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🔗 Geology 🔗 Rocks and minerals 🔗 Iceland

Iceland spar, formerly called Iceland crystal (Icelandic: silfurberg [ˈsɪlvʏrˌpɛrk], lit. 'silver-rock') and also called optical calcite, is a transparent variety of calcite, or crystallized calcium carbonate, originally brought from Iceland, and used in demonstrating the polarization of light.

🔗 United States 🔗 Religion 🔗 Islam 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 Religion/Interfaith 🔗 Dallas-Fort Worth 🔗 Islam/Islam and Controversy

On September 14, 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for bringing a disassembled digital clock to school. The incident ignited allegations of racial profiling and Islamophobia from many media sources and commentators.

The episode arose when Mohamed reassembled the parts of a digital clock in an 8-inch (20 cm) pencil container and brought it to school to show his teachers. His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half. He was handcuffed, taken into custody and transported to a juvenile detention facility, where he was fingerprinted and his mug shot was taken. He was then released to his parents. According to local police, they arrested him because they initially suspected he may have purposely caused a bomb scare. The case was not pursued further by the juvenile justice authorities, but he was suspended from school.

Following the incident, the police determined Mohamed had no malicious intent, and he was not charged with any crime. News of the incident went viral – initially on Twitter – with allegations by commentators that the actions of the school officials and police were due to their stereotyping of Mohamed based on his Sudanese ancestry and Muslim faith. Afterwards, U.S. President Barack Obama as well as other politicians, activists, technology company executives, and media personalities commented about the incident. Many of them praised Mohamed for his ingenuity and creativity, and he was invited to participate in a number of high-profile events related to encouraging youth interest in science and technology. Although Mohamed was cleared in the final police investigation, he became the subject of conspiracy theories – many of them contradictory, citing no evidence, and conflicting with established facts – which claimed that the incident was a deliberate hoax.

On November 23, 2015, Ahmed's family threatened to sue the City of Irving and the school district for civil rights violations and physical and mental anguish unless they received written apologies and compensation of $15 million. This lawsuit was dismissed in May 2017 for lack of evidence. The family also sued conservative talk show hosts Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, and another Fox News commentator for lesser amounts on the grounds of defamation of character. Both cases were dismissed with prejudice for First Amendment free speech reasons. In late 2015, his family decided to accept a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation and move to Qatar.

🔗 United States 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Boston 🔗 United States/American television 🔗 Cartoon Network

On the morning of January 31, 2007, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards depicting the Mooninites, characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to a massive panic. Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville by Peter "Zebbler" Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, these devices were part of a nationwide guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

The massive panic led to controversy and criticism from U.S. media sources, including The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, CNN, and The Boston Herald. Some ridiculed the city's response to the devices—including the arrests of the two men hired to place the placards around the area—as disproportionate and indicative of a generation gap between city officials and the younger residents of Boston, at whom the ads were targeted. Several sources noted that the hundreds of officers in the Boston police department or city emergency planning office on scene were unable to identify the figure depicted for several hours until a young staffer at Mayor Thomas Menino's office saw the media coverage and recognized the figures.

After the devices were removed, the Boston Police Department stated in its defense that the ad devices shared some similarities with improvised explosive devices, with them also discovering an identifiable power source, a circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape. Investigators were not mollified by the discovery that the devices were not explosive in nature, stating they still intended to determine "if this event was a hoax or something else entirely". Although city prosecutors eventually concluded there was no ill intent involved in the placing of the ads, the city continues to refer to the event as a "bomb hoax" (implying intent) rather than a "bomb scare".

Reflecting years later, various academics and media sources have characterized the phenomenon as a form of social panic. Gregory Bergman wrote in his 2008 book BizzWords that the devices were basically a self-made form of the children's toy Lite-Brite. Bruce Schneier wrote in his 2009 book Schneier on Security that Boston officials were "ridiculed" for their overreaction to the incident. In his 2009 book Secret Agents, historian and communication professor Jeremy Packer discussed a cultural phenomenon called the "panic discourse" and described the incident as a "spectacular instance of this panic". In a 2012 article, The Boston Phoenix called the incident the "Great Mooninite Panic of 2007". A 2013 publication by WGBH wrote that the majority of Boston youth thought that the arrests of two men who placed devices were not justified.

🔗 Literature

A chrestomathy ( kreh-STOM-ə-thee; from the Ancient Greek χρηστομάθεια khrēstomátheia 'desire of learning', from χρηστός khrēstós 'useful' + μανθάνω manthánō 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject.

In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style. It is different from an anthology because of its didactic purpose.

🔗 Holidays 🔗 Men's Issues

International Men's Day (IMD) is a global awareness day for many issues that men face, including parental alienation, abuse, homelessness, suicide, and violence, celebrated annually on November 19. The objectives of celebrating an International Men's Day are set out in 'All the Six Pillars of International Men's Day'. It is also an occasion to celebrate boys' and men's lives, achievements and contributions, in particular for their contributions to nation, union, society, community, family, marriage, and childcare.

🔗 United States 🔗 Death 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Death/Suicide

Farmers' suicides in the United States refers to the instances of American farmers taking their own lives, largely since the 1980s, partly due to their falling into debt, but as a larger mental-health crisis among U.S. agriculture workers. In the Midwest alone, over 1,500 farmers have taken their own lives since the 1980s. It mirrors a crisis happening globally: in Australia, a farmer dies by suicide every four days; in the United Kingdom, one farmer a week takes their own life, in France it is one every two days. More than 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995 in India.

