Everything is Interesting
Pininfarina is an Italian car design firm and coachbuilder in Cambiano, Italy. Founded in 1930 by automobile designer and builder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina, the company has been employed by a wide variety of high-end automobile manufacturers, including Ferrari, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Cadillac, Jaguar, Volvo, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia. It also has designed trams in France, high-speed trains in Holland, and trolleys in the USA.
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Computer poker players are computer programs designed to play the game of poker against human opponents or other computer opponents. They are commonly referred to as pokerbots or just simply bots.
These bots or computer programs are used often in online poker situations as either legitimate opponents for humans players or a form of cheating. Cardrooms forbid the use of bots although the level of enforcement from site operators varies considerably.
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Polaris is a 2007 Texas hold ’em poker playing program developed by the computer poker research group at the University of Alberta. The program requires little computational power at match time, so it is run on an Apple MacBook Pro during competitions. It currently plays only heads-up (two player) Limit Texas hold’em. The University of Alberta has been developing ‘pokerbots’ since 1997.
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The ARM is a computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by ARM Holdings. An instruction set is a list of all the instructions that a processor can execute (e.g. add, subtract, move, load, store, etc.). It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used ISA.
In 2005, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year used at least one ARM processor. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers.
Silicon Fen (sometimes the Cambridge Cluster) is the name given to the region around Cambridge, England, which is home to a number of high-tech businesses, especially those related to software, electronics, and biotechnology. Many of these have connections with the University of Cambridge, and the area is now one of the most important technology centers in Europe. It is called ‘Silicon Fen’ by analogy with Silicon Valley in California, because it lies at the south of Fenland.
The so-called Cambridge phenomenon, giving rise to start-up companies in a town previously only having a little light industry in the electrical sector, is usually dated to the founding of the Cambridge Science Park in 1970 (an initiative of Trinity College that moved away from a traditional low-development policy for Cambridge). The area is known for a high degree of ‘networking,’ enabling people across the region to find partners, jobs, funding, and know-how. Organisations have sprung up to facilitate this process, for example the Cambridge Network.
Kruder & Dorfmeister is an Austrian duo most known for their downtempo-dub remixes of pop, hip-hop and drum and bass songs. Their mixes are usually flavored with sampler-processed vocals, deep bassline dub, trip-hop elements, bossa grooves and smoothly-shaped echoes. Some of their better-known works include ‘High Noon,’ ‘Original Bedroom Rockers’ and remixes of Madonna’s ‘Nothing Really Matters,’ Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless,’ Count Basic’s ‘Speechless’ and Roni Size’s ‘Heroes.’
Many of their remixes are collected on the double album ‘The K & D Sessions.’ Although best known internationally for their remixing work, the duo gained their primary reputation in Europe for their live DJ performances and ‘DJ-Kicks’ album. Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister have their own record studio, G Stone Recordings in Vienna, through which they release many of their own albums.
AdWords is Google’s main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google’s total advertising revenues were USD$28 billion in 2010. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one headline and two additional text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.
On Google the adverts are displayed either at the very top of the search results with an orange background, on the right hand side or in both these places. In a PPC contract advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on their advert. Many pay per click providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest operators.
Takashi Murakami is a prolific contemporary Japanese artist who works in both fine arts media—such as painting—as well as digital and commercial media. He blurs the boundaries between high and low art by appropriating popular themes from mass media and pop culture, and turning them into thirty-foot sculptures, ‘Superflat’ paintings, or marketable commercial goods such as figurines or phone caddies.
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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is an art museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it is one of the 20th century’s most important architectural landmarks. It is located at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central Park). It opened in October of 1959, ten years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim and six months after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Giorgio Moroder (b. 1940) is an Italian record producer, songwriter, and performer. His work with synthesizers during the 1970s and 1980s had a significant influence on New Wave, house, and electronic music in general. Particularly well known for his work with Donna Summer during the era of disco, Moroder is the founder of the former Musicland Studios in Munich, which was also used by Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Elton John. In addition to his work with Donna Summer, Moroder also produced a number of electronic disco hits and a score of songs for a variety of others including David Bowie, Irene Cara, and, Blondie.
In 1984, Moroder compiled a new restoration and edit of the famous silent film ‘Metropolis’ and provided a contemporary soundtrack to the film with pop hits from Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Billy Squier, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler, and Freddie Mercury. He also integrated the old-fashioned intertitles into the film as subtitles to improve continuity, and he played the film at a rate of 24 frames per second. Since the original speed was unknown this choice was controversial. Known as the ‘Moroder version,’ it sparked debate among film buffs, with outspoken critics and supporters of the film falling into equal camps.
The Federal Reserve (sometimes called ‘The Fed‘) is a large central bank that loans money to other smaller banks. The presidentially appointed, Federal Reserve Board is a group of financial leaders who work for the Federal Reserve and decide how much interest to charge these banks for borrowing money. The Federal Reserve interest rate is decided by the Federal Reserve Board after studying the condition of the US Economy.
When the economy is growing too fast, the Federal Reserve makes borrowing more expensive by increasing the interest rate, which means people and companies spend less which discourages inflation. When economic growth slows, the interest rate is decreased so that borrowing will increase and there will be growth.
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Ah Beng is a stereotype applied to a certain group of young Chinese men in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia. The stereotypical view of an Ah Beng is a young Chinese man or teenager who lacks cultural refinement or indulges in criminal activity or is involved in brawls or arguments out of disagreements with other people. Ah Bengs are also sometimes associated with extensively-modified or ‘zhng-ed’ cars, and are stereotypically seen as excessively flashy and show-offish. Ah Bengs are often stereotyped as trying to emulate Japanese street fashion.
In Malaysia, the term ‘Ah Beng’ usually refers to males who have unusual styles and tastes. And the term ‘lala-zai’ refers to males involved in stereotypical gangster activity or fashion such as the dyeing of hair. In Singapore, the term ‘Ah Beng’ is normally used describe gangster wannabes who cannot speak fluent English and have very low education. They commonly speak in Mandarin or Hokkien.
The Daily Omnivore 