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🔗 Computing

Seam carving (or liquid rescaling) is an algorithm for content-aware image resizing, developed by Shai Avidan, of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and Ariel Shamir, of the Interdisciplinary Center and MERL. It functions by establishing a number of seams (paths of least importance) in an image and automatically removes seams to reduce image size or inserts seams to extend it. Seam carving also allows manually defining areas in which pixels may not be modified, and features the ability to remove whole objects from photographs.

The purpose of the algorithm is image retargeting, which is the problem of displaying images without distortion on media of various sizes (cell phones, projection screens) using document standards, like HTML, that already support dynamic changes in page layout and text but not images.

Image Retargeting was invented by Vidya Setlur, Saeko Takage, Ramesh Raskar, Michael Gleicher and Bruce Gooch in 2005. The work by Setlur et al. won the 10-year impact award in 2015.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Statistics

The gravity model of international trade in international economics is a model that, in its traditional form, predicts bilateral trade flows based on the economic sizes and distance between two units.

The model was first introduced in economics world by Walter Isard in 1954. The basic model for trade between two countries (i and j) takes the form of

${\displaystyle F_{ij}=G*{\frac {M_{i}*M_{j}}{D_{ij}}}}$

In this formula G is a constant, F stands for trade flow, D stands for the distance and M stands for the economic dimensions of the countries that are being measured. The equation can be changed into a linear form for the purpose of econometric analyses by employing logarithms. The model has been used by economists to analyse the determinants of bilateral trade flows such as common borders, common languages, common legal systems, common currencies, common colonial legacies, and it has been used to test the effectiveness of trade agreements and organizations such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Head and Mayer 2014). The model has also been used in international relations to evaluate the impact of treaties and alliances on trade (Head and Mayer).

The model has also been applied to other bilateral flow data (also 'dyadic' data) such as migration, traffic, remittances and foreign direct investment.

The WHOIS++ protocol is a distributed directory system, originally designed to provide a "white pages" search mechanism to find humans, but which could actually be used for arbitrary information retrieval tasks. It was developed in the early 1990s by BUNYIP Information Systems and is documented in the IETF.

WHOIS++ was devised as an extension to the pre-existing WHOIS system. WHOIS was an early networked directory service, originally maintained by SRI International for the Defense Data Network. The WHOIS protocol is still widely used to allow domain ownership records in the Internet to be easily queried.

WHOIS++ attempted to address some of the short comings in the original WHOIS protocol that had become apparent over the years. It supported multiple languages and character sets to help with I18N issues, had a more advanced query syntax, and the ability to generate "forward knowledge" in the form of 'centroid' data structures that could be used to route queries from one server to another. The protocol was designed to be backward compatible with the older WHOIS standard, so that WHOIS++ clients could still extract meaningful information from the already deployed WHOIS servers.

Whilst WHOIS++ as a white pages directory service never really took off compared to competitors such as X.500, it did gain a notable amount of use in the United Kingdom as the underlying search and retrieval protocol of a number of subject based gateways funded as part of the Jisc Electronic library programme. This was achieved using software called ROADS that provided WHOIS++ base and index servers and CGI based web interfaces to WHOIS++ clients. The use of centroids to provide forward knowledge and query routing allowed a subject gateway to not only provide resources to academic users from their own database but also point them at other JISC funded subject gateways that might have useful information.

The WHOIS++ protocol is now designated by the IETF as a historic protocol and is no longer deployed in new systems or developed.

🔗 Mathematics

In number theory, a formula for primes is a formula generating the prime numbers, exactly and without exception. No such formula which is efficiently computable is known. A number of constraints are known, showing what such a "formula" can and cannot be.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Energy

A traveling-wave reactor (TWR) is a proposed type of nuclear fission reactor that can convert fertile material into usable fuel through nuclear transmutation, in tandem with the burnup of fissile material. TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to use fuel efficiently without uranium enrichment or reprocessing, instead directly using depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The concept is still in the development stage and no TWRs have ever been built.

The name refers to the fact that fission remains confined to a boundary zone in the reactor core that slowly advances over time. TWRs could theoretically run self-sustained for decades without refueling or removing spent fuel.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history

Ivan Mikhailovich Chisov (Russian: Иван Михайлович Чисов, Ukrainian: Іван Михайлович Чиссов; 1916–1986) was a Soviet Air Force lieutenant who survived a fall of approximately 7,000 meters (23,000 feet). Some references give the spelling of his last name as Chissov (Russian: Чиссов, Ukrainian: Чиссов).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

The Karatsuba algorithm is a fast multiplication algorithm. It was discovered by Anatoly Karatsuba in 1960 and published in 1962. It reduces the multiplication of two n-digit numbers to at most ${\displaystyle n^{\log _{2}3}\approx n^{1.58}}$ single-digit multiplications in general (and exactly ${\displaystyle n^{\log _{2}3}}$ when n is a power of 2). It is therefore faster than the classical algorithm, which requires ${\displaystyle n^{2}}$ single-digit products. For example, the Karatsuba algorithm requires 3¹⁰ = 59,049 single-digit multiplications to multiply two 1024-digit numbers (n = 1024 = 2¹⁰), whereas the classical algorithm requires (2¹⁰)² = 1,048,576 (a speedup of 17.75 times).

The Karatsuba algorithm was the first multiplication algorithm asymptotically faster than the quadratic "grade school" algorithm. The Toom–Cook algorithm (1963) is a faster generalization of Karatsuba's method, and the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm (1971) is even faster, for sufficiently large n.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 China 🔗 Islam 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

The Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government of the People's Republic of China, are internment camps that have been operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government for the purpose of indoctrinating Uyghurs since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror" announced in 2014. The camps were established under General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration and led by party secretary, Chen Quanguo. These camps are reportedly operated outside the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them. Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as other ethnic minority groups, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting sinicization.

As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense claimed that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps". In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps". There have also been multiple reports from media, politicians and researchers comparing the camps to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

In 2019, the United Nations ambassadors from 22 nations, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom signed a letter condemning China's mass detention of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the camps. Conversely, a joint statement was signed by 37 states commending China's counter-terrorism program in Xinjiang, including Algeria, the DR Congo, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines and Sudan.

🔗 Technology

Ackermann steering geometry is a geometric arrangement of linkages in the steering of a car or other vehicle designed to solve the problem of wheels on the inside and outside of a turn needing to trace out circles of different radii.

It was invented by the German carriage builder Georg Lankensperger in Munich in 1817, then patented by his agent in England, Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834) in 1818 for horse-drawn carriages. Erasmus Darwin may have a prior claim as the inventor dating from 1758.

🔗 Culture

Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue or "Dialogue in the Spirit of David Bohm") is a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone's point of view fully, equally and nonjudgementally. This can lead to new and deeper understanding. The purpose is to solve the communication crises that face society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness. It utilizes a theoretical understanding of the way thoughts relate to universal reality. It is named after physicist David Bohm who originally proposed this form of dialogue.