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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Not to be confused with SuperDrive, a trademark used by Apple Computer for various disk drive products or the Super Disc, CD addon for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk. The SuperDisk hardware was created by 3M's storage products group Imation in 1997, with manufacturing chiefly by Matsushita.

The SuperDisk had little success in North America; with Compaq, Gateway and Dell being three of only a few OEMs who supported it. It was more successful in Asia and Australia, where the second-generation SuperDisk LS-240 drive and disk was released. SuperDisk worldwide ceased manufacturing in 2003.

🔗 Law 🔗 Statistics

The Howland will forgery trial was a U.S. court case in 1868 to decide Henrietta Howland Robinson's contest of the will of Sylvia Ann Howland. It is famous for the forensic use of mathematics by Benjamin Peirce as an expert witness.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Computing/Early computers 🔗 Computing/Networking

Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.

🔗 Computer science

In computer programming, the Schwartzian transform is a technique used to improve the efficiency of sorting a list of items. This idiom is appropriate for comparison-based sorting when the ordering is actually based on the ordering of a certain property (the key) of the elements, where computing that property is an intensive operation that should be performed a minimal number of times. The Schwartzian transform is notable in that it does not use named temporary arrays.

The Schwartzian transform is a version of a Lisp idiom known as decorate-sort-undecorate, which avoids recomputing the sort keys by temporarily associating them with the input items. This approach is similar to memoization, which avoids repeating the calculation of the key corresponding to a specific input value. By comparison, this idiom assures that each input item's key is calculated exactly once, which may still result in repeating some calculations if the input data contains duplicate items.

The idiom is named after Randal L. Schwartz, who first demonstrated it in Perl shortly after the release of Perl 5 in 1994. The term "Schwartzian transform" applied solely to Perl programming for a number of years, but it has later been adopted by some users of other languages, such as Python, to refer to similar idioms in those languages. However, the algorithm was already in use in other languages (under no specific name) before it was popularized among the Perl community in the form of that particular idiom by Schwartz. The term "Schwartzian transform" indicates a specific idiom, and not the algorithm in general.

For example, to sort the word list ("aaaa","a","aa") according to word length: first build the list (["aaaa",4],["a",1],["aa",2]), then sort it according to the numeric values getting (["a",1],["aa",2],["aaaa",4]), then strip off the numbers and you get ("a","aa","aaaa"). That was the algorithm in general, so it does not count as a transform. To make it a true Schwartzian transform, it would be done in Perl like this:

🔗 International relations 🔗 Technology 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Robotics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 European Union 🔗 Science Policy 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a European Union regulation concerning artificial intelligence (AI).

It establishes a common regulatory and legal framework for AI in the European Union (EU). Proposed by the European Commission on 21 April 2021, and then passed in the European Parliament on 13 March 2024, it was unanimously approved by the Council of the European Union on 21 May 2024. The Act creates a European Artificial Intelligence Board to promote national cooperation and ensure compliance with the regulation. Like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, the Act can apply extraterritorially to providers from outside the EU, if they have users within the EU.

It covers all types of AI in a broad range of sectors; exceptions include AI systems used solely for military, national security, research and non-professional purposes. As a piece of product regulation, it would not confer rights on individuals, but would regulate the providers of AI systems and entities using AI in a professional context. The draft Act was revised following the rise in popularity of generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, whose general-purpose capabilities did not fit the main framework. More restrictive regulations are planned for powerful generative AI systems with systemic impact.

The Act classifies AI applications by their risk of causing harm. There are four levels – unacceptable, high, limited, minimal – plus an additional category for general-purpose AI. Applications with unacceptable risks are banned. High-risk applications must comply with security, transparency and quality obligations and undergo conformity assessments. Limited-risk applications only have transparency obligations and those representing minimal risks are not regulated. For general-purpose AI, transparency requirements are imposed, with additional evaluations when there are high risks.

La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) stated that the adopted version of the AI Act would be ineffective, arguing that the role of self-regulation and exemptions in the act rendered it "largely incapable of standing in the way of the social, political and environmental damage linked to the proliferation of AI".

🔗 Biography 🔗 India

Edmund Thomas Clint (19 May 1976 — 15 April 1983) was an Indian child prodigy known for having drawn over 25,000 paintings during his short life of less than seven years.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics

The Fresnel integrals S(x) and C(x) are two transcendental functions named after Augustin-Jean Fresnel that are used in optics and are closely related to the error function (erf). They arise in the description of near-field Fresnel diffraction phenomena and are defined through the following integral representations:

The simultaneous parametric plot of S(x) and C(x) is the Euler spiral (also known as the Cornu spiral or clothoid).

🔗 Technology 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism

Gray goo (also spelled grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy ("eating the environment", more literally "eating the habitation"). The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.

Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines or clanking replicators. The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. In 2004 he stated, "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'." Engines of Creation mentions "gray goo" in two paragraphs and a note, while the popularized idea of gray goo was first publicized in a mass-circulation magazine, Omni, in November 1986.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Spaceflight/Timeline of spaceflight working group

This article documents notable spaceflight events during the year 2019.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 New York City 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Sociology/social movements 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Anarchism 🔗 OWS 🔗 2010s

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, and lasted for fifty-nine days—from September 17 to November 15, 2011.

The motivations for Occupy Wall Street largely resulted from public distrust in the private sector during the aftermath of the Great Recession in the United States. There were many particular points of interest leading up to the Occupy movement that angered populist and left-wing groups. For instance, the 2008 bank bailouts under the George W. Bush administration utilized congressionally appropriated taxpayer funds to create the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which purchased toxic assets from failing banks and financial institutions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC in January 2010 allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on independent political expenditures without government regulation. This angered many populist and left-wing groups that viewed the ruling as a way for moneyed interests to corrupt public institutions and legislative bodies, such as the United States Congress.

The protests gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the United States and other Western countries. The Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income and wealth inequality in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies which emphasized redress through direct action over the petitioning to authorities.

The protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011. Protesters then turned their focus to occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, foreclosed homes, college and university campuses and social media.