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Jie people

The Jié (Middle Chinese: ) were members of a tribe of northern China in the fourth century. During the period of the Sixteen Kingdoms, they were regarded by the Han people as one of the Five Barbarians. Under Shi Le and his family, they established the Later Zhao dynasty which dominated northern China for most of its existence from 319 to 351. The Jie ceased to play a role in Chinese history after Ran Min's culling order and the wars that followed the collapse of Later Zhao, although historians believe that certain prominent figures from later periods may have been descendants of the Jie.

Name and origins
There are widely differing accounts of the exact ethnic origins of the Jie, with one theory uncertainly suggesting that they spoke a Yeniseian language, According to Sinologist Mark Edward Lewis, the Jie were of Indo-European origin (probably Iranian). Based on descriptions given by historical records, the Jie were identified by their high noses, full beards and deep eyes.

According to the Book of Wei (6th century AD), the name Jie was derived from the Jiéshì area (羯室, modern Yushe County in Shanxi province), where the Jie resided.

According to the Book of Jin, the ancestors of Shi Le were a part of the multi-ethnic Xiongnu tribe known as Qiāngqú (羌渠). Edwin Pulleyblank believes the Qiangqu represent the Kangju state of Sogdia. Although Pulleyblank suggested that they might have been Tocharian in origin, most scholars believe that Kangju was constituted by an Eastern Iranian people. Some have linked the names Shi (石) and Jie (羯) to a Sogdian statelet known as 石國 Shíguó (literally, "Stone Country", at Chach Zhěshí 赭時, now Tashkent, also meaning "Stone City" in Common Turkic). Also, An Lushan, a Tang rebel general, had a Sogdian stepfather and was called a Jiehu.

The name of the parent house of Turko-Mongol Barlas and Borjigin clans (house of Genghis Khan and Timur) was Kiyat, almost identical to the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the name Jie, /ki̯at/.

Others claim that the Jie were an ancient Yeniseian-speaking tribe related to the Ket people, who today live between the Ob and Yenisey rivers—the character 羯 (jié) is pronounced /kiɛt̚/ in Hokkien, /kʰiːt̚/ or /kiːt̚/ in Cantonese, /ciat̚/ in Hakka and ketsu in Japanese, implying that the ancient pronunciation might have been fairly close to Ket (kʰet). The root may be transliterated as Jié- or Tsze2- and an older form, < kiat, may also be reconstructed. This ethnonym might be cognate with the ethnonyms of Yeniseian-speaking peoples, such as the Ket and the Kott (who spoke the extinct Kott language). Pulleyblank (1962) connected the ethnonym to Proto-Yeniseian *qeˀt/s "stone". Vovin et al. (2016) also pointed to *keˀt "person, human being" as another possible source. Alexander Vovin also suggests that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language, further connecting them with the Jie people.

Among the Yeniseian languages, Jie is hypothesized to be Pumpokolic. Vovin, Vajda, and de la Vaissière have suggested that Jie shares the same idiosyncrasies with the Pumpokol language, and the two are therefore closely related. This argument is strengthened by the fact that in northern Mongolia, Yeniseian-derived hydronyms have been demonstrated to be exclusively Pumpokolic, while influence from other Yeniseian languages is only found further north. This therefore lends credence to the theory that the Jie are a Pumpokolic-speaking tribe, and confirms that the Pumpokolic-speaking Yeniseians existed in the core territory of the Xiongnu state.

Other sources link the Jie to the Lesser Yuezhi (Xiao Yuezhi 小月氏), who remained in China as vassals of the Xiongnu and then the Han dynasty.

Sixteen Kingdoms
Most of what is known about the Jie people comes from the Later Zhao dynasty, one of the Sixteen Kingdoms that existed in the first half of the 4th-century. The earliest recorded Jie was Shi Le, a minor chieftain from Wuxiang County in Shangdang Commandery under the Western Jin dynasty. However, his name was not originally "Shi Le", as it does not appear that the Jie had family names; Instead, his original name was either Bei (㔨) or Fule (匐勒). He became chieftain by succeeding his father Zhouhezhu (周曷朱) and grandfather Yeyiyu (耶奕于) before him. When a famine struck Bing province in 303 or 304, he and many other Jie people became displaced. The Jin provincial inspector, looking to fund his military for an ongoing civil war, had these people captured and sold into slavery.

After attaining his freedom, Shi Le became a bandit and later a rebel leader with his Han Chinese friend, Ji Sang, who gave Shi Le his name. After their rebellion was defeated in 307, Shi Le joined the Xiongnu-led Han-Zhao dynasty, where he quickly rose through the ranks and became a key commander in their war against the Western Jin. He was also effectively a powerful warlord who controlled the eastern parts of the empire and made the city of Xiangguo (襄國, in modern Xingtai, Hebei) his capital. In 319, Shi Le broke away and established the Later Zhao. He conquered his former state in 329, and while some areas in the north remained independent, the Later Zhao became a hegemonic power in northern China, reaching a temporary deadlock with the Eastern Jin and Cheng-Han dynasties in the south.

One of Shi Le's prominent generals was his distant cousin, Shi Hu, who was also his adoptive brother. The Jie, or at least the Shi clan, had an unusual practice of heavily adopting people into their family, regardless of their ethnicity. Many of Shi Le's princes like Shi Kan and Shi Cong were adopted, with the two in particular being from Han Chinese families. After Shi Le died in 333, his biological son, Shi Hong took the thone, but was soon usurped and killed by Shi Hu in 334.

Shi Hu ruled over northern China for roughly 15 years, and records describe him as one of the most brutal tyrants of his period. He shifted the capital to Ye, and much like Shi Le, was strongly invested in Buddhism as he revered the Kuchean monk, Fotu Cheng and promoted religious freedom. His reign was troubled by succession crises, and after his death in 349, his family members engaged in an internecine struggle over the throne. During the course of the conflict, Shi Hu's adopted Han Chinese grandson, Shi Min, was promised the role of Crown Prince, but soon violently took control of the emperor and capital after his promise was reneged upon.

After surviving multiple assassination attempts, Shi Min suspected that he could not trust the Jie and tribespeople in Ye. In 349, he ordered the killing of every Jie and non-Han people, identifying them by their high noses and full beards. Shi Min personally led his soldiers to massacre the tribes in Ye while his generals purged their armies of tribesmen. According to some sources, more than 200,000 of them were slain, but a large portion of them were also Han Chinese who were mistaken due to their facial features. Regardless, the culling order appears to have had an adverse effect on the Jie population. Later that year, Shi Min massacred the Shi clan in Ye, changed his name to Ran Min and proclaimed himself Emperor of (Ran) Wei.

In 351, the final ruler of Later Zhao, Shi Zhi and his family were massacred in Xiangguo, bringing the dynasty to an end. The last member of the Shi clan fled to the Eastern Jin in Jiankang, but was executed upon his arrival. The remaining Jie people eventually became subjects of the Xianbei-led Former Yan, who defeated Ran Min and conquered the Hebei and Shandong regions.

