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πŸ”— Small-World Experiment

πŸ”— Mass surveillance πŸ”— Sociology

The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation", although Milgram did not use this term himself.

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πŸ”— Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

πŸ”— Electronics πŸ”— Guild of Copy Editors

The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers, due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation, often rupturing the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.

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πŸ”— Dadda Multiplier

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Computer hardware

The Dadda multiplier is a hardware binary multiplier design invented by computer scientist Luigi Dadda in 1965. It uses a selection of full and half adders to sum the partial products in stages (the Dadda tree or Dadda reduction) until two numbers are left. The design is similar to the Wallace multiplier, but the different reduction tree reduces the required number of gates (for all but the smallest operand sizes) and makes it slightly faster (for all operand sizes).

Dadda and Wallace multipliers have the same three steps for two bit strings w 1 {\displaystyle w_{1}} and w 2 {\displaystyle w_{2}} of lengths β„“ 1 {\displaystyle \ell _{1}} and β„“ 2 {\displaystyle \ell _{2}} respectively:

  1. Multiply (logical AND) each bit of w 1 {\displaystyle w_{1}} , by each bit of w 2 {\displaystyle w_{2}} , yielding β„“ 1 β‹… β„“ 2 {\displaystyle \ell _{1}\cdot \ell _{2}} results, grouped by weight in columns
  2. Reduce the number of partial products by stages of full and half adders until we are left with at most two bits of each weight.
  3. Add the final result with a conventional adder.

As with the Wallace multiplier, the multiplication products of the first step carry different weights reflecting the magnitude of the original bit values in the multiplication. For example, the product of bits a n b m {\displaystyle a_{n}b_{m}} has weight n + m {\displaystyle n+m} .

Unlike Wallace multipliers that reduce as much as possible on each layer, Dadda multipliers attempt to minimize the number of gates used, as well as input/output delay. Because of this, Dadda multipliers have a less expensive reduction phase, but the final numbers may be a few bits longer, thus requiring slightly bigger adders.

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πŸ”— YIMBY Movement

πŸ”— Architecture πŸ”— Urban studies and planning πŸ”— Effective Altruism

The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-infrastructure development movement mostly focusing on public housing policy, real estate development, public transportation, and pedestrian safety in transportation planning, in contrast and in opposition to the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") movement that generally opposes most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo. As a popular organized movement in the United States, it began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a major housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in state and local politics across the United States.

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels. They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development (especially for affordable housing or trailer parks), high-speed rail lines, homeless shelters, day cares, schools, universities and colleges, bike lanes, and transportation planning that promotes pedestrian safety infrastructure. YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing. Some YIMBYs have also supported public-interest projects like clean energy or alternative transport.

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,:β€Š1β€Š and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.

πŸ”— NCP, the Predecessor of TCP/IP

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Networking

The Network Control Program (NCP) provided the middle layers of the protocol stack running on host computers of the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet.

NCP preceded the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) as a transport layer protocol used during the early ARPANET. NCP was a simplex protocol that utilized two port addresses, establishing two connections, for two-way communications. An odd and an even port were reserved for each application layer application or protocol. The standardization of TCP and UDP reduced the need for the use of two simplex ports for each application down to one duplex port.

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πŸ”— Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

πŸ”— Video games

.kkrieger (from Krieger, German for warrior) is a first-person shooter video game created by German demogroup .theprodukkt (a former subdivision of Farbrausch), which won first place in the 96k game competition at Breakpoint in April 2004. The game remains a beta version as of 2019.

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πŸ”— Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips

πŸ”— Computing

The Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips are a series of speech synthesizer digital signal processor integrated circuits created by Texas Instruments beginning in 1978. They continued to be developed and marketed for many years, though the speech department moved around several times within TI until finally dissolving in late 2001. The rights to the speech-specific subset of the MSP line, the last remaining line of TI speech products as of 2001, were sold to Sensory, Inc. in October 2001.

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πŸ”— A Roman road built in 312 BC, is still in use today

πŸ”— Italy πŸ”— Classical Greece and Rome πŸ”— Athletics πŸ”— Highways πŸ”— Road transport πŸ”— Highways/European Highways

The Appian Way (Latin and Italian: Via Appia) is one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient republic. It connected Rome to Brindisi, in southeast Italy. Its importance is indicated by its common name, recorded by Statius, of Appia longarum... regina viarum ("the Appian Way, the queen of the long roads").

The road is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor who began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC during the Samnite Wars.

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πŸ”— Today a greater percentage of Dutch people speak English than Canadians

πŸ”— Lists πŸ”— Statistics πŸ”— Linguistics πŸ”— Linguistics/Applied Linguistics πŸ”— Languages πŸ”— Countries πŸ”— English Language

The following is a list of English-speaking population by country, including information on both native speakers and second-language speakers.

Some of the entries in this list are dependent territories (e.g.: U.S. Virgin Islands), autonomous regions (e.g.: Hong Kong) or associated states (e.g.: Cook Islands) of other countries, rather than being fully sovereign countries in their own right.

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πŸ”— Need for Cognition

πŸ”— Psychology

The need for cognition (NFC), in psychology, is a personality variable reflecting the extent to which individuals are inclined towards effortful cognitive activities.

Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world". Higher NFC is associated with increased appreciation of debate, idea evaluation, and problem solving. Those with a high need for cognition may be inclined towards high elaboration. Those with a lower need for cognition may display opposite tendencies, and may process information more heuristically, often through low elaboration.

Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity (see below).

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