Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education

Linda Stone, a tech writer and consultant, coined the term continuous partial attention in 1998 to describe a modern adaptive behavior of continuously dividing one's attention. Stone has clarified that continuous partial attention is not the same as multi-tasking. Where multi-tasking is driven by a conscious desire to be productive and efficient, CPA is an automatic process motivated only by "a desire to be a live node on the network" or by the willingness to connect and stay connected, scanning and optimizing opportunities, activities and contacts in an effort to not miss anything that is going on.

Continuous partial attention is not necessarily a dysfunctional state. However, it may lead to increased stress and decreased ability to focus and concentrate on the present moment, prohibiting reflection, contemplation, and thoughtful decision making. The constant connectedness that is associated with continuous partial attention may also affect relationships, lower productivity levels, and lead to over-stimulation and a lack of fulfillment.

Linda Stone's research has focused on examples in the United States though she has posited that, "We may not all find ourselves in the same attention era at the same time. We are likely to find ourselves experiencing a flow: attraction to an ideal, taking the expression of the ideal to an extreme and experiencing unintended and less than pleasant consequences, giving birth to and launching a new ideal while integrating the best of what came before."

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Telecommunications

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.

🔗 Amateur radio 🔗 Michigan

Heathkit is the brand name of kits and other electronic products produced and marketed by the Heath Company. The products over the decades have included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions, and the influential Heath H-8, H-89, and H-11 hobbyist computers, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser.

Heathkit manufactured electronic kits from 1947 until 1992. After closing that business, the Heath Company continued with its products for education, and motion-sensor lighting controls. The lighting control business was sold around 2000. The company announced in 2011 that they were reentering the kit business after a 20-year hiatus but then filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and under new ownership began restructuring in 2013. As of 2019, the company has a live website with newly-designed products, services, vintage kits, and replacement parts for sale.

🔗 Mathematics

The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963 and popularized in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American a short time later. It is constructed by writing the positive integers in a square spiral and specially marking the prime numbers.

Ulam and Gardner emphasized the striking appearance in the spiral of prominent diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines containing large numbers of primes. Both Ulam and Gardner noted that the existence of such prominent lines is not unexpected, as lines in the spiral correspond to quadratic polynomials, and certain such polynomials, such as Euler's prime-generating polynomial x² − x + 41, are believed to produce a high density of prime numbers. Nevertheless, the Ulam spiral is connected with major unsolved problems in number theory such as Landau's problems. In particular, no quadratic polynomial has ever been proved to generate infinitely many primes, much less to have a high asymptotic density of them, although there is a well-supported conjecture as to what that asymptotic density should be.

In 1932, more than thirty years prior to Ulam's discovery, the herpetologist Laurence Klauber constructed a triangular, non-spiral array containing vertical and diagonal lines exhibiting a similar concentration of prime numbers. Like Ulam, Klauber noted the connection with prime-generating polynomials, such as Euler's.

🔗 Typography

Tiresias is a family of TrueType sans-serif typefaces that were designed with the aim of legibility by people with impaired vision at the Scientific Research Unit of Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. The font was originally designed for the RNIB by Chris Sharville of Laker Sharville Design Associates who was working with John Gill at the time.

The family includes

• Tiresias Infofont – for information labels, optimized for maximum legibility at a distance of 30–100 cm.
• Tiresias Keyfont – for labeling the tops of keys of keyboards, PIN pads, appliances, remote controls (features exaggerated punctuation marks, no descender on the J)
• Tiresias LPfont – for large-print publications. A wedge-serif design.
• Tiresias PCfont – for raster displays
• Tiresias Screenfont – for television subtitling and on-screen user interfaces
• Tiresias Signfont – a more open spacing for use on signs

In late 2007, all Tiresias fonts except Tiresias Screenfont were released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.

The Tiresias Screenfont was sold by Bitstream Inc., who in 2012 were acquired by Monotype Corporation. The acquiring company continues to market Tiresias on its websites.

🔗 Film 🔗 Television 🔗 Novels 🔗 Screenwriters

In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for film, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, and later extended to a similar device in other fiction.

The MacGuffin technique is common in films, especially thrillers. Usually, the MacGuffin is revealed in the first act, and thereafter declines in importance. It can reappear at the climax of the story but may actually be forgotten by the end of the story. Multiple MacGuffins are sometimes derisively identified as plot coupons.

🔗 Psychology

Terror management theory (TMT) is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and codified in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, and the terror is then managed by embracing cultural beliefs, or symbolic systems that act to counter biological reality with more durable forms of meaning and value.

The most obvious examples of cultural values that assuage death anxiety are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g. belief in afterlife, religion). However, TMT also argues that other cultural values – including those that are seemingly unrelated to death – offer symbolic immortality. For example, values of national identity, posterity, cultural perspectives on sex, and human superiority over animals have been linked to death concerns. In many cases these values are thought to offer symbolic immortality either a) by providing the sense that one is part of something greater that will ultimately outlive the individual (e.g. country, lineage, species), or b) by making one's symbolic identity superior to biological nature (i.e. you are a personality, which makes you more than a glob of cells).

Because cultural values determine that which is meaningful, they are also the foundation for self-esteem. TMT describes self-esteem as being the personal, subjective measure of how well an individual is living up to their cultural values.

TMT is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound – albeit subconscious – anxiety in people that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, self-esteem provides a buffer against death-related anxiety.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Birds

Alex (May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. The name Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds.

Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively. Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human, in some respects, and he had not even reached his full potential by the time he died. She believed that he possessed the emotional level of a two-year-old human at the time of his death.

🔗 New York (state) 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/American currency

The Ithaca HOUR is a local currency formerly used in Ithaca, New York and was one of the longest-running local currency systems, though it is now no longer in circulation. It has inspired other similar systems in Madison, Wisconsin; Santa Barbara, California; Corvallis, Oregon; and a proposed system in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. One Ithaca HOUR is valued at US$10 and is generally recommended to be used as payment for one hour's work, although the rate is negotiable.

🔗 Norway 🔗 Paranormal

The Hessdalen lights are unidentified lights which have been observed in a 12-kilometre-long (7.5 mi) stretch of the Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway periodically since at least the 1930s.