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🔗 Basic income
Basic income, also called universal basic income (UBI), citizen's income, citizen's basic income in the United Kingdom, basic income guarantee in the United States and Canada, or basic living stipend or guaranteed annual income or universal demogrant, is a governmental public program for a periodic payment delivered to all on an individual basis without means test or work requirement. The incomes would be:
- Unconditional: A basic income would vary with age, but with no other conditions. Everyone of the same age would receive the same basic income, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else.
- Automatic: Someone's basic income would be automatically paid weekly or monthly into a bank account or similar.
- Non-withdrawable: Basic incomes would not be means-tested. Whether someone's earnings increase, decrease, or stay the same, their basic income will not change.
- Individual: Basic incomes would be paid on an individual basis and not on the basis of a couple or household.
- As a right: Every legal resident would receive a basic income, subject to a minimum period of legal residency and continuing residency for most of the year.
Basic income can be implemented nationally, regionally or locally. An unconditional income that is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (at or above the poverty line) is sometimes called a full basic income while if it is less than that amount, it is sometimes called partial. A welfare system with some characteristics similar to those of a basic income is a negative income tax in which the government stipend is gradually reduced with higher labour income. Some welfare systems are sometimes regarded as steps on the way to a basic income, but because they have conditionalities attached they are not basic incomes. If they raise household incomes to specified minima they are called guaranteed minimum income systems. For example, Bolsa Família in Brazil is restricted to poor families and the children are obligated to attend school.
Several political discussions are related to the basic income debate. Examples include the debates regarding robotization, artificial intelligence (AI), and the future of work. A key issue in these debates is whether robotisation and AI will significantly reduce the number of available jobs. Basic income often comes up as a proposal in these discussions.
Discussed on
- "Basic income" | 2009-08-12 | 37 Upvotes 56 Comments
🔗 Pecha Kucha: Preventative Medicine for Death By PowerPoint
PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ, IPA: [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa], chit-chat) is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total). At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.
Inspired by their desire to "talk less, show more," Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) created PechaKucha in February 2003. It was a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, their experimental event space in Roppongi, and to enable young designers to meet, show their work, and exchange ideas in 6 minutes 40 seconds.
In 2004, cities in Europe began hosting PK Nights and days, followed over the years by hundreds of others. As of April 2019, PKNs had been held in more than 1,142 cities worldwide. More than 3 million people have attended a PK Night.
PechaKucha is a registered trademark of PechaKucha, Inc.
In January 2018, PK's Astrid Klein, Mark Dytham, and Sean Smyth established PK, Inc. to create software to expand the PK platform.
Discussed on
- "Pecha Kucha: Preventative Medicine for Death By PowerPoint" | 2009-08-11 | 10 Upvotes 6 Comments
🔗 Why the Z boson had a different mass at different times of day.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed.
It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland. LEP collided electrons with positrons at energies that reached 209 GeV. It was a circular collider with a circumference of 27 kilometres built in a tunnel roughly 100 m (300 ft) underground and passing through Switzerland and France. LEP was used from 1989 until 2000. Around 2001 it was dismantled to make way for the Large Hadron Collider, which re-used the LEP tunnel. To date, LEP is the most powerful accelerator of leptons ever built.
Discussed on
- "Why the Z boson had a different mass at different times of day." | 2009-08-08 | 65 Upvotes 22 Comments
🔗 Mind benders: List of paradoxes
This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning (falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result.
However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream perception of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. These paradoxes, often called antinomy, point out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description.
Discussed on
- "Mind benders: List of paradoxes" | 2009-07-07 | 15 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 The Clever Hans Effect
Clever Hans (in German: der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.
After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues. In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition. Pfungst was an assistant to German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, who incorporated the experience with Hans into his further work on animal psychology and his ideas on phenomenology.
Discussed on
- "Clever Hans (Intelligence Misattributon)" | 2023-03-26 | 61 Upvotes 20 Comments
- "The Clever Hans Effect" | 2009-06-25 | 34 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 The hairy ball theorem
The hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology (sometimes called the hedgehog theorem in Europe) states that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres. For the ordinary sphere, or 2‑sphere, if f is a continuous function that assigns a vector in R3 to every point p on a sphere such that f(p) is always tangent to the sphere at p, then there is at least one p such that f(p) = 0. The theorem was first stated by Henri Poincaré in the late 19th century, and first proven in 1912 by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer.
The theorem has been expressed colloquially as "you can't comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick" or "you can't comb the hair on a coconut".
Discussed on
- "The hairy ball theorem" | 2009-06-12 | 63 Upvotes 36 Comments
🔗 Perl 6 new regexp rules
Raku rules are the regular expression, string matching and general-purpose parsing facility of Raku, and are a core part of the language. Since Perl's pattern-matching constructs have exceeded the capabilities of formal regular expressions for some time, Raku documentation refers to them exclusively as regexes, distancing the term from the formal definition.
Raku provides a superset of Perl 5 features with respect to regexes, folding them into a larger framework called rules, which provide the capabilities of a parsing expression grammar, as well as acting as a closure with respect to their lexical scope. Rules are introduced with the rule keyword, which has a usage quite similar to subroutine definitions. Anonymous rules can be introduced with the regex (or rx) keyword, or simply be used inline as regexes were in Perl 5 via the m (matching) or s (substitution) operators.
Discussed on
- "Perl 6 new regexp rules" | 2009-06-08 | 29 Upvotes 4 Comments
🔗 Opposition to and problems with neckties
A necktie, or simply a tie, is a long piece of cloth, worn, usually by men, for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat.
Variants include the ascot, bow, bolo, zipper, cravat, and knit. The modern necktie, ascot, and bow tie are descended from the cravat. Neckties are generally unsized, but may be available in a longer size. In some cultures men and boys wear neckties as part of regular office attire or formal wear. Some women wear them as well but usually not as often as men. Neckties can also be worn as part of a uniform (e.g. military, school, waitstaff), whereas some choose to wear them as everyday clothing attire. Neckties are traditionally worn with the top shirt button fastened, and the tie knot resting between the collar points.
Discussed on
- "Opposition to and problems with neckties" | 2009-06-01 | 13 Upvotes 31 Comments
🔗 Proving something exists nonconstructively using probability.
The probabilistic method is a nonconstructive method, primarily used in combinatorics and pioneered by Paul Erdős, for proving the existence of a prescribed kind of mathematical object. It works by showing that if one randomly chooses objects from a specified class, the probability that the result is of the prescribed kind is strictly greater than zero. Although the proof uses probability, the final conclusion is determined for certain, without any possible error.
This method has now been applied to other areas of mathematics such as number theory, linear algebra, and real analysis, as well as in computer science (e.g. randomized rounding), and information theory.
Discussed on
- "Proving something exists nonconstructively using probability." | 2009-05-27 | 26 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Déformation professionnelle
Déformation professionnelle (French: [defɔʁmasjɔ̃ pʁɔfɛsjɔnɛl], professional deformation or job conditioning) is a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one's own profession or special expertise, rather than from a broader or humane perspective. It is often translated as "professional deformation", though French déformation can also be translated as "distortion". The implication is that professional training, and its related socialization, often result in a distortion of the way one views the world. Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel observed, "Every specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understands the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him."
As a term in psychology, it was likely coined by the Belgian sociologist Daniel Warnotte or Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin.
Discussed on
- "Déformation professionnelle" | 2009-05-22 | 44 Upvotes 27 Comments