Union begins the East Prussian Offensive, to eliminate German forces in East Prussia.
January 16 – WWII: Adolf Hitler takes residence in the Führerbunker in Berlin.
January 17
WWII: The Soviet Union occupies Warsaw, Poland.
The Holocaust: Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who has saved thousands of Jews, is taken into custody by a Soviet patrol during the Siege of Budapest and is never again seen publicly.


What's the smallest country in North America by landmass?

List of North American countries by area

Below is a list of countries and dependencies in North America by area. The region includes Canada, the Caribbean, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Central America, Greenland, Mexico, and the United States. Canada is the largest country in North America and the Western Hemisphere. Saint Kitts and Nevis is the smallest country in North America overall, while El Salvador is the smallest country on the mainland. Greenland is a dependent territory of Denmark, but would be the third-largest country in the continent.


where was part of the classic surfing movie endless summer filmed

The Endless Summer

Development Brown remembered, "I felt if I could take two years to make a film, maybe I could make something special". To do this, he would need a bigger budget than he had on previous films. To raise the $50,000 budget for The Endless Summer, Brown took the best footage from his four previous films and made Waterlogged. With the money raised from Waterlogged, Brown filmed The Endless Summer, his sixth surf film.
Brown's original concept was for Cape St. Francis to be the main destination, but through the suggestion of a travel agent, during the planning stages of the film, that a round-the-world ticket, would cost $50 cheaper than just a Los Angeles to Cape Town, South Africa round-trip flight. after which Bruce came up with the idea of following the summer season by traveling up and down the world.
Production
The Endless Summer was filmed in:
Southern Hemisphere: South Africa (Cape St. Francis), Australia, New Zealand (Manu Bay), and Tahiti.
Northern Hemisphere: Hawaii, California (Salt Creek Beach, Steamer Lane, Malibu), Senegal, Ghana (Labadi), and Nigeria.
Mike Hynson and Robert August had to pay $1,400 for their own around-the-world tickets, and Brown required a commitment of three months. Production lasted four months.

The Endless Summer

The Endless Summer is a 1966 American surf documentary film directed, produced, edited and narrated by Bruce Brown. The film follows surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August on a surfing trip around the world.  Despite the balmy mediterranean climate of their native California, cold ocean currents make local beaches inhospitable during the winter, without later, modern wetsuits. They travel to the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, Senegal (Dakar), Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa in a quest for new surf spots while introducing locals to the sport along the way.


Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone di Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led a series of successful campaigns across Europe during the Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars from 1796 to 1815. He was the leader of the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then of the French Empire as Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814, and briefly again in 1815.
Born on the island of Corsica to a family of Italian origin, Napoleon moved to mainland France in 1779 and was commissioned as an officer in the French Army in 1785. He supported the French Revolution in 1789, and promoted its cause in Corsica. He rose rapidly in the ranks after breaking the siege of Toulon in 1793 and firing on royalist insurgents in Paris on 13 Vendémiaire in 1795. In 1796, Napoleon commanded a military campaign against the Austrians and their Italian allies in the War of the First Coalition, scoring decisive victories and becoming a national hero. He led an expedition to Egypt and Syria in 1798 which served as a springboard to political power. In November 1799, Napoleon engineered the Coup of 18 Brumaire against the Directory, and became First Consul of the Republic. He won the Battle of Marengo in 1800, which secured French victory in the War of the Second Coalition, and in 1803 sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States, which doubled the latter's area. In December 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, further expanding his power.


Napoleon II

Napoleon II (Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte; 20 March 181122 July 1832) was the disputed Emperor of the French for a few weeks in 1815. He was the son of Emperor Napoleon I and Empress Marie Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria. Napoleon II had been Prince Imperial of France and King of Rome since birth. After the fall of his father, he lived the rest of his life in Vienna and was known in the Austrian court as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt for his adult life (from the German version of his second given name, along with a title his grandfather granted him in 1818).  He was posthumously given the nickname L'Aiglon ("the Eaglet").


Who is the disputed Emperor of the French?

Emperor of the French

Emperor of the French (French: Empereur des Français) was the title of the monarch and supreme ruler of the First and the Second French Empires.
Details
A title and office used by the House of Bonaparte starting when Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor on 18 May 1804 by the Senate and was crowned Emperor of the French on 2 December 1804 at the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, in Paris, with the Crown of Napoleon.


