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πŸ”— Chicago Tunnel and Reservoir Plan

πŸ”— Environment πŸ”— Urban studies and planning πŸ”— Chicago πŸ”— Illinois

The Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (abbreviated TARP and more commonly known as the Deep Tunnel Project or the Chicago Deep Tunnel) is a large civil engineering project that aims to reduce flooding in the metropolitan Chicago area, and to reduce the harmful effects of flushing raw sewage into Lake Michigan by diverting storm water and sewage into temporary holding reservoirs. The megaproject is one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken in terms of scope, cost and timeframe. Commissioned in the mid-1970s, the project is managed by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. Completion of the system is not anticipated until 2029, but substantial portions of the system have already opened and are currently operational. Across 30 years of construction, over $3 billion has been spent on the project.

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πŸ”— Mafia (party game)

πŸ”— Role-playing games πŸ”— Horror πŸ”— Games

Mafia (also known as The Werewolves) is a social deduction game, created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves), and an uninformed majority (the villagers). At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: first, a night role, during which those with night killing powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day role, in which surviving players debate the identities of players and vote to eliminate a suspect. The game continues until a faction achieves its win condition; for the village, this usually means eliminating the evil minority, while for the minority this usually means reaching numerical parity with the village and eliminating any rival evil groups.

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πŸ”— Edgelord

πŸ”— Internet culture πŸ”— Sociology

An edgelord is someone on the Internet who tries to impress or shock by posting edgy opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.

The term is a portmanteau derived from "edgy" and "shitlord" – a person who "basks in the bitterness and misery of others".

Merriam-Webster gave the following example:

We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, β€œEvery year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it” - merry Xmas from the original edgelord.

Edgelords were characterised by author Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:

...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability...

It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan.

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πŸ”— Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory

πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Sociology πŸ”— Media

Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural psychology, developed by Geert Hofstede. It shows the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis.

Hofstede developed his original model as a result of using factor analysis to examine the results of a worldwide survey of employee values by IBM between 1967 and 1973. It has been refined since. The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task-orientation versus person-orientation). The Hofstede Cultural Dimensions factor analysis is based on extensive cultural preferences research conducted by Gert Jan Hofstede and his research teams. Hofstede based his research on national cultural preferences rather than individual cultural preferences. Hofstede included six key aspects of national culture country comparison scales, including: the power distance index (PDI), individualism vs. collectivism (IDV), motivation towards achievement and success (MAS, formerly masculinity versus femininity), uncertainty avoidance index (UAI), long term orientation versus short term normative orientation (LTO), and indulgence versus restraint (IVR). The PDI describes the degree to which authority is accepted and followed. The IDV measures the extent to which people look out for each other as a team or look out for themselves as an individual. MAS represents specific values that a society values. The UAI describes to what extent nations avoid the unknown. LTO expresses how societies either prioritize traditions or seek for the modern in their dealings with the present and the future. The IVR index is a comparison between a country's willingness to wait for long-term benefits by holding off on instant gratification, or preferences to no restraints on enjoying life at the present.

Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In 2010, Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint. Hofstede's work established a major research tradition in cross-cultural psychology and has also been drawn upon by researchers and consultants in many fields relating to international business and communication. The theory has been widely used in several fields as a paradigm for research, particularly in cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication. It continues to be a major resource in cross-cultural fields.

πŸ”— The Volfefe Index

πŸ”— Finance & Investment πŸ”— Economics πŸ”— Business πŸ”— Psychology

The Volfefe Index is a stock market index of volatility in market sentiment for US Treasury bonds caused by tweets by President Donald Trump.

Bloomberg News observed Volfefe was created due to the statistical significance of Trump tweets on bond prices. ABC News Online posited Volfefe could help analyze interest rate risk in the face of "unpredictable" activity on social media by Trump.

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πŸ”— Social Bookmarking

πŸ”— Internet culture πŸ”— Websites πŸ”— Websites/Computing

Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.

πŸ”— Signalling System No 7

πŸ”— Telecommunications

Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) is a set of telephony signaling protocols developed in 1975, which is used to set up and tear down telephone calls in most parts of the world-wide public switched telephone network (PSTN). The protocol also performs number translation, local number portability, prepaid billing, Short Message Service (SMS), and other services.

In North America SS7 is often referred to as Common Channel Signaling System 7 (CCSS7). In the United Kingdom, it is called C7 (CCITT number 7), number 7 and Common Channel Interoffice Signaling 7 (CCIS7). In Germany, it is often called Zentraler Zeichengabekanal Nummer 7 (ZZK-7).

The SS7 protocol is defined for international use by the Q.700-series recommendations of 1988 by the ITU-T. Of the many national variants of the SS7 protocols, most are based on variants standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). National variants with striking characteristics are the Chinese and Japanese Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC) national variants.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined the SIGTRAN protocol suite that implements levels 2, 3, and 4 protocols compatible with SS7. Sometimes also called Pseudo SS7, it is layered on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) transport mechanism for use on Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet.

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πŸ”— The Overview Effect

πŸ”— Spaceflight πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Spirituality

The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space.

It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.

The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.

Astronauts Michael Collins, Ron Garan, Rusty Schweikart, Edgar Mitchell, Tom Jones, Scott Kelly, James Irwin, Mike Massimino, AndrΓ© Kuipers, Chris Hadfield, and Sally Ride are all reported to have experienced the effect.

The term and concept were coined in 1987 by Frank White, who explored the theme in his book The Overview EffectΒ β€” Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), (AIAA, 1998).

In 2018, the SpaceBuzz project was created so "children around the world can also get to experience the Overview Effect." It was announced in a press release on December 20 by astronaut AndrΓ© Kuipers on the European Space Agency's (ESA) website. Spacebuzz aims to give children an overview effect like experience using virtual reality (VR) in order to have the same insight astronauts have when seeing planet Earth from space. Spacebuzz is a project started by the Overview Effect Foundation backed by ESA and the Netherlands Space Office..

In late 2019 it was reported that researchers at the University of Missouri aimed to reproduce the experience, with an isolation tank, half a tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof VR headset.

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πŸ”— Sputnik virophage

πŸ”— Viruses

Sputnik virophage (from Russian cΠΏΡƒΡ‚Π½ΠΈΠΊ "satellite", Latin "virus" and Greek φάγΡιν phagein "to eat") is a subviral agent that reproduces in amoeba cells that are already infected by a certain helper virus; Sputnik uses the helper virus's machinery for reproduction and inhibits replication of the helper virus.

Viruses like Sputnik that depend on co-infection of the host cell by helper viruses are known as satellite viruses. At its discovery in a Paris water-cooling tower in 2008 Sputnik was the first known satellite virus that inhibited replication of its helper virus and thus acted as a parasite of that virus. In analogy to the term bacteriophage it was called a virophage. However, the usage of this term and the relationship between virophages and classical satellite viruses remain controversial.

Sputnik virophages were found infecting giant viruses of Mimiviridae group A. However, they are able to grow in amoebae infected by Mimiviridae of any of the groups A, B, and C.

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