Later history
Hereafter, the Jie people seemingly faded into obscurity. Despite this, there were several figures in later history who may have been of Jie ethnicity. Gai Wu, a rebel during the Northern Wei dynasty, is described in the Book of Qi as a Jiehu (羯胡), although the Book of Wei states that he was a Lushuihu (盧水胡) instead. Both Erzhu Rong and Hou Jing, two famous warlords of the Northern Dynasties, were identified as Qihu (契胡) and Jiehu respectively, and modern scholars have suggested that they could have been be related to the Jie. The Tang dynasty rebel, An Lushan was also called a Jiehu, and according to the unearthed epitaph of Shi Chonggui, the Shi clan of Shatuo origin that ruled the Later Jin (936–947) claimed that they were descendants of Shi Le.

"Two-legged sheep" myth
In modern times, the Jie people have become synonymous with the phrase "two-legged sheep" (两脚羊), a euphemism for cannibalism. This is based on a rumour that the Jie people would often kidnap Han Chinese women, herding and killing them for military ration. Historical records make no mention of this specific practice, and the earliest use of "two-legged sheep" comes from the Song dynasty scholar Zhuang Chuo (莊綽) in his book, "A Compilation of Chicken Ribs" (雞肋編) when describing an anecdote of cannibalism during the fall of Northern Song. Shi Hu's crown prince, Shi Sui (石邃) reportedly killed and ate women for his own amusement, but this is not indicative of the Jie people as a whole. Furthermore, cannibalism was also common practice in China among both Han Chinese and non-Han people during desperate times of war and famines.

title: Jie people


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World line

The world line (or worldline) of an object is the path that an object traces in 4-dimensional spacetime. It is an important concept of modern physics, and particularly theoretical physics.

The concept of a "world line" is distinguished from concepts such as an "orbit" or a "trajectory" (e.g., a planet's orbit in space or the trajectory of a car on a road) by inclusion of the dimension time, and typically encompasses a large area of spacetime wherein paths which are straight perceptually are rendered as curves in spacetime to show their (relatively) more absolute position states—to reveal the nature of special relativity or gravitational interactions.

The idea of world lines was originated by physicists and was pioneered by Hermann Minkowski. The term is now used most often in the context of relativity theories (i.e., special relativity and general relativity).

Usage in physics
A world line of an object (generally approximated as a point in space, e.g., a particle or observer) is the sequence of spacetime events corresponding to the history of the object. A world line is a special type of curve in spacetime. Below an equivalent definition will be explained: A world line is either a time-like or a null curve in spacetime. Each point of a world line is an event that can be labeled with the time and the spatial position of the object at that time.

For example, the orbit of the Earth in space is approximately a circle, a three-dimensional (closed) curve in space: the Earth returns every year to the same point in space relative to the sun. However, it arrives there at a different (later) time. The world line of the Earth is therefore helical in spacetime (a curve in a four-dimensional space) and does not return to the same point.

Spacetime is the collection of events, together with a continuous and smooth coordinate system identifying the events. Each event can be labeled by four numbers: a time coordinate and three space coordinates; thus spacetime is a four-dimensional space. The mathematical term for spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold (a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point). The concept may be applied as well to a higher-dimensional space. For easy visualizations of four dimensions, two space coordinates are often suppressed. An event is then represented by a point in a Minkowski diagram, which is a plane usually plotted with the time coordinate, say $$t$$, vertically, and the space coordinate, say $$x$$, horizontally. As expressed by F.R. Harvey
 * A curve M in [spacetime] is called a worldline of a particle if its tangent is future timelike at each point. The arclength parameter is called proper time and usually denoted τ. The length of M is called the proper time of the particle. If the worldline M is a line segment, then the particle is said to be in free fall.

A world line traces out the path of a single point in spacetime. A world sheet is the analogous two-dimensional surface traced out by a one-dimensional line (like a string) traveling through spacetime. The world sheet of an open string (with loose ends) is a strip; that of a closed string (a loop) resembles a tube.

Once the object is not approximated as a mere point but has extended volume, it traces not a world line but rather a world tube.

World lines as a method of describing events

A one-dimensional line or curve can be represented by the coordinates as a function of one parameter. Each value of the parameter corresponds to a point in spacetime and varying the parameter traces out a line. So in mathematical terms a curve is defined by four coordinate functions $$x^a(\tau),\; a=0,1,2,3$$ (where $$x^{0}$$ usually denotes the time coordinate) depending on one parameter $$\tau$$. A coordinate grid in spacetime is the set of curves one obtains if three out of four coordinate functions are set to a constant.

Sometimes, the term world line is used informally for any curve in spacetime. This terminology causes confusions. More properly, a world line is a curve in spacetime that traces out the (time) history  of a particle, observer or small object. One usually uses the proper time of an object or an observer as the curve parameter $$\tau$$ along the world line.

Trivial examples of spacetime curves
A curve that consists of a horizontal line segment (a line at constant coordinate time), may represent a rod in spacetime and would not be a world line in the proper sense. The parameter simply traces the length of the rod.

A line at constant space coordinate (a vertical line using the convention adopted above) may represent a particle at rest (or a stationary observer). A tilted line represents a particle with a constant coordinate speed (constant change in space coordinate with increasing time coordinate). The more the line is tilted from the vertical, the larger the speed.

Two world lines that start out separately and then intersect, signify a collision or "encounter". Two world lines starting at the same event in spacetime, each following its own path afterwards, may represent e.g. the decay of a particle into two others or the emission of one particle by another.

World lines of a particle and an observer may be interconnected with the world line of a photon (the path of light) and form a diagram depicting the emission of a photon by a particle that is subsequently observed by the observer (or absorbed by another particle).

Tangent vector to a world line: four-velocity
The four coordinate functions $$x^a(\tau),\; a = 0, 1, 2, 3$$ defining a world line, are real number functions of a real variable $$\tau$$ and can simply be differentiated by the usual calculus. Without the existence of a metric (this is important to realize) one can imagine the difference between a point $$p$$ on the curve at the parameter value $$\tau_0$$ and a point on the curve a little (parameter $$\tau_0 + \Delta\tau$$) farther away. In the limit $$\Delta\tau \to 0$$, this difference divided by $$\Delta\tau$$ defines a vector, the tangent vector of the world line at the point $$p$$. It is a four-dimensional vector, defined in the point $$p$$. It is associated with the normal 3-dimensional velocity of the object (but it is not the same) and therefore termed four-velocity $$\vec{v}$$, or in components: $$\vec{v} = \left(v^0, v^1, v^2, v^3\right) = \left( \frac{dx^0}{d\tau}\;,\frac{dx^1}{d\tau}\;, \frac{dx^2}{d\tau}\;, \frac{dx^3}{d\tau} \right)$$

such that the derivatives are taken at the point $$p$$, so at $$\tau = \tau_0$$.

All curves through point p have a tangent vector, not only world lines. The sum of two vectors is again a tangent vector to some other curve and the same holds for multiplying by a scalar. Therefore, all tangent vectors for a point p span a linear space, termed the tangent space at point p. For example, taking a 2-dimensional space, like the (curved) surface of the Earth, its tangent space at a specific point would be the flat approximation of the curved space.

