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🔗 Computing 🔗 Project-independent assessment

JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs) is an open-source, Emacs-like text editor, primarily intended for Unix-like operating systems. It also supports MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. JOVE was inspired by Gosling Emacs but is much smaller and simpler, lacking Mocklisp. It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, United States on a PDP-11 minicomputer. JOVE was distributed with several releases of BSD Unix, including 2.9BSD, 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD-Lite2.

As of 2022, the latest development release of JOVE is version 4.17.4.4; the stable version is 4.16. Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.

🔗 England 🔗 Hampshire 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 British crime

The Southern Television broadcast interruption was a broadcast signal intrusion that occurred on 26 November 1977 in parts of southern England in the United Kingdom. The audio of a Southern Television broadcast was replaced by a voice claiming to represent the 'Ashtar Galactic Command', delivering a message instructing humanity to abandon its weapons so it could participate in a 'future awakening' and 'achieve a higher state of evolution'. After six minutes, the broadcast returned to its scheduled programme.

Subsequent investigations showed that the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority had rebroadcast the signal from a small but nearby unauthorised transmitter, instead of the intended source at Rowridge transmitting station. The hoaxer was never identified.

The event prompted hundreds of telephone calls from concerned members of the public, and was widely reported in British and American newspapers. These are sometimes contradictory, including differing accounts of the name used by the speaker and the wording of their message.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Health and fitness

The protein leverage hypothesis states that human beings will prioritize the consumption of protein in food over other dietary components, and will eat until protein needs have been met, regardless of energy content, thus leading to over-consumption of foodstuffs when their protein content is low.

This hypothesis has been put forward as a potential explanation of the obesity epidemic. Empirical tests have provided some evidence to confirm the hypothesis with one study suggesting that this could be a link between ultra-processed foods and the prevalence of obesity in the developed world.

In the 1980s, David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson, researchers now at the University of Sydney, began to study appetite and food intake in locusts. By studying responses to artificial diets with differing compositions of protein and carbohydrate, they developed the protein leverage hypothesis. Their experiments showed that those who aren't getting enough protein in their diet will continue to be hungry, even when their overall caloric intake is high. "Protein decoys", such as ultraprocessed savory foods that contain little protein (e.g., barbecue chips), are likely to be attractive and to result in overeating. The hormone FGF21, which is released from the liver, can drive savory-seeking behavior under conditions of low protein intake. However, extremely high protein diets can also have drawbacks. In 2020 Simpson and Raubenheimer published the popular science book Eat Like the Animals: What Nature Teaches Us about the Science of Healthy Eating, which details their experiments. For lifelong health they recommend eating a balanced diet with more fiber and fewer fats and carbohydrates rather than an extremely high protein diet.

In 1995, Australian researcher Susanna Holt developed the concept of satiety value, a measure of how much a given food is likely to satisfy the hunger of someone. High protein foods have been found to have high satiety values, though these are outmatched by potatoes and oats (which have a low glycemic index). Fruits rank similarly to high protein foods (likely due to their high level of dietary fibre).

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

A negative base (or negative radix) may be used to construct a non-standard positional numeral system. Like other place-value systems, each position holds multiples of the appropriate power of the system's base; but that base is negative—that is to say, the base b is equal to −r for some natural number r (r ≥ 2).

Negative-base systems can accommodate all the same numbers as standard place-value systems, but both positive and negative numbers are represented without the use of a minus sign (or, in computer representation, a sign bit); this advantage is countered by an increased complexity of arithmetic operations. The need to store the information normally contained by a negative sign often results in a negative-base number being one digit longer than its positive-base equivalent.

The common names for negative-base positional numeral systems are formed by prefixing nega- to the name of the corresponding positive-base system; for example, negadecimal (base −10) corresponds to decimal (base 10), negabinary (base −2) to binary (base 2), negaternary (base −3) to ternary (base 3), and negaquaternary (base −4) to quaternary (base 4).

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.

🔗 Radio Stations

United Biscuits Network (UBN) was an internal radio station serving the factories of United Biscuits (UB) in Britain that operated from 1970 to 1979.

