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🔗 Environment 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Industrial design

Biophilic design is a concept used within the building industry to increase occupant connectivity to the natural environment through the use of direct nature, indirect nature, and space and place conditions. Used at both the building and city-scale, it is argued that this idea has health, environmental, and economic benefits for building occupants and urban environments, with few drawbacks. Although its name was coined in recent history, indicators of biophilic design have been seen in architecture from as far back as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 JavaScript 🔗 Microsoft/.NET

JScript is Microsoft's dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

JScript is implemented as an Active Scripting engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to OLE Automation applications that support Active Scripting, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages, and Windows Script Host. It also means such applications can use multiple Active Scripting languages, e.g., JScript, VBScript or PerlScript.

JScript was first supported in the Internet Explorer 3.0 browser released in August 1996. Its most recent version is JScript 9.0, included in Internet Explorer 9.

JScript 10.0 is a separate dialect, also known as JScript .NET, which adds several new features from the abandoned fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard. It must be compiled for .NET Framework version 2 or version 4, but static type annotations are optional.

🔗 Psychology

Mean world syndrome is a cognitive bias where people perceive the world to be more dangerous than it actually is due to long-term, moderate to heavy exposure to violence-related content on mass media.

Mean world syndrome asserts that viewers who are exposed to violence-related content can experience increased fear, anxiety, pessimism and heightened state of alert in response to perceived threats. This is because media (namely television) consumed by viewers has the power to directly influence and inform their attitudes, beliefs and opinions about the world.

Dr. George Gerbner, who coined the term mean world syndrome in the 1970s, began his research on the effects of violent media on individuals’ attitudes by claiming that a major cultural shift was taking place, where "who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell."

Since TV was becoming an ever increasing presence in the average American household and the amount of violence on TV was growing exponentially, Gerbner conducted several large-scale studies that upheld his hypothesis: those who watched moderate to large amounts of TV believed the world to be a more dangerous place.

Since the 1970s, numerous studies have corroborated Gerbner's findings that moderate to heavy viewing of violence-related content on TV increased depression, fear, anxiety, anger, pessimism, post-traumatic stress and substance use. For example, in 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement on media violence which concluded that “extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.”

🔗 Psychology

Inductive reasoning aptitude (also called differentiation or inductive learning ability) measures how well a person can identify a pattern within a large amount of data. It involves applying the rules of logic when inferring general principles from a constellation of particulars.

Measurement is generally done in a timed test by showing four pictures or words and asking the test taker to identify which of the pictures or words does not belong in the set. The test taker is shown a large number of sets of various degrees of difficulty. The measurement is made by timing how many of these a person can properly identify in a set period of time. The test resembles the game 'Which of These Is Not Like the Others'.

Inductive reasoning is very useful for scientists, auto mechanics, system integrators, lawyers, network engineers, medical doctors, system administrators and members of all fields where substantial diagnostic or data interpretation work is needed. Inductive reasoning aptitude is also useful for learning a graphical user interface quickly, because highly inductive people are very good at seeing others' categorization schemes. Inductive reasoning aptitude is often counter-productive in fields like sales where tolerance is very important, because highly inductive people tend to be good at seeing faults in others.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Politics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Asia

A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism, hydraulic society, hydraulic civilization, or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.

Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a water dynasty. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based on class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military, is vital for the maintenance of control.

🔗 Science Policy

Government by algorithm (also known as algorithmic regulation, regulation by algorithms, algorithmic governance, algocratic governance, algorithmic legal order or algocracy) is an alternative form of government or social ordering, where the usage of computer algorithms, especially of artificial intelligence and blockchain, is applied to regulations, law enforcement, and generally any aspect of everyday life such as transportation or land registration. The term 'government by algorithm' appeared in academic literature as an alternative for 'algorithmic governance' in 2013. A related term, algorithmic regulation is defined as setting the standard, monitoring and modification of behaviour by means of computational algorithms — automation of judiciary is in its scope.

