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🔗 Computing

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE or PVE) is an open-source software server for virtualization management. It is a hosted hypervisor that can run operating systems including Linux and Windows on x64 hardware. It is a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel and allows deployment and management of virtual machines and containers. Proxmox VE includes a web console and command-line tools, and provides a REST API for third-party tools. Two types of virtualization are supported: container-based with LXC (starting from version 4.0 replacing OpenVZ used in version up to 3.4, included), and full virtualization with KVM. It includes a web-based management interface.

Proxmox VE is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

🔗 Statistics

Berkson's paradox also known as Berkson's bias or Berkson's fallacy is a result in conditional probability and statistics which is often found to be counterintuitive, and hence a veridical paradox. It is a complicating factor arising in statistical tests of proportions. Specifically, it arises when there is an ascertainment bias inherent in a study design. The effect is related to the explaining away phenomenon in Bayesian networks, and conditioning on a collider in graphical models.

It is often described in the fields of medical statistics or biostatistics, as in the original description of the problem by Joseph Berkson.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Poetry

"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem that has lent its name to a psychological effect called the centipede effect or centipede syndrome. The centipede effect occurs when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it or reflection on it. For example, a golfer thinking too closely about their swing or someone thinking too much about how they knot their tie may find their performance of the task impaired. The effect is also known as hyperreflection or Humphrey's law after English psychologist George Humphrey (1889–1966), who propounded it in 1923. As he wrote of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us". The effect is the reverse of a solvitur ambulando.

🔗 Books

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

Postman's book has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.

🔗 Death 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Latin

Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.

The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by one or more bones. Often this alone is enough to evoke the trope, but other motifs such as a coffin, hourglass and wilting flowers signified the impermanence of human life. Often these function within a work whose main subject is something else, such as a portrait, but the vanitas is an artistic genre where the theme of death is the main subject. The Danse Macabre and Death personified with a scythe as the Grim Reaper are even more direct evocations of the trope.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.

A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona, becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification. Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses. Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona. Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct. Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits. Studies involving longitudinal effects of parasocial interactions on children are still relatively new, according to developmental psychologist Sandra L. Calvert.

Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona. These virtual interactions may involve commenting, following, liking, or direct messaging. The consistency in which the persona appears could also lead to a more intimate perception in the eyes of the user.

🔗 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.

🔗 New York (state) 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/American currency

The Ithaca HOUR is a local currency formerly used in Ithaca, New York and was one of the longest-running local currency systems, though it is now no longer in circulation. It has inspired other similar systems in Madison, Wisconsin; Santa Barbara, California; Corvallis, Oregon; and a proposed system in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. One Ithaca HOUR is valued at US$10 and is generally recommended to be used as payment for one hour's work, although the rate is negotiable.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Romania 🔗 Film/British cinema 🔗 Film/War films

Children of Men is a 2006 dystopian action thriller film co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The screenplay, based on P. D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men, was credited to five writers, with Clive Owen making uncredited contributions. The film takes place in 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Asylum seekers seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom, where they are subjected to detention and refoulement by the government. Owen plays civil servant Theo Faron, who must help refugee Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) escape the chaos. Children of Men also stars Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine.

The film was released by Universal Pictures on 22 September 2006 in the UK and on 25 December in the US. Critics noted the relationship between the US' Christmas opening and the film's themes of hope, redemption, and faith. Despite the limited release and lack of any clear marketing strategy during awards season by the film's distributor, Children of Men received critical acclaim and was recognised for its achievements in screenwriting, cinematography, art direction, and innovative single-shot action sequences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. It was also nominated for three BAFTA Awards, winning Best Cinematography and Best Production Design, and for three Saturn Awards, winning Best Science Fiction Film. In 2016 it was voted 13th among 100 films considered the best of the 21st century by 117 film critics from around the world.

🔗 Women's History 🔗 Iceland

On 24 October 1975, Icelandic women went on strike for the day to "demonstrate the indispensable work of women for Iceland’s economy and society" and to "protest wage discrepancy and unfair employment practices". It was then publicized domestically as Women's Day Off (Kvennafrídagurinn). Participants, led by women's organizations, did not go to their paid jobs and did not do any housework or child-rearing for the whole day. Ninety percent of Iceland's female population participated in the strike. Iceland's parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal pay the following year.