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🔗 United States 🔗 Environment 🔗 Mammals 🔗 United States/Idaho

The beaver drop was a 1948 Idaho Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers (Castor canadensis). The program involved moving 76 beavers by airplane and parachuting them to new areas in Central Idaho. The program was initiated to both reduce cost and decrease mortality rates during the relocation. Alleviating complaints about "nuisance beavers" and their activities were an underlying reason for it.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Law 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Florida

Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 – May 18, 2008) was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died at his Pinecrest, Florida home on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Werckmeister temperaments are the tuning systems described by Andreas Werckmeister in his writings. The tuning systems are numbered in two different ways: the first refers to the order in which they were presented as "good temperaments" in Werckmeister's 1691 treatise, the second to their labelling on his monochord. The monochord labels start from III since just intonation is labelled I and quarter-comma meantone is labelled II. The temperament commonly known as "Werckmeister III" is referred to in this article as "Werckmeister I (III)".

The tunings I (III), II (IV) and III (V) were presented graphically by a cycle of fifths and a list of major thirds, giving the temperament of each in fractions of a comma. Werckmeister used the organbuilder's notation of ^ for a downwards tempered or narrowed interval and v for an upward tempered or widened one. (This appears counterintuitive - it is based on the use of a conical tuning tool which would reshape the ends of the pipes.) A pure fifth is simply a dash. Werckmeister was not explicit about whether the syntonic comma or Pythagorean comma was meant: the difference between them, the so-called schisma, is almost inaudible and he stated that it could be divided up among the fifths.

The last "Septenarius" tuning was not conceived in terms of fractions of a comma, despite some modern authors' attempts to approximate it by some such method. Instead, Werckmeister gave the string lengths on the monochord directly, and from that calculated how each fifth ought to be tempered.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Ukraine

The Antonov An-225 Mriya (Ukrainian: Антонов Ан-225 Мрія, lit. 'dream' or 'inspiration'; NATO reporting name: Cossack) is a strategic airlift cargo aircraft that was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Originally, this unique aircraft was developed as an enlargement of the Antonov An-124 to transport Buran-class orbiters. After successfully fulfilling its Soviet military missions, it was mothballed for eight years. It was then refurbished and reintroduced into commercial operation with Antonov Airlines, carrying oversized payloads. While a second airframe with a slightly different configuration was partially built, construction was halted more than once due to a lack of funding and interest. This second aircraft was last brought up to 60–70% completion in 2009.

As an over sized aircraft the Antonov An-225 Mriya holds multiple records which include; heaviest aircraft ever built, and largest wingspan of any aircraft in operational service. Other records held by the An-225 are cargo related in terms of weight and length as the Antonov An-225 has the capability to carry up to 640 tonnes (705 short tons). The An-225 attracts a high degree of public interest, so much that it has managed to attain a global following due to its size and its uniqueness. People frequently visit airports to see its scheduled arrivals and departures.

🔗 Electronics

An antifuse is an electrical device that performs the opposite function to a fuse. Whereas a fuse starts with a low resistance and is designed to permanently break an electrically conductive path (typically when the current through the path exceeds a specified limit), an antifuse starts with a high resistance, and programming it converts it into a permanent electrically conductive path (typically when the voltage across the antifuse exceeds a certain level). This technology has many applications.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Lists 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

This is a list of commercial video games with available source code. The source code of these commercially developed and distributed video games is available to the public or the games' communities.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming has caused the majority of the Earth to become uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching ongoing environmental developments in a flooded, abandoned London. The novel is an expansion of a novella of the same title first published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine in January 1962, Vol. 4, No. 24.

In 2010, Time Magazine named The Drowned World one of the top 10 best post-apocalyptic books. The novel has been identified as a founding text in the literary genre known as climate fiction.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Automobiles

A gyrocar is a two-wheeled automobile. The difference between a bicycle or motorcycle and a gyrocar is that in a bike, dynamic balance is provided by the rider, and in some cases by the geometry and mass distribution of the bike itself, and the gyroscopic effects from the wheels. Steering a motorcycle is done by precessing the front wheel. In a gyrocar, balance was provided by one or more gyroscopes, and in one example, connected to two pendulums by a rack and pinion.

