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🔗 One Laptop per Child

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Environment 🔗 International development

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.

The goal was to transform education, by enabling children in low-income countries to have access to content, media and computer-programming environments. When the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so achieving this objective required bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer designed by Yves Béhar. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support.

The OLPC project was the subject of much discussion. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English. It was criticized from many sides regarding its US-centric focus ignoring bigger problems, high total costs, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success. In 2014, after disappointing sales, the Foundation shut down.

The OLPC project is critically reviewed in a 2019 MIT Press book titled The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.

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🔗 Intuitionism

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. That is, logic and mathematics are not considered analytic activities wherein deep properties of objective reality are revealed and applied, but are instead considered the application of internally consistent methods used to realize more complex mental constructs, regardless of their possible independent existence in an objective reality.

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🔗 Kaffeklubben Island – northernmost undisputed point of land on Earth

🔗 Geography 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Islands 🔗 Greenland

Kaffeklubben Island or Coffee Club Island (Danish: Kaffeklubben Ø; Greenlandic: Inuit Qeqertaat) is an uninhabited island lying off the northern shore of Greenland. It contains the northernmost undisputed point of land on Earth.

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🔗 Golden hat

🔗 Germany 🔗 Time 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Fashion

Golden hats (or Gold hats) (German: Goldhüte, singular: Goldhut) are a very specific and rare type of archaeological artifact from Bronze Age Europe. So far, four such objects ("cone-shaped gold hats of the Schifferstadt type") are known. The objects are made of thin sheet gold and were attached externally to long conical and brimmed headdresses which were probably made of some organic material and served to stabilise the external gold leaf. The following Golden Hats are known as of 2012:

  • Golden Hat of Schifferstadt, found in 1835 at Schifferstadt near Speyer, c. 1400–1300 BC.
  • Avanton Gold Cone, incomplete, found at Avanton near Poitiers in 1844, c. 1000–900 BC.
  • Golden Cone of Ezelsdorf-Buch, found near Ezelsdorf near Nuremberg in 1953, c. 1000–900 BC; the tallest known specimen at c. 90 cm.
  • Berlin Gold Hat, found probably in Swabia or Switzerland, c. 1000–800 BC; acquired by the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin, in 1996.

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🔗 Firehose of Falsehood

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

The firehose of falsehood, or firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. Since 2014, when it was successfully used by Russia during its annexation of Crimea, this model has been adopted by other governments and political movements around the world.

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🔗 _NSAKEY

🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

_NSAKEY was a variable name discovered in an operating system from Microsoft in 1999. The variable contained a 1024-bit public key; such keys are used in cryptography for encryption and authentication. Due to the name it was speculated that the key was owned by the United States National Security Agency (the NSA) which would allow the intelligence agency to subvert any Windows user's security. Microsoft denied the speculation and said that the key's name came from the NSA being the technical review authority for U.S. cryptography export controls.

The key was discovered in a Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 (which had been released unstripped of its symbolic debugging data) in August 1999 by Andrew D. Fernandes of Cryptonym Corporation.

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🔗 List of video games considered the best

🔗 Video games 🔗 Lists

This is a list of video games that multiple video game journalists and critics have considered to be among the best of all time. The games listed here are included on at least six separate "best/greatest of all time" lists from different publications, as chosen by their editorial staffs.

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🔗 Sweden Solar System

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest permanent scale model of the Solar System. The Sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. The system was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm and is on the scale of 1:20 million.

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🔗 As We May Think

🔗 Computing 🔗 Libraries

"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

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🔗 Sámi National Day

🔗 Russia 🔗 Norway 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Finland 🔗 Norse history and culture

The Sámi National Day is an ethnic national day for the Sámi (Saami) people that falls on February 6, the date when the first Sámi congress was held in 1917 in Trondheim, Norway. The congress was the first time that Norwegian and Swedish Sámi came together across national borders to work on finding solutions to common problems.

In 1992 at the 15th Sámi Conference in Helsinki, Finland, a resolution was passed that Sámi National Day should be celebrated on February 6 to commemorate the first Sámi congress in 1917, that Sami National Day is for all Sámi, regardless of where they live, and on that day the Sámi flag should be flown and the Sámi anthem sung in the local Sámi language. The first time Sami National Day was celebrated was in 1993, when the International Year of Indigenous People was proclaimed open in Jokkmokk, Sweden by the United Nations.

Since then, celebrating the day has become increasingly popular. In Norway, it is compulsory for municipal administrative buildings to fly the Norwegian flag, and optionally also the Sami flag, on February 6. Particularly notable is the celebration in Norway's capital Oslo, where the bells in the highest tower of Oslo City Hall play the Sami national anthem as the flags are raised. Some larger places have taken to arranging festivities in the week around the Sami National Day. The National Day has been included in the almanacs published by the University of Helsinki since 2004. The Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish authorities recommend general flagging on the day.

By coincidence, February 6 was also the date representatives of the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula gathered annually to meet with Russian bureaucrats to debate and decide on issues of relevance to them. This assembly, called the Kola Sobbar, has been dubbed the "first Sámi Parliament" by the researcher Johan Albert Kalstad. However, the founding of the Kola Sobbar did not influence the choice of the date for Sámi People's Day, as the assembly existed only during the late 1800s and was largely forgotten until the early 2000s.