An innovative study of Wikipedia biographical pages is presented. It is shown that the dates of some historical cataclysms may be reproduced from peculiarities of lifespan changes over time. Time dependence of number of biographical pages related to a year has a broken linear trend in logarithmic scale. It shows a sudden change of the slope from 0.0006 to 0.008 per year near 1700 AC. Presumably...

Several years ago, my buddy Steve died in an avalanche. It was a stormy day and the avalanche danger was high, but Steve and his partners felt that by choosing a familiar route and carefully managing their exposure, they could stay out of trouble. After all, they were experienced backcountry skiers with avalanche training. Steve, the most skilled of the group, had just visited the area less tha...

Antarctica provides an excellent environment to examine the natural and background aerosols in the atmosphere over snow and ice. The Indian efforts (metrological measurements) at Antarctica were initiated with the establishment of the first Antarctic station in Eastern Antarctica during the first Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica (ISEA) in 1981. The detailed and systematic characteriza...

More and more military first-person shooters situate their action in contemporary conflicts, with some claiming to various degrees to realistically depicted that conflict. Using the recently released game Medal of Honor as an example, this paper shows that such realism is made impossible by the presence of three ideological constructs found in military shooters: the FPS apparatus, the military-...

Muslims in France: Identifying a Discriminatory Equilibrium We analyze the assimilation patterns of Muslim immigrants in Western countries with a unique identification strategy. Survey and experimental data collected in France in 2009 reveal that Muslims and rooted French are locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium whereby (i) rooted French exhibit taste-based discrimination against those they are ...

For survival, it is necessary to attend quickly towards dangerous objects, but to turn away from something that is disgusting. We tested whether fear and disgust sounds direct spatial attention differently. Using fMRI, a sound cue (disgust, fear or neutral) was presented to the left or right ear. The cue was followed by a visual target (a small arrow) which was located on the same (valid) or op...

Large fluctuations of conductivity with time are observed in a low-mobility twodimensional electron system in silicon at low electron densities ns and temperatures. A dramatic increase of the noise power (∝ 1/fα) as ns is reduced below a certain density ng, and a sharp jump of α at ns ≈ ng, are attributed to the freezing of the electron glass at ns = ng. The data strongly suggest that glassy dy...