March 19, 2012
Screen burn-in, or ghost image, is a permanent discoloration of areas on an electronic display such as a cathode ray tube (CRT) display or computer display monitor or television set caused by cumulative non-uniform usage of the pixels. With phosphor-based electronic displays (for example CRT-type computer monitors or plasma displays), non-uniform use of pixels, such as prolonged display of non-moving images (text or graphics), gaming, or certain broadcasts with tickers and flags, can create a permanent ghost-like image of these objects or otherwise degrade image quality.
This is because the phosphor compounds which emit light to produce images lose their luminance with use. Uneven usage results in uneven light output over time, and in severe cases can create a ghost image of previous content. Even if ghost images are not recognizable, the effects of screen burn are an immediate and continual degradation of image quality.
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March 19, 2012
A score bug (or, in an expanded form, a score banner or scorebar) is a digital on-screen graphic which is displayed at either the top or lower third bottom of a television screen during the broadcast of a sports game in order to display the current score and other statistics. The first television network in the United States to produce a score bug (digital on-screen graphic) was ABC, which used one on the telecast of the 1994 Purolator 500 NASCAR event. A transparent digit counted down the number of laps remaining in the race.
ABC also incorporated the Sports Bug for their 1994 World Cup coverage, providing the time and score on the game as well as enabling advertiser sponsorship to broadcast games without interruptions. Later that fall, Fox introduced a full-score bug for its NFL coverage, known as the ‘FoxBox,’ as did cable network ESPN. ABC expanded theirs to ‘Monday Night Football’ in 1997. CBS introduced theirs upon returning to the NFL in the fall of 1998, and NBC in 2001 during its coverage of the XFL.
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March 18, 2012
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic discipline focused upon the application of critical theory (a neo-Marxist examination and critique of society and culture) to the intersection of race, law, and power. ‘CRT recognizes that racism is ingrained in the fabric and system of the American society.
The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.’
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March 18, 2012
The Space Traders is a science fiction short story by Derrick Bell (1930 – 2011), the first tenured African-American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and one of the originators of critical race theory (which argues that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society). Published in 1992, its subject is the arrival of apparently benevolent and powerful extraterrestrials that offer the United States a wide range of benefits such as gold, clean nuclear power and other technological advances, in exchange for one thing: handing over all black people in the U.S. to the aliens. The story posits that the people and political establishment of the U.S. are willing to make this deal, passing a constitutional amendment to enable it.
‘The Space Traders’ was adapted for television in 1994 by director Reginald Hudlin and writer Trey Ellis. It aired on HBO as the leading segment of a three-part television anthology entitled ‘Cosmic Slop,’ which focused on minority-centric science fiction. In the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the story became the subject of political controversy. A review of the TV adaptation on the conservative news site Breitbart.com argued that it ‘captures the stupidity, paranoia, and shameless race-hustling of the people that Obama embraces.’ In ‘The Atlantic,’ Conor Friedersdorf replied by arguing that the story’s critics ‘would do well to acknowledge that for many decades of American history, including years during Professor Bell’s life, a majority of Americans would have voted in favor of trading blacks for fantastic wealth, unlimited energy, and an end to pollutants.’
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March 18, 2012
A Princess of Mars (1917) is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century pulp fiction. It is also a seminal instance of the planetary romance, a sub-genre of science fantasy that became highly popular in the decades following its publication. Its early chapters also contain elements of the Western. The story is set on Mars, imagined as a dying planet with a harsh desert environment. This vision of Mars was based on the work of the astronomer Percival Lowell, whose ideas were widely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Barsoom series inspired a number of well-known 20th century science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and John Norman, and was also inspirational for many scientists in the fields of space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life, including Carl Sagan, who read ‘A Princess of Mars’ when he was a child.
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March 18, 2012
Sergio Leone [lee-oh-nee] (1929 – 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre. Leone’s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ ‘The Colossus of Rhodes,’ the Dollars Trilogy (‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ ‘For a Few Dollars More,’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), Once ‘Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘Duck, You Sucker!’, and ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’
Born in Rome, Leone was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone (known as director Roberto Roberti) and the silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi (Bice Waleran). During his schooldays, Leone was a classmate of his later musical collaborator Ennio Morricone for a time. After watching his father work on film sets, Leone began his own career in the film industry at the age of 18 after dropping out of law studies at the university.
