Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Conservatism 🔗 Elections and Referendums

In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.

The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform. The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica was also widely accused of interfering with the Brexit referendum, although the official investigation recognised that the company was not involved "beyond some initial enquiries" and that "no significant breaches" took place.

In interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times, information about the data misuse was disclosed in March 2018 by Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee. In response, Facebook apologized for their role in the data harvesting and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in April 2018 in front of Congress. In July 2019, it was announced that Facebook was to be fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission due to its privacy violations. In October 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a £500,000 fine to the UK Information Commissioner's Office for exposing the data of its users to a "serious risk of harm". In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012. Nevertheless, Cambridge Analytica's methods and their high-profile clients—including the Trump presidential campaign and the UK's Leave.EU campaign—brought the problems of psychological targeting that scholars have been warning against to public awareness. The scandal sparked an increased public interest in privacy and social media's influence on politics. The online movement #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter.

🔗 Computer graphics

The Ramer–Douglas–Peucker algorithm, also known as the Douglas–Peucker algorithm and iterative end-point fit algorithm, is an algorithm that decimates a curve composed of line segments to a similar curve with fewer points.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Chemistry

Alcohol powder or powdered alcohol or dry alcohol is a product generally made using micro-encapsulation. When reconstituted with water, alcohol (specifically ethanol) in powder form becomes an alcoholic drink. In March 2015 four product labels for specific powdered alcohol products were approved by the United States Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) which opened the doors for legal product sales. However, as of 4 January 2016, the product is not yet available for sale and legalization remains controversial due to public-health and other concerns. Researchers have expressed concern that, should the product go into production, increases in alcohol misuse, abuse, and associated physical harm to its consumers could occur above what has been historically associated with liquid alcohol alone.

🔗 Iran 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Law 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Politics 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Israel

The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian code of law of ancient Mesopotamia, dated to about 1754 BC (Middle Chronology). It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code. A partial copy exists on a 2.25-metre-tall (7.5 ft) stone stele. It consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (lex talionis) as graded based on social stratification depending on social status and gender, of slave versus free, man versus woman.

Nearly half of the code deals with matters of contract, establishing the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon for example. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction, the liability of a builder for a house that collapses, or property that is damaged while left in the care of another. A third of the code addresses issues concerning household and family relationships such as inheritance, divorce, paternity, and reproductive behavior. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on a government official; this provision establishes that a judge who alters his decision after it is written down is to be fined and removed from the bench permanently. A few provisions address issues related to military service.

The code was discovered by modern archaeologists in 1901, and its editio princeps translation published in 1902 by Jean-Vincent Scheil. This nearly complete example of the code is carved into a diorite stele in the shape of a huge index finger, 2.25 m (7.4 ft) tall. The code is inscribed in the Akkadian language, using cuneiform script carved into the stele. The material was imported into Sumeria from Magan - today the area covered by the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

It is currently on display in the Louvre, with replicas in numerous institutions, including the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, the Clendening History of Medicine Library & Museum at the University of Kansas Medical Center, the library of the Theological University of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven in Belgium, the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, the Prewitt-Allen Archaeological Museum at Corban University, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. It is generally considered to represent a classic clash between two schools of moral thought, utilitarianism and deontological ethics. The general form of the problem is this:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:

1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?

Philippa Foot introduced this modern form of the problem in 1967. Judith Thomson, Frances Kamm, and Peter Unger have also analysed the dilemma extensively.

Earlier forms of the problem predated Foot's publication. Frank Chapman Sharp included a version in a moral questionnaire given to undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in 1905. In this variation, the railway's switchman controlled the switch, and the lone individual to be sacrificed (or not) was the switchman's child. The German legal scholar Hans Welzel discussed a similar problem in 1951. In his commentary on the Talmud, published long before his death in 1953, Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz discussed the similar question of whether it is ethical to deflect a projectile from a larger crowd toward a smaller one.

Beginning in 2001, the trolley problem and its variants have been used extensively in empirical research on moral psychology. Trolley problems have also been a topic of popular books. The problem arises in discussing the ethics of autonomous vehicle design, which may require programming to choose whom or what to strike when a collision appears to be unavoidable.

🔗 Biography

John Socha-Leialoha (born 1958) is a software developer best known for creating Norton Commander, the first orthodox file manager. The original Norton Commander was written for DOS. Over the years, Socha's design for file management has been extended and cloned many times.

John grew up in the woods of Wisconsin, earned a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University. He now lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife. His son, John Avi, is a graduate of the University of Washington.

Starting in September 2010, John began working at Microsoft officially.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts

The Phaistos Disc (also spelled Phaistos Disk, Phaestos Disc) is a disk of fired clay from the Minoan palace of Phaistos on the island of Crete, possibly dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (second millennium B.C.). The disk is about 15 cm (5.9 in) in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion.

The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, and features 241 tokens, comprising 45 distinct signs, which were apparently made by pressing hieroglyphic "seals" into a disc of soft clay, in a clockwise sequence spiraling toward the center of the disk.

The Phaistos Disc captured the imagination of amateur and professional archaeologists, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs. While it is not clear that it is a script, most attempted decipherments assume that it is; most additionally assume a syllabary, others an alphabet or logography. Attempts at decipherment are generally thought to be unlikely to succeed unless more examples of the signs are found, as it is generally agreed that there is not enough context available for a meaningful analysis.

Although the Phaistos Disc is generally accepted as authentic by archaeologists, a few scholars believe that the disc is a forgery or a hoax.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Game theory 🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".

Although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.

Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in overfishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order". Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. On the other hand, Dieter Helm argues that these examples are context-specific and the tragedy of the commons "is not generally solved this way. If it were, the destruction of nature would not have occurred."

In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator. In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules.

In environmental science, the "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology.

🔗 Constructed languages

Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message.

Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Dynamical systems

In mathematics and physics, the Poincaré recurrence theorem states that certain dynamical systems will, after a sufficiently long but finite time, return to a state arbitrarily close to (for continuous state systems), or exactly the same as (for discrete state systems), their initial state.

The Poincaré recurrence time is the length of time elapsed until the recurrence. This time may vary greatly depending on the exact initial state and required degree of closeness. The result applies to isolated mechanical systems subject to some constraints, e.g., all particles must be bound to a finite volume. The theorem is commonly discussed in the context of ergodic theory, dynamical systems and statistical mechanics. Systems to which the Poincaré recurrence theorem applies are called conservative systems.

The theorem is named after Henri Poincaré, who discussed it in 1890 and proved by Constantin Carathéodory using measure theory in 1919.