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🔗 Computing

The Owner-Free File System (OFF System, or OFF for short) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system in which all shared files are represented by randomized multi-used data blocks. Instead of anonymizing the network, the data blocks are anonymized and therefore, only data garbage is ever exchanged and stored and no forwarding via intermediate nodes is required. OFF claims to have been created with the expressed intention "to cut off some gangrene-infested bits of the copyright industry."

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Home Living

Sears Modern Homes were houses sold primarily through mail order catalog by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer.

From 1908 to 1942, Sears sold more than 70,000 of these houses in North America. Sears Modern Homes were purchased primarily by customers in East Coast and Midwest states but have been located as far south as Florida, as far west as California, and as far north as Alaska and Canada. No complete record of their locations was left by Sears when they closed the Modern Homes program but current-day researchers are compiling a database of those that have been found so far and the list continues to grow.

Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Most included the latest comforts and conveniences available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century, such as central heating, indoor plumbing, telephone, and electricity.

Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families. Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. Some builders and companies purchased houses directly from Sears to build as model homes, speculative homes, or homes for customers or employees. Although most shipments came by rail, newspaper advertisements in the late 1920s and early 1930s showed Sears offering truck delivery to buyers living within a 35-mile (56 km) radius of their Newark, New Jersey, plant and their Norwood, Ohio, Sash & Door company.

Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940 with sales through local sales offices continuing into 1942. Years later, the sales records related to home sales were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. Because the various kit home companies often copied plan elements or designs from each other, there are a number of catalog and kit models from different manufacturers that look similar or identical to models offered by Sears. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Solar System/Moon

The Artemis program is a U.S. government-funded international human spaceflight program that has the goal of landing "the first woman and the next man" on the Moon, specifically at the lunar south pole region, by 2024. The program is carried out predominantly by NASA, U.S. commercial spaceflight companies contracted by NASA, and international partners including the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) the Australian Space Agency (ASA), the UK Space Agency (UKSA), the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) the State Space Agency of Ukraine, and the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB). NASA is leading the program, but expects international partnerships to play a key role in advancing Artemis as the next step towards the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars.

In December 2017, President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, authorizing the lunar campaign. Artemis draws upon ongoing spacecraft programs including Orion, the Gateway, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and adds an undeveloped crewed lander. The Space Launch System will serve as the primary launch vehicle for Orion, while commercial launch vehicles are planned for use to launch various other elements of the campaign. NASA requested US$1.6 billion in additional funding for Artemis for fiscal year 2020, while the Senate Appropriations Committee requested from NASA a five-year budget profile which is needed for evaluation and approval by Congress.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

Charlieplexing (also known as tristate multiplexing, reduced pin-count LED multiplexing, complementary LED drive and crossplexing) is a technique for accessing a large number of LEDs, switches, micro-capacitors or other I/O entities, using very few tri-state logic wires from a microcontroller, these entities being wired as discrete components, x/y arrays, or woven in a diagonally intersecting pattern to form diagonal arrays.

The method uses the tri-state logic capabilities of microcontrollers in order to gain efficiency over traditional multiplexing, each I/O pin being capable, when required, of rapidly changing between the three states, logical 1, logical 0, and high impedance.

This enables these I/O entities (LEDs, switches etc.) to be connected between any two microcontroller I/Os - e.g. with 4 I/Os, each I/O can pair with 3 other I/Os, resulting in 6 unique pairings (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3, 2/4, 3/4). Only 4 pairings are possible with standard x/y multiplexing (1/3, 1/4, 2/3, 2/4). Also, due to the microcontroller's ability to reverse the polarity of the 6 I/O pairs, the number of LEDS (or diodes) that are uniquely addressable, can be doubled to 12 - adding LEDS 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 3/2, 4/2 and 4/3.

Although it is more efficient in its use of I/O, a small amount of address manipulation is required when trying to fit Charlieplexing into a standard x/y array.

Other issues that affect standard multiplexing but are exacerbated by Charlieplexing are:

• consideration of current requirements and the forward voltages of the LEDs.
• a requirement to cycle through the in-use LEDs rapidly so that the persistence of the human eye perceives the display to be lit as a whole. Multiplexing can generally be seen by a strobing effect and skewing if the eye's focal point is moved past the display rapidly.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Women artists

Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was not discovered and recognized until after her death. She worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago's North Shore, while she pursued her photography. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.