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March 17, 2012
‘Boneless lean beef trimmings,’ occasionally referred to as pink slime, are made from meat trimmings passed through a centrifuge then squeezed through a tube the size of a pencil, during which time it is exposed to ammonia gas. The combination of the gas with water in the meat results in a reaction that increases the pH (lowering acidity) and killing any pathogens such as E. coli. At the end of the process, the beef is at least 90 percent lean.
The typical beef production process results in beef trimmings, consisting of fat and meat, that frequently had been cooked down to recover the oils from the trim because it was not profitable to otherwise separate the meat from the trimmings. However, today much of these beef trimmings are sent as USDA-approved cuts of meat to special separation plants, where centrifuges separate the beef from the fat. The production process was pioneered by Eldon Roth, who in the 1980s founded Beef Products Inc.
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March 17, 2012
Rose Mary Woods (1917 – 2005) was Richard Nixon’s secretary from his days in the Congress in 1951, through his Vice Presidency, Presidency, and until the end of his political career. Before H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman became the operators of Nixon’s presidential campaign, Woods was Nixon’s gatekeeper. Rose Mary was born in northeastern Ohio, part of blue-collar America and as most such households were then, her family was strongly Democratic. Following graduation from McKinley High School, she went to work for Royal China Inc., the city’s largest employer. Her fiance died during WWII; to escape the memories of her hometown she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1943, working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid.
Impressed by his neatness and efficiency, she accepted his job offer in 1951. She developed a very close relationship with the entire Nixon family, especially First Lady Pat Nixon. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of the 181⁄2 minute gap in a June 20, 1972 audio tape. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred — which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the ‘Rose Mary Stretch’) — was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. The contents of the gap remain a mystery.
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March 17, 2012
Okayplayer is an online hip-hop and alternative music website and community. The group was co-founded by The Roots’ drummer Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson as a loose musical collective in 1987, and evolved into an online community in 1999. In 2004, Questlove launched Okayplayer Records as a spin-off of the community, in partnership with Decon. The community is made up of recording artists (who keep their official internet homes there) and message board users. Artists and staff, as well as those who post to the site’s message board, call themselves ‘okayplayers’ or ‘OKPs.’
Okayplayer has been identified as an online community that allows people to bypass traditional media. An example of such a collaboration fostered by the site is the Foreign Exchange project, with Little Brother’s vocalist Phonte Coleman and Dutch producer named Nicolay meeting on Okayplayer, and making an album together by sending tracks and verses back and forth over the Internet. The album, ‘Connected,’ was released before the pair had met in real life. Okayplayer organize regular tours and an annual ‘Roots Picnic’ all day event. Okayplayer artists include: The Roots, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, Common, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, and RJD2.
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March 17, 2012
reCAPTCHA is a system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s main Pittsburgh campus, and aquired by Google in 2009. It uses CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. reCAPTCHA is currently digitizing the archives of ‘The New York Times’ and books from Google Books.
reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The subscribing websites present these images for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words, as part of their normal validation procedures. They then return the results to the reCAPTCHA service, which sends the results to the digitization projects. The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, aided by a MacArthur Fellowship. An early CAPTCHA developer, he realized ‘he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.’
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March 16, 2012
‘The Fusilli Jerry‘ is the 107th episode of the sitcom ‘Seinfeld.’
This was the 21st episode of the sixth season. It aired in 1995. Working titles for this episode were ‘The Move’, ‘The Proctologist,’ and ‘The Assman.’
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March 16, 2012
‘Pass the Dutchie‘ was a song recorded by the British group Musical Youth from their 1982 album ‘The Youth of Today.’ It was a major hit, holding the number one position on the UK singles charts for three weeks in 1982 and selling 5 million copies worldwide. The song was a cover version of the song ‘Pass the Kouchie’ by The Mighty Diamonds, which deals with the recreational use of cannabis, ‘kouchie’ being slang for a cannabis pipe.
For the cover version, the song’s title was bowdlerized to ‘Pass the Dutchie,’ and all obvious drug references were removed from the lyrics; e. g., when the original croons ‘How does it feel when you got no herb?,’ the cover version refers to ‘food’ instead. ‘Dutchie’ is used as a slang term to refer to a food cooking pot such as a Dutch oven in Jamaica and the Caribbean. It has since become a drug reference in itself, denoting a blunt stuffed with marijuana and rolled in a wrapper from a Dutch Masters cigar.
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