In 1970 the BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain, although there were a few offshore pirate radio broadcasters, such as Radio Caroline. At one time factories had sought to avoid unnecessary background sound, but during the Second World War psychologists found that light background music (muzak) increased productivity at times it was low, a trend that continued after the war. But as jobs became deskilled and ever more monotonous, muzak became less effective, and staff turnover increased. United Biscuits was affected by this trend; Hector Laing, the managing director in the 1960s, needed to reduce the costs of high staff turnover. Inspired by the success of the pirate stations, Laing hired suitable staff, bought state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment, and set up UBN at UB headquarters in Osterley, west London (later the headquarters of broadcaster Sky UK).

In decision theory, the sure-thing principle states that a decision maker who would take a certain action if he knew that event E has occurred, and also if he knew that the negation of E has occurred, should also take that same action if he knows nothing about E.

The principle was coined by L.J. Savage:

A businessman contemplates buying a certain piece of property. He considers the outcome of the next presidential election relevant. So, to clarify the matter to himself, he asks whether he would buy if he knew that the Democratic candidate were going to win, and decides that he would. Similarly, he considers whether he would buy if he knew that the Republican candidate were going to win, and again finds that he would. Seeing that he would buy in either event, he decides that he should buy, even though he does not know which event obtains, or will obtain, as we would ordinarily say. It is all too seldom that a decision can be arrived at on the basis of this principle, but except possibly for the assumption of simple ordering, I know of no other extralogical principle governing decisions that finds such ready acceptance.

He formulated the principle as a dominance principle, but it can also be framed probabilistically. Richard Jeffrey and later Judea Pearl showed that Savage's principle is only valid when the probability of the event considered (e.g., the winner of the election) is unaffected by the action (buying the property). Under such conditions, the sure-thing principle is a theorem in the do-calculus (see Bayes networks). Blyth constructed a counterexample to the sure-thing principle using sequential sampling in the context of Simpson's paradox, but this example violates the required action-independence provision.

The principle is closely related to independence of irrelevant alternatives, and equivalent under the axiom of truth (everything the agent knows is true). It is similarly targeted by the Ellsberg and Allais paradoxes, in which actual people's choices seem to violate this principle.

🔗 Computing

A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite ("TCP/IP") by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most other protocols disappearing.

The pioneers of packet switching technology built computer networks to research data communications in the early 1970s. As public data networks emerged in the mid to late 1970s, the debate about interface standards was described as a "battle for access standards". An international collaboration between several national postal, telegraph and telephone ("PTT") providers and commercial operators developed the X.25 standard in 1976, which was adopted on public networks providing global coverage. Several proprietary standards also emerged, most notably IBM's Systems Network Architecture.

The United States Department of Defense developed and tested TCP/IP during the 1970s in collaboration with universities and researchers in the United States, United Kingdom and France. IPv4 was released in 1981 and the DoD made it standard for all military computer networking. By 1984, an international reference model known as the OSI model had been agreed on, with which TCP/IP was not compatible. Many governments in Europe – particularly France, West Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Economic Community – and also the United States Department of Commerce mandated compliance with the OSI model and the US Department of Defense planned to transition away from TCP/IP to OSI.

Meanwhile, the development of a complete Internet protocol suite by 1989, and partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry to incorporate TCP/IP software into various operating systems laid the foundation for the widespread adoption of TCP/IP as a comprehensive protocol suite. While OSI developed its networking standards in the late 1980s, TCP/IP came into widespread use on multi-vendor networks for internetworking and as the core component of the emerging Internet.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Spirits

Andrew Johnson was drunk when he made his inaugural address as Vice President of the United States on March 4, 1865. Multiple sources suggest Johnson had been drunk for at least a week prior, he drank heavily the night before the inauguration, and he consumed either three glasses of whisky or one glass of French brandy the morning of the ceremony. Witnesses variously described Johnson's speech as incoherent, inane, self-aggrandizing, repetitive, hostile, sloppy, and overly long. He kissed the Bible when he took the oath of office, and he was too drunk to administer the oath of office to incoming senators. The incident presaged some of Johnson's difficulties as chief executive when he succeeded to the presidency 42 days later, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

🔗 Electronics

The 7400 series of integrated circuits (ICs) are a popular logic family of transistor–transistor logic (TTL) logic chips.

In 1964, Texas Instruments introduced the SN5400 series of logic chips, in a ceramic semiconductor package. A low-cost plastic package SN7400 series was introduced in 1966 which quickly gained over 50% of the logic chip market, and eventually becoming de facto standardized electronic components. Over the decades, many generations of pin-compatible descendant families evolved to include support for low power CMOS technology, lower supply voltages, and surface mount packages.