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🔗 Technology 🔗 Blogging

Sousveillance ( soo-VAY-lənss) is the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies. The term "sousveillance", coined by Steve Mann, stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).

While surveillance and sousveillance both generally refer to visual monitoring, the terms also denote other forms of monitoring such as audio surveillance or sousveillance. In the audio sense (e.g. recording of phone conversations), sousveillance is referred to as "one party consent".

Undersight (inverse oversight) is sousveillance at high-level, e.g. "citizen undersight" being reciprocal to a congressional oversight committee or the like.

Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on the "watchful vigilance from underneath" and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance, and may thus be thought of as a form of an ethnography or ethnomethodology study (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance).

Sousveillance typically involves community-based recording from first person perspectives, without necessarily involving any specific political agenda, whereas inverse-surveillance is a form of sousveillance that is typically directed at, or used to collect data to analyze or study, surveillance or its proponents (e.g., the actions of police or protestors at a protest rally).

Sousveillance is not necessarily countersurveillance; i.e. sousveillance can be used to "counter" the forces of surveillance, or it can also be used together with surveillance to create a more complete "veillance" ("Surveillance is a half-truth without sousveillance"). The question of "Who watches the watchers" is dealt with more properly under the topic of metaveillance (the veillance of veillance) than sousveillance.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Underwater diving

Standard diving dress, also known as hard-hat or copper hat equipment, deep sea diving suit, or heavy gear, is a type of diving suit that was formerly used for all relatively deep underwater work that required more than breath-hold duration, which included marine salvage, civil engineering, pearl shell diving and other commercial diving work, and similar naval diving applications. Standard diving dress has largely been superseded by lighter and more comfortable equipment.

Standard diving dress consists of a diving helmet made from copper and brass or bronze, clamped over a watertight gasket to a waterproofed canvas suit, an air hose from a surface-supplied manually operated pump or low pressure breathing air compressor, a diving knife, and weights to counteract buoyancy, generally on the chest, back, and shoes. Later models were equipped with a diver's telephone for voice communications with the surface. The term deep sea diving was used to distinguish diving with this equipment from shallow water diving using a shallow water helmet, which was not sealed to the suit.

Some variants used rebreather systems to extend the use of gas supplies carried by the diver, and were effectively self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, and others were suitable for use with helium based breathing gases for deeper work. Divers could be deployed directly by lowering or raising them using the lifeline, or could be transported on a diving stage. Most diving work using standard dress was done heavy, with the diver sufficiently negatively buoyant to walk on the bottom, and the suits were not capable of the fine buoyancy control needed for mid-water swimming.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Animation 🔗 Translation studies 🔗 Video games/Sega 🔗 Animation/Computer animation 🔗 Animation/Web animation

"All your base are belong to us" is an Internet meme based on a poorly translated phrase from the opening cutscene of the Japanese video game Zero Wing. The phrase first appeared on the European release of the 1991 Sega Mega Drive conversion of the 1989 Japanese arcade game.

By the early 2000s, a GIF animation depicting the opening text became widespread on web forums. A music video accompanied by a techno remix of the clip, originally posted on the website Newgrounds, gained popularity and became a derivative Internet meme in its own right. The original meme has been referenced many times in media outside of the forums.

The original phrase in Japanese, uttered by the enigmatic antagonist "CATS", is "君達の基地は、全てCATSがいただいた" (Hepburn Romanization: Kimitachi no kichi wa subete CATS ga itadaita), which can be translated more accurately as "All of your bases have been taken over by CATS" (see the transcript below).

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Its main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

The book delineates rational and non-rational motivations or triggers associated with each type of thinking process, and how they complement each other, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to people's tendency to replace a difficult question with one that is easy to answer, the book summarizes several decades of research to suggest that people have too much confidence in human judgment. Kahneman performed his own research, often in collaboration with the psychologist Amos Tversky, which enriched his experience to write the book. It covers different phases of his career: his early work concerning cognitive biases, his work on prospect theory and happiness, and with the Israel Defense Forces.

