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🔗 Fifth-Generation Warfare

🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory

Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of "information and perception". There is no widely agreed upon definition of fifth-generation warfare, and it has been rejected by some scholars, including William S. Lind, who was one of the original theorists of fourth-generation warfare.

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🔗 Inverted totalitarianism

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the term inverted totalitarianism in 2003 to describe what he saw as the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin analysed the United States as increasingly turning into a managed democracy (similar to an illiberal democracy). He uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to draw attention to the totalitarian aspects of the American political system while emphasizing its differences from proper totalitarianism, such as Nazi and Stalinist regimes.

The book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012) by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco portrays inverted totalitarianism as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics bests politics. Every natural resource and living being is commodified and exploited by large corporations to the point of collapse as excess consumerism and sensationalism lull and manipulate the citizenry into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government.

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🔗 Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Florida

The Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV) is a heavier than air flight system developed at the University of Florida, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The WEAV was invented in 2006 by Dr. Subrata Roy, plasma physicist, aerospace engineering professor at the University of Florida, and has been a subject of several patents. The WEAV employs no moving parts, and combines the aircraft structure, propulsion, energy production and storage, and control subsystems into one integrated system.

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🔗 Bell Labs Holmdel Complex

🔗 Architecture 🔗 New Jersey 🔗 National Register of Historic Places

The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, in Holmdel Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States, functioned for 44 years as a research and development facility, initially for the Bell System and later Bell Labs. The centerpiece of the campus is an Eero Saarinen–designed structure that served as the home to over 6,000 engineers and researchers. This modernist building, dubbed "The Biggest Mirror Ever" by Architectural Forum due to its mirror box exterior, was the site of a Nobel Prize discovery, the laser cooling work of Steven Chu.

Restructuring of the company's research efforts reduced the use of the Holmdel Complex, and in 2006 the building was put up for sale. The building has undergone renovations into a multi-purpose living and working space, dubbed Bell Works by its redevelopers. Since 2013 it has been operated by Somerset Development, who redeveloped the building into a mixed-use office for high-tech startup companies. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. A number of movies, television programs, and commercials have been filmed at Bell Works, including Severance, The Crowded Room, and Law & Order: Organized Crime.

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🔗 Jeppson's Malört

🔗 Spirits 🔗 Chicago

Jeppson's Malört is an American brand of bäsk liqueur, a type of brännvin flavored with anise or wormwood. Malört was introduced in Chicago in the 1930s and was long produced by the Carl Jeppson Company. In 2018, as its last employee was retiring, the brand and company name were sold to CH Distillery of Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Jeppson's Malört is named after Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant who first distilled and popularized the liquor in Chicago. Malört (literally moth herb) is the Swedish word for wormwood, which is the key ingredient in bäsk. Malört is extremely low in thujone, a chemical once prevalent in absinthe and similar drinks.

Known for its extremely bitter taste, Malört has been described as "infamous" and "the worst booze ever". It can be found in some Chicago-area bars and liquor stores, and is growing in popularity, with sales of Malört shots increasing from 0.4 million in 2007 to 7.9 million in 2022. However, it is rare to find elsewhere in the United States.

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🔗 List of countries by life expectancy

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Death 🔗 Countries

The article documents lists of countries by average life expectancy at birth by various sources of estimates.

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🔗 Thermal Grill Illusion

The thermal grill illusion is a sensory illusion originally demonstrated in 1896 by the Swedish physician Torsten Thunberg. The illusion is created by an interlaced grill of warm (e.g., 40°C/104°F) and cool (20°C/68°F) bars. When someone presses a hand against the grill, they experience the illusion of burning heat. But if the person presses against only a cool bar, only coolness is experienced; if the person presses against only a warm bar, only warmth is experienced.

Researchers have used the illusion to demonstrate that burning pain sensation is in fact a mixture of both cold and heat pain and that it is only the inhibition of the cold pain "channel" that reveals the heat component.

The illusion is demonstrated by positioning the middle finger in cold water and the ring and index fingers in warm water. Due to shortcomings in the body map - multisensory representation of the body - and this particular sensory input configuration, the brain is tricked into thinking the middle finger is in the warm water and the index and ring fingers in cold water.

In an fMRI experiment of the illusion, researchers recently observed an activation of the thalamus not seen for control stimuli. Also, activity in a portion of the right mid/anterior insula correlated with the perceived unpleasantness of the illusion.

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🔗 Extreme Value Theory

🔗 Statistics

Extreme value theory or extreme value analysis (EVA) is a branch of statistics dealing with the extreme deviations from the median of probability distributions. It seeks to assess, from a given ordered sample of a given random variable, the probability of events that are more extreme than any previously observed. Extreme value analysis is widely used in many disciplines, such as structural engineering, finance, earth sciences, traffic prediction, and geological engineering. For example, EVA might be used in the field of hydrology to estimate the probability of an unusually large flooding event, such as the 100-year flood. Similarly, for the design of a breakwater, a coastal engineer would seek to estimate the 50-year wave and design the structure accordingly.

🔗 Regional Handwriting Variation

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Writing systems

Although people in many parts of the world share common alphabets and numeral systems (versions of the Latin writing system are used throughout the Americas, Australia, and much of Europe and Africa; the Arabic numerals are nearly universal), styles of handwritten letterforms vary between individuals, and sometimes also vary systematically between regions.

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🔗 Utah Data Center

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 United States/Utah

The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion.

The Utah Data Center, code-named Bumblehive, is the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (IC CNCI) data center designed to support the US intelligence community. The "massive data repository" is designed to cope with the large increase in digital data that has accompanied the rise of the global internet.

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