Government by algorithm raises new challenges that are not captured in the e-government literature and the practice of public administration. Some sources equate cyberocracy, which is a hypothetical form of government that rules by the effective use of information, with algorithmic governance, although algorithms are not the only means of processing information. Nello Cristianini and Teresa Scantamburlo argued that the combination of a human society and an algorithmic regulation forms a social machine.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

Dreadful Sanctuary is a science fiction novel by British author Eric Frank Russell. After its serialization in the American magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1948, it was first published in book form in 1951 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,975 copies. Russell rewrote the novel for the first American paperback edition, published by Lancer Books in 1963. Editorial interference forced Russell to replace the original ending with a more tragic conclusion in this edition. A British hardcover was issued in 1953, with a paperback incorporating further "minor revisions" following in 1967. Italian translations of Dreadful Sanctuary were published in 1953 and 1986; a German translation appeared in 1971, and a French translation in 1978.

Partly inspired by Fortean ideas, the novel concerns an international conspiracy to prevent humanity from achieving space travel.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment

The term 3-6-3 Rule describes how the United States retail banking industry operated from the 1950s to the 1980s. The name 3-6-3 refers to the impression that bankers had a stable, comfortable existence by paying 3 percent interest on deposits, lending money out at 6 percent, and being able to "tee off at the golf course by 3 p.m."

The implication was that the banks were less competitive during that period than in subsequent years due to tight regulations that limited the formation and location of banks as well as restrictions on interest rates that could be charged or paid. As a result, bankers had "power and prestige ... while profits were steady and certain". These regulations were loosened in the 1980s.

Richmond Federal Reserve senior economist John R. Walter argues that, although there is evidence that restrictions on banks before the 1980s did limit the competitiveness of banking markets and thereby granted some banks monopoly power, "the regulatory restrictions probably had a limited effect on competition" during the time in question. Chicago Federal Reserve researchers Robert DeYoung and Tara Rice argue that, "Like most good jokes, the 3-6-3 rule mixes a grain of truth with a highly simplified view of reality."

The rule has been noted positively following the late-2000s financial crisis as a preferable way for banks to operate following the bailout of major banks.

Australia's banking system, which was deregulated in the 1990s in a manner similar to that in the U.S., also came to be characterized in the same way as did the United Kingdom's.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Appalachia 🔗 Mining 🔗 Organized Labour 🔗 United States/West Virginia

The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia. Up to 100 people were killed, and many more arrested. The United Mine Workers saw major declines in membership, but the long-term publicity led to some improvements in working conditions.

For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders) who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired and the United States Army, represented by the West Virginia Army National Guard led by McDowell County native William Eubanks, intervened by presidential order.

🔗 Oregon 🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century

The Begum's Fortune (French: Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum, literally "the 500 millions of the begum"), also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879 novel by Jules Verne, with some utopian elements and other elements that seem clearly dystopian. It is noteworthy as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary, and somewhat pessimistic about the development of science and technology.

Long after The Begum's Fortune was published, it came out that its story is based on a manuscript by Paschal Grousset, a Corsican revolutionary who had participated in the Paris Commune and was at the time living in exile in the United States and London. It was bought by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of most of Verne's books. The attribution of plot elements between Grousset's original text and Verne's work on it has not been completely defined. Later, Verne worked similarly on two more books by Grousset and published them under his name, before the revolutionary finally got a pardon and was able to return to France and resume publication in his own name.

The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly done English translation soon after its publication in French—one of the bad translations considered to have damaged Verne's reputation in the English-speaking world. W. H. G. Kingston was near death and deeply in debt at the time. His wife, Mrs. A. K. Kingston, who did the translation for him, was certainly otherwise preoccupied than with the accuracy of the text and may have had to rely on outside help. In 2005 a new translation from the French was made by Stanford Luce and published by Wesleyan University.

I. O. Evans, in his introduction to his "Fitzroy Edition" of The Begum's Fortune, suggested a connection between the creation of artificial satellites in this novel and the publication of The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale in 1869.