World lines in special relativity
So far a world line (and the concept of tangent vectors) has been described without a means of quantifying the interval between events. The basic mathematics is as follows: The theory of special relativity puts some constraints on possible world lines. In special relativity the description of spacetime is limited to special coordinate systems that do not accelerate (and so do not rotate either), termed inertial coordinate systems. In such coordinate systems, the speed of light is a constant. The structure of spacetime is determined by a bilinear form η, which gives a real number for each pair of events. The bilinear form is sometimes termed a spacetime metric, but since distinct events sometimes result in a zero value, unlike metrics in metric spaces of mathematics, the bilinear form is not a mathematical metric on spacetime.

World lines of freely falling particles/objects are called geodesics. In special relativity these are straight lines in Minkowski space.

Often the time units are chosen such that the speed of light is represented by lines at a fixed angle, usually at 45 degrees, forming a cone with the vertical (time) axis. In general, useful curves in spacetime can be of three types (the other types would be partly one, partly another type):

 * light-like curves, having at each point the speed of light. They form a cone in spacetime, dividing it into two parts. The cone is three-dimensional in spacetime, appears as a line in drawings with two dimensions suppressed, and as a cone in drawings with one spatial dimension suppressed.

 * time-like curves, with a speed less than the speed of light. These curves must fall within a cone defined by light-like curves. In our definition above: world lines are time-like curves in spacetime.
 * space-like curves falling outside the light cone. Such curves may describe, for example, the length of a physical object. The circumference of a cylinder and the length of a rod are space-like curves.

At a given event on a world line, spacetime (Minkowski space) is divided into three parts.

 * The future of the given event is formed by all events that can be reached through time-like curves lying within the future light cone.
 * The past of the given event is formed by all events that can influence the event (that is, that can be connected by world lines within the past light cone to the given event).
 * The lightcone at the given event is formed by all events that can be connected through light rays with the event. When we observe the sky at night, we basically see only the past light cone within the entire spacetime.
 * Elsewhere is the region between the two light cones. Points in an observer's elsewhere are inaccessible to them; only points in the past can send signals to the observer. In ordinary laboratory experience, using common units and methods of measurement, it may seem that we look at the present, but in fact there is always a delay time for light to propagate.  For example, we see the Sun as it was about 8 minutes ago, not as it is "right now".  Unlike the present in Galilean/Newtonian theory, the elsewhere is thick; it is not a 3-dimensional volume but is instead a 4-dimensional spacetime region.
 * Included in "elsewhere" is the simultaneous hyperplane, which is defined for a given observer by a space that is hyperbolic-orthogonal to their world line. It is really three-dimensional, though it would be a 2-plane in the diagram because we had to throw away one dimension to make an intelligible picture. Although the light cones are the same for all observers at a given spacetime event, different observers, with differing velocities but coincident at the event (point) in the spacetime, have world lines that cross each other at an angle determined by their relative velocities, and thus they have different simultaneous hyperplanes.
 * The present often means the single spacetime event being considered.

Simultaneous hyperplane
Since a world line $$ w(\tau) \isin R^4$$ determines a velocity 4-vector $$ v = \frac {dw}{d\tau}$$ that is time-like, the Minkowski form $$ \eta(v,x)$$ determines a linear function $$ R^4 \rarr R$$ by $$ x \mapsto \eta( v, x ) .$$ Let  N be the null space of this linear functional. Then N is called the simultaneous hyperplane with respect to v. The relativity of simultaneity is a statement that N depends on v. Indeed, N is the orthogonal complement of v with respect to η. When two world lines u and w are related by $$ \frac {du}{d\tau} = \frac {dw}{d\tau}, $$ then they share the same simultaneous hyperplane. This hyperplane exists mathematically, but physical relations in relativity involve the movement of information by light. For instance, the traditional electro-static force described by Coulomb's law may be pictured in a simultaneous hyperplane, but relativistic relations of charge and force involve retarded potentials.

World lines in general relativity
The use of world lines in general relativity is basically the same as in special relativity, with the difference that spacetime can be curved. A metric exists and its dynamics are determined by the Einstein field equations and are dependent on the mass-energy distribution in spacetime. Again the metric defines lightlike (null), spacelike, and timelike curves. Also, in general relativity, world lines include timelike curves and null curves in spacetime, where timelike curves fall within the lightcone. However, a lightcone is not necessarily inclined at 45 degrees to the time axis. However, this is an artifact of the chosen coordinate system, and reflects the coordinate freedom (diffeomorphism invariance) of general relativity. Any timelike curve admits a comoving observer whose "time axis" corresponds to that curve, and, since no observer is privileged, we can always find a local coordinate system in which lightcones are inclined at 45 degrees to the time axis. See also for example Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates.

World lines of free-falling particles or objects (such as planets around the Sun or an astronaut in space) are called geodesics.

World lines in quantum field theory
Quantum field theory, the framework in which all of modern particle physics is described, is usually described as a theory of quantized fields. However, although not widely appreciated, it has been known since Feynman that many quantum field theories may equivalently be described in terms of world lines. This preceded much of his work on the formulation which later became more standard. The world line formulation of quantum field theory has proved particularly fruitful for various calculations in gauge theories  and in describing nonlinear effects of electromagnetic fields.

World lines in literature
In 1884 C. H. Hinton wrote an essay "What is the fourth dimension ?", which he published as a scientific romance. He wrote
 * Why, then, should not the four-dimensional beings be ourselves, and our successive states the passing of them through the three-dimensional space to which our consciousness is confined.

A popular description of human world lines was given by J. C. Fields at the University of Toronto in the early days of relativity. As described by Toronto lawyer Norman Robertson:
 * I remember [Fields] lecturing at one of the Saturday evening lectures at the Royal Canadian Institute. It was advertised to be a "Mathematical Fantasy"—and it was! The substance of the exercise was as follows: He postulated that, commencing with his birth, every human being had some kind of spiritual aura with a long filament or thread attached, that traveled behind him throughout his life. He then proceeded in imagination to describe the complicated entanglement every individual became involved in his relationship to other individuals, comparing the simple entanglements of youth to those complicated knots that develop in later life.

Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, describes the worldlines of stars and people:
 * “Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.”

Almost all science-fiction stories which use this concept actively, such as to enable time travel, oversimplify this concept to a one-dimensional timeline to fit a linear structure, which does not fit models of reality. Such time machines are often portrayed as being instantaneous, with its contents departing one time and arriving in another—but at the same literal geographic point in space. This is often carried out without note of a reference frame, or with the implicit assumption that the reference frame is local; as such, this would require either accurate teleportation, as a rotating planet, being under acceleration, is not an inertial frame, or for the time machine to remain in the same place, its contents 'frozen'.

Author Oliver Franklin published a science fiction work in 2008 entitled World Lines in which he related a simplified explanation of the hypothesis for laymen.

In the short story Life-Line, author Robert A. Heinlein describes the world line of a person:

 * He stepped up to one of the reporters. "Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross-section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen-eighties.

 * "Imagine this space-time event that we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end in his mother's womb, and the other at the grave..."

