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🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology

Wage slavery is a term describing a situation in which a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It has been used to criticise exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labour and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, some socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labour.

Similarities between wage labour and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labour and slavery, while Luddites emphasised the dehumanisation brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labour in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labour union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labour press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labour leader without the phrase".

🔗 Computing

In computer science, dancing links is a technique for reverting the operation of deleting a node from a circular doubly linked list. It is particularly useful for efficiently implementing backtracking algorithms, such as Donald Knuth's Algorithm X for the exact cover problem. Algorithm X is a recursive, nondeterministic, depth-first, backtracking algorithm that finds all solutions to the exact cover problem. Some of the better-known exact cover problems include tiling, the n queens problem, and Sudoku.

The name dancing links, which was suggested by Donald Knuth, stems from the way the algorithm works, as iterations of the algorithm cause the links to "dance" with partner links so as to resemble an "exquisitely choreographed dance." Knuth credits Hiroshi Hitotsumatsu and Kōhei Noshita with having invented the idea in 1979, but it is his paper which has popularized it.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 United States/Texas

Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed, produced, edited and scored by Shane Carruth, who also stars with David Sullivan.

Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure, philosophical implications, and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth, a college graduate with a degree in mathematics and a former engineer, chose not to simplify for the sake of the audience. The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, before securing a limited release in the United States, and has since gained a cult following.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Energy 🔗 Caribbean 🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible drilling rig Sedco 135 in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50 m (160 ft) deep. On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout resulting in one of the largest oil spills in history.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Death 🔗 Health and fitness 🔗 Japan 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Japan/Science and technology

Karoshi (過労死, Karōshi), which can be translated literally as "overwork death" in Japanese, is occupational sudden mortality. The major medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress and a starvation diet. This phenomenon is also widespread in other parts of Asia.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Internet 🔗 Religion 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Islam 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Animation 🔗 Comics 🔗 South Park

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day (or Draw Mohammed Day) was a 2010 event in support of artists threatened with violence for drawing representations of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It stemmed from a protest against censorship of the American television show South Park episode "201", led by the show's distributor Comedy Central, in response to death threats that had been made against some of those responsible for two segments broadcast in April 2010. A drawing representing Mohammed was posted on the Internet on April 20, 2010, with a message suggesting that "everybody" create a drawing depicting Mohammad on May 20 in support of free speech.

U.S. cartoonist Molly Norris of Seattle, Washington created the artwork in reaction to Internet death threats that had been made against animators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for depicting Muhammad in an episode of South Park. Postings on RevolutionMuslim.com (under the pen name Abu Talha al-Amrikee; later identified as Zachary Adam Chesser) had said that Parker and Stone could wind up like Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who was stabbed and shot to death.

Norris claimed that, if people draw pictures of Muhammad, radical Islamist terrorists would not be able to murder them all, and threats to do so would become unrealistic. Within a week, Norris' idea became popular on Facebook, was supported by numerous bloggers, and generated coverage on the blog websites of major U.S. newspapers. As the publicity mounted, Norris and the man who created the first Facebook page promoting the May 20 event disassociated themselves from it. Nonetheless, planning for the protest continued with others "taking up the cause". Facebook had an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page, which grew to over 100,000 participants (101,870 members by May 20). A protest page on Facebook against the initiative named "Against ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'" attracted slightly more supporters (106,000 by May 20). Subsequently, Facebook was temporarily blocked by Pakistan; the ban was lifted after Facebook agreed to block the page for users in India and Pakistan.

In the media, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day attracted support from commentators who felt that the campaign represented important issues of freedom of speech, and the need to stand up for this freedom.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Greece 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Dance 🔗 Composers 🔗 Dance/Ballet 🔗 Classical music 🔗 Military history/Balkan military history 🔗 Biography/Musicians 🔗 Military history/European military history

Iannis Xenakis (also spelt as Yannis Xenakis) (Greek: Γιάννης (Ιάννης) Ξενάκης [ˈʝanis kseˈnacis]; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Greek-French composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France. He is considered an important post-World War II composer whose works helped revolutionize 20th-century classical music.

Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.

Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–54) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes, that were a summa of his interests and skills. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (French edition 1963, English translation 1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed by himself.

🔗 Terrorism 🔗 Watches 🔗 Brands

The Casio F-91W is a digital watch manufactured by Japanese electronics company Casio. Introduced in 1989, it is popular for its low price and long battery life. Annual production is 3 million units per year.