BERT (language model)

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a language model based on the transformer architecture, notable for its dramatic improvement over previous state of the art models. It was introduced in October 2018 by researchers at Google. A 2020 literature survey concluded that "in a little over a year, BERT has become a ubiquitous baseline in Natural Language Processing (NLP) experiments counting over 150 research publications analyzing and improving the model."
BERT was originally implemented in the English language at two model sizes: (1) BERTBASE: 12 encoders with 12 bidirectional self-attention heads totaling 110 million parameters, and (2) BERTLARGE: 24 encoders with 16 bidirectional self-attention heads totaling 340 million parameters. Both models were pre-trained on the Toronto BookCorpus (800M words) and English Wikipedia  (2,500M words).
Design
BERT is an "encoder-only" transformer architecture.

Transformers

In 1986, the cartoon became the film The Transformers: The Movie, which is set in the year 2005. It introduced the Matrix as the "Autobot Matrix of Leadership", as a fatally wounded Prime gives it to Ultra Magnus; however, as Prime dies he drops the matrix, which is then caught by Hot Rod who subsequently becomes Rodimus Prime later on in the film. Unicron, a Transformer who devours planets, fears its power and re-creates a heavily damaged Megatron as Galvatron, as well as Bombshell or Skywarp becoming Cyclonus, Thundercracker becoming Scourge and two other Insecticons becoming Scourge's huntsmen, the Sweeps. Eventually, Rodimus Prime takes out the Matrix and destroys Unicron. In the United Kingdom, the weekly comic book interspliced original material to keep up with U.S. reprints, and The Movie provided much new material. Writer Simon Furman proceeded to expand the continuity with movie spin-offs involving the time travelling Galvatron. The Movie also featured guest voices from Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron, Scatman Crothers as Jazz, Casey Kasem as Cliffjumper, Orson Welles as Unicron and Eric Idle as the leader of the Junkions (Wreck-Gar, though unnamed in the movie). The Transformers theme tune for the film was performed by Lion with "Weird Al" Yankovic adding a song to the soundtrack.


USS Chicago (CA-29)

World War II When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Chicago was at sea with Task Force 12 and the Force immediately began a five-day sweep in the Oahu-Johnston-Palmyra triangle in an effort to intercept the enemy. The Force returned to Pearl Harbor on 12 December; from 14–27 December, Chicago operated with Task Force 11 on patrol and search missions.
On 2 February 1942, Chicago departed Pearl Harbor for Suva, where she joined the newly formed ANZAC Squadron, later redesignated as Task Force 44. During March and April, the cruiser operated off the Louisiade Archipelago, covering the attacks on Lae and Salamaua, New Guinea. In a position to intercept enemy surface units which attempted to attack Port Moresby, Chicago also provided cover for the arrival of American troops on New Caledonia.
On 1 May, Chicago was ordered from Nouméa to join Commander, Southwest Pacific, and on the 4th she supported  in her strike against the Japanese on Tulagi, Solomon Islands during the Battle of the Coral Sea. On 7 May, she proceeded, with the Support Group, to intercept and attack the Japanese Port Moresby invasion group. The following day, the group underwent several Japanese air attacks, during which Chicago suffered several casualties from strafing, but drove off the planes and proceeded ahead until it was clear that the Japanese force had been turned back.

Chiapas conflict

6 July 2003: Violent acts take place during the legislative elections in indigenous regions of Chiapas, principally in San Juan Cancuc, Zinacantán and Chenalhó. At the federal level, the largest rate of absenteeism was registered in the recent history of the country.
September/October 2003: A series of conflicts between members of the Independent Center of Agricultural Workers and Campesinos (CIOAC) and Zapatistas, around the detention of Armín Morales Jiménez by militants of the EZLN for the accused crime of abuse of confidence.
22 January 2004: The houses of the community of Nuevo San Rafael in Montes Azules Reserve were all burned. According to the Secretary of Agrarian Reform (SRA), the inhabitants had voluntarily decided to abandon their homes and return to their places of origin. NGOs accused the SRA of having divided the population so as to force residents to leave the reserve.
10 April 2004: Zapatista supporters from the municipality of Zinacantán were ambushed by members of the PRD, leaving dozens wounded and displacing 125 Zapatista families.
23 April 2004: Noel Pável González, student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National School of Anthropology and History, was found murdered in Mexico City. Elements of the investigation point towards the involvement of the ultra-right group "El Yunque."