Farmers are among the most likely to die by suicide, in comparison to other occupations, according to a study published in January 2020 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Researchers at the University of Iowa found that farmers, and others in the agricultural trade, had the highest suicide rate of all occupations from 1992 to 2010, the years covered in a 2017 study. The rate was 3.5 times that of the general population. This echoed a study conducted the previous year by the CDC and another undertaken by the National Rural Health Association (NRHA).

Most family farmers seem to agree on what led to their plight: government policy. In the years after the New Deal, they say, the United States set a price floor for farmers, essentially ensuring they received a minimum wage for the crops they produced. But the government began rolling back this policy in the 1970s, and now the global market largely determines the price they get for their crops. Big farms can make do with lower prices for crops by increasing their scale; a few cents per gallon of cow's milk adds up if you have thousands of cows.

—Time, November 27, 2019

As of April 2023, the suicide rate within the farming community exceeds that of the general population by three and a half times.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Languages

The pre-Greek substrate (or substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Greek language or languages (either Pre-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages) spoken in prehistoric Greece prior to the emergence of the Proto-Greek language in the region c. 3200–2200 BC, during the Early Helladic period. About 1,000 words of Greek vocabulary cannot be adequately explained as derivatives from Proto-Greek or Proto-Indo-European, leading to the substratum hypothesis.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers are any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers. These algorithms often need randomized constants for mixing or initialization purposes. The cryptographer may wish to pick these values in a way that demonstrates the constants were not selected for a nefarious purpose, for example, to create a backdoor to the algorithm. These fears can be allayed by using numbers created in a way that leaves little room for adjustment. An example would be the use of initial digits from the number π as the constants. Using digits of π millions of places after the decimal point would not be considered trustworthy because the algorithm designer might have selected that starting point because it created a secret weakness the designer could later exploit—though even with natural-seeming selections, enough entropy exists in the possible choices that the utility of these numbers has been questioned.

Digits in the positional representations of real numbers such as π, e, and irrational roots are believed to appear with equal frequency (see normal number). Such numbers can be viewed as the opposite extreme of Chaitin–Kolmogorov random numbers in that they appear random but have very low information entropy. Their use is motivated by early controversy over the U.S. Government's 1975 Data Encryption Standard, which came under criticism because no explanation was supplied for the constants used in its S-box (though they were later found to have been carefully selected to protect against the then-classified technique of differential cryptanalysis). Thus a need was felt for a more transparent way to generate constants used in cryptography.

"Nothing up my sleeve" is a phrase associated with magicians, who sometimes preface a magic trick by holding open their sleeves to show they have no objects hidden inside.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Radio 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering

In antenna theory, a phased array usually means an electronically scanned array, a computer-controlled array of antennas which creates a beam of radio waves that can be electronically steered to point in different directions without moving the antennas. The general theory of an electromagnetic phased array also finds applications in ultrasonic and medical imaging application (phased array ultrasonics) and in optics optical phased array.

In a simple array antenna, the radio frequency current from the transmitter is fed to multiple individual antenna elements with the proper phase relationship so that the radio waves from the separate elements combine (superpose) to form beams, to increase power radiated in desired directions and suppress radiation in undesired directions. In a phased array, the power from the transmitter is fed to the radiating elements through devices called phase shifters, controlled by a computer system, which can alter the phase or signal delay electronically, thus steering the beam of radio waves to a different direction. Since the size of an antenna array must extend many wavelengths to achieve the high gain needed for narrow beamwidth, phased arrays are mainly practical at the high frequency end of the radio spectrum, in the UHF and microwave bands, in which the operating wavelengths are conveniently small.

Phased arrays were originally conceived for use in military radar systems, to steer a beam of radio waves quickly across the sky to detect planes and missiles. These systems are now widely used and have spread to civilian applications such as 5G MIMO for cell phones. The phased array principle is also used in acoustics, and phased arrays of acoustic transducers are used in medical ultrasound imaging scanners (phased array ultrasonics), oil and gas prospecting (reflection seismology), and military sonar systems.

The term "phased array" is also used to a lesser extent for unsteered array antennas in which the phase of the feed power and thus the radiation pattern of the antenna array is fixed. For example, AM broadcast radio antennas consisting of multiple mast radiators fed so as to create a specific radiation pattern are also called "phased arrays".

🔗 Plants 🔗 Forestry 🔗 Ecology

Pioneer species are resilient species that are the first to colonize barren environments, or to repopulate disrupted biodiverse steady-state ecosystems as part of ecological succession. A number of kinds of events can create good conditions for pioneers, including disruption by natural disasters, such as wildfire, flood, mudslide, lava flow or a climate-related extinction event or by anthropogenic habitat destruction, such as through land clearance for agriculture or construction or industrial damage. Pioneer species play an important role in creating soil in primary succession, and stabilizing soil and nutrients in secondary succession.

For humans, because pioneer species quickly occupy disrupted spaces they are sometimes treated as weeds or nuisance wildlife, such as the common dandelion or stinging nettle. Even though humans have mixed relationships with these plants, these species tend to help improve the ecosystem because they can break up compacted soils and accumulate nutrients that help with a transition back to a more mature ecosystem. In human managed ecological restoration or agroforestry, trees and herbaceous pioneers can be used to restore soil qualities and provide shelter for slower growing or more demanding plants. Some systems use introduced species to restore the ecosystem, or for environmental remediation. The durability of pioneer species can also make them potential invasive species.