To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 United States/Ohio 🔗 United States/Cincinnati 🔗 Civil Rights Movement 🔗 Alabama

Frederick Lee "Fred" Shuttlesworth (born Fred Lee Robinson, March 18, 1922 – October 5, 2011) was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He helped Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

The Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport was named in his honor in 2008.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award is bestowed annually in his name.

🔗 Video games

Doom, a first-person shooter game by id Software, was released in December 1993 and is considered one of the most significant and influential titles in video game history. Development began in November 1992, with programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. Late in development, Hall was replaced by Sandy Petersen and programmer Dave Taylor joined. The music and sound effects were created by Bobby Prince.

The Doom concept was proposed in late 1992, after the release of Wolfenstein 3D and its sequel Spear of Destiny. John Carmack was working on an improved 3D game engine from those games, and the team wanted to have their next game take advantage of his designs. Several ideas were proposed, including a new game in their Commander Keen series, but John proposed a game about using technology to fight demons inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns the team played. The initial months of development were spent building prototypes, while Hall created the Doom Bible, a design document for his vision of the game and its story; after id released a grandiose press release touting features that the team had not yet begun working on, the Doom Bible was rejected in favor of a plotless game with no design document at all.

Over the next six months, Hall designed levels based on real military bases, Romero built features, and artists Adrian and Cloud created textures and demons based on clay models they built. Hall's level designs, however, were deemed uninteresting and Romero began designing his own levels; Hall, increasingly frustrated with his limited influence, was fired in July. He was replaced by Petersen in September, and the team worked increasingly long hours until the game was completed in December 1993. Doom was self-published by id on December 10, 1993, and immediately downloaded by thousands of players.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Video games

Zynga Inc. is an American social game developer running social video game services and founded in April 2007 with headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games."

Zynga launched its best-known game, FarmVille, on Facebook in June 2009, reaching 10 million daily active users (DAU) within six weeks. As of August 2017, Zynga had 30 million monthly active users (MAU). In 2017 its most successful games were Zynga Poker and Words with Friends 2, with about 57 million games being played at any given moment; and CSR Racing 2, the most popular racing game on mobile devices.

Zynga began trading on NASDAQ December 16, 2011, under the ticker ZNGA.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Linux 🔗 Computing/Early computers

Emacs or EMACS (Editor MACroS) is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, continues actively as of 2020.

Emacs has over 10,000 built-in commands and its user interface allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Implementations of Emacs typically feature a dialect of the Lisp programming language that provides a deep extension capability, allowing users and developers to write new commands and applications for the editor. Extensions have been written to manage email, files, outlines, and RSS feeds, as well as clones of ELIZA, Pong, Conway's Life, Snake and Tetris.

The original EMACS was written in 1976 by Carl Mikkelsen, David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.

The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project. XEmacs is a variant that branched from GNU Emacs in 1991. GNU Emacs and XEmacs use similar Lisp dialects and are for the most part compatible with each other.

Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. Emacs is among the oldest free and open source projects still under development.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology

In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when he or she works in a group than when working alone and is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals. Research on social loafing began with rope pulling experiments by Ringelmann, who found that members of a group tended to exert less effort in pulling a rope than did individuals alone. In more recent research, studies involving modern technology, such as online and distributed groups, have also shown clear evidence of social loafing. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from individual members feeling their individual effort will not matter to the group.

The French professor of agricultural engineering called Max Ringelman demonstrated what “social loafing” was in the 1890s. Ringelman, who was also considered one of the founders of social psychology, made people pull on ropes separately and in groups, and he measured and compared how hard they pulled. After collecting the results he realized that members of a group tended to exert less effort in pulling a rope than did individuals alone. In more recent research, studies involving modern technology, such as online and distributed groups, have also shown clear evidence of social loafing. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from individual members feeling that his or her effort will not matter to the group. This is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals, but should be distinguished from the accidental coordination problems that groups sometimes experience.

Several studies found, a lack of an understanding of individual contributions, unchallenging tasks given to the individual, low personal satisfaction from the task, and a lack of a united group to be the most prevalent motivational origins of social loafing. Theories investigating why social loafing occurs range from a group member feeling their contribution will not be noticed to a group member realizing their efforts are not necessary. In a work setting, most managers agree if a task is new or complex employees should work alone. While tasks that are well known and have room for individual effort are better when done in groups.

In order to diminish social loafing from a group, several strategies could be put forward. Social loafing primarily happens when an individual unconscious or conscious exerts less effort due to a decrease in social awareness. In order to counteract the likelihood of this happening, Miguel Herraez, conducted a study on students where he used accountability and cooperation when unequal participation is found. The students were encouraged to do provide equal participation in the work and to point out sources of conflict that could arise. The conclusion of the study found that providing support to the group members lacking in commitment and creating options for independence among group members lowered social loafing. The support for the weaker students improves their standing while also benefiting the other students.