During her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never printed. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier's photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier's prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Maier's work subsequently attracted critical acclaim, and since then, Maier's photographs have been exhibited around the world.

Her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films, including the film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards.

🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was a 1962 experiment conducted on Good Friday at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin (the active principle in psilocybin mushrooms) would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.

🔗 Urban studies and planning

Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day, which is approximately one hour. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi. Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant. Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation. In his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford attributes this observation to Bertrand Russell:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

A related concept is that of Zahavi, who also noticed that people seem to have a constant "travel time budget", that is, "a stable daily amount of time that people make available for travel." David Metz, former chief scientist at the Department of Transport, UK, cites data of average travel time in Britain drawn from the British National Travel Survey in support of Marchetti's and Zahavi's conclusions. The work casts doubt on the contention that investment in infrastructure saves travel time. Instead, it appears from Metz's figures that people invest travel time saved in travelling a longer distance, a particular example of Jevons paradox described by the Lewis–Mogridge position. Because of the constancy of travel times as well as induced travel, Robert Cervero has argued that the World Bank and other international aid agencies evaluate transportation investment proposals in developing and rapidly motorizing cities less on the basis of potential travel-time savings and more on the accessibility benefits they confer.

🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Haiti

The United States occupation of Haiti began on July 28, 1915, when 330 US Marines landed at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) convinced US President Woodrow Wilson to take control of the country's political and financial interests. The occupation took place following years of socioeconomic instability within Haiti that culminated with the lynching of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by a mob angered by his executions of political prisoners.

During the occupation, Haiti had three new presidents while the United States ruled as a military regime through martial law, led by Marines and the US-created Gendarmerie of Haiti. A corvée system of forced labor was used by the US for infrastructure projects, resulting in hundreds to thousands of deaths. The occupation ended the constitutional ban on foreign ownership of land, which had existed since the foundation of Haiti.

The occupation ended on August 1, 1934, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt reaffirmed an August 1933 disengagement agreement. The last contingent of Marines departed on August 15, 1934, after a formal transfer of authority to the Gendarmerie of Haiti.

🔗 Color

RAL is a colour management system used in Europe that is created and administered by the German RAL gGmbH (RAL non-profit LLC), which is a subsidiary of the German RAL Institute. In colloquial speech, RAL refers to the RAL Classic system, mainly used for varnish and powder coating, but now plastics as well. Approved RAL products are provided with a hologram to make unauthorised versions difficult to produce. Imitations may show different hue and colour when observed under various light sources.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Death 🔗 Iran 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire 🔗 Military history/Ottoman military history

The Sayfo or the Seyfo (lit. 'sword'; see below), also known as the Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.

The Assyrians were divided into mutually antagonistic churches, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, and the Chaldean Catholic Church. Before World War I, they lived in mountainous and remote areas of the Ottoman Empire (some of which were effectively stateless). The empire's nineteenth-century centralization efforts led to increased violence and danger for the Assyrians.

Mass killing of Assyrian civilians began during the Ottoman occupation of Azerbaijan from January to May 1915, during which massacres were committed by Ottoman forces and pro-Ottoman Kurds. In Bitlis province, Ottoman troops returning from Persia joined local Kurdish tribes to massacre the local Christian population (including Assyrians). Ottoman forces and Kurds attacked the Assyrian tribes of Hakkari in mid-1915, driving them out by September despite the tribes mounting a coordinated military defense. Governor Mehmed Reshid initiated a genocide of all of the Christian communities in Diyarbekir province, including Syriac Christians, facing only sporadic armed resistance in some parts of Tur Abdin. Ottoman Assyrians living farther south, in present-day Iraq and Syria, were not targeted in the genocide.

The Sayfo occurred concurrently with and was closely related to the Armenian genocide, although the Sayfo is considered to have been less systematic. Local actors played a larger role than the Ottoman government, but the latter also ordered attacks on certain Assyrians. Motives for killing included a perceived lack of loyalty among some Assyrian communities to the Ottoman Empire and the desire to appropriate their land. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Assyro-Chaldean delegation said that its losses were 250,000 (about half the prewar population); the accuracy of this figure is unknown. They later revised their estimate to 275,000 dead at the Lausanne Conference in 1923. The Sayfo is less studied than the Armenian genocide. Efforts to have it recognized as a genocide began during the 1990s, spearheaded by the Assyrian diaspora. Although several countries acknowledge that Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire were victims of a genocide, this assertion is rejected by the Turkish government.