X-Nico

unusual facts about problem-solving



Anti-pattern

Silver bullet: Assuming that a favorite technical solution can solve a larger process or problem

Binary blob

In the Linux kernel development community, Linus Torvalds has made strong statements on the issue of binary-only modules, asserting: "I refuse to even consider tying my hands over some binary-only module", and continuing: "I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem".

Border Incident

"Here is the All-American Canal. It runs through the desert for miles along the California-Mexico border... Farming in Imperial Valley... requires a vast army of farm workers... and this army of farm workers comes from our neighbor to the south, from Mexico. ... It is this problem of human suffering and injustice about which you should know. The following composite case is based upon factual information supplied by the Immigration and Naturalization Service..."

Chrysler LH engine

Oil sludge buildup in an automobile engine results most often from poor maintenance, often from not changing engine oil at the recommended intervals, rather than to a problem with the engine.

Colin Mathura-Jeffree

Other roles include a case solving scientist in Lifetime Television’s Reckless Behavior: Caught on Tape (also called Stolen Life) helping Emma Norman (Odette Yustman) opposite Antonio Sabàto, Jr.

Conversion between quaternions and Euler angles

Actually this simple use of "quaternions" was first presented by Euler some seventy years earlier than Hamilton to solve the problem of magic squares.

Cuspy halo problem

One approach to solving the cusp-core problem in galactic halos is to consider models that modify the nature of dark matter; theorists have considered warm, fuzzy, self-interacting, and meta-cold dark matter, among other possibilities.

David Wike

David played the role of 'Joey' in the original production of The Dog Problem (play) by David Rabe.

David Wynn Miller

In 2005, Montclair, New Jersey resident Brenda Rickard was arrested and charged with orchestrating a $30 million mortgage scam: "Rickard, who claimed her name is :Brenda :Rickard, is a follower of :Judge: David-Wynn: Miller, who gives seminars around the country and advocates speaking in the 'true language,' which features odd punctuation and syntax. 'I have no problem with the complaint against me as long as it’s in the truthful language,' Rickard told the judge."

Egocentric predicament

Since 1710, when George Berkeley broached in his fashion the problem of the egocentric predicament, denying the existence of material substance except as ideas in the minds of perceivers, and thus asserting a problematical relation with reality, hence has this thesis proved a stumbling block.

Fermat–Weber problem

Weber problem, the problem of finding a point minimizing the sum of weighted distances from given (point, weight) pairs

Fold-and-cut theorem

The first proof of the fold-and-cut theorem, solving the problem, was published in 1999 by Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, and Anna Lubiw.

FTBFS

Traditionally it has been used to call attention to a problem reported about a Debian package, early in its lifecycle.

George W. Hunter III

Hunter concentrated his research effort on that endemic problem, and by 1951 his team had eliminated it in the Nagatoishi district of Kurume City, Japan, using a landmark program of molluscicides to control the snail host.

Hajime Ishii

Ishii said the situation created a great problem for democracy in Japan and invited three former Komeito party members and Soka Gakkai Honorary President Daisaku Ikeda for an intensive deliberation on issue of politics.

Houston, We've Got a Problem

Houston, We've Got a Problem is a 1974 television film about the Apollo 13 spaceflight, directed by Lawrence Doheny and starring Ed Nelson in the role of NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz.

James Stanley Hey

His task was to work on radar anti-jamming methods; for a year German jamming of Allied radar had been a problem and the escape of two German warships (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau) through the English Channel, aided by enemy radar jamming from the French Coast, had highlighted the problem.

Jane Symons

Unusually for a tabloid health writer, Symons was praised in the British Medical Journal, where Professor David Colquhoun of the Department of Pharmacology, at University College London wrote that "It isn’t often that a Murdoch tabloid produces a better account of a medical problem than anything the Department of Health’s chief scientific advisor can muster.".

John Peter Smith Hospital

Fetus also had fluid building up inside the skull (Hydrocephalus) and possibly had a heart problem.

Joseph Rakowski

During his four month term of office, Rakowski worked with New York City Mayor David Dinkins and New Jersey Attorney General Robert J. Del Tufo to address a problem where trucks full of garbage were being driven from New York City to Jersey City, New Jersey and their full trailers abandoned.