X-23

After being found by Kitty, Laura was taken to their base to recover. When Laura wakes up, with her memories now returning, at the former Weapon X facility she immediately tries to escape. Teen Cyclops goes to talk to her, while he's gone Teen Jean mentions to the team that Teen Cyclops "fancies" Laura. As Laura makes it outside she's met by Teen Cyclops, who was waiting for her. Teen Cyclops tries to calm her down but Laura only ceases hostility after getting Teen Cyclops scent and figuring out that Teen Cyclops is who he says he is.
The two talk, with Laura telling him that she does not want to talk about her past or what happened to her. Suddenly Teen Cyclops awkwardly hugs her, when she was distracted and looking sad, because he thought she needed a hug. Laura tells him that she does not do hugs, especially not with an audience as Kitty, Teen Jean, and Teen Beast were watching them. Teen Jean expressed a very conflicted look upon her face due to the hug and having read part of Laura's mind, thus she knows what happened in Avengers Arena. Laura thanks them for helping her and suggests they take the fight to the Purifiers, but in order for her to track them down, they will have to return her to where they found her.

Hug

Etymology The origins of the word are unknown, but two hypotheses exist. The first is that the verb "hug" (first used in the 1560s) could be related to the Old Norse word , which meant to comfort. The second hypothesis is that the word is related to the German word , which means to foster or cherish, and originally meant to enclose with a hedge.
Characteristics
A hug, sometimes in association with a kiss, is a form of nonverbal communication. Depending on culture, context and relationship, a hug can indicate familiarity, love, affection, friendship, brotherhood, flirting or sympathy.
Hugs can indicate support, comfort, and consolation, particularly where words are insufficient. A hug usually demonstrates affection and emotional warmth, sometimes arising from joy or happiness when reunited with someone or seeing someone absent after a long time. A non-reciprocal hug may demonstrate a relational problem.
A hug can range from a brief one-second squeeze, with the arms not fully around the other person, to an extended holding. The length of a hug in any situation is socially and culturally determined. In the case of lovers, and occasionally others, the hips may also be pressed together. The emotionality of the hug can also influence the direction of the hug.
The direction of hugs generally corresponds with handedness, with right-handed people tending to lead with the right hand, but a heightened emotional state makes it slightly more likely for people to lead with the left hand. This small but significant effect has been attributed to right-hemispheric emotional processing.


Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.
Origins
The field overlapped with artificial intelligence since the efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English. Since rule-based approaches were able to make arithmetic (systematic) calculations much faster and more accurately than humans, it was expected that lexicon, morphology, syntax and semantics can be learned using explicit rules, as well. After the failure of rule-based approaches, David Hays coined the term in order to distinguish the field from AI and co-founded both the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) in the 1970s and 1980s. What started as an effort to translate between languages evolved into a much wider field of natural language processing.
Annotated corpora
In order to be able to meticulously study the English language, an annotated text corpus was much  needed. The Penn Treebank was one of the most used corpora. It consisted of IBM computer manuals, transcribed telephone conversations, and other texts, together containing over 4.5 million words of American English, annotated using both  part-of-speech tagging and syntactic bracketing.

Natural Language Toolkit

The Natural Language Toolkit, or more commonly NLTK, is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) for English written in the Python programming language. It supports classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning functionalities. It was developed by Steven Bird and Edward Loper in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is accompanied by a book that explains the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit, plus a cookbook.
NLTK is intended to support research and teaching in NLP or closely related areas, including empirical linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and machine learning.
NLTK has been used successfully as a teaching tool, as an individual study tool, and as a platform for prototyping and building research systems. There are 32 universities in the US and 25 countries using NLTK in their courses.
Library highlights
Discourse representation
Lexical analysis: Word and text tokenizer
n-gram and collocations
Part-of-speech tagger
Tree model and Text chunker for capturing


What is the tallest peak in Warren Range, Antarctica?

