July 11, 2012
Pop punk is a sub genre of alternative rock, which typically merges pop melodies with speedy punk tempos, chord changes, and loud guitars. Contemporary pop punk bands have a radio friendly sheen to their music, but still maintain much of the speed and attitude of classic punk rock. It is not clear when the term ‘pop punk’ was first used, but pop-influenced punk rock had been around since the mid- to late-1970s.
An early use of the term appeared in a 1977 ‘New York Times’ article, ‘Cabaret: Tom Petty’s Pop Punk Rock Evokes Sounds of 60s.’ In the mid-1990s, the California pop punk bands Green Day and The Offspring, who were later followed by Blink-182, would all achieve worldwide commercial success. From the mid-1990s onwards, some bands associated with the genre have been described as happy punk, faux-punk, mall punk, pseudo-punk,or bubblegum punk.
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July 11, 2012
Top 40 is a music industry shorthand for the currently most-popular songs in a particular genre. When used without qualification, it typically refers to the best-selling or most frequently broadcast popular music songs of the previous week. Top 40 became the dominant radio format of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Its popularity coincided with the rapid changes in recording technology in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, the recording industry agreed upon a standard recording format for higher fidelity music, so any new record player could play any new record.
Also in that year, new single records were released on 45 rpm records, and the Top 40 thereafter became a survey of the popularity of these records (and their airplay on the radio). Tape recording had become perfected, allowing artists more freedom as they composed songs, especially novelty songs. By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the 45 rpm record would decrease in popularity and other means would be used to evaluate the popularity of new songs, such as cassette-single, CD single, and digital MP3/AAC sales (plus radio airplay).
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July 11, 2012
Mosquito control manages the population of mosquitoes to reduce their damage to human health, economies, and enjoyment. Mosquito control is a vital public-health practice throughout the world and especially in the tropics because mosquitoes spread many diseases, such as malaria. Mosquito-control operations are targeted against three different problems:
Nuisance mosquitoes (bother people around homes or in parks and recreational areas); Economically important mosquitoes (reduce real estate values, adversely affect tourism and related business interests, or negatively impact livestock or poultry production); and Public health (focusing on mosquitoes as vectors, or transmitters, of infectious disease).
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July 9, 2012
The Bullingdon Club is a secret society dining club for exclusive students at Oxford University. The club has no permanent rooms and is notorious for its members’ wealth and destructive binges. Membership is by invitation only, and prohibitively expensive for most, given the need to pay for the uniform, dinners, and damages. The club was founded over 200 years ago. Originally it was a hunting and cricket club. This foundational sporting purpose is attested to in the Club’s symbol.
‘The Wisden Cricketer’ reports that the Bullingdon is ‘ostensibly one of the two original Oxford University cricket teams but it actually used cricket merely as a respectable front for the mischievous, destructive, or self-indulgent tendencies of its members.’ By the late 19th century, the present emphasis on dining within the Club began to emerge. ‘The Bullingdon Club dinners were the occasion of a great display of exuberant spirits, accompanied by a considerable consumption of the good things of life, which often made the drive back to Oxford an experience of exceptional nature.’
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July 7, 2012
Behavioral addiction is a form of addiction which does not rely on chemicals (like drugs and alcohol), characterized by a compulsion to repeatedly engage in an action until said action causes serious negative consequences to the person’s physical, mental, social, and/or financial well-being. One sign that a behavior has become addictive is if it persists despite these consequences. Behavioral addictions, which are sometimes referred to as impulse control disorders, are increasingly recognized as treatable forms of addictions. Behaviors which may be addicting include gambling, eating, intercourse, viewing pornography, use of computers, playing video games, working , exercising, spiritual obsession (as opposed to religious devotion), cutting, and shopping.
When analyzing the addiction to food for example, a published study in 2009 from The Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that the same molecular mechanisms that drive people into drug addiction are behind the compulsion to overeat, pushing people into obesity. In this study, scientists focused on a particular receptor in the brain known to play an important role in vulnerability to drug addiction — the dopamine D2 receptor. The D2 receptor responds to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released in the brain by pleasurable experiences like food or sex or drugs like cocaine.
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July 7, 2012
Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions; the current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. For example, a prediction market security might reward a dollar if a particular candidate is elected, such that an individual who thinks the candidate had a 70% chance of being elected should be willing to pay up to 70 cents for such a security.
