Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP): combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide. Authors contributing to the encyclopedia give Stanford University the permission to publish the articles, but retain the copyright to those articles.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): scholarly online encyclopedia, dealing with philosophy, philosophical topics, and philosophers. The IEP combines open access publication with peer reviewed publication of original papers. Contribution is generally by invitation, and contributors are recognized and leading international specialists within their field.
Philosophy (φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom'): study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Historically, philosophy encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a philosopher. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics. Today, major subfields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of existence and reality; epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge and belief; ethics, which is concerned with moral value; and logic, which studies the rules of inference that allow one to derive conclusions from true premises. Other notable subfields include philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.
Historical overview: Western philosophy: Ancient era (Greco-Roman), Medieval era, Modern era; Middle Eastern philosophy: Pre-Islamic philosophy, Islamic philosophy; Eastern philosophy: Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, East Asian philosophy (CJKV); African philosophy; Indigenous American philosophy; Women in philosophy.
Branches of philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic, Other subfields: Mind and language, Philosophy of science, Political philosophy, Philosophy of religion, Metaphilosophy.
Phenomenology (philosophy) (φαινόμενον, phainómenon "that which appears" and λόγος, lógos "study"): philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th c. by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
Escapism: mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an "escape" from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life. It can also be used as a term to define the actions people take to help relieve persisting feelings of depression or general sadness (boredom?). J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Karl Marx (religion - "opium of the people")
Digital philosophy: direction in philosophy and cosmology advocated by certain mathematicians and theoretical physicists, e.g., Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse; grew out of an earlier digital physics (both terms are due to Fredkin), which proposes to ground much of physical theory in cellular automata.
Dream argument: postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality. Synopsis: While one dreams, one does not normally realize one is dreaming. On more rare occasions, the dream may be contained inside another dream with the very act of realizing that one is dreaming, itself, being only a dream that one is not aware of having. This has led philosophers to wonder whether it is possible for one ever to be certain, at any given point in time, that one is not in fact dreaming, or whether indeed it could be possible for one to remain in a perpetual dream state and never experience the reality of wakefulness at all. In Western philosophy this philosophical puzzle was referred to by Plato (Theaetetus 158b-d), Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011a6), and the Academic Skeptics. It is now best known from René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In Eastern philosophy this type of argument is sometimes referred to as the "Zhuangzi paradox" ("The Butterfly Dream"). The Yogachara philosopher Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century C.E.) referenced the argument in his "Twenty verses on appearance only." Simulated reality and Simulation hypothesis. René Descartes: "Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once." Critical discussion: In the past, philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have separately attempted to refute Descartes's account of the dream argument. Locke claimed that you cannot experience pain in dreams. Various scientific studies conducted within the last few decades provided evidence against Locke's claim by concluding that pain in dreams can occur, but on very rare occasions. Philosopher Ben Springett has said that Locke might respond to this by stating that the agonizing pain of stepping in to a fire is non-comparable to stepping in to a fire in a dream. Hobbes claimed that dreams are susceptible to absurdity while the waking life is not.
Dehellenization: disillusionment with Greek Philosophy stemming from the Hellenistic Period and the use of reason in particular, usually committed by a religion or faith-based system. Coined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 during his speech entitled “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections,” in order to refer to the attempt of some recent scholars to separate Christianity from Greek philosophical thought.
Platonic Academy: founded by Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) in ca. 387 BC in Athens. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) studied there for twenty years (367 BC – 347 BC) before founding his own school, the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic period as a skeptical school, until coming to an end after the death of Philo of Larissa in 83 BC.
Socrates (470/469 – 399 BC): classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. He is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Plato's dialogues are among the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity, though it is unclear the degree to which Socrates himself is "hidden behind his 'best disciple', Plato". As British philosopher Martin Cohen has put it, "Plato, the idealist, offers an idol, a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of 'the Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic." For a time, Socrates fulfilled the role of hoplite, participating in the Peloponnesian war—a conflict which stretched intermittently over a period spanning 431 to 404 B.C. Several of Plato's dialogues refer to Socrates' military service. Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on the pursuit of virtue rather than the pursuit, for instance, of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. It is argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. In Plato's dialogue the Republic, Socrates openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates found short of ideal any government that did not conform to his presentation of a perfect regime led by philosophers, and Athenian government was far from that. It is, however, possible that the Socrates of Plato's Republic is colored by Plato's own views.
Socratic problem: term for the situation in the history of scholarship with respect to the existing materia pertaining to the individual known as Socrates which scholars rely upon as the only extant sources for knowing anything at all about this individual, but when compared, show contradictions and do not agree. It is apparent to scholarship (c.2011) that this problem is now deemed a task seeming impossible to clarify and thus perhaps now classified as unsolvable. It is widely understood that in later dialogues Plato used the character Socrates to give voice to views that were his own. Besides Plato, three other important sources exist for the study of Socrates: Aristophanes, Aristotle, and Xenophon.
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire œuvre is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. In addition to being a foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, and mathematics, Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality, particularly Christianity, which Friedrich Nietzsche, amongst other scholars, called "Platonism for the people."
Epistles (Plato): series of thirteen letters traditionally included in the Platonic corpus. Their authenticity has been the subject of some dispute, and scholarly consensus has shifted back and forth over time.
Epicureanism: system of philosophy based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus—about whom very little is known—Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" is the greatest good, but the way to attain such pleasure is to live modestly and to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of one's desires. This led one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia). The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure to be the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life makes it different from "hedonism" as it is commonly understood. Epicurus defined justice as an agreement "neither to harm nor be harmed". It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly (agreeing "neither to harm nor be harmed"), and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Existence precedes essence: central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Since the world "in-itself" is absurd, that is, not "fair", then a meaningful life can at any point suddenly lose all its meaning; Albert Camus, for instance, famously claimed in Le Mythe de Sisyphe that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Pessimism: mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. Philosophical pessimism is the related idea that views the world in a strictly anti-optimistic fashion. This form of pessimism is not an emotional disposition as the term commonly connotes. Instead, it is a philosophy or worldview that directly challenges the notion of progress and what may be considered the faith-based claims of optimism. Philosophical pessimists are often existential nihilists believing that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Etymology: first used by Jesuit critics of Voltaire's 1759 novel 'Candide, ou l'Optimisme', in their attacks on Voltaire, the Jesuits of the Revue de Trévoux accused him of pessimisme. Ancient Greeks; Baltasar Gracián; Voltaire; Voltaire; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"); Giacomo Leopardi; Arthur Schopenhauer, Post-Schopenhauerian pessimism; Friedrich Nietzsche; Albert Camus.
Solipsism (solus 'alone', and ipse 'self'): philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
Ancient philosophy: philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history (c. 600 CE). Ancient Chinese philosophy: Hundred Schools of Thought; Early Imperial China. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy: Pre-Socratic philosophers; Classical Greek philosophers; Hellenistic philosophy; Hellenistic schools of thought; Early Roman and Christian philosophy; Philosophers during Roman times. Ancient Indian philosophy: Vedic philosophy; Sramana philosophy; Classical Indian philosophy; Ancient Indian philosophers: Philosophers of Vedic Age (c. 1500 – c. 600 BCE), Philosophers of Axial Age (600–185 BCE), Philosophers of Golden Age (184 BCE – 600 CE). Ancient Iranian philosophy: Schools of thought: Zoroastrianism, Pre-Manichaean thought, Manichaeism, Mazdakism, Zurvanism; Philosophy and the Empire; Literature. Ancient Jewish philosophy: First Temple (c. 900 to 587 BCE), Assyrian exile (587 to 516 BCE), Second Temple (516 BCE to 70 CE), Second Temple (516 BCE to 70 CE).
Graphical relationship among the various pre-socratic philosophers and thinkers; red arrows indicate a relationship of opposition.
Pre-Socratic philosophy: early Greek philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of these early philosophers spanned the workings of the natural world as well as human society, ethics, and religion. They sought explanations based on natural law rather than the actions of gods. Their work and writing has been almost entirely lost. Knowledge of their views comes from testimonia, i.e. later authors' discussions of the work of pre-Socratics. Philosophy found fertile ground in the ancient Greek world because of the close ties with neighboring civilizations and the rise of autonomous civil entities, poleis. Pre-Socratic philosophy began in the 6th century BCE with the three Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They all attributed the arche (a word that could take the meaning of "origin," "substance" or "principle") of the world to, respectively, water, apeiron (the unlimited), and air governed by nous (mind or intelligence). Another three pre-Socratic philosophers came from nearby Ionian towns: Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. Xenophanes is known for his critique of the anthropomorphism of gods. Heraclitus, who was notoriously difficult to understand, is known for his maxim on impermanence, ta panta rhei, and for attributing fire to be the arche of the world. Pythagoras created a cult-like following that advocated that the universe was made up of numbers. The Eleatic school (Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Melissus) followed in the 5th century BCE. Parmenides claimed that only one thing exists and nothing can change. Zeno and Melissus mainly defended Parmenides' opinion. Anaxagoras and Empedocles offered a pluralistic account of how the universe was created. Leucippus and Democritus are known for their atomism, and their views that only void and matter exist. The Sophists advanced critical thinking and philosophical relativism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889.04.26–1951.04.29): Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: the only book-length philosophical work published by the German-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project – to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science – and is recognized as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century.
Haidbauer incident (Der Vorfall Haidbauer): took place in April 1926 when Josef Haidbauer, an 11-year-old schoolboy in Otterthal, Austria, reportedly collapsed unconscious after being hit on the head during class by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Apology: "Last year with God's help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then."
Ontology
Mathematical universe hypothesis (Ultcimate Ensemble): speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by the cosmologist Max Tegmark.
Epistemology (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē 'knowledge', and -logy): branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. The Gettier problem
Private language argument: argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent, and was introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later work, especially in the Philosophical Investigations. The argument was central to philosophical discussion in the second half of the 20th c.
Seriousness: attitude of gravity, solemnity, persistence, and earnestness toward something considered to be of importance. Some notable philosophers and commentators have criticised excessive seriousness, while others have praised it. Seriousness and comedy; detecting presence and absence of seriousness in humor; detecting degree of seriousness in developmental psychology; measuring degree of seriousness in crime; medical triage; cultural variation in measurement and detection (of seriousness).
Finite and Infinite Games (1986): book by religious scholar James P. Carse. Finite vs. infinite games: "There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants..." Theatrical vs. Dramatic: If motherhood is a requirement and a duty, there are rules to be obeyed and goals to be achieved. This is motherhood as theatrical role. If motherhood is a choice and a process, it becomes a living drama.
The Infinite Game (2019): book by Simon Sinek, applying ideas from James P. Carse's similarly titled book, Finite and Infinite Games to topics of business and leadership. As Sinek explains, finite games (e.g. chess and football) are played with the goal of getting to the end of the game and winning, while following static rules. Every game has a beginning, middle, and end, and a final winner is distinctly recognizable. In contrast, infinite games (e.g. business and politics) are played for the purpose of continuing play rather than to win. Sinek claims that leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, aligned with infinite play, will build stronger, more innovative, inspiring, resilient organizations, though these benefits may accrue over larger timescales than benefits associated with a finite mindset.
Waist–hip ratio (WHR): 0.8-0.9 in Africa, S. America; 0.7 in Indo-European, 0.6 in China.
The four most common female body shapes: banana (straight, rectangular), apple (triangle downward), pear (spoon, bell, triangle upward), and hourglass (triangles opposing, facing in)
Physical attractiveness: Sexual dimorphism; Symmetry; Body scent; Genetics; Hairiness; Skin color
Apollonian and Dionysian: philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, loosely based on Apollo and Dionysus in Greek mythology. Some Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche and later followers. In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, and appeals to emotions and instincts. The Ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although often the two deities were entwined by nature.
Entertainment: something that holds the attention and interest of an audience, or gives pleasure and delight; can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience's attention; storytelling, music, drama, dance, and different kinds of performance exist in all cultures. Entertainment evolves and can be adapted to suit any scale, ranging from an individual who chooses a private entertainment from a now enormous array of pre-recorded products; to a banquet adapted for two; to any size or type of party, with appropriate music and dance; to performances intended for thousands; and even for a global audience. Amusement, fun, laughter; serious entertainment (e.g. ceremony, celebration, religious festival, or satire). Audience turns a private recreation or leisure activity into entertainment; passive audience for play, opera, television show, or film; active: games (participant/audience roles may be routinely reversed). Public or private; unscripted and spontaneous vs formal, scripted performance. Some activities that once were considered entertaining, particularly public punishments, have been removed from the public arena; fencing or archery were necessary skills - now are serious sports and professions, developing into entertainment. Entertainment for one group or individual may be regarded as work by another.
Woodstock (Woodstock Music & Art Fair, Woodstock Festival; White Lake, NY, USA; 1969: 500,000 concert-goers)
Wave-Gotik-Treffen (1987: Potsdam, GDR; 1992: Eiskeller club, Leipzig, DE): considered the largest gothic festival on this planet. "Dark music": Gothic rock, Gothic Metal, Dark Electro, EBM, Industrial, Noise, Darkwave, Neofolk, Neoclassical, Medieval Music, Acoustic Folk, Experimental, Deathrock, Symphonic Metal, Punk... Goth-, Cybergoth-, Steampunk and Rivethead- subcultures.
de:Wave-Gotik-Treffen: Seit Jahren bezeichnen Antifa-Gruppen das Wave-Gotik-Treffen als „Nazi-Treffen“. Antifa-Gruppen kritisieren, Besucher mit Uniformen, die den Uniformen der Schutzstaffel oder der Wehrmacht zum Verwechseln ähnlich seien, würden toleriert. Die Veranstalter betonen, ein unpolitisches Festival auszurichten, distanzieren sich jedoch nicht von rechts. {dressing style from sci-fi/neo-Victorians and a bit of military, rave: steampunk, cyberpunk, the Matrix, the Dark City, militaristic fashion}
Fusion Festival (Lärz, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, DE): slogan: "5 days of Holiday communism"; political theme: pronounced anti-fascist, anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-homophopia and of course somewhat anti-government.
Teknival: large free parties which take place worldwide; grown out of the rave, UK traveller and Burning Man scenes and spawned an entire subculture; summer time. French Teknivals (Teknival negotiators deal directly with the Ministry of Interior, not the Ministry of Culture (with whom the commercial ventures seeking official status must deal) indicating that they are largely not cultural but security concerns); UK Teknivals; Czech Teknivals; Bulgarian Teknivals
Legendary Entertainment (Legend Pictures, LLC): USA media company based in Burbank, CA. The company was founded by Thomas Tull in 2000 and in 2005, concluded an agreement to co-produce and co-finance films with Warner Bros. In 2014, Legendary began a similar arrangement with Universal Studios. Since 2016, Legendary has been a subsidiary of the Chinese, PRC, conglomerate Wanda Group ($3.5 bln purchase).
Political philosophy
Category:Political philosophy (study of topics such as politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a laws by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.)
Hyperreality: in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world. Some famous theorists of hyperreality/hyperrealism include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman and Umberto Eco. Key relational themes: Simulation; Simulacrum. Definitions: "A real without origin or reality" – Jean Baudrillard; "The authentic fake" – Umberto Eco. Examples: Disneyland; Filmography: Existenz; Other examples: In A Clockwork Orange when Alex says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" when he undergoes Ludovico's Technique, Second Life.
Philosophical zombie (p-zombie): in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that from the outside is indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie was poked with a sharp object it would not feel any pain sensation, yet could behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch", recoil from the stimulus, and say that it is feeling pain).
Abstraction: thought process in which ideas are distanced from objects. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification of detail, wherein formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus speaking of things in the abstract demands that the listener have an intuitive or common experience with the speaker, if the speaker expects to be understood.
Map–territory relation: relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself. The relationship has also been expressed in other terms, such as Alan Watts's "The menu is not the meal." The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[6] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").
Systems thinking: process of understanding how those things which may be regarded as systems influence one another within a complete entity, or larger system. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization "healthy" or "unhealthy".
Humanity, survival of humanity, economics, natural resources:
The Limits to Growth (1972, LTG): book about the computer modeling of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies. The report's findings suggest that in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization, it is highly likely that there would be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity. Despite facing severe criticism and scrutiny upon its initial release, subsequent research aimed at verifying its predictions consistently supports the notion that there have been inadequate modifications made since 1972 to substantially alter its essence.
World3: model is a system dynamics model for computer simulation of interactions between population, industrial growth, food production and limits in the ecosystems of the Earth. It was originally produced and used by a Club of Rome study that produced the model and the book The Limits to Growth. ince World3 was originally created it has had minor tweaks to get to the World3/91 model used in the book Beyond the Limits, later improved to get the World3/2000 model distributed by the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research and finally the World3/2004 model used in the book Limits to growth: the 30 year update. Model: Agricultural system, Nonrenewable resources system, Reference run predictions.
Beyond the Limits (1992): book continuing the modeling of the consequences of a rapidly growing global population that was started in Limits to Growth.
Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996; by Joseph Tainter): paper on energy economics. "Industrialism illustrates this point. It generated its own problems of complexity and costliness. <...> such elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy." "<...> Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations." "Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be."
Twelve leverage points (1997; by Donella Meadows): She started with the observation that there are levers, or places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being, an ecosystem, an ecoregion) where a "small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". Leverage points to intervene in a system: 1. Power to transcend paradigms; 2. Mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises from; 3. Goal of the system; 5. Rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints); 6. Structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information); 7. Gain around driving positive feedback loops; 8. Strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the effect they are trying to correct against; 9. Length of delays, relative to the rate of system changes; 10. Structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures); 11. The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows; 12. Constants, parameters, numbers.
Natural Capitalism (1999 book by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins): "next industrial revolution" depends on the espousal of four central strategies: "the conservation of resources through more effective manufacturing processes, the reuse of materials as found in natural systems, a change in values from quantity to quality, and investing in natural capital, or restoring and sustaining natural resources"
Cybernetics: transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. In the 21st century, the term is often used in a rather loose way to imply "control of any system using technology;" this has blunted its meaning to such an extent that many writers avoid using it.
Norbert Wiener (1894.11.26–1964.03.18): USA mathematician and philosopher; famous child prodigy. Early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. Considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback. Strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, whose government he advised during the 1950s. Wiener equation; Wiener filter
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950; revised 1954): argues for the benefits of automation to society. It analyzes the meaning of productive communication and discusses ways for humans and machines to cooperate, with the potential to amplify human power and release people from the repetitive drudgery of manual labor, in favor of more creative pursuits in knowledge work and the arts. People could be free to expand their minds, pursue artistic careers, while automatons take over assembly line production to create necessary commodities. These machines must be "used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf". Automatons must not be taken for granted, because with advances in technology that allow them to learn, the machines may be able to escape human control if humans do not continue proper supervision of them; we might become entirely dependent on them, or even controlled by them; There is danger in trusting decisions to something which cannot think abstractly, and may therefore be unlikely to identify with intellectual human values which are not purely utilitarian. Machines, in Wiener's opinion, are meant to interact harmoniously with humanity and provide respite from the industrial trap we have made for ourselves. Wiener describes the automaton as inherently necessary to humanity's societal evolution.
Von Neumann universal constructor: self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer.
Autopoiesis (Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production'): a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The original definition can be found in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
Systems engineering, optimization, information retrieval, search algorithms
Branch and bound: algorithm design paradigm for discrete and combinatorial optimization problems, as well as general real valued problems.
Beam search: heuristic search algorithm that explores a graph by expanding the most promising node in a limited set. Beam search is an optimization of best-first search that reduces its memory requirements.
Continuous optimization:
Quasi-Newton method: methods used to either find zeroes or local maxima and minima of functions, as an alternative to Newton's method. They can be used if the Jacobian or Hessian is unavailable or is too expensive to compute at every iteration.
Statistical process control (SPC): method of quality control which uses statistical methods. SPC is applied in order to monitor and control a process. Monitoring and controlling the process ensures that it operates at its full potential. At its full potential, the process can make as much conforming product as possible with a minimum (if not an elimination) of waste (rework or scrap). SPC can be applied to any process where the "conforming product" (product meeting specifications) output can be measured. Key tools used in SPC include control charts; a focus on continuous improvement; and the design of experiments. An example of a process where SPC is applied is manufacturing lines.
Ishikawa diagram (fishbone diagrams, herringbone diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, or Fishikawa): causal diagrams created by Kaoru Ishikawa (1968) that show the causes of a specific event. The categories typically include: People, Methods, Machines, Materials, Measurements, Environment.
Design of experiments (DOE, experimental design): design of any task that aims to describe or explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associated with true experiments in which the design introduces conditions that directly affect the variation, but may also refer to the design of quasi-experiments, in which natural conditions that influence the variation are selected for observation.
Factorial experiment: experiment whose design consists of two or more factors, each with discrete possible values or "levels", and whose experimental units take on all possible combinations of these levels across all such factors; allows the investigator to study the effect of each factor on the response variable, as well as the effects of interactions between factors on the response variable.
Process management: ensemble of activities of planning and monitoring the performance of a business process. The term usually refers to the management of business processes and manufacturing processes. Application of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to define, visualize, measure, control, report and improve processes with the goal to meet customer requirements profitably.
Workflow application: software application which automates, to at least some degree, a process or processes. The processes are usually business-related but can be any process that requires a series of steps to be automated via software. Some steps of the process may require human intervention, such as an approval or the development of custom text, but functions that can be automated should be handled by the application. Advanced applications allow users to introduce new components into the operation.
Workflow management system: provides an infrastructure for the set-up, performance and monitoring of a defined sequence of tasks, arranged as a workflow application.
Scientific workflow system: specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application. The simplest computerized scientific workflows are scripts that call in data, programs, and other inputs and produce outputs that might include visualizations and analytical results.
Bioinformatics workflow management system: specialized form of workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or a workflow, that relate to bioinformatics.
UGENE (FOSS; OS: cross-paltform): computer software for bioinformatics; provides GUI for the pre-built tools so biologists with no computer programming skills can access those tools more easily. Sequence View; Alignment Editor; Phylogenetic Tree Viewer; Assembly Browser; Workflow Designer.
Galaxy (computational biology) (OS: Linux, OSX): aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming experience; largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system; an open, web-based platform for performing accessible, reproducible, and transparent genomic science
Apache Taverna (FOSS; OS: Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows): allows users to integrate many different software components, including WSDL SOAP or REST Web services, such as those provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ), SoapLab, BioMOBY and EMBOSS.
Introduction to entropy: idea of "irreversibility" is central to the understanding of entropy. In a physical system, entropy provides a measure of the amount of thermal energy that cannot be used to do work.
Entropy: measure of the number of specific realizations or microstates that may realize a thermodynamic system in a defined state specified by macroscopic variables. Entropy is commonly understood as a measure of molecular disorder within a macroscopic system. According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.
Kullback–Leibler divergence: measure of the difference between two probability distributions P and Q. It is not symmetric in P and Q. In applications, P typically represents the "true" distribution of data, observations, or a precisely calculated theoretical distribution, while Q typically represents a theory, model, description, or approximation of P.
Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction: one of a class of reactions that serve as a classical example of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, resulting in the establishment of a nonlinear chemical oscillator. The only common element in these oscillators is the inclusion of bromine and an acid. The reactions are important to theoretical chemistry in that they show that chemical reactions do not have to be dominated by equilibrium thermodynamic behavior. These reactions are far from equilibrium and remain so for a significant length of time and evolve chaotically. An essential aspect of the BZ reaction is its so called "excitability"; under the influence of stimuli, patterns develop in what would otherwise be a perfectly quiescent medium. The mechanism for this reaction is very complex and is thought to involve around 18 different steps which have been the subject of a number of research papers.
Lyapunov exponent (Lyapunov characteristic exponent): of a dynamical system is a quantity that characterizes the rate of separation of infinitesimally close trajectories. Quantitatively, two trajectories in phase space with initial separation vector diverge (provided that the divergence can be treated within the linearized approximation) at a rate given by , here is the Lyapunov exponent.
Lyapunov time: characteristic timescale on which a dynamical system is chaotic; defined as the inverse of a system's largest Lyapunov exponent.
Wolfram code: naming system often used for one-dimensional cellular automaton rules, introduced by Stephen Wolfram in a 1983 paper and used in his book A New Kind of Science.
Moore neighborhood: comprises the eight cells surrounding a central cell on a two-dimensional square lattice.
Speed of light (cellular automaton): propagation rate across the grid of exactly one step (either horizontally, vertically or diagonally) per generation.
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation (S23: Stays alive).
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction (B3: Born).
Glider (Conway's Life) (1970; Richard K. Guy): pattern that travels across the board in Conway's Game of Life. Gliders are the smallest spaceships, and they travel diagonally at a speed of c/4. Hacker emblem.
Life without Death (Toffoli & Margolus (1987); B3/S012345678): in contrast to the more complex patterns that exist within Conway's Game of Life, Life without Death commonly features still life patterns, in which no change occurs, and ladder patterns, that grow in a straight line.
Day & Night (1997; Nathan Thompson; rule notation B3678/S34678): dead cell becomes live (is born) if it has 3, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, and a live cell remains alive (survives) if it has 3, 4, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, out of the eight neighbors in the Moore neighborhood. Name "Day & Night" because its on and off states are symmetric: if all the cells in the Universe are inverted, the future states are the inversions of the future states of the original pattern.
Brian's Brain: In each time step, a cell turns on if it was off but had exactly two neighbors that were on, just like the birth rule for Seeds. All cells that were "on" go into the "dying" state, which is not counted as an "on" cell in the neighbor count, and prevents any cell from being born there. Cells that were in the dying state go into the off state. The "dying state" cells tend to lead to directional movement, so almost every pattern in Brian's Brain is a spaceship.
Still life (cellular automaton): a pattern that does not change from one generation to the next. Common examples: Blocks; Hives; Loaves; Tubs, barges, boats and ships. Eaters and reflectors. Maximum density.
Spaceship (cellular automaton): is a finite pattern which reappears after a certain number of generations in the same orientation but in a different position.
Speed of light (cellular automaton): propagation rate across the grid of exactly one step (either horizontally, vertically or diagonally) per generation. In a single generation, a cell can only influence its nearest neighbours, and so the speed of light (by analogy with the speed of light in physics) is the maximum rate at which information can propagate. It is therefore an upper bound to the speed at which any pattern can move.
Breeder (cellular automaton): a pattern that exhibits quadratic growth, by generating multiple copies of a secondary pattern, each of which then generates multiple copies of a tertiary pattern.
Control theory: interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems with inputs, and how their behavior is modified by feedback.
PID controller (proportional-integral-derivative controller): control loop feedback mechanism (controller) widely used in industrial control systems. A PID controller calculates an error value as the difference between a measured process variable and a desired setpoint. The controller attempts to minimize the error by adjusting the process through use of a manipulated variable. P depends on the present error, I on the accumulation of past errors, and D is a prediction of future errors, based on current rate of change.
Role of chance in scientific discoveries: many domains, especially psychology, are concerned with the way science interacts with chance — particularly "serendipity" (accidents that, through sagacity, are transformed into opportunity). Psychologist Kevin Dunbar and colleagues estimate that between 30% and 50% of all scientific discoveries are accidental in some sense. Psychologist Alan A. Baumeister says a scientist must be "sagacious" (attentive and clever) to benefit from an accident. Dunbar quotes Louis Pasteur's saying that "Chance favors only the prepared mind". The prepared mind, Dunbar suggests, is one trained for observational rigor. Research suggests that scientists are taught various heuristics and practices that allow their investigations to benefit, and not suffer, from accidents. First, careful control conditions allow scientists to properly identify something as "unexpected". Once a finding is recognized as legitimately unexpected and in need of explaining, researchers can attempt to explain it: They work across various disciplines, with various colleagues, trying various analogies in order to understand the first curious finding. Preparing to make discoveries: The word "Serendipity" is frequently understood as simply "a happy accident", but Horace Walpole used the word 'serendipity' to refer to a certain kind of happy accident: the kind that can only be exploited by a "sagacious" or clever person. Thus Dunbar and Fugelsang talk about, not just luck or chance in science, but specifically "serendipity" in science.
Scientific revolution: emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed views of society and nature.
The central science: Chemistry is often called the central science because of its role in connecting the physical sciences, which include chemistry, with the life sciences and applied sciences such as medicine and engineering. The nature of this relationship is one of the main topics in the philosophy of chemistry and in scientometrics.
Unity of science: thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole.
Hard and soft science: colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor and legitimacy. Roughly speaking, the natural sciences are considered "hard" while the social sciences are usually described as "soft". There are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs, and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.
The central science: Chemistry is often called the central science because of its role in connecting the physical sciences, which include chemistry, with the life sciences and applied sciences such as medicine and engineering. The nature of this relationship is one of the main topics in the philosophy of chemistry and in scientometrics. The central role of chemistry can be seen in the systematic and hierarchical classification of the sciences by Auguste Comte in which each discipline provides a more general framework for the area it precedes (mathematics → astronomy → physics → chemistry → physiology and medicine → social sciences). Balaban and Klein have more recently proposed a diagram showing partial ordering of sciences in which chemistry may be argued is “the central science” since it provides a significant degree of branching. In forming these connections the lower field cannot be fully reduced to the higher ones.
International Science Council (ISC): international non-governmental organization that unites scientific bodies at various levels across the social and natural sciences. The ISC was formed with its inaugural general assembly in 2018.07.04 by the merger of the former International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), making it one of the largest organisations of this type.
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: scientific conference held yearly in Lindau, Germany, inviting Nobel prize winners to present to and interact with young researchers from all over the world.
Uniformitarianism: assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe; key principle of geology and virtually all fields of science, but naturalism's modern geologists, while accepting that geology has occurred across deep time, no longer hold to a strict gradualism
Thomas Kuhn (1922.07.18–1996.06.17): USA physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift", which has since become an English-language idiom.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): book about the history of science by philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities; argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. One of the aims of science is to find models that will account for as many observations as possible within a coherent framework. Together, Galileo's rethinking of the nature of motion and Keplerian cosmology represented a coherent framework that was capable of rivaling the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic framework.
E-folding: time interval in which an exponentially growing quantity increases by a factor of e; it is the base-e analog of doubling time.
Technology Life Cycle (TLC): different Technologies, different lifespans: steel, paper - long; electronic or pharmaceutical products - short. TLC is concerned with the time and cost of developing the technology, the timeline of recovering cost and modes of making the technology yield a profit proportionate to the costs and risks involved. TLC may, further, be protected during its cycle with patents and trademark seeking to lengthen the cycle and to maximize the profit from it. R&D phase, ascent phase (strongest phase of the TLC because it is here that the technology is superior to alternatives and can command premium profit or gain), maturity phase, decline/decay phase. Licensing options: in R&D phase (small firms (SMEs), venture capitalists, strategic alliances, IPO, cross-licensing); technology-owning firm would tend to exclusively enjoy technology's profitability, preferring not to license it in ascent phase; maturity phase: joint ventures rather than licensing (e.g. in regions (developing country) where the technology would be in the ascent phase); decline phase: to prolong the lifetime, the originator can license at lower cost the technology, also if the licensees cannot learn the technique and the technology without the help of the originator - (encountered often in developing country contracts) technical service and technical assistance contracts.
Technology adoption lifecycle: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority adopters, laggards.
Technology lifecycle (technology maturity lifecycle): bleeding edge, leading edge, state of the art, dated, obsolete.
Hype cycle: maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Technology Trigger → Peak of Inflated Expectations → Trough of Disillusionment → Slope of Enlightenment → Plateau of Productivity. Hype in new media
Types of Innovation:
Disruptive technology, aka disruptive innovation: an innovation that disrupts an existing market
Ford Model T: John Steinbeck's Cannery Row: "Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than about the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire iron belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered." :D. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where Henry Ford is regarded as a messianic figure, graveyard crosses have been topped off and become T's.
Technologies and innovations, R&D (Civilization (game) style):
Knock-down kit: production of parts in one set of "countries" and assembly in another set, because of cheap labor, tax incentives, "buy-national products": how the business people circumvent politics.
Cannibalization#Maintenance: practice of removing parts or subsystems necessary for repair from another similar device, rather than from inventory, usually when resources become limited. The source system is usually crippled as a result, if only temporarily, in order to allow the recipient device to function properly again.
Technological utopianism (techno-utopianism; e/acc = effective accelerationism): any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death. Principles: 1. Technology reflects and encourages the best aspects of human nature; 2. Technology improves our interpersonal communication, relationships, and communities; 3. Technology democratizes society (PRC - not); 4. Technology inevitably progresses (lost technologies of Antique); 5. Unforeseen impacts of technology are positive (ICE, AI, AGI); 6. Technology increases efficiency and consumer choice; 7. New technology can solve the problems created by old technology.
Creative destruction (Schumpeter's gale): theory of economic innovation and the business cycle; "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".
Technological convergence (Telecommunications convergence, network convergence, convergence): tendency for different technological systems to evolve toward performing similar tasks. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications), and video that now share resources and interact with each other synergistically; emerging telecommunications technologies, and network architecture used to migrate multiple communications services into a single network. Rise of digital communication in the late 20th c.; deliver text, audio, and video material over the same wired, wireless, or fiber-optic connections. Convergence services, such as VoIP, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc., will replace the old technologies and is a threat to the current service providers.
Template:Home theater PC (application software): HDTV & PC & gaming console become one; super PC in combination with screens (LCD) of various sizes and in various places for all uses prevails
Telecommunication convergence: cable connection (also optical fiber connection), wireless connections (from mobiles (e.g. GSM), to Wi-Fi, to any antenna, satellite dish); all could be driven into one where only (digital) information quantity is shuffled around at different latency and speed (conversations/conferences: chat, voice, video; streaming, watching, online gaming); the unifying principle is Internet.
Usually any technological battles (involving lots of lawyers at the level of patent, trademark, copyright & co litigation) produce the losers and the winners, and the winners make some standards:
The battles about non-Internet during pre-Internet (Microsoft didn't know that Internet will become important):
IE (1995.08.15; outcompeted Netscape; but then Netscape turned into Firefox) vs Safari (web browser) (2003.01.07) vs Google Chrome (2008.09.02)
iTunes (2001.01.09) & Apple Retail Store (Apple Store; 2001) vs Google doesn't sell hardware nor has an official media player
Mac OS X (2001.03.24) vs Google Chrome OS (announced: 2009.07.07; shipped 2011.06.15 with HW)
iLife (2003.01.07) & iWork (2005.01.11) & iWork.com (2009.01.06) vs Google Docs (2007.02; Writely (2005.08) + Google Labs Spreadsheets (2006.06.06)) vs Microsoft Office Web Apps (2010.06.07) & Microsoft Office website (2004.05-) & Microsoft Office Live (2006-)
Battle between Apple and Google (per Tim Wu "battle for the Internet" in 21st c.):
iTunes Store (2003.04.28; includes iBookstore, App Store, Video, Audiobooks, Music) vs Google Play (2012.03.06; includes Android Market (Apps and games), Movies, Music, Books)
iOS (2007.06.29; EULA) vs Android (2008.09.20; Apache License; Linux kernel under GPL2)
App Store (iOS) (2008.07.10) vs Android Market (2008.10.22)
Google Cloud Storage (2010.05.19) vs iCloud (2011.10.12)
iBooks & iBookstore (2010.04.02) vs Google Books ?? (Google Book Search; 2004)
Research and development
Research and development (R&D)
SRI International (founded as Stanford Research Institute): one of the world's largest contract research institutes. 2010 financials: US DoD 67%, NIH 10%, US companies 5%.
SoftBank Group: Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. SoftBank owns stakes in many technology, energy, and financial companies. It also runs Vision Fund, the world's largest technology-focused venture capital fund, with over $100 billion in capital. SoftBank was ranked in the Forbes Global 2000 list as the 36th largest public company in the world, and the second largest publicly traded company in Japan after Toyota.
