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πŸ”— Edward Bernays

πŸ”— United States πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Marketing & Advertising πŸ”— Judaism πŸ”— Jewish history πŸ”— Vienna

Edward Louis Bernays (; German: [bΙ›ΙΜ―ΛˆnaΙͺs]; November 22, 1891 βˆ’ March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life. He was the subject of a full length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self.

His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" and his work for the United Fruit Company connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinctβ€”and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.

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πŸ”— Parkinson's Law of Triviality

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Systems πŸ”— Business πŸ”— Engineering πŸ”— Systems/Systems engineering

Parkinson's law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The law has been applied to software development and other activities. The terms bicycle-shed effect, bike-shed effect, and bike-shedding were coined as metaphors to illuminate the law of triviality; it was popularised in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by the Danish software developer Poul-Henning Kamp in 1999 and has spread from there to the whole software industry.

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πŸ”— Letters of Last Resort

πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Politics πŸ”— Politics of the United Kingdom πŸ”— Military history/European military history πŸ”— Military history/British military history

The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines. They contain orders on what action to take in the event that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and has killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and the "second person" (normally a high-ranking member of the Cabinet) whom the prime minister has designated to make a decision on how to act in the event of the prime minister's death. In the event that the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of Government of the United Kingdom.

The letters are stored inside two nested safes in the control room of each submarine. The letters are destroyed unopened after a prime minister leaves office, so their content remains known only to the prime minister who issued them.

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πŸ”— Quantum vacuum plasma thruster

πŸ”— Spaceflight πŸ”— Physics πŸ”— Alternative Views

A quantum vacuum thruster (QVT or Q-thruster) is a theoretical system hypothesized to use the same principles and equations of motion that a conventional plasma thruster would use, namely magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), to make predictions about the behavior of the propellant. However, rather than using a conventional plasma as a propellant, a QVT would interact with quantum vacuum fluctuations of the zero-point field.

The concept is controversial and generally not considered physically possible. However, if QVT systems were possible they could eliminate the need to carry propellant, being limited only by the availability of energy.

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πŸ”— United States incarceration rate

πŸ”— United States πŸ”— Crime πŸ”— Statistics

In September 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

At the end of 2016, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that in the United States, about 2,298,300 people were incarcerated out of a population of 324.2 million. This means that 0.7% of the population was behind bars. Of those who were incarcerated, about 1,316,000 people were in state prison, 615,000 in local jails, 225,000 in federal prisons, 48,000 in youth correctional facilities, 34,000 in immigration detention camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 11,000 in territorial prisons, 2,500 in Indian Country jails, and 1,300 in United States military prisons.

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πŸ”— R-tree

πŸ”— Computer science πŸ”— Databases πŸ”— Databases/Computer science

R-trees are tree data structures used for spatial access methods, i.e., for indexing multi-dimensional information such as geographical coordinates, rectangles or polygons. The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts. A common real-world usage for an R-tree might be to store spatial objects such as restaurant locations or the polygons that typical maps are made of: streets, buildings, outlines of lakes, coastlines, etc. and then find answers quickly to queries such as "Find all museums within 2 km of my current location", "retrieve all road segments within 2 km of my location" (to display them in a navigation system) or "find the nearest gas station" (although not taking roads into account). The R-tree can also accelerate nearest neighbor search for various distance metrics, including great-circle distance.

πŸ”— Lehmer sieve

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Early computers

Lehmer sieves are mechanical devices that implement sieves in number theory. Lehmer sieves are named for Derrick Norman Lehmer and his son Derrick Henry Lehmer. The father was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, and his son followed in his footsteps as a number theorist and professor at Berkeley.

A sieve in general is intended to find the numbers which are remainders when a set of numbers are divided by a second set. Generally, they are used in finding solutions of Diophantine equations or to factor numbers. A Lehmer sieve will signal that such solutions are found in a variety of ways depending on the particular construction.

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πŸ”— Kerckhoffs's principle

πŸ”— Cryptography πŸ”— Cryptography/Computer science πŸ”— Citizendium Porting

Kerckhoffs's principle (also called Kerckhoffs's desideratum, assumption, axiom, doctrine or law) of cryptography was stated by Netherlands born cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs in the 19th century: A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge.

Kerckhoffs's principle was reformulated (or possibly independently formulated) by American mathematician Claude Shannon as "the enemy knows the system", i.e., "one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them". In that form, it is called Shannon's maxim. This concept is widely embraced by cryptographers, in contrast to "security through obscurity", which is not.

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πŸ”— Pi Calculus

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computer science

In theoretical computer science, the Ο€-calculus (or pi-calculus) is a process calculus. The Ο€-calculus allows channel names to be communicated along the channels themselves, and in this way it is able to describe concurrent computations whose network configuration may change during the computation.

The Ο€-calculus is simple, it has few terms and so is a small, yet expressive language (see #Syntax). Functional programs can be encoded into the Ο€-calculus, and the encoding emphasises the dialogue nature of computation, drawing connections with game semantics. Extensions of the Ο€-calculus, such as the spi calculus and applied Ο€, have been successful in reasoning about cryptographic protocols. Beside the original use in describing concurrent systems, the Ο€-calculus has also been used to reason about business processes and molecular biology.

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πŸ”— The SOLID principles of object-oriented design

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Computer science

In object-oriented computer programming, SOLID is a mnemonic acronym for five design principles intended to make software designs more understandable, flexible and maintainable. It is not related to the GRASP software design principles. The principles are a subset of many principles promoted by American software engineer and instructor Robert C. Martin. Though they apply to any object-oriented design, the SOLID principles can also form a core philosophy for methodologies such as agile development or adaptive software development. The theory of SOLID principles was introduced by Martin in his 2000 paper Design Principles and Design Patterns, although the SOLID acronym was introduced later by Michael Feathers.

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