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πŸ”— Broken Windows Theory

πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Law Enforcement

In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. It was popularized in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose policing policies were influenced by the theory.

The theory became subject to debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has been enforced with controversial police practices, such as the high use of stop-and-frisk in New York City in the decade up to 2013. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines, and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.

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πŸ”— Pine Gap, Australia

πŸ”— Australia πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/North American military history πŸ”— Military history/United States military history πŸ”— Military history/Intelligence πŸ”— Australia/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history πŸ”— Military history/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history πŸ”— Australia/Northern Territory

Pine Gap is the commonly used name for a US satellite surveillance base and Australian Earth station approximately 18 kilometres (11Β mi) south-west of the town of Alice Springs, Northern Territory in the centre of Australia which is jointly operated by Australia and the United States. Since 1988, it has been officially called the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG); previously, it was misleadingly known as Joint Defence Space Research Facility.

The station is partly run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US National Security Agency (NSA), and US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and is a key contributor to the NSA's global interception effort, which included the ECHELON program. The classified NRO name of the Pine Gap base is Australian Mission Ground Station (AMGS), while the unclassified cover term for the NSA function of the facility is RAINFALL.

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πŸ”— Berkson's Paradox

πŸ”— Statistics

Berkson's paradox also known as Berkson's bias or Berkson's fallacy is a result in conditional probability and statistics which is often found to be counterintuitive, and hence a veridical paradox. It is a complicating factor arising in statistical tests of proportions. Specifically, it arises when there is an ascertainment bias inherent in a study design. The effect is related to the explaining away phenomenon in Bayesian networks, and conditioning on a collider in graphical models.

It is often described in the fields of medical statistics or biostatistics, as in the original description of the problem by Joseph Berkson.

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πŸ”— Programma 101, the first commercial β€œdesktop computer”

πŸ”— Computing

The Olivetti Programma 101, also known as Perottina or P101, is one of the first "all in one" commercial programmable desktop calculators, although not the first. Produced by Italian manufacturer Olivetti, based in Ivrea, Piedmont, and invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto, the P101 has the main features of large computers of that period. It was launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair; volume production started in 1965. A futuristic design for its time, the Programma 101 was priced at $3,200 (equivalent to $26,000 in 2019). About 44,000 units were sold, primarily in the US.

It is usually called a printing programmable calculator or desktop calculator because its arithmetic instructions correspond to calculator operations.

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πŸ”— A graph is moral if two nodes that have a common child are married

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Mathematics πŸ”— Statistics πŸ”— Robotics

In graph theory, a moral graph is used to find the equivalent undirected form of a directed acyclic graph. It is a key step of the junction tree algorithm, used in belief propagation on graphical models.

The moralized counterpart of a directed acyclic graph is formed by adding edges between all pairs of non-adjacent nodes that have a common child, and then making all edges in the graph undirected. Equivalently, a moral graph of a directed acyclic graph G is an undirected graph in which each node of the original G is now connected to its Markov blanket. The name stems from the fact that, in a moral graph, two nodes that have a common child are required to be married by sharing an edge.

Moralization may also be applied to mixed graphs, called in this context "chain graphs". In a chain graph, a connected component of the undirected subgraph is called a chain. Moralization adds an undirected edge between any two vertices that both have outgoing edges to the same chain, and then forgets the orientation of the directed edges of the graph.

πŸ”— Wirth's Law

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Computer science πŸ”— Project-independent assessment

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

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πŸ”— James-Lange Theory

πŸ”— Psychology

The James–Lange theory is a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed by philosopher John Dewey and named for two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange (see modern criticism for more on the theory's origin). The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Previously people considered emotions as reactions to some significant events or their features, i.e. events come first, and then there is an emotional response. James-Lange theory proposed that the state of the body can induce emotions or emotional dispositions. In other words, this theory suggests that when we feel teary, it generates a disposition for sad emotions; when our heartbeat is out of normality, it makes us feel anxiety. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system. It proposes that each specific category of emotion is attached to a unique and different pattern of physiological arousal and emotional behaviour in reaction due to an exciting stimulus.

The theory has been criticized and modified over the course of time, as one of several competing theories of emotion. Modern theorists have built on its ideas by proposing that the experience of emotion is modulated by both physiological feedback and other information, rather than consisting solely of bodily changes, as James suggested. Psychologist Tim Dalgleish states that most modern affective neuroscientists would support such a viewpoint. In 2002, a research paper on the autonomic nervous system stated that the theory has been "hard to disprove".

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πŸ”— The Skip list

πŸ”— Computer science

In computer science, a skip list is a data structure that allows O ( log ⁑ n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)} search complexity as well as O ( log ⁑ n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)} insertion complexity within an ordered sequence of n {\displaystyle n} elements. Thus it can get the best features of an array (for searching) while maintaining a linked list-like structure that allows insertion, which is not possible in an array. Fast search is made possible by maintaining a linked hierarchy of subsequences, with each successive subsequence skipping over fewer elements than the previous one (see the picture below on the right). Searching starts in the sparsest subsequence until two consecutive elements have been found, one smaller and one larger than or equal to the element searched for. Via the linked hierarchy, these two elements link to elements of the next sparsest subsequence, where searching is continued until finally we are searching in the full sequence. The elements that are skipped over may be chosen probabilistically or deterministically, with the former being more common.

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πŸ”— Idaho Stop

πŸ”— Transport πŸ”— Cycling

The Idaho stop is the common name for laws that allow cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign, and a red light as a stop sign. It first became law in Idaho in 1982, but was not adopted elsewhere until Delaware adopted a limited stop-as-yield law, the "Delaware Yield", in 2017. Arkansas was the second state to legalize both stop-as-yield and red light-as-stop in April 2019. Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.

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