Vinson Massif

Mount Vinson is the highest peak in Antarctica, at . It lies in the north part of Vinson Massif's summit plateau in the south portion of the main ridge of the Sentinel Range about  north of Hollister Peak. It was first climbed in 1966 by an American team led by Nicholas Clinch. An expedition in 2001 was the first to climb via the Eastern route, and also took GPS measurements of the height of the peak. As of February 2010, 1,400 climbers have attempted to reach the summit of Mount Vinson. Mount Vinson is ranked 6th by topographic isolation.
Geography
The Vinson Massif extends between Goodge Col and Branscomb Glacier to the northwest, Nimitz Glacier and Gildea Glacier to the southwest and south, and Dater Glacier and its tributary Hinkley Glacier to the east. The southeastern part of the massif ends at Hammer Col, which joins it to the Craddock Massif, of which the highest point is Mount Rutford (). The massif comprises both the high central Vinson Plateau with its few peaks rising to over , and several side ridges mostly trending southwest or northeast from the plateau.
The current height () of Mount Vinson was measured by a GPS survey that was conducted by the 2004 Omega Foundation team comprising Damien Gildea of Australia (leader) and Rodrigo Fica and Camilo Rada of Chile. Since 1998 and continuing through 2007, the Omega Foundation has placed a GPS receiver on the summit for a suitable period of time to obtain accurate satellite readings.


What is the Australian largest holistic magazine?

Magazine

A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combination of the three.
Definition
In the technical sense a journal has continuous pagination throughout a volume. Thus, Bloomberg Businessweek, which starts each issue anew with page one, is a magazine, but the Journal of Business Communication, which continues the same sequence of pagination throughout the coterminous year, is a journal. Some professional or trade publications are also peer-reviewed, for example the Journal of Accountancy.  Non-peer-reviewed academic or professional publications are generally professional magazines. That a publication calls itself a journal does not make it a journal in the technical sense; The Wall Street Journal is actually a newspaper.

The Australian Women's Weekly

The Australian Women's Weekly, sometimes known as simply The Weekly, is an Australian monthly women's magazine published by Are Media in Sydney and founded in 1933. For many years it was the number one magazine in Australia before being outsold by the Australian edition of Better Homes and Gardens in 2014. , The Weekly has overtaken Better Homes and Gardens again, coming out on top as Australia's most read magazine. The magazine invested in the 2020 film I Am Woman about Helen Reddy, singer and feminist icon.
History and profile
The magazine was started in 1933 by Frank Packer and Ted Theodore as a weekly publication. The first editor was George Warnecke and the initial dummy was laid out by William Edwin Pidgeon who went on to do many famous covers over the next 25 years. It was to have two distinctive features; firstly, the newspaper's features would have an element of topicality, and secondly the magazine would appeal to all Australian women, regardless of class, and have a national focus. Wanting it to appeal to a mass audience, Warnecke hoped The Weekly would be a sign that Australia finally was coming out of the Depression. Jean Williamson was hired (moving from the Sydney Morning Herald) where she was surprised to find that she was the editor for "fiction". Soon letters were arriving from women who were obviously lonely and light fiction brought them comfort.


Cleopatra Selene II

Cleopatra Selene II (Greek: Κλεοπάτρα Σελήνη; summer 40 BC –  BC; the numeration is modern) was a Ptolemaic princess, Queen of Numidia (briefly in 25 BC) and Mauretania (25 BC – 5 BC) and Queen of Cyrenaica (34 BC – 30 BC). She was an important royal woman in the early Augustan age.
Cleopatra Selene was the only daughter of Greek Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Roman Triumvir Mark Antony. In the Donations of Antioch and of Alexandria, she was made queen of Cyrenaica and Libya. After Antony and Cleopatra's defeat at Actium and their suicides in Egypt in 30 BC, Selene and her brothers were brought to Rome and placed in the household of Octavian's sister, Octavia the Younger, a former wife of her father.
Selene married Juba II of Numidia and Mauretania. She had great influence in Mauretania's government decisions, especially regarding trade and construction projects. During their reign, the country became extremely wealthy. The couple had a son and successor, Ptolemy of Mauretania. Through their granddaughter Drusilla, the Ptolemaic line intermarried into Roman nobility for many generations.
Early life

Caesarion

Ptolemy XV Caesar (; , ; 23 June 47 BC – 29 August 30 BC), nicknamed Caesarion (, , "Little Caesar"), was the last pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, reigning with his mother Cleopatra VII from 2 September 44 BC until her death by 12 August 30 BC, then as sole ruler until his death was ordered by Octavian (who would become the first Roman emperor as Augustus).
Caesarion was the eldest son of Cleopatra and the only known biological son of Julius Caesar, after whom he was named. He was the last sovereign member of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt.