Process engineering: understanding and application of the fundamental principles and laws of nature that allow humans to transform raw material and energy into products that are useful to society, at an industrial level. Principal areas of focus in process engineering: process design; process control; process operations; supporting tools; process economics; Process Data Analytics. History of process engineering: the set of knowledge that is now known as process engineering was then forged out of trial and error throughout the industrial revolution. By 1980, the concept of process engineering emerged from the fact that chemical engineering techniques and practices were being used in a variety of industries. By this time, process engineering had been defined as "the set of knowledge necessary to design, analyze, develop, construct, and operate, in an optimal way, the processes in which the material changes". By the end of the 20th c., process engineering had expanded from chemical engineering-based technologies to other applications, including metallurgical engineering, agricultural engineering, and product engineering.
Neuromorphic engineering: concept developed by Carver Mead, in the late 1980s, describing the use of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system. In recent times the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, and mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI and software systems that implement models of neural systems (for perception, motor control, or multisensory integration). The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, threshold switches and transistors.
Machine: man-made device that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action. Machines can be driven by animals and people, by natural forces such as wind and water, and by chemical, thermal, or electrical power, and include a system of mechanisms that shape the actuator input to achieve a specific application of output forces and movement. They can also include computers and sensors that monitor performance and plan movement, often called mechanical systems.
Self-replicating machine: type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle.
Self-replicating spacecraft: has been applied – in theory – to several distinct "tasks". The particular variant of this idea applied to the idea of space exploration is known as a von Neumann probe. Other variants include the Berserker and an automated terraforming seeder ship.
Theory: Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing large-scale mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by self-replicating spacecraft, taking advantage of their exponential growth. Given this pattern, and its similarity to the reproduction patterns of bacteria, it has been pointed out that von Neumann machines might be considered a form of life. It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Applications for self-replicating spacecraft: Von Neumann probes: Von Neumann universal constructor; Berserkers: programmed to seek out and exterminate lifeforms and life-bearing exoplanets whenever they are encountered; Replicating seeder ships.
History of the electric vehicle: EVs first appeared in the mid-19th century. An electric vehicle held the vehicular land speed record until around 1900. The high cost, low top speed, and short range of battery electric vehicles, compared to later internal combustion engine vehicles, led to a worldwide decline in their use; although electric vehicles have continued to be used in the form of electric trains and other niche uses. Since 2010, combined sales of all-electric cars and utility vans achieved 1 million units delivered globally in 2016.09. Golden age: Electric vehicles had a number of advantages over their early-1900s competitors. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. They also did not require gear changes. (While steam-powered cars also had no gear shifting, they suffered from long start-up times of up to 45 minutes on cold mornings.) The cars were also preferred because they did not require a manual effort to start, as did gasoline cars which featured a hand crank to start the engine. In order to overcome the limited operating range of electric vehicles, and the lack of recharging infrastructure, an exchangeable battery service was first proposed as early as 1896; Hartford Electric Light Company; Milburn Wagon Company cars. Decline: by 1912, an electric car sold for almost double the price of a gasoline car. California electric car maker Tesla Motors began development in 2004 on the Tesla Roadster, which was first delivered to customers in 2008. The Roadster was the first highway legal serial production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells, and the first production all-electric car to travel more than 320 km per charge. 2009.08 edition of The New Yorker, GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz was quoted as saying, "All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us – and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam." The Nissan Leaf, introduced in Japan and USA in 2010.12, became the first modern all-electric, zero tailpipe emission five door family hatchback to be produced for the mass market from a major manufacturer.
Electric car use by country: Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are generally divided into all-electric or battery electric vehicles (BEVs), that run only on batteries, and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), that combine battery power with internal combustion engines. The popularity of electric vehicles has been expanding rapidly due to government subsidies, their increased range and lower battery costs, and environmental sensitivity.
Propulsion: action or process of pushing or pulling to drive an object. The term is derived from two Latin words: pro, meaning before or forward; and pellere, meaning to drive. A propulsion system consists of a source of mechanical power, and a propulsor (means of converting this power into propulsive force). A technological system uses an engine or motor as the power source (commonly called a powerplant), and wheels and axles, propellers, or a propulsive nozzle to generate the force. Biological propulsion systems use an animal's muscles as the power source, and limbs such as wings, fins or legs as the propulsors. Vehicular propulsion: Air propulsion (Powered aircraft); Ground propulsion; Maglev; Marine propulsion; Spacecraft propulsion; Cable car (railway). Animal locomotion.
Heat engine: system that converts heat to mechanical energy, which can then be used to do mechanical work. It does this by bringing a working substance from a higher state temperature to a lower state temperature. A heat source generates thermal energy that brings the working substance to the higher temperature state. The working substance generates work in the working body of the engine while transferring heat to the colder sink until it reaches a lower temperature state. During this process some of the thermal energy is converted into work by exploiting the properties of the working substance. The working substance can be any system with a non-zero heat capacity, but it usually is a gas or liquid. During this process, some heat is normally lost to the surroundings and is not converted to work. Also, some energy is unusable because of friction and drag.
Gas turbine: combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the direction of flow: a rotating gas compressor; a combustor; a compressor-driving turbine. A propelling nozzle is added to produce thrust for flight. An extra turbine is added to drive a propeller (turboprop) or ducted fan (turbofan) to reduce fuel consumption (by increasing propulsive efficiency) at subsonic flight speeds. An extra turbine is also required to drive a helicopter rotor or land-vehicle transmission (turboshaft), marine propeller or electrical generator (power turbine). Greater thrust-to-weight ratio for flight is achieved with the addition of an afterburner.
Afterburner (BE: reheat): additional combustion component used on some jet engines, mostly those on military supersonic aircraft. Its purpose is to increase thrust, usually for supersonic flight, takeoff, and combat. The afterburning process injects additional fuel into a combustor in the jet pipe behind (i.e., "after") the turbine, "reheating" the exhaust gas. Afterburning significantly increases thrust as an alternative to using a bigger engine with its attendant weight penalty, but at the cost of increased fuel consumption (decreased fuel efficiency) which limits its use to short periods.
Reciprocating engine (piston engine): typically a heat engine that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert high temperature and high pressure into a rotating motion.
Journal of Structural Engineering: principal professional peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the oldest professional civil engineering society in the United States.
The Boring Company: infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. Musk has cited difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the current 2-D transportation network as inspiration for the project. In March 2017, Musk announced that sometime in April the company would start using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) to begin digging a usable tunnel at SpaceX. At the end of April 2017, a TBM was seen at SpaceX with the company's name on the side. The TBM was revealed to be named "Godot" in May 2017, after the Beckett play Waiting for Godot. 2017.07 Musk said that The Boring Company had received verbal government approval to build an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. 2017.10 the company obtained a utility permit for the construction of the Baltimore-Washington tunnel from the Maryland’s Department of Transportation. This part of the tunnel - some 35 miles between Penn Station in Baltimore to Washington Union Station - will start near Fort Meade. Boring machines: Proof-rock, a "fully-Boring-Company-designed machine", anticipated to be ten times faster than conventional boring machines, with hopes of making it even faster. Currently under development as of May 2018. According to Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson, tunnels specifically built for electric vehicles have reduced size and complexity, and thus decreased cost. “The insight I think that’s so powerful is that if you only envision electric vehicles in your tunnels you don’t need to do the air handling for all carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, you know, basically pollutants for exhaust. You could have scrubbers and a variety of simpler things that make everything collapse to a smaller tunnel size, which dramatically lowers the cost … The whole concept of what you do with tunnels changes.”
Christopher Alexander (1936.10.04–2022.03.17): Austrian-born British-USA architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor. In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.
Pattern language: organized and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language. What is a pattern? Many patterns form a language. Design problems in a context: Balancing of forces; Patterns contain their own rationale.
Computer science (CS) and Electrical engineering (EE)
Quality (philosophy): attribute or a property characteristic of an object in philosophy. In contemporary philosophy the idea of qualities, and especially how to distinguish certain kinds of qualities from one another, remains controversial. In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig examines concepts of quality in classical and romantic, seeking a Metaphysics of Quality and a reconciliation of those views in terms of non-dualistic holism.
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ): theory of reality introduced in Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and expanded in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). The MOQ incorporates facets of Sophism, East Asian philosophy, pragmatism, the work of F. S. C. Northrop, and indigenous American philosophy. Pirsig argues that the MOQ is a better lens through which to view reality than the subjective/objective mindset that Pirsig attributes to Aristotle. Quality: Static quality patterns and dynamic quality: Dynamic quality; Static quality patterns.
Quality (business), the non-inferiority or superiority of something ↓
Quality (physics), in response theory
Energy quality, used in various science disciplines
Logical quality, philosophical categorization of statements
Service quality, comparison of expectations with performance in a service
Vapor quality, in thermodynamics, the ratio of mass of vapor to that of vapor and liquid
Data quality, refers to the condition of a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables
Practices: Quality assurance (QA), Quality control (QC)
Quality (business) (high quality): pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something (goods or services); it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose (fitness for purpose) while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people.
Description:
Quality planning
Quality assurance (QA): means of providing enough confidence that business requirements and goals (as outlined in quality planning) for a product and/or service will be fulfilled. This error prevention is done through systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, and monitoring of processes
Quality control (QC): means of fulfilling quality requirements, reviewing all factors involved in production. The business confirms that the good or service produced meets organizational goals, often using tools such as operational auditing and inspection.
Quality improvement: continuous improvement.
Market sector perspectives
Operations management (OPS MGMT)
Manufacturing (MFG)
Service sector
Quality in Japanese culture: atarimae hinshitsu – The idea that things will work as they are supposed to (e.g. a pen will write); miryokuteki hinshitsu （魅力的品質）– The idea that things should have an aesthetic quality which is different from "atarimae hinshitsu" (e.g. a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer, and leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader).
Seven Basic Tools of Quality: designation given to a fixed set of graphical techniques identified as being most helpful in troubleshooting issues related to quality. 7 are: cause-and-effect diagram (Ishikawa diagram), check sheet, control chart, histogram, Pareto chart, scatter plot, stratified sampling.
5S (methodology): name of a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke. The list describes how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and storing the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new order. In some quarters, 5S has become 6S, the sixth element being safety. 5S was developed in Japan and was identified as one of the techniques that enabled Just in Time manufacturing.
Six Sigma: set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by engineers Bill Smith & Mikel J Harry while working at Motorola in 1986. Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy at General Electric in 1995. It seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization who are experts in these methods.
Kaizen: Japanese word for "continual improvement". In business, kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain.
Toyota Production System (TPS): integrated socio-technical system, developed by Toyota, that comprises its management philosophy and practices. The TPS organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers. The system is a major precursor of the more generic "lean manufacturing". Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, Japanese industrial engineers, developed the system between 1948 and 1975.
Lean manufacturing (lean production, often simply "lean"): systematic method for waste minimization ("Muda") within a manufacturing system without sacrificing productivity. Lean also takes into account waste created through overburden ("Muri") and waste created through unevenness in work loads ("Mura"). Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA).
Kanban: scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). Kanban is an inventory-control system to control the supply chain. Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency.
Verification and validation: independent procedures that are used together for checking that a product, service, or system meets requirements and specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. Validation can be expressed by the query "Are you building the right thing?" and verification by "Are you building it right?". Verification of machinery and equipment usually consists of design qualification (DQ), installation qualification (IQ), operational qualification (OQ), and performance qualification (PQ). Aspects of validation: Selectivity/specificity, Accuracy and precision, Repeatability, Limit of detection, Limit of quantification, Curve fitting and its range, System suitability
Ishikawa diagram (fishbone diagrams): causal diagrams created by Kaoru Ishikawa that show the potential causes of a specific event. Common uses of the Ishikawa diagram are product design and quality defect prevention to identify potential factors causing an overall effect.
Taguchi methods (タグチメソッド): statistical methods, sometimes called robust design methods, developed by Genichi Taguchi to improve the quality of manufactured goods, and more recently also applied to engineering, biotechnology, marketing and advertising.
Loss functions: Loss functions in the statistical theory, Taguchi's use of loss functions, Reception of Taguchi's ideas by statisticians
Off-line quality control: Taguchi's rule for manufacturing - best opportunity to eliminate variation of the final product quality is during the design of a product and its manufacturing process; strategy for quality engineering (System design, Parameter design, Tolerance design (Pareto principle))
Design of experiments (DOE): Outer arrays, Management of interactions (Interactions, as treated by Taguchi; Inefficiencies of Taguchi's designs)
One-way function: (in computer science) is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, specifically the theory of polynomial time problems. Not being one-to-one is not considered sufficient of a function for it to be called one-way.
Cryptographic hash function: hash function that can be defined as a deterministic procedure that takes an arbitrary block of data and returns a fixed-size bit string, the (cryptographic) hash value, such that an accidental or intentional change to the data will change the hash value. The data to be encoded is often called the "message," and the hash value is sometimes called the message digest or simply digest.
Preimage attack: (First-) preimage attack: given a hash h, find a message m (a preimage) such that hash(m) = h; Second-preimage attack: given a fixed message m1, find a different message m2 (a second preimage) such that hash(m2) = hash(m1).
Rainbow table: precomputed lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function
Avalanche effect: is evident if, when an input is changed slightly (for example, flipping a single bit) the output changes significantly (e.g., half the output bits flip)
Confusion and diffusion: Claude Shannon in his paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, published in 1949: confusion refers to making the relationship between the key and the ciphertext as complex and involved as possible; diffusion refers to the property that the redundancy in the statistics of the plaintext is "dissipated" in the statistics of the ciphertext.
Salt (cryptography): consists of random bits that are used as one of the inputs to a one-way function. The other input is usually a password or passphrase.
Not so secured hash functions (many attacks and at least one collision are found):
MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5)
Public-key cryptography: cryptographic system requiring two separate keys, one to lock or encrypt the plaintext, and one to unlock or decrypt the cyphertext. Neither key will do both functions. One of these keys is published or public and the other is kept private. No fully satisfactory solution to the public key authentication problem is known: i.e. if you receive a public key, there is no reliable verification, that this public key came from the specific source (MITM).
Digital signature (digital signature scheme): mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document.
Public key infrastructure (PKI): a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates. In cryptography, a PKI is an arrangement that binds public keys with respective user identities by means of a certificate authority (CA).
Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM): form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker. It is an attack on mutual authentication. Public keys can be verified by a Certificate Authority (CA), but CAs can be attacked and the certificates on behalf of the compromised CAs be issued.
Alice and Bob: party A and B in cryptography. Mallory: malicious attacker
Certificate authority (certification authority, CA): entity that issues digital certificates. The digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate; CA is a trusted third party that is trusted by both the subject (owner) of the certificate and the party relying upon the certificate.
Diffie–Hellman key exchange: specific method of exchanging cryptographic keys. It is one of the earliest practical examples of key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography. The Diffie–Hellman key exchange method allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel. This key can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher.
Elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman: anonymous key agreement protocol that allows two parties, each having an elliptic curve public–private key pair, to establish a shared secret over an insecure channel. This shared secret may be directly used as a key, or better yet, to derive another key which can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher.
Forward secrecy (perfect forward secrecy (PFS)): property of key-agreement protocols that ensures that a session key derived from a set of long-term keys will not be compromised if one of the long-term keys is compromised in the future.
Security and anonymity
Tor (anonymity network): weaknesses: users should not mistake Tor's anonymity for end-to-end encryption (always use HTTPS with Tor); in March 2011, researchers with the Rocquencourt, France based National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique, INRIA) have documented an attack ("bad apple attack") that is capable of revealing the IP addresses of BitTorrent users on the Tor network.
I2P (Invisible Internet Project): computer network layer that allows applications to send messages to each other pseudonymously and securely (web surfing, chatting, blogging, file transfers).
de:Sofortüberweisung: Online-Zahlungssystem der Sofort AG zur bargeldlosen Zahlung im Internet. Es handelt sich um keinen in der Finanzwelt feststehenden oder allgemeinen Begriff. Bei der Sofortüberweisung übermittelt der „Zahlende“ neben seinen Kontoinformationen seine persönliche PIN sowie eine gültige TAN auf einer Website an die Sofort AG, woraufhin diese die eigentliche Transaktion im Namen des Kunden ausführt. Das Zahlungsverfahren ist unsicher gegenüber Man-in-the-middle-Angriffen. Da ITAN-Verfahren hiergegen typischerweise nicht schützen, funktionieren diese mit Sofortüberweisung. Mit modernen, sichereren Zahlungsverfahren wie HBCI funktioniert das Verfahren nicht.
Mint.com USA free web-based personal financial management service for the US and Canada created by entrepreneur Aaron Patzer; primary service allows users to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan transactions and balances through a single user interface as well make budgets and goals. MITM attack?
Browser (the most frequently used program on any OS; the default way to connect to internet, LAN, to a huge network):
Browser Security Handbook, CC-3.0-BY; ultimate reading for anyone designing a browser and to know the weaknesses of the Internet usage
Man in the Browser: form of Internet threat related to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), is a trojan that infects a web browser and has the ability to modify pages, modify transaction content or insert additional transactions, all in a completely covert fashion invisible to both the user and host application.
Metasploit Project: open-source computer security project which provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing
Backdoor (computing): method of bypassing normal authentication, securing illegal remote access to a computer, obtaining access to plaintext, and so on, while attempting to remain undetected. "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson: modified version of the Unix C compiler that would put backdoors into compiled code of programs or of compilers (and itself, the modified Unix C compiler!); Davi A. Wheeler counters this with "diverse double-compiling".
Cryptovirology: field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software. Asymmetric backdoor: can be used only by the attacker, even after it is found. The vast majority of cryptovirology attacks are covert in nature.
Kleptography: study of stealing information securely and subliminally; natural extension of the theory of subliminal channels (pioneered by Gustavus J. Simmons); related to steganography.
Remote administration software (RAT): piece of software that allows a remote "operator" to control a system as if he has physical access to that system. Many trojans and backdoors have RAT capabilities, aka RAT trojans.
Warden (software): what's the difference between anti-cheat SW and spyware? What are the limits? E-sports pro-competition and privacy?
LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon, per Command&Conquer series): license=Public domain (!!!); DDoS attack
Major malwares:
Conficker (first detected Nov. 2008): computer worm targeting the MS Windows OS. Formed largest till that time botnet.
Stuxnet (discovered in June 2010): advanced malware. 500 kB size. Infects in this order: Windows (uses 4 zero-day exploits plus CPLINK vulnerability); PCS7, WinCC and STEP7; Siemens S7 PLCs. Still under heavy research (11/12/14). Developed by a pro-team of programmers (5-30 ppl). C, C++. Target: Natanz uranium enrichment centrifuges, Iran (?).
Realtek &
JMicron: both in Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan; their digital signatures for SW were stolen for the digital signature of Stuxnet (for Windows infections).
Duqu (discovered 1 September, 2011; "~DQ"): thought to be related to Stuxnet. Nomenclature: Duqu malware, Duqu flaw, Operation Duqu (related to Op. Stuxnet?). Duqu has valid, but abused digital signature (stolen from C-Media, Taipei), and collects information to prepare for future attacks. Duqu uses a 54×54 pixel jpeg file and encrypted dummy files as containers to smuggle data to its command and control center; original malware sample automatically removes itself after 36 days.
Flame (malware) (first detected 2012.05; Flamer, sKyWIper, Skywiper): modular computer malware for MS Windows OS. '"twenty times" more complicated than Stuxnet' Kaspersky Lab. 20 MB; Lua + compiled C++ code linked in; 5 different encryption methods; SQLite DB; detects antivirus SW and adopts file extensions to minimize being detected; fake audio driver to maintain persistenc on the compromised system. Infected mainly Iranian and other Middle Eastern (also Western-Bank Israel) PCs.
Zeus (malware): Trojan horse malware package that runs on versions of Microsoft Windows. While it can be used to carry out many malicious and criminal tasks, it is often used to steal banking information by man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing. It is also used to install the CryptoLocker ransomware. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in 2007.07 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in 2009.03. In 2009.06 security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster.com, ABC, Oracle, Play.com, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek.
Gameover ZeuS: 2015.02.24 the FBI announced a reward of up to $3 million in exchange for information regarding alleged Russian cyber criminal Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev over his suspected association with Gameover ZeuS.
CryptoLocker: ransomware trojan that targets computers running Microsoft Windows, believed to have first been posted to the Internet on 5 September 2013. CryptoLocker propagated via infected email attachments, and via an existing botnet; when activated, the malware encrypts certain types of files stored on local and mounted network drives using RSA public-key cryptography, with the private key stored only on the malware's control servers. The malware then displays a message which offers to decrypt the data if a payment (through either bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucher) is made by a stated deadline, and it will threaten to delete the private key if the deadline passes. If the deadline is not met, the malware offered to decrypt data via an online service provided by the malware's operators, for a significantly higher price in bitcoin.
Mirai (malware) (Japanese for "the future", 未来): malware that turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled "bots", that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as remote cameras and home routers.
2016 Dyn cyberattack (2016.10.21): involved multiple DDoS attacks targeting systems operated by DNS provider Dyn, which caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America.
WannaCry ransomware attack: May 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Petya (malware): family of encrypting ransomware that was first discovered in 2016. The malware targets Microsoft Windows-based systems, infecting the master boot record to execute a payload that encrypts the NTFS file table, demanding a payment in Bitcoin in order to regain access to the system. Variants of Petya were first seen in March 2016, which propagated via infected e-mail attachments. In June 2017, a new variant of Petya was used for a global cyberattack, primarily targeting Ukraine. The new variant propagates via the EternalBlue exploit, which is generally believed to have been developed by NSA and was used earlier in the year by the WannaCry ransomware.
Security companies live on being little known, but they can attract big fishes/clients only by "showing off". How to balance exposure and keeping anonymity and security intact?
Stuxnet (discovered in June 2010), {q.v.}
Operation Aurora (began in mid-2009; disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010): attack on Google, Adobe, Juniper, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Dow Chemical. Primary goal of the attack was to gain access to and potentially modify source code repositories. Aurora exploited zero-day vulnerabilities (unfixed and previously unknown to the target system developers) in Internet Explorer.
GhostNet (discovered in March 2009): large-scale cyber spying operation; C&C infrastructure is based mainly in PRC and has infiltrated high-value political, economic and media locations in 103 countries. Social engineering through emails with attachments; Trojan:
Ghost Rat (Gh0st RAT)
Operation Shady RAT (starting mid-2006): attack on defense contractors, businesses worldwide, the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee; "a five year targeted operation by one specific actor".
Moonlight Maze (began in March 1998, for 2 years): incident in which U.S. officials accidentally discovered a pattern of probing of computer systems at The Pentagon, NASA, United States Department of Energy, private universities, and research labs.
Farewell Dossier: collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector (code-named "Farewell"), gathered and gave to the French DST in 1981–82 (Cold War).
DarkSide (hacking group): Eastern Europe-based cybercriminal hacking group that targets victims using ransomware and extortion; it is believed to be behind the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and the recent attack on a Toshiba unit.
Colonial Pipeline cyberattack (2021.05.07): Colonial Pipeline, an American oil pipeline system that originates in Houston, Texas, and carries gasoline and jet fuel mainly to the Southeastern United States, suffered a ransomware cyberattack that impacted computerized equipment managing the pipeline. In response, Colonial Pipeline Company halted all of the pipeline's operations to contain the attack. Colonial Pipeline paid the requested ransom (75 bitcoin or nearly $5 million) within several hours after the attack. The hackers then sent Colonial Pipeline a software application to restore their network, but it operated very slowly. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a regional emergency declaration for 17 states and Washington, D.C., to keep fuel supply lines open on 2021.05.09. It was the largest cyberattack on an oil infrastructure target in the history of USA. The FBI and various media sources identified the criminal hacking group DarkSide as the responsible party. The same group is believed to have stolen 100 gigabytes of data from company servers the day before the malware attack.
Information Warfare Monitor (IWM): advanced research activity tracking the emergence of cyberspace as a strategic domain; in Canada:
Citizen Lab + SecDev Group;
Advanced persistent threat (APT): group, such as a foreign government, with both the capability and the intent to persistently and effectively target a specific entity. The term is commonly used to refer to cyber threats, in particular that of Internet-enabled espionage, but applies equally to other threats such as that of traditional espionage or attack.
Cyberwarfare: involves the battlespace use and targeting of computers, online control systems and networks in warfare. It involves both offensive and defensive operations pertaining to the threat of cyberattacks, espionage and sabotage. There has been controversy over whether such operations can be called "war". Nevertheless, nations have been developing their capabilities and engaged in cyberwarfare either as an aggressor, defendant, or both.The United States, China, Russia, Israel and the United Kingdom are believed to have the most developed cyber warfare capabilities.Two other notable players are Iran and North Korea. Espionage; Sabotage; Denial-of-service attack; Electrical power grid; Propaganda. Saudi Arabia: Shamoon virus began destroying over 35,000 computer systems, rendering them inoperable; virus used to target the Saudi government by causing destruction to the state owned national oil company Saudi Aramco. USA: The Economist describes cyberspace as "the fifth domain of warfare," and William J. Lynn, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, states that "as a doctrinal matter, the Pentagon has formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare . . . [which] has become just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space." Controversy over terms.
Democratic National Committee cyber attacks: 2016.12.09 the CIA told U.S. legislators the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted the cyberattacks and other operations during the 2016 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump in winning the presidency. These intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia hacked the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) as well as the D.N.C. — and chose not to leak information obtained from the R.N.C.
Cyberwarfare by Russia: denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, participation of state-sponsored teams in political blogs, internet surveillance using SORM technology, persecution of cyber-dissidents and other active measures. According to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, some of these activities have been coordinated by the Russian signals intelligence, which is part of the FSB and was formerly a part of the 16th KGB department, but others have been directed by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Military of Russia.
Hacktivism: hacking + activism; hacking = "illegally breaking into computers" OR "clever computer usage/programming" (depends on the person or organization, e.g. popular media vs. EFF), activism includes both explicitly non-violent action (Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi) and violent revolutionary activities (Malcolm X and Che Guevara)
LulzSec (Lulz Security): compromise of user accounts from Sony Pictures in 2011 and several other high profile attacks
Cyber intrusion in literature:
Daemon (technothriller series)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo : Lisbeth Salander
Equation Group (classified as an advanced persistent threat): highly sophisticated threat actor suspected of being tied to TAO unit of US NSA. Kaspersky Labs describes them as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world and "the most advanced ... we have seen", operating alongside the creators of Stuxnet and Flame. Most of their targets have been in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria, and Mali. The name originated from the group's extensive use of encryption. By 2015, Kaspersky documented 500 malware infections by the group in at least 42 countries, while acknowledging that the actual number could be in the tens of thousands due to its self-terminating protocol. 2016 breach of the Equation Group: in 2016.08, a hacking group calling itself "The Shadow Brokers" announced that it had stolen malware code from the Equation Group. Kaspersky Lab noticed similarities between the stolen code and earlier known code from the Equation Group malware samples it had in its possession including quirks unique to the Equation Group's way of implementing the RC6 encryption algorithm, and therefore concluded that this announcement is legitimate. The most recent dates of the stolen files are from June 2013, thus prompting Edward Snowden to speculate that a likely lockdown resulting from his leak of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance efforts stopped The Shadow Brokers' breach of the Equation Group. Exploits against Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances and Fortinet's firewalls were featured in some malware samples released by The Shadow Brokers.
Japanese domestic market (JDM): Japan's home market for Japanese vehicles and components. For the importer, these terms refer to Japanese-brand automobiles and parts designed to conform to Japanese regulations and to suit Japanese buyers. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#Japan}
Veteran era: first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in DE and, under license from Benz, in FR by Emile Roger. First motor car in Central Europe was produced by Czech company Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau (later renamed to Tatra) in 1897, the Präsident automobil.
Präsident: automobile was more of a carriage without horses than a car in modern sense.
Term "
Brass Era car": retronym for "horseless carriage", the original name for such vehicles, which is still in use today. Within the 15 years that make up this era, the various experimental designs and alternative power systems would be marginalised. Key developments included the electric ignition system (by dynamotor on the Arnold in 1898, though Robert Bosch, 1903, tends to get the credit), independent suspension (actually conceived by Bollée in 1873), and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909). Leaf springs were widely used for suspension, though many other systems were still in use, with angle steel taking over from armored wood as the frame material of choice. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted, allowing a variety of cruising speeds, though vehicles generally still had discrete speed settings, rather than the infinitely variable system familiar in cars of later eras. Safety glass also made its debut, patented by John Wood in England in 1905.
Vintage car: old automobile, and in the narrower senses of car enthusiasts and collectors, it is a car from the period of 1919 to 1930.
Shanghai Maglev Train (30.5 km): magnetic levitation train, or maglev line that operates in Shanghai, China. The line is the first commercially operated high-speed magnetic levitation line in the world. Connect Shanghai Pudong International Airport and the outskirts of central Pudong where passengers could interchange to the Shanghai Metro to continue their trip to the city center. It cost $1.2 billion to build. Built by a joint venture of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp in Kassel.
Map of the world's railways, color coded to show rail gauge, the distance between tracks. Black is standard gauge, Red is Russian gauge, Yellow is Indian gauge, Orange is Iberian gauge, Blue is cape gauge and purple is meter gauge.
Break of gauge: occurs where a line of one track gauge (the distance between the rails, or between the wheels of trains designed to run on those rails) meets a line of a different gauge. Trains and rolling stock generally cannot run through without some form of conversion between gauges, leading to passengers having to change trains and freight requiring transloading or transshipping; this can add delays, costs, and inconvenience to travel on such a route.
Bus rapid transit: bus-based mass transit system. A true BRT system generally has specialized design, services and infrastructure to improve system quality and remove the typical causes of delay. Sometimes described as a "surface subway", BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of light rail or metro with the flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system. The first BRT system was the Rede Integrada de Transporte ('Integrated Transportation Network') in Curitiba, Brazil, which entered service in 1974.
BRT Standard: evaluation tool for Bus Rapid Transit corridors around the world, based on international best practices. The Standard establishes a common definition for BRT and identifies BRT best practices, as well as functioning as a scoring system to allow BRT corridors to be evaluated and recognized for their superior design and management aspects.
Shared mobility: refers to the shared used of a vehicle, bicycle, or other transportation mode. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, bikesharing, peer-to-peer ridesharing, on-demand ride services, microtransit, and other modes.
early: Chanakya's Arthashastra or Xenophon's Oeconomicus (both 4th c. BC), Aristotle's Politics (c.a. 350 BC)
mid: mercantilism and nationalism
modern:
British enlightenment: John Locke, Dudley North, David Hume
Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edmund Burke;
Classical political economy: Jeremy Bentham: utilitarianism; Jean-Baptiste Say vs Thomas Malthus; David Ricardo: comparative advantage, economy is bound to tend towards a steady state
John Stuart Mill proposed 4 scenarios: Malthus' - population grew quicker than supplies, leading to falling wages and rising profits, Smith's - if capital accumulated faster than population grew then real wages would rise, Ricardo's - should capital accumulate and population increase at the same rate, yet technology stay stable, there would be no change in real wages because supply and demand for labour would be the same, fourth - technology advanced faster than population and capital stock increased, result would be a prospering economy (that's what's happening since industrial revolution?)
Karl Marx: defined "Capitalism"; Robert Owen: first capitalist to have better working conditions for the lower pay; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Friedrich Engels; Das Kapital. Marx never suggested how Communism would work but criticized the then-current situation of boom and bust in capitalist societies.
Neoclassical: Marginal utility; mathematical analysis. Lausanne school: Vilfredo Pareto - "Pareto efficiency"; Cambridge school: Alfred Marshall - supply and demand graph, "Marshallian cross"; Vienna school (aka Austrian school; advocated the use of deductive logic instead): Schumpeter - entrepreneurs, von Mises - praxeology ("science of human action"), von Hayek - The Road to Serfdom, socialism requires central economic planning leading to totalitarianism.
Depression and reconstruction: John Maynard Keynes - dissatisfied with Versailles conference quit it and proposed: 1) reduce war reparation payment by Germany (or it could lead to WWII), 2) arrangement to set off debt repayments between the Allies, 3) complete reform of international currency exchange and international loan fund, 4) reconciliation of trade relations with Russia and Eastern Europe. Keynesian economics: deficit spending (printing money?) to avert crises and maintain full employment.
"American Way": John R. Commons - government ought to be the mediator between the conflicting groups (monopolies, large corporations, labor disputes and fluctuating business cycles). Adolf Berle's and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932): detailed the evolution in the contemporary economy of big business, and argued that those who controlled big firms should be better held to account. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958): argued voters reaching a certain material wealth begin to vote against the common good; big business set prices and use advertising to create artificial demand for their own products, distorting people's real preferences (private-bureaucracy: a technostructure of experts who manipulate marketing and public relations channels). Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), 2 assumptions: people and firms will act to maximise their self interested goals, markets tend towards an equilibrium of prices, where demand matches supply; adapted thermodynamics formulae to economic theory. Ronald Coase The Nature of the Firm, law and economics. Milton Friedman advocated the quantity theory of money (Capitalism and Freedom), permanent income hypothesis - rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income and windfall gains would mostly be saved.
New classical macroeconomics (new classical economics): analysis entirely on a neoclassical economics framework; emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations; in contrast with its rival new Keynesian school. 1970s and early 1980s: stagflation occurred - Keynesians were puzzled by it because the original Phillips curve ruled out concurrent high inflation and high unemployment. New Classical school emerged in the 1970s as a response to the failure of Keynesian economics to explain stagflation. Productivity/efficiency wedge is a simple measure of aggregate production efficiency (economy is less productive given the capital and labor resources available in the economy); capital wedge is a gap between the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution in consumption and the marginal product of capital (“deadweight” loss that affects capital accumulation and savings decisions acting as a distortionary capital (savings) tax); Labor wedge is the ratio between the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure and the marginal product of labor (acts as a distortionary labor tax, making hiring workers less profitable (i.e. labor market frictions)).
Law of one price: economic concept which posits that "a good must sell for the same price in all locations"; constitutes the basis of the theory of purchasing power parity. Assume different prices for a single identical good in two locations, no transport costs and no economic barriers between both locations.
Income elasticity of demand (IED): measures the responsiveness of the demand for a good to a change in the income of the people demanding the good, ceteris paribus; calculated as the ratio of the percentage change in demand to the percentage change in income. Inferior goods: IED<0; normal goods: IED>0, necessity good: 1>IED>0, luxury good or superior good: IED>1, sticky good: IED=0.
Kuznets curve: represents graphically the hypothesis advanced by Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and 1960s that as an economy develops, a natural cycle of economic inequality occurs, driven by market forces which at first increase inequality, and then decrease it after a certain average income is attained. Criticisms: East Asian miracle. Environmental Kuznets curve: externalities - whether pollution actually begins to decline for good when an economic threshold is reached or whether the decrease is only in local pollutants and pollution is simply exported to poorer developing countries. Wealthy nations have a trend of exporting the activities that create the most pollution, like manufacturing of clothing and furniture, to poorer nations that are still in the process of industrial development.
Value of life: economic value assigned to life in general, or to specific living organisms; marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life "priceless", thus illegalizing any form of slavery; i.e., humans cannot be bought for any price. However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made. $50,000 per year of quality life (international standard whether to cover a new medical procedure) [2008]; $129,000 per year of quality life (based on analysis of kidney dialysis procedures) in USA [2008].
Slavery in the 21st century (modern slavery, neo-slavery): institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 38 mln to 46 mln, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (8 mln), PRC (3.86 mln), Pakistan (3.19 mln), North Korea (2.64 mln), Nigeria (1.39 mln), Indonesia (1.22 mln), Congo DR (1 mln), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000).
Race to the bottom: socio-economic phrase to describe either government deregulation of the business environment or reduction in corporate tax rates, in order to attract or retain usually foreign economic activity in their jurisdictions. While this phenomenon can happen between countries as a result of globalization and free trade, it also can occur within individual countries between their sub-jurisdictions (states, localities, cities). It may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production. The effect and intent of these actions is to lower labor rates, cost of business, or other factors (pensions, environmental protection and other externalities) over which governments can exert control. This deregulation lowers the cost of production for businesses. Countries/localities with higher labor, environmental standards, or taxes can lose business to countries/localities with less regulation, which in turn makes them want to lower regulations in order to keep firms’ production in their jurisdiction, hence driving the race to the lowest regulatory standards.