Heinlein's Methuselah's Children uses the term, as does James Blish's The Quincunx of Time (expanded from "Beep").

A visual novel named Steins;Gate, produced by 5pb., tells a story based on the shifting of world lines. Steins;Gate is a part of the "Science Adventure" series. World lines and other physical concepts like the Dirac Sea are also used throughout the series.

Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem involves a long discussion of worldlines over dinner in the midst of a philosophical debate between Platonic realism and nominalism.

Absolute Choice depicts different world lines as a sub-plot and setting device.

A space armada trying to complete a (nearly) closed time-like path as a strategic maneuver forms the backdrop and a main plot device of "Singularity Sky" by Charles Stross.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: World line


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Talk:Desk Set

Untitled
Isis, I feel that you must prove that this film is considered propagandistic via some means. I am a librarian, have seen the film, and did not come away with your views. If you can state that there has some discussion of this, then I won't feel like removing those paragraphs stating the impression of a pro-computer sentiment of this vintage motion picture --Two Halves

 * Do a Google search on the title and 'review' to see some of the pages I based my draft on. They use more modern terms than the word "propaganda," like "product placement," to discuss the effect the film was supposed to have of diffusing anxiety about computers, and if you have a problem with that word, then please change it to something you can live with, but I don't think you can disagree with the librarians and computer folks who wrote those essays explaining what a positive light the film deliberately shed on those occupations. -- isis 07:00 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

With all the recent discussion of the use of copyrighted images in the Wikipedia, I am not sure if the image contained in the article should be continued to be displayed. I would like to get other opinions, however. Please feel free to respond at will. --Two halves 05:40 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

 * I think it's been decided that showing video covers is covered under Fair Use. -- Zoe

2006 - Whoever wrote the section of Katharine and George Cukor must either be pretty clueless or pulling somebody's leg. Cukor was gay - he had absolutely no sexual interest in Katharine - this has been documented in at least two reputable biographies 9 (George Cukor - a double life) but they were very good friends for over 50 years. When Katharine and Spencer met each other it was Cukor who offered Spencer a cottage for rent on his estate - eventually Katharine moved in with Spencer in the 1960's and it was in the cottage that Spencer died.

I find it difficult to see why critics will have a hard time with Bunny's dual behaviors. It's mentioned in the article that it's unrealistic that Bunny Watson is all goo-goo about Mike Cutler while still being incredibly capable. Even some incredibly intelligent women were socialized in those times to believe that marriage (and children) was a vastly preferable existence. Even today, there are plenty of traditionalists who still believe the same thing. Theoriste 01:44, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Filmed in color or colorized?
I just watched this on DVD. My initial guess was that it was filmed in B&W and colorized, but maybe not? Anybody know for sure? -- RoySmith (talk) 20:13, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I've seen an old print in a theater, and this was made in color; it's the first color Tracy/Hepburn film.64.131.229.210 04:21, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

"Views of Desk Set"
Does anyone know who these critics are? This section appears to be unsourced POV, and possibly even original research. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 08:21, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * As a movie, Desk Set has often been criticized, but the critics differ somewhat over whether the main problem was the unbelievable characterizations in the original play or the casting of Tracy and Hepburn in those parts.
 * Yes, that whole section (except for the last sentence, about the Canadian radio program), is really a review of the movie. It appears to be the opinion(s) of the editor(s) who wrote that section, so it clearly is original research.  Which is too bad, because it does make some good points.  6SJ7 (talk) 08:35, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

"transparent alias for NBC"
I doubt that the movie is explicitly referencing NBC, but rather is presenting a generic television network. The fact that they use Rockefeller Center for exteriors would seem to more indicate that Rockefeller Center was a likely-looking building for exteriors, more than anything else. Is there anything in the movie itself or any source that indicates the movie is specifically representing NBC, other than the use of their building?--NapoliRoma (talk) 16:49, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Research Dept at FBC
To me, this looks like a library at UCLA I did some research in. Does anyone know where this was filmed? DFS (talk) 04:59, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Back in those days, interior shots were mostly done on sound stages. However they may have been modeled on an actual UCLA library.   Will Beback    talk    19:55, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Spelling of EMERAC/EMARAC/EMMARAC
There are many variations listed on the web. The stage play script uses EMMARAC but that might have been changed for the movie. The -RAC is consistent, but EME, EMA, and EMMA can all be derived from the supposed full name - "ElectroMagnetic MEmory And" supplies either one or two M's, and an E or an A as the second vowel. 66.76.242.44 (talk) 14:50, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

IBM Sponsored
I am surprised there is no mention at all of this film being sponsored by IBM, it was made to try to put people's minds at ease about their jobs being taken by computers - And knowing that it's very transparent :)

http://thecomputerboys.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ensmenger2010-CB-desk-set.pdf

https://paleofuture.com/blog/2014/3/19/ibm-sponsored-a-major-hollywood-movie-about-computers-in-1957

Lawrie (talk) 01:02, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Desk Set


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Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman (דניאל כהנמן; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best-known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences together with Vernon L. Smith. Kahneman's published empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. Kahneman became known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics."

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, and developed prospect theory. In 2011, Kahneman was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. In 2015, The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Kahneman was professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Kahneman was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was married to cognitive psychologist and Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman, who died in 2018.

Early life
Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, now Israel, on March 5, 1934. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to France in the early 1920s. He spent his childhood years in Paris. Kahneman and his family were in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. His father, Efrayim, was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews, but he was released after six weeks due to the intervention of his employer, La Cagoule backer Eugène Schueller. The family was on the run for the remainder of the war but survived except for Efrayim who died of diabetes in 1944. Kahneman and his family then moved to British Mandatory Palestine in 1948, just before the creation of the state of Israel.

Kahneman wrote of his experience in Nazi-occupied France, explaining in part why he entered the field of psychology: "It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting."

Education and early career
In 1954, Kahneman received his Bachelor of Science degree, with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Kahneman describes as influential in his intellectual development, was Kahneman's chemistry teacher at Beit-Hakerem High School, and Kahneman's physiology professor at university. Kahneman was average in mathematics, but he thrived in psychology. Kahneman was led to psychology when he discovered in his teens that he was more interested in why people believe in God than in whether God exists, and more interested in indignation than in ethics.

In 1954, he began his military service as a second lieutenant, serving for a year in infantry. He then served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces. He developed a structured interview for combat recruits, which remained in use in the IDF for several decades. Kahneman describes his military service as a "very important period" in his life.

In 1958, he went to the United States to study for his PhD in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1961 dissertation, advised by Susan Ervin, examined relations between adjectives in the semantic differential and allowed him to "engage in two of [his] favorite pursuits: the analysis of complex correlational structures and FORTRAN programming".

Cognitive psychology
Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1966. His early work focused on visual perception and attention. From 1965 to 1966, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan, and at the Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge, during the summers of 1968 and 1969. He was a fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies, and a lecturer in cognitive psychology at Harvard University in 1966 to 1967. His work on attention led to a book, Attention and Effort, in which he presented a theory of effort based on studies of pupillary changes during mental tasks. Kahneman also developed rules of counterfactual thinking, and published "Norm Theory" with Dale Miller.