The concept was originally described in fiction in 1911 "Two Boys in a Gyrocar: The story of a New York to Paris Motor Race" by Kenneth Brown, (Houghton Mifflin Co). However the first prototype Gyrocar, The Shilovski Gyrocar, was commissioned in 1912 by the Russian Count Pyotr Shilovsky, a lawyer and member of the Russian royal family. It was manufactured to his design by the Wolseley Tool and Motorcar Company in 1914 and demonstrated in London the same year. The gyrocar was powered by a modified Wolseley C5 engine of 16–20 hp, with a bore of 90 mm and a stroke of 121 mm. It was mounted ahead of the radiator, driving the rear wheel through a conventional clutch and gear box. A transmission brake was fitted after the gearbox – there were no brakes on the wheels themselves. The weight of the vehicle was 2.75 tons and it had a very large turning radius.

In 1927 Louis Brennan, funded to the tune of £12,000 (plus a £2000 per year) by John Cortauld built a rather more successful gyrocar. Two contra-rotating gyros were housed under the front seats, spun in a horizontal plane at 3500 rpm by 24V electric motors powered from standard car batteries. This was the greatest speed obtainable with the electric motors available, and meant that each rotor had to weigh 200 lb (91 kg) to generate sufficient forces. Precession was in the vertical fore-aft plane. The car had a Morris Oxford engine, engine mountings, and gearbox. Two sidewheels (light aircraft tailwheels were used) were manually lowered on stopping; if the driver forgot and switched off the gyros and walked away, the car would continue to balance itself using the gyro momentum for a few minutes, and then the wheels would automatically be dropped to stop tipping.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison. It is his prison that is now most widely meant by the term "panopticon".

🔗 Politics

Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making procedure where individuals allocate votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. By doing so, quadratic voting helps enable users to address issues of voting paradox and majority-rule. Quadratic voting works by allowing users to 'pay' for additional votes on a given matter to express their preference for given issues more strongly, resulting in voting outcomes that are aligned with the highest willingness to pay outcome, rather than just the outcome preferred by the majority regardless of the intensity of individual preferences. The payment for votes may be through either artificial or real currencies (e.g. with tokens distributed equally among voting members or with real money). Under various sets of conditions, quadratic voting has been shown to be much more efficient than one-person-one-vote in aligning collective decisions with doing the most good for the most people. Quadratic voting (abbreviated as QV) is considered a promising alternative to existing democratic structures to solve some of the known failure modes of one-person-one-vote democracies. Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. It differs from Cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic.

Quadratic voting is based upon market principles, where each voter is given a budget of vote credits that they have the personal decisions and delegation to spend in order to influence the outcome of a range of decisions. If a participant has a strong preference for or against a specific decision, additional votes could be allocated to proportionally demonstrate the voter's preferences. A vote pricing rule determines the cost of additional votes, with each vote becoming increasingly more expensive. By increasing voter credit costs, this demonstrates an individual's preferences and interests toward the particular decision. This money is eventually cycled back to the voters based upon per capita. Both Weyl and Lalley conducted research to demonstrate that this decision-making policy expedites efficiency as the number of voters increases. The simplified formula on how quadratic voting functions is:

cost to the voter = (number of votes)².

The quadratic nature of the voting suggests that a voter can use their votes more efficiently by spreading them across many issues. For example, a voter with a budget of 16 vote credits can apply 1 vote credit to each of the 16 issues. However, if the individual has a stronger passion or sentiment on an issue, they could allocate 4 votes, at the cost of 16 credits, to the singular issue, effectively using up their entire budget. This mechanism towards voting demonstrates that there is a large incentive to buy and sell votes, or to trade votes. Using this anonymous ballot system provides identity protection from vote buying or trading since these exchanges cannot be verified by the buyer or trader.