Kalkaska, Michigan

A map of Kalkaska is featured on the cover of Problem Solving with C++ by Walter Savitch, the Seventh Edition (Pearson International Edition).

Lagarith

Lagarith attempts to avoid this problem by supporting YV12, YUY2, RGB, and RGBA colorspaces.

Lake Elmore

Recently, the lake has had a problem with milfoil, and there are several fundraisers every year to help the Milfoil Foundation, which then uses the money to pay for the milfoil's extraction.

Leonard Chang

Chang's experiments in crime fiction is related to this shift, since the stories revolve around solving a mystery or crime, and despite the fact that the protagonist is Korean American, the debt here is more to crime and noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald.

Logan Northern Australia Water Scheme

Following a change of government, the canal component of the scheme was rejected by the incoming Premier, Richard Court, who considered Perth did not have a water problem.

Matched betting

Matched betting is legal and a spokesperson for William Hill has indicated that the betting industry does not have a problem with this use of free bets.

Microwave Massacre

Donald (Vernon) is a construction worker with a big problem: his shrew of a wife May (Claire Ginsberg) has started to only cook gourmet foods in a Hyacinth Bucket-style misguided effort to make themselves seem classier than they are.

Minimum wage

Three other possible reasons minimum wages do not affect employment were suggested by Alan Blinder: higher wages may reduce turnover, and hence training costs; raising the minimum wage may "render moot" the potential problem of recruiting workers at a higher wage than current workers; and minimum wage workers might represent such a small proportion of a business's cost that the increase is too small to matter.

Motz's problem

In mathematics, Motz's problem is a problem which is widely employed as a benchmark for singularity problems to compare the effectiveness of numerical methods.

Nassir al-Hiti

Since he has commanded the 2nd Division, he has been supported by United States Army General Raymond T. Odierno, who stated, The security forces here are widely considered to be part of the problem.

Nick Leslau

Thanks to his friend Tom Hunter, Leslau became interested in solving the world's problems: in 2006 they had a working holiday in Ayacucho, Peru; in 2007 to Malawi to help build an orphanage.

Norway in 1814

He learned that Prussia and Austria were waning in their support of Sweden's claims to Norway, that Tsar Alexander I of Russia (a distant cousin of Christian Frederik's) favored a Swedish-Norwegian union but not with Bernadotte as the king, and that the United Kingdom was looking for a solution to the problem that would keep Norway out of Russia's influence.

Novim

The group was formed at the University of California campus in Santa Barbara to create a collaborative problem-solving approach to address wide-spread and complicated problems, modeled after approaches at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP).

Omar Agha

The Congress of Vienna, which addressed the problem of Christian slaves from Barbary piracy, charged the United Kingdom to negotiate with the Dey of Algiers and the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli.

One Day in Europe

The Champions League match between Galatasaray and Deportivo La Coruña which takes place in Moscow on that particular day only worsens the problem.

One Way Forward

Research on this problem has been done by liberals like Ralph Nader, Public Citizen, and Common Cause and conservatives like the Cato Institute.

Orville Dewey

He was compelled to resign his charge in 1848, and retired to his farm in Sheffield, where he prepared a course of lectures for the Lowell Institute of Boston, on the "Problem of Human Life and Destiny," which course was repeated twice in New York, and delivered in many other cities.

Plain Clothes Theatre Productions

In 2006 the company produced a double bill of plays by Canadian playwright George F. Walker from his 'Suburban Motel' collection of plays; namely Problem Child and Criminal Genius.

Proof that 22/7 exceeds π

The evaluation of this integral was the first problem in the 1968 Putnam Competition.

Quadratic formula

The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (597–668 AD) was first to clearly describe the quadratic formula, although prior civilizations had investigated quadratic equations, understood them fairly well, and developed methods for solving them.

Samuel B. Maxey

He died in 1895 at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he had gone for treatment of an intestinal problem.

Scottish Book

This problem was solved only in 1972 by Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.

Steiner point

The Fermat point of a triangle, the solution to the Steiner tree problem for the three vertices of the triangle

The Dark House

Edward Środoń, an unemployed zootechnician from Mosty with a dark past and a growing drinking problem, tries to start over with a clean slate.