Judgment and decision-making
Kahneman's lengthy collaboration with Amos Tversky began in 1969, after Tversky gave a guest lecture at one of Kahneman's seminars at Hebrew University. Their first jointly written paper, "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers," was published in 1971. They published seven journal articles in the years 1971 to 1979. They flipped a coin to determine whose name would appear first on their initial paper and alternated thereafter. Their article "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" introduced the notion of anchoring. Kahneman and Tversky spent an entire year at an office in the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, writing this paper. They spent more than three years revising an early version of prospect theory that was completed in early 1975. The final version was published in 1979. The pair also teamed with Paul Slovic to edit a compilation entitled "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" (1982) that was a summary of their work and of other recent advances that had influenced their thinking. Kahneman was ultimately awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty". In the introduction of "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Kahneman acknowledges and shares that "our collaboration on judgment and decision making was the reason for the Nobel Prize that I received in 2002, which Amos Tversky would have shared had he not died, aged fifty-nine, in 1996". Kahneman left Hebrew University in 1978 to take a position at the University of British Columbia. In 2021, Kahneman co-authored a book with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, titled Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.

The Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said of Kahneman that: "His central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That's a powerful and important discovery."

Behavioral economics
Kahneman and Tversky both spent the academic year 1977 to 1978 at Stanford University, Kahneman as a fellow at the school's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences interdisciplinary research lab and Tversky with a visiting appointment at the university's psychology department. Richard Thaler was a visiting professor at the Stanford branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research during that same year. According to Kahneman: "We soon became friends, and have ever since had a considerable influence on each other's thinking." Building in part on prospect theory and Kahneman and Tversky's body of work, Thaler published "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice" in 1980, a paper which Kahneman called "the founding text of behavioral economics". Richard Thaler obtained a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to spend the academic year 1984 to 1985 with Kahneman at the University of British Columbia. Together with Kahneman's friend Jack Knetsch they worked on two papers on fairness and on the endowment effect.

From 1979 to 1986, Kahneman published multiple articles and chapters. Kahneman published one chapter during the years 1987 to 1989. A few papers on decision making appeared after that hiatus, notably cumulative prospect theory, and an explanation of risk-taking by unrealistic "bold forecasts", but the focus of Kahneman's research from that time was the study of subjective experience.

Variants of utility
Economists distinguish experienced utility—in the sense of Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism—from decision utility, which is the utility explained by and derived from choices. The experienced utility of an episode is formalized as the temporal integration of momentary utility.

Kahneman further distinguished the expected utility from both remembered and predicted utility. Predicted utility (better known as affective forecasting) is the predicted experienced utility for a future experience. Remembered utility is the evaluation of a past experience. The essential finding of many experiments is that memories of experienced utility are systematically inaccurate. Furthermore, the remembered evaluation of past episodes (remembered utility) is the best predictor of subsequent decision utility.

One of the cognitive biases of remembered utility is called the peak–end rule. It affects how people remember the pleasantness or unpleasantness of experiences. It states that a person's overall impression of past events is determined, for the most part, not by the total pleasure and suffering it contained, but by how it felt at its peak and at its end. For example, the memory of a painful colonoscopy is improved if the examination is extended by three minutes in which the scope is still inside but not moved anymore, resulting in a moderately uncomfortable sensation. This extended colonoscopy, despite involving more pain overall, is remembered less negatively due to the reduced pain at the end. This even increases the likelihood for the patient to return for subsequent procedures.

Happiness and life satisfaction
The analysis of the experienced utility of short episodes readily extends to the broader notion of happiness. This connection led Kahneman, together with Ed Diener and Norbert Schwarz to organize a workshop, which yielded a book that covered a range of topics in hedonic psychology, which they defined as "the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment.

Most studies of well-being use retrospective questions such as "How happy are you these days?". A smaller number of studies use experience sampling, in which people are probed at random times during the day, and asked to rate their experience of the present moment. Much later (source TED talk) Kahneman described this distinction in terms of two selves: the experiencing self, which is aware of pleasure and pain as they are happening, and the remembering self, which shows the aggregate pleasure and pain over an extended period of time.

Kahneman initially believed that the happiness of the experiencing self is the true measure of well-being. Around 2000, he assembled a team consisting of Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone. The mission of the team was to create a measure of experienced happiness that economists could take seriously. As a more practical substitute to the experience sampling techniques of the time, the team developed The Day-Reconstruction Method, in which participants described the day as a sequence of episodes, and rated the experience on several affective dimensions. Kahneman also participated in the formulation of the well-being module of the Gallup World Poll. The effort to measure experienced happiness was only partly successful. Measures of affect are routinely included in well-being questionnaires, but the idea that experienced happiness is the better concept did not hold. Kahneman defined happiness in terms of "what I experience here and now", but says that in reality humans pursue life satisfaction, which "is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks—achieving goals, meeting expectations".

Focusing illusion
With David Schkade, Kahneman developed the notion of the focusing illusion to explain in part the mistakes people make when estimating the effects of different scenarios on their future happiness (also known as affective forecasting, which has been studied extensively by Daniel Gilbert). The "illusion" occurs when people consider the impact of one specific factor on their overall happiness, they tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that would in most cases have a greater impact. In what has been consdered his most famous dictum, Kahneman described the illusion in Thinking, Fast and Slow, writing: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

A good example is provided by Kahneman and Schkade's 1998 paper, "Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction". In that paper, students in the Midwest and in California reported similar levels of life satisfaction, but the Midwesterners thought their Californian peers would be happier. The only distinguishing information the Midwestern students had when making these judgments was the fact that their hypothetical peers lived in California. Thus, they "focused" on this distinction, thereby overestimating the effect of the weather in California on its residents' satisfaction with life.

Teaching
Kahneman taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1970–1978. He then became a professor at the University of British Columbia, leaving in 1986. Next, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1986 to 1994. Thereafter, Kahneman was a senior scholar and faculty member emeritus at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He was also a fellow at Hebrew University and a Gallup Senior Scientist.

Partnership with Amos Tversky
Kahneman and Amos Tversky's collaboration helped launch the field of behavioral economics.

Kahneman and Tversky first crossed paths in the Psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968. In the period between 1971 and 1979 they published work on judgment and decision-making that led to Kahnemann winning the Nobel Prize. During this period they were described as “inseperable” and as “soul mates”.

After leaving Israel in 1978 and accepting positions at different universities, the intensity and exclusivity of their earlier period of joint collaboration was reduced. According to Kahneman the collaboration "tapered off" in the early 1980s, although they tried to revive it, but the period when Kahneman published almost exclusively with Tversky ended in 1983, when he published two papers with Anne Treisman, his wife since 1978. Factors contributing to this estrangement included Tversky receiving most of the external credit for the output of the partnership, and a reduction in the generosity with which Tversky and Kahneman interacted with each other, leading Kahneman to say, “I eventually divorced him”. However, they would continue to publish together until the end of Tversky's life, and worked together on the introduction to an edited collection of papers related to their work during the last six month's of Tversky's life.

