May 30, 2019
The splinternet (also referred to as ‘cyber-balkanization’) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and interests. China erected a ‘Great Firewall’ to restrict the informational sources its citizens have access to. The U.S. and Australia, are discussing plans to create a similar systems to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.
Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of ‘parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes.’ Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, use the term pejoratively, describing a threat to the internet’s status as a globe-spanning network of networks.
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May 19, 2019
Virgil Abloh [ahb-loh] (b. 1980) is an American fashion designer, entrepreneur and DJ who has been the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear collection since March 2018. Apart from his work at Louis Vuitton, Abloh serves as the chief executive officer of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2013.
He entered the world of fashion with an internship at Fendi in 2009 alongside rapper Kanye West. The two then began an artistic collaboration that would launch Abloh’s career with the founding Off-White.
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May 14, 2019
Stand on Zanzibar [zan-zuh-bahr] is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969.
The story is set in 2010, mostly in the United States. A number of plots and many vignettes are played out in this future world, based on Brunner’s extrapolation of social, economic, and technological trends, such as an enormous population and its impact: social stresses, eugenic legislation, widening social divisions, future shock and extremism.
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May 10, 2019
The Frankfurt kitchen was the first unified concept kitchen. It was designed to enable efficient work, maximize the usable area of a small space, and to be built at low cost in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for architect Ernst May’s social housing project ‘New Frankfurt’ in Frankfurt, Germany.
German cities after the end of World War I were plagued by a serious housing shortage. Various social housing projects were built in the 1920s to increase the number of rental apartments for working class families subject on tight budget constraints. As a consequence, the apartments designed were comfortable but not spacious.
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May 7, 2019
A cognitive bias is when someone makes a bad choice that they think is a good choice. This bias is an important part of the study of cognitive psychology, which looks at basic actions of the mind, such as thought, feeling, problem solving, memory, and language.
Cognitive biases are often a side effect of evolutionary changes. Some behaviors that were beneficial for primitive humans and animals are unsuited to modernity. Others are adaptive and may lead to more effective actions in a given context.
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May 1, 2019
The monkey selfie copyright dispute is a series of disputes about the copyright status of selfies taken by a group of macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater.
The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog ‘Techdirt,’ which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater’s objections, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright.
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