Twitter

X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media websites and the seventh-most visited website in the world. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in posts (formerly "tweets") and like or repost/retweet other users' content. X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service is that posts are required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017 and removed for paid accounts in 2023. The majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15 percent of all accounts) were not genuine people.


Utrecht (province)

Utrecht (), officially the Province of Utrecht (), is a province of the Netherlands. It is located in the centre of the country, bordering the Eemmeer in the north-east, the province of Gelderland in the east and south-east, the province of South Holland in the west and south-west and the province of North Holland in the north-west and north. The province of Utrecht has a population of about 1,388,000 as of January 2023. With a land area of approximately , it is the second smallest province in the country. Apart from its eponymous capital, major cities and towns in the province are Amersfoort, Houten, IJsselstein, Nieuwegein, Veenendaal and Zeist. The busiest railway station in the Netherlands, Utrecht Centraal, is located in the province of Utrecht.

Randstad

The publication "Randstad 2040", released by the Government of the Netherlands, reveals that the Noordvleugel (Amsterdam and Utrecht region) is already growing parallel to the A1, A2, and A4 motorways, as well as into the northern part of North Holland (Alkmaar and Hoorn region) and Flevoland (Almere and Lelystad region). There is also a trend shown that the Noordvleugel is expanding parallel to the A2 (Amsterdam towards Eindhoven) and A12 (Utrecht towards the WERV region, encompassing the cities of Wageningen, Ede, Rhenen and Veenendaal) motorways. This region is called the Zuidoostflank (English: Southeastside).
Culture
It is sometimes argued that a cultural divide exists between the Randstad and the rest of the country. This distinction is usually made in relation to Dutch politics and media, who according to critics are mostly interested in the affairs of the Randstad. Both branches (government and media) have their centre in the Randstad; respectively in The Hague and in Hilversum. The Randstad itself, however, does not represent a unified cultural zone. It is not a 'place' of residence or a carrier of cultural identity. According to the late influential urbanist Niek de Boer, the Randstad simply 'does not exist'. While the cities and landscapes in the Randstad share some commonalities, there are also large differences originating in centuries of divergent development. There are strong local identities within the region, especially in rural environments.
Politically, the Randstad is broadly right-leaning and conservative, with student cities, including Amsterdam, Utrecht, Haarlem, Leiden and Delft, being more left-leaning and progressive.
The Randstad is home to some of the most reputable universities in Europe, including the University of Amsterdam, the VU Amsterdam, Leiden University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Utrecht University and the Delft University of Technology.


how many blue stripes are on the american flag

Flag of the United States

The national flag of the United States, often referred to as the American flag or the U.S. flag, consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red (top and bottom) alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton, referred to as the union and bearing fifty small, white, five-pointed stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows, where rows of six stars (top and bottom) alternate with rows of five stars. The 50 stars on the flag represent the 50 U.S. states, and the 13 stripes represent the thirteen British colonies that declared independence from Great Britain, which they went on to secure by their victory in the American Revolutionary War.
Nicknames for the flag include the Stars and Stripes, Old Glory, and the Star-Spangled Banner. Credit for the term "Stars and Stripes" has been given to the Marquis de Lafayette, a French soldier who volunteered his aid to the Continental Army, led by George Washington, in the Revolutionary War against Britain.
History
The current design of the U.S. flag is its 27th; the design of the flag has been modified officially 26 times since 1777. The 48-star flag was in effect for 47 years until the 49-star version became official on July 4, 1959. The 50-star flag was ordered by then president Eisenhower on August 21, 1959, and was adopted in July 1960. It is the longest-used version of the U.S. flag and has been in use for over  years.


what must be present for a combustion reaction to occur

Combustion

Combustion of hydrocarbons is thought to be initiated by hydrogen atom abstraction (not proton abstraction) from the fuel to oxygen, to give a hydroperoxide radical (HOO). This reacts further to give hydroperoxides, which break up to give hydroxyl radicals. There are a great variety of these processes that produce fuel radicals and oxidizing radicals. Oxidizing species include singlet oxygen, hydroxyl, monatomic oxygen, and hydroperoxyl. Such intermediates are short-lived and cannot be isolated. However, non-radical intermediates are stable and are produced in incomplete combustion. An example is acetaldehyde produced in the combustion of ethanol. An intermediate in the combustion of carbon and hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, is of special importance because it is a poisonous gas, but also economically useful for the production of syngas.
Solid and heavy liquid fuels also undergo a great number of pyrolysis reactions that give more easily oxidized, gaseous fuels. These reactions are endothermic and require constant energy input from the ongoing combustion reactions. A lack of oxygen or other improperly designed conditions result in these noxious and carcinogenic pyrolysis products being emitted as thick, black smoke.
The rate of combustion is the amount of a material that undergoes combustion over a period of time. It can be expressed in grams per second (g/s) or kilograms per second (kg/s).