Personal life
Kahneman's first wife was Irah Kahneman, an Israeli social researcher, with whom he had two children. They were later divorced. Kahneman's daughter, Lenore Shoham, who works in technology, collaborated with her father on his Nobel lecture. His son, Michael Kahneman, has schizophrenia; Kahneman was quoted as saying that Michael "would have been a very brilliant economist."

His second wife was the cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman, from 1978 until her death in 2018. They lived part-time in Berkeley, California. From 2020, he lived in New York City with Barbara Tversky, the widow of his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky.

Kahneman's paternal uncle was Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva.

In 2015, Kahneman said he had always been "far on the left of the spectrum in Israeli politics". He described himself as a very hard worker, "a worrier" and "not a jolly person", who is "quite capable of great enjoyment, and I've had a great life". Richard Thaler called his close friend an "avid pessimist." Thaler, a self-described optimist stated that he failed to convince Kahneman to spend less time worrying as Kahneman "claimed this was rational because he would not be disappointed as much with the outcomes of life."

Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, three weeks after his 90th birthday. Former colleague and Princeton faculty member, Eldar Shafir said that Kahneman "was a giant in the field" and that "many areas in the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene. He will be greatly missed." Behavioural economist Richard Thaler said Kahneman's work was "one of the most important accomplishments of 20th century science," and added, "It's hard to think of any psychologist whose work has influenced so many different fields." Kahneman and Tversky were “the founders of our field”, said Ulrike Malmendier, a behavioral economist and member of the German official council of economic experts.

Awards and recognition

 * In 1982, he received (joint with Amos Tversky), the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association
 * In 1992, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology
 * In 1995, he was selected for the Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contributions to General Psychology
 * In 1995, he received (joint with Amos Tversky), the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists
 * In 2001, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences
 * In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, despite being a research psychologist, for his work in prospect theory. Kahneman stated he has never taken a single economics course – that everything that he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from their collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.
 * Kahneman, co-recipient with Tversky, earned the 2003 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.
 * In 2004, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
 * In 2005, he received the Decision Analysis Publication Award (for best paper published in 2003) by the Decision Analysis Society
 * In 2006, he received the Kampe de Feriet Award from the Society for Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty
 * In 2006, he received the Thomas Schelling Prize for intellectual contribution to public policy through the Kennedy School for Public Policy, Harvard University
 * In 2006, he received (joint with Amos Tversky) the Frank P. Ramsey Medal of the Decision Analysis Society
 * In 2007, he was presented with the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.
 * In 2008, he received the John McGovern Award Lecture of The American Association for the Advancement of Science
 * In 2008, Kahneman was elected to be a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy
 * In 2010, he received the Tufts University, Leontief Prize
 * In 2011, he became a Distinguished Fellow of The American Economic Association
 * In both 2011 and 2012, he made the Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.
 * On November 9, 2011, he was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 * His book Thinking, Fast and Slow was the winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Current Interest and the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award for the best book published in 2011.
 * In 2012, he was accepted as corresponding academician at the Real Academia Española (Economic and Financial Sciences).
 * In 2013, he received the McGovern Award in Science by the Cosmos Club
 * In 2013, he received the SAGE-CASBS Award for Social Science
 * On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama announced that Daniel Kahneman would be a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
 * In December 2018, Kahneman was named a Gold Medal Honoree by The National Institute of Social Sciences.
 * In 2015, The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.
 * In 2019, Kahneman received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
 * In 2023, he was presented with the Helen Dinerman Award of the World Association for Public Opinion Research

Honorary degrees

 * 2001, University of Pennsylvania
 * 2002, University of Trento
 * 2003, The New School
 * 2003, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 * 2004, Harvard University
 * 2004, The University of East Anglia
 * 2004, University of British Columbia
 * 2005, University of Milan
 * 2006, Université de Paris I
 * 2006, University of Alberta
 * 2007, University of Rome La Sapienza
 * 2009, Erasmus University
 * 2009, Georgetown University
 * 2010, University of Michigan
 * 2011, Carnegie-Mellon University
 * 2013, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
 * 2013, Cambridge University
 * 2014, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 * 2014, Yale University
 * 2015, McGill University
 * 2016, Stellenbosch University
 * 2016, University of Haifa
 * 2021, HEC Paris
 * 2023, York University

Notable contributions

 * Anchoring-and-adjusting
 * Attribute substitution
 * Availability heuristic
 * Base rate fallacy
 * Cognitive bias
 * Conjunction fallacy
 * Dictator game
 * Framing (social sciences)
 * Loss aversion
 * Optimism bias
 * Peak–end rule
 * Planning fallacy
 * Prospect theory
 * Cumulative prospect theory
 * Reference class forecasting
 * Representativeness heuristic
 * Simulation heuristic
 * Status quo bias

Books

 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)
 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)
 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)
 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)
 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)
 * (Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, pp. 40–44)

title: Daniel Kahneman


text:
Amos Tversky

Amos Nathan Tversky (עמוס טברסקי; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk.

Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a three-volume treatise, Foundations of Measurement. His early work with Daniel Kahneman focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment; later they worked together to develop prospect theory, which aims to explain irrational human economic choices and is considered one of the seminal works of behavioral economics.

Six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work he did in collaboration with Amos Tversky. While Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, Kahneman has commented that he feels "it is a joint prize. We were twinned for more than a decade."

Tversky also collaborated with many leading researchers including Thomas Gilovich, Itamar Simonson, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tversky as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with Edwin Boring, John Dewey, and Wilhelm Wundt.

Early life and education
Tversky was born in Haifa, British Palestine (now Israel), as son of the Polish-born veterinarian Yosef Tversky and Lithuanian Jewish Jenia Tversky (née Ginzburg), a social worker who later became a member of the Knesset representing the Mapai (Workers' Party). Tversky had one sister, Ruth, thirteen years his senior.

Tversky's mother has said he was self-taught in many areas, including mathematics. In high school, Tversky took classes from literary critic Baruch Kurzweil, and befriended classmate Dahlia Ravikovich, who would become an award-winning poet.

Tversky received his bachelor's degree from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel in 1961, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1965. He had already developed a clear vision of researching judgement.

Military service and career
During this time he was also a member and leader in Nahal, an Israel Defense Forces program that combined compulsory military service with the establishment of agricultural settlements.

Tversky served with distinction in the Israel Defense Forces as a paratrooper, rising to the rank of captain and being decorated for bravery. He parachuted in combat zones during the Suez Crisis in 1956, commanded an infantry unit during the Six-Day War in 1967, and served in a psychology field-unit during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Academic roles
After his doctorate, Tversky taught at Hebrew University. He then joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1978, where he spent the rest of his career.

Work with Daniel Kahneman
Amos Tversky's most influential work was done with his longtime collaborator, Daniel Kahneman, in a partnership that began in the late 1960s. Their work explored the biases and failures in rationality continually exhibited in human decision-making. Starting with their first paper together, "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers", Kahneman and Tversky laid out eleven "cognitive illusions" that affect human judgment, frequently using small-scale empirical experiments that demonstrate how subjects make irrational decisions under uncertain conditions. (They introduced the notion of cognitive bias in 1972. ) This work was highly influential in the field of economics, which had largely presumed rationality of all actors.