Hubbert peak theory: water (partly renewable, intensive on energy) and phosphorus are needed for food (and energy), fisheries are renewable; energy: oil, gas, coal, uranium; helium (inert gas!) - special case; transition metals, precious metals
Pareto efficiency: state of allocation of resources in which it is impossible to make any one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off. The term is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. The concept has applications in academic fields such as economics, engineering, and the life sciences. Pareto improvement is defined to be a change to a different allocation that makes at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off, given a certain initial allocation of goods among a set of individuals. An allocation is defined as "Pareto efficient" or "Pareto optimal" when no further Pareto improvements can be made.
Econophysics: interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics; statistical finance.
Complexity economics: application of complexity science to the problems of economics; computer simulations to gain insight into economic dynamics, and avoids the assumption that the economy is a system in equilibrium.
The Observatory of Economic Complexity: multidisciplinary effort between the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab and the Center for International Development at Harvard University; develop new tools that can help visualize and make sense of large volumes of data.
The Product Space: network that formalizes the idea of relatedness between products traded in the global economy
Economic complexity index (ECI): holistic measure of the production characteristics of large economic systems, usually whole countries; attempt to synthesize the collective knowledge of a society.
List of countries by economic complexity: ECI was calculated with trade data from the UN Comtrade, thus the information is only based on exports (and not goods produced)
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): USA private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community"; well known for providing start and end dates for recessions in US; largest economics research organization in US; many USA Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences and many members of the Council of Economic Advisers (to the USA president). Aging, Asset Pricing, Children, Corporate Finance, Development of the American Economy, Economics of Education, Economics of Fluctuation Growth, Energy and the Environment, Health Care, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, International Finance and Macroeconomics, International Trade and Investment, Labor Studies, Law and Economics, Monetary Economics, Political Economy, Productivity, and Public Economics.
Law and economics (economic analysis of law): application of economic theory (specifically microeconomic theory) to the analysis of law. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Cobra effect: occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. as a type of unintended consequence. The term is used to illustrate the causes of incorrect stimulation in economy and politics.
Campbell's law: adage developed by Donald T. Campbell, an example of the cobra effect: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." (p. 85)
Infrastructure-based development (infrastructure-driven development): combines key policy characteristics inherited from the Rooseveltian progressivist tradition and Neo-Keynesian economics in the United States, France's Gaullist and Neo-Colbertist centralized economic planning, Scandinavian social democracy as well as Singaporean and Chinese state capitalism : it holds that a substantial proportion of a nation’s resources must be systematically directed towards long term assets such as transportation, energy and social infrastructure (schools, universities, hospitals…) in the name of long term economic efficiency (stimulating growth in economically lagging regions and fostering technological innovation) and social equity (providing free education and affordable healthcare). According to a study by D.A. Aschauer, there is a positive and statistically significant correlation between investment in infrastructure and economic performance. Furthermore, the infrastructure investment not only increases the quality of life, but, based on the time series evidence for the post-WWII period in USA, infrastructure also has positive impact on both labor and multifactor productivity. The multifactor productivity can be defined as the variable in the output function not directly caused by the inputs, private and public capital. Thus, the impact of infrastructure investment on multifactor productivity is important because the higher multifactor productivity implies higher economic output and hence higher growth. According to an overview of multiple studies by Louis Cain, the infrastructure investments have also been profitable. For example, Fogel estimated the private rate of return on the Union Pacific Railroad at 11.6%, whereas the social rate that accounts for social benefits, such as improved firm efficiencies and government subsidies, was estimated at 29.9%. In another study, Heckelman and Wallis estimated that the first 500 miles of railroad in a given state led to major increases in property values between 1850 and 1910. They calculated the revenue gain from the land appreciation to be $33,000-$200,000 per mile, while construction costs were $20,000-$40,000 per mile. Roller and Waverman, utilizing data for 21 OECD countries conclude that there is a causal relationship between telecommunications infrastructure investment and aggregate output. “Successful countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and South Korea still remember the harsh adjustment mechanisms imposed abruptly upon them by the IMF and World Bank during the 1997-1998 ‘Asian Crisis’ […] What they have achieved in the past 10 years is all the more remarkable: they have quietly abandoned the “Washington consensus” by investing massively in infrastructure projects […] this pragmatic approach proved to be very successful.” Research conducted by the World Pensions Council (WPC) suggests that while China invested roughly 9% of its GDP in infrastructure in the 1990s and 2000s, most Western and non-Asian emerging economies invested only 2% to 4% of their GDP in infrastructure assets. In the West, the notion of pension fund investment in infrastructure has emerged primarily in Australia and Canada in the 1990s notably in Ontario and Quebec and has attracted the interest of policy makers in sophisticated jurisdictions such as California, New York, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK. Trumponomics: unconventional (by American standards) policy mix favoring renewed federal government involvement in infrastructure investment and co-investment across the board (at national, state, municipal and local level).
Deskilling: process by which skilled labor within an industry or economy is eliminated by the introduction of technologies operated by semi- or unskilled workers. This results in cost savings due to lower investment in human capital, and reduces barriers to entry, weakening the bargaining power of the human capital. Deskilling is the decline in working positions through the machinery introduced to separate workers from the production process. Deskilling can also refer to individual workers specifically. The term refers to a person becoming less proficient over time. Examples of how this can occur include changes in one's job definition, moving to a completely different field, chronic underemployment (e.g. working as a cashier instead of an accountant), and being out of the workforce for extended periods of time (e.g. quitting a position in order to focus exclusively on child-rearing). It can also apply to immigrants who held high-skilled jobs in their countries of origin but cannot find equivalent work in their new countries and so are left to perform low-skilled work they are overqualified for.
Sudden stop (economics): in capital flows is defined as a sudden slowdown in private capital inflows into emerging market economies, and a corresponding sharp reversal from large current account deficits into smaller deficits or small surpluses.
Total factor productivity (TFP): variable which accounts for effects in total output not caused by traditionally measured inputs of labor and capital. Technology growth and efficiency are regarded as two of the biggest sub-sections of Total Factor Productivity, the former possessing "special" inherent features such as positive externalities and non-rivalness which enhance its position as a driver of economic growth. TFP may account for up to 60% of growth within economies.
Asset–liability mismatch: financial terms of an institution's assets and liabilities do not correspond. Currency mismatch: one currency for borrowing, another currency for using (e.g. lending, national currency (original sin)). Maturity mismatch: duration gap; long-term assets vs short-term liabilities. Asset–liability mismatches are important to insurance companies and various pension plans, which may have long-term liabilities (insurance/pension plans) that must be backed by assets; choosing assets that are appropriately matched to their financial obligations is therefore an important part of their long-term strategy.
de:Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau): die größte nationale Förderbank der Welt. Die Gründung der KfW erfolgte auf der Grundlage des „KfW-Gesetzes“ als eine Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts (AöR). Die Rechtsaufsicht hat das Bundesministerium der Finanzen. 1948.12.16 mit dem Ziel gegründet, den Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft zu finanzieren; Das Startkapital stammte vor allem aus Marshallplan.
Shadow banking system: term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. The phrase "shadow banking" contains the pejorative connotation of back alley loan sharks. Many in the financial services industry find this phrase offensive and prefer the euphemism "market-based finance". Shadow banking has grown in importance to rival traditional depository banking, and was a primary factor in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 and the global recession that followed. Like regular banks, shadow banks provide credit and generally increase the liquidity of the financial sector. Yet unlike their more regulated competitors, they lack access to central bank funding or safety nets such as deposit insurance and debt guarantees. Shadow banks can be involved in the provision of long-term loans like mortgages, facilitating credit across the financial system by matching investors and borrowers individually or by becoming part of a chain involving numerous entities, some of which may be mainstream banks. Due in part to their specialized structure, shadow banks can sometimes provide credit more cost-efficiently than traditional banks. In USA prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the shadow banking system had overtaken the regular banking system in supplying loans to various types of borrower; including businesses, home and car buyers, students and credit users. In 2016, Benoît Cœuré (ECB executive board member) stated that controlling shadow banking should be the focus to avoid a future financial crisis, since the banks' leverage had been lowered. The concept of credit growth by unregulated institutions, though not the term "shadow banking system", dates at least to 1935, when Friedrich Hayek stated: "There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money.... The characteristic peculiarity of these forms of credit is that they spring up without being subject to any central control, but once they have come into existence their convertibility into other forms of money must be possible if a collapse of credit is to be avoided."
BlackRock: USA global investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with $7.4 trillion in assets under management as of end-Q4 2019. Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world's largest shadow bank. USA government contracted with BlackRock to help resolve the fallout of the financial meltdown of 2008. According to Vanity Fair, the financial establishment in Washington and on Wall Street believed BlackRock was the best choice for the job. In 2009, BlackRock first became the No. 1 asset manager worldwide.
Wall Street
Den of Thieves (book) (1992; James B. Stewart): recounts the insider trading scandals involving Ivan Boesky,
Michael Milken (junk bond and
Drexel Burnham Lambert (in)fame) and others during the 1980s such as Martin Siegel, Dennis Levine, Robert Freeman, Richard Wigton, Timothy Tabor, John A. Mulheren, Lowell Milken, Robert Wilkis, ...
High-yield debt (non-investment-grade bond, speculative-grade bond, or junk bond): bond that is rated below investment grade.
Sovereign default: failure or refusal of the government of a sovereign state to pay back its debt in full; formal declaration of a government not to pay (repudiation) or only partially pay its debts (due receivables), or the de facto cessation of due payments; sometimes countries escape the real burden of some of their debt through inflation; sometimes countries devaluate their currency by ending or altering the convertibility of their currency into precious metals or foreign currency at fixed rates. Most authorities will limit the use of "default" to mean failure to abide by the terms of bonds or other debt instruments. Dramatic rise in the interest rate faced by a government due to fear that it will fail to honor its debt is sometimes called a sovereign debt crisis. Since a sovereign government, by definition, controls its own affairs, it cannot be obliged to pay back its debt; governments may face severe pressure from lending countries; in the most extreme cases, a creditor nation may declare war on a debtor nation for failing to pay back debt, in order to enforce creditor's rights (e.g. UK invaded Egypt 1882, gunboat diplomacies, 1915 USA occupied Haiti); government which defaults may also be excluded from further credit and some of its overseas assets may be seized. Governments rarely default on the entire value of their debt - they often enter into negotiations with their bondholders to agree on a delay or partial reduction of their debt payments, which is often called a debt restructuring or 'haircut'. IMF often assists in sovereign debt restructurings. Causes: insolvency/over-indebtedness of the state; change of government; decline of the state.
List of sovereign debt crises: world economic elite: FR (1812), DE (Prussia (1807, 1813); 1932, 1939, 1948), JP (1942, 1946-1952), RU (1839, 1885, 1918, 1947, 1957, 1991, 1998.08.17), UK (1822, 1834, 1888-1889, 1932), USA (1779, 1790, 1798, 1862, 1933, 1971 (Nixon Shock)); China (1921, 1932, 1939), India (1958, 1969, 1972), Brazil (1898, 1902, 1914, 1931, 1937, 1961, 1964, 1983, 1986–1987, 1990).
By country:
USA:
Financial position of the United States: assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP,) as of Q1 2014.
Long Depression: worldwide price recession, beginning in 1873 and running through the spring of 1879; most severe in Europe and USA, which had been experiencing strong economic growth fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution in the decade following the American Civil War. The episode was labeled the "Great Depression" at the time, and it held that designation until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Economy of UK had been in continuous depression from 1873 to as late as 1896 and some texts refer to the period as the Great Depression of 1873–96. While the production of iron doubled between the 1870s and 1890s, the price of iron halved; steel production increased twentyfold (0.5 mln. t to 11 mln. t), and railroad development boomed.
1997 Asian financial crisis: hardest hit: Indonesia (-83%), the rest only by about -40%: Thailand, Phillippines, Malaysia, South Korea (why South Korea among these nations in 1997?).
South Korean won: started floating just before 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Great Recession (Lesser Depression, Long Recession, global recession of 2009): major global recession characterized by various systemic imbalances and was sparked by the outbreak of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and financial crisis of 2007–08; European sovereign debt crisis, austerity, high levels of household debt, trade imbalances, high unemployment and limited prospects for global growth in 2013 and 2014 continue to provide obstacles to full recovery from the Great Recession. Countries that avoided recession: Poland (the only one in EU); China, India, and Iran; South Korea (the only large OECD country); Australia (experiencing only one quarter of negative growth in 2008.Q4); financial crisis did not affect developing countries to a great extent.
Financial crisis of 2007–08 (Global Financial Crisis, 2008 financial crisis): considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s; resulted in the threat of total collapse of large financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments, and downturns in stock markets around the world.
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: ten-member commission appointed by US government with the goal of investigating the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–08
Synthetic CDO: is a variation of a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) that generally uses credit default swaps and other derivatives to obtain its investment goals; synthetic CDOs have been criticized as serving as a way of hiding short position of bets against the subprime mortgages from unsuspecting triple-A seeking investors, and contributing to the 2007-2008 financial crisis by amplifying the subprime mortgage housing bubble. From value of $5 trl in 2006 to $2 bln in 2012.
Naked Capitalism: blog published by Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors, Inc., a management consulting firm; focus on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process. Banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis.
Yanis Varoufakis (1961.03.24-): political economist and author of dual Greek-Australian nationality; active participant in the current debates on the global and European crisis; professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens and a private consultant for Valve Corporation. 2004.01-2006.12: economic adviser to George Papandreou, whose government he was to become an ardent critic of a few years later. Varoufakis compares the role of the US economy since the 1970s in relation to the rest of the world with the minotaur.
2014–15 Russian financial crisis: result of the collapse of the Russian ruble beginning in the second half of 2014, and the associated shrinking of the Russian economy.
Eurozone crisis
Eurozone crisis (previously [2013.07.15]: European sovereign-debt crisis): ongoing crisis that has been affecting the countries of the Eurozone since early 2009, when a group of 10 central and eastern European banks asked for a bailout. In 1992, members of the European Union signed the Maastricht Treaty, under which they pledged to limit their deficit spending and debt levels {UTOPISTIC agreement? Is this agreement even possible to abide? Can ECB NOT print more € notes?}. It allowed the sovereigns to mask ("Enronise") their deficit and debt levels through a combination of techniques, including inconsistent accounting, off-balance-sheet transactions as well as the use of complex currency and credit derivatives structures. Structure of the Eurozone as a currency union (i.e. all use €) without fiscal union (e.g., different tax and public pension rules {there are tax heavens in EU which use euros}) contributed to the crisis and harmed the ability of European leaders to respond. European banks own a significant amount of sovereign debt, such that concerns regarding the solvency of banking systems or sovereigns are negatively reinforcing. 2010 and later: EFSF and ESM; crisis had a major political impact on the ruling governments in 8 out of 17 eurozone countries, leading to power shifts in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands [13/06/23]. Odious debt (e.g. Siemens sold to Greece). (OLD: to get money from EFSF, EFSM, IMF, the Eurozone country should be unable to borrow on markets at acceptable rates and then it would take three to four weeks to draw up a support programme including sending experts from the Commission, the IMF and the ECB to the Eurozone country in difficulty. Greece got €110 bln in 2010 before EFSF was there, so those moneys are on bilateral commitment by the Eurozone countries (excluding Slovakia and newest Euro member Estonia [11/12/19]).)
Causes of the European sovereign-debt crisis: Ireland's banks lent the money to property developers, generating a massive property bubble. When the bubble burst, Ireland's government and taxpayers assumed private debts. Greek government increased its commitments to public workers in the form of extremely generous wage and pension benefits, with the former doubling in real terms over 10 years. Iceland's banking system grew enormously, creating debts to global investors (external debts) several times GDP.
Controversies surrounding the European sovereign-debt crisis: European sovereign-debt crisis resulted from a combination of complex factors, including the globalization of finance; easy credit conditions during the 2002–2008 period that encouraged high-risk lending and borrowing practices; the 2007–2012 global financial crisis; international trade imbalances; real-estate bubbles that have since burst; the 2008–2012 global recession; fiscal policy choices related to government revenues and expenses; and approaches used by nations to bail out troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socializing losses. Ireland's banks lent the money to property developers, generating a massive property bubble; bubble burst, Ireland's government and taxpayers assumed private debts. Greek government increased commitments to public workers in the form of extremely generous wage and pension benefits, with the former doubling in real terms over 10 years. Iceland's banking system grew enormously, creating debts to global investors (external debts) several times GDP. Greece hid its growing debt and deceived EU officials with the help of derivatives designed by major banks; some financial institutions clearly profited from the growing Greek government debt in the short run. European bailouts are largely about shifting exposure from banks and others, who otherwise are lined up for losses on the sovereign debt they have piled up, onto European taxpayers. Speculation about the breakup of the eurozone: Breakup vs. deeper integration.
2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis: 2013.03.25 €10bln bailout was announced in return for Cyprus agreeing to close its second largest bank, the Cyprus Popular Bank (also known as Laiki Bank), levying all uninsured deposits there, and possibly around 40% of uninsured deposits in the Bank of Cyprus (the Island's largest commercial bank), many held by wealthy citizens of other countries - many of them from Russia - who were using Cyprus as a tax haven. No insured deposit of 100,000 Euros or less would be affected.
Greek government-debt crisis: statistical credibility - problems with unreliable data had existed ever since Greece applied for membership of the Euro in 1999; tax evasion and corruption. Downgrading of creditworthiness. German banks were lenders & Greek government was the borrower - both sides were corrupt & made huge mistakes? Bailout of the Greek debts is the bailout of the German banks which financed those debts.
2011.10.26 (EU summit): Euro countries agreed on a plan to cut the debt of Greece from today's 160% to 120% of GDP by 2020. As part of that plan, it was proposed that all owners of Greek governmental bonds should "voluntarily" accept a 50% haircut of their bonds (resulting in a debt reduction worth €100bn), and moreover accept interest rates being reduced to only 3.5%.
2012.03: According to Forbes magazine Greece’s restructuring represents a default; Combined this will result in a 53.5% haircut of the face value, so that the Greek debt pile overall will decrease from its current level at €350bn, to a more sustainable [sic?!] level around €250bn.
2012.05: several EU officials reminded Greece, that no matter the outcome of the parliamentary elections, they had a choice to either: "respect and follow the agreed debt rescue plan, with the needed requirement to approve the next round of €11.9bn fiscal austerity for the budget years 2013 and 2014" XOR "have the second bailout loan immediately cancelled, followed by an uncontrolled default and exclusion from the eurozone".
Public pensions in Greece: For decades pensions in Greece were known to be among the most generous in the European Union, allowing many pensioners to retire earlier than pensioners in other European countries. This placed a heavy burden on Greece's public finances which (coupled with an aging workforce) made the Greek state increasingly vulnerable to external economic shocks, culminating in a recession due to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent European debt crisis. This series of crises has forced the Greek government to implement economic reforms aimed at restructuring the pension system and eliminating inefficiencies within it. Measures in the Greek austerity packages imposed upon Greek citizens by the European Central Bank have achieved some success at reforming the pension system despite having stark ramifications for standards of living in Greece, which have seen a sharp decline since the beginning of the crisis. Prior to 2010, most employees had a contribution rate of 6.67%, while employers contributed 13.33% (double the employee rate), with a higher rate for hazardous occupations. As of 2016 when the Greek government reformed the pension scheme, the self-employed sector and other white-collar sectors have had their respective contribution rates equalized and unified, standing at 20% of their annual income (regardless of assumed earnings).
Tax evasion and corruption in Greece: tax evasion has been described by Greek politicians as “a national sport” - with up to €30 billion per year going uncollected. 2009.08 size of the Greek black market to be around €65bn (equal to 25% of GDP). Fakelaki ("little envelope").
Greek government-debt crisis countermeasures: tax evasion and tax collection improvements: seven out of 10 self-employed Greeks significantly under-report their earnings, only 200 Greeks declaring incomes of over €500,000. By 2012, wages have been cut to the level of the late 1990s. Purchasing power equals that of 1986. The suicide rate in Greece used to be the lowest in Europe, but by 2012.03 it had increased by 40%. Estimates in 2012.03 were that 1/11th residents of greater Athens (~400,000 people) were visiting a soup kitchen daily.
Greek bailout referendum, 2015: as a result of the referendum, the bailout conditions were rejected by a majority of over 61% to 39% approving, with the "No" vote winning in all of Greece's regions.
Proposed long-term solutions for the Eurozone crisis. Proposals: European fiscal union; European bank recovery and resolution authority; Eurobonds; European Monetary Fund (EMF); Drastic debt write-off financed by wealth tax.
Actors fueling the crisis: Credit rating agencies; Media; Speculators
Speculation about the breakup of the eurozone: Breakup vs. deeper integration
Odious debt
Manipulated debt and deficit statistics
Collateral for Finland
Effects of IMF/EU austerity policies
USA
Bankruptcy in the United States: largest corps going bust post 2007-2009 mess (bust date): Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. (2008.9.15), Washington Mutual (2008.9.26), Worldcom, Inc. (2002.7.21), General Motors (2009.6.1), CIT Group (2009.11.1), MF Global (2011.11.08), Chrysler (2009.4.30), Thornburg Mortgage (2009.5.01), IndyMac Bancorp (2008.7.31), General Growth Properties (2009.4.16), Lyondell Chemical (2009.1.06). Exempt property; Spendthrift trusts; Debtor's discharge ("fresh start"); Entities that cannot be debtors = banks and other deposit institutions, insurance companies, railroads, and certain other financial institutions and entities regulated by the federal and state governments (in legalese: "insolvent", "in liquidation", "in receivership", but NOT "bankrupt"). Social and economic factors: majority of personal bankruptcies involve substantial medical bills.
Panic of 1837: financial crisis in USA that touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins.
State bankruptcies in the 1840s: in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and the territory of Florida.
Orange County, California#bankruptcy (1994.12.06): county lost at least $1.5 billion through high-risk investments in derivatives; criminal prosecution of County of Orange treasurer Robert Citron. 1996.06.12: emergence from bankruptcy.
Chrysler Chapter 11 reorganization (2009.04.30): equity ownership of the "New Chrysler": Fiat=20%, US gov.=9.85%, CA gov.=2.46%, UAW retiree medical fund=67.69%. US fed. gov. paid $6.6 bln in financing of the "Old Chrysler".
General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization (2009.06.01): total debt: before=$94.7bln, after=$17bln; employees: before=91k, after=68.5k. 2009.07.10 new entity completed the purchase of continuing operations, assets and trademarks of GM as a part of the 'pre-packaged' Chapter 11 reorganization. New entity with the backing of US Treasury was formed to acquire profitable assets, under section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code, with the new company planning to issue IPO of stock in 2010.
Detroit bankruptcy (2013.07.18; pop(2012): city=700k, urban=3.8mln, metro=4.3mln, CSA=5.3mln): debt=$18-20bln (largest municipal bankruptcy filing in USA history by debt); one-third of the city’s budget was going toward retiree benefits. 2013.06 the government of Detroit stopped making payments on some of its unsecured debts, including pension obligations.
Decline of Detroit: local crime rates are among the highest in the United States, and vast areas of the city are in a state of severe urban decay. Detroit riots:
Detroit race riot of 1943: it occurred in a period of dramatic population increase associated with the military buildup as Detroit's auto industry was converted to the war effort; nearly 400,000 migrants, both African American and European American, came from the Southeastern United States from 1941 to 1943 and were competing for jobs and housing in an already crowded city, both between each other and with foreign immigrants.
1967 Detroit riot: precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in the history of USA, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot.
Humans and economics
Sex-selective abortion (and sex-selective infanticide): practice of terminating a pregnancy based upon the predicted sex of the baby. The selective abortion of female fetuses is most common in areas where cultural norms value male children over female children, especially in parts of PRC, India, Pakistan, the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia), and Southeast Europe (Albania, Montenegro; Macedonia, Kosovo).
Missing women of Asia: "Das Gupta observed that the preference for boys and the resulting shortage of girls was even more pronounced in the more highly developed Haryana and Punjab regions of India than in poorer areas, and also the high prevalence of this prejudice among the more educated and affluent women (mothers) there"; "The bias against girls is very evident among the relatively highly developed, middle-class dominated nations (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and the immigrant Asian communities in the United States and Britain."; "A different development occurred in South Korea which in the early 1990s had one of the highest male to female ratios in the world. By 2007 however, South Korea, had a male to female ratio comparable to that found in Western Europe, US and Sub Saharan Africa."
Brain drain (human capital flight): large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge; coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe.
brain drain from Germany to US in terms of Nobel laureates
Lump of labor fallacy (lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity): contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. Historically, the term "lump of labour" originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours that employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term has also been used to describe the commonly held beliefs that increasing labour productivity and immigration cause unemployment.
List of largest consumer markets: "% of GDP" is of interest: if it is ~>100% (or maybe even >80%), these countries are supported by other governments or by NGOs (receiving foreign aid); those with ~<50% are living on oil money or have huge amounts of currency in the banks - these countries are investing into the other countries or the leaders are accruing money in their Swiss/Bermuda accounts. Or?
List of countries by research and development spending: sort by % of GDP (PPP) and at the top are the developed, in the middle - developing, at the bottom - poor or natural resources rich (e.g. oil, tourism) countries.
Selection of GDP PPP data (top 10 countries and blocs) and respective trade blocs, ordered by trade bloc, 2018.
List of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita: the growth in PPP of the core of EU is envied by neighbors (Spain, Portugal) and the Eastern Europe, Russia. Japan and tiny East Asian nations set the stage for PRC and maybe South East Asia and South Asia (Indian subcontinent). In Americas, the North American PPP is envied by the Central and South. Africa as a continent lags behind all other continents [12/12/16].
A world map of countries by trading status, late 20th century, using the world system differentiation into core countries, semi-periphery countries and periphery countries.
Core countries: industrialized capitalist countries on which periphery countries and semi-periphery countries depend. Core countries control and benefit from the global market. They are usually recognized as wealthy states with a wide variety of resources and are in a favorable location compared to other states. They have strong state institutions, a powerful military and powerful global political alliances. Core countries do not always stay core permanently. Throughout history, core states have been changing and new ones have been added to the core list. The most influential countries in the past have been what would be considered core. Today, it is currently perceived that the heart of the core countries currently consists of United States, Canada, most of Western Europe, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. The population of the core is by far the wealthiest and best educated on the planet.
Countries designated by IMF in 2009.04 World Economic Outlook as advanced economies are in blue, while countries designated as emerging and developing economies are in orange and red; of these, those designated by the United Nations as least developed countries are in red, while others are in orange.
Developing country (less developed country, underdeveloped country): nation with an underdeveloped industrial base, and a low HDI relative to other countries. On the other hand, since the late 1990s developing countries tended to demonstrate higher growth rates than the developed ones.
Least developed country: country that, according to the United Nations, exhibits the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development, with the lowest HDI ratings of all countries in the world. A country is classified as a Least Developed Country if it meets three criteria: Poverty, Human resource weakness, Economic vulnerability.
Newly industrialized country: countries whose economies have not yet reached developed country status but have, in a macroeconomic sense, outpaced their developing counterparts. Another characterization of NICs is that of nations undergoing rapid economic growth (usually export-oriented). South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey.
Graph of Major Developing Economies by Real GDP per capita at PPP 1990-2013
Social Progress Index: measures the extent to which countries provide for the social and environmental needs of their citizens. Fifty-four indicators in the areas of basic human needs, foundations of well-being, and opportunity to progress show the relative performance of nations. The index is published by the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative, and is based on the writings of Amartya Sen, Douglass North, and Joseph Stiglitz. The SPI measures the well-being of a society by observing social and environmental outcomes directly rather than the economic factors. The social and environmental factors include wellness (including health, shelter and sanitation), equality, inclusion, sustainability and personal freedom and safety.
Developed country#Comparative table (2020): 2018 - LT; 2016 - LV; 2011 - EE; 2010 - IL, SI; 2009 - CZ & SK; 2005 - PT, KR; 2002 - GR; 2001 - NZ; 1999 - ES; 1997 - FI, IE; 1996 - IS, GB/UK; 1994 - AU, BE, CA, FR; 1993 - JP; 1992 - AT, LU; 1991 - DK, DE, NL; 1989 - USA; 1987 - NO, CH/Swiss.
World map showing percent of population living on less than $1.25 (ppp) per day using the latest data from 2000-2006.
Theories of poverty: foundation upon which poverty reduction strategies are based. Grondona, Harrison, and Lindsay all feel that at least some aspects of development-resistant cultures need to change in order to allow under-developed nations (and cultural minorities within developed nations) to develop effectively.
Feminization of poverty: concept that describes the idea that women represent disproportionate percentages of the world's poor. UNIFEM describes it as "the burden of poverty borne by women, especially in developing countries". This concept is not only a consequence of lack of income, but is also the result of the deprivation of capabilities and gender biases present in both societies and governments. This includes the poverty of choices and opportunities, such as the ability to lead a long, healthy, and creative life, and enjoy basic rights like freedom, respect, and dignity. Women's increasing share of poverty is related to the rising incidence of lone mother households.
Market research
Mystery shopping (mystery consumer): tool used externally by market research companies or watchdog organizations or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service or compliance to regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services.
Stiftung Warentest (since 1964.12.4, by BRD): German consumer organisation and foundation involved in investigating and comparing goods and services in an unbiased way. Financed by its publications (test and Finanztest) and €6 mln. by Federal Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture and Consumer Protection to have no ads.
Finanztest: consumer magazine which focuses on providing objective information about financial services. "Legal and Everyday Life Issues", "Investment and Provision for Retirement", "Home and Living", "Tax", "Health and Insurance".
Money creation: process by which the money supply of a country, or of an economic or monetary region, is increased. In most modern economies, most of the money supply is in the form of bank deposits. Central banks monitor the amount of money in the economy by measuring the so-called monetary aggregates. Money creation by government spending. The central bank is the banker of the government and provides to the government a range of services at the operational level, such as managing the Treasury's single account, and also acting as its fiscal agent (e.g. by running auctions), its settlement agent, and its bond registrar. Central banks can become insolvent in liabilities on foreign currency. Fractional reserve theory of money creation: Money multiplier. Banks first lend and then cover their reserve ratios: The decision whether or not to lend is generally independent of their reserves with the central bank or their deposits from customers; banks are not lending out deposits or reserves, anyway. Banks lend on the basis of lending criteria, such as the status of the customer's business, the loan's prospects, and/or the overall economic situation. Monetary financing: Monetary financing used to be standard monetary policy in many countries, such as Canada or France, while in others it was and still is prohibited. In the Eurozone, Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty explicitly prohibits the European Central Bank from financing public institutions and state governments. In Japan, the nation's central bank "routinely" purchases approximately 70% of state debt issued each month, and owns, as of Oct 2018, approximately 440 trillion JP¥ (approx. $4trillion) or over 40% of all outstanding government bonds.
Optimum currency area: geographical region in which it would maximize economic efficiency to have the entire region share a single currency. It describes the optimal characteristics for the merger of currencies or the creation of a new currency. The theory is used often to argue whether or not a certain region is ready to become a currency union, one of the final stages in economic integration.
Monetary hegemony: economic and political concept in which a single state has decisive influence over the functions of the international monetary system. The term monetary hegemony appeared in Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism, describing not only an asymmetrical relationship that the US dollar has to the global economy, but the structures of this hegemonic edifice that Hudson felt supported it, namely the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The US dollar continues to underpin the world economy and is the key currency for medium of international exchange, unit of account (e.g. pricing of oil), and unit of storage (e.g. treasury bills and bonds) and, despite arguments to the contrary, is not in a state of hegemonic decline. The international monetary system has borne witness to two monetary hegemons: UK and USA. British monetary hegemony. American monetary hegemony.
Exorbitant privilege: refers to the benefit the United States has due to its own currency (i.e., the US dollar) being the international reserve currency. Accordingly, the US would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency. The position puzzle consists of the difference between the (negative) USA net international investment position (NIIP) and the accumulated USA current account deficits, the former being much smaller than the latter. The income puzzle consists of the fact that despite a deeply negative NIIP, the USA income balance is positive, i.e. despite having much more liabilities than assets, earned income is higher than interest expenses. Opposition in France: In the Bretton Woods system put in place in 1944, USA dollars were convertible to gold. In France, it was called "America's exorbitant privilege" as it resulted in an "asymmetric financial system" where foreigners "see themselves supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals". In 1965.02 President Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to exchange its USA dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. He sent the French Navy across the Atlantic to pick up the French reserve of gold and was followed by several countries. As it resulted in considerably reducing USA gold stock and USA economic influence, it led USA President Richard Nixon to end unilaterally the convertibility of the dollar to gold on 1971.08.15 (the "Nixon Shock"). This was meant to be a temporary measure but the dollar became permanently a floating fiat money and in 1976.10, the USA government officially changed the definition of the dollar; references to gold were removed from statutes.
Interchange fee: fee paid between banks for the acceptance of card based transactions.
Black market (underground economy): there is also grey market. Black market provides 1.8 billion jobs. Sexual exploitation and forced labor; Illegal drugs; Prostitution; Weapons; Illegally logged timber; Animals and animal products; Alcohol; Tobacco (differences in taxes between the US states); Biological organs; Racketeering; Transportation providers; Counterfeit medicine, essential aircraft and automobile parts; Copyrighted media (Since digital information can be duplicated repeatedly with no loss of quality, and passed on electronically at little to no cost, the effective underground market value of media is zero, differentiating it from nearly all other forms of underground economic activity; crime of duplication, with no physical property being stolen); Currency; Fuel prices in EU (exchange rate between Euro and Pound Sterling: smuggling between Norther Ireland and Republic of Ireland). Appearance and disappearance (prohibition in USA; marijuana). Wars;
Indian black money (According to the data provided by the Swiss Banking Association, India has more black money than the rest of the world combined).
Capital:
Capital flight: occurs when assets or money rapidly flow out of a country, due to an event of economic consequence.
Illicit financial flows: form of illegal capital flight and occurs when money is illegally earned, transferred, or spent; money is intended to disappear from any record in the country of origin, and earnings on the stock of illicit financial flows outside of a country generally do not return to the country of origin.
Silver Thursday: event that occurred in USA in the silver commodity markets on Thursday, 1980.03.27. A steep fall in silver prices led to panic on commodity and futures exchanges. Hunt brothers (Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt) tried to corner the silver market.
Finance: study of how people allocate their assets over time under conditions of certainty and uncertainty; time value of money; aims to price assets based on their risk level, and expected rate of return.
Financial system: allows the transfer of money between savers (and investors) and borrowers. Financial Services and Systems: "a set of complex and closely interconnected financial institutions, markets, instruments, services, practices, and transactions."
Global financial system (GFS): consists of institutions, their customers, and financial regulators that act on a global level. Banks, hedge funds, IMF, Bank for International Settlements (BIS); central banks of G20, finance ministries of EU, NAFTA, OPEC; regulators of the GFS: IMF, BIS, USA (many regulatory authorities), EU (ECB), Bank of China, a few others.
Nasdaq, Inc.: USA multinational financial services corporation that owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market and eight European stock exchanges, namely Armenian Stock Exchange, Copenhagen Stock Exchange, Helsinki Stock Exchange, Iceland Stock Exchange, Riga Stock Exchange, Stockholm Stock Exchange, Tallinn Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ OMX Vilnius. It is headquartered in New York City.
OMX (Aktiebolaget Optionsmäklarna/Helsinki Stock Exchange): Swedo-Finnish financial services company, formed in 2003 through a merger between OM AB and HEX plc and is a part of the NASDAQ OMX Group since February 2008.
Global Settlement (2003.04.28): enforcement agreement between the SEC, NASD, NYSE, and ten of the United States's largest investment firms to address issues of conflict of interest within their businesses; firms would have to literally insulate their banking and analysis departments from each other physically and with Chinese walls.
Net present value (NPV, net present worth (NPW)): measurement of the profitability of an undertaking that is calculated by subtracting the present values (PV) of cash outflows (including initial cost) from the present values of cash inflows over a period of time. Incoming and outgoing cash flows can also be described as benefit and cost cash flows, respectively. Time value of money dictates that time affects the value of cash flows.
Contango (forwardation): situation where the futures price (or forward price) of a commodity is higher than the anticipated spot price at maturity of the futures contract.
