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🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.

A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona, becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification. Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses. Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona. Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct. Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits. Studies involving longitudinal effects of parasocial interactions on children are still relatively new, according to developmental psychologist Sandra L. Calvert.

Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona. These virtual interactions may involve commenting, following, liking, or direct messaging. The consistency in which the persona appears could also lead to a more intimate perception in the eyes of the user.

🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Colonialism 🔗 Egypt 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Suez Crisis or the Second Arab–Israeli War, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression in the Arab world and as the Sinai War in Israel, was a British–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. Israel invaded on 29 October, having done so with the primary objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as the recent tightening of the eight-year-long Egyptian blockade further prevented Israeli passage. After issuing a joint ultimatum for a ceasefire, the United Kingdom and France joined the Israelis on 5 November, seeking to depose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal, which Nasser had earlier nationalised by transferring administrative control from the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company to Egypt's new government-owned Suez Canal Authority. Shortly after the invasion began, the three countries came under heavy political pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as from the United Nations, eventually prompting their withdrawal from Egypt. Israel's four-month-long occupation of the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula enabled it to attain freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, but the Suez Canal itself was closed from October 1956 to March 1957. The Suez Crisis led to international humiliation for the British and the French in the wake of the Cold War, which established the Americans and the Soviets as the world's superpowers. It also strengthened Nasser's standing.

Before they were defeated, Egyptian troops had blocked all ship traffic by sinking 40 ships in the Suez Canal. It later became clear that Israel, the United Kingdom, and France had conspired to invade Egypt. Though the three allies had attained a number of their military objectives, the Suez Canal itself was useless. American president Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued a strong warning to the British if they were to invade Egypt; he threatened serious damage to the British financial system by selling the American government's bonds of pound sterling. Historians have concluded that the Suez Crisis "signified the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers" vis-à-vis the United States and the Soviet Union.

As a result of the conflict, the United Nations established the United Nations Emergency Force to police and patrol the Egypt–Israel border, while British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned from his position. For his diplomatic efforts in resolving the conflict through United Nations initiatives, Canadian external affairs minister Lester B. Pearson received a Nobel Peace Prize. Analysts have argued that the Suez Crisis may have emboldened the Soviet Union, prompting the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

🔗 Chess

Los Alamos chess (or anti-clerical chess) is a chess variant played on a 6×6 board without bishops. This was the first chess-like game played by a computer program. This program was written at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer in 1956. The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time.

The program was very simple, containing only about 600 instructions. It was mostly a minimax tree search and could look four plies ahead. For scoring the board at the end of the four-ply lookahead, it estimates a score for material and a score for mobility, then adds them up. Pseudocode for the chess program is described in Figure 11.4 of Newell, 2019. In 1958, a revised version was written for MANIAC II for full 8×8 chess, though its pseudocode was never published. There is a record of a single game by it, circa November 1958 (Table 11.2 of Newell, 2019).

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books 🔗 Systems

How to Solve It (1945) is a small volume by mathematician George Pólya describing methods of problem solving.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

In information security and programming, a buffer overflow, or buffer overrun, is an anomaly where a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations.

Buffers are areas of memory set aside to hold data, often while moving it from one section of a program to another, or between programs. Buffer overflows can often be triggered by malformed inputs; if one assumes all inputs will be smaller than a certain size and the buffer is created to be that size, then an anomalous transaction that produces more data could cause it to write past the end of the buffer. If this overwrites adjacent data or executable code, this may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, and crashes.

Exploiting the behavior of a buffer overflow is a well-known security exploit. On many systems, the memory layout of a program, or the system as a whole, is well defined. By sending in data designed to cause a buffer overflow, it is possible to write into areas known to hold executable code and replace it with malicious code, or to selectively overwrite data pertaining to the program's state, therefore causing behavior that was not intended by the original programmer. Buffers are widespread in operating system (OS) code, so it is possible to make attacks that perform privilege escalation and gain unlimited access to the computer's resources. The famed Morris worm in 1988 used this as one of its attack techniques.

Programming languages commonly associated with buffer overflows include C and C++, which provide no built-in protection against accessing or overwriting data in any part of memory and do not automatically check that data written to an array (the built-in buffer type) is within the boundaries of that array. Bounds checking can prevent buffer overflows, but requires additional code and processing time. Modern operating systems use a variety of techniques to combat malicious buffer overflows, notably by randomizing the layout of memory, or deliberately leaving space between buffers and looking for actions that write into those areas ("canaries").

🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Contiki is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Extant uses for Contiki include systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitoring, and alarms. It is open-source software released under the BSD-3-Clause license.

Contiki was created by Adam Dunkels in 2002 and has been further developed by a worldwide team of developers from Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cisco, ENEA, ETH Zurich, Redwire, RWTH Aachen University, Oxford University, SAP, Sensinode, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, ST Microelectronics, Zolertia, and many others. Contiki gained popularity because of its built in TCP/IP stack and lightweight preemptive scheduling over event-driven kernel which is a very motivating feature for IoT. The name Contiki comes from Thor Heyerdahl's famous Kon-Tiki raft.

Contiki provides multitasking and a built-in Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP stack), yet needs only about 10 kilobytes of random-access memory (RAM) and 30 kilobytes of read-only memory (ROM). A full system, including a graphical user interface, needs about 30 kilobytes of RAM.

A new branch has recently been created, known as Contiki-NG: The OS for Next Generation IoT Devices

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums

Democratic backsliding is a form of autocratization, a process of regime change toward authoritarianism in which the exercise of political power becomes less limited and more arbitrary and repressive. Democratic backsliding specifically assumes a starting point of a democratic system. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and political participation in the process of government selection. Democratic backsliding involves the weakening of democratic institutions, such as the peaceful transition of power or free and fair elections, or the violation of individual rights that underpin democracies, especially freedom of expression. Democratic backsliding is the opposite of democratization.

Democratic backsliding is a gradual process, composed of instances of decline. It is not sudden nor dramatic, and typically follows legal processes to weaken democratic institutions. The Democratic Erosion Consortium categorizes these events of erosion into precursors, symptoms, acts of resistance to backsliding, and destabilizing events.

Proposed causes of democratic backsliding include economic inequality, unemployment, culture wars, culturally conservative reactions to societal changes, populist or personalist politics, and external influence from great power politics. Economic inequality is strongly associated with democratic backsliding in the 21st century, even in wealthy democracies. During crises, backsliding can occur when leaders impose autocratic rules during states of emergency that are either disproportionate to the severity of the crisis or remain in place after the situation has improved.

During the Cold War, democratic backsliding occurred most frequently through coups. Since the end of the Cold War, democratic backsliding has occurred more frequently through the election of personalist leaders or parties who subsequently dismantle democratic institutions. During the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, many new, weakly institutionalized democracies were established; these regimes have been most vulnerable to democratic backsliding. The third wave of autocratization has been ongoing since 2010 after the Great Recession, when the number of liberal democracies was at an all-time high. More than half of all autocratization episodes over 1900–2023 have a U-turn shape in which the autocratization is closely followed by and linked to subsequent democratization.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Popular Culture

Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".

Names for variations on the principle have also been coined, usually in the context of online communication, including:

• Umhoefer's or Umhöfer's rule: "Articles on writing are themselves badly written." Named after editor Joseph A. Umhoefer.
• Skitt's law: "Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself." Named after Skitt, a contributor to alt.usage.english on Usenet.
• Hartman's law of prescriptivist retaliation: "Any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror [sic]." Named after editor and writer Jed Hartman.
• The iron law of nitpicking: "You are never more likely to make a grammatical error than when correcting someone else's grammar." Coined by blogger Zeno.
• McKean's law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error."
• Bell's first law of Usenet: "Flames of spelling and/or grammar will have spelling and/or grammatical errors." Named after Andrew Bell, a contributor to alt.sex on Usenet.

Further variations state that flaws in a printed ("Clark's document law") or published work ("Barker's proof") will only be discovered after it is printed and not during proofreading, and flaws such as spelling errors in a sent email will be discovered by the sender only during rereading from the "Sent" box.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Databases 🔗 Databases/Computer science

R-trees are tree data structures used for spatial access methods, i.e., for indexing multi-dimensional information such as geographical coordinates, rectangles or polygons. The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts. A common real-world usage for an R-tree might be to store spatial objects such as restaurant locations or the polygons that typical maps are made of: streets, buildings, outlines of lakes, coastlines, etc. and then find answers quickly to queries such as "Find all museums within 2 km of my current location", "retrieve all road segments within 2 km of my location" (to display them in a navigation system) or "find the nearest gas station" (although not taking roads into account). The R-tree can also accelerate nearest neighbor search for various distance metrics, including great-circle distance.