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🔗 Constructed languages

Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. In 1960 Scientific American published an article introducing the language. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban.

Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language.

Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive, and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

White Coke (Russian: Бесцветная кока-кола, tr. Bestsvetnaya koka-kola, lit. "colorless Coca-Cola") is a nickname for a clear variant of Coca-Cola produced in the 1940s at the request of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov. Like other clear colas, it was of the same original flavor, virtually unchanged by the absence of caramel coloring.

🔗 Spaceflight

MOOSE, originally an acronym for Man Out Of Space Easiest but later changed to the more professional-sounding Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment, was a proposed emergency "bail-out" system capable of bringing a single astronaut safely down from Earth orbit to the planet's surface. The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 lb (91 kg) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag 6 ft (1.8 m) long with a flexible 0.25 in (6.4 mm) ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

The astronaut would leave the vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam. The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing the apex of the cone. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 ft (9.1 km) where the air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 m/s). The foam heat shield would serve a final role as cushioning when the astronaut touched down and as a flotation device should they land on water. The radio beacon would guide rescuers.

General Electric performed preliminary testing on some of the components of the MOOSE system, including flying samples of heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflating a foam-filled bag with a human subject embedded inside, and test-dropping dummies and a human subject in MOOSE foam shields short distances. U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger's historic freefall from a balloon at 103,000 ft (31,000 m) in August 1960 also helped demonstrate the feasibility of such extreme parachuting. However, the MOOSE system was nonetheless always intended as an extreme emergency measure when no other option for returning an astronaut to Earth existed; falling from orbit protected by nothing more than a spacesuit and a bag of foam was unlikely to ever become a particularly safe—or enticing—maneuver.

Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed an interest in the MOOSE system, and so by the end of the 1960s the program had been quietly shelved.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Radio 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Engineering

In engineering, the terahertz gap is a frequency band in the terahertz region of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio waves and infrared light for which practical technologies for generating and detecting the radiation do not exist. It is defined as 0.1 to 10 THz (wavelengths of 3 mm to 30 µm). Currently, at frequencies within this range, useful power generation and receiver technologies are inefficient and unfeasible.

Mass production of devices in this range and operation at room temperature (at which energy k·T is equal to the energy of a photon with a frequency of 6.2 THz) are mostly impractical. This leaves a gap between mature microwave technologies in the highest frequencies of the radio spectrum and the well developed optical engineering of infrared detectors in their lowest frequencies. This radiation is mostly used in small-scale, specialized applications such as submillimetre astronomy. Research that attempts to resolve this issue has been conducted since the late 20th century.

The Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modeling (OOram) is a method, based on the concept of role, for performing object-oriented modeling.

Originally (1989) coined Object Oriented Role Analysis, Synthesis and Structuring (OORASS), the method focuses on describing patterns of interaction without connecting the interaction to particular objects/instances. OOram was originally developed by Trygve Reenskaug (1996), a professor at the University of Oslo and the founder of the Norwegian IT company Taskon. The use of "roles" in OOram is similar in application to that of Agent-oriented programming.

Enterprise models created according to OOram may have a number of views, with each view presenting certain aspects of a model. The following ten views are proposed:

1. Area of concern view: Textual description of a phenomenon represented in the role model.
2. Stimulus-response view: Describes how environment roles may trigger activities in the organization (stimulus), together with the effect (response).
3. Role list view: List describing all roles of a role model together with attributes and textual explanation.
4. Semantic view: Describes meaning of roles and relationships between roles.
5. Collaboration view: Describes patterns of roles and message paths.
6. Interface view: Describes all messages that can be sent along a message path.
7. Scenario view: Provides a sample sequence of messages flowing between roles (a concrete example).
8. Process view: Describes data flow between roles and associated activities performed by the roles.
9. State diagram view: For each role, the legal states can be described together with messages that trigger transitions.
10. Method specification view: Describes what messages to send for each method belonging to a role. May also specify procedures to perform.

OOram suggests a varied mix of formal and informal notations and languages for representing and communicating models. Which view to use depends upon the needs in a particular situation.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Physics 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 Physics/Publications

The Bogdanov affair was an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at and before the Big Bang.

The controversy began in 2002, with an allegation that the twins, celebrities in France for hosting science-themed TV shows, had obtained PhDs with nonsensical work. Rumours spread on Usenet newsgroups that their work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system that physics journals use to select papers for publication. While the Bogdanov brothers continued to defend the veracity of their work, the debate over whether or not it represented a contribution to physics spread from Usenet to many other Internet forums, eventually receiving coverage in the mainstream media. A Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) internal report later concluded that their theses had no scientific value.

