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π Operation Dark Winter
Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22β23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.
Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.
Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.
The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.
Discussed on
- "Operation Dark Winter" | 2020-03-06 | 149 Upvotes 104 Comments
π China's Final Warning
"China's final warning" (Russian: ΠΠΎΡΠ»Π΅Π΄Π½Π΅Π΅ ΠΊΠΈΡΠ°ΠΉΡΠΊΠΎΠ΅ ΠΏΡΠ΅Π΄ΡΠΏΡΠ΅ΠΆΠ΄Π΅Π½ΠΈΠ΅) is a Russian proverb meaning a warning that carries no real consequences.
π Product Red
Product Red, stylized as (PRODUCT)RED or (PRODUCT)RED, is a licensed brand by the company Red, stylized as (RED), that seeks to engage the private sector in raising awareness and funds to help eliminate HIV/AIDS in eight African countries, namely Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. It is licensed to partner companies including Apple Inc., Nike, American Express (UK), The Coca-Cola Company, Starbucks, Converse, Electronic Arts, Primark, Head, Buckaroo, Penguin Classics (UK & International), Gap, Armani, FIAT, Hallmark (US), SAP, Beats Electronics, and Supercell. The concept was founded in 2006 by U2 frontman and activist Bono, together with Bobby Shriver of the One Campaign and DATA. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is the recipient of Product Red's money.
As part of a new business model, each partner company creates a product with the Product Red logo. In return for the opportunity to increase revenue through the Product Red license, up to 50% of profits gained by each partner is donated to the Global Fund. As Product Red is owned by Red, a portion of the contributions received from the partner brands is assigned as profit. Such an amalgamation of humanitarian aid and for-profit businesses is one example of "ethical consumerism".
In 2012, One Campaign acquired Red as a division of One. Both organizations were co-founded by Bono and Shriver.
Since 2020, Product Red has been used in the global fund to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discussed on
- "Product Red" | 2022-12-01 | 38 Upvotes 49 Comments
π Live in Cook County Jail
Live in Cook County Jail is a 1971 live album by American blues musician B.B. King, recorded on September 10, 1970, in Cook County Jail in Chicago. Agreeing to a request by jail warden Winston Moore, King and his band performed for an audience of 2,117 prisoners, most of whom were young black men. King's set list consisted mostly of slow blues songs, which had been hits earlier in his career. When King told ABC Records about the upcoming performance, he was advised to bring along press and recording equipment.
Live in Cook County Jail spent thirty-three weeks on the Billboard Top LPs chart, where it peaked at number twenty-five. It also reached number one on the Top R&B chart, King's only album to do so. In addition to positive reviews from critics, much of the press surrounding Live in Cook County Jail focused on the harsh living conditions in the prison, which led to an eventual reform.
Although Live in Cook County Jail continues to receive praise as one of King's best albums, critics often overlook it in favor of 1965's Live at the Regal. Rolling Stone ranked Live in Cook County Jail at number 499 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and in 2002, it was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. The performance at Cook County Jail had a profound impact on King, who not only continued to perform free concerts at prisons throughout his life, but also co-established the Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation.
Discussed on
- "Live in Cook County Jail" | 2023-12-26 | 27 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Ted Kaczynski
Theodore John Kaczynski (; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (), is an American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a more primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology.
In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was untenable; he began his bombing campaign in 1978. In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.
Kaczynski was the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before his identity was known, the FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media naming him the "Unabomber." The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, which led to a tip from Kaczynski's brother David, who recognized the writing style.
After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted him to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, whereas he did not believe that he was insane. In 1998, a plea bargain was reached under which he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Discussed on
- "Ted Kaczynski" | 2020-06-04 | 24 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Balance in game design
In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning a game's rules, usually with the goal of preventing any of its component systems from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. An unbalanced system represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game's entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.
π Messier Marathon
A Messier marathon is an attempt, usually organized by amateur astronomers, to find as many Messier objects as possible during one night. The Messier catalogue was compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier during the late 18th century and consists of 110 relatively bright deep-sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters).
Discussed on
- "Messier Marathon" | 2025-04-07 | 38 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Hispanic Paradox
The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world. The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites. According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites.
There are multiple hypotheses which aim to determine the reason for the existence of this paradox. Some attribute the Hispanic paradox to biases created by patterns or selection in migration. One such hypothesis is the Salmon Bias, which suggests that Hispanics tend to return home towards the end of their lives, ultimately rendering an individual "statistically immortal" and thus artificially lowering mortality for Hispanics in the United States. Another hypothesis in this group is that of the Healthy Migrant, which attributes the better health of Hispanics to the assumption that the healthiest and strongest members of a population are most likely to migrate.
Other hypotheses around the Hispanic paradox maintain that the phenomenon is real, and is caused by sociocultural factors which characterize the Hispanic population. Many of these factors can be described under the more broad categories of cultural values, interpersonal context, and community context. Some health researchers attribute the Hispanic paradox to different eating habits, especially the relatively high intake of legumes such as beans and lentils.
π Agglutinative Language
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions. This results in generally more easily deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word. This usually results in a shortening of the word, or it provides easier pronunciation.
Agglutinative languages have generally one grammatical category per affix while fusional languages have multiple. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from a morphological point of view. It is derived from the Latin verb agglutinare, which means "to glue together".
Non-agglutinative synthetic languages are fusional languages; morphologically, they combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, drastically changing them in the process, and joining several meanings in a single affix (for example, in the Spanish word comΓ "I ate", the suffix -Γ carries the meanings of first person, singular number, past tense, perfective aspect, indicative mood, active voice.) The term agglutinative is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for synthetic. Used in this way, the term embraces both fusional languages and inflected languages. The agglutinative and fusional languages are two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one or the other end. For example, Japanese is generally agglutinative, but displays fusion in otΕto (εΌ, younger brother), from oto+hito (originally woto+pito), and in its non-affixing verb conjugations. A synthetic language may use morphological agglutination combined with partial usage of fusional features, for example in its case system (e.g., German, Dutch, and Persian).
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very few irregular verbs. For example, Japanese has very few irregular verbs β only two are significantly irregular, and there are only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity; Ganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is defined); while in the Quechua languages, all the ordinary verbs are regular. Korean has only ten irregular forms of conjugation except for the passive and causative conjugations. Georgian is an exception; it is highly agglutinative (with up to eight morphemes per word), but it has a significant number of irregular verbs with varying degrees of irregularity.
Discussed on
- "Agglutinative Language" | 2019-11-19 | 59 Upvotes 29 Comments
π Download Valley
Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software. The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.
Although the term references Silicon Valley, it does not refer to a specific valley or any geographical area. Many of the companies are located in Tel Aviv and the surrounding region. It has been used by Israeli media as well as in other reports related to IT business.
Download managers from Download Valley companies have been used by major download portals and software hosts, including Download.com by CNET, Softonic.com and SourceForge.