Normal backwardation (backwardation): market condition wherein the price of a commodities' forward or futures contract is trading below the expected spot price at contract maturity.
Decentralized finance (DeFi): blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum. DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts. Some DeFi applications promote high interest rates but are subject to high risk.
Central securities depository (CSD): specialized financial organization holding securities like shares, either in certificated or uncertificated (dematerialized) form, allowing ownership to be easily transferred through a book entry rather than by a transfer of physical certificates. This allows brokers and financial companies to hold their securities at one location where they can be available for clearing and settlement. This is usually done electronically, making it much faster and easier than was traditionally the case where physical certificates had to be exchanged after a trade had been completed. Scope: Domestic central securities depository; International central securities depository (ICSD). Functions: Safekeeping; Deposit and withdrawal; Dividend, interest, and principal processing, as well as corporate actions including proxy voting; Other services; Pledge.
Depository Trust Company (DTC; 1973-): New York corporation that performs the functions of a central securities depository as part of the US National Market System. DTC annually settles transactions worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, processes hundreds of millions of book-entry deliveries, and custodies millions of securities issues worth tens of trillions of dollars issued in the United States and over 100 other countries. "Chills and freezes"
American depositary receipt (ADR; sometimes spelled depository): negotiable security that represents securities of a foreign company and allows that company's shares to trade in the U.S. financial markets. Shares of many non-U.S. companies trade on U.S. stock exchanges through ADRs, which are denominated and pay dividends in U.S. dollars, and may be traded like regular shares of stock. ADRs are also traded during U.S. trading hours, through U.S. broker-dealers. ADRs simplify investing in foreign securities because the depositary bank "manage[s] all custody, currency and local taxes issues". The first ADR was introduced by J.P. Morgan in 1927 for the British retailer Selfridges on the New York Curb Exchange, the American Stock Exchange's precursor.
2 European international CSDs:
Euroclear: Belgium-based financial services company that specializes in the settlement of securities transactions, as well as the safekeeping and asset servicing of these securities. It was founded in 1968 as part of J.P. Morgan & Co. to settle trades on the then developing eurobond market. Euroclear provides securities services to financial institutions located in more than 90 countries. In addition to its role as an international central securities depository (ICSD), Euroclear also acts as the central securities depository (CSD) for Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French, Irish, Swedish, and UK securities. Euroclear also owns EMXCo, the UK's leading provider of investment-fund order routing. 2022: Aftermath of Russian invasion of Ukraine
Clearstream (2000-): financial services company that specializes in the settlement of securities transactions and is owned by Deutsche Börse AG. It provides settlement and custody as well as other related services for securities across all asset classes. Clearstream operates securities settlement systems based in both Luxembourg and Germany, which allow for the holding and transfer of securities. Clearstream has around 2,500 customers in 110 countries. Clearstream accepts central banks and AML-regulated credit institutions (such as regulated banks) as customers. Clearstream does not accept natural persons as customers and no account is opened in the name of a natural person. Clearstream has therefore been described as a "bank for banks". History: Clearstream affair; Iranian funds controversy; 2022: Aftermath of Russian invasion of Ukraine.
National Settlement Depository (Russia) (NSD): headquartered in Moscow, is a Russian non-bank financial institution and CSD. It provides depository, settlement (bank account), and related services to financial market entities. Its services cover both securities listed in Russia's 2011 Federal Law "On the Central Securities Depository", and other Russian and foreign equity and debt securities. NSD is the CSD of the Russian Federation, and was assigned CSD status by the Russian Federal Financial Markets Service in 2012. It is the largest securities depository in Russia by market value of equity and debt securities held in custody, which in June 2022 were 70 trillion roubles ($1.12 trillion). It is a member of the Moscow Exchange Group. In March 2022, in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NSD's accounts were blocked and frozen at international CSDs Euroclear and Clearstream (CSDs which together held €50tn of assets on behalf of investors). In addition, the European Union added NSD to its sanctions list, blocking NSD's accounts in euros, and in Euroclear and Clearstream; as a result, NSD could not service forex-denominated bonds issued by Russia and Russian companies. NSD suspended transactions in euros. In 2014, the large international securities depositories Euroclear and Clearstream gained full access to the Russian securities market, thus providing non-Russian companies and investment funds with investment opportunities. In 2014, in compliance with the FATCA requirements, NSD was registered with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and was assigned a Global Intermediary Identification Number.
Renaissance Technologies: East Setauket, New York-based USA investment management firm founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker, which specializes in systematic trading using only quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses; one of the first highly successful hedge funds using quantitative trading— known as "quant hedge funds"—that rely on powerful computers and sophisticated mathematics to guide investment strategies. In 1988 the firm established its most profitable portfolio, the Medallion Fund, which used an improved and expanded form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, improved by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which they could profit. Simons and Ax started a hedge fund and christened it Medallion in honor of the math awards that they had won. Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, which is run mostly for fund employees, "is famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning >35% annualized over a 20-year span." Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009. The company is now jointly run by Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, two computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. By 2015.10, Renaissance had roughly $65 billion worth of assets under management, most of which belong to employees of the firm. Firm is intensely secretive about the inner workings of its business and very little is known about it; is known for its ability to recruit and retain top scientific talent, for having a personnel turnover that's nearly non-existent, and for requiring its researchers to agree to stringent intellectual property obligations by signing iron clad non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. “the best physics and mathematics department in the world” and, according to Weatherall, “avoids hiring anyone with even the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides”. Renaissance is the top financial firm contributing to federal campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, donating $33,108,000 by July. During the 2016 campaign cycle Simons contributed $26,277,450, ranking as the 5th largest individual contributor. Simons directed all but $25,000 of his funds towards liberal candidates. Mercer contributed $25,059,300, ranking as the 7th largest individual contributor. Mercer directed all funds contributed towards conservative candidates.
Jim Simons (mathematician) (1938.04.25-): USA mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is known as a quantitative investor and in 1982 founded Renaissance Technologies. Due to the success of Renaissance in general and its Medallion Fund in particular, Simons has been described as the greatest investor on Wall Street. As reported by Forbes, his net worth as of October 2019 is estimated to be $21.6 billion, making Simons the 21st-richest man in the United States.
Robert Mercer (1946.07.11-): USA hedge fund manager, former principal investor in the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, computer scientist who was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer, and former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies. Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.
Rebekah Mercer: USA heiress, foundation director, and major Republican donor who oversees the day-to-day operations of philanthropic and political projects for the Mercer family. She began managing the family foundation when the Mercers started getting involved in conservative causes. Her father, billionaire Robert Mercer, said in November 2017 that he had sold his stake in Breitbart to his daughters.
Quantum Group of Funds: privately owned hedge funds based in Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) and Cayman Islands. They are advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Soros started the fund in 1973 in partnership with Jim Rogers. In 1992, the lead fund, Soros' Quantum Fund, became famous for 'breaking' the Bank of England, forcing it to devalue the pound. Soros had bet his entire fund in a short sale on the ultimately fulfilled prediction that the British currency would drop in value, a coup that netted him a profit of $1 billion, also known as Black Wednesday.
Sovereign wealth fund (SWF; sovereign investment fund, social wealth fund): state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity fund or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by revenues from commodity exports or from foreign-exchange reserves held by the central bank. Some sovereign wealth funds may be held by a central bank, which accumulates the funds in the course of its management of a nation's banking system; this type of fund is usually of major economic and fiscal importance. Other sovereign wealth funds are simply the state savings that are invested by various entities for the purposes of investment return, and that may not have a significant role in fiscal management. There have been attempts to distinguish funds held by sovereign entities from foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks. Sovereign wealth funds can be characterized as maximizing long-term return, with foreign exchange reserves serving short-term "currency stabilization", and liquidity management. Many central banks in recent years possess reserves massively in excess of needs for liquidity or foreign exchange management. Moreover, it is widely believed most have diversified hugely into assets other than short-term, highly liquid monetary ones, though almost no data is publicly available to back up this assertion. History: SWFs invest in a variety of asset classes such as stocks, bonds, real estate, private equity and hedge funds. Many sovereign funds are directly investing in institutional real estate.
Russian Direct Investment Fund (Российский фонд прямых инвестиций; RDIF): Russia's sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 by the Russian government to make investments in companies of high-growth sectors of the Russian economy. Its mandate is to co-invest alongside the world’s largest institutional investors, direct investment funds, sovereign wealth funds and leading companies. RDIF’s reserved capital under management equals $10 billion.
China Investment Corporation (CIC; 中国投资有限责任公司): SWF that manages part of PRC's foreign exchange reserves. China's largest sovereign wealth fund, CIC was established in 2007 with about US$200 billion of assets under management, a number that grew to US$941 billion in 2017 and US$1.2 trillion in 2021.
State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE): of PRC is an administrative agency under the State Council tasked with drafting rules and regulations governing foreign exchange market activities, and managing the state foreign-exchange reserves, which at the end of December 2016 stood at $3.01 trillion for the People's Bank of China. Brad Setser said: "SAFE has built up one of the largest US equity portfolios of any foreign government entity investing abroad, including the major sovereign wealth funds....It appears SAFE began diversifying into equities early in 2007 and, rather than being deterred by the subprime crisis, it continued to buy."
Payment systems, Alternative currencies, Cryptocurrencies
Payment service provider: offers shops online services for accepting electronic payments by a variety of payment methods including credit card, bank-based payments such as direct debit, bank transfer, and real-time bank transfer based on online banking. Typically, they use a software as a service model and form a single payment gateway for their clients (merchants) to multiple payment methods.
Worldpay: provides payment services for mail order and Internet retailers, as well as point of sale transactions. Customers are a mix of multinational, multichannel retailers, with the majority being small business merchants. Worldpay started as an electronic payment provider called Streamline in 1989 in the UK but has extended into mail order/telephone order, "unattended" payments and handling secure payments over the Internet through merger and acquisition of several other companies.
SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication): Belgian cooperative society providing services related to the execution of financial transactions and payments between banks worldwide. Its principal function is to serve as the main messaging network through which international payments are initiated. It also sells software and services to financial institutions, mostly for use on its proprietary "SWIFTNet", and assigns ISO 9362 Business Identifier Codes (BICs), popularly known as "SWIFT codes". The SWIFT messaging network is a component of the global payments system. However, the organization does not manage accounts on behalf of individuals or financial institutions, and it does not hold funds from third parties. It also does not perform clearing or settlement functions. After a payment has been initiated, it must be settled through a payment system, such as TARGET2 in Europe. In the context of cross-border transactions, this step often takes place through correspondent banking accounts that financial institutions have with each other.
SPFS (Система передачи финансовых сообщений (СПФС)): Russian equivalent of the SWIFT financial transfer system, developed by the Central Bank of Russia. The system has been in development since 2014, when USA government threatened to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system. The Russian Government is also in talks to expand SPFS to developing countries such as Turkey and Iran. Owing to its limitations, the SPFS system is seen as a last resort, rather than as a replacement for the SWIFT network. Since 2019 many agreements have been reached to link SPFS to other countries' payment systems in China, India, Iran, as well as the countries inside the EAEU who are planning to use SPFS directly. At the end of 2020, there were 23 foreign banks connected to the SPFS from Armenia, Belarus, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Switzerland.
Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS): payment system which offers clearing and settlement services for its participants in cross-border RMB payments and trade. Backed by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), China launched the CIPS in 2015 to internationalise RMB use. CIPS also counts several foreign banks as shareholders including HSBC, Standard Chartered, the Bank of East Asia, DBS Bank, Citi, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and BNP Paribas.
Proof of stake currencies: Algorand, Cardano, EOS.IO, Gridcoin, Nxt, Peercoin, Polkadot, Steem, Tezos, TRON
ERC-20 tokens
Stablecoins: Dai, Diem, Tether, USD Coin
Other currencies
Blockchain (database): distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision. It consists of data structure blocks—which hold exclusively data in initial blockchain implementations, and both data and programs in some of the more recent implementations—with each block holding batches of individual transactions and the results of any blockchain executables. Each block contains a timestamp and information linking it to a previous block.
Ethereum: public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality. It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute P2P contracts using a cryptocurrency called ether.
The DAO (organization): digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. The DAO is stateless, and is not tied to any particular nation state. As a result, many questions of how government regulators will deal with a stateless fund have not yet been dealt with. 2016.06 users exploited a vulnerability in the DAO code to enable them to siphon off one third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. 2016.07.20 the Ethereum community decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This was controversial, and led to a fork in Ethereum, where the original unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum Classic, thus breaking Ethereum into two separate active cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum Classic: People who held Ether from before the DAO hard fork have both a balance of Ethereum Classic (ETC) and an equal amount of Ethereum (ETH).
Vitalik Buterin (1994.01.31-): programmer and writer. He is primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum, and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. In 2014 Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship.
Hal Finney (computer scientist) (1956.05.04–2014.08.28): USA software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. Finney later worked for PGP Corporation. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In October 2009, Finney announced in an essay on the blog Less Wrong that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2009.08.
Adam Back (1970.07-): British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.
Nick Szabo: computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science and received a law degree from George Washington University Law School.
On governance
"Blockchain governance generally comes in only three varieties:(1) Lord of the Flies, (2) lawyers, or (3) ruthlessly minimized." Someone asked, "Why ruthless?" and Szabo wrote, "Otherwise the children or the lawyers will win."
Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker
Gavin Andresen (Gavin Bell): software developer best known for his involvement with bitcoin. Andresen graduated from Princeton University in 1988.
Mark Karpelès (1985.06.01-): former CEO of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. He moved to Japan in 2009. Karpelès was born in 1985 in Chenôve, France, the child of Anne-Robert Karpelès, a geologist. He was raised in Dijon. Arrest and prosecution. Bankruptcy proceedings.
"As of April 2020, China accounts for more than 75% of Bitcoin blockchain operation around the world. Some rural areas in China are considered as the ideal destination for Bitcoin mining mainly due to the cheaper electricity price and large undeveloped land for pool construction. The mining pool statistics is obtained from
https://btc.com/stats."
List of bitcoin forks: defined variantly as changes in the protocol of the bitcoin network or as the situations that occur "when two or more blocks have the same block height". A fork influences the validity of the rules. Forks are typically conducted in order to add new features to a blockchain, to reverse the effects of hacking or catastrophic bugs. Forks require consensus to be resolved or else a permanent split emerges. Forks of the client software: Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited. Intended hard forks splitting the cryptocurrency: Bitcoin Cash: Forked at block 478558 2017.08.01 → Bitcoin SV: Forked at block 556766 2018.11.15; Bitcoin Gold: Forked at block 491407 2017.10.24.
Wei Dai (戴维): computer engineer known for contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. He developed the Crypto++ cryptographic library, created the b-money cryptocurrency system, and co-proposed the VMAC message authentication algorithm. The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him. Wei Dai was member of the Cypherpunks, Extropians, and SL4 mailing lists in the 1990s. On SL4 he exchanged with people such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, and others in the nascent "rationalist" community.
Proof of stake (PoS): protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. Unlike a proof of work (PoW) protocol, PoS systems do not incentivize extreme amounts of energy consumption. Attacks: PoS protocols can suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem, where validator nodes validate conflicting copies of the blockchain because there is minimal cost to doing so, and a smaller chance of losing out on rewards by validating a block on the wrong chain. If this persists, it can allow double-spending. This can be mitigated through penalizing validators who validate conflicting chains or by structuring the rewards so that there is no economic incentive to create conflicts.
Cardano (blockchain platform): public blockchain platform. It is open-source and decentralized, with consensus achieved using proof of stake. It can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its internal cryptocurrency, Ada. Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. The development of the project is overseen and supervised by the Cardano Foundation based in Zug, Switzerland. It is also the largest cryptocurrency to use a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a greener alternative to proof-of-work protocols.
Direct operations: central bank purchases bonds directly from its government. "Essentially, the government prints and sells bonds to the central bank on an ad-hoc basis; the central bank in turns issues currency to pay for them. Essentially the government is provided with cash to meet its needs, although it has created a corresponding liability."
Gresham's law: monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will disappear from circulation.
Shipping industry of the People's Republic of China:
COSCO (China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company) {PRC government owned company}. PRC is the hugest shipper of containers, hugest ISO container producer. The Port of Shanghai is the busiest in the world.
Economic integration: The degree of economic integration can be categorized into seven stages: (1) Preferential trading area, (2) Free trade area, (3) Customs union, (4) Common market, (5) Economic union, (6) Economic and monetary union, (7) Complete economic integration.
Customs union: type of trade bloc which is composed of a free trade area with a common external tariff. Most famous: EU + 3 countries; CAN, MERCOSUR, EAC, SACU.
Economics and psychology
Choice overload (people are confronted with many choices versus just a few choices),
Overchoice (problem facing consumers in the postindustrial society: too many choices),
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Schwartz argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers)
Human economic behavior
Homo economicus (Economic human): concept in some economic theories of humans as rational and narrowly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments toward their subjectively defined ends.
Homo reciprocans (Reciprocal human): concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment.
The map shows different (political as well as economic) spaces in Europe, such as EU, the Eurozone, EEA, the Schengen Area, but also (potential) EU accession candidates and former EU member states.
in the center: "Eurozone"; other circles: EU, EEA, Schengen Area, EU Customs Union, Monetary Agreement with EU, CEFTA. Periphery: Council of Europe. Neighboring "union": Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
European integration: process of industrial, economic, political, legal, social and cultural integration of states wholly or partially in Europe or nearby. European integration has primarily come about through EU and its policies.
Multi-speed Europe (two-speed Europe): idea that different parts of the European Union should integrate at different levels and pace depending on the political situation in each individual country. Indeed, multi-speed Europe is currently a reality, with only a subset of EU countries being members of the eurozone and of the Schengen area. Like other forms of differentiated integration such as à la carte and variable geometry, "multi-speed Europe" arguably aims to salvage the "widening and deepening of the European Union" in the face of political opposition (euroscepticism).
EU in the world; areas of EU members which are not in EU. Map of European Union in the world (with overseas countries and territories (OCT) and outermost regions (OMR))
In EU, but not in NATO: Ireland (why?), Sweden (is trying [2023/12/26] to join NATO, but Turkey and Hungary say no (with no small help from Russian gov.)), Austria (due to "losing" WWII, foreign USSR policy, extremely good relations with Russia [2023/12/26]). Finnland due to "losing" WWII, foreign USSR policy, joined NATO in 2023.04.04 (signed 2022.07.05). In NATO, but not in EU: Iceland (fishery policy), Norway (über rich land, oil), Albania (Muslim?), Turkey (Muslim?).
European Union VAT area: "Goods are only considered as imported or exported if they enter or leave the area. The VAT percentage does, however, differ from country to country within the area, which is a complicating factor, especially when, for example, an Internet-based reseller in one EU country sells to an EU customer in a different EU country." Amazon suffers in service due to EU politics?
Excluded areas: UK: Gibraltar, Channel Islands, British Overseas; Spain: Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla; Netherlands: Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Caribbean Netherlands; Italy: Campione d'Italia, Livigno, Lake Lugano; Greece: Mount Athos (autonomous monastic region); Germany: Büsingen am Hochrhein, Heligoland; France: overseas; Finland: Åland; Denmark: Faroe Islands, Greenland.
VAT Information Exchange System (VIES): electronic means of transmitting information relating to VAT-registration (i.e., validity of VAT-numbers) of companies registered in EU.
Eurosphere (European Empire): grown in popularity in the early years of the 21st century
Citizenship of the European Union: Multiple nationality permitted: CZ: Yes [effective 2014.01.01]. DE & AT: No (some exceptions: USA/CA, ...); LT, EE, DK: No; all others: Yes. Acquisition by birth; Acquisition by descent; Acquisition by marriage; Acquisition by naturalisation.
Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification (CVM): safeguard measure invoked by the European Commission when a new member or acceding state of EU has failed to implement commitments undertaken in the context of the accession negotiations in the fields of the Area of freedom, security and justice or internal market policy.
Enhanced cooperation: procedure where a minimum of nine EU member states are allowed to establish advanced integration or cooperation in an area within EU structures but without the other members being involved. [As of 2013.02] this procedure is being used in the fields of divorce law and patents, and is approved for the field of a financial transaction tax.
European External Action Service (EEAS): diplomatic service and combined foreign and defence ministry of EU. The EEAS is led by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP), who is also President of the Foreign Affairs Council and Vice-President of the European Commission, and carries out the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), including CSDP. The EEAS, as well as the office of the HR, was initiated following the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009.12.01. It was formally established in 2010.12.01. The EEAS was formed by merger of the external relations departments of the European Commission and of the Council, which were joined by staff seconded from national diplomatic services of the Member States. Although it supports both the Commission and the Council, the EEAS is independent from them and has its own staff, as well as a separate section in the EU budget.
EU three: FR, DE, UK who collectively wield most influence within EU.
Big Four (European Union): FR, DE, IT, UK; they are the EU countries individually represented as full members of the G7, the G8 and the G20.
G6 (EU): unofficial group of the interior ministers of the six European Union member states – DE, FR, UK, Italy, Spain, and PL – with the largest populations and so with the majority of votes in the Council of the European Union.
New Hanseatic League (Hansa): established in 2018.02 by EU finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a two-page foundational document which set out the countries' "shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of EMU.
Institutional seats of the European Union: Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, rather than being concentrated in a single capital city. The Hague is the only exception, as the fixed seat of European Police Office (Europol).
Agencies of the European Union (>40): decentralised body of EU, which is distinct from the institutions. Agencies are established to accomplish specific tasks. Each agency has its own legal personality. Some answer the need to develop scientific or technical know-how in certain fields, others bring together different interest groups to facilitate dialogue at European and international level.
United States of Europe ((USE), the Federal States of Europe (FSE), the European State, the European Superstate, the European Federation): similar hypothetical scenarios of a single sovereign state in Europe (hence superstate), organised as a federation similar to USA, as contemplated by political scientists, politicians, geographers, historians, futurologists, and fiction writers.
Baltoscandia (Baltoscandian Confederation): geopolitical concept of a Baltic–Scandinavian union (consisting of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). The idea was proposed by a Swedish professor Sten de Geer (1886–1933) in the journal Geografiska Annaler in 1928 and further developed by Professor Kazys Pakštas (1893–1960), a Lithuanian scientist in the field of geography and geopolitics.
Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8): regional co-operation format that includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries were amongst the strongest supporters of the Baltic countries' independence and later they were the first to open their borders, introducing visa-free regimes with the Baltic countries. The Nordic countries actively assisted the Baltic countries in their preparations for integration into EU and NATO. On the political level, co-operation in the NB8 format is conducted primarily in the form of annual meetings of the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers. Since 2004.05.01, six Nordic and Baltic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are EU members. Regular informal NB6 Prime Ministers’ meetings on EU matters take place on the eve of Council meetings as well as Foreign Affairs Ministers of these six countries meet on the eve of General Affairs Council and Foreign Affairs Council meetings. NB8 and Visegrad Group.
Visegrád Group: cultural and political alliance of four Central European states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, that are members of EU and NATO – for the purposes of advancing military, cultural, economic and energy cooperation with one another along with furthering their integration in the EU. Visegrád was chosen as the location for the 1991 meeting as an intentional allusion to the medieval Congress of Visegrád in 1335 between John I of Bohemia, Charles I of Hungary and Casimir III of Poland. Neighbor relations: Austria, Germany, Ukraine.
The utility of EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (civilian and military components) compared to that of NATO, depending on level of conflict.
EU and peace, crisis, war:
European Union–NATO relations: two main treaty-based Western organisations for cooperation between member states, both headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Their natures are different and they operate in different spheres: NATO is a purely intergovernmental organisation functioning as a military alliance whose primary task is to implement article 5 in the North Atlantic Treaty on collective territorial defence. The EU on the other hand is a partly supranational and partly intergovernmental sui generis entity akin to a confederation that entails wider economic and political integration. Unlike NATO, the EU pursues a foreign policy in its own right - based on consensus, and member states have equipped it with tools in the field of defence and crisis management; CSDP structure. The EU and NATO have respectively 27 and 31 member states, of which 22 are members of both.. Another four NATO members are EU applicants—Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey—and another one, UK, is a former EU member. Iceland and Norway have opted to remain outside of the EU, but do participate in the European Single Market as part of their EEA membership. The memberships of the EU and NATO are distinct, and some EU member states are traditionally neutral on defence issues. Several EU and NATO member states were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact. Denmark has an opt-out from the CSDP.
2022 Danish European Union opt-out referendum: abolition of the defence opt-out, one of the country's opt-outs from the European Union, was held in Denmark in 2022.06.01. The referendum was announced in 2022.03.06 following a broad multi-party defence agreement reached during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The referendum resulted in the "Yes" side winning with approximately two-thirds of the vote.
Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO): part of EU's CSDP in which 26 of the 27 national armed forces pursue structural integration. Based on Article 42.6 and Protocol 10 of the Treaty on European Union, introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, PESCO was first initiated in 2017. The initial integration within the PESCO format is a number of projects which launched in 2018. Non-participating EU member states: Denmark has a permanent opt-out from the common defence policy; Malta wants to see how PESCO develops first since it may violate the Maltese Constitution (Neutrality Clause). Denmark did not participate as (prior to its abolition in July 2022) it had an opt-out from the Common Security and Defence Policy, nor did the United Kingdom, which withdrew from the EU in 2020. The Council of the EU approved Denmark joining PESCO in 2023.05.23.
Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP): EU's course of action in the fields of defence and crisis management, and a main component of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The CSDP involves the deployment of military or civilian missions to preserve peace, prevent conflict and strengthen international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. Military missions are carried out by EU forces established with secondments from the member states' armed forces. The CSDP also entails collective self-defence amongst member states as well as PESCO in which 25 of the 27 national armed forces pursue structural integration. The EU command & control structures are much smaller than NATO's Command Structure (NCS), which has been established for territorial defence. It has been agreed that NATO's Allied Command Operations (ACO) may be used for the conduct of the EU's missions. The MPCC, established in 2017 and to be strengthened in 2020, is the EU's first permanent military OHQ. In parallel, the newly established European Defence Fund (EDF) marks the first time the EU budget is used to finance multinational defence projects.
Association Trio (2021.05.17): tripartite format for the enhanced cooperation, coordination, and dialogue between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine with EU on issues of common interest related to EU, enhancing cooperation within the framework of the Eastern Partnership, and committing to the prospect of joining EU. All three members of the Association Trio currently maintain free trade agreements with the EU through the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area and are members of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly.
Template:EU institutions &
Institutions of the European Union: 7 institutions. European Parliament ("lower house") + Council of EU ("upper house") = legislative; European Commission = executive; European Council = sets impetus and direction; Court of Justice of EU = judiciary; ECB = central bank / euro; European Court of Auditors = financial auditor.
President of the European Commission: head of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. The President of the Commission leads a Cabinet of Commissioners, referred to as the College, collectively accountable to the European Parliament. The President is empowered to allocate portfolios amongst, reshuffle or dismiss Commissioners as necessary. The College directs the Commission's civil service, sets the policy agenda and determines the legislative proposals it produces. The Commission is the only body that can propose] EU laws. The Commission President also represents the EU abroad, together with the President of the European Council and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The post was established in 1958. Each new President is nominated by the European Council and formally elected by the European Parliament, for a five-year term.
President of the European Council: representative of the European Union (EU) on the world stage, and the person presiding over and driving forward the work of the European Council
Eurostat: Directorate-General of the European Commission located in Luxembourg; provide statistical information to the institutions of EU and to promote the harmonisation of statistical methods across its member states and candidates for accession as well as EFTA countries.
Supremacy (European Union law): principle by which the laws of European Union member states that conflict with laws of the European Union must be ignored by national courts so that the European Union law can take effect. The legal doctrine emerged from the European Court of Justice through a number of decisions.
Treaties of the European Union: sets out the EU's constitutional basis; establish the various EU institutions together with their remit, procedures and objectives.
Treaty on European Union (2007): one of the primary Treaties of EU. The TEU form the basis of EU law, by setting out general principles of the EU's purpose, the governance of its central institutions (such as the Commission, Parliament, and Council), as well as the rules on external, foreign and security policy.
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, 1957.03.25 signed by BeNeLux, DE (West Germany), FR, IT): one of two treaties forming the constitutional basis of EU, the other being TEU. It was previously known as the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC). The Treaty originated as the Treaty of Rome (fully the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best-known of the European Communities (EC).
Opt-outs in the European Union: occasionally member states negotiate certain opt-outs from legislation or treaties of the European Union, meaning they do not have to participate in certain policy areas. Denmark (four opt-outs: euro, AFSJ (defense), CSDP), Ireland (two opt-outs: Schengen, AFSJ), Poland (one opt-out: Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU) and the United Kingdom (four opt-outs: Schengen, euro, Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU, AFSJ). Sweden has "opt-out" de facto (euro).
Edinburgh Agreement (1992) (1992.12): agreement that granted Denmark four exceptions to the Maastricht Treaty so that it could be ratified by Denmark. The opt-outs are outlined in the Edinburgh Agreement and concern the EMU (as above), CSDP, Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and the citizenship of the European Union (this opt-out was rendered meaningless when the Amsterdam Treaty adopted the same wording for all members).
Opt outs out of Schengen Area: Ireland; Andorra: special case. UK left EU 23:00 GMT in 2020.01.31 (00:00 2020.02.01 CET).
Eurozone: opt outs: Denmark, Sweden does NOT enter ERM II and does NOT hold a referendum on euro on purpose. UK left EU 00:00 2020.02.01 CET.
Community acquis (acquis communautaire, EU acquis, FR: acquis - "that which has been agreed upon"): accumulated legislation, legal acts, and court decisions which constitute the body of EU law.
Area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ): ensure security, rights and free movement within the EU; cross border police cooperation had to increase to counter cross border crime, and thus also minimum judicial standards. European Arrest Warrant, the Schengen Area and Frontex. European crimes (7): counterfeiting euro notes and coins; credit card and cheque fraud; money laundering; people-trafficking; computer hacking and virus attacks; corruption in the private sector; and marine pollution (possible others: racial discrimination and incitement to racial hatred; trafficking in human organs and tissue; and corruption in awarding public contracts).
Schengen Area: EU opt outs: UK & Ireland; Eu microstate opt outs: Andorra; still to join: Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus (Cyprus dispute), Croatia.
Official Journal of the European Union: official gazette of record for EU; published every working day in all of the official languages of the member states. Only legal acts published in the Official Journal are binding.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; implementation date 2018.05.25): regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within EU and EEA. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. The GDPR aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. Business processes that handle personal data must be built with data protection by design and by default, meaning that personal data must be stored using pseudonymization or full anonymization, and use the highest-possible privacy settings by default, so that the data is not available publicly without explicit, informed consent, and cannot be used to identify a subject without additional information stored separately. No personal data may be processed unless it is done under a lawful basis specified by the regulation, or if the data controller or processor has received an unambiguous and individualized affirmation of consent from the data subject. The data subject has the right to revoke this consent at any time.
Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH): EU regulation dating from 2006.12.18. REACH addresses the production and use of chemical substances, and their potential impacts on both human health and the environment. Its 849 pages took seven years to pass, and it has been described as the most complex legislation in the Union's history and the most important in 20 years. It is the strictest law to date regulating chemical substances and will affect industries throughout the world. REACH entered into force on 2007.06.01, with a phased implementation over the next decade.
Substance of very high concern (SVHC): chemical substance (or part of a group of chemical substances) concerning which it has been proposed that use within EU be subject to authorisation under the REACH Regulation. Indeed, listing of a substance as an SVHC by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is the first step in the procedure for authorisation or restriction of use of a chemical. The first list of SVHCs was published on 2008.10.28 and the list has been updated many times to include new candidates. The most recent update occurred on 2020.06 to include a total 209 SVHC.
Prüm Convention (Signed: 2005.05.27; Effective: 2006.11.01): law enforcement treaty which was signed by Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain in the town of Prüm in Germany, and which is open to all members of the European Union, 14 of which are currently parties. Contents of the Convention: The Convention was adopted so as to enable the signatories to exchange data regarding DNA, fingerprints and vehicle registration of concerned persons and to cooperate against terrorism. It also contains provisions for the deployment of armed sky marshals on flights between signatory states, joint police patrols, entry of (armed) police forces into the territory of another state for the prevention of immediate danger (hot pursuit), and cooperation in case of mass events or disasters. Furthermore, a police officer responsible for an operation in a state may, in principle, decide to what degree the police forces of the other states that were taking part in the operation could use their weapons or exercise other powers.
EU economics, finances, budget, currencies, crisis
European Exchange Rate Mechanism#Exchange rate bands: if nominally the currency is pegged and the inflation is several times higher than EU-15 average, who pays for the debts & the risk of the would-be Eurozone member at the introduction of Euro? - Eurozone members.
European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF): agreed by the 27 member states of the European Union on 9 May 2010 (€440 bln); 2011 7 21 : €780 bln; 2011 10 27: €1 trln ⇒ money put to good use, used at risk, or wasted?
European Stability Mechanism (ESM): intergovernmental organization located in Luxembourg City, which operates under public international law for all eurozone Member States having ratified a special ESM intergovernmental treaty. It was established 2012.09.27 as a permanent firewall for the eurozone, to safeguard and provide instant access to financial assistance programmes for member states of the eurozone in financial difficulty, with a maximum lending capacity of €500 billion. Replaces two earlier temporary EU funding programmes: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). All new bailouts for any eurozone member state will now be covered by ESM, while the EFSF and EFSM will continue to handle money transfers and programme monitoring for the previously approved bailout loans to Ireland, Portugal and Greece.
European Fiscal Compact (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union)
Budget of the European Union: 5% of expenditure is on administration, 95% on policies. Policies (2006 percentages):
Common Agricultural Policy (47%): income support for farmers (70%), rural development (20%), market support (10%; e.g. bad weather).
Regional policy of the European Union (30%; Cohesion Policy): stated aim of improving the economic well-being of regions in the EU and also to avoid regional disparities. Convergence objective (82%; poorest regions), regional competitiveness and employment (the other regions; funding managed by ERDF or ESF)
Horizon 2020: project became embroiled with the 2014 referendums held by Switzerland, which opted to impose a quota on immigration between that country and the EU. Switzerland, which maintains bilateral agreements with the EU, was intended to be a participant of Horizon 2020, but negotiations that would have ensured this were put on hold in the aftermath of the decision. Turkey joined this funding program. This funding programme also includes Israel, which joined after protracted negotiations about whether funding could be directed to projects beyond the Green Line; eventually the two parties agreed to disagree, and Israel published its views in an Appendix to the official documents. Open access is an underlying principle of Horizon 2020.
European Investment Bank (EIB): international financial institution, a publicly owned bank (owners: Member States of the European Union, who subscribe to the Bank's capital – EUR 232 billion (end of 2009)). Subscribed capital: end-2009 EUR 232 billion.
European Investment Fund (EIF): provision of finance to SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), EIF does not lend money to SMEs directly; rather it provides finance through private banks and funds. Its main operations are in the areas of venture capital and guaranteeing loans. EIB: 62%, Eu Communities (EC)/Eu Commission 29%, 9% - private.
Interreg (1989-): initiative that aims to stimulate cooperation between regions in EU.
Free trade areas in Europe: BAFTA was a free trade agreement between Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that existed between 1994 and 2004. EFTA; CEFTA. CISFTA.
European Free Trade Association (EFTA): free trade organisation between four European countries that operates in parallel with – and is linked to – EU. Today's EFTA members are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, of which the latter two were founding members. Three of the EFTA countries are part of the European Union Internal Market through the Agreement on EEA, which took effect in 1994; the fourth, Switzerland, opted to conclude bilateral agreements with the EU. In 1999, Switzerland concluded a set of bilateral agreements with EU covering a wide range of areas, including movement of people, transport, and technical barriers to trade.
Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA): trade agreement between non-EU countries in Southeast Europe. Former Yugoslavian nations (except: Croatia and Slovenia are in EU) + Albania + Moldova (Moldova is also in CISFTA).
European Economic Area (EEA): comprises three member states of EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), and 27 member states of EU, excluding Croatia which is set to join once its accession agreement is ratified by all EEA countries [2014].
European Union Customs Union (EUCU): consists of all the member states of the European Union and Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Turkey {q.v. European Union–Turkey Customs Union}.