According to Kahneman the collaboration 'tapered off' in the early 1980s, although they tried to revive it. Factors included Tversky receiving most of the external credit for the output of the partnership, and a reduction in the generosity with which Tversky and Kahneman interacted with each other.

Comparative ignorance
Tversky and Fox (1995) addressed ambiguity aversion, the idea that people do not like ambiguous gambles or choices with ambiguity, with the comparative ignorance framework. Their idea was that people are only ambiguity averse when their attention is specifically brought to the ambiguity by comparing an ambiguous option to an unambiguous option. For instance, people are willing to bet more on choosing a correct colored ball from an urn containing equal proportions of black and red balls than an urn with unknown proportions of balls when evaluating both of these urns at the same time. However, when evaluating them separately, people are willing to bet approximately the same amount on either urn. Thus, when it is possible to compare the ambiguous gamble to an unambiguous gamble people are averse — but not when one is ignorant of this comparison.

Notable contributions

 * foundations of measurement
 * anchoring and adjustment
 * availability heuristic
 * base rate fallacy
 * conjunction fallacy
 * framing
 * behavioral finance
 * clustering illusion
 * loss aversion
 * prospect theory
 * cumulative prospect theory
 * representativeness heuristic
 * Tversky index
 * support theory
 * contrast model
 * feature matching account of similarity

Approach to research
Kahneman said that Tversky "had simply perfect taste in choosing problems, and he never wasted much time on anything that was not destined to matter. He also had an unfailing compass that always kept him going forward.

Tversky's 1974 Science article with Kahneman on cognitive illusions triggered a "cascade of related research," Science News wrote in a 1994 article tracing the recent history of research on reasoning. Decision theorists in economics, business, philosophy and medicine as well as psychologists cited their work.

Recognition
In 1980, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1984 he was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1985 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Tversky, as a co-recipient with Daniel Kahneman, earned the 2003 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.

After Tversky's death, Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the work he did in collaboration with Tversky. Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Personality and characteristics
Kahneman has said "Amos was the freest person I have known, and he was able to be free because he was also one of the most disciplined."

Persi Diaconis, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, has said "You were happy being in his presence. There was a light shining out of him."

Gerhard Casper, President of Stanford University, said Tversky "maintained the highest standards of professional ethics", and "His dedication to Stanford and its institutions of faculty governance was exemplary."

Whilst being very collaborative, Tversky also had a lifelong habit of working alone at night while others slept.

In intellectual debate Tversky "wanted to crush the opposition".

Tversky believed that humans live under uncertainty, in a probabilistic universe.

Personal life
In 1963, Tversky married American psychologist Barbara Gans, who later became a professor in the human-development department at Teachers College, Columbia University. They had three children together.

He died of a metastatic melanoma in 1996.

He was a Jewish atheist.

Tversky intelligence test
As recounted by Malcolm Gladwell in 2013's David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Tversky's peers thought so highly of him that they devised a tongue-in-cheek one-part test for measuring intelligence. As related to Gladwell by psychologist Adam Alter, the Tversky intelligence test was "The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were."

The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, released in 2016, is about Tversky's personal and professional relationship with Daniel Kahneman.

title: Amos Tversky


text:
Ron Dembo

Ron Samuel Dembo is an academic and entrepreneur.

Academia
From 1976 to 1986, Dembo served as a professor at Yale University. During this time, he held joint appointments in both the Department of Computer Science and the School of Management. He co-authored three Technical Reports at Yale's Dept. of Computer Science in 1984. Additionally, he served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The online faculty listings at Yale's and MIT's Computer Science and Management Dept.'s do not reflect Mr. Dembo's employment there at this time.

Dembo's scholarly contributions encompass a diverse range of subjects, including finance and mathematical optimization. He is listed as inventor for patents in fields such as computational finance, climate change, and software engineering.

Entrepreneurship
Dembo was founder and CEO of Algorithmics Incorporated. Algorithmics was sold to Fitch in 2005 and later to IBM in 2012. It has since been acquired by SS&C.

In 2005, Dembo founded Zerofootprint Software, a Toronto-based, cleantech software and services company. In the same year, he founded the non-profit Zerofootprint Foundation which won gold in the Climate Change category at the Canadian Environment Awards in 2008. In 2009, Dembo also established the ZERO prize, a one million dollar prize for a design to retrofit a concrete building built between 1945 and 1990.

He currently sits on a number of boards and is a member of the Climate Change Adaptation Advisory Committee Canada and was appointed to the Steering Committee of the World Urban Campaign, coordinated by UN-Habitat.

Awards and Honors
In May 2007, Dembo was made a lifetime Fields Institute Fellow. This fellowship is awarded to "individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the Fields Institute," its programs, and to the Canadian mathematical community. Dembo's alma mater, the University of Waterloo, honored Dembo with a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Medal for Professional Achievement in business and climate change, 2007.

In 2008, he received a Green Toronto Award from the City of Toronto for his work with Zerofootprint, as well as a Certificate of Recognition, Champion of Green from the Government of Ontario.

In 2009 and 2010, Dembo participated in the Steering Committee of the World Urban Campaign, as coordinated by UN Habitat, in Barcelona, Paris and Rio de Janeiro. As of 2022, Partners may nominate themselves for positions on the Steering Committee and Committee membership is subject to a vote. In 2024, Zerofootprint remains a Partner in the Business and Industries Constituency of the World Urban Campaign by UN Habitat.

Books
Dembo is the author of three books: Seeing Tomorrow: Rewriting the Rules of Risk, co-authored with Andrew Freeman, published in April 1998; Upside Downside: Simple Rules of Risk Management for the Smart Investor, co-authored with Daniel Stoffman, published in March 2006; and Everything You Wanted to Know About Offsetting But Were Afraid to Ask, co-authored with Clive Davidson and released in May 2007. His latest book, Risk Thinking, was published in 2021 (ISBN 978-1665707008).

title: Ron Dembo


text:
Duchy of Anhalt

The Duchy of Anhalt (Herzogtum Anhalt) was a historical German duchy. The duchy was located between the Harz Mountains in the west and the River Elbe and beyond to the Fläming Heath in the east. The territory was once ruled by the House of Ascania, and is now part of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt.

History
Anhalt's origins lie in the Principality of Anhalt, a state of the Holy Roman Empire.

Dukes of Anhalt
During the 9th century, most of Anhalt was part of the Duchy of Saxony. In the 12th century, it came under the rule of Albert the Bear, margrave of Brandenburg. Albert was descended from Albert, count of Ballenstedt, whose son Esico (died 1059 or 1060) appears to have been the first to bear the title of count of Anhalt. Esico's grandson, Otto the Rich, count of Ballenstedt, was the father of Albert the Bear, who united Anhalt with the Margraviate of Brandenburg (March of Brandenburg). When Albert died in 1170, his son Bernard, who received the title of duke of Saxony in 1180, became count of Anhalt. Bernard died in 1212, and Anhalt, separated from Saxony, passed to his son Henry I, who in 1218 took the title of prince and was the real founder of the house of Anhalt.

