Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Military history 🔗 Europe 🔗 Politics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 European history 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

"Z" is one of several symbols painted on military vehicles of the Russian Armed Forces involved in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The symbol has been used in Russian popular culture as a sign of support for the invasion. Displaying any of the symbols on vehicles in public is illegal in Kazakhstan.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Portugal 🔗 Galicia

Saudade (European Portuguese: [sɐwˈðaðɨ] ; Brazilian Portuguese: [sawˈdadʒi] ; Galician: [sawˈðaðɪ]; Northeast Brazil: [sawˈdadi]). (English: ; plural saudades) in Portuguese and Galician is an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It derives from the Latin word for solitude. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused. Duarte Nunes Leão defines saudade as, "Memory of something with a desire for it". In Brazil, the day of saudade is officially celebrated on 30 January. It is not a widely acknowledged day in Portugal.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Novels/Short story

"The Murderer" (1953) is a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Environment 🔗 International development

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.

The goal was to transform education, by enabling children in low-income countries to have access to content, media and computer-programming environments. When the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so achieving this objective required bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer designed by Yves Béhar. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support.

The OLPC project was the subject of much discussion. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English. It was criticized from many sides regarding its US-centric focus ignoring bigger problems, high total costs, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success. In 2014, after disappointing sales, the Foundation shut down.

The OLPC project is critically reviewed in a 2019 MIT Press book titled The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Ships 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The escort carrier or escort aircraft carrier (U.S. hull classification symbol CVE), also called a "jeep carrier" or "baby flattop" in the United States Navy (USN) or "Woolworth Carrier" by the Royal Navy, was a small and slow type of aircraft carrier used by the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the United States Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army Air Force in World War II. They were typically half the length and a third the displacement of larger fleet carriers, slower, more-lightly armed and armored, and carried fewer planes. Escort carriers were most often built upon a commercial ship hull, so they were cheaper and could be built quickly. This was their principal advantage as they could be completed in greater numbers as a stop-gap when fleet carriers were scarce. However, the lack of protection made escort carriers particularly vulnerable, and several were sunk with great loss of life. The light carrier (U.S. hull classification symbol CVL) was a similar concept to the escort carrier in most respects, but was fast enough to operate alongside fleet carriers.

Escort carriers were too slow to keep up with the main forces consisting of fleet carriers, battleships, and cruisers. Instead, they were used to escort merchant ship convoys, defending them from enemy threats such as submarines and planes. In the invasions of mainland Europe and Pacific islands, escort carriers provided air support to ground forces during amphibious operations. Escort carriers also served as backup aircraft transports for fleet carriers, and ferried aircraft of all military services to points of delivery.

In the Battle of the Atlantic, escort carriers were used to protect convoys against U-boats. Initially escort carriers accompanied the merchant ships and helped to fend off attacks from aircraft and submarines. As numbers increased later in the war, escort carriers also formed part of hunter-killer groups that sought out submarines instead of being attached to a particular convoy.

In the Pacific theater, CVEs provided air support of ground troops in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. They lacked the speed and weapons to counter enemy fleets, relying on the protection of a Fast Carrier Task Force. However, at the Battle off Samar, one U.S. task force of escort carriers and destroyers managed to successfully defend itself against a much larger Japanese force of battleships and cruisers. The Japanese met a furious defense of carrier aircraft, screening destroyers, and destroyer escorts.

Of the 151 aircraft carriers built in the U.S. during World War II, 122 were escort carriers, though no examples survive. The Casablanca class was the most numerous class of aircraft carrier, with 50 launched. Second was the Bogue class, with 45 launched.

🔗 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.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants

Synsepalum dulcificum is a plant in the Sapotaceae family, native to tropical Africa. It is known for its berry that, when eaten, causes sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. This effect is due to miraculin. Common names for this species and its berry include miracle fruit, miracle berry, miraculous berry, sweet berry, and in West Africa, where the species originates, agbayun (in Yoruba), taami, asaa, and ledidi.

The berry itself has a low sugar content and a mildly sweet tang. It contains a glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. At neutral pH, miraculin binds and blocks the receptors, but at low pH (resulting from ingestion of sour foods) miraculin binds proteins and becomes able to activate the sweet receptors, resulting in the perception of sweet taste. This effect lasts until the protein is washed away by saliva (up to about 30 minutes).

The names miracle fruit and miracle berry are shared by Gymnema sylvestre and Thaumatococcus daniellii, which are two other species used to alter the perceived sweetness of foods.

🔗 Sociology

Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.

It involves the understanding of social agents, the interaction among these agents, and the effect of these interactions on the social aggregate. Although the subject matter and methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science, several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such as physics and artificial intelligence. Some of the approaches that originated in this field have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the fields of social network analysis and network science.

In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social complexity. Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of computational sociology. A practical and well-known example is the construction of a computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyze the structure of a social system.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Languages 🔗 Medicine/Neurology

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in autistic individuals. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.

🔗 Amateur radio

Olivia MFSK is an amateur radioteletype protocol, using multiple frequency-shift keying (MFSK) and designed to work in difficult (low signal-to-noise ratio plus multipath propagation) conditions on shortwave bands. The signal can be accurately received even if the surrounding noise is 10 dB stronger. It is commonly used by amateur radio operators to reliably transmit ASCII characters over noisy channels using the high frequency (3–30 MHz) spectrum. The effective data rate of the Olivia MFSK protocol is 150 characters/minute.

Olivia modes are commonly referred to as Olivia X / Y (or, alternatively, Olivia Y / X ), where X refers to the number of different audio tones transmitted and Y refers to the bandwidth in hertz over which these signals are spread. Examples of common Olivia modes are 16/500, 32/1000 and 8/250.