People who buy low and sell high are rewarded for improving the market prediction, while those who buy high and sell low are punished for degrading the market prediction. Evidence so far suggests that prediction markets are at least as accurate as other institutions predicting the same events with a similar pool of participants.
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July 6, 2012
‘Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions’ is a 2008 book by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, in which he challenges readers’ assumptions about making decisions based on rational thought.
Ariely explains, ‘My goal, by the end of this book, is to help you fundamentally rethink what makes you and the people around you tick. I hope to lead you there by presenting a wide range of scientific experiments, findings, and anecdotes that are in many cases quite amusing. Once you see how systematic certain mistakes are–how we repeat them again and again–I think you will begin to learn how to avoid some of them.’
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July 5, 2012
‘Conductive ink‘ is an ink that conducts electricity. These materials may be classed as fired high solids systems or PTF (polymer thick film) systems that allow circuits to be drawn or printed on a variety of substrate materials such as polyester or paper.
These types of materials usually contain conductive materials such as powdered or flaked silver and carbon like materials. Conductive inks can be a more economical way to lay down a modern conductive traces when compared to traditional industrial standards such as etching copper from copper plated substrates to form the same conductive traces on relevant substrates, as printing is a purely additive process producing little to no waste streams which then have to be recovered or treated.
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July 4, 2012
The Found Footage Festival is a live comedy event and screening featuring unusual and humorous clips from VHS videotapes gathered from thrift stores, garage sales, warehouses, estate sales, and dumpsters throughout the United States. Founded in 2004, the Festival originated in Wisconsin and Minnesota by Joe Pickett, Nick Prueher and Geoff Haas, childhood friends from Wisconsin. While still in high school, Pickett and Prueher began collecting videos from garage sales, training videos from odd jobs, and copies of tapes from a video production house. The friends would then play selections from this collection for entertainment at parties.
In 2004, Pickett and Prueher quit their day jobs to focus on production of their first feature documentary, ‘Dirty Country.’ They started the touring ‘Found Footage Festival’ show to fund the production of the documentary. In addition to its regular touring schedule, the Festival has appeared at the HBO ‘US Comedy Arts Festival,’ ‘Just For Laughs’ (the Montreal comedy festival), the ‘New York Comedy Festival,’ the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, and the ‘Central Standard Film Festival’ in Minneapolis. The Festival is currently based out of New York City.
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July 3, 2012
The Basement Tapes is a 1975 studio album by Bob Dylan and The Band. The songs featuring Dylan’s vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album’s release, at houses in and around Woodstock, NY, where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, ‘The Basement Tapes’ marked their first official release.
When Columbia Records prepared the album, eight songs recorded solely by the Band were added to sixteen songs taped by Dylan and the Band. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan’s best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.
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July 3, 2012
Kim Dotcom, real name Kim Schmitz (b. 1974) is a German-Finnish businessman who rose to prominence during the dot-com bubble and was convicted of insider trading and embezzlement in its aftermath. He is the founder of Megaupload and its associated websites. He legally changed his surname to Dotcom in 2005. in 2012, the New Zealand Police placed him in custody in response to US charges of criminal copyright infringement in relation to his Megaupload Web site.
Dotcom has spoken out against his negative portrayal in the media, claiming to be a reformed character and a legitimate businessman who has been unfairly demonized by United States authorities and industry trade groups such as the RIAA and MPAA. He contends that the services offered by his Megaupload site were not significantly different from those of comparable services such as Rapidshare or YouTube, and he has just been used as a scapegoat because of his hacker past.
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June 28, 2012
OSx86 is a collaborative hacking project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture and x86-64 compatible processors. The effort started soon after the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement that Apple would be transitioning its personal computers from PowerPC to Intel microprocessors. Apple uses a Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, to tie Mac OS to the systems it distributed to developers after announcing its switch to Intel’s chips. A computer built to run this type of Mac OS X is also known as a Hackintosh.
Hackintoshed notebook computers are also referred to as ‘Hackbooks.’ The Apple software license does not allow Mac OS X to be used on a computer that is not ‘Apple-branded.’ The legality of this form of tying is disputed. While the methods Apple uses to prevent Mac OS X from being installed on non-Apple hardware are protected from commercial circumvention in the United States by the DMCA, specific changes to the law regarding the concept of jailbreaking has thrown such and similar circumvention methods when carried out by end-users for personal use into a legal grey area.
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