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🔗 Disability

Audio induction loop systems, also called audio-frequency induction loops (AFILs) or hearing loops, are an assistive listening technology for individuals with reduced ranges of hearing.

A hearing loop consists of one or more physical loops of cable which are placed around a designated area, usually a room or a building. The cable generates an electromagnetic field throughout the looped space which can be picked up by a telecoil-equipped hearing aid, a cochlear implant (CI) processor, or a specialized hand-held hearing loop receiver for individuals without telecoil-compatible hearing aids.

The loops carry baseband audio-frequency currents; no carrier signal is used. The benefit is that it allows the sound source of interest – whether a musical performance or a ticket taker's side of the conversation – to be transmitted to the hearing-impaired listener clearly and free of other distracting noise in the environment. Typical installation sites include concert halls, ticket kiosks, high-traffic public buildings (for PA announcements), auditoriums, places of worship, courtrooms, meeting rooms, and homes.

In the United Kingdom, as an aid for disability, their provision, where reasonably possible, is required by the Equality Act 2010 and previously by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and they are available in "the back seats of all London taxis, which have a little microphone embedded in the dashboard in front of the driver; at 18,000 post offices in the U.K.; at most churches and cathedrals", according to Prof. David G. Myers.

In the United States, an alternative technology using FM transmission to "neck loop" receivers was more widely adopted due to economic advantages. In comparison, hearing loop systems require a greater initial investment by the facility operator, but offer greater convenience and avoid the social stigma and hygienic concerns entailed by the FM system's paraphernalia for those who have hearing aids.

Another alternative system, used primarily in theatres, uses invisible infrared radiation; compatible headsets can pick up the modulated infrared energy to reproduce sound.

🔗 Transport 🔗 Urban studies and planning

A road diet (also called a lane reduction, road rechannelization or road conversion) is a technique in transportation planning whereby the number and/or the width of travel lanes of the road is reduced, often to achieve a reduction in crash rates.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Geography 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia

In geography, a pole of inaccessibility is the farthest (or the most difficult to reach) location in a given landmass, sea, or other topographical feature, starting from a given boundary, relative to a given criterion. A geographical criterion of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach according to that criterion. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline, implying the farthest point into a landmass from the shore, or the farthest point into a body of water from the shore. In these cases, a pole of inaccessibility is the center of a maximally large circle that can be drawn within an area of interest only touching but not crossing a coastline. Where a coast is imprecisely defined, the pole will be similarly imprecise.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Aviation/Soviet aviation

The Tupolev Tu-4 (Russian: Туполев Ту-4; NATO reporting name: Bull) is a piston-engined Soviet strategic bomber that served the Soviet Air Force from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. The aircraft was a copy of the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, having been reverse-engineered from seized aircraft that had made emergency landings in the USSR.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/World War II

Operation Mincemeat was a successful British deception operation of the Second World War to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Two members of British intelligence obtained the body of Glyndwr Michael, a tramp who died from eating rat poison, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines and placed personal items on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain (Acting Major) William Martin. Correspondence between two British generals that suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint, was also placed on the body.

Part of the wider Operation Barclay, Mincemeat was based on the 1939 Trout memo, written by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. With the approval of the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the American military commander in the Mediterranean, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the plan began by transporting the body to the southern coast of Spain by submarine and releasing it close to shore, where it was picked up the following morning by a Spanish fisherman. The nominally neutral Spanish government shared copies of the documents with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation, before returning the originals to the British. Forensic examination showed they had been read and Ultra decrypts of German messages showed that the Germans fell for the ruse. German reinforcements were shifted to Greece and Sardinia before and during the invasion of Sicily; Sicily received none.

The full effect of Operation Mincemeat is not known, but Sicily was liberated more quickly than anticipated and losses were lower than predicted. The events were depicted in Operation Heartbreak, a 1950 novel by the former cabinet minister Duff Cooper, before one of the intelligence officers who planned and carried out Mincemeat, Ewen Montagu, wrote a history in 1953. Montagu's book formed the basis for the 1956 British film The Man Who Never Was. A second British film was released in 2021, titled Operation Mincemeat. It also has been adapted into a musical.

