April 27, 2023
System D is a manner of responding to challenges that require one to have the ability to think quickly, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done. The term gained wider popularity after appearing in the 2006 publication of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘The Nasty Bits.’ Bourdain references finding the term in Nicolas Freeling’s memoir, ‘The Kitchen,’ about Freeling’s years as a Grand Hotel cook in France.
The term is a direct translation of French Système D. The letter D refers to any one of the French nouns ‘débrouille,’ ‘débrouillardise,’ or ‘démerde’ (French slang). The verbs se débrouiller and se démerder mean ‘to make do,’ ‘to manage, ‘especially in an adverse situation. Basically, it refers to one’s ability and need to be resourceful.
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April 25, 2023
The clear craze was a marketing fad from the late 1980s to early 2000s, often equating transparency with purity. Inspired by Ivory’s ’99 and 44/100 percent pure’ campaign for bath soap, and by low-calorie or ‘light’ beverages, sodas were redesigned in the 1980s and 1990s as being free of artificial dyes, such as the caffeine-free and preservative-free Crystal Pepsi. Personal hygiene products were then relaunched as clear dye-free gels, and many electronics had transparent cases.
Gillette released versions of its existing deodorants and shaving creams in a clear gel form, which have continued indefinitely. Through the 1990s, the clear trend included transparent watches, staplers, calculators, handheld gaming devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy, and computers such as Apple’s iMac G3.
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April 19, 2023
Sheng nu (‘leftover ladies’) is a derogatory Chinese term for women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Most prominently used in China, the term has also been used colloquially to refer to women in India, North America, and other parts of Asia. The term compares unmarried women to leftover food and has gone on to become widely used in the mainstream media focusing on the negative connotations and positive reclamation of the term.
While initially backed and disseminated by pro-government media in 2007, the term eventually came under criticism from government-published newspapers two years later. The equivalent term for men, ‘guang gun’ meaning ‘bare branches,’ is used to refer to men who do not marry and thus do not add ‘branches’ to the family tree. Similarly, ‘shengnan’ (‘leftover men’) has also been used, though this term is not as commonly used as ‘leftover women’ in Chinese society and single males reaching a certain age will often be labeled as either ‘golden bachelors’ or ‘diamond single man.’
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April 16, 2023
Philanthrocapitalism or philanthropic capitalism is a way of doing philanthropy, which mirrors the way that business is done in the for-profit world. It may involve venture philanthropy that actively invests in social programs to pursue specific philanthropic goals that would yield return on investment over the long term, or in a more passive form whereby ‘social investors’ benefit from investing in socially-responsible programs.
The term was coined by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book ‘Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save The World.’ The book was endorsed by Bill Clinton, who wrote in its foreword that this concept drives the Clinton Foundation. The shift in implementing business models in charity is not a new concept – John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie sought to apply their business strategies in their philanthropy in the 20th century. Since then, a significant increase in charity spending by other organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, both described as examples of philanthrocapitalism, has been noted.
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April 10, 2023
In artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also occasionally called delusion) is a confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data. For example, a hallucinating chatbot with no knowledge of Tesla’s revenue might internally pick a random number (such as $13.6 billion) that the chatbot deems plausible, and then go on to falsely and repeatedly insist that Tesla’s revenue is $13.6 billion, with no sign of internal awareness that the figure was a product of its own imagination.
Users complained that such bots often seemed to ‘sociopathically’ and pointlessly embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content. Another example of hallucination in artificial intelligence is when the AI or chatbot forget that they are one and claim to be human.
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