Social loafing should be distinguished from the accidental coordination problems that groups sometimes experience.

🔗 Politics

The Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a UK-based company. It intends to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states.

The index was first published in 2006, with updates for 2008, 2010 and later years. The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. In addition to a numeric score and a ranking, the index categorises each country in one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.

🔗 Mathematics

The art gallery problem or museum problem is a well-studied visibility problem in computational geometry. It originates from a real-world problem of guarding an art gallery with the minimum number of guards who together can observe the whole gallery. In the geometric version of the problem, the layout of the art gallery is represented by a simple polygon and each guard is represented by a point in the polygon. A set ${\displaystyle S}$ of points is said to guard a polygon if, for every point ${\displaystyle p}$ in the polygon, there is some ${\displaystyle q\in S}$ such that the line segment between ${\displaystyle p}$ and ${\displaystyle q}$ does not leave the polygon.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Pakistan

Osama bin Laden's compound, known locally as the Waziristan Haveli (Urdu: وزیرستان حویلی‎), was an upper-class mansion that was used as a safe house for militant Islamist Osama bin Laden, who was shot and killed there by U.S. forces on May 2, 2011. The compound was located at the end of a dirt road 1,300 metres (0.8 mi) southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburb housing many retired military officers. Bin Laden was reported to have evaded capture by living in a section of the house for at least five years, having no Internet or phone connection, and hiding away from the public, who were allegedly unaware of his presence.

Completed in 2005, the main buildings in the compound lay on a 3,500-square-metre (38,000 sq ft) plot of land, much larger than those of nearby houses. Its perimeter was 3.7- to 5.5-metre (12 to 18 ft) concrete walls topped with barbed wire, and there were two security gates. The compound had very few windows. Little more than five years old, the compound's ramshackle buildings were badly in need of repainting. The grounds contained a well-kept vegetable garden, rabbits, some 100 chickens and a cow. The house itself did not stand out architecturally from others in the neighbourhood, except for its size and exaggerated security measures; for example, the third-floor balcony had a 2-metre (7 ft) privacy wall. Photographs inside the house showed excessive clutter and modest furnishings. After the American mission, there was extensive interest in and reporting about the compound and its design. To date, the Pakistani government has not responded to any allegations as to who had built the structure.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. searched for bin Laden for nearly 10 years. By tracking his courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti to the compound, U.S. officials surmised that bin Laden was hiding there. During a raid on May 2, 2011, 24 members of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group arrived by helicopter, breached a wall using explosives, and entered the compound in search of bin Laden. After the operation was completed and bin Laden was killed, Pakistan demolished the structure in February 2012.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Globalization

Petrodollar recycling is the international spending or investment of a country's revenues from petroleum exports ("petrodollars"). It generally refers to the phenomenon of major petroleum-exporting nations, mainly the OPEC members plus Russia and Norway, earning more money from the export of crude oil than they could efficiently invest in their own economies. The resulting global interdependencies and financial flows, from oil producers back to oil consumers, can reach a scale of hundreds of billions of US dollars per year – including a wide range of transactions in a variety of currencies, some pegged to the US dollar and some not. These flows are heavily influenced by government-level decisions regarding international investment and aid, with important consequences for both global finance and petroleum politics. The phenomenon is most pronounced during periods when the price of oil is historically high.

The term petrodollar was coined in the early 1970s during the oil crisis, and the first major petrodollar surge (1974–1981) resulted in more financial complications than the second (2005–2014).

In August 2018, Venezuela declared that it would price its oil in Euros, Yuan and other currencies.

🔗 Computer science

The circle–ellipse problem in software development (sometimes called the square–rectangle problem) illustrates several pitfalls which can arise when using subtype polymorphism in object modelling. The issues are most commonly encountered when using object-oriented programming (OOP). By definition, this problem is a violation of the Liskov substitution principle, one of the SOLID principles.

The problem concerns which subtyping or inheritance relationship should exist between classes which represent circles and ellipses (or, similarly, squares and rectangles). More generally, the problem illustrates the difficulties which can occur when a base class contains methods which mutate an object in a manner which may invalidate a (stronger) invariant found in a derived class, causing the Liskov substitution principle to be violated.

The existence of the circle–ellipse problem is sometimes used to criticize object-oriented programming. It may also imply that hierarchical taxonomies are difficult to make universal, implying that situational classification systems may be more practical.