Jason Zweig, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, helped write and research the book over two years. The book was a New York Times bestseller and was the 2012 winner of the American National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in behavioral science, engineering and medicine. The integrity of some priming studies cited in the book has been called into question in the midst of the psychological replication crisis.

🔗 Physics

The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman:

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Bible 🔗 Time

In Roman timekeeping, a day was divided into periods according to the available technology. Initially, the day was divided into two parts: the ante meridiem (before noon) and the post meridiem (after noon). With the introduction of the Greek sundial to Rome from the Samnites circa 293 BC, the period of the natural day from sunrise to sunset was divided into twelve hours.

🔗 Korea 🔗 Korea/one or more inactive working groups

Yongsan Electronics Market (Korean: 용산전자상가) is a retail area in Seoul, South Korea. Comprising over 20 buildings, it houses 5,000 stores that sell appliances, stereos, computers and peripherals, office equipment, telephones, lighting equipment, electronic games and software, videos, and CDs.

The market has a variety of stores, each with different operating procedures. Some stores operate like traditional retail shops, with set prices, name brands, and warranties. Other shops accept, or even expect, customers to bargain and may not have any posted prices for items.

The Electronics Market is located on Subway line 1, at Yongsan Station, at Exit 2. Entrance is from the train station through the Terminal Shopping Center or by walking around the station at ground level to enter the market. It may also be reached by the subway line to Sinyongsan station.

Merchants at Yongsan Electronics Market compete for customer attention, leading shopgoers to coin the term yongpari (용팔이), with pari (팔이) meaning "fly", to criticize their behavior. Due to this publicity, the President of the Hyundai I shopping mall announced in 2008 that it seeks to improve misconduct and offer improved customer service.

🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia 🔗 Cities 🔗 European history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better, although statistics and charts would state otherwise. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built solely to impress Empress Catherine II by her former lover Grigory Potemkin, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. While modern historians claim accounts of this portable village are exaggerated, the original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress; the structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be viewed again as if another example. The term is a translation of the Russian: потёмкинские деревни (IPA: /pɐˈtʲɵmkʲɪnskʲɪɪ dʲɪˈrʲɛvnʲɪ/; romanization: potyómkinskiye derévni).

🔗 Engineering

A wax motor is a linear actuator device that converts thermal energy into mechanical energy by exploiting the phase-change behaviour of waxes. During melting, wax typically expands in volume by 5–20% (Freund et al. 1982).

A wide range of waxes can be used in wax motors, ranging from highly refined hydrocarbons to waxes extracted from vegetable matter. Specific examples include paraffin waxes in the straight-chain n-alkanes series. These melt and solidify over a well-defined and narrow temperature range.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Measurement

In particle physics and physical cosmology, Planck units are a system of units of measurement defined exclusively in terms of four universal physical constants: c, G, ħ, and k_B. Expressing one of these physical constants in terms of Planck units yields a numerical value of 1. They are a system of natural units, defined using fundamental properties of nature (specifically, properties of free space) rather than properties of a chosen prototype object. Originally proposed in 1899 by German physicist Max Planck, they are relevant in research on unified theories such as quantum gravity.

The term Planck scale refers to quantities of space, time, energy and other units that are similar in magnitude to corresponding Planck units. This region may be characterized by particle energies of around 10¹⁹ GeV or 10⁹ J, time intervals of around 10⁻⁴³ s and lengths of around 10⁻³⁵ m (approximately the energy-equivalent of the Planck mass, the Planck time and the Planck length, respectively). At the Planck scale, the predictions of the Standard Model, quantum field theory and general relativity are not expected to apply, and quantum effects of gravity are expected to dominate. One example is represented by the conditions in the first 10⁻⁴³ seconds of our universe after the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

The four universal constants that, by definition, have a numerical value 1 when expressed in these units are:

• c, the speed of light in vacuum,
• G, the gravitational constant,
• ħ, the reduced Planck constant, and
• k_B, the Boltzmann constant.

Variants of the basic idea of Planck units exist, such as alternate choices of normalization that give other numerical values to one or more of the four constants above.