The Great Santini

Believing that the film's title - giving the perception that it was about circus stunts - would be the problem, it was tested as Sons and Heroes in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as Reaching Out in Rockford, Illinois, and The Ace in Peoria, Illinois.

Thermal time hypothesis

A possible solution to this problem has been put forward by Carlo Rovelli and Alain Connes, both in the classical and quantum theory, and goes by the name of the thermal time hypothesis.

Thomas Hobbes

He built a good reputation in philosophic circles and in 1645 was chosen with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others, to referee the controversy between John Pell and Longomontanus over the problem of squaring the circle.

Water supply and sanitation in Algeria

In some parts of the country, such as in the valleys of El Oued and Ouargla, a rising water table due to seepage from septic tanks was a major problem.

Wayne Laugesen

As the National Catholic Register's correspondent covering the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops when the Catholic sexual abuse scandal emerged, Laugesen is often cited for research that has put the problem in context by comparing abuse statistics of Catholic institutions with those of other religious and secular organizations.


see also

Axon Idea Processor

Axon Idea Processor was written in Visual Prolog by Mr. Chan Bok from Singapore as a tool for computer-assisted thinking and problem solving.

Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness

The focus of the non-religious/non-spiritual Penn Resiliency Program, supported in part by Martin Seligman through the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, was mostly on adolescent depression treatment, teaching cognitive-behavioral and social problem-solving skills to build resilience.

Daniel Batson

He has also written about religious experiences, defending a four-stage model of religious experiences, based upon Graham Wallas' four-stage model of problem-solving in the psychology of creativity (Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis, 1993).

Eight Disciplines Problem Solving

Requires training in the 8D problem-solving process as well as appropriate data collection and analysis tools such as Pareto diagrams, Fishbone Diagrams, and flowcharts.

Jaap van Till

This law gives us a much higher for V for any large value of N than either Metcalfe's law or Reed's law, resulting in herd or hive like thinking, problem solving, and decision making.

JACK Intelligent Agents

The JACK platform was written for commercial application of the multi-agent paradigm (a COTS product) to complex problem solving and was the basis for starting the company Agent Oriented Software (AOS) where it remains the flagship product.

Liz Danforth

Danforth completed a master's degree in Information and Library Science (University of Arizona, 2008), and was one of a dozen hand-selected "gaming experts" who participated in the American Library Association's million-dollar grant-funded project to explore how gaming can be used to improve problem-solving and literacy skills, and to develop a model gaming "toolbox" for gaming in libraries.

MathPath

At MathPath he has taught such courses as problem solving, combinatorics, and solving the Rubik's Cube.

Matriz

MATRIZ, a body recognized as the custodian of the body of knowledge of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ ).

National Youth Leadership Training

For example, on the third day, there is a series of round-robin games and events that encourage team work, planning, and problem-solving.

Ranatra fusca

"Ranatra fusca" is the namesake of an award for exemplary creativity in the international student problem solving competition Odyssey of the Mind, because the insect served as the inspiration for a particularly creative solution to a problem in the early days of the program.

Saul Amarel

Amarel received the Award named after Allen Newell from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his wide-ranging contributions to Artificial Intelligence, especially in advancing our understanding of the role of representation in problem solving, and of the theory and practice of computational planning.

Scenario planning

During the past 5 years, computer supported Morphological Analysis has been employed as aid in scenario development by the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm.

Sujoy K. Guha

His major contributions have been in the indigenously developed non-hormonal polymer based injectable male contraceptive (RISUG) for which the Final Phase-III Clinical trials are underway; Problem-solving at a national level regarding contraceptives in mass usage, especially Copper T; individualized spot air-conditioning system for hospital patients and rehabilitation of the blind, with emphasis on opening automobile repair as an employment avenue.

Sweet Valerian

Dopamine is a chemical in the brain which affects adrenalin and the functions of memory, attention, and problem-solving.

Tom Peters

Peters currently lives in West Tinmouth, Vermont with his wife Susan Sargent, and continues to write and speak about personal and business empowerment and problem-solving methodologies.