Combustion

Complete In complete combustion, the reactant burns in oxygen and produces a limited number of products. When a hydrocarbon burns in oxygen, the reaction will primarily yield carbon dioxide and water. When elements are burned, the products are primarily the most common oxides. Carbon will yield carbon dioxide, sulfur will yield sulfur dioxide, and iron will yield iron(III) oxide. Nitrogen is not considered to be a combustible substance when oxygen is the oxidant. Still, small amounts of various nitrogen oxides (commonly designated  species) form when the air is the oxidative.
Combustion is not necessarily favorable to the maximum degree of oxidation, and it can be temperature-dependent. For example, sulfur trioxide is not produced quantitatively by the combustion of sulfur.  species appear in significant amounts above about , and more is produced at higher temperatures. The amount of  is also a function of oxygen excess.
In most industrial applications and in fires, air is the source of oxygen (). In the air, each mole of oxygen is mixed with approximately  of nitrogen. Nitrogen does not take part in combustion, but at high temperatures, some nitrogen will be converted to  (mostly , with much smaller amounts of ). On the other hand, when there is insufficient oxygen to combust the fuel completely, some fuel carbon is converted to carbon monoxide, and some of the hydrogens remain unreacted. A complete set of equations for the combustion of a hydrocarbon in the air, therefore, requires an additional calculation for the distribution of oxygen between the carbon and hydrogen in the fuel.


bosnia and herzegovina croatia macedonia and slovenia all used to be parts of

List of former sovereign states

Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia (1868–1918) Free State of Fiume (1920–1924)
Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945)
Free Territory of Trieste (1947–1954)
Republic of Ragusa (1358–1808)
Republic of Serbian Krajina (1991–1995)
In Greece:
First Hellenic Republic (1828–1832)
Areopagus of Eastern Continental Greece (1821–1825)
Kingdom of Greece (1832–1924, 1935–1941, 1944–1974)
United States of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864)
Septinsular Republic (1800–1815)
Principality of Samos (1815–1864)
Cretan State (1898–1913)
Free State of Ikaria (1912)
Italian Islands of the Aegean (1912–1945)
In Montenegro:
Prince-Bishopric of Montenegro (1516–1852)
Principality of Montenegro (1852–1910)
Kingdom of Montenegro (1910–1918)
Italian governorate of Montenegro (1941–1943)
German-occupied territory of Montenegro (1943–1944)
In North Macedonia:
Kruševo Republic (1903)
Independent Macedonia (1944) [proposed]
In Serbia:
Revolutionary Serbia (1804–1813)
Principality of Serbia (1815–1882)
Kingdom of Serbia (1882–1918)
State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (1918)
Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1943)
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1943–1992)
(1992–2003)
(2003–2006)
Republic of Kosova (1991–1999)
In Turkey:
Byzantine Empire (395–1453)
Duchy of Athens (1205–1458)
Despotate of Epirus (1356–1479)
Empire of Nicaea (1204–1261)
Ottoman Empire (–1922)
Government of the Grand National Assembly (1920–1923)
Caucasus
Caucasian Albania (2nd century BC–8th century AD)
Kabardia (–)
Circassia (13th century–1864)
Kingdom of Abkhazia (778–1008)
Elisu Sultanate (1604–1844)
Avar Khanate (13th century–1864)
Caucasian Imamate (1828–1859)
Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus (1917–1921)

Partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Background Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a single entity occupying roughly the same territory since the rise of the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia and the subsequent Ottoman conquest of Bosnia between the 1380s and 1590s. The borders of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina were largely set as the borders of the Ottoman-era Eyalet of Bosnia, fixed in the south and west by the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, in the north by the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, and in the east by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.
Although formally under Ottoman sovereignty, Austria-Hungary occupied the territory and created the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 before officially annexing it in 1908. Following World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the territory passed in whole to the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. In 1922, it was internally divided into six oblasts of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
In 1929, the oblasts were replaced with four Banovinas of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but all of them also included regions outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Cvetković–Maček Agreement that created the Banovina of Croatia in 1939 encouraged what was essentially a partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia. The agreement angered Bosniaks, then known as Yugoslav Muslims, including the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (JMO) that denounced the agreement's partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina.