Eurozone (euro area): economic and monetary union (EMU) of 18 EU member states that have adopted the euro (€) as their common currency and sole legal tender.
Sweden and the euro: Sweden does not currently use the euro as its currency and has no plans to replace the krona in the near future. Sweden maintains that joining the ERM II (a requirement for euro adoption) is voluntary, and has chosen to remain outside ERM II pending public approval by a referendum, thereby intentionally avoiding the fulfilment of the adoption requirements.
Eurogroup: meeting of the finance ministers of the eurozone.
Railteam: alliance of European high-speed rail operators: Deutsche Bahn, SNCF, Kingdom Eurostar UK, NS Hispeed, ÖBB, SBB-CFF-FFS, SNCB
Rail Baltica: ongoing greenfield railway infrastructure project to link Finland (via ferry or an undersea tunnel), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania with Poland and through this with the European standard gauge rail line network. Its purpose is to provide passenger and freight service between participating countries and improve rail connections between Central and Northern Europe. Furthermore, it is intended to be a catalyst for building the economic corridor in Northeastern Europe. The project envisages a continuous rail link from Tallinn (Estonia) to Warsaw (Poland). Link Finland (Helsinki-Tallinn Tunnel?), the Baltic States (Tallinn, Pärnu, Riga, Panevėžys, Kaunas), Poland (Białystok, Warsaw), and Germany (Berlin). Planned off-routes to Vilnius, to Riga Airport. As of 2020.01, the high-speed railway connection from Tallinn to the Lithuanian-Polish border was expected to be completed by 2026.
Trans-European Transport NetworkO (TEN-T): planned network of roads, railways, airports and water infrastructure in EU. The TEN-T network is part of a wider system of Trans-European Networks (TENs), including a telecommunications network (eTEN) and a proposed energy network (TEN-E or Ten-Energy). The European Commission adopted the first action plans on trans-European networks in 1990. TEN-T envisages coordinated improvements to primary roads, railways, inland waterways, airports, seaports, inland ports and traffic management systems, providing integrated and intermodal long-distance, high-speed routes.
Energy policy of EU
EU taxonomy for sustainable activities: classification system established to clarify which investments are environmentally sustainable, in the context of the European Green Deal. The aim of the taxonomy is to prevent greenwashing and to help investors make greener choices. Investments are judged by six objectives: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, the circular economy, pollution, effect on water, and biodiversity. Debate over natural gas and nuclear energy: Regarding nuclear power, concerns about safety and waste disposal had led to Spain, Belgium and Germany committing to abandoning nuclear power in the coming years, even though Belgium later pushed forward its nuclear phase-out by ten years following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On the inclusion of nuclear power in the taxonomy, a group of four countries (Spain, Denmark, Austria and Luxembourg) has co-signed an open letter to criticize the inclusion project of the Commission. Austria and Luxembourg have even threatened to sue the Commission in the Court of Justice if it included the two power sources into the taxonomy, on the ground that it would weaken its credibility. On the other hand, France is promoting the inclusion of nuclear power into the taxonomy, supported by Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The economy and energy minister of these countries published a joint opinion article on the 11th October 2021 to defend the role of nuclear power in the fight against climate change. Moreover, they support that it would lead to a better control on the energy prices, as nuclear power price is more stable than the power of gas which is mainly imported. Furthermore, a joint letter to the Commission from Finland and Sweden asked to remove the deadline for investment in nuclear energy and criticized the stringent criteria for waste disposal, which in their view fail to account the advances achieved in the two countries.
European Union–Turkey Customs Union: 1995.03.06 decision of the EC-Turkey Association Council to implement a customs union (tr: Gümrük Birliği) between Turkey and EU on 1995.12.31. Goods can travel between the two entities without any customs restrictions. Customs Union does not cover essential economic areas, such as agriculture, services or public procurement, to which bilateral trade concessions apply.
Switzerland:
Switzerland–European Union relations: Swiss Franc is pegged to € from 2011.08.06. 1.20 francs=1 €. It is pseudo ERM II, maintained by the Swiss National Bank (SNB).
[[Swiss referendum, February 2009]: on extending the freedom of movement for workers within the European Union to Bulgaria and Romania. 60% Yes, 40% No.
Microstates and the European Union: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City. All have Euro except Liechtenstein (has Swiss Franc). EU law application is fishy; still to be dragged to court in any of these microstates and see if EU law would apply.
European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP): foreign relations instrument of the EU which seeks to tie those countries to the east and south of the EU into the EU. Action Plan: EU offers financial assistance to countries within the European Neighbourhood, so long as they meet the strict conditions of government reform, economic reform and other issues surrounding positive transformation. The ENP does not cover countries which are in the current EU enlargement agenda, the European Free Trade Association or the western European microstates.
EU-Russia Common Spaces: RU did not want to participate in ENP, because RU sees ENP as "junior partnership", therefore the 4 Common Spaces (which are seen by RU as "equal partnering") were developed. EU treats these Common Spaces as another ENP (same laws, same source of funding, just different naming per request from RU).
Union for the Mediterranean (UfM): created in July 2008 as a relaunched Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (the Barcelona Process), when a plan to create an autonomous Mediterranean Union was dropped
Euro-Mediterranean free trade area (EU-MED FTA, EMFTA; Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area or Euromed FTA): based on UfM/Barcelona Process and ENP
Eastern Partnership (EaP): Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine.
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area: three free trade areas established between the European Union, and Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine respectively. The DCFTAs are part of each country's EU Association Agreement. They allow Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine access to the EU's internal market in selected sectors and grant EU investors in those sectors the same regulatory environment in the associated country as in the EU. The agreements with Moldova and Georgia have been ratified and officially entered into force in July 2016, although parts of them were already provisionally applied. The agreement with Ukraine was provisionally applied since 2016.01.01 and formally entered into force on 2017.09.01. Unlike standard free trade areas, the DCFTA is aimed to offer the associated country the "four freedoms" of the EU Single Market: free movement of goods, services, capital, and people. Movement of people however, is in form of visa-free regime for short stay travel, while movement of workers remains within the remit of the EU Member States.
in 2011.10: row between UK and its fellow EU members reached a head as the UK had blocked more than 70 EU statements to UN committees. The row was over the wording used; the statements read they were on behalf of the EU, rather than "EU and its member states" as the UK insisted. The UK's actions were intended to stop the perceived drift towards a common EU foreign policy and were insisted upon by British Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague.
EU foreign trade and foreign policy
energy (oil & gas):
Russia in the European energy sector - RU is the largest exporter of oil and natural gas to EU. West financed
Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod pipeline in 1982-1984. Gazprom invested in infrastructure in EU countries (piping, distribution) and in collecting the moneys (pricing, services). Transneft.
Nord Stream: gas from RU to DE (NEL pipeline (Norddeutsche Erdgasleitung) & OPAL pipeline (Ostsee-Pipeline-Anbindungsleitung)) by pipeline on the Baltic seabed.
Map of the major existing and proposed Russian natural gas transportation pipelines to Europe.
Baltic Pipe: natural gas pipeline between Europipe II (which traverses the North Sea between Norway and Germany) and Poland. It is a strategic infrastructure project to create a new European gas supply corridor. The Baltic Pipe officially became operational in 2022.09.27, one day after a series of as of yet unexplained explosions in 2022.09.26 rendered the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines from Russia to Germany inoperable.
EU Military
Berlin Plus agreement: short title of a comprehensive package of agreements made between NATO and the EU 2002.12.16:
The use of NATO assets by the EU is subject to a "right of first refusal": NATO must first decline to intervene in a given crisis.
Approval of the use of assets has to be unanimous among NATO states. For example, Turkish reservations about Operation Concordia using NATO assets delayed its deployment by more than five months.
EU Border and immigration
Melilla: Spanish city on the north coast of Morocco; area=12.3 km². Immigration.
Asylum applicants in Europe between 1 January and 30 June 2015. Central Mediterranean Route, Eastern Mediterranean Route (Turkey) → Western Balkan Route.
European migrant crisis: of 2015 arose through the rising number of refugees and migrants going to the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea, or through Southeast Europe, and applying for asylum. They come from areas such as the Middle East (Syria, Iraq), Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Gambia), South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh), and the Western Balkans (Serbia, Kosovo, Albania). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of November 2015, the top three nationalities of the over half a million Mediterranean Sea arrivals since the beginning of the year are Syrian (52%), Afghan (19%) and Iraqi (6%), all overwhelmingly Muslim entrants. Most of the refugees and migrants are adult men (65%): of the unauthorized entrants arriving in Europe by sea in 2015, 58% were adult males over 18 years of age, 17% were adult females over 18 years of age, and 25% were minor males and minor females under 18 years of age. Individual countries have at times reintroduced border controls within the Schengen Area, and rifts have emerged between countries willing to allow entry of asylum seekers for processing of refugee claims and others countries trying to discourage their entry for processing. Article 26 of the Schengen Convention says that carriers which transport people into the Schengen area shall, if they transport people who are refused entry into the Schengen Area, be responsible to pay for the return of the refused people, and pay penalties; Further clauses on this topic are found in EU directive 2001/51/EC; This has had the effect that migrants without a visa are not allowed on aircraft, boats or trains going into the Schengen Area, so migrants without a visa have resorted to migrant smugglers.
Austrian border barrier: border barriers and migration management facilities constructed by Austria 2015.11-2016.01 on its border with Slovenia and in 2016 on its border with Italy, as a response to European migrant crisis. They are located on internal European Union borders, since Austria, Italy and Slovenia are members of the EU and the free travel Schengen Area with a common visa policy. The barrier on the Slovenian border is several kilometers long, located near the busiest border crossing, Spielfeld-Šentilj and includes police facilities for screening and processing migrants. Foreign ministers of Austria, Slovenia and other Balkan countries met in Austria without Greece and agreed to reduce the flow of migrants into Central Europe and "sooner or later (...) to shut their doors entirely".
Hungarian border barrier: built by Hungary in 2015 on its border with Serbia and Croatia. The fence was constructed during the European migrant crisis (see timeline), with the aim to ensure border security by preventing immigrants from entering illegally, and enabling the option to enter through official checkpoints and claim asylum in Hungary in accordance with international and European law.
Democracy in Europe Movement 2025: a Pan-European political movement launched in 2015 by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. The movement was officially presented at a ceremonial event held on 9 February 2016 in the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin and on the 23rd March in Rome. The movement aims to reform the European Union's existing institutions to create a "full-fledged democracy with a sovereign Parliament respecting national self-determination and sharing power with national Parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils". Movement is supported by Julian Assange, Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, English musician Brian Eno, American economist James K. Galbraith, former Labour MP Stuart Holland and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. To highlight the urgency of democratizing Europe before reaching a point of no return, the movement sets the horizon for the year 2025 to draft a democratic constitution that will replace all the European treaties that are in force today. First among these is "hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika they formed together with unelected ‘technocrats’ from other international and European institutions". The organization cites the emerging extremist nationalism of some new political parties as well as the so-called Brexit and Grexit state departure initiatives as evidence of this impending European fracture.
Federal Reserve of USA
Federal Reserve (Federal Reserve System; the Fed): central banking system of USA. It was created in 1913.12.23, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907) led to the desire for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises. Over the years, events such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s have led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System. Congress established three key objectives for monetary policy in the Federal Reserve Act: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates.
Chair of the Federal Reserve (chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System): head of the Federal Reserve, and is the active executive officer of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The chair shall preside at the meetings of the Board.
Paul Volcker (1927.09.05–2019.12.08): USA economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended the high levels of inflation seen in the United States throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He previously served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979. President Jimmy Carter nominated him to succeed G. William Miller as Fed chairman and President Ronald Reagan renominated him once. Volcker did not seek a third term at the Fed and was succeeded by Alan Greenspan. After his retirement from the Board, he chaired the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 during the subprime mortgage crisis.
China, Greater China
Bamboo network: network of overseas Chinese businesses operating in Southeast Asia; usually family owned and managed through a centralized bureaucracy. ASEAN & bamboo network?
Beijing Consensus (北京共识; China Model (中国模式), Chinese Economic Model): political and economic policies of PRC that began to be instituted by Deng Xiaoping after Mao Zedong's death in 1976. The policies are thought to have contributed to China's "economic miracle" and eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. In 2004, the phrase "Beijing Consensus" was coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo to frame China's economic development model as an alternative—especially for developing countries—to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies promoted by the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury. Characteristics of the China Model or the "Beijing Consensus": replacing trust in the free market for economic growth with "a more muscular state hand on the levers of capitalism"; an absence of political liberalization; strong leading role of ruling political party; population control. Criticism: The Economist have called the model "unclear" and an invention of "American think-tank eggheads" and "plumage-puffed Chinese academics". Instead of strong government, critics have stated that China's success results from its "vast, cheap labor supply", its "attractive internal market for foreign investment", and its access to the American market, which provides a perfect spendthrift counterpart for China's exports and a high savings rate.
Post-Soviet alliances (ex-USSR, Russia in the center)
G-20 major economies: 19 countries and EU (European Commission European Central Bank). 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China (PRC), FR, DE, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, RU, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, UK, USA. Collectively, the G-20 economies account for around 85% of the gross world product (GWP), 80% of world trade (or, if excluding EU intra-trade, 75%), and two-thirds of the world population.
Economic Cooperation Organization: Eurasian political and economic intergovernmental organization which was founded in 1985 in Tehran by the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development): intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1960 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members. Most OECD members are high-income economies with a very high HDI and are regarded as developed countries. OECD is an official UN Observer.
Development Assistance Committee (DAC): forum to discuss issues surrounding aid, development and poverty reduction in developing countries. It describes itself as being the "venue and voice" of the world's major donor countries. The Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD), sometimes called the "Secretariat of the DAC", is the OECD Directorate within which the DAC operates.
Union of South American Nations (USAN; nl: Unie van Zuid-Amerikaanse Naties, UZAN; pt: União de Nações Sul-Americanas, UNASUL; es: Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, UNASUR): intergovernmental union integrating two existing customs unions – Mercosur and CAN.
Bank of the South (BancoSur): monetary fund and lending organization established in 2009.09.26 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela with an initial capital of US$20 billion.
Mercosur (or Mercosul): full customs union of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela; Bolivia (2012). Purpose is to promote free trade and the fluid movement of goods, people, and currency.
Andean Community of Nations (es: Comunidad Andina, CAN): customs union of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Africa
Economics and politics, ruling
Low-ball: persuasion and selling technique in which an item or service is offered at a lower price than is actually intended to be charged, after which the price is raised to increase profits.
Competition regulator: government agency, typically a statutory authority, sometimes called an economic regulator, which regulates and enforces competition laws, and may sometimes also enforce consumer protection laws; ECA (European Competition Authorities), ICN (International Competition Network), and OECD
Criticisms of welfare: Classical liberals, libertarians and conservatives often argue that the provision of tax-funded services or transfer payments reduces the incentive for workers to seek employment, thereby by reducing the need to work, reducing the rewards of work, and exacerbating poverty. Socialists typically criticize the welfare state as championed by liberals and social democrats as an attempt to legitimize and strengthen the capitalist economic system, which conflicts with the socialist goal of replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system.
Welfare state: "concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms of economic and social organization". T.H. Marshall: distinctive combination of democracy, welfare, and capitalism. E.g. Nordic countries. Progressive tax. In the period following the World War II, many countries in Europe moved from partial or selective provision of social services to relatively comprehensive coverage of the population. Paxton: "All the modern twentieth-century European dictatorships of the right, both fascist and authoritarian, were welfare states…. They all provided medical care, pensions, affordable housing, and mass transport as a matter of course, in order to maintain productivity, national unity, and social peace". DE: Otto von Bismarck created the modern welfare state by building on a tradition of welfare programs in Prussia and Saxony that began as early as in the 1840s, and by winning the support of business; introduced old age pensions, accident insurance and medical care. Esping-Andersen (1990): 1) Social Democracy, 2) Christian Democracy (conservatism), 3) Liberalism; 18 OECD countries are divided as follows: 1) Social Democratic: Nordics and the Netherlands, 2) Christian Democratic: AT, BE, FR, DE, ES and IT, 3) Liberal: AU, CA, JA, CH and USA, 4) Not clearly classified: IE, NZ and UK.
Nordic model (Nordic capitalism, Nordic social democracy): although there are significant differences among the Nordic countries, they all share some common traits; support for a "universalist" welfare state (relative to other developed countries) which are aimed specifically at enhancing individual autonomy, promoting social mobility and ensuring the universal provision of basic human rights, as well as for stabilizing the economy; maximizing labor force participation, promoting gender equality, egalitarian and extensive benefit levels, the large magnitude of wealth redistribution, and liberal use of expansionary fiscal policy. Neither fully capitalistic or socialistic, and attempts to merge the most desirable elements of both into a "hybrid" system. Overall tax burdens (%GDP) are among the world's highest: SE (51.1%), DK (46% in 2011), and FI (43.3%), compared to non-Nordic countries like DE (34.7%), CA (33.5%), IE (30.5%).
Flexicurity (flexibility and security): welfare state model with a pro-active labour market policy. The term was first coined by the social democratic Prime Minister of Denmark Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in the 1990s; “golden triangle” with a “three-sided mix of (1) flexibility in the labour market combined with (2) social security and (3) an active labour market policy with rights and obligations for the unemployed”.
Welfare in Finland: compared internationally, very comprehensive. Created almost entirely during the first three decades after WWII, the social security system was an outgrowth of the traditional Nordic belief that the state was not inherently hostile to the well-being of its citizens, but could intervene benevolently on their behalf. Child-Care services: charge relatively low fees, also based on law; availability of quality day care (the staff are university-educated in early childhood education) has allowed the female population to pursue careers more commonly than in other parts of the world. Services for the disabled. Services for substance abusers: alcoholism.
Maternity package: kit granted by the Finnish social security institution Kela, to all expectant or adoptive parents who live in Finland or are covered by the Finnish social security system. Since 1949 it has been given to all mothers-to-be, provided they visited a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy, and the pregnancy has lasted at least 154 days.
Social protection in France: make up for about 500 billion euros annually, or more than 30% of GDP. However, the desire to establish a universal system has faced opposition; this explains why the French welfare system is plural, with a wide variety of actors. The most important is the general scheme for employees of industry, commerce and services.
French special retirement plan: enjoyed by employees of some government-owned corporations: SNCF (national railways), the RATP (Parisian transport), the electrical and gas companies (EDF and GDF) which used to be government-owned; as well as some employees whose functions are directly related to the State such as the military, French National Police, sailors, Civil law notaries' assistants, employees of the Opéra de Paris... The main differences between the special retirement plan and the usual private sector retirement plans are the retirement age and the number of years a worker must contribute to the fund before being allowed a full pension.
Grenelle Insertion (concluded 2008.05.27): open multi-party debate in France that gathered representatives of national and local government and organizations (industry, labor, professional associations, non-governmental organizations) on an equal footing, with goal of unifying a position on the reform of the national policy of insertion. It insisted on the need to reform the insertion system to make it more attractive for people to return to work.
Revenu de solidarité active: French form of in work welfare benefit aimed at reducing the barrier to return to work. It was implemented 2009.06.01 by the French government.
Welfare in South Korea: National Pension Service (NPS), introduced in 1988; about one-fifth of the elderly receive pensions, which is a major factor contributing to the fact that nearly a half of the South Korean elderly live in relative poverty, which is the highest proportion among OECD countries; South Korean tax and welfare system is the least effective in reducing inequality among all of OECD countries.
Welfare in Japan: Beginning in the 1920s, the government enacted a series of welfare programs, based mainly on European models, to provide medical care and financial support. During the postwar period, a comprehensive system of social security was gradually established. Government expenditures for all forms of social welfare increased from 6% of the national income in the early 1970s, to 18% in 1989. But a much older tradition calls for support within the family and the local community.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ): independent Washington D.C.-based international network. Launched in 1997 by the Center for Public Integrity, ICIJ was spun off in February 2017 into a fully independent organisation which includes more than 200 investigative journalists and 100 media organizations in over 70 countries who work together on "issues such as "cross-border crime, corruption, and the accountability of power." The ICIJ has exposed smuggling and tax evasion by multinational tobacco companies (2000), "by organized crime syndicates; investigated private military cartels, asbestos companies, and climate change lobbyists; and broke new ground by publicizing details of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts."
Offshore Leaks: name of a report disclosing details of 130,000 offshore accounts in 2013.04. Some observers have called it the biggest hit against international tax fraud of all times (to date), although it has been pointed out that normal businesses may use the offshore legislation to ease formalities in international trade.
Panama Papers: 1.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source. The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. "John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", he told them. In a May 6 statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realise the scale of the injustices they described". He added that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the ICIJ posted the full document on its website.
Paradise Papers: set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investments that were leaked to the German reporters Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper shared them with the ICIJ, and a network of more than 380 journalists. Some of the details were made public in 2017.11.05 and stories are still being released. The documents originate from legal firm Appleby, the corporate services providers Estera and Asiaciti Trust, and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions. They contain the names of more than 120,000 people and companies. At 1.4 TB in size, this is second only to the Panama Papers of 2016 as the biggest data leak in history.
Tax inversion (corporate inversion): practice of relocating a corporation's legal domicile to a lower-tax country, while retaining its material operations (including management, functional headquarters and majority shareholders) in its higher-tax country of origin. In practice, it means replacing the existing USA-based parent company with a foreign-based parent company, thus making the original USA company a subsidiary of the new foreign-based parent.
Shadow banking system: term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. The phrase "shadow banking" contains the pejorative connotation of back alley loan sharks. Many in the financial services industry find this phrase offensive and prefer the euphemism "market-based finance".
Tax haven: enerally defined as a country or place with very low "effective" rates of taxation for foreigners ("headline" rates may be higher). In some traditional definitions, a tax haven also offers financial secrecy. However, while countries with high levels of secrecy but also high rates of taxation (e.g. the United States and Germany in the Financial Secrecy Index ("FSI") rankings), can feature in some tax haven lists, they are not universally considered as tax havens. In contrast, countries with lower levels of secrecy but also low "effective" rates of taxation (e.g. Ireland in the FSI rankings), appear in most § Tax haven lists. Traditional tax havens, like Jersey, are open about zero rates of taxation, but as a consequence have limited bilateral tax treaties. Modern corporate tax havens have non-zero "headline" rates of taxation and high levels of OECD-compliance, and thus have large networks of bilateral tax treaties. However, their BEPS tools enable corporates to achieve "effective" tax rates closer to zero, not just in the haven but in all countries with which the haven has tax treaties; putting them on tax haven lists. Tax havens are mostly successful and well-governed economies, and being a haven has often brought prosperity. The top 10–15 GDP-per-capita countries, excluding oil and gas exporters, are tax havens.
Corporate haven (corporate tax haven, multinational tax haven): jurisdiction that multinational corporations find attractive for establishing subsidiaries or incorporation of regional or main company headquarters, mostly due to favourable tax regimes (not just the headline tax rate), and/or favourable secrecy laws (such as the avoidance of regulations or disclosure of tax schemes), and/or favourable regulatory regimes (such as weak data-protection or employment laws). Modern corporate tax havens (such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and Singapore), differ from traditional corporate tax havens (such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Jersey), in their ability to maintain OECD-compliance, while using OECD-whitelisted § IP-based BEPS tools and § Debt-based BEPS tools, which don't file public accounts, to still enable the corporate to avoid taxes, not just in the corporate haven, but in all operating countries that have tax treaties with the haven. Main features: Denial of status; Financial impact; Conduits and Sinks; Employment tax; UK transformation; Distorted GDP/GNP. IP-based BEPS tools. IP-based Tax inversions: Apple vs. Pfizer-Allergan; Apple's IP-based BEPS inversion. Debt-based BEPS tools: Dutch "Double Dip"; Irish Section 110 SPV. Ranking corporate tax havens. Failure of OECD BEPS Project: Departure of U.S. and EU; U.S. as BEPS winner
Offshore financial centre (OFC): country or jurisdiction that provides financial services to nonresidents on a scale that is incommensurate with the size and the financing of its domestic economy. "Offshore" does not refer to the location of the OFC (many FSF-IMF OFCs, such as Luxembourg and Hong Kong, are located "onshore"), but to the fact that the largest users of the OFC are nonresident (e.g. they are "offshore"). The IMF lists OFCs as a third class of financial centre, with International Financial Centres (IFCs), and Regional Financial Centres (RFCs); there is overlap (e.g. Singapore is an RFC and an OFC). Academics now consider the activities of OFCs to be synonymous with tax havens, with a particular focus on corporate tax planning BEPS tools, tax-neutral asset structuring vehicles, and shadow banking/asset securitization.
Base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS): refers to corporate tax planning strategies used by multinationals to "shift" profits from higher-tax jurisdictions to lower-tax jurisdictions, thus "eroding" the "tax-base" of the higher-tax jurisdictions. The OECD defines BEPS strategies as also: "exploiting gaps and mismatches in tax rules"; however, academics proved corporate tax havens (e.g. Ireland, the Caribbean, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, and HK), who are the largest global BEPS hubs, use OECD-whitelisted tax structures and OECD-compliant BEPS tools. Corporate tax havens offer BEPS tools to "shift" profits to the haven, and additional BEPS tools to avoid paying taxes within the haven (e.g. Ireland's "Green Jersey"). BEPS tools are mostly associated with U.S. technology and life science multinationals. Tax academics showed use of BEPS tools by U.S. multinationals, via tax havens, maximised long-term U.S. exchequer receipts and/or shareholder returns, at the expense of other jurisdictions. An important academic study in July 2017 published in Nature, "Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network", showed that the pressure to maintain OECD-compliance had split corporate-focused tax havens into two different classifications: Sink OFCs, which act as the terminus for BEPS flows, and Conduit OFCs, which act as the conduit for flows from higher-tax locations to the Sink OFCs. It was noted that the 5 major Conduit OFCs, namely, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Switzerland, all have a top-ten ranking in the 2018 Global Innovation Property Centre (GIPC) IP Index. Complex agendas: Other tax experts, including a founder of academic tax haven research, James R. Hines Jr., note that USA multinational use of BEPS tools and corporate tax havens had actually increased the long-term tax receipts of the USA exchequer, at the expense of other higher-tax jurisdictions, making the USA a major beneficiary of BEPS tools and corporate-tax havens. OECD BEPS Project: In 2017.06, USA Treasury official explained that the reason why USA refused to sign up to the OECD's MLI, or any of its Actions, was because: "USA tax treaty network has a low degree of exposure to base erosion and profit shifting issues". However, by mid-2018, U.S. multinationals had not repatriated any BEPS tools, and the evidence is that they have increased exposure to corporate tax havens. In March-May 2018, Google committed to doubling its office space in Ireland, while in June 2018 it was shown that Microsoft is preparing to execute Apple's Irish BEPS tool, the "Green Jersey" (see Irish experience post-TCJA).
Double Irish arrangement: BEPS corporate tax tool, used mostly by USA multinationals since the late 1980s, to avoid corporate taxation on most non-USA profits. It is the largest tax avoidance tool in history and by 2010, was shielding USD 100 billion annually in USA multinational foreign profits from taxation, and was the main tool by which USA multinationals built up untaxed offshore reserves of USD 1 trillion from 2004 to 2018. Traditionally, it was also used with the Dutch Sandwich BEPS tool, however, changes to Irish tax law in 2010 dispensed with this requirement for most users. However, by mid-2018, other tax academics, including the IMF, noted technical flaws in the TCJA had increased the attractiveness of Ireland's BEPS tools, and the CAIA BEPS tool in particular, which post-TCJA, delivered a total effective tax rate ("ETR") of 0–3% on profits that can be fully repatriated to the U.S. without incurring any additional U.S. taxation. In July 2018, one of Ireland's leading tax economists forecasted a "boom" in the use of the Irish CAIA BEPS tool, as U.S. multinationals close existing double Irish BEPS schemes before the 2020 deadline.
Base erosion and profit shifting (OECD project): OECD/G20 project to set up an international framework to combat tax avoidance by multinational enterprises ("MNEs") using BEPS tools. Currently, after the BEPS report has been delivered in 2015, the project is now in its implementation phase, 116 countries are involved, including a majority of developing countries. During two years, the package was developed by participating members on an equal footing, as well as widespread consultations with jurisdictions and stakeholders, including business, academics and civil society. The European Commission and the US have unilateraly taken actions in 2017-2018 that implement several key measures of the BEPS project, even going beyond in some cases.
Leprechaun economics: term used by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to describe 26.3% increase in Irish 2015 GDP, that was later revised to 34.4%, in 2016.07.12 publication by the Irish Central Statistics Office ("CSO") restating 2015 Irish national accounts. While the event which caused the artificial Irish GDP growth occurred in Q1 2015, the Irish CSO had to delay the Irish 2015 GDP revision, and redact the release of its regular economic data in 2016-2017, to protect the source's identity. Only in Q1 2018, could economists confirm Apple as the source, and that "leprechaun economics" was the largest individual BEPS action, and the largest quasi-tax inversion of a USA corporation, in history. "Leprechaun economics" marked the first known replacement of Ireland's prohibited BEPS tool, the double Irish, with the more powerful Irish BEPS tool, the "capital allowances for intangible assets" ("CAIA") tool, also called the "Green Jersey". Whereas Washington blocked the proposed USD 160 billion Pfizer-Allergan Irish tax inversion in 2016.04, Apple executed a USD 300 billion tax inversion of its entire non-U.S. business to Ireland. Research in 2018.06, using 2015 data, confirmed Ireland, already a "major tax haven", was now the world's largest tax haven.
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers.
Conduit and Sink OFCs: empirical quantitative method of classifying corporate tax havens, offshore financial centres and tax havens. Rather than analyzing taxation and legal structures to identify and classify potential tax havens (the preferred EU, IMF, and OECD route), this approach analyses the ownership chains of 98 million global companies (a purely empirical, or outcomes-based, route), relative to the size of countries of their incorporation. The technique gives both a method of classification and a method of understanding the relative scale of corporate tax havens/offshore financial centers.
24 global Sink OFCs: jurisdictions in which a disproportional amount of value disappears from the economic system (i.e. the traditional tax havens).
CORPNET's top 5 global Conduit OFCs channel 47% of corporate offshore connections and include the following:
NL – the largest global Conduit OFC (by total connections), with dense links from the EU–28 (via the "Dutch Sandwich"), to the EU Sink OFC of Luxembourg, and the Caribbean Sink OFC "triad" of Bermuda/BVI/Cayman.
UK – 2nd largest Conduit OFC (by total connections), with dense links from Europe to Asia; 18 of the 24 Sink OFCs are current, or past, dependencies of the U.K. (see table on Sink OFCs).
CH – a major Conduit OFC with a very dense network of connections with Jersey, the 4th largest Sink OFC.
SG – the main Conduit OFC for Asia, and densely connected to the two major Asian Sink OFCs of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
IE – very dense connections with the US (see Ireland as a tax haven), with very dense connections to Sink OFC Luxembourg, an established "backdoor" out of the Irish tax system.
report published in Nature in 2017: The report used the Moody's Orbis corporate database to examine 98 million global companies and their 71 million ownership connections (using big data computer modelling) to identify 5 global Conduit OFCs. These are countries of high financial reputation (i.e. not formally labelled "tax havens" by OECD/EU), but who have "advanced" legal and tax structuring vehicles (and SPVs) that help legally route funds to the 24 tax havens (called Sink OFCs), without incurring tax in the Conduit OFC (or even tax in the source of funds location, where royalty payment schemes can be used).
British Virgin Islands (BVI) - in terms of connections, is the "Netherlands of Sink OFCs" and heavily linked with the Conduit OFC United Kingdom.
Luxembourg and Hong Kong - would have been considered Conduit OFCs, but the research shows they are even bigger Sink OFCs (i.e. longer-term homes for funds), Luxembourg (for routing funds from high-tax EU countries) and Hong Kong (for routing funds out of China)
Jersey - remains a unique link with major Conduit OFC, Switzerland (because the study could not capture individual "trusts", Jersey could be understated).
Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Triad - these three classic offshore tax havens are heavily interlinked and starting to present as one large Sink OFC.
Taiwan - has been a controversial entrant on several tax haven lists (the Tax Justice Network calls Taiwan the "Switzerland of Asia", however, Taiwan is not on any EU/OECD/IMF tax-haven list), and is identified as the 2nd largest Asian Sink OFC.
Cayman Islands - the Cayman Islands are becoming the biggest financial centre for the Central and Latin America.
Malta - the report highlights the rise of Sink OFC Malta as an emerging tax haven "inside" the EU, which has been a source of wider media scrutiny.
Mauritius - has become a major Sink OFC for both SE Asia (especially India) and African economies, and now ranking 8th overall.
Isle of Man omitted. Ireland underestimated: By aggregating national account data, Zucman can identify an excess of liabilities over assets, implying that the missing assets (to balance the equation), are hidden in tax-havens. On this basis, in 2015, he estimated that 8% of the world's wealth (or $7.6 trillion) was "missing" in offshore tax-havens.
Press materials from the EU Commission findings against Apple in Ireland regarding illegal State aid.
Ireland as a tax haven: Ireland is labelled a tax haven or corporate tax haven, which it rejects. Ireland's base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools give foreign corporates § Effective tax rates of 0% to 3% on global profits re-routed to Ireland via Ireland's tax treaty network. Ireland's BEPS tools are the world's largest BEPS flows, exceeding the entire Caribbean system, and artificially inflating the US-EU trade deficit. Ireland's QIAIF & LQIAIF regimes, and Section 110 SPVs, enable foreign investors to avoid Irish taxes on Irish assets, and can be combined with Irish BEPS tools to create confidential routes out of the Irish corporate tax system. As these structures are OECD-whitelisted, Ireland uses data protection, data privacy laws, and opt-outs from filing of public accounts, to obscure their effects. There is evidence Ireland acts as a § Captured state fostering tax avoidance strategies. Ireland is on all academic "tax haven lists", including the § Leaders in tax haven research, and tax NGOs. Ireland does not meet the 1998 OECD definition of a tax haven, but no OECD member, including Switzerland, has ever met this definition. Similarly, no EU-28 country is amongst the 64 listed in the 2017 EU tax haven blacklist and greylist. 2016.09, Brazil became the first G20 country to "blacklist" Ireland as a tax haven. A reliance on USA corporates (80% of Irish tax, 25% of Irish labour, 25 of top 50 Irish firms, and 57% of Irish value-add), is a concern in Ireland. Technical issues with TCJA: Some tax experts, noting Google and Microsoft's actions in 2018, assert these flaws in the TCJA are deliberate, and part of the USA Administration's original strategy to reduce aggregate effective global tax rates for USA multinationals to circa 10-15% (i.e. 21% on USA income, and 3% on non-USA income, via Irish BEPS tools). There has been an increase in USA multinational use of Irish intangible capital allowances, and some tax experts believe that the next few years will see a boom in USA multinationals using the Irish "Green Jersey" BEPS tool and on-shoring their IP to Ireland (rather than the USA). As discussed in § Hines-Rice 1994 definition and § Source of contradictions, the USA Treasury's corporation tax policy seeks to maximise long-term USA. taxes paid by using corporate tax havens to minimise near-term foreign taxes paid. In this regard, it is possible that Ireland still has a long-term future as a USA corporate tax haven.
International Financial Services Centre (IFSC): began in 1987 as a special economic zone on a derelict 11 hectare site near the centre of Dublin, with EU approval to apply a 10% corporate tax rate for designated financial services activities on the site. Before the expiry of this EU approval in 2005, the Irish Government legislated in 1998/99 to effectively "turn the entire country into an IFSC" by reducing the overall Irish corporate tax rate from 32% to 12.5% (full effect by 2003). The legal requirement for a specific IFSC geographic area was thus removed, and the term International Financial Services ("IFS") sector is now sometimes used.
Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland: While Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, the evidence is that foreign multinationals pay an § Effective tax rate (ETR) of under 4% on all global profits that they can "shift" to Ireland, via Ireland's 72 bilateral tax treaties. These lower effective tax rates are achieved by a complex set of Irish BEPS tools which handle the largest BEPS flows in the world (e.g. the double Irish as used by Google and Facebook, the single malt as used by Microsoft and Allergan, and capital allowances for intangible assets as used by Accenture, and by Apple post Q1 2015).
