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🔗 Biography 🔗 Syria

Bassel Khartabil (Arabic: باسل خرطبيل‎), also known as Bassel Safadi (Arabic: باسل صفدي‎), (22 May 1981, Damascus – 3 October 2015) was a Palestinian Syrian open-source software developer. On 15 March 2012, the one-year anniversary of the Syrian uprising, he was detained by the Syrian government at Adra Prison in Damascus. Between then and 3 October 2015, he had been transferred to an unknown location, probably to be judged by a military court. On 7 October 2015, Human Rights Watch and 30 other human rights organizations issued a letter demanding that Khartabil's whereabouts be disclosed. On 11 November 2015, rumors surfaced that Khartabil had been secretly sentenced to death. In August 2017, his wife made public that Khartabil had been executed by the Syrian regime shortly after his disappearance in 2015.

Khartabil was born in Damascus and raised in Syria, where he specialized in open source software development. He was chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab and was CTO of Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria. He has served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and has contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Openclipart, Fabricatorz, and Sharism. He "is credited with opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people."

His last work included an open, 3D virtual reconstruction of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, real time visualization, and development with Fabricatorz for the web programming framework Aiki Framework. This was later created and displayed in his honor.

On February 7, 2018, the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship was announced in Bassel's memory. The fellowship awards $50,000, including additional support, to outstanding individuals developing open culture in their communities. The fellowship was created by Creative Commons, Fabricatorz Foundation, Jimmy Wales Foundation, Mozilla, #NEWPALMYRA, and Wikimedia.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

The trancitor as the combined word of a "transfer-capacitor" is to be considered as another active-device category besides the transistor as a "transfer-resistor". As observed in the table shown, four kinds of active devices are theoretically deduced. Among them, trancitors are missing to be the third and fourth kinds, whereas transistors, such as bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and field-effect transistor (FET), were already invented as the first and second kinds, respectively. Unlike the transistor switching the current at its output (i.e., current source), the trancitor transfers its input to the voltage output (i.e., voltage source), so an inverse relationship with each other.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Firearms 🔗 Metalworking

A shot tower is a tower designed for the production of small diameter shot balls by freefall of molten lead, which is then caught in a water basin. The shot is primarily used for projectiles in shotguns, and also for ballast, radiation shielding and other applications where small lead balls are useful.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Anthroponymy

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymous adjective Gaussian is pronounced GOWSS-ee-ən.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing

Oink's Pink Palace (frequently stylized as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police agencies. These music industry organisations described OiNK as an "online pirate pre-release music club", whereas former users described it as one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. About a month before the shut-down, music magazine Blender elected OiNK's creator, British software engineer Alan Ellis, to their The Powergeek 25 — the Most Influential People in Online Music list. Alan Ellis was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown Court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty on 15 January 2010.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Germany 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Poland 🔗 Current events 🔗 Rivers

The 2022 Oder environmental disaster is a mass die-off of fish, beavers and other wildlife in the Oder river in Poland and Germany, causing a health and environmental crisis in large parts of the country and subsequently a political scandal.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/Rail transport modelling

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Lists 🔗 Countries

This is a list of countries by hospital beds per 1000 or 100,000 people, as published by the local governments, international organisation (OECD, E.U.), academic sources or others. The number of beds per people is an important indicator of the health care system of a country. The basic measure focus on all hospital beds, which are variously split and occupied. The classic hospital beds are also called curative beds. For severe patients with risk of organ(s) failure, patients are provided intensive care unit beds (aka ICU bed) or critical care beds (CCB).

Among OECD countries, curative beds' occupancy rate average was 75%, from 94.9% (Ireland) to 61.6% (Greece), with half of the OECD's nation between 70% and 80%.

In 2009, European nations, most of them also part of OECD, had an aggregated total of 2,070,000 acute beds and 73,585 (2.8%) critical care beds (CCB) or 11.5CCB/100,000 inhabitants. Germany had 29.2, Portugal 4.2.Aging population leads to increased demand for CCB and difficulties to satisfy it, while both quantity of CCB and availability are poorly documented.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Microsoft

PhotoDNA is a proprietary image-identification and content filtering technology widely used by online service providers.