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🔗 Military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/Military historiography

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (French: La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu) is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.

While the author acknowledges that the events and violence of what has been called the Gulf War took place, he asks if the events that took place were really as they were presented, and could they be called a war? The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

🔗 Role-playing games

Tunnels & Trolls (abbreviated T&T) is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Ken St. Andre and first published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. The second modern role-playing game published, it was written by Ken St. Andre to be a more accessible alternative to Dungeons & Dragons and is suitable for solitaire, group, and play-by-mail gameplay.

🔗 Internet culture

Community Memory (CM) was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages. Individuals could place messages in the computer and then look through the memory for a specific notice.

While initially conceived as an information and resource sharing network linking a variety of counter-cultural economic, educational, and social organizations with each other and the public, Community Memory was soon generalized to be an information flea market, by providing unmediated, two-way access to message databases through public computer terminals. Once the system became available, the users demonstrated that it was a general communications medium that could be used for art, literature, journalism, commerce, and social chatter.

🔗 United States 🔗 Computing 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 United States/American television

“Where do you want to go today?” was the title of Microsoft’s second global image advertising campaign. The broadcast, print and outdoor advertising campaign was launched in November 1994 through the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The campaign had Microsoft spending $100 million through July 1995, of which $25 million would be spent during the holiday shopping season ending in December 1994.

Tony Kaye directed a series of television ads filmed in Hong Kong, Prague and New York City that showed a broad range of people using their PCs. The television ads were first broadcast in Australia on November 13, the following day in both the United States and Canada, with Britain, France and Germany seeing the spots in subsequent days. An eight-page print ad described the personal computer as “an open opportunity for everybody” that “[facilitates] the flow of information so that good ideas—wherever they come from—can be shared”, and was placed in mass-market magazines including National Geographic, Newsweek, People, Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated.

The New York Times described the campaign as taking “a winsome, humanistic approach to demystifying technology”. However, the Times reported in August 1995 that the response to Microsoft’s campaign in the advertising trade press had been “lukewarm” and quoted Brad Johnson of Advertising Age as stating that “Microsoft is on version 1.0 in advertising. Microsoft is not standing still. It will improve its advertising.” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, then the firm’s executive vice president, acknowledged that the response to the campaign had been “chilly”.

In June 1999, Microsoft announced that it would be ending its nearly five-year-long relationship with Wieden+Kennedy, shifting $100 million (~$166 million in 2022) in billings to McCann Erickson Worldwide Advertising in a split that was described by The New York Times as mutual. Dan Wieden, president and chief creative officer of the advertising agency, characterized the relationship with Microsoft as “intense” and said that it had “run its course”.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector. The vectors are chosen carefully such that they capture the semantic and syntactic qualities of words; as such, a simple mathematical function (cosine similarity) can indicate the level of semantic similarity between the words represented by those vectors.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books

Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis is a 2016 book by the American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt discussing the phenomenon of American men in their prime leaving the workforce. Statistically, the labor force involvement for men twenty and older fell from 86% to 68% between 1948 and 2015. The book discusses the history, causes, and implications of the phenomenon, as well as possible solutions.

🔗 Law 🔗 Statistics 🔗 United Kingdom

R v Adams [1996] EWCA Crim 10 and 222, are rulings in the United Kingdom that banned the expression in court of headline (soundbite), standalone Bayesian statistics from the reasoning admissible before a jury in DNA evidence cases, in favour of the calculated average (and maximal) number of matching incidences among the nation's population. The facts involved strong but inconclusive evidence conflicting with the DNA evidence, leading to a retrial.

🔗 Science Policy

Government by algorithm (also known as algorithmic regulation, regulation by algorithms, algorithmic governance, algocratic governance, algorithmic legal order or algocracy) is an alternative form of government or social ordering, where the usage of computer algorithms, especially of artificial intelligence and blockchain, is applied to regulations, law enforcement, and generally any aspect of everyday life such as transportation or land registration. The term 'government by algorithm' appeared in academic literature as an alternative for 'algorithmic governance' in 2013. A related term, algorithmic regulation is defined as setting the standard, monitoring and modification of behaviour by means of computational algorithms — automation of judiciary is in its scope.

Government by algorithm raises new challenges that are not captured in the e-government literature and the practice of public administration. Some sources equate cyberocracy, which is a hypothetical form of government that rules by the effective use of information, with algorithmic governance, although algorithms are not the only means of processing information. Nello Cristianini and Teresa Scantamburlo argued that the combination of a human society and an algorithmic regulation forms a social machine.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Poland

The method of Zygalski sheets was a cryptologic technique used by the Polish Cipher Bureau before and during World War II, and during the war also by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, to decrypt messages enciphered on German Enigma machines.

The Zygalski-sheet apparatus takes its name from Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician–cryptologist Henryk Zygalski, who invented it about October 1938.

🔗 Books 🔗 Transhumanism 🔗 Alternative Views

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology is a 1986 molecular nanotechnology book written by K. Eric Drexler with a foreword by Marvin Minsky. An updated version was released in 2007. The book has been translated into Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese.