Keenan Wynn (July 27, 1916 – October 14, 1986) was an American character actor. He was born in New York City, New York. He was known for his role in the 1972 thriller movie "The Mechanic".
Wynn died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles, California, aged 70.
Frank de Kova
Frank de Kova (March 17, 1910 – October 15, 1981) was an Italian-American character actor. de Kova was born in New York City. He was known for his role as "The Man" in the 1972 thriller movie "The Mechanic".
de Kova died of heart failure at his home in Sepulveda, California, aged 71.
Realpolitik
Realpolitik is a system of politics or principles based on practical, rather than moral or ideological considerations. Realpolitik is the idea that the world is ruthless and you have to act realistically, even if it causes other things to happen that are bad, or decisions have to be made that upset your people.
Ludwig von Rochau was a 19th century writer and politician. He describes it as follows:
A good example of a realpolitik politician is Henry Kissinger, who helped U.S. Presidents in the 1960s and 1970s to expand the power of the United States and its allies.
Linda Christian
Linda Christian (November 13, 1923 – July 22, 2011) was a Mexican actress. She appeared in Mexican and Hollywood movies. She worked mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. She was the first Bond girl, appearing in the 1954 movie "Casino Royale".
Christian was born Blanca Rose Welter in Tampico, Mexico. She died in Palm Desert, California at age eighty-seven.
Regression toward the mean
Regression toward the mean simply means that, following an extreme random event, the next random event is likely to be less extreme. Regression toward the mean was first described by Francis Galton. He found that offspring of tall parents tended to be shorter. Also, offspring of shorter parents tended to be taller. Galton stated that processes that did not follow regression towards the mean would quickly go out of control.
In 1886, Galton published a paper called "Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature". In the paper, he observed that extreme characteristics (e.g., height) in parents are not passed on completely to their offspring. Rather, the characteristics in the offspring "regress" towards a "mediocre" point. Today, this point is called the mean. By measuring the heights of hundreds of people, he was able to quantify regression to the mean, and estimate the size of the effect. Galton wrote that, “the average regression of the offspring is a constant fraction of their respective mid-parental deviations”. This means that the difference between a child and its parents for some characteristic is proportional to its parents' deviation from typical people in the population. If its parents are each two inches taller than the averages for men and women, on average, the child will be shorter than its parents by some factor times two inches. Today, this factor has been calculated to be one minus the regression coefficient. For height, Galton estimated this coefficient to be about two thirds: the height of an individual will measure around a midpoint that is two thirds of the parents’ deviation from the population average.
Galton used the term regression to describe an observable fact in the inheritance of multi-factorial quantitative genetic traits: namely that the offspring of parents who lie at the tails of the distribution will tend to lie closer to the centre, the mean, of the distribution. He quantified this trend, and in doing so invented linear regression analysis. This is the starting point for much of modern statistical modelling. Since then, the term "regression" has taken on different meanings, and it may be used by modern statisticians to describe phenomena of sampling bias which have little to do with Galton's original observations in the field of genetics.
Galton's explanation for the regression phenomenon he observed is now known to be incorrect. He stated: “A child inherits partly from his parents, partly from his ancestors. Speaking generally, the further his genealogy goes back, the more numerous and varied will his ancestry become, until they cease to differ from any equally numerous sample taken at haphazard from the race at large.” This is incorrect, since a child receives its genetic makeup exclusively from its parents. There is no generation-skipping in genetic material: any genetic material from earlier ancestors than the parents must have passed through the parents. The phenomenon is better understood if we assume that the inherited trait (e.g., height) is controlled by a large number of recessive genes. Exceptionally tall individuals must be homozygous for increased height mutations on a large proportion of these loci. But the loci which carry these mutations are not necessarily shared between two tall individuals, and if these individuals mate, their offspring will be on average homozygous for "tall" mutations on fewer loci than either of their parents. In addition, height is not entirely genetically determined, but also subject to environmental influences during development, which make offspring of exceptional parents even more likely to be closer to the average than their parents.
In sharp contrast to this population genetic phenomenon of regression to the mean, which is best thought of as a combination of a binomially distributed process of inheritance (plus normally distributed environmental influences), the term "regression to the mean" is now often used to describe completely different phenomena in which an initial sampling bias may disappear as new, repeated, or larger samples display sample means that are closer to the true underlying population mean.
Promised Land (movie)
Promised Land is a 2012 drama movie. It was directed by Gus Van Sant. It stars Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, Hal Holbrook and Rosemarie DeWitt. The screenplay is written by Damon and Krasinski based on a story by Dave Eggers. The movie is about two corporate salespeople. They visit a rural town trying to buy drilling rights from local residents. This movie had a limited release in the United States on December 28, 2012. It was released nationwide on January 4, 2013.
Comrade
Comrade is the name given to someone who belongs to the same social group, party or company. It literally means "friend", "colleague", but an also mean "ally". The term can refer to someone who has the same beliefs or values. That way, in Communism, people who belong to the Communist Party address each other as "comrade".
Terms like this avoid using titles, rank or any other sign that one person is better than, or different from, another.
Giulio Questi
Giulio Questi (18 March 1924 – 3 December 2014) was an Italian movie director and screenwriter. He was known for his roles in "La morte ha fatto l'uovo" and "Django Kill! (If You Live Shoot!)". Questi was born in Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy.
Questi died in Rome, Italy, aged 90.
Sjefke Janssen
Sjefke Janssen (October 28, 1919 – December 3, 2014) was a Dutch professional road bicycle racer. He was known for his bronze medal in the Elite race of the 1947 UCI Road World Championships.
Janssen was a professional cyclist from 1946 through 1954. After retiring, he became a cycling team-manager and owned a bicycle shop in Elsloo.
He was born and died in Elsloo. At the time of his death, Janssen was the oldest living Dutch Tour de France racer.
He was the father of Dutch Olympic team dressage coach Sjef Janssen.
V. R. Krishna Iyer
Vaidyanathapura Rama Krishna Iyer (15 November 1914 – 4 December 2014), popularly known as V. R. Krishna Iyer, was an Indian judge in the Supreme Court of India. He was born at Vaidyanathapuram near Palakkad, in Malabar region of Kerala. He served in the Supreme Court from 1973 until his death in 2014.
Iyer died in Kochi, Kerala, India from renal and heart failure, aged 100.
Claudia Emerson