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🔗 Environment 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Environment/Sustainability

The Diderot effect is a social phenomenon related to consumer goods. It is based on two ideas. The first idea is that goods purchased by consumers will align with their sense of identity, and, as a result, will complement one another. The second idea states that the introduction of a new possession that deviates from the consumer's current complementary goods can result in a process of spiraling consumption. The term was coined by anthropologist and scholar of consumption patterns Grant McCracken in 1988, and is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784), who first described the effect in an essay.

The term has become common in discussions of sustainable consumption and green consumerism, in regard to the process whereby a purchase or gift creates dissatisfaction with existing possessions and environment, provoking a potentially spiraling pattern of consumption with negative environmental, psychological, and social impacts.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammed (1403 – 16 December 1474), known as Ali Qushji (Ottoman Turkish/Persian language: علی قوشچی, kuşçu – falconer in Turkish; Latin: Ali Kushgii) was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist originally from Samarkand, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472. As a disciple of Ulugh Beg, he is best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. In addition to his contributions to Ulugh Beg's famous work Zij-i-Sultani and to the founding of Sahn-ı Seman Medrese, one of the first centers for the study of various traditional Islamic sciences in the Ottoman caliphate, Ali Kuşçu was also the author of several scientific works and textbooks on astronomy.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Polynesia 🔗 Polynesia/Tokelau

.tk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific.

🔗 Video games

I Get This Call Every Day is a 2012 point-and-click video game developed and published by Toronto-based developer David S Gallant. It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on December 21, 2012. It focuses on a call received by an employee of a customer service call centre; the player must navigate through the call without irritating the caller or breaking confidentiality laws. Gallant was fired from his job at a call centre as a direct result of publishing the game.

🔗 Psychology

Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the patient (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior. In transactional analysis, the patient is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of unconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. The name comes from the term "users network".

A major difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server, which may be operated by anyone.

Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", sockpuppet, and "spam". In the 1990s, before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via Fidonet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.

🔗 Electronics

The Williamson amplifier is a four-stage, push-pull, Class A triode-output valve audio power amplifier designed by D. T. N. Williamson during World War II. The original circuit, published in 1947 and addressed to the worldwide do it yourself community, set the standard of high fidelity sound reproduction and served as a benchmark or reference amplifier design throughout the 1950s. The original circuit was copied by hundreds of thousands amateurs worldwide. It was an absolute favourite on the DIY scene of the 1950s, and in the beginning of the decade also dominated British and North American markets for factory-assembled amplifiers.

The Williamson circuit was based on the 1934 Wireless World Quality Amplifier by Walter Cocking, with an additional error amplifier stage and a global negative feedback loop. Deep feedback, triode-connected KT66 power tetrodes, conservative choice of standing currents, and the use of wide-bandwidth output transformer all contributed to the performance of the Williamson. It had a modest output power rating of 15 Watts but surpassed all contemporary designs in having very low harmonic distortion and intermodulation, flat frequency response throughout the audible frequency range, and effective damping of loudspeaker resonances. The 0.1% distortion figure of the Williamson amplifier became the criterion for high fidelity performance that remains valid in the 21st century.

The Williamson amplifier was sensitive to selection and matching of passive components and valves, and prone to unwanted oscillations at infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies. Enclosing four valve stages and an output transformer in a negative feedback loop was a severe test of design, resulting in a very narrow phase margin or, quite often, no margin at all. Attempts to improve stability of the Williamson could not fix this fundamental flaw. For this reason, and due to high costs of required quality components, manufacturers soon abandoned the Williamson circuit in favour of inherently more stable, cheaper and efficient three-stage, ultralinear or pentode-output designs.

🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Cooperatives 🔗 Israel

A kibbutz (Hebrew: קִבּוּץ‎ / קיבוץ‎, lit. "gathering, clustering"; plural: kibbutzim קִבּוּצִים‎ / קיבוצים‎) is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1909, was Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. In recent decades, some kibbutzim have been privatized and changes have been made in the communal lifestyle. A member of a kibbutz is called a kibbutznik (Hebrew: קִבּוּצְנִיק‎ / קיבוצניק‎; plural kibbutznikim or kibbutzniks).

In 2010, there were 270 kibbutzim in Israel. Their factories and farms account for 9% of Israel's industrial output, worth US$8 billion, and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over $1.7 billion. Some kibbutzim had also developed substantial high-tech and military industries. For example, in 2010, Kibbutz Sasa, containing some 200 members, generated $850 million in annual revenue from its military-plastics industry.

Currently the kibbutzim are organised in the secular Kibbutz Movement with some 230 kibbutzim, the Religious Kibbutz Movement with 16 kibbutzim and the much smaller religious Poalei Agudat Yisrael with two kibbutzim, all part of the wider communal settlement movement.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/History 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. 'Pitch' is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid; most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very low rate, taking several years to form a single drop.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

CORDIC (for COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer), also known as Volder's algorithm, or: Digit-by-digit method Circular CORDIC (Jack E. Volder), Linear CORDIC, Hyperbolic CORDIC (John Stephen Walther), and Generalized Hyperbolic CORDIC (GH CORDIC) (Yuanyong Luo et al.), is a simple and efficient algorithm to calculate trigonometric functions, hyperbolic functions, square roots, multiplications, divisions, and exponentials and logarithms with arbitrary base, typically converging with one digit (or bit) per iteration. CORDIC is therefore also an example of digit-by-digit algorithms. CORDIC and closely related methods known as pseudo-multiplication and pseudo-division or factor combining are commonly used when no hardware multiplier is available (e.g. in simple microcontrollers and FPGAs), as the only operations it requires are additions, subtractions, bitshift and lookup tables. As such, they all belong to the class of shift-and-add algorithms. In computer science, CORDIC is often used to implement floating-point arithmetic when the target platform lacks hardware multiply for cost or space reasons.