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🔗 Computer science

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 1 GB English text file. Specifically, the prize awards 5000 euros for each one percent improvement (with 500,000 euros total funding) in the compressed size of the file enwik9, which is the larger of two files used in the Large Text Compression Benchmark; enwik9 is the first 1,000,000,000 characters of a specific version of English Wikipedia. The ongoing competition is organized by Hutter, Matt Mahoney, and Jim Bowery.

🔗 Industrial design

The Xerox 914 was the first successful commercial plain paper copier which in 1959 revolutionized the document-copying industry. The culmination of inventor Chester Carlson's work on the xerographic process, the 914 was fast and economical. The copier was introduced to the public on September 16, 1959, in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television.

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Apple Inc./Mac

The Command key (sometimes abbreviated as Cmd key), ⌘, formerly also known as the Apple key or open Apple key, is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. The Command key's purpose is to allow the user to enter keyboard commands in applications and in the system. An "extended" Macintosh keyboard—the most common type—has two command keys, one on each side of the space bar; some compact keyboards have one only on the left.

The ⌘ symbol (the "looped square") was chosen by Susan Kare after Steve Jobs decided that the use of the Apple logo in the menu system (where the keyboard shortcuts are displayed) would be an over-use of the logo. Apple's adaptation of the symbol—encoded in Unicode at U+2318—was derived in part from its use in Nordic countries as an indicator of cultural locations and places of interest. The symbol is known by various other names, including "Saint John's Arms" and "Bowen knot".

🔗 Toys

A toy balloon or party balloon, is a small balloon mostly used for decoration, advertising and children's toys. Toy balloons are usually made of rubber or aluminized plastic, and inflated with air or helium. They come in a great variety of sizes and shapes, but are most commonly 10 to 30 centimetres in diameter. Toy balloons are not considered to include "sky lanterns" (hot-air paper balloons), although these too are or were used as child toys in some parts of the world.

According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, out of 373 children who died in the US between 1972 and 1992 after choking on children's products, nearly a third choked on latex balloons. The Consumer Products Safety Commission found that children had inhaled latex balloons whole (often while trying to inflate them) or choked on fragments of broken balloons. Parents, a monthly magazine about raising children, advised parents to buy Mylar balloons instead of latex balloons.

🔗 United States 🔗 Medicine

Elixir sulfanilamide was an improperly prepared sulfonamide antibiotic that caused mass poisoning in the United States in 1937. It is believed to have killed more than 100 people. The public outcry caused by this incident and other similar disasters led to the passing of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which significantly increased the Food and Drug Administration's powers to regulate drugs.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Databases 🔗 Databases/Computer science

Cyc (pronounced SYKE, ) is a long-living artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.

Douglas Lenat began the project in July 1984 at MCC, where he was Principal Scientist 1984–1994, and then, since January 1995, has been under active development by the Cycorp company, where he is the CEO.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Crime 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Iraq

During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape and the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.

The George W. Bush administration claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents and not indicative of U.S. policy.^: 328 This was disputed by humanitarian organizations including the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch; these organizations stated that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.^: 328

Documents popularly known as the Torture Memos came to light a few years later. These documents, prepared in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States Department of Justice, authorized certain enhanced interrogation techniques (generally held to involve torture) of foreign detainees. The memoranda also argued that international humanitarian laws, such as the Geneva Conventions, did not apply to American interrogators overseas. Several subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), have overturned Bush administration policy, ruling that the Geneva Conventions do apply.

In response to the events at Abu Ghraib, the United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty. Eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, these soldiers were court-martialed, convicted, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service. Two soldiers, found to have perpetrated many of the worst offenses at the prison, Specialist Charles Graner and PFC Lynndie England, were subject to more severe charges and received harsher sentences. Graner was convicted of assault, battery, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and loss of rank, pay and benefits. England was convicted of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and committing an indecent act and sentenced to three years in prison. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer of all detention facilities in Iraq, was reprimanded and demoted to the rank of colonel. Several more military personnel who were accused of perpetrating or authorizing the measures, including many of higher rank, were not prosecuted. In 2004, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized for the Abu Ghraib abuses.

🔗 Computing

The MicroVAX 78032 (otherwise known as the DC333) is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that implemented a subset of the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). The 78032 was used exclusively in DEC's VAX-based systems, starting with the MicroVAX II in 1985. When clocked at a frequency of 5 MHz, the 78032's integer performance is comparable to the original VAX-11/780 of 1977. The microprocessor could be paired with the MicroVAX 78132 floating point accelerator for improved floating point performance.

The 78032 represented a number of firsts for DEC. It was DEC's first single-chip microprocessor implementation of the VAX ISA and DEC's first self-fabricated microprocessor. The MicroVAX 78032 is also notable as it was the first semiconductor device to be registered for protection under the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984.

The MicroVAX 78032 contains 125,000 transistors on an 8.7 by 8.6 mm (74.82 mm²) die that was fabricated in DEC's ZMOS process, a 3.0 µm NMOS logic process with two layers of aluminum interconnect. The die is packaged in a 68-pin surface-mounted leaded chip carrier.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Finland

The Karelian question or Karelian issue (Finnish: Karjala-kysymys, Swedish: Karelska frågan) is a dispute in Finnish politics over whether to try to regain control over eastern Finnish Karelia and other territories ceded to the Soviet Union in the Winter War and the Continuation War. Despite the name "Karelian question", the term may refer also to the return of Petsamo, ceded parts of Salla and Kuusamo, and four islands in the Gulf of Finland. Sometimes the phrase "debate on the return of the ceded territories" (luovutettujen alueiden palautuskeskustelu, Swedish: debatten om tillbakalämningen av de avträdda territorierna) is used. The Karelian question remains a matter of public debate rather than a political issue.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Saturn family of 4-bit (datapath) microprocessors was developed by Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s first for the HP-71B handheld computer and then later for various HP calculators (starting with the HP-18C). It succeeded the Nut family of processors used in earlier calculators. The original Saturn chip was first used in the HP-71B hand-held BASIC-programmable computer, introduced in 1984. Later models of the family powered the popular HP 48 series of calculators. The HP48SX and HP48S were the last models to use genuine Saturn processors manufactured by HP. Later calculator models used Saturn processors manufactured by NEC. The HP 49 series initially used the Saturn CPU as well, until the NEC fab could no longer manufacture the processor for technical reasons in 2003. Therefore, starting with the HP 49g+ model in 2003, the calculators switched to a Samsung S3C2410 processor with an ARM920T core (part of the ARMv4T architecture) which ran an emulator of the Saturn hardware in software. In 2000, the HP 39G and HP 40G were the last calculators introduced based on the actual NEC fabricated Saturn hardware. The last calculators based on the Saturn emulator were the HP 39gs, HP 40gs and HP 50g in 2006, as well as the 2007 revision of the hp 48gII. The HP 50g, the last calculator utilizing this emulator, was discontinued in 2015 when Samsung stopped producing the ARM processor on which it was based.