The incident prompted criticism of the Bogdanovs' approach to science popularization, led to multiple lawsuits, and provoked reflection among physicists as to how and why the peer review system can fail.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Education

Social facilitation is defined as improvement or decrease in individual performance when working with other people rather than alone.

In addition to working together with other people, social facilitation also occurs in the mere presence of other people. Previous research has found that individual performance is improved by coaction, performing a task in the presence of others who are performing a similar task, and having an audience while performing a certain task. An example of coaction triggering social facilitation can be seen in instances where a cyclist's performance is improved when cycling along with other cyclists as compared to cycling alone. An instance where having an audience triggers social facilitation can be observed where a weightlifter lifts heavier weight in the presence of an audience. Social facilitation has occasionally been attributed to the fact that certain people are more susceptible to social influence, with the argument that personality factors can make these people more aware of evaluation.

The Yerkes-Dodson law, when applied to social facilitation, states that "the mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade in the performance of less familiar tasks." Compared to their performance when alone, when in the presence of others they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed tasks and worse on complex or new ones.

The audience effect attempts to explain psychologically why the presence of an audience leads to people performing tasks better in some cases and worse in others. This idea was further explored when some studies showed that the presence of a passive audience facilitated the better performance of a simple task, while other studies showed that the presence of a passive audience inhibited the performance of a more difficult task or one that was not well practiced, possibly due to psychological pressure or stress. (See Yerkes–Dodson law.)

🔗 Video games 🔗 Chess

The Universal Chess Interface (UCI) is an open communication protocol that enables chess engines to communicate with user interfaces.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Solar System

Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan), meaning 'all', and σπέρμα (sperma), meaning 'seed') is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and also by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.

Panspermia hypotheses propose (for example) that microscopic life-forms that can survive the effects of space (such as extremophiles) can become trapped in debris ejected into space after collisions between planets and small Solar System bodies that harbor life. Some organisms may travel dormant for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with protoplanetary disks. Under certain ideal impact circumstances (into a body of water, for example), and ideal conditions on a new planet's surfaces, it is possible that the surviving organisms could become active and begin to colonize their new environment. At least one report finds that endospores from a type of Bacillus bacteria found in Morocco can survive being heated to 420 °C (788 °F), making the argument for Panspermia even stronger. Panspermia studies concentrate not on how life began, but on methods that may distribute it in the Universe.

Pseudo-panspermia (sometimes called "soft panspermia" or "molecular panspermia") argues that the pre-biotic organic building-blocks of life originated in space, became incorporated in the solar nebula from which planets condensed, and were further—and continuously—distributed to planetary surfaces where life then emerged (abiogenesis). From the early 1970s, it started to become evident that interstellar dust included a large component of organic molecules. Interstellar molecules are formed by chemical reactions within very sparse interstellar or circumstellar clouds of dust and gas. The dust plays a critical role in shielding the molecules from the ionizing effect of ultraviolet radiation emitted by stars.

The chemistry leading to life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during a habitable epoch when the Universe was only 10 to 17 million years old. Though the presence of life is confirmed only on the Earth, some scientists think that extraterrestrial life is not only plausible, but probable or inevitable. Probes and instruments have started examining other planets and moons in the Solar System and in other planetary systems for evidence of having once supported simple life, and projects such as SETI attempt to detect radio transmissions from possible extraterrestrial civilizations.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Hospitals

The Kirkbride Plan was a system of mental asylum design advocated by American psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) in the mid-19th century. The asylums built in the Kirkbride design, often referred to as Kirkbride Buildings (or simply Kirkbrides), were constructed during the mid-to-late-19th century in the United States. The structural features of the hospitals as designated by Kirkbride were contingent on his theories regarding the healing of the mentally ill, in which environment and exposure to natural light and air circulation were crucial. The hospitals built according to the Kirkbride Plan would adopt various architectural styles, but had in common the "bat wing" style floor plan, housing numerous wings that sprawl outward from the center.

The first hospital designed under the Kirkbride Plan was the Trenton State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, constructed in 1848. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, numerous psychiatric hospitals were designed under the Kirkbride Plan across the United States. By the twentieth century, popularity of the design had waned, largely due to the economic pressures of maintaining the immense facilities, as well as contestation of Kirkbride's theories amongst the medical community.

Numerous Kirkbride structures still exist, though many have been demolished or partially-demolished and repurposed. At least 30 of the original Kirkbride buildings have been registered with the National Register of Historic Places in the United States, either directly or through their location on hospital campuses or in historic districts.