Irish Section 110 Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV): Irish tax resident company, which qualifies under Section 110 of the Irish Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 ("TCA") for a special tax regime that enables the SPV to attain "tax neutrality": i.e. the SPV pays no Irish taxes, VAT, or duties. Section 110 was created to help International Financial Services Centre ("IFSC") legal and accounting firms compete for the administration of global securitisation deals. Section 110 is the core of the IFSC structured finance regime, and now dominates EU securitisation. In 2016, it was discovered that US distressed debt funds used Section 110 SPVs, structured by IFSC service firms, to avoid Irish taxes on €80bn of Irish domestic investments. Research shows that IFSC Section 110 SPVs are largely unregulated, operating like brass plate companies with little supervision from the Irish Revenue or the Central Bank of Ireland (also noted by the IMF). It shows the rise in use of IFSC Section 110 SPVs by sanctioned/prohibited Russian banks. A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland has warned that the Irish Government underestimates the risks of Irish SPVs in shadow banking. Abuses: Vulture fund tax avoidance; Unregulated shadow banking
EU illegal State aid case against Apple in Ireland: 2016.08.29, after a two-year EU investigation, Margrethe Vestager of the European Commission announced: "Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple". The Commission ordered Apple to pay €13 billion, plus interest, in unpaid Irish taxes from 2004–14 to the Irish State. It was the largest corporate tax fine in history. On the 7 September 2016, the Irish State secured a majority in Dail Eireann to reject payment of the back-taxes, which including penalties, could reach €20 billion, or 10% of 2014 Irish GDP. In November 2016, the Irish State formally appealed the ruling, claiming there was no departure from Irish taxation law, and that the Commission's action was "an intrusion into Irish sovereignty", as national tax policy is excluded from EU treaties. In November 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook, announced Apple would appeal, and in September 2018, Apple lodged €13 billion to an escrow account, pending appeal. Ireland's rejection of the EU Commission's "windfall" in back-taxes surprised some. However, in § Understanding Irish decision, U.S.-controlled multinationals are 25 of Ireland's top 50 companies, pay over 80% of all Irish corporate taxes (circa. €8 billion per annum), directly employ 25% of the Irish labour force (and indirectly pay half of all Irish salary taxes), and are 57% of all non-farm OECD value-add in the Irish economy. In contrast, there are no non-U.S./non-U.K. foreign multinationals in Ireland's top 50 firms. The U.K. firms are either selling into Ireland, like Tesco, or date pre-2009, after which the U.K. reformed to a "territorial" tax system. Multinationals from "territorial" systems rarely use tax havens, and in 2016, the U.S. was one of the last "worldwide" tax systems in operation. The cost of U.S. multinationals abandoning Ireland as a U.S. corporate-tax haven, would greatly exceed the EU's €13 billion "windfall".
Modified gross national income (GNI*): created by the Central Bank of Ireland in February 2017 as a new way to measure the Irish economy, and Irish indebtedness, due to the considerable distortion that BEPS tools of USA multinational tax schemes, were having on Irish GNP and Irish GDP. While a "distorted GDP-per-capita" is a known feature of corporate-tax havens, Ireland was the first to replace its GDP/GNP metrics.
"The land and freshwater footprints for the production of essential amino acids from various nutritional sources. All estimates are based on data reported by Moomaw et al. (2017). Land footprints are reported in hectares per metric ton of product. Freshwater footprints are reported in cubic meters of freshwater per metric ton of product."
Algaculture: form of aquaculture involving the farming of species of algae.
Economics and war
Map of separation barriers in the world. A separation barrier is not necessarily a border barrier.
Separation barrier (separation wall): barrier, wall or fence, constructed to limit the movement of people across a certain line or border, or to separate peoples or cultures. A separation barrier that runs along an internationally recognized border is known as a border barrier. David Henley opines in The Guardian that separation barriers are being built at a record-rate around the world along borders and do not only surround dictatorships or pariah states. In 2014, The Washington Post listed notable 14 separation walls as of 2011, indicating that the total concurrent number of walls and barriers which separate countries and territories is 45.
Border barrier (border fence, border wall): separation barrier that runs along or near an international border. Such barriers are typically constructed for border control purposes such as curbing illegal immigration, human trafficking, and smuggling. Some such barriers are constructed for defence or security reasons. In cases of a disputed or unclear border, erecting a barrier can serve as a de facto unilateral consolidation of a territorial claim that can supersede formal delimitation. A border barrier does not usually indicate the location of the actual border, and is usually constructed unilaterally by a country, without the agreement or cooperation of the other country.
Hunger Plan (der Hungerplan, der Backe-Plan): economic management scheme that was put in place to ensure that Germans were given priority over food supplies, at the expense of everyone else. Historian Timothy Snyder estimates: “4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944.” In the Western Europe no large starvation occurred.
Odd pricing: Consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being significantly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 is associated with spending $1 rather than $2. Another phenomenon noted by economists is that a price point for a product (such as $4.99) remains stable for a long period of time, with companies slowly reducing the quantity of product in the package until consumers begin to notice. At this time the price will increase marginally (to $5.05) and then within an exceptionally short time will increase to the next price point (to $5.99).
Disintermediation: removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet. Disintermediation may decrease the total cost of servicing customers and may allow the manufacturer to increase profit margins and/or reduce prices. Disintermediation initiated by consumers is often the result of high market transparency, in that buyers are aware of supply prices direct from the manufacturer. Buyers may choose to bypass the middlemen (wholesalers and retailers) to buy directly from the manufacturer, and pay less. Buyers can alternatively elect to purchase from wholesalers. Often, a business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C) company functions as the bridge between buyer and manufacturer. Reintermediation: Amazon, eBay. Examples: Dell, Apple; In the automotive industry: Tesla.
Point of sale (POS, Checkout): place where a retail transaction is completed; point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or services; merchant will also normally issue a receipt for the transaction. Customized hardware and software as per their requirements
Automated sales suppression device (zapper): software program that falsifies the electronic records of POS systems for the purpose of tax evasion.
Square, Inc.: merchant services aggregator and mobile payments company based in San Francisco, CA. Two applications & services: Square Register and Square Wallet; allows individuals and merchants in USA and CA to accept debit and credit cards on their iOS or Android smartphone or tablet computer. The app supports manually entering the card details or swiping the card through the Square Reader, a small plastic device which plugs into the audio jack of a supported smartphone or tablet and reads the magnetic stripe. On the iPad version of the Square Register app, the interface resembles a traditional cash register.
Corporate group ("group of companies"): collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control.
Concern (business) (German: Konzern, Cyrillic: Концерн): type of business group common in Europe, particularly in Germany. It results from the merger of several legally independent companies an economic entity under unified management. These associated companies are called "Group" companies.
Pay what you want (PWYW): pricing strategy where buyers pay any desired amount for a given commodity, sometimes including zero. In some cases, a minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price for the commodity.
Planning, product development (product management), projects (project management)
Project management triangle: model of the constraints of project management. It is a graphic aid where the three attributes show on the corners of the triangle to show opposition. It is useful to help with intentionally choosing project biases, or analyzing the goals of a project. It is used to illustrate that project management success is measured by the project team's ability to manage the project, so that the expected results are produced while managing time and cost. Like any human undertaking, projects need to be performed and delivered under certain constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been listed as "scope" (features and quality, what's the end result), "time", and "cost". You are given the options of Fast (time), Good (quality), and Cheap (cost, $, €, £), and told to pick any two.
Work breakdown structure: deliverable-oriented decomposition of a project into smaller components. A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into manageable sections. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK 5) defines the work breakdown structure as a "A hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables." "On Time, On Spec, On Budget."
Critical path method: The Nome Trilogy (part 2 "Diggers" by Terry Pratchett) mentions "the doctrine of the Critical Path" and says that it means that "There's always something that you should have done first."
Non-recurring engineering (NRE): refers to the one-time cost to research, design, develop and test a new product or product enhancement. When budgeting for a new product, NRE must be considered to analyze if a new product will be profitable. Even though a company will pay for NRE on a project only once, NRE costs can be prohibitively high and the product will need to sell well enough to produce a return on the initial investment. NRE is unlike production costs, which must be paid constantly to maintain production of a product. It is a form of fixed cost in economics terms. Once a system is designed any number of units can be manufactured without increasing NRE cost.
Earned value management: project management technique for measuring project performance and progress in an objective manner.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP): business-management software—typically a suite of integrated applications—that an organization can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities (product planning & cost, manufacturing or service delivery, marketing & sales, inventory management, shipping & payment). Backend: database.
Microsoft Dynamics: Microsoft markets Dynamics applications through a network of reselling partners who provide specialized services.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly: Navision): ERP software product from Microsoft. The product is part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and intended to assist with finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, supply chains, analytics and electronic commerce for small and medium-sized companies and local subsidiaries of large international groups. For modifications of the system, the proprietary programming language C/AL is used. NAV Add-ons: NAV CfMD (Certified for Microsoft Dynamics). Navision originated at PC&C A/S (Personal Computing and Consulting), a company founded in Denmark in 1984. PC&C released its first accounting package, PCPlus, in 1985—a single-user application with basic accounting functionality. There followed in 1987 the first version of Navision, a client/server-based accounting application that allowed multiple users to access the system simultaneously. The success of the product prompted the company to rename itself to Navision Software A/S in 1995. The Navision product sold primarily in Denmark until 1990. From Navision version 3 the product was distributed in other European countries, including Germany and UK. In 1995 the first version of Navision based on Microsoft Windows 95 was released. 2002.07.11 Microsoft bought Navision A/S to go with its previous acquisition of Great Plains. Navision became a new division at Microsoft, named Microsoft Business Solutions (Microsoft Dynamics), which also handled Microsoft CRM. 2005.09 Microsoft re-branded the product and re-released it as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
C/AL (Client/server Application Language): the programming language used within C/SIDE the Client/Server Integrated Development Environment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Formerly known as Navision Attain) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central up until (and including) version 14. C/AL resembles the Pascal language on which it is based. The original C/AL compiler was written by Michael Nielsen.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and shares the same codebase as NAV and NAV's C/AL language is being phased out in favor of the new AL language. Product is primarily a web-based SaaS solution accessed via dynamics.com, though presently there is an on-premise version available, which included the option to use the NAV role-tailored "thick" client through version 14, while versions 15 and later are web-only.
Network effect (network externality, demand-side economies of scale): effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. Positive feedback: telephone, Facebook, Twitter. Negative feedback: "congestion" (as in traffic congestion or network congestion). Over time, positive network effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, in a positive feedback loop.
Information economics: studies how information and information systems affect an economy and economic decisions. Information is easy to create but hard to trust; easy to spread but hard to control; influences many decisions.
Information asymmetry: study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case. E.g. adverse selection, moral hazard, and information monopoly. Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz studied the influence of artificial intelligence on the theory of asymmetric information and observed that artificial intelligent agents decrease the degree of information asymmetry and thus the market where these agents are used are more efficient than when they are not used.
Motherhood penalty: term coined by sociologists who argue that in the workplace, working mothers encounter systematic disadvantages in pay, perceived competence, and benefits relative to childless women. Specifically, women may suffer a per-child wage penalty, resulting in a pay gap between non-mothers and mothers that is larger than the gap between men and women. Mothers may also suffer worse job-site evaluations indicating that they are less committed to their jobs, less dependable, and less authoritative than non-mothers. Thus, mothers may experience disadvantages in terms of hiring, pay, and daily job experience. The motherhood wage penalty is not limited to the United States, and has been documented in over a dozen other industrialized nations including Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Australia. A study by Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll found that employers perceived mothers as less competent than childless women, and also perceived childless men as less competent and committed than men who were fathers.
Maternity leave in the United States: includes a provision mandating 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for mothers of newborn or newly adopted children. This policy is distinct to other industrialized countries for its relative scarcity of benefits, in terms of the short length of protected maternity leave and not offering some form of wage compensation for the leave of absence.
by economist Branko Milanovic. He analyzed global income inequality, comparing 1988 and 2008. His analysis indicated that the global top 1% and the middle classes of the emerging economies (e.g., China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt) were the main winners of globalization during that time. The real (inflation adjusted) income of the global top 1% increased approximately 60%, while the middle classes of the emerging economies (those around the 50th percentile of the global income distribution in 1988) rose 70-80%. On the other hand, those in the middle class of the developed world (those in the 75th to 90th percentile in 1988, such as the American middle class) experienced little real income gains. The richest 1% contains 60 million persons globally, including 30 million Americans (i.e., the top 12% of Americans by income were in the global top 1% in 2008).
Economic inequality: difference found in various measures of economic well-being among individuals in a group, among groups in a population, or among countries. Economic inequality sometimes refers to income inequality, wealth inequality, or the wealth gap. Economists generally focus on economic disparity in three metrics: wealth, income, and consumption. According to PolitiFact the top 400 richest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined." According to the New York Times on July 22, 2014, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent". Inherited wealth may help explain why many Americans who have become rich may have had a "substantial head start". In September 2012, according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), "over 60 percent" of the Forbes richest 400 Americans "grew up in substantial privilege". A 2017 report by the IPS said that three individuals, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, or 160 million people, and that the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor has created a "moral crisis", noting that "we have not witnessed such extreme levels of concentrated wealth and power since the first gilded age a century ago."
International inequality: economic differences between countries. According to UN Human Development Report 2004, the gross domestic per capita in countries with high, medium and low human development (a classification based on the UN Human Development Index) was 24,806 PPP$, 4,269 PPP$ and 1,184 PPP$, respectively.
6% of the world's population owns 52% of the global assets. The richest 2% own more than 51% of the global assets and the richest 10% own 85% of the global assets.
Over 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day. over 50% of the world population lives on less than 2 US$/day; over 20% of the world population lives on less than $1.25/day
Colonial origins of comparative development: 2001 article written by Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson and published in American Economic Review. It is considered a seminal contribution to development economics through its use of European settler mortality as an instrumental variable of institutional development in former colonies. The theory proposed in the article is that Europeans only set up growth-inducing institutions in areas where the disease environment was favourable, so that they could settle. In areas with unfavourable disease environment to Europeans, such as central Africa, they instead set up extractive institutions which persist to the present day and explain much of the variation in income across countries.
Basic income pilots: smaller-scale preliminary experiments which are carried out on selected members of the relevant population to assess the feasibility, costs and effects of the full-scale implementation of basic income or the related concept of negative income tax, including partial basic income and similar programs. Northern America: Pilots in United States in the 1960s and 1970s; Mincome in Manitoba; Native American casinos and tribal profit sharing; Y Combinator; Ontario Basic Income Pilot Project; Stockton, California. Africa: Namibia; Uganda; GiveDirectly in Kenya. Asia: Madhya Pradesh, India; Iran; Israel. Latin America: Bolsa Familia, Quatinga Velho. Europe: Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Scotland, Spain (ingreso mínimo vital), Germany, Wales.
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED): database maintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that has more than 500,000 economic time series from 81 sources. The data can be viewed in graphical and text form or downloaded for import to a database or spreadsheet, and viewed on mobile devices. They cover banking, business/fiscal, consumer price indexes, employment and population, exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, monetary aggregates, producer price indexes, reserves and monetary base, USA trade and international transactions, and USA financial data. The time series are compiled by the Federal Reserve and collected from government agencies such as the US Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Simon–Ehrlich wager: 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run." Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
Price of oil: by the end of 2009.10 one in twelve of the largest oil tankers was being used more for temporary storage of oil, rather than transportation. From 2014.06 to 2015.01, as the price of oil dropped 60% and the supply of oil remained high, the world's largest traders in crude oil purchased at least 25 million barrels to store in supertankers to make a profit in the future when prices rise. Trafigura, Vitol, Gunvor, Koch, Shell and other major energy companies began to book booking oil storage supertankers for up to 12 months. In 2015 as global capacity for oil storage was out-paced by global oil production, and an oil glut occurred. Crude oil storage space became a tradable commodity with CME Group— which owns NYMEX— offering oil-storage futures contracts in 2015.03. By 2015.03.05, as oil production outpaces oil demand by 1.5 million barrels a day, storage capacity globally is dwindling. In USA alone, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, USA crude-oil supplies are at almost 70% of USA storage capacity, the highest to capacity ratio since 1935.
Impact of declining oil price: The decline on oil price during 1985–1986 is considered to have contributed to the fall of USSR. Research shows that declining oil prices make oil-rich states less bellicose; "both oil importers and exporters vote more often with USA in the United Nations General Assembly" during oil slumps.
2010s oil glut: a considerable surplus of crude oil that started in 2014–2015 and accelerated in 2016, with multiple causes. They include general oversupply as US and Canadian tight oil (shale oil) production reached critical volumes, geopolitical rivalries amongst oil-producing nations, falling demand across commodities markets due to the deceleration of the Chinese economy, and possible restraint of long-term demand as Environmental policy promotes fuel efficiency and steers an increasing share of energy consumption away from fossil fuels. The world price of oil was above US$125 per barrel in 2012, and remained relatively strong above $100 until 2014.09, after which it entered a sharp downward spiral, falling below $30 by January 2016. The North Sea oil and gas industry was financially stressed by the reduced oil prices, and called for government support in 2016.05.
Oil-storage trade ("contango"): market strategy in which large, often vertically-integrated oil companies purchase oil for immediate delivery and storage—when the price of oil is low—and hold it in storage until the price of oil increases. Investors bet on the future of oil prices through a financial instrument, oil futures in which they agree on a contract basis, to buy or sell oil at a set date in the future. Crude oil is stored in salt mines, tanks and oil tankers. USA SPR is the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil—727 million barrels— stored in huge underground salt caverns along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. An emergency oil stockpile was recommended by several Presidents throughout the twentieth century, in 1944, in 1952, 1956 and in 1970. The SPR is a "deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool of foreign policy" but it has rarely been used.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (United States) (SPR): emergency fuel storage of petroleum maintained underground in Louisiana and Texas by DOE. It is the largest emergency supply in the world, with the capacity to hold up to 115,600,000 m³. USA started the petroleum reserve in 1975 after oil supplies were interrupted during the 1973–1974 oil embargo, to mitigate future supply disruptions. Maximum total withdrawal capability from the SPR is only 4.4 million barrels per day (700,000 m3/d), so it would take over 150 days to use the entire inventory.
Soft despotism: term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people. Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds FUD in the general populace.
Soft tyranny: idea first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 work titled Democracy in America. It is described as the individualist preference for equality and its pleasures, requiring the state - as a tyrant majority or a benevolent authority - to step in and adjudicate. In this regime, political leaders operate under a blanket of restrictions and, while it retains the practical virtues of democracy, citizens influence policymaking through bureaucrats and non-governmental organizations. This is distinguished from despotism or tyranny (hard tyranny) in the sense that state of government in such democratic society is composed of guardians who hold immense and tutelary (protective) power. According to Tocqueville, the danger of this form of government comes amid the satisfaction of material well-being because it puts the individuals' critical faculties to sleep. In this condition, people who are used to a culture of gain, comfort, career, and wealth shudder at the thought of revolution and the emergent consumerism drives the society's cultural decline.
Crown land (crownland, royal domain): territorial area belonging to the monarch, who personifies the Crown. It is the equivalent of an entailed estate and passes with the monarchy, being inseparable from it. Today, in Commonwealth realms such as Canada and Australia, crown land is considered public land and is apart from the monarch's private estate. In Britain, the hereditary revenues of Crown lands provided income for the monarch until the start of the reign of George III, when the profits from the Crown Estate were surrendered to the Parliament of Great Britain in return for a fixed civil list payment. The monarch retains the income from the Duchy of Lancaster.
Democratization (democratisation): transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction. It may be the transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy, a transition from an authoritarian political system to a semi-democracy or transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a democratic political system. The outcome may be consolidated (as it was for example in the United Kingdom) or democratization may face frequent reversals (as happened in Chile). Different patterns of democratization are often used to explain other political phenomena, such as whether a country goes to a war or whether its economy grows. Causes: Economic development and modernization; Equality and inclusive institutions; Culture; Social capital and civil society; Elite-driven democratization; Waves of democracy; Class alliances and cleavages; Rulers' need for taxation; Promotion, and foreign influence and intervention; Scrambled constituencies; Education; Natural resources; Death or ouster of dictator; War and national security; Contingency and negotiations; International institutions.
Red marks countries where the LDI (V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index) has declined substantially and significantly over the past ten years. Blue marks countries where the level of democracy has advanced. Countries in grey are substantially unchanged.
Eu: mostly multi party (esp. Northern Eu), except: two party: GE, MT, ES, LI, MC; dominant party: AZ, RU; no party: VA.
Americas:
SA: mostly multi party, except: two party: Guyana, Honduras; single party: Cuba
NA: multi party: CA; two party: USA, MX
CA: multi party: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama; two party: Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua
Caribbean: mostly two party, except: multi party: Aruba, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, Puerto Rico, Suriname, US Virgin Islands; single party: Cuba.
Asia:
Central Asia: mostly dominant party, except: multi party: Kyrgyzstan; single party: Turkmenistan
Eastern Asia: mostly multi party, except: dominant party: Japan; single party: PRC, North Korea
Southern Asia: mostly multi party, except: two party: Sri Lanka.
South-Eastern Asia: many multi party, except: dominant party: Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore; single party: Laos, Vietnam
Western Asia: many multi party, except: dominant party: AZ, JO, SY, YE; no party: KW (in practice several political groups act as de facto parties), OM, QA, SA, UAE
Australasia: Australia: 2.7 for MPs, 3.3 for Senators.
The descent into barbarism has comparable structural elements:
Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
Dictatorship of one party;
Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory.
European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (International Black Ribbon Day; 23 August): esignated by the European Parliament in 2008/2009 as "a Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, to be commemorated with dignity and impartiality"
Prometheism (Prometheanism; PL: "Prometeizm"): political project initiated by Poland's Józef Piłsudski; aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor states, including the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union. During Interwar Prometheism and Piłsudski's other concept of an "Intermarum federation" constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and some of his political heirs.
The Black Book of Communism: documents a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines.
Declaration of independence (declaration of statehood): assertion by a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. In 2010, UN's International Court of Justice ruled in the an advisory opinion in Kosovo that "International law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence", though the state from which the territory wishes to secede may regard the declaration as rebellion, which may lead to a war of independence or a constitutional settlement to resolve the crisis. Not all declarations of independence succeed in the formation of an independent state.
Siege mentality: shared feeling of victimization and defensiveness—a term derived from the actual experience of military defences of real sieges. It is a collective state of mind in which a group of people believe themselves constantly attacked, oppressed, or isolated in the face of the negative intentions of the rest of the world. The result is a state of being overly fearful of surrounding peoples, and an intractably defensive attitude. At a national level, siege mentalities existed in USSR, Communist Albania, Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland, as a result of ideological isolation; while a similar mentality is currently to be seen in North Korea, Russia, USA, West Bank, Israel, Taiwan, Venezuela and Poland, where it is arguably encouraged by both the government—to help justify their continuance in power—and the opposition—to help justify their overthrowing the government through violent means.
Gerontocracy: form of oligarchical rule in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are significantly older than most of the adult population. In many political structures, power within the ruling class accumulates with age, making the oldest the holders of the most power. Those holding the most power may not be in formal leadership positions, but often dominate those who are. In a simplified definition, a gerontocracy is a society where leadership is reserved for elders. Plato famously stated that "it is for the elder man to rule and for the younger to submit". One example of the ancient Greek gerontocracy can be seen in the city state of Sparta, which was ruled by a Gerousia, a council made up of members who were at least 60 years old and who served for life. In USSR: In 1980, the average Politburo member was 70 years old (as opposed to 55 in 1952 and 61 in 1964), and by 1982, Brezhnev's Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, his Minister of Defense Dmitriy Ustinov and his Premier Nikolai Tikhonov were all in their mid-to-late seventies. Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's 68-year-old successor, was seriously ill with kidney disease when he took over, and after his death fifteen months later, he was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, then 72, who lasted thirteen months before his death and replacement with Gorbachev. USA: In 2021, the average age of USA senator was 64, and positions of power within the legislatures – such as chairmanships of various committees – are usually bestowed upon the more experienced, that is, older, members of the legislature. Under President Donald Trump, the United States government more generally has been described as a gerontocracy. At 70, Trump was the oldest person ever to be inaugurated president of the United States, until the inauguration of Joe Biden. Many senior officials in Trump's administration, such as Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have been septuagenarians or older. Biden was 78 when he was sworn in on 20 January 2021, making him the oldest person to be inaugurated president of the United States. The Biden administration's cabinet appointments have also reflected these gerontocratic tendencies. For example, Janet Yellen, Biden's Treasury Secretary, is 75. The Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and the Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are also both the oldest holders of their offices in American history. Representative Don Young and Senators Diane Feinstein and Chuck Grassley are the oldest members of congress at 88 years old. Theocracy: Gerontocracy is common in theocratic states and religious organizations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which leadership is concentrated in the hands of religious elders. Despite the age of the senior religious leaders, however, parliamentary candidates in Iran must be under 75. Nominally a theocratic monarchy, Saudi Arabia, likened to various late communist states, has been ruled by gerontocrats. Aged king Saud and his aged relatives held rule along with many elder clerics. Other countries: Present-day Italy is often considered a gerontocracy,[24] even in the internal Italian debate.[25][26] The Monti government had the highest average age in the western world (64 years), with its youngest members being 57. Former Italian prime minister Mario Monti was 70 when he left office, his immediate predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was 75 at the time of resignation (2011), the previous head of the government Romano Prodi was 70 when he stepped down (2008). The Italian president Sergio Mattarella is 75, while his predecessors Giorgio Napolitano and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi were 89 and 86 respectively. In 2013, the youngest among the candidates for prime minister (Pier Luigi Bersani) was 62, the others being 70 and 78.
Multitude: term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. The term has a history of use reaching back to antiquity, but took on a strictly political concept when it was first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt.
Stateless nation: ethnic group, religious group, linguistic group or other cohesive group which is not the majority population in any nation state. The term implies that the group "should have" such a state, and thus expresses irredentism.
Horseshoe theory: asserts that the extreme left and the extreme right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.
Austrian School: school of economic thought that is based on the concept of methodological individualism – that social phenomena result from the motivations and actions of individuals. Originated in the late-19th and early-20th c. Vienna with the work of Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and others. According to economist Bryan Caplan, by the late twentieth century, a split had developed among those who self-identify with the Austrian School: 1) building on the work of Hayek, follows the broad framework of mainstream neoclassical economics, including its use of mathematical models and general equilibrium; 2) following Mises and Rothbard, rejects the neoclassical theories of consumer and welfare economics, dismisses empirical methods and mathematical and statistical models as inapplicable to economic science, and asserts that economic theory went entirely astray in 20th c.; they offer the Misesian view as a radical alternative paradigm to mainstream theory.
Praxeology: "Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life" von Mises. Is "Praxeology" science, social science, pseudoscience, philosophy?
Economic calculation problem: criticism of using economic planning as a substitute for market-based allocation of the factors of production. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" and later expanded upon by Friedrich Hayek.
Methodenstreit: intellectual history beyond German-language discourse, was an economics controversy commenced in the 1880s and persisting for more than a decade, between that field's Austrian School and the (German) Historical School; debate concerned the place of general theory in social science and the use of history in explaining the dynamics of human action. It also touched on policy and political issues, including the roles of the individual and state.
Historical school of economics (Prussian Historical School): approach to academic economics and to public administration that emerged in the 19th century in Germany, and held sway there until well into the 20th c. Among the central tenets of this School was that "from her origins, it had been Prussia's historical mission to unite Germany".
Essays in Positive Economics (1953; Milton Friedman): collection of earlier articles with its lead an original essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics".
Non-aggression principle (non-aggression axiom, anti-coercion principle, zero aggression principle, non-initiation of force, or NAP)
Social justice: idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. Criticism: no full definition; how one can treat somebody in a socially just way if the other does not treat you that way? Whats the difference between "justice" and "social justice"? Is "social justice" injustice?
American Enterprise Institute (AEI; 1938-): center-right think tank based in Washington, D.C., that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. AEI is an independent nonprofit organization supported primarily by contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Organization is aligned with conservatism and neoconservatism but does not support political candidates. AEI advocates in favor of private enterprise, limited government, and democratic capitalism. Political stance and impact: The institute is a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution; however, the two entities have often collaborated. From 1998 to 2008, they co-sponsored the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and in 2006 they launched the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.
Federation of American Scientists (FAS; 1946-): USA nonprofit global policy think tank with the stated intent of using science and scientific analysis to attempt to make the world more secure; founded by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs. FAS also aims to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons that are in use, and prevent nuclear and radiological terrorism. They hope to present high standards for nuclear energy's safety and security, illuminate government secrecy practices, as well as track and eliminate the global illicit trade of conventional, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Hudson Institute (1961.07.20-): conservative USA think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation.
Herman Kahn (1922.02.15–1983.07.07): founder of the Hudson Institute and one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He became known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability. Cultural influence: Along with John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, Kahn was, reportedly, an inspiration for the character "Dr. Strangelove" in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick released in 1964. After Kubrick read Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War, he began a correspondence with him which led to face-to-face discussions between Kubrick and Kahn. In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for the "Doomsday Machine", a device which would immediately cause the destruction of the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. Both the name and the concept of the weapon are drawn from the text of On Thermonuclear War.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI; 1966-): international institute based in Stockholm; provides data, analysis and recommendations for armed conflict, military expenditure and arms trade as well as disarmament and arms control. The research is based on open sources and is directed to decision-makers, researchers, media and the interested public. SIPRI's organizational purpose is to conduct scientific research in issues on conflict and cooperation of importance for international peace and security, with the goal of contributing to an understanding for the conditions for a peaceful solution of international conflicts and sustainable peace.
Union of Concerned Scientists (1969-): nonprofit science advocacy organization based in the United States. The UCS membership includes many private citizens in addition to professional scientists.
Mont Pelerin Society: international organization composed of economists, philosophers, historians, intellectuals, business leaders, and others who favor classical liberalism. It advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies, and the political values of an open society. Had strong influence on many governments (including USA). Secretive? What did they accomplish? Where did they fail?
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): bipartisan Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank; conducts policy studies and strategic analyses on political, economic and security issues, focusing on technology, public policy, international trade and finance, and energy
Google Ideas: cross-sector, inter-disciplinary "think tank" or "think/do tank" based in New York City, dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions.
Edge Foundation, Inc.: association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Currently, its main activity is contributing to the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. The site is an online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas.
Milken Institute: independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California with offices in Washington, DC, New York, Miami, London, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. It publishes research and hosts conferences that apply market-based principles and financial innovations to social issues in the US and internationally. The Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and presents itself as nonpartisan and non-ideological.
GlobalSecurity.org: USA nonpartisan, independent, nonprofit organization that serves as a think tank, and research and consultancy group; focused on national and international security issues; military analysis, systems, and strategies; intelligence matters; and space policy analysis. In part it seeks to find new approaches to international security, and promotes achieving cooperative international security and preventing nuclear proliferation. To this end it seeks to improve intelligence-community capabilities to respond to new threats and to prevent the need for military action, while at the same time enhancing the effectiveness of military forces when needed.
RethinkX (2016-): think tank founded by Tony Seba and James Arbib that focuses on identifying disruptive innovations that could soon impact society. Rethinking Transportation 2020–2030: published in 2017, builds on the ideas described in two of Seba's previously published books. The thesis of "Rethinking Transportation" is that, by 2030, a convergence of exponentially-improving factors will make it cheaper for urban and suburban dwellers to subscribe to Transportation as a Service (TaaS), using self-driving electric cars, than to own their own car. Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020–2030: convergence of exponentially-improving factors will make manufactured protein "five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute—more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace." Rethinking Humanity: "the same processes and dynamics that drive S-curve adoption of new products at a sector level repeat at the level of civilizations," and that, second, human civilization was now "on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago." each of the five "foundational sectors" that underpin the global economy—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—"will be disrupted in the period 2020–2033, costs will fall by 10x or more, while production processes an order of magnitude (10x) more efficient will use 90% fewer natural resources with 10x-100x less waste." It further asserts that these technological disruptions have the potential to disrupt human civilization, for good or ill, and that humanity must develop a new social, political, and economic "Organizing System" to ensure that the outcome of this disruption is "A New Age of Freedom."
Sphere of influence (SOI): spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity, accommodating to the interests of powers outside the borders of the state that controls it. Historical remnants: Many areas of the world are considered to have inherited culture from a previous sphere of influence, that while perhaps today halted, continues to share the same culture, e.g. Anglosphere, Arab World, Eurosphere, Francophonie, Françafrique, Greater India, legacy of the Roman Empire/Latin America, East Asian cultural sphere (Chinese cultural sphere), Slavisphere (RU vs other slavs?), Spanish sphere of influence (i.e. language?). Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: WWII (Axis vs USSR; later Axis vs USSR + Allies); Cold War.
Map reflecting the categories of power in international relations.Major regional powers in their political regions.
Power (international relations): Those states that have significant amounts of power within the international system are referred to as middle powers, regional powers, great powers, superpowers, or hyperpowers/hegemons, although there is no commonly accepted standard for what defines a powerful state. The G-20 is seen as a meeting of governments that exercise varying degrees of influence within the international system. Entities other than states can have power in international relations. Such entities can include multilateral international organizations, military alliance organizations like NATO, multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, non-governmental organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, or other institutions such as the Hanseatic League and technology companies like Facebook and Google. Concepts of political power: Power as a goal; Power as influence; Power as security; Power as capability. Power as status: Categories of power: Superpower, Great power, Middle power, Small power; Other categories: Regional power, Cultural superpower, Energy superpower. Hard, soft and smart power.
Power projection (force projection or strength projection): term used in international relations to refer to the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory. The ability of a state to project its power into an area may serve as an effective diplomatic lever, influencing the decision-making process and acting as a potential deterrent on other states' behavior. Even states with sizable hard power assets (such as a large standing army) may only be able to exert limited regional influence so long as they lack the means of effectively projecting their power on a global scale. Generally, only a select few states are able to overcome the logistical difficulties inherent in the deployment and direction of a modern, mechanized military force. Allies and partners can take up or share some of the burden of power projection. Assets for power projection can often serve dual uses, as the deployment of various countries' militaries during the humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake illustrates. Types:
Soft power
Gray zone competition: "By 2020 the Army's programs for modernization were now framed as a decades-long process of cooperation with allies and partners, for competition with potential adversaries who historically have blurred the distinction between peace and war"—from: Reorganization plan of United States Army: The list of armies, a mixture of allies, partners, and competitors is estimated to be: Russia, China, India: faces Pakistan, Japan: faces North Korea.
Applications of Power projection
Hard power
Power projection#Power Projection capabilities: Maritime force: Green-/Blue-water navy; Heli/Aircraft carries; Overseas bases; Troops deployed in operations abroad; Nuclear deterrence.
Superpower: Alice Lyman Miller: "a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony". British Empire (WWII) → USA + USSR (Cold War) → USA.
Superpower collapse: USSR; USA: PRC's Government views USA as "a superpower in decline"; UK: Suez Crisis of 1956 is generally considered as the beginning of the end of Britain's period as a superpower.
Great power: state that is recognized as having the ability to exert its influence on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess military and economic strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence, which may cause small powers to consider the great powers' opinions before taking actions of their own.
Potential superpowers: state or a political and economic entity that is speculated to be, or is in the process of becoming, a superpower at some point during the 21st century. Presently, only USA fulfills the criteria to be considered a superpower. States most commonly mentioned as being potential superpowers are PRC, EU, India, and Russia. {Obsolete [2014]: Comparison by: population, HDI, GDP, Global 2000 firms, Patents in force, Oil reserves, Security Council, IMF voting power, IBRD voting power, Defense spending, Military personnel, Nuclear weapons}. Notably, the EU as a whole has some of the world's largest and most influential languages being official within its borders.
American Century: characterization of the 20th century as being largely dominated by USA in political, economic, and cultural terms.
European balance of power: international relations concept that applies historically and currently to the states of Europe. It is often known by the term European State System. Its basic tenet is that no single European power should be allowed to achieve hegemony over a substantial part of the continent and that this is best curtailed by having a small number of ever-changing alliances contend for power.