who sings oh what a night late december back in 63

December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)

"December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" is a song originally performed by the Four Seasons, written by original Four Seasons keyboard player Bob Gaudio and his future wife Judy Parker, produced by Gaudio, and included on the group's album Who Loves You (1975).
The song features drummer Gerry Polci on lead vocals, with Frankie Valli, the group's usual lead vocalist, singing the bridge sections and backing vocals and bass player Don Ciccone singing the falsetto part.
Song origins
According to the co-writer and longtime group member Bob Gaudio, the song's lyrics were originally set in 1933 with the title "December 5th, 1933," and celebrated the repeal of Prohibition, but after the band revolted against what Gaudio would admit was a "silly" lyric being paired with an instrumental groove they knew would be a hit, Parker, who had not written a song lyric before by that point, wrote a new set of lyrics. By Gaudio's account, the song was a recollection of his and Parker's first meeting. In real life, Parker and Gaudio had not met until 1973, when both were working as producers for Motown Records. Parker indicated that the lyrics had a more hypothetical origin, as she imagined what a man would react to his first time, while at the same time trying to maintain a degree of innocence upon which the Four Seasons had built their brand.


English Stackexchange

Q: What’s the difference between "tire" and "tyre"? Basically, everything is in the title.
I've seen on the web that tire is US English, while tyre is British English.
But then I asked some British friends graduating in Language and Literature, and they said to me that tyre tends to disappear in England.
Could somebody confirm this for me?

A: Your web research is correct. Your friends may be correct in their social circle, but across the whole of England they are not correct. As a quick check, I looked at UK websites for vehicle servicing:
kwik-fit:

We stock a wide range of tyres

Halfords Autocentres:

Book tyres online with our quick and easy tyre size finder.


Using monolingual data to improve ASR on code-switching languages.

Title: Language Modeling for Code-Switching: Evaluation, Integration of Monolingual Data, and Discriminative Training

Abstract: We focus on the problem of language modeling for code-switched language, in the context of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Language modeling for code-switched language is challenging for (at least) three reasons: (1) lack of available large-scale code-switched data for training; (2) lack of a replicable evaluation setup that is ASR directed yet isolates language modeling performance from the other intricacies of the ASR system; and (3) the reliance on generative modeling. We tackle these three issues: we propose an ASR-motivated evaluation setup which is decoupled from an ASR system and the choice of vocabulary, and provide an evaluation dataset for English-Spanish code-switching. This setup lends itself to a discriminative training approach, which we demonstrate to work better than generative language modeling. Finally, we explore a variety of training protocols and verify the effectiveness of training with large amounts of monolingual data followed by fine-tuning with small amounts of code-switched data, for both the generative and discriminative cases.

Title: Modelling Collective Opinion Formation by Means of Active Brownian Particles

Abstract: The concept of active Brownian particles is used to model a collective opinion formation process. It is assumed that individuals in community create a two-component communication field that influences the change of opinions of other persons and/or can induce their migration. The communication field is described by a reaction-diffusion equation, the opinion change of the individuals is given by a master equation, while the migration is described by a set of Langevin equations, coupled by the communication field. In the mean-field limit holding for fast communication we derive a critical population size, above which the community separates into a majority and a minority with opposite opinions. The existence of external support (e.g. from mass media) changes the ratio between minority and majority, until above a critical external support the supported subpopulation exists always as a majority. Spatial effects lead to two critical ``social'' temperatures, between which the community exists in a metastable state, thus fluctuations below a certain critical wave number may result in a spatial opinion separation. The range of metastability is particularly determined by a parameter characterizing the individual response to the communication field. In our discussion, we draw analogies to phase transitions in physical systems.


Factor VIII

Coagulation factor VIII (Factor VIII, FVIII, also known as anti-hemophilic factor (AHF)) is an essential blood clotting protein. In humans, it is encoded by F8 gene. Defects in this gene result in hemophilia A, an X-linked bleeding disorder.
Factor VIII is produced in the liver's sinusoidal cells and endothelial cells outside the liver throughout the body. This protein circulates in the bloodstream in an inactive form, bound to another molecule called von Willebrand factor, until an injury that damages blood vessels occurs. In response to injury, coagulation factor VIII is activated and separates from von Willebrand factor. The active protein (sometimes written as coagulation factor VIIIa) interacts with another coagulation factor called factor IX. This interaction sets off a chain of additional chemical reactions that form a blood clot.