🔗 Education

TRIZ (; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch, literally: "theory of the resolution of invention-related tasks") is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature". It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as "the theory of inventive problem solving", and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.

Following Altshuller's insight, the theory developed on a foundation of extensive research covering hundreds of thousands of inventions across many different fields to produce a theory which defines generalisable patterns in the nature of inventive solutions and the distinguishing characteristics of the problems that these inventions have overcome.

An important part of the theory has been devoted to revealing patterns of evolution and one of the objectives which has been pursued by leading practitioners of TRIZ has been the development of an algorithmic approach to the invention of new systems, and to the refinement of existing ones.

TRIZ includes a practical methodology, tool sets, a knowledge base, and model-based technology for generating innovative solutions for problem solving. It is useful for problem formulation, system analysis, failure analysis, and patterns of system evolution. There is a general similarity of purposes and methods with the field of pattern language, a cross discipline practice for explicitly describing and sharing holistic patterns of design.

The research has produced three primary findings:

1. problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences
2. patterns of technical evolution are also repeated across industries and sciences
3. the innovations used scientific effects outside the field in which they were developed

TRIZ practitioners apply all these findings in order to create and to improve products, services, and systems.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Automobiles

This is a list of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles made by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Inc. The predictions concern Tesla's suite of advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) functions, marketed as of December 2025 as "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" ("FSD"), and provide estimates for when Tesla will achieve fully autonomous driving, requiring no human intervention, which SAE considers Level 5 automation. Tesla does not classify FSD according to the SAE levels of autonomy, but has acknowledged that full autonomy is "dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions".

Musk has publicly stated estimated timelines and intended capabilities of the system since at least 2013. FSD and Autopilot are classified as SAE Level 2 ADAS, as of January 2024. A lawsuit filed in February 2023 by Tesla investors alleging that Musk committed securities fraud by making misleading statements about the development timeline of autonomous Tesla vehicles was dismissed without prejudice in September 2024; the judge ruled that Tesla's legal team successfully argued that Elon Musk's statements were "corporate puffery", i.e., vague corporate optimism.

Notes

🔗 Business

"Think" (stylized as THINK) is a slogan associated with the American multinational technology company IBM.

🔗 Philadelphia 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 National Register of Historic Places 🔗 Pipe organ

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world, based on the number of playing pipes, the number of ranks and its weight. The Wanamaker Organ is located within a spacious 7-story Grand Court at the John Wanamaker Store (originally Wanamaker's and most recently Macy's) and was played twice a day Monday through Saturday. The organ was featured at several special concerts held throughout the year, including events featuring the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ Festival Chorus and Brass Ensemble.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome

The quadratrix or trisectrix of Hippias (also called the quadratrix of Dinostratus) is a curve which is created by a uniform motion. It is traced out by the crossing point of two lines, one moving by translation at a uniform speed, and the other moving by rotation around one of its points at a uniform speed. An alternative definition as a parametric curve leads to an equivalence between the quadratrix, the image of the Lambert W function, and the graph of the function ${\displaystyle y=x\cot x}$.

The discovery of this curve is attributed to the Greek sophist Hippias of Elis, around 420 BC. Historians of mathematics have suggested that Hippias used it to solve the angle trisection problem, hence its name as a trisectrix. Later around 350 BC Dinostratus used it to solve the problem of squaring the circle, hence its name as a quadratrix. Dinostratus's theorem, used by Dinostratus to square the circle, relates an endpoint of the curve to the value of π. Both angle trisection and squaring the circle can be solved using a compass, a straightedge, and a given copy of this curve; however, they cannot be solved with compass and straightedge alone. Although a dense set of points on the curve can be constructed by compass and straightedge, allowing these problems to be approximated, the whole curve cannot be constructed in this way.

The quadratrix of Hippias is a transcendental curve. It is one of several curves used in Greek mathematics for squaring the circle.