March 25, 2011
Holi [hoh-lee] is a spring religious festival celebrated by Hindus. It is primarily observed in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and countries with large Indic diaspora populations, such as Suriname, Malaysia, Guyana, South Africa, Trinidad, United Kingdom, United States, Mauritius, and Fiji.
The main day, Holi, is celebrated by people throwing colored powder and colored water at each other. Bonfires are lit the on the eve of the festival in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad accomplished when Demoness Holika carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt but Prahlad, a staunch devotee of god Vishnu, escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion.
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March 25, 2011
The Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward, a series of reforms in China from 1958 to 1962. The pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The masses of China were mobilized to eradicate the birds, and citizens took to banging pots and pans or beating drums to scare the birds from landing, forcing them to fly until they fell from the sky in exhaustion. Nests were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings were killed, resulting in the near-extinction of the birds in China. Non-material rewards and recognition were offered to schools, work units and government agencies in accordance with the volume of pests they had killed.
By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate more insects than grains. Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bedbugs in the ongoing campaign against the Four Pests. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine in which upwards of 30 million people died of starvation.
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March 25, 2011
Grisaille [gri-zahy] is a term for painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome, usually in shades of grey. It is particularly used in large decorative schemes in imitation of sculpture. Paintings executed in brown are sometimes referred to by the more specific term brunaille, and paintings executed in green are sometimes called verdaille.
A grisaille may be executed for its own sake, as underpainting for an oil painting (in preparation for glazing layers of color over it), or as a model for an engraver to work from. Full coloring of a subject makes many more demands of an artist, and working in grisaille was often chosen as being quicker and cheaper, although the effect was sometimes deliberately chosen for aesthetic reasons.
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March 25, 2011
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives. Little is known of his life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch produced several triptychs, panel paintings which are divided into three sections, which are hinged together and folded.
Among his most famous is ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ which depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel. When the exterior panels are closed the viewer can see, painted in grisaille (shades of grey), God creating the Earth.
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March 25, 2011
Joe Coleman (born November 22, 1955) is an American painter, illustrator and performance artist. He is best known for intricately detailed portraits of subjects both famous and infamous: artists, outlaws, serial killers, movies stars, friends, and family. He paints with a single-hair brush and uses a jewelers loupe; much of the detail is not visible to the naked eye.
The majority of his portraits portray the central subject in the center of the canvas, while biographical scenes and details from the subject’s life ring the central image. His work draws as much from Coleman’s beginnings as a comic book artist as from historical precedents. His paintings are most often compared to those of Hieronymus Bosch, and his work has been exhibited alongside canvases by the Dutch master.
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March 25, 2011
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been set for Dunbar’s number; it has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.
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March 25, 2011
The Dilbert Principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by ‘Dilbert cartoonist’ Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing. In the ‘Dilbert’ strip of February 5, 1995 Dogbert says that ‘leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.’ Adams expanded on the idea in a satirical 1996 book of the same name, which is required reading at some management and business programs.
The Dilbert principle is comparable to the Peter Principle (in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence). It assumes that people are promoted because they are competent, and that the tasks higher up in the hierarchy require skills or talents they do not possess. It concludes that due to this, a competent employee will eventually be promoted to, and remain at, a position at which he or she is incompetent. The Dilbert principle, by contrast, assumes that the upper echelons of an organization have little relevance to its actual production, and that the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder.
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March 25, 2011
The Peter Principle: ‘In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.’
It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of the same name. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently.Therefore, sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their ‘level of incompetence’), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.
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March 25, 2011
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.
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March 25, 2011
Depressive realism is the proposition that people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality, specifically that they are less affected by positive illusions of illusory superiority, the illusion of control, and optimism bias.
The concept refers to people with borderline or moderate depression, suggesting that while non-depressed people see things in an overly positive light and severely depressed people see things in overly negative light, the mildly discontented grey area in between in fact reflects the most accurate perception of reality.
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March 25, 2011
The intelligence of the Ashkenazi [ahsh-kuh-nah-zee] Jews has been the subject of studies which report higher a average intelligence quotient than among the general population. They are greatly overrepresented in occupations and fields with the high cognitive demands. During the 20th century, Ashkenazi Jews made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US science Nobel Prizes, and half of the world’s chess champions were among their ranks.
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March 25, 2011
Inbreeding depression is the reduced fitness in a given population as a result of breeding of related individuals. It is often the result of a population bottleneck. In general, the higher the genetic variation within a breeding population, the less likely it is to suffer from inbreeding depression. Inbreeding depression seems to be present in most groups of organisms, but is perhaps most important in hermaphroditic species. The majority of plants are hermaphroditic and thus are capable of the most severe degree of inbreeding depression.
Although severe inbreeding depression in humans is uncommon, there have been several cases. As with animals, this phenomenon tends to occur in isolated, rural populations that are cut off to some degree from other areas of civilization. A notable example is the Vadoma tribe of western Zimbabwe, many of whom carry the trait of having only two toes due to a small gene pool.
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