Conflict continuum: model or concept various social science researchers use when modeling conflict on a continuum from low to high-intensity, such as from aggression to irritation to explosiveness. The mathematical model of game theory originally posited only a winner and a loser (a zero-sum game) in a conflict, but was extended to cooperation (a win-win situation and a non-zero sum game), and lets users specify any point between cooperation, peace,[Nash equilibrium] rivalry, contest, crisis,: 2 and conflict among stakeholders.
Category:Proportional representation electoral systems
Closed list: variant of party-list proportional representation where voters can (effectively) only vote for political parties as a whole and thus have no influence on the party-supplied order in which party candidates are elected. If voters have at least some influence then it is called an open list. In closed list systems the party has pre-decided on who will receive the votes for the political parties in the elections, that is, the candidates positioned highest on this list tend to always get a seat in the parliament while the candidates positioned very low on the closed list will not.
Testimonial party (nl: beginselpartij/getuigenispartij): political party that focuses on its principles, instead of adapting them to local or temporal issues in the pursuit of coalition government participation. Specific phenomenon in NL, because of the Dutch system of proportional representation, in which any party which has over 0.66% of the vote can enter parliament, resulting in a large number of relatively small political parties, none of which are able to obtain a supermajority in the house of representatives. As a result, Dutch political parties will negotiate and compromise to form a coalition government. Testimonial parties will not compromise, and combined with the fact that they are usually small parties, participation in a coalition government is extremely unlikely.
Semi-presidential system: dual executive system, is a system of government in which a president exists alongside a prime minister and a cabinet, with the latter two responding to the legislature of the state. It differs from a parliamentary republic in that it has a popularly elected head of state who is more than a ceremonial figurehead, and from the presidential system in that the cabinet, although named by the president, responds to the legislature, which may force the cabinet to resign through a motion of no confidence. While the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and Finland (from 1919 to 2000) exemplified an early semi-presidential system, the term "semi-presidential" was actually first introduced in a 1959 article by journalist Hubert Beuve-Méry, and popularized by a 1978 work written by political scientist Maurice Duverger, both of whom intended to describe the French Fifth Republic (established in 1958). Subtypes: premier-presidential system - the prime minister and cabinet are exclusively accountable to parliament (France, Poland (de facto, however, according to the Constitution, Poland is a parliamentary republic), Portugal, Romania, Lithuania, Mongolia, ...); president-parliamentary system - the prime minister and cabinet are dually accountable to the president and to the parliament (Taiwan, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambic, (Russia)).
Cohabitation (government): system of divided government that occurs in semi-presidential systems, such as France, whenever the president is from a different political party than the majority of the members of parliament. It occurs because such a system forces the president to name a premier (prime minister) who will be acceptable to the majority party within parliament. Thus, cohabitation occurs because of the duality of the executive: an independently elected president and a prime minister who must be acceptable both to the president and to the legislature. France: Mitterrand–Chirac period (1986–1988); Mitterrand–Balladur period (1993–1995); Chirac–Jospin period (1997–2002)
Political processes
Mediatisation: loss of imperial immediacy; subsumption of one monarchy into another monarchy in such a way that the ruler of the annexed state keeps his sovereign title and, sometimes, a measure of local power.
German Mediatisation (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss): series of mediatisations and secularisations that took place in the Holy Roman Empire 1795-1814 and that drastically altered the political map of the country under relentless military and diplomatic pressure from revolutionary France and later Napoleon.
Intelligence, espionage, secret agencies, "privacy is dead"
Agent handling: management of agents, principal agents, and agent networks (called "assets") by intelligence officers typically known as case officers.
Chilling Effects (group): Google sends the cease-and-desist letters it receives to this group; backed by EFF and many law schools in USA
Industrial espionage: Concerns of national governments: DE: main perpetrator was thought to be China, although it has been revealed that a significant amount of economic espionage on Germany was conducted by USA
Treason: crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's nation or sovereign. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant. Treason against the king was known as high treason and treason against a lesser superior was petty treason. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor. At times, the term "traitor" has been used as a political epithet, regardless of any verifiable treasonable action. In a civil war or insurrection, the winners may deem the losers to be traitors. Likewise the term "traitor" is used in heated political discussion – typically as a slur against political dissidents, or against officials in power who are perceived as failing to act in the best interest of their constituents.
Analytic confidence: rating employed by intelligence analysts to convey doubt to decision makers about a statement of estimative probability. The need for analytic confidence ratings arise from analysts' imperfect knowledge of a conceptual model. Scientific methods for determining analytic confidence remain in infancy.
Radome (portmanteau of radar and dome): structural, weatherproof enclosure that protects a microwave (e.g. radar) antenna. The radome is constructed of material that minimally attenuates the electromagnetic signal transmitted or received by the antenna. In other words, the radome is transparent to radar or radio waves. Radomes protect the antenna surfaces from weather and conceal antenna electronic equipment from public view. They also protect nearby personnel from being accidentally struck by quickly rotating antennas.
Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF): enclosed area within a building that is used to process SCI level classified information. A SCIF prevents physical, electromagnetic and any other eavesdropping in SCIF facilities.
Mass surveillance in the United States: dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through USA. After WWI and WWII, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of USA' rival at the time, USSR. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters. The formation of the international UKUSA surveillance agreement of 1946 evolved into the ECHELON collaboration by 1955 of five English-speaking nations, also known as the Five Eyes, and focused on interception of electronic communications, with substantial increases in domestic surveillance capabilities. Following the September 11th attacks of 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities grew immensely. Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush 2001.09.14 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama. Many details about the surveillance activities conducted in the United States were revealed in the disclosure by Edward Snowden in 2013.06. Regarded as one of the biggest media leaks in the United States, it presented extensive details about the surveillance programs of the NSA, that involved interception of Internet data and telephonic calls from over a billion users, across various countries.
Intellipedia: online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community. Uses MediaWiki and Google was contracted to provide the servers and search to rank the pages. Three separate wikis running on JWICS, SIPRNet, Intelink-U.
SIPRNet: "a system of interconnected computer networks used by the United States Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information (up to and including information classified SECRET) by packet switching over the TCP/IP protocols in a 'completely secure' environment". Bradley Manning & WikiLeaks; US diplomatic cables.
Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS): system of interconnected computer networks primarily used by the United States Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to transmit classified information by packet switching over TCP/IP in a secure environment. Cleared up to Top Secret and SCI.
Intelink: group of secure intranets used by the United States Intelligence Community. Intelink refers to the web environment on protected top secret, secret, and unclassified networks. Intelink-U: sensitive but unclassified; Intelink-S: secret-level variant of Intelink, operates on SIPRNet; Intelink-TS: sharing intelligence products up to the Top Secret and SCI level, operates on JWICS; Intelink-P (CapNet): CIA’s sole-source link to the White House and other high-level, intelligence consumers; Intelink-C (Commonwealth; STONEGHOST): links the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia intelligence communities at the TS/SCI level.
In 1975Church Committee;
Frank Church (about NSA): "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide", "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge... I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return".
Utah Data Center (Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center): data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data on the scale of yottabytes (1024 bytes).
KH-9 Hexagon: series of photographic reconnaissance satellites launched by USA between 1971 and 1986. Of twenty launch attempts by the National Reconnaissance Office, all but one were successful. Photographic film aboard Big Bird was sent back to Earth in recoverable film return capsules for processing and interpretation. The best ground resolution achieved by the main cameras was better than 0.6 meters.
Global surveillance: Main targets: China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan were ranked highly on the NSA's list of spying priorities, followed by France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. Irrelevant : From a US intelligence perspective, countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Nepal were largely irrelevant, as were most European countries like Finland, Denmark, Croatia and the Czech Republic.
Terrorist Surveillance Program (~2001.09.11-): NSA implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person
NSA call database: NSA maintains a database containing hundreds of billions of records of telephone calls made by U.S. citizens from the four largest telephone carriers in the United States: AT&T, SBC, BellSouth (all three now called AT&T), and Verizon.
Stellar Wind (STELLARWIND): open secret code name for certain information collection activities performed by NSA and revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. W. Binney goes on to say that the NSA has highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.
SIGINT Activity Designator (SIGAD): SIGINT line of collection activity; associated with a signals collection stations, which may be a base or a ship.
PRISM (surveillance program): in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information; provides for the targeting of any customers of participating corporations who live outside the United States, or American citizens whose communications include people outside the USA; allegedly includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice over IP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details.
XKeyscore: searching and analyzing Internet data about foreign nationals across the world
Tailored Access Operations (TAO): cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of NSA; active since at least circa 1998. TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on computer systems being used by entities foreign to USA. TAO is reportedly "now (2013.06.10) the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA's huge Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) (SIGINT), consisting of more than 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers". Microsoft provides advance warning to the NSA of vulnerabilities it knows about, before fixes or information about these vulnerabilities is available to the public; this enables TAO to execute so-called zero-day attacks. A Microsoft official who declined to be identified in the press confirmed that this is indeed the case, but said that Microsoft can't be held responsible for how the NSA uses this advance information.
NSA ANT catalog: 50-page classified document listing technology available to NSA TAO by the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) Division to aid in cyber surveillance. Most devices are described as already operational and available to US nationals and members of the Five Eyes alliance. According to Der Spiegel, which released the catalog to the public in 2013.12.30, "The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets' data." The document was created in 2008.
Equation Group: classified as an advanced persistent threat, is a highly sophisticated threat actor suspected of being tied to the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of USA NSA. Kaspersky Labs describes them as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world and "the most advanced (...) we have seen", operating alongside the creators of Stuxnet and Flame. Most of their targets have been in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria and Mali. The name originated from the group's extensive use of encryption.
The Shadow Brokers: hacker group who first appeared in the summer of 2016. They published several leaks containing hacking tools from NSA, including several zero-day exploits. Specifically, these exploits and vulnerabilities targeted enterprise firewalls, anti-virus products, and Microsoft products. Speculations and theories on motive and identity: NSA insider threat / whistleblower; Theory on ties to Russia.
UKUSA Agreement (United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement; Five Eyes (FVEY)): multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 9 Eyes, 14 Eyes, other "third parties": NATO members, other European democracies (Sweden), Pacific allies (Singapore, South Korea), Israel, Japan...
MUSCULAR (surveillance program): located in the United Kingdom, is the name of a surveillance programme jointly operated by GCHQ and NSA that was revealed by documents which were released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. GCHQ is the primary operator of the program. GCHQ and NSA have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google. Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013. In early 2013.11, Google announced that it was encrypting traffic between its data centers. In mid-November, Yahoo! announced similar plans.
First Chief Directorate: organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence in USSR.
GRU (Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба Вооружённых сил Росси́йской Федера́ции); formerly Main Intelligence Directorate (Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние)): foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units. Unlike Russia's other security and intelligence agencies—such as SVR, FSB, and FSO, whose heads report directly to the president of Russia—the director of the GRU is subordinate to the Russian military command, reporting to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff. The directorate is reputedly Russia's largest foreign-intelligence agency, and is distinguished among its counterparts for its willingness to execute riskier "complicated, high stakes operations". An investigation by Bellingcat and Capital identified GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev (using the alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov) as a suspect in the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian businessman Emiliyan Gebrev (Емилиян Гебрев) in Sofia, following an attack that mirrored the techniques used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. That attack has been specifically tied to Unit 29155.
Spetsnaz GRU (Special Forces of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces; Части и подразделения специального назначения (спецназ) Главного управления Генерального штаба Вооружённых сил Российской Федерации (СпН ГУ ГШ ВС РФ)): special forces (spetsnaz) of the G.U., the foreign military intelligence agency of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The Spetsnaz GRU was formed in 1949, the first spetsnaz force in the Soviet Union, as the military force of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Armed Forces. The force was designed in the context of the Cold War to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage against enemy targets in the form of special reconnaissance and direct action attacks. The Spetsnaz GRU inspired additional spetsnaz forces attached to other Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the Vympel and Alpha Group of the KGB.
GRU Unit 29155: Russian (GRU) unit tasked with foreign assassinations and other activities aimed at destabilizing European countries. The unit is thought to have operated in secret since at least 2008, though its existence only became publicly known in 2019.
Russian bounty program: alleged project of Russian military intelligence to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing American and other allied service members during the war in Afghanistan. The existence of the alleged program was reported in the media in 2020 and became an issue in the 2020 presidential election campaign. In June 2020, The Washington Post reported that intelligence suggesting the existence of a bounty operation dated to as early as 2018. The Washington Post and Associated Press both reported that Trump administration White House officials were informed of the intelligence reports in early 2019. In June 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed, several months earlier, that Unit 29155 of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had secretly offered Taliban-associated militants bounties to kill U.S. troops and other coalition personnel in Afghanistan, including during peace talks with the Taliban.
Mitrokhin Archive: collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate.
First Chief Directorate (of KGB): responsible for foreign operations and intelligence collection activities by the training and management of the covert agents, intelligence collection management, and the collection of political, scientific and technical intelligence. After USSR collapse it became
Foreign Intelligence Service.
Active measures (активные мероприятия): Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it. Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents. Against the United States: stirring up racial tensions in USA by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, placing an explosive package in "the Negro section of New York" (operation PANDORA), and spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had been planned by the US government; starting rumors that the moon landings were hoaxes and the money ostensibly used by NASA was in actuality used by the CIA...
Igor Gouzenko (Игорь Сергеевич Гузенко; 1919.01.26–1982.06.25): cipher clerk for USSR embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected in 1945.09.05, three days after the end of WWII, with 109 documents on the USSR's espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada. Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence's efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa". Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage".
Gouzenko Affair: name given to events in Canada surrounding the defection of Igor Gouzenko from USSR in 1945 and his subsequent allegations regarding the existence of a Soviet spy ring of Canadian Communists. Gouzenko's defection and revelations are considered by historians to have marked the beginning of the Cold War in Canada, as well as potentially setting the stage for the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Gouzenko's information, prior to the Commission, led to a sweeping investigation and arrests under the War Measures Act of 21 Canadians, along with 11 convictions. Among them was the Labor-Progressive Party Member of Parliament for Cartier, Fred Rose, the only Communist ever elected to Parliament. Other notable people among those accused of passing over secrets were Canadian Army Captain Gordon Lunan, and Sam Carr, a senior organizer of the Labor-Progressive Party.
Oleg Gordievsky (1938.10.10-): former colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985.
Pavel Sudoplatov (1907.07.07–1996.09.26) was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was involved in several famous episodes, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, and Operation Scherhorn, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks, made him well-known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
Metro-2: informal name for a purported secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro (known as Metro-1 when in comparison with Metro-2). The system was supposedly built, or at least started, during the time of Joseph Stalin and was codenamed D-6 (Д-6) by the KGB. It is said to connect the Kremlin with FSB headquarters, the government airport at Vnukovo-2, and an underground town at Ramenki, in addition to other locations of national importance.
Shabtai Kalmanovich (Hebrew: שבתאי קלמנוביץ', Lithuanian: Šabtajus Kalmanovičius, Russian: Шабтай Генрихович Калманович; 1947.12.18–2009.11.02): KGB spy, who later became known in Russia as a successful businessman, concert promoter and basketball sponsor. Born in Kaunas, Soviet Lithuania to an impoverished Jewish family in 1947. His mother was a Holocaust survivor who had been sheltered by a Lithuanian family after escaping Nazi captivity in the Ninth Fort. He studied chemical engineering, and joined the Soviet Army soon after his studies. When his commanders learned that his family was planning to emigrate to Israel, he was summoned to the Jewish administration of the KGB, and was recruited as a spy in exchange for expediting the emigration procedures for himself and his family. In 1971, he emigrated to Israel with his family after they received exit permits. Kalmanovich had been instructed to infiltrate Nativ by his KGB case officer and pass intelligence on its activities. According to his indictment, Kalmanovich handed over information to the Soviets over a period of 17 years. Kalmanovich became a businessman after the KGB funded investments for him in Israel. He became wealthy by exploiting cheap labor in South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana, in conjunction with other Israeli, South African and Taiwanese businessmen. He lived and worked for a time in Sierra Leone, where he made a fortune in the diamond trade and worked as a representative for Israel. His frequent trips to the Soviet Union and East Germany had aroused the suspicion of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency. Shin Bet had conducted an investigation and discovered evidence that he was passing information to the Soviets. In 1988, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for spying for the KGB. He was released after five years. Following his release in 1993, he sponsored an Israeli women's basketball team, and relocated to post-Soviet Russia to further his business career. In Russia, he promoted concerts for stars such as Michael Jackson, José Carreras and Liza Minnelli. Since 1994, Kalmanovich was director general of the large Tishinsky shopping center in Moscow. He also sponsored three basketball clubs (Žalgiris Kaunas of Lithuania, Spartak Moscow and UGMK Yekaterinburg of Russia) and became general manager of the Russia women's national basketball team in 2008. In 1999, when Žalgiris Kaunas became the champions of the EuroLeague, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus awarded Kalmanovich with Lithuanian citizenship and the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. 2009.11.02 Kalmanovich was assassinated by unknown gunmen in a passing Lada Priora vehicle as he was sitting in his car, a Mercedes S500, in Moscow.
Yuri Bezmenov (Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Безме́нов; 1939 – 1993.01.05; alias: Tomas David Schuman): Soviet journalist for RIA Novosti and a former PGU KGB informant who defected to Canada. Life in India, propaganda work, and disillusionment (1963–1970). Defection to the West and life in Canada (1970–1983). Pro-American literature and lectures (Los Angeles, 1981–1986)
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections: intelligence community assessment stated, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Hillary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
Fancy Bear (APT28, Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, STRONTIUM): cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU. Security firms SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and Fireeye's Mandiant have also said the group is sponsored by the Russian government. Likely operating since the mid-2000s, Fancy Bear's methods are consistent with the capabilities of nation-state actors. The threat group is known to target government, military, and security organizations, especially Transcaucasian and NATO-aligned states. Fancy Bear is thought to be responsible for cyber attacks on the German parliament, the French television station TV5Monde, the White House, NATO, the Democratic National Committee, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. The group serves the political interests of the Russian government, which includes helping foreign candidates that are favored by it to win elections (such as when they leaked Hillary Clinton's emails to help gain traction for Donald Trump during the United States 2016 Elections). Fancy Bear's behavior has been classified as an advanced persistent threat. They employ zero-day vulnerabilities and use spear phishing and malware to compromise targets.
Cozy Bear: classified as advanced persistent threat APT29, Russian hacker group believed to be associated with Russian intelligence. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has suggested that it may be associated with either FSB or Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)..
Sandworm (hacker group) (Telebots, Voodoo Bear, Iron Viking): Advanced Persistent Threat operated by Military Unit 74455, a cyberwarfare unit of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. The team is believed to be behind the December 2015 Ukraine power grid cyberattack, the 2017 cyberattacks on Ukraine using the NotPetya malware, various interference efforts in the 2017 French presidential election, and the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Then-United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania Scott Brady described the group's cyber campaign as "representing the most destructive and costly cyber-attacks in history." In February 2022, Sandworm allegedly released the Cyclops Blink as malware. The malware is similar to VPNFilter. The malware allows a botnet to be constructed, and affects Asus routers and WatchGuard Firebox and XTM appliances. CISA issued a warning about this malware. In April 2022, Sandworm attempted a blackout in Ukraine. It is said to be the first attack in five years to use an Industroyer malware variant called Industroyer2.
Vulkan files: leaked set of emails, and other documents, implicating the Russian company NTC Vulkan (НТЦ Вулкан) in acts of cybercrime, political interference in foreign affairs (such as in the 2016 United States presidential election) through social media, censorship of domestic social media, and espionage, in collusion with Russia's FSB, their armed forces (GOU and GRU); and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections: Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum: a debated subject and remains unproven, though multiple sources argue evidence exists demonstrating that the Russian government attempted to influence British public opinion in favor of leaving the European Union. Investigations into this subject have been undertaken by the UK Electoral Commission, the UK Parliament's Culture Select Committee and Intelligence and Security Committee, and the United States Senate. "The Russia Report" published by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament in 2020.07 did not specifically address the Brexit campaign, but it concluded that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace. It also found substantial evidence that there had been interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Germany's secret services and secrecy
Enigma machine: any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used in the twentieth century for enciphering and deciphering secret messages. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. An estimated 100,000 Enigma machines were constructed. After the end of World War II, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, still widely considered secure, to a number of developing countries. As these countries did not know that the machine had been broken, their supposedly secure communications were in fact being read regularly by the major Western intelligence agencies.
B-Dienst (Beobachtungsdienst): Department of the German Naval Intelligence Service (Marinenachrichtendienst, MND III) of the OKM, that dealt with the interception and recording, decoding and analysis of the enemy, in particular British radio communications before and during WWII. B-Dienst broke British Naval Combined Cypher No. 3 in October 1941, which was used to encrypt all communications between naval personnel, for Allied North Atlantic convoys, providing intelligence for the Battle of the Atlantic, until the British Admiralty introduced Naval Cypher No. 5 on 1943.06.10 and became effectively secure with the introduction of the stencil subtractor system that was used to recypher Naval Cypher No. 5, in 1944.01. It is worth noting that from 1942 on-wards, due to the high demand for men at the front, B-Dienst was forced to employ women cryptographers. By the end of the war, employment was split at 50% women and 50% men.
Stasi 2.0: 2013.08 German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected the comparison between NSA and the Stasi, suggesting that the comparison trivialises what state security did to people in East Germany
de:Volkszählungsboykott#Volkszählungsboykott: interesting; why? Before people were asked even stronger and stranger questions? Anonymity and privacy vs (efficient) service provision and open society... What is "open society"? Freedom of speech? Freedom to be anonymous?..
Britain's, United Kingdom's secrecy
Stewart Menzies (1890.01.30–1968.05.29): Chief of MI6 (SIS), British Secret Intelligence Service from 1939 to 1952, during and after WWII. Following the end of the war, Menzies entered MI6 (also known as SIS). He was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Soon after the war, Menzies was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the Imperial General Staff, General Staff Officer, first grade. Within MI6, he became assistant director for special intelligence. Admiral Hugh Sinclair became director-general of MI6 in 1924, and he made Menzies his deputy by 1929, with Menzies being promoted to full colonel soon afterwards. Menzies was certainly adept at bureaucratic intrigue, a virtual necessity in his position, but his efforts as Chief had a major role in winning WWII, as evidenced by his nearly 1,500 meetings with Prime Minister Churchill during the war.
Special Operations Executive (SOE): British WWII organisation to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. SOE operated in all countries or former countries occupied by or attacked by the Axis forces, except where demarcation lines were agreed with Britain's principal Allies (USSR and USA). It also made use of neutral territory on occasion, or made plans and preparations in case neutral countries were attacked by the Axis.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC): covert organisation set up in New York City by MI6 in 1940.05 upon the authorisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. purpose was to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage against British interests in the Americas, and mobilise pro-British opinion in the Americas. As a 'huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda', the BSC influenced news coverage in the Herald Tribune, the New York Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Radio New York Worldwide. The stories disseminated from Rockefeller Center would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, before being relayed to the American public. Through this, anti-German stories were placed in major American media outlets to turn public opinion. BSC benefitted from support given by the chief of the US Office of Strategic Services, William J. Donovan (whose organisation was modelled on British activities), and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was staunchly anti-Nazi.
Ultra: designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence thus obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra secret. In order to ensure that the successful code breaking did not become apparent to the Germans, British intelligence created a fictional MI6 master spy, Boniface, who controlled a fictional series of agents throughout Germany. Information obtained through code-breaking was often attributed to the human intelligence from the Boniface network. The term "Ultra" has often been used almost synonymously with "Enigma decrypts". However, Ultra also encompassed decrypts of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machines that were used by the German High Command, and the Hagelin machine. Safeguarding of sources: The Allies were seriously concerned with the prospect of the Axis command finding out that they had broken into the Enigma traffic. The British were more disciplined about such measures than the Americans, and this difference was a source of friction between them. In the Battle of the Atlantic, the precautions were taken to the extreme. In most cases where the Allies knew from intercepts the location of a U-boat in mid-Atlantic, the U-boat was not attacked immediately, until a "cover story" could be arranged. For example, a search plane might be "fortunate enough" to sight the U-boat, thus explaining the Allied attack.
Bombe: electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during WWII. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently from each other and from the British Bombe. The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company.
Colossus computer: set of computers developed by British codebreakers in 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. Colossus was designed by research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.
Israel's secret services and secrecy
National Security Council (Israel) (NSC): Israel's central body for coordination, integration, analysis and monitoring in the field of national security and is the staff forum on national security for the Israeli Prime Minister and Government. However, national security decisions typically made by national security councils in other countries are handled by the Security Cabinet. The Council draws its authority from the government and operates according to guidelines from the Prime Minister. The NSC was established in 1999 by the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu following Government Resolution 4889, in the framework of drawing lessons from the Yom Kippur War.
Israeli Intelligence Community: made up of Aman (military intelligence), Mossad (overseas intelligence) and Shabak (internal security).
Mossad: national intelligence agency of Israel. Mossad is responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counter-terrorism. Its director answers directly and only to the Prime Minister. Its annual budget is estimated to be around US$2.73 bln and it is estimated that it employs around 7,000 people directly, making it the one of the world's largest espionage agencies. Unlike other security bodies (such as the Israeli Army or the Israel Security Agency), its purpose, objectives, roles, missions, powers or budget have not been defined in any law.
Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel) (Aman): central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Aman was created in 1950, when the Intelligence Department was spun off from the IDF's General Staff (the Intelligence Department itself was composed largely of former members of the Haganah Intelligence Service). Aman is an independent service, and not part of the ground forces, Navy or the Air Force.
Unit 8200: Israeli Intelligence Corps unit responsible for collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning. Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as a feeder programs for the unit. Former Unit 8200 soldiers have, after completing their military service, gone on to founding and occupying top positions in many international IT companies and in Silicon Valley.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency; Shabak): Israel's internal security service. Its motto is "Magen veLo Yera'e" (מָגֵן וְלֹא יֵרָאֶה, lit. "Shield and not seen" or "The unseen shield"). Organization: The Arab Department: responsible primarily for Arab-related counterterrorism activities in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip; The Israel and Foreigners Department: formerly named the Non-Arab Affairs Department. As its original concerns mostly related to the Communist Bloc, it shrank after the fall of the Soviet Union, but rose again in importance in response to Jewish terrorist activity beginning in the early 80s; The Protective Security Department: responsible for protecting high-value individuals and locations in the country such as government officials, embassies, airports, and research facilities.
Jonathan Pollard (1954.08.07-): former intelligence analyst for USA government. In 1987, as part of a plea agreement, Pollard pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. Pollard is the only American who has received a life sentence for passing classified information to an ally of the U.S. In defense of his actions, Pollard declared that he committed espionage only because "the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information". Israeli officials, U.S.-Israeli activist groups, and some U.S. politicians who saw his punishment as unfair lobbied continually for reduction or commutation of his sentence. The Israeli government acknowledged a portion of its role in Pollard's espionage in 1987, and issued a formal apology to the U.S., but did not admit to paying him until 1998. Opposing any form of clemency were many active and retired U.S. officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet; several former U.S. Secretaries of Defense; a bi-partisan group of U.S. congressional leaders; and members of the U.S. intelligence community. Pollard revealed aspects of the U.S. intelligence gathering process, its "sources and methods". He sold numerous closely guarded state secrets, including NSA's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. While Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Pollard worked exclusively for Israel, Pollard admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries.
Black propaganda: false information and material that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side. It is typically used to vilify, embarrass or misrepresent the enemy. Black propaganda is covert in nature in that its aims, identity, significance, and sources are hidden.
Active measures: form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB) to influence the course of world events; "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs" - retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin.
Big lie (große Lüge): gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in WWI on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting WWI. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and USA. U.S. psychological profile of Hitler: His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. Subsequent use: Cold War era; Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election; 21st-century use by American conservatives; Uyghur genocide: Government of China (PRC) has falsely denied committing human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and has labelled declarations of Uyghur genocide as a "big lie" perpetrated by hostile forces; Russo-Ukrainian War: Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations described the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as "the War of the Big Lie. The Lie that Ukraine doesn't exist. The Lie that Ukraine has no right to full sovereignty because it is a puppet state of the West. The Lie that A invaded B because C is to blame – the West, the expansion of NATO, the USA's global hegemony."
Information privacy (data privacy): relationship between collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. Privacies: medical, financial, political (voting), Internet (ISPs, websites, databases, logging of data).
Personally identifiable information (PII): information technology and the Internet have made it easier to collect PII, leading to a profitable market in collecting and reselling PII. Forensics: criminals hide their PII (wear masks, gloves, no handwriting, proxy IP address). Intelligence agencies: sometimes employees do not disclose to their family and friends where they work.
@DE:
de:Datenkrake (data + octopus): "steht für Systeme und Organisationen, die personenbezogene Informationen in großem Stil auswerten und/oder sie an Dritte weitergeben".
Expectation of privacy (in US constitutional law): legal test which is crucial in defining the scope of the applicability of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Organizations:
Privacy International (PI): UK-based non-profit organisation formed in 1990, "as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations": rankings of countries by Privacy index.
de:FoeBuD (
FoeBuD, Verein zur Förderung des öffentlichen bewegten und unbewegten Datenverkehrs): DE privacy and digital rights organisation. Moto: "a world worth living in the digital age". Has links with CCC.
Freiheit statt Angst (Freedom not Fear): yearly demonstration for data/info privacy and against surveillance, in DE from 2006; from 2008 in other countries.
Some companies using the web users for their financial gain (and privacy breach):
Claria Corporation (formerly: Gator Corporation) [1998-2006/2008]: produced spyware containing products. Going for advertisement money: replace websites' ads with their own ads.
NebuAd [2006-2009]: developing behavioral targeting advertising systems, seeking deals with ISPs to enable them to analyse customer's websurfing habits in order to provide them with more relevant, micro-targeted advertising.
Phorm (previously: 121Media): at first produced spyware containing products. Then produced Webwise - behavioral targeting service (similar to NebuAd) that uses deep packet inspection to examine traffic. UK ISPs used/use Phorm.
Stierlitz (Шти́рлиц): lead character in a popular Russian book series written in the 1960s by novelist Yulian Semyonov and of the television adaptation Seventeen Moments of Spring. Stierlitz has become a stereotypical spy in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, similar to James Bond in Western culture. Ivan Zassoursky notes that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, has been portrayed as "embod[ying] the image—very important for the Russian television audience—of Standartenführer von Stierlitz... If anyone missed the connection between Putin, who served in Germany, and von Stierlitz, articles in the press reminded them of the resemblance and helped create the association." The connection went both ways; Putin was strongly influenced by the novels, commenting: "What amazed me most of all was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not."
Minarchism: small government, or limited-government libertarianism. The only governmental institutions would be the military, police, courts, and legislatures, with some theories also including prisons.
Template:Anarcho-capitalism:
Anarcho-capitalist literature: Neal Stephenson's: Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: "franchise operated quasi-national entities": free market for sovereignty services; Ayn Rand's: Atlas Shrugged: isolated community with no government, that operates strictly according to the non-aggression principle
Free market / Laissez-faire vs. Socialism/Communism:
Libertarian socialism (social anarchism, sometimes left libertarianism): group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless societywithout private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialism is opposed to all coercive forms of social organization, and promotes free association in place of government and opposes what it sees as the coercive social relations of capitalism, such as wage labor. The term libertarian socialism is used by some socialists to differentiate their philosophy from state socialism or by some as a synonym for left anarchism.
Japan–United States relations: notion that Japan is becoming the "Great Britain of the Pacific", or the key and pivotal ally of USA in the region.
United States–European Union relations: Cooperation: NATO Quint = US and EU big four (France, Germany, Italy and the UK), Arms embargo on the People's Republic of China
Territorial disputes in the South China Sea#Background: involve both island and maritime claims among seven sovereign states within the region: Brunei, PRC (China), Taiwan (ROC), Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Haiyang Shiyou 981 standoff: tensions between China and Vietnam arising from the Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation moving its Haiyang Shiyou 981 (known in Vietnam as "Hải Dương - 981") oil platform to waters near the disputed Paracel Islands in South China Sea, and the resulting Vietnamese efforts to prevent the platform from establishing a fixed position.
Aksai Chin#Strategic importance: China National Highway 219 runs through Aksai Chin connecting Lazi and Xinjiang in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Despite this region being nearly uninhabitable and having no resources, it remains strategically important for China as it connects Tibet and Xinjiang. Construction started in 1951 and the road was completed in 1957. The construction of this highway was one of the triggers for the Sino-Indian War of 1962.
March (territory) (mark): border region similar to a frontierq; during the Frankish Carolingian Dynasty, usage of the word spread throughout Europe. Generally circumscribed the same or similar land area as a county but was differentiated from other counties by its special position at the border of the state. In contrast to regular counties, which were ruled over by counts, marches were (at least in theory) ruled over by nobles with the title of Marquess (English), Marquis (French or Scots), Margrave (Markgraf i.e. count of the mark) or nobles with corresponding titles (other European states).
Marches of Neustria: two Marches created in 861 by the Carolingian king of West Francia Charles the Bald that were ruled by officials appointed by the crown, known as wardens, prefects or margraves (or "marquis" in French).
List of divided islands: New Guinea, Borneo, Ireland, Hispaniola, (Isla Grande de) Tierra del Fuego, Timor, Cyprus...
Geostrategy: subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends —in this case, a country's resources (whether they are limited or extensive) with its geopolitical objectives (which can be local, regional, or global).
String of Pearls (Indian Ocean): geopolitical hypothesis proposed by United States political researchers in 2004. The term refers to the network of Chinese military and commercial facilities and relationships along its sea lines of communication, which extend from the Chinese mainland to Port Sudan in the Horn of Africa. The sea lines run through several major maritime choke points such as the Strait of Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Lombok Strait as well as other strategic maritime centres in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Somalia. Many commentators in India believe this plan, together with the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and other parts of China's Belt and Road Initiative under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping, is a threat to India's national security.
Peter Zeihan (1973.01.18-): USA geopolitical analyst and author. Accidental Superpower (2014): focuses on topographical and geographical landmarks (rivers, oceans, mountains, etc.) as distinct advantages in a nation's ability to dominate others economically, industrially and militarily. With the use of maps, Zeihan is able to point out that navigable rivers, or access to the oceans, along with a reliable road or rail network make a critical difference, of which the USA is featured to have twelve navigable rivers, two oceans on either of its flanks, which are key in relying less on large land infrastructure projects, which in turn encourage small government.
Revolutionary wave: series of revolutions occurring in various locations in a similar time period. In many cases, past revolutions and revolutionary waves may inspire current ones, or an initial revolution inspires other concurrent "affiliate revolutions" with similar aims.
Atlantic Revolutions: United States (1775–1783), France and French-controlled Europe (1789–1814), Haiti (1791–1804), and Spanish America (1810–1825).
Revolutions of 1848 (Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples, the Year of Revolution)
Caricature by Ferdinand Schröder on the defeat of the revolutions of 1848/49 in Europe (published in Düsseldorfer Monatshefte, 1849.08.)
Revolutions of 1917–23: formed a revolutionary wave precipitated by the end of World War I in general and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 in particular.
Government, government intervention and government regulation
Democracy (EL: δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) "rule of the people"): all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives; contemporary governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic elements. Concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions.
Criticism of democracy: Economic: irrational voters, efficiency of the system, wealth disparity. Sociological: lack of political education, benefits of a specialised society. Political: uncontested good, cyclical theory of government, Political Coase Theorem, political instability (many people have put forward the idea that democracy is undesirable for a developing country in which economic growth and the reduction of poverty are top priority). Philosophical: mob rule (Plato's the Republic: "Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike"), violation of Property Rights (libertarians), timocracy and oligarchy, role of republicanism, moral decay. Administrative: short-termism (instability of coalition governments), corruption within democratic governments, volatility/unsustainability.
