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🔗 Brands

The AlphaSmart was a brand of portable, battery powered, word-processing keyboards manufactured by NEO Direct, Inc. (formerly Renaissance Learning, Inc, formerly AlphaSmart, Inc., formerly Intelligent Peripheral Devices, Inc.). Originally released in 1993, the first AlphaSmart models were intended for writing on-the-go and could be plugged into a computer to transfer saved written text. The units' portability and long battery life made them valuable to journalists, writers, and students. Later models expanded functionality by spell-checking, running applications, and accessing wireless printers.

The last model, Neo 2, was released in 2007, and production was discontinued by the company in late September 2013, although the company still offers support and software to existing users.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 History 🔗 Death 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Soviet Union/history of Russia 🔗 Soviet Union/Russia

Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them. The higher estimates of mass killings account for the crimes that governments committed against civilians, including executions, the destruction of populations through man-made hunger and deaths that occurred during forced deportations and imprisonment, and deaths that resulted from forced labor.

In addition to "mass killings," terms that are used to define such killings include "democide", "politicide", "classicide", and "genocide."

🔗 Animation

Rubber hose animation was the first animation style that became standardized in the American animation field. The defining feature is the curving motion most things possess, resembling that of a rubber hose. While the style fell out of fashion during the 1930s, there has been a minor revitalization of it in recent years with works such as the video games Cuphead and Bendy and the Ink Machine, and the film Steven Universe: The Movie.

🔗 Psychology

The behavioral immune system is a phrase coined by the psychological scientist Mark Schaller to refer to a suite of psychological mechanisms that allow individual organisms to detect the potential presence of disease-causing parasites in their immediate environment, and to engage in behaviors that prevent contact with those objects and individuals.

These mechanisms include sensory processes through which cues connoting the presence of parasitic infections are perceived (e.g., the smell of a foul odor, the sight of pox or pustules), as well as stimulus–response systems through which these sensory cues trigger a cascade of aversive affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions (e.g., arousal of disgust, automatic activation of cognitions that connote the threat of disease, behavioral avoidance).

The existence of a behavioral immune system has been documented across many animal species, including humans. It is theorized that the mechanisms that comprise the behavioral immune system evolved as a crude first line of defense against disease-causing pathogens.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Internet 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

Van Eck phreaking (also known as Van Eck Radiation) is a form of eavesdropping in which special equipment is used to pick up side-band electromagnetic emissions from electronic devices that correlate to hidden signals or data for the purpose of recreating these signals or data in order to spy on the electronic device. Side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions are present in (and with the proper equipment, can be captured from) keyboards, computer displays, printers, and other electronic devices.

In 1985, Wim van Eck published the first unclassified technical analysis of the security risks of emanations from computer monitors. This paper caused some consternation in the security community, which had previously believed that such monitoring was a highly sophisticated attack available only to governments; van Eck successfully eavesdropped on a real system, at a range of hundreds of metres, using just $15 worth of equipment plus a television set.

As a consequence of this research, such emanations are sometimes called "van Eck radiation", and the eavesdropping technique van Eck phreaking. Government researchers were already aware of the danger, as Bell Labs had noted this vulnerability to secure teleprinter communications during World War II and was able to produce 75% of the plaintext being processed in a secure facility from a distance of 80 feet (24 metres). Additionally the NSA published Tempest Fundamentals, NSA-82-89, NACSIM 5000, National Security Agency (Classified) on February 1, 1982. In addition, the van Eck technique was successfully demonstrated to non-TEMPEST personnel in Korea during the Korean War in the 1950s.

While Phreaking is the process of exploiting telephone networks, it is used here because of its connection to eavesdropping. Van Eck phreaking of CRT displays is the process of eavesdropping on the contents of a CRT by detecting its electromagnetic emissions.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Business

Herbert Henry Dow (February 26, 1866 – October 15, 1930) was a Canadian-born American chemical industrialist, best known as the founder of the American multinational conglomerate Dow Chemical. He was a graduate of Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a prolific inventor of chemical processes, compounds, and products, and was a successful businessman.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

A holon (Greek: ὅλον, from ὅλος, holos, 'whole' and -ον, -on, 'part') is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In other words, holons can be understood as the constituent part–wholes of a hierarchy.

The holon represents a way to overcome the dichotomy between parts and wholes, as well as a way to account for both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms. The term was coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (1967). In Koestler's formulations, a holon is something that has integrity and identity while simultaneously being a part of a larger system; it is a subsystem of a greater system.

Holons are sometimes discussed in the context of self-organizing holarchic open (SOHO) systems.

🔗 Computing

Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size.

It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression standard. Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.

The format has been designed to be portable and work in low memory environments, and used in portable handheld and IoT devices, where those properties are particularly important. Current research works on designing and developing more energy-efficient BPG hardware which can then be integrated in portable devices such as digital cameras.

While there is no built-in native support for BPG in any mainstream browsers, websites can still deliver BPG images to all browsers by including a JavaScript library written by Bellard.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

This is a list of notable custom software projects which have significantly failed to achieve some or all of their objectives, either temporarily or permanently, and/or have suffered from significant cost overruns. For a list of successful major custom software projects, see Custom software#Major project successes.

Note that failed projects, and projects running over budget, are not necessarily the sole fault of the employees or businesses creating the software. In some cases, problems may be due partly to problems with the purchasing organisation, including poor requirements, over-ambitious requirements, unnecessary requirements, poor contract drafting, poor contract management, poor end-user training, or poor operational management.

🔗 Computing

The Owner-Free File System (OFF System, or OFF for short) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system in which all shared files are represented by randomized multi-used data blocks. Instead of anonymizing the network, the data blocks are anonymized and therefore, only data garbage is ever exchanged and stored and no forwarding via intermediate nodes is required. OFF claims to have been created with the expressed intention "to cut off some gangrene-infested bits of the copyright industry."