Princes of Anhalt
Over the next six hundred years multiple divisions of the Anhalt principality took place as younger sons were granted appanages and founded lines of their own. These divisions included:
 * Anhalt-Bernburg 1252–1468, 1603–1863
 * Anhalt-Dessau 1396–1561, 1603–1863
 * Anhalt-Köthen 1396–1562, 1603–1853
 * Anhalt-Plötzkau 1544–1553, 1603–1665
 * Anhalt-Zerbst 1252–1396, 1544–1796

19th century duchies
In 1806, Napoleon elevated the remaining states of Anhalt-Bernburg, Anhalt-Dessau and Anhalt-Köthen to duchies (Anhalt-Plötzkau and Anhalt-Zerbst had ceased to exist in the meantime). These duchies were united in 1863 to form a united Anhalt again due to the extinction of the Köthen and Bernburg lines. The new duchy consisted of two large portions – Eastern and Western Anhalt, separated by the interposition of a part of the Prussian Province of Saxony – and of five enclaves surrounded by Prussian territory: Alsleben, Muhlingen, Dornburg, Gödnitz and Tilkerode-Abberode. The eastern and larger portion of the duchy was enclosed by the Prussian government district of Potsdam (in the Prussian Province of Brandenburg), Province of Magdeburg and Merseburg (belonging to the Prussian Province of Saxony). The western or smaller portion (the so-called Upper Duchy or Ballenstedt) was also enclosed by the two latter districts and by the Duchy of Brunswick.

The capital of Anhalt (at the times when it was a united state) was Dessau.

In 1918, Anhalt became a state within the Weimar Republic (see Free State of Anhalt). After World War II it was united with the Prussian parts of Saxony in order to form the new state of Saxony-Anhalt. Having been dissolved in 1952, the state was reestablished prior to the German reunification and is now part of the Bundesland Saxony-Anhalt in Germany.

Constitution
The duchy, by virtue of a fundamental law, proclaimed on September 17, 1859 and subsequently modified by various decrees, was a constitutional monarchy. The duke, who was addressed as "Highness," wielded the executive power while sharing the legislation with the estates. The diet (Landtag) was composed of thirty-six members, of whom two were appointed by the duke, eight were representatives of landowners paying the highest taxes, two of the highest assessed members of the commercial and manufacturing classes, fourteen of the other electors of the towns and ten of the rural districts. The representatives were chosen for six years by indirect vote and must have completed their twenty-fifth year. The duke governed through a minister of state, who was the praeses of all the departments—finance, home affairs, education, public worship and statistics.

Geography
In the west, the land is undulating and in the extreme southwest, where it forms part of the Harz range, mountainous, the Ramberg peak being the tallest at 1900 ft (579 m). From the Harz, the country gently slopes down to the Saale; between this river and the Elbe is fertile country. East of the Elbe, the land is mostly a flat sandy plain, with extensive pine forests, interspersed with bog-land and rich pastures. The Elbe is the chief river, intersecting the eastern portion of the former duchy, from east to west, and at Rosslau is met by the Mulde. The navigable Saale takes a northerly direction through the western portion of the eastern part of the territory and receives, on the right, the Fuhne and, on the left, the Wipper and the Bode.

The climate is generally mild, less so in the higher regions to the south-west. The area of the former duchy is 906 sqmi. The population was 203,354 in 1871 and 328,007 in 1905.

The country was divided into the districts of Dessau, Köthen, Zerbst, Bernburg and Ballenstedt with Bernburg being the most, and Ballenstedt the least. Four towns, namely Dessau, Bernburg, Köthen and Zerbst, had populations exceeding 20,000. The inhabitants of the former duchy, who were primarily upper Saxons, belonged, with the exception of about 12,000 Roman Catholics and 1700 Jews, to the Evangelical Church. The supreme ecclesiastical authority was the consistory in Dessau; while a synod of 39 members, elected for six years, assembled at periods to deliberate on internal matters touching the organization of Church of Anhalt. The Roman Catholics were under the Bishop of Paderborn.

Rulers of Anhalt, Middle Ages

 * Esico ?–1059/1060, first Count of Anhalt
 * Otto the Rich, Count of Ballenstedt
 * Albert the Bear ?–1170
 * Bernard ?–1212
 * Henry I 1212–1252

Dukes of Anhalt, 1863–1918

 * Leopold IV 1863–1871
 * Friedrich I 1871–1904
 * Friedrich II 1904–1918
 * Eduard 1918
 * Joachim Ernst 1918

title: Duchy of Anhalt


text:
Talk:2004 United States presidential election

Demographics section addition
Hello, all. I'm interested in adding demographics information to this election page. To specify, demographics on voter turnout regarding things like gender, age, income, race, etc. I have found a credible source, and was thinking of making fancy pie-charts to add somewhere in the results section. Please let me know if there is any feedback.

All the best. -- 7partparadigm talk 06:02, 1 December, 2013 (UTC)

"First 21st century president to win re-election" worth including?
I don't know if it's worth noting that this election made Bush the first 21st century president to win re-election, as he also was the first 21st century president in general, unless you count the year in which Clinton was president, in which case this statement becomes false. Either way, I'm of the view that it should be removed. Builder018 (talk) 02:26, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

I agree. I've removed the sentence. marbeh raglaim (talk) 05:22, 8 July 2022 (UTC)


text:
Crossing number

Crossing number may refer to:

 * Crossing number (knot theory) of a knot is the minimal number of crossings in any knot diagram for the knot.
 * The average crossing number is a variant of crossing number obtained from a three-dimensional embedding of a knot by averaging over all two-dimensional projections.
 * The link crossing number is the sum of positive and negative crossings
 * Crossing number (graph theory) of a graph is the minimal number of edge intersections in any planar representation of the graph.

title: Crossing number


text:
User:Bagpuss

Hello everyone, my name's Richard. I was born in Bury St. Edmunds, though I have lived in Guisborough since I was about one. I did a degree in mathematics at the University of Leeds and now I'm studying for a Master's in the same at McMaster University, which is in Hamilton, Ontario

For those wondering about my nickname, Bagpuss was one of my favourite TV shows when I was younger After a while I graduated onto Doctor Who  These days I tend to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scrubs and The Simpsons, though when I'm back home there's a lot of other series I enjoy  So, here's the Bagpuss list of the best of British (hey, it gives me quick links if I want to write about them):
 * Have I Got News for You
 * The League of Gentlemen
 * Spaced
 * Robot Wars
 * Never Mind the Buzzcocks

Ah, what the heck, some good old series as well:

 * Red Dwarf
 * Blackadder
 * Steptoe and Son
 * Fawlty Towers
 * Maid Marian and Her Merry Men

Well I've been having a fun time. I haven't quite been in an edit war, but rather an argument over what to call the article on footie. I came late to the debate and my chosen title "Association football" had already been discounted. Unfortunate that.

title: User:Bagpuss