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🔗 Architecture 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Shopping Centers

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer (also known as the Gruen effect) is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making consumers more susceptible to make impulse buys. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who disavowed such manipulative techniques.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 LGBT studies/LGBT Person 🔗 LGBT studies

Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 - June 9, 2024) was an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist.

She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.

🔗 Film 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Japan 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history 🔗 Film/War films 🔗 Military history/War films 🔗 Anime and manga 🔗 Japan/Japanese cinema 🔗 Anime and manga/Studio Ghibli 🔗 Film/Japanese cinema 🔗 Film/Animated films

Grave of the Fireflies (Japanese: 火垂るの墓, Hepburn: Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 Japanese animated war drama film written and directed by Isao Takahata, and produced by Studio Ghibli. It is based on the 1967 semi-autobiographical short story Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka.

The film stars Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara and Akemi Yamaguchi. Set in the city of Kobe, Japan, it tells the story of siblings and war orphans Seita and Setsuko, and their desperate struggle to survive during the final months of World War II. Universally acclaimed, Grave of the Fireflies has been ranked as one of the greatest war films of all time and is recognized as a major work of Japanese animation.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Effective Altruism

The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-infrastructure development movement mostly focusing on public housing policy, real estate development, public transportation, and pedestrian safety in transportation planning, in contrast and in opposition to the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") movement that generally opposes most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo. As a popular organized movement in the United States, it began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a major housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in state and local politics across the United States.

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels. They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development (especially for affordable housing or trailer parks), high-speed rail lines, homeless shelters, day cares, schools, universities and colleges, bike lanes, and transportation planning that promotes pedestrian safety infrastructure. YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing. Some YIMBYs have also supported public-interest projects like clean energy or alternative transport.

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,^: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.

🔗 Europe 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Percussion

A pyrophone, also known as a "fire/explosion organ" or "fire/explosion calliope" is a musical instrument in which notes are sounded by explosions, or similar forms of rapid combustion, rapid heating, or the like, such as burners in cylindrical glass tubes, creating light and sound. It was invented by physicist and musician Georges Frédéric Eugène Kastner (born 1852 in Strasbourg, France – died 1882 in Bonn, Germany), son of composer Jean-Georges Kastner, around 1870.

🔗 United States

The United States government's Strategic Computing Initiative funded research into advanced computer hardware and artificial intelligence from 1983 to 1993. The initiative was designed to support various projects that were required to develop machine intelligence in a prescribed ten-year time frame, from chip design and manufacture, computer architecture to artificial intelligence software. The Department of Defense spent a total of $1 billion on the project.

The inspiration for the program was Japan's fifth generation computer project, an enormous initiative that set aside billions for research into computing and artificial intelligence. As with Sputnik in 1957, the American government saw the Japanese project as a challenge to its technological dominance. The British government also funded a program of their own around the same time, known as Alvey, and a consortium of U.S. companies funded another similar project, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation.

The goal of SCI, and other contemporary projects, was nothing less than full machine intelligence. "The machine envisioned by SC", according to Alex Roland and Philip Shiman, "would run ten billion instructions per second to see, hear, speak, and think like a human. The degree of integration required would rival that achieved by the human brain, the most complex instrument known to man."

The initiative was conceived as an integrated program, similar to the Apollo moon program, where different subsystems would be created by various companies and academic projects and eventually brought together into a single integrated system. Roland and Shiman wrote that "While most research programs entail tactics or strategy, SC boasted grand strategy, a master plan for an entire campaign."

The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and directed by the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO). By 1985 it had spent $100 million, and 92 projects were underway at 60 institutions: half in industry, half in universities and government labs. Robert Kahn, who directed IPTO in those years, provided the project with its early leadership and inspiration. Clint Kelly managed the SC Initiative for three years and developed many of the specific application programs for DARPA, such as the Autonomous Land Vehicle.

By the late 1980s, it was clear that the project would fall short of realizing the hoped-for levels of machine intelligence. Program insiders pointed to issues with integration, organization, and communication. When Jack Schwarz ascended to the leadership of IPTO in 1987, he cut funding to artificial intelligence research (the software component) "deeply and brutally", "eviscerating" the program (wrote Pamela McCorduck). Schwarz felt that DARPA should focus its funding only on those technologies which showed the most promise. In his words, DARPA should "surf", rather than "dog paddle", and he felt strongly AI was not "the next wave".

Although the program failed to meet its goal of high-level machine intelligence, it did meet some of its specific technical objectives, for example those of autonomous land navigation. The Autonomous Land Vehicle program and its sister Navlab project at Carnegie Mellon University, in particular, laid the scientific and technical foundation for many of the driverless vehicle programs that came after it, such as the Demo II and III programs (ALV being Demo I), Perceptor, and the DARPA Grand Challenge. The use of video cameras plus laser scanners and inertial navigation units pioneered by the SCI ALV program form the basis of almost all commercial driverless car developments today. It also helped to advance the state of the art of computer hardware to a considerable degree. On the software side, the initiative funded development of the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, a program that handled logistics using artificial intelligence techniques. This was a huge success, saving the Department of Defense billions during Desert Storm.

The project was superseded in the 1990s by the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative and then by the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. These later programs did not include artificial general intelligence as a goal, but instead focused on supercomputing for large scale simulation, such as atomic bomb simulations. The Strategic Computing Initiative of the 1980s is distinct from the 2015 National Strategic Computing Initiative—the two are unrelated.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 United States/Texas - Austin

Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, 816 F. Supp. 432 (W.D. Tex. 1993), was a lawsuit arising from a 1990 raid by the United States Secret Service on the headquarters of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) in Austin, Texas. The raid, along with the Secret Service's unrelated Operation Sundevil, was influential in the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

🔗 Iran 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Law 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Politics 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Israel

The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian code of law of ancient Mesopotamia, dated to about 1754 BC (Middle Chronology). It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code. A partial copy exists on a 2.25-metre-tall (7.5 ft) stone stele. It consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (lex talionis) as graded based on social stratification depending on social status and gender, of slave versus free, man versus woman.

Nearly half of the code deals with matters of contract, establishing the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon for example. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction, the liability of a builder for a house that collapses, or property that is damaged while left in the care of another. A third of the code addresses issues concerning household and family relationships such as inheritance, divorce, paternity, and reproductive behavior. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on a government official; this provision establishes that a judge who alters his decision after it is written down is to be fined and removed from the bench permanently. A few provisions address issues related to military service.

The code was discovered by modern archaeologists in 1901, and its editio princeps translation published in 1902 by Jean-Vincent Scheil. This nearly complete example of the code is carved into a diorite stele in the shape of a huge index finger, 2.25 m (7.4 ft) tall. The code is inscribed in the Akkadian language, using cuneiform script carved into the stele. The material was imported into Sumeria from Magan - today the area covered by the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

It is currently on display in the Louvre, with replicas in numerous institutions, including the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, the Clendening History of Medicine Library & Museum at the University of Kansas Medical Center, the library of the Theological University of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven in Belgium, the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, the Prewitt-Allen Archaeological Museum at Corban University, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

🔗 Transport 🔗 Sweden

Dagen H (H day), today usually called "Högertrafikomläggningen" ("The right-hand traffic diversion"), was the day on 3 September 1967, in which the traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right. The "H" stands for "Högertrafik", the Swedish word for "right traffic". It was by far the largest logistical event in Sweden's history.