Coagulation

Contact activation pathway (intrinsic) The contact activation pathway begins with formation of the primary complex on collagen by high-molecular-weight kininogen (HMWK), prekallikrein, and FXII (Hageman factor). Prekallikrein is converted to kallikrein and FXII becomes FXIIa. FXIIa converts FXI into FXIa. Factor XIa activates FIX, which with its co-factor FVIIIa form the tenase complex, which activates FX to FXa. The minor role that the contact activation pathway has in initiating blood clot formation can be illustrated by the fact that individuals with severe deficiencies of FXII, HMWK, and prekallikrein do not have a bleeding disorder. Instead, contact activation system seems to be more involved in inflammation, and innate immunity. Despite this, interference with the pathway may confer protection against thrombosis without a significant bleeding risk.
Final common pathway
The division of coagulation in two pathways is arbitrary, originating from laboratory tests in which clotting times were measured either after the clotting was initiated by glass, the intrinsic pathway; or clotting was initiated by thromboplastin (a mix of tissue factor and phospholipids), the extrinsic pathway.
Further, the final common pathway scheme implies that prothrombin is converted to thrombin only when acted upon by the intrinsic or extrinsic pathways, which is an oversimplification. In fact, thrombin is generated by activated platelets at the initiation of the platelet plug, which in turn promotes more platelet activation.


A metric for diversity in rankings in retrieval

Title: A Ranking Algorithm for Re-finding

Abstract: Re-finding files from a personal computer is a frequent demand to users. When encountered a difficult re-finding task, people may not recall the attributes used by conventional re-finding methods, such as a file's path, file name, keywords etc., the re-finding would fail. We proposed a method to support difficult re-finding tasks. By asking the user a list of questions about the target, such as a document's pages, author numbers, accumulated reading time, last reading location etc. Then use the user's answers to filter out the target. After the user answered a list of questions about the target file, we evaluate the user's familiar degree about the target file based on the answers. We devise a ranking algorithm which sorts the candidates by comparing the user's familiarity degree about the target and the candidates. We also propose a method to generate re-finding tasks artificially based on the user's own document corpus.

Title: Structural Learning of Diverse Ranking

Abstract: Relevance and diversity are both crucial criteria for an effective search system. In this paper, we propose a unified learning framework for simultaneously optimizing both relevance and diversity. Specifically, the problem is formalized as a structural learning framework optimizing Diversity-Correlated Evaluation Measures (DCEM), such as ERR-IA, a-NDCG and NRBP. Within this framework, the discriminant function is defined to be a bi-criteria objective maximizing the sum of the relevance scores and dissimilarities (or diversity) among the documents. Relevance and diversity features are utilized to define the relevance scores and dissimilarities, respectively. Compared with traditional methods, the advantages of our approach lie in that: (1) Directly optimizing DCEM as the loss function is more fundamental for the task; (2) Our framework does not rely on explicit diversity information such as subtopics, thus is more adaptive to real application; (3) The representation of diversity as the feature-based scoring function is more flexible to incorporate rich diversity-based features into the learning framework. Extensive experiments on the public TREC datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art diversification approaches, which validate the above advantages.


Which programming paradigm supposedly eliminates side-effects?

Stackoverflow Stackexchange

Q: I want to call it side-effect programming, but there's gotta be a better term for this What is the name of the following programming paradigm:
Code is executed based on a set of logical tests resolving to true (the clause). The clause is comprised of operators and operands. Each operand is a value/object.
Instead of evaluating the clause explicitly, as is done in imperative languages (e.g., normal flow control like if(){}), the clause is declared and bound to the resulting code. When the clause is satisfied, at any point in the future, the code will execute.
So, it's basically a dependency tree that re-evaluates whether the code should execute whenever a dependency changes state.
E.g.,
when(a && b && c < 3 && d.changes())
{
  runThisCode();
}

I'm looking for a more formal name and definition, and I haven't come up with anything after searching for it. It's somewhere between declarative and imperative, but I've never seen a language or paradigm that lets one do this.
Thanks,
Sean

A: Maybe it is dataflow programming? Or reactive programming?