Democracy Index: index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. 4 regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
Anti-democratic thought: 1.1 Plato's rejection of Athenian democracy; 1.2 Nietzsche on democracy; 1.5 Michels on democracy (iron law of oligarchy)
Democracy: The God That Failed (BOOK): by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949.09.02-) is a German-born academic, libertarian theorist and an Austrian School economist; containing thirteen essays on democracy. Passages in the book oppose universal suffrage and favor "natural elites". The book helped popularize Hoppe on the far-right. Hoppe attributes democracy's failures to pressure groups seeking increased government expenditures, regulations and taxation and a lack of counter-measures to them. Potential solutions he discusses include secession, "shifting of control over the nationalised wealth from a larger, central government to a smaller, regional one" and "complete freedom of contract, occupation, trade and migration introduced". Hoppe concludes that democracy is the primary cause of a wave of decivilization sweeping the world since WWI, and that democracy must be delegitimized. Hoppe characterizes democracy as "publicly owned government", and when he compares it with monarchy—"privately owned government"—he concludes that the latter is preferable; however, Hoppe aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure for advancing civilization—something he calls the natural order, a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in which jurisdictions freely compete for adherents. The title of the work is an allusion to {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#Soviet Union, USSR (1922-1991)The God that Failed}.
The Economist's Democracy Index survey for 2012.
Democracy in America (De La Démocratie en Amérique; published in two volumes, 1st in 1835 and 2nd in 1840): classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville, examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead: collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. Main themes: The Puritan Founding, The Federal Constitution (USA people play a more prominent role in the protection of freedom: Township democracy; Mores, laws, and circumstances; Tyranny of the majority; Religion and beliefs; The family; Individualism; Associations; Self-interest rightly understood; Materialism), Situation of women. Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve". He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself. According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals.
Regulatory capture: examples: USA: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) (formerly: Minerals Management Service (MMS)) - Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC): ponzi scheme in silver and gold trading; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): hydraulic fracturing of rocks "posed little or no threat" to drinking water; Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): unsafe planes flying; New York Fed: flirting with Wall Street; FDA: Monsanto's rBGH (growth hormone); ICC; Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): 1979 Three Mile Island accident; OCC: financial crisis of 2008 and banks OCC controls; SEC: Wall Street, crisis of 2008. Japan: Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA): Fukushima.
Crony capitalism: "The larger the government budget and the more the economy is regulated, the more opportunities for cronyism exists." Examples: military-industrial complex of USA; USDA (US dept. of Agriculture: Creekstone Farms); Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Government failure: when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. Government's failure to intervene in a market failure that would result in a socially preferable mix of output is referred to as passive Government failure. Government vs. economics = Politicians vs. economists.
Continuity of government: principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of nuclear war or other catastrophic event.
Government self-regulation
JASON (advisory group): independent group of scientists which advises the USA government on matters of science and technology. The group was first created as a way to get a younger generation of scientists—that is, not the older Los Alamos and MIT Radiation Laboratory alumni—involved in advising the government. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members.
Various forms of government, and their associated political systems, located along the pathway of regional integration or separation.The territorial organization of European countries.
Democratic consolidation: process by which a new democracy matures, in a way that it becomes unlikely to revert to authoritarianism without an external shock, and is regarded as the only available system of government within a country. This is the case when: no significant political group seriously attempts to overthrow the democratic regime, the democratic system is regarded as the most appropriate way to govern by the vast majority of the public, and all political actors are accustomed to the fact that conflicts are resolved through established political and constitutional rules.
Federation (Latin: foedus, foederis, 'covenant'; aka federal state): political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions under a central (federal) government. Important ones: Argentina, Mexico, USA. Alleged de facto federations: Spain, European Union, Russian Federation, South Africa.
Regional state: more centralized than a federation, but more decentralized than a unitary state. Important ones: China, France, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
Unitary state: state governed as a single entity in which the central government is ultimately supreme. Unitary states stand in contrast with federations, also known as federal states. Unitary republics, Unitary monarchies.
Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO; HQ=The Hague; 1991.02.11-): purpose is to facilitate the voices of unrepresented and marginalised nations and peoples worldwide. Technically, it is not a non-governmental organisation (NGO) as some of its members are governments or government agencies of unrecognized states
Eurasia:
Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM; 1996-): EU Commission, ASEAN Plus Three (the Three: China (PRC), Korea, Japan); from 2008: India, Mongolia, Pakistan; from 2010: Australia, Russia, New Zealand; from 2012: Bangladesh, Norway, Switzerland.
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE; langs=en, fr, de, it, ru, es): world's largest regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization with observer status at UN. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, promotion of human rights, freedom of the press, and free and fair elections. The OSCE is concerned with early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict rehabilitation. Most of its 57 participating countries are in Europe, but there are a few members present in Asia and North America. The participating states cover much of the land area of the Northern Hemisphere. It was created during the Cold War era as a forum for discussion between the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc.
Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty: post–Cold War adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed 1999.11.19 during OSCE's 1999 Istanbul summit. The main difference with the earlier treaty is that the troop ceilings on a bloc-to-bloc basis (NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact) would be replaced with a system of national and territorial ceilings. NATO member-states link their ratification of the Adapted CFE Treaty with the fulfillment by Russia of the political commitments it undertook at the 1999 OSCE Istanbul Summit (so called "Istanbul commitments") to withdraw its forces from Georgia and Moldova. Russia has strongly criticized this linkage, which it considers artificial, and has on several occasions questioned the relevance of the Adapted CFE Treaty, given its continued non-ratification by NATO states. Russia suspended its ratification in 2007.07.14 amidst cooling relations between the US and Russia.
Science and Development Network: not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology in the developing world to policymakers, researchers, the media and civil society.
International Criminal Court (ICC): permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (although jurisdiction for the crime of aggression will not be active until 2017 at the earliest). Intended to complement existing national judicial systems, and may only exercise its jurisdiction when national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute such crimes.
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO): Eurasian political, economic and military organisation which was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB): multilateral development bank that aims to support the building of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The bank started operation after the agreement entered into force in 2015.12.25, after ratifications were received from 10 member states holding a total number of 50% of the initial subscriptions of the Authorized Capital Stock. Major economies that are not members include Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, and the United States. The United Nations has addressed the launch of AIIB as having potential for "scaling up financing for sustainable development" for the concern of global economic governance. The capital of the bank is $100 billion, equivalent to 2⁄3 of the capital of the Asian Development Bank and about half that of the World Bank. The bank was proposed by China in 2013 and the initiative was launched at a ceremony in Beijing in October 2014. It received the highest credit ratings from the three biggest rating agencies in the world, and is seen as a potential rival to World Bank and IMF.
Template:United Nations &
United Nations (UN): international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace. Founded in 1945 after WWII to replace League of Nations. General Assembly (the main deliberative assembly); the Security Council (for deciding certain resolutions for peace and security); the Economic and Social Council (for assisting in promoting international economic and social cooperation and development); the Secretariat (for providing studies, information, and facilities needed by the UN); the International Court of Justice (the primary judicial organ); and the United Nations Trusteeship Council (which is currently inactive). FAO (food and agriculture), ICAO (aviation), IFAD, ILO, IMO (maritime), IMF, ITU, UNESCO, UNIDO (industrial development), UPU (postal), WB (World Bank, or World Bank Group (WBG)?), WFP, WHO, WIPO, WMO (meteorological), UNWTO (tourism).
United Nations Secretariat (French: Secrétariat des Nations unies) is one of the six major organs of the United Nations, with the others being (a) the General Assembly; (b) the Security Council; (c) the Economic and Social Council; (d) the defunct Trusteeship Council; and (e) the International Court of Justice. The Secretariat is the United Nations' executive arm. The Secretariat has an important role in setting the agenda for the deliberative and decision-making bodies of the UN (the General Assembly, Economic and Social Council, and Security Council), and the implementation of the decision of these bodies. The Secretary-General, who is appointed by the General Assembly, is the head of the secretariat.
Defamation of religion and the United Nations: issue that has been repeatedly addressed by some member states of UN since 1999. Several non-binding resolutions have been voted on and accepted by the UN condemning "defamation of religion". The motions, sponsored on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, aim to prohibit expression that would "fuel discrimination, extremism and misperception leading to polarization and fragmentation with dangerous unintended and unforeseen consequences". Religious groups, human rights activists, free-speech activists, and several countries in the West have condemned the resolutions arguing it amounts to an international blasphemy law. Critics of the resolutions including human rights groups argue that they are used to politically strengthen domestic anti-blasphemy and religious defamation laws, which are used to imprison journalists, students and other peaceful political dissidents.
Durban Review Conference: 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). Conference was boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and USA. The Czech Republic discontinued its attendance on the first day, and twenty-three other EU countries sent low-level delegations. The western countries had expressed concerns that the conference would be used to promote anti-Semitism and laws against blasphemy perceived as contrary to the principles of free speech, and that the conference would not deal with discrimination against homosexuals. European countries also criticized the meeting for focusing on the West and ignoring problems of racism and intolerance in the developing world.
List of specialized agencies of the United Nations: autonomous organizations working with the United Nations and each other through the co-ordinating machinery of the United Nations Economic and Social Council at the intergovernmental level, and through the Chief Executives Board for co-ordination (CEB) at the inter-secretariat level. At present the UN has in total 15: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO); International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); International Labour Organization (ILO); International Maritime Organization (IMO); International Monetary Fund (IMF); International Telecommunication Union (ITU); United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); Universal Postal Union (UPU); World Bank Group (WBG: IBRD, IFC, IDA); World Health Organization (WHO); World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); World Meteorological Organization (WMO); World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Related organizations: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission; International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); International Organization for Migration (IOM); Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons; WTO.
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
World Digital Library (WDL): international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress; aims to expand non-English and non-western content on the Internet, and contribute to scholarly research; make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishing WIPO, WIPO was created to promote and protect IP across the world by cooperating with countries as well as international organizations. It began operations on 1970.04.26 when the convention entered into force.
International Court of Justice (ICJ): primary judicial branch of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. Its main functions are to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to provide advisory opinions on legal questions submitted to it by duly authorized international branches, agencies, and the UN General Assembly.
United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs: office of the U.N. Secretariat that promotes and facilitates peaceful international cooperation in outer space. It works to establish or strengthen the legal and regulatory frameworks for space activities, and assists developing countries in using space science and technology for sustainable socioeconomic development.
Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies): multilateral treaty that forms the basis of international space law. Negotiated and drafted under the auspices of UN, it was opened for signature in USA, UK, and USSR in 1967.01.27, entering into force on 1967.10.10. As of February 2021, 111 countries are parties to the treaty—including all major spacefaring nations—and another 23 are signatories.
World Heritage Site: landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, scientific or other form of significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity".
World Bank Group (WBG): family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and most famous development bank in the world and is an observer at the United Nations Development Group. Technically the World Bank is part of the United Nations system, but its governance structure is different: each institution in the World Bank Group is owned by its member governments, which subscribe to its basic share capital, with votes proportional to shareholding. Membership gives certain voting rights that are the same for all countries but there are also additional votes which depend on financial contributions to the organization. The President of the World Bank is nominated by the President of USA and elected by the Bank's Board of Governors.
World Bank: international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs. Official goal is the reduction of poverty. However, according to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of Capital investment.
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development: international financial institution that offers loans to middle-income developing countries. It was established in 1944 with the mission of financing the reconstruction of European nations devastated by WWII.
International Development Association: international financial institution which offers concessional loans and grants to the world's poorest developing countries.
International Finance Corporation: international financial institution that offers investment, advisory, and asset management services to encourage private sector development in developing countries. It was established in 1956 as the private sector arm of the World Bank Group to advance economic development by investing in strictly for-profit and commercial projects that purport to reduce poverty and promote development. The IFC's stated aim is to create opportunities for people to escape poverty and achieve better living standards by mobilizing financial resources for private enterprise, promoting accessible and competitive markets, supporting businesses and other private sector entities, and creating jobs and delivering necessary services to those who are poverty-stricken or otherwise vulnerable.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
International Monetary Fund (IMF): "hedge fund of the world" run by US (~17% of all votes)? SDRs are proportional to vote percentage. Is it socialist or libertarian or somebody-to-get-rich (like in arms trading)? IMF's impact on: access to food, public health, environment. IMF's support to dictators during the Cold War.
Special Drawing Rights: supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets. Not a currency, SDRs instead represent a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged. As they can only be exchanged for Euros, Japanese yen, UK pounds, or US dollars, SDRs may actually represent a potential claim on IMF member countries' nongold foreign exchange reserve assets, which are usually held in those currencies. ISO 4217 code: XDR. As of March 2011, the amount of SDRs in existence is around XDR 238.3 billion, but this figure is expected to rise to XDR 476.8 by 2013.
Institute of International Finance (IIF): world's only global association or trade group of financial institutions - world's largest commercial banks and investment banks, as well as a growing number of insurance companies and investment management firms; associate members include multinational corporations, trading companies, export credit agencies, and multilateral agencies. Created by 38 banks of leading industrialized countries in 1983 in response to the international debt crisis of the early 1980s. IIF played a role in the global financial crisis of 2008 by advocating to relax subsequent attempts of self-regulation (Basel III rules), the debt crises of Latin American, Asia, and the Euro zone. Greek debt crisis
World Trade Organization (WTO)
World Trade Organization (WTO, NOT part of UN; i.e. UN is for politics, WTO is for economics and trade, but UN & WTO work "closely" together politically as economics goes hand-in-hand with politics, e.g.
International Trade Centre (ITC)): supervise and liberalize international trade. Before Jan. 1, 1995 -
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Provides a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements, and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their parliaments. The WTO is governed by a ministerial conference, meeting every two years; a general council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the ministerial conference. Languages: en, fr, es.
International Trade Organization (ITO): Bretton Woods Conference 1944; but by 1950 ITO still was non-existent, while "GATT 1947" gained significance leading to GATT and later WTO to be the replacement for never-to-be ITO.
World Trade Organization accession and membership: huge economies joining WTO (all others, like EU, USA, Japan, South Korea were from GATT times): India (1995 1 01), Indonesia (1995 1 01), China (PRC, 2001 12 11), Taiwan (ROC, 2002 1 01), Russia (2011 12 16).
Multi Fibre Arrangement: Bangladesh for the cheapest clothing, China for better quality "bras". EU & USA fight Chinese textile imports outside WTO/GATT agreement.
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS): TRIPS contains requirements that nations' laws must meet for copyright rights, including the rights of performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting organizations; geographical indications, including appellations of origin; industrial designs; integrated circuit layout-designs (Mickey-Mouse copyright by Disney meets the IC "copyright-like" IP rights of Intel); patents; monopolies for the developers of new plant varieties; trademarks; trade dress; and undisclosed or confidential information. TRIPS also specifies enforcement procedures, remedies, and dispute resolution procedures.
Doha Declaration (Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, 2001 Nov.): the old guard of patents and the new cheap "essential medicines". Similar to Linux vs. MS Windows/Mac OS X patent battles, just now human lives are at stake.
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE): central command of NATO military forces. Location: at Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons (at first located in Paris (1951-1967), but then France (under de Gaulle) left NATO). From 1951, SHAPE was the headquarters of operational forces in the European theatre (Allied Command Europe, ACE), but since 2003 SHAPE has been the headquarters of Allied Command Operations (ACO) controlling all allied operations worldwide. The commanding officer of Allied Command Operations has also retained the title "Supreme Allied Commander Europe" (SACEUR), and continues to be a U.S. four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as Commander, U.S. European Command.
Contact Countries (2000): Australia (AUSCANNZUKUS) [formerly also UK], New Zealand (AUSCANNZUKUS) [formerly also UK], Japan [WWII & USA occupation of Japan], South Korea [USA and Korean War]
AUSCANNZUKUS ("Five Eyes"): Anglosphere nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA.
Enlargement of NATO: After the Cold War ended, and Germany reunited in 1990, there was a debate in NATO about continued expansion eastward. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the organization, amid much debate within the organization and Russian opposition. Cyprus and Macedonia are stalled from accession by, respectively, Turkey and Greece, pending the resolution of disputes between them. Other countries which have a stated goal of eventually joining include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Georgia. The incorporation of countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of influence has been a cause of increased tension between NATO countries and Russia.
NATO Response Force (NRF): high-readiness force comprising land, air, sea and special forces units capable of being deployed quickly. Until 2022.02, when NATO activated it in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, units assigned to the NRF had only been used to assist with disaster relief and security at high-profile security events. In 2022.02.25 after a NATO meeting, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) was activated for the defense of members of the alliance, for the first time.
Exercise Trident Juncture 2018 (2018.10.25–11.23): NATO-led military exercise held in Norway with an Article 5 collective defence scenario. The exercise was the largest of its kind in Norway since the 1980s. An expected 50,000 participants from 31 nations partook, including 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft and 65 vessels. The exercise was mainly held in the central and eastern parts of Norway, in addition to air and sea areas in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The stated goal of Trident Juncture was to train the NRF and to test the alliance's defence capability.
2008 Bucharest summit (2–4 April 2008): NATO summit organized in the Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest, Romania. Among other business, Croatia and Albania were invited to join the Alliance. The Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia was not invited to join NATO due to its ongoing naming dispute with Greece. Georgia and Ukraine had hoped to join the NATO Membership Action Plan, but, while welcoming the two countries’s aspirations for membership and agreeing that "these countries will become members of NATO", the NATO members decided to review their request in December 2008. NATO–Russia meeting: Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to the summit, and he arrived on the second day (3 April) to participate in bilateral NATO–Russia talks. He opposed the US plans to deploy missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, which was discussed at the summit. Russia also opposed Georgia and Ukraine's NATO membership bids.
2022 Madrid summit (2022.06.29–30): Australia, Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Sweden, ROC (Taiwan) and Thailand are not member states of NATO but were invited to attend and participate in the summit. The presidents of the European Council and European Commission were also invited, as well as the ministers of Jordan, Mauritania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. President Zelenskyy was invited to the summit and made an appearance via video link.
Foreign relations of NATO: NATO runs a number of programs which provide a framework for the partnerships between itself and these non-member nations, typically based on that country's location. These include the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace. Global NATO: Australia, Colombia, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia (More recently, Mongolia has been working together with NATO on Science for Peace and Security Programme, which focuses on cybersecurity and reducing the environmental impact of military sites), New Zealand, Pakistan.
Finland–NATO relations: became a member of NATO on 2023.04.04 (finalizing the fastest accession process in the treaty's history). Finland has had formal relations with NATO since 1994, when it joined the Partnership for Peace program. Finland has historically maintained a position of neutrality in the face of its often complicated relations with Russia. The possibility of membership became a topic of debate in the country after the end of the Cold War, and following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country officially applied to join NATO in 2022.05.18. Cooperation before joining: Before joining NATO, Finland participated in nearly all sub-areas of the Partnership for Peace programme, and provided peacekeeping forces to both the Afghanistan and Kosovo missions. The Finnish government's 1997 defense white paper strongly advocated the development of interoperability to support international crisis management in line with the PfP concept. The 1998–2008 defense program began in May 1997 at the "Spirit of PfP" training in northern Norway. Foreign opinion: In 2014.06 interview in the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, Vladimir Putin's personal envoy Sergey Alexandrovich Markov accused Finland of extreme "Russophobia" and suggested that Finland joining NATO could start World War III. In 2016.07, Putin stated on a visit to Finland that Russia would increase the number of troops on the Finnish border if Finland were to join NATO. He also warned that NATO would "fight to the last Finn against Russia". After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the radical shift in Finnish positions toward joining NATO, Maria Zakharova and Dmitry Medvedev warned that joining NATO would have consequences for Finland, including the deployment of nuclear weapons; Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the Finnish lease on the Saimaa canal may be terminated. By the end of 2022.09, 28 of 30 NATO member states had ratified the accession protocol, the remaining two being Hungary and Turkey, who would both ratify it by early 2023.04.
Sweden–NATO relations: have a close relationship and regularly carry out joint exercises, cooperate in peacekeeping operations and share information. Historically, a minority of the Swedish population has been in favour of NATO membership, but the question of membership rose in popularity following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Sweden applied to join the organisation in 2022.05.18. 2022.07.05, NATO signed the accession protocol for Sweden to join the alliance. While Sweden's membership has not been fully ratified by NATO member states and it is not yet a full member, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in 2023.03 it was "inconceivable" NATO would not respond if Sweden's security were threatened. By November, Sweden's NATO membership had been ratified by 28 out of 30 member states, with only Hungary and Turkey not having so far done so. During the process of application, Sweden held elections resulting in a center-right government that pledged to continue the NATO process, reaffirming a united front with Finland's application, and suggesting that they would be more able to meet Turkish requirements. 2022.11.24 Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced he was backing Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO, promising Hungary would have ratified NATO membership in January. 2023.03, Jens Stoltenberg pushed for Hungary and Turkey to finalize the accession of Finland and Sweden by the July summit. Hungary's Orban stated in March that while he and his party Fidesz supported NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, he objected to their support for the EU's freezing of funds for Hungary due to concerns about rule-of-law and corruption. Orban said "it’s not right for them to ask us to take them on board while they’re spreading blatant lies about Hungary, about the rule of law in Hungary, about democracy, about life here". A Hungarian delegation was sent to both countries to discuss the issue. On 15 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkish officials indicated that Finland's application would be approved in mid-April while Sweden's would be approved independently. The United States informally held up a Turkish purchase of F-16 fighter jets because of the Swedish NATO membership issue. Analysts said that aid and financing required to respond to 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake increased the importance of good relations with Western countries. They noted agreement would be easier after a Swedish anti-terrorism law took effect on 1 June, and after Turkish elections in May.
Other military alliances, USA is a member of
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad): informal strategic dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia and India that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney of USA, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. The diplomatic and military arrangement was widely viewed as a response to increased Chinese economic and military power, and the Chinese government responded to the Quadrilateral dialogue by issuing formal diplomatic protests to its members. In a 2021 joint statement, "The Spirit of the Quad," Quad members described "a shared vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific," and a "rules-based maritime order in the East and South China Seas," which Quad members state are needed to counter Chinese maritime claims. The Quad pledged to respond to COVID-19, and held a first Quad Plus meeting that included representatives from New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam to work on its response to it. Widely viewed as intending to curb "China's growing power," the Quad's joint statement drew criticism from China's foreign ministry, which said the Quad "openly incites discord" among regional powers in Asia. Creation and cessation of the Quad (2007-2008): China's opposition; Australia's departure. Intermission (2009-2017): Continued naval exercises; Australia's foreign policy under the Liberal-National governments; The US "Pivot to Asia"; Japan's reorientation to the Indo-Pacific; China's foreign policy under Xi; India's shift in position. Restarting the Quad (2017-): 2017 ASEAN Summit; Follow-up meetings; Quad Plus meeting on COVID-19; An Asian NATO? Expanding scope; Other meetings and upcoming events; European and Canadian pivot to the Indo-Pacific: Canada, European Union, France, Germany, The Netherlands, The UK. Concept of the Indo-Pacific. Analysis.
Malabar (naval exercise): trilateral naval exercise involving the United States, Japan and India as permanent partners. Originally begun in 1992 as a bilateral exercise between India and the United States, Japan became a permanent partner in 2015. Past non-permanent participants include Singapore and Australia. The annual Malabar exercises includes diverse activities, ranging from fighter combat operations from aircraft carriers through maritime interdiction operations, anti-submarine warfare, diving salvage operations, amphibious operations, counter-piracy operations, cross–deck helicopter landings and anti–air warfare operations.
AUKUS (2021.09.15): trilateral security pact between Australia, UK and USA for the Indo-Pacific region. Under the pact, the US and the UK will help Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The pact also includes cooperation on "cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities". Under the pact, Australia will acquire new long-range strike capabilities for its air force, navy and army. The pact will focus on military capability, separating it from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance that also includes New Zealand and Canada. The government of China was vocal in its contempt for the deal, accusing the three western powers of having a "cold-war mentality", as the deal was widely seen as being, at least in part, a response to China's status as an increasingly assertive emerging superpower. It was also criticised for not involving New Zealand, an important strategic ally in the Pacific region, which was presumed to be because of the country's nuclear-free policy. International responses:
Japan: Prior to this, in 2021.11, former prime minister Shinzo Abe in a virtual address to the Sydney Dialogue, welcomed the creation of AUKUS in the midst of an increasingly severe security environment, and called for greater Japan-AUKUS cooperation and integration concerning artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities. 2022.12.10, Australia's Minister for Defence announced their desire for Japan to join the pact.
France: 2021.09.17, France, which is an ally of the three countries, recalled its ambassadors from Australia and USA; French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the pact a "stab in the back" following Australia's cancellation of a French–Australian submarine deal worth €56 billion (A$90 billion) without notice, ending efforts to develop a deeper strategic partnership between France and Australia. After a call between the French and USA presidents, the French ambassador returned to USA in 2021.09.30. Beaune described the United Kingdom as a junior partner and vassal of the United States due to the pact, saying in an interview: "Our British friends explained to us they were leaving the EU to create Global Britain. We can see that this is a return into the American lap and a form of accepted vassalisation."
Anonymous terrorism: terrorist attacks (acts using intentional violence to achieve political aims) that no group or person has been publicly claimed responsibility for — constitutes about six out of seven terrorist attacks in the world at least since 1998. This proportion has been called "surprisingly high" and is in conflict with the conventional wisdom that terrorists "mount an operation to call attention to their grievances" and to "the costs of ignoring" those grievances, which can't happen if the perpetrators don't make public the "cost", i.e. announce that an event of killing and/or destruction was their work. A number of theories have been advanced as to why terror groups sometimes don't claim an attack, including: a motivation not to force concessions from the enemy, but to punish or destroy them, by killing and demoralizing them; an interest in plausible deniability; avoiding retaliation; and a byproduct of a disconnect between terror leadership and operatives.
Genocides in history: Before 1490: Neanderthals, Ancient gendercides, Destruction of Carthage; Mongol Empire, Tamerlane; Wu Hu and Jie. 1490 to 1914: Congo, French conquest of Algeria, German South West Africa; Americas, United States; Afghanistan, Dzungar genocide, Japanese colonization of Hokkaido; Ottoman Empire; Russian Empire: Circassians; Kyrgyz; 13th-century extermination of the Cathars; Vendee; War of the Three Kingdoms (Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Cromwellian Plantation), British Empire: Great Irish Famine; Australia (aborigines), New Zealand. 20th century (from WWI): Ottoman Empire/Turkey: Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide, Greek genocide, Great Famine of Mount Lebanon, Dersim Massacre; Soviet Union: Decossackization, Holodomor, Poles in the Soviet Union, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachay and Kalmyks and volga germans, Deportations of Baltic people, Crimean Tatars; Japan (Nanking massacre and Japanese war crimes); Republic of China and Tibet; Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe: The Holocaust, Non-Jewish victims, Slavic population in the Soviet Union, Independent State of Croatia, Serbs, Muslims and Croats, Poland, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, Romani people, Disabled and mentally ill. Post–WWII Central and Eastern Europe: Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950); Partition of India. 1951 onwards: Australia 1900–1969 (Stolen Generation, History wars, and Bringing them home), Zanzibar, Algerian War, Cambodian genocide, Guatemalan civil war and Guatemalan genocide, Bangladesh Liberation War Genocide of 1971, Burundi 1972 and 1993, Equatorial Guinea; Indonesia: East Timorese genocide & Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66; West New Guinea/West Papua; Persecution of Biharis in Bangladesh & Indigenous Chakmas; Argentina; Ethiopia; Baathist Iraq: Genocide of Kurds, Marsh Arabs; PRC: Tibet; Brazil: Genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Hutus (Rwandan genocide); Somalia: 1988–1991 Isaaq genocide, 2007 Bantu attacks; Chechnya; Sri Lanka; Myanmar; ISIL; Yemen.
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP; 2006-): consortium of investigative centers, media and journalists operating in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Central America. OCCRP is the only full-time investigative reporting organization that specializes in organized crime and corruption. It publishes its stories through local media and in English and Russian through its website. Broke new ground on the Magnitsky case, the largest tax fraud in Russian history, and demonstrated that funds stolen from the Russian treasury ended up in a company now owned by the son of Moscow's former transportation minister. Some of the money was used to buy high-end real estate near Wall Street. Since 2012, OCCRP has dedicated the Person of the Year Award that "recognizes the individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption":
2012 – Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan – Other mentions: Naser Kelmendi, Milo Đukanović, Vladimir Putin, Miroslav Mišković, Islam Karimov, Darko Šarić
2013 – Parliament of Romania – Other mentions: Darko Šarić, Gulnara Karimova
2014 – Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation – Other mentions: Viktor Orbán, Milo Đukanović
2015 – Milo Đukanović, Prime Minister of Montenegro – Other mentions: First Family of Azerbaijan, Nikola Gruevski
2016 – Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela – Other mentions: Rodrigo Duterte, Bashar al-Assad, ISIL/ISIS, Raúl Castro/Luis Alberto Rodríguez, Vladimir Putin
2017 – Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines – Other mentions: Jacob Zuma, Robert Mugabe
2018 – Danske Bank, for the money laundering scandal
2019 – Joseph Muscat, for the flourishing of criminality and corruption under his leadership as Prime Minister of Malta – Other mentions: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Denis-Christel Sassou Nguesso
2020 – Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, for "surrounding himself with corrupt figures, using propaganda to promote his populist agenda, undermining the justice system, and waging a destructive war against the Amazon region that has enriched some of the country’s worst land owners." – Other mentions: President of USA Donald Trump, President of Turkey Recep Erdoğan, and Ihor Kolomoyskyi
2021 – Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, "in recognition of all he has done to advance organized criminal activity and corruption." – Other mentions: Former President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, President of Syria Bashar al-Assad, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Former Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz
2022 – Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and mercenary leader, "for his tireless efforts to “extend Russia's vicious and corrupt reach, to steal for Vladimir Putin, and to punish those who resist.”" – Other mentions: European Court of Justice, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega
Russian Laundromat: scheme to move $20–80 billion out of Russia from 2010 to 2014 through a network of global banks, many of them in Moldova and Latvia. The Guardian reported that around 500 people were suspected of being involved, many of whom were wealthy Russians.
Danske Bank money laundering scandal: ongoing investigations and media attention on the Copenhagen-based Danske Bank's involvement in suspicious transactions by non-resident accounts between 2007–2015. It has been claimed to possibly be the largest money laundering scandal in the world. The total amount of suspicious funds has been quoted by sources as having been either $30 billion US dollars, $130 billion US dollars or up to $230 billion US dollars. According to the Danish FSA, non-resident portfolios from Russia in 2012 made up 35% of the profits of the local branch. The overall percentage of Russian clients in the branch was 8%. A former executive of the Estonian branch of Danske Bank was found dead in 2019.09.25. Estonian police discovered the body of Aivar Rehe, who was in charge of the branch from 2007 until 2015, during a search operation after his disappearance that began two days earlier. Rehe was a key witness in the ongoing criminal investigation. The cause of his death has been reported as suicide.
WikiLeaks: international, online, non-profit, journalistic organisation which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph Farrell, and Sarah Harrison are the only other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange.
GlobaLeaks: open-source, free software intended to enable anonymous whistleblowing initiatives.
@Mathematics: maths is also a language
@@Physics: formulae
@@Chemistry: Chemical formulae & Skeletal formulae are languages (2D & 3D languages!)
@@EECS: CS is written in various computer languages
Vernacular: literary language variant vs vernacular, e.g. Classical Latin vs Vulgar Latin or classical Arabic vs spoken Arabic. The vernacular (idiom, dialect, mother tongue, {"spoken"}) is evolving all the time according to (small) groups of persons, but the literary variant is slower to evolve and more "frozen" in time, as it will be read at the time when vernacular will be so far away from the classical/written language as French/Italian/Spanish & Portuguese/Romanian from Classical Latin. Undefined concept.
Programming/Computer language ⇒
Computer programming, but programming languages are written in English (keywords!) with strict math-logic (syntax, semantics; specification (idealism) and implementation (realism); type system; library(ies)), but it's also an art of writing in the same sense as writing book/poem/Wikipedia article...
7,000 or more human languages all over the world. Half the world population speaks one of 10 languages (>1%). Most everybody else speaks one of 300 languages (4%). 5% of the world speaks one of 6,500 languages (95%).
Lingua franca (lit. 'Frankish tongue'; bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, link language): language or dialect systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages. Lingua francas have developed around the world throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages" facilitated trade), but also for cultural, religious, diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Romance-based pidgin language used (especially by traders and seamen) as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th century. A world language – a language spoken internationally and by many people – is a language that may function as a global lingua franca.
First language (native language, mother tongue, arterial language, L1)
Multilingualism: Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population; becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness
What is language? "Dialect" or "language:
Dialect continua in Europe.
Dialect continuum (dialect chain, dialect area, L-complex): spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties are not mutually intelligible. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves. In this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, dialectologists map variation of various language features across a dialect continuum, drawing lines called isoglosses between areas that differ with respect to some feature. Since the early 20th century, the increasing dominance of nation-states and their standard languages has been steadily eliminating the nonstandard dialects that comprise dialect continua, making the boundaries ever more abrupt and well-defined.
Kashmir, in which local Muslims usually regard their language as Urdu, the national standard of Pakistan, while Hindus regard the same speech as Hindi, an official standard of India.
In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties within a continuum with Serbia to the north and Bulgaria to the east. The standard was deliberately based on varieties from the west of the republic that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the national standard of North Macedonia, but viewed by Bulgarians as a dialect of Bulgarian. Ex-Yugoslavia: Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs can communicate easily.
Europe: Germanic languages (North Germanic continuum {Scandinavia}, Continental West Germanic continuum {High/Low German, Dutch, Frisian}, Anglic continuum {English in England, English language in southern England, Scots}); Romance languages (Western Romance continuum, Eastern Romance continuum {Romania}); Slavic languages (West and East Slavic (also North Slavic); South Slavic continuum); Uralic languages (Sami languages, Baltic-Finnic languages).
Middle East: Turkic dialect continuum (Turkish, Azeri, Khalaj language, Turkmen); Arabic - diglossia (Modern Standard Arabic: written standard; modern vernacular dialects/languages); Assyrian Neo-Aramaic; Persian (Iran and Central Asia (Persian, Dari and Tajik))
Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India (Indic dialect continuum)
Chinese (continuum comparable to that of the Romance languages, however they share a common written language - firstly Classical Chinese (till early 20th c.), nowadays - from báihuà {Written Vernacular Chinese} to Pǔtōnghuà {Modern Standard Chinese; Modern Standard Mandarin}; Mandarin continuum, Yue continuum, Min Nan continuum);
Cree and Ojibwa.
Dialect levelling: refers to the assimilation, mixture and/or eradication of certain dialects, often due to language standardisation. Dialect levelling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after the industrialisation and modernisation of the area or areas in which they are spoken. Standard German: Urbanization and Standard Language (five forms of ‘Printer’s Language’ in 15th - 16th c.; Luther); Mandarin tonal levelling in Taiwan.
India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and around them are the areas that are the most linguistically diverse in the world.
Endangered language: While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they are currently disappearing at an accelerated rate due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages. The general consensus is that there are between 6000 and 7000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50-90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with fewer than 10,000 speakers.
endangeredlanguages.com
Language documentation: process by which a language is documented from a documentary linguistics perspective; aims to “to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community”.
Fusional language: type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes to denote grammatical, syntactic or semantic change.Indo-European languages are: Sanskrit (and the modern Indo-Aryan languages), Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Icelandic, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Czech; another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group.
Classification, taxonomy of languages - difficult:
Language code: assigns letters and/or numbers as identifiers or classifiers for languages. Difficulties of classification - language code schemes attempt to classify within the complex world of human languages, dialects, and variants. Most schemes make some compromises between being general and being complete enough to support specific dialects.
IETF language tag: BCP 47; each language tag is composed of one or more "subtags" separated by hyphens (-), each subtag is made with basic Latin letters or digits only. There are exceptions and grandfathered cases, but the subtags occur in the following order: single primary language subtag (2 letter: ISO 639-1 or 3 letter: ISO 639-2/3/5); up to three optional extended language subtags composed of three letters each, separated by hyphens; optional script subtag (composed of a four letter script code from ISO 15924 (usually written in title case)); optional region subtag (composed of a two letter country code from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (usually written in upper case), or a three digit code from UN M.49 for geographical regions); optional variant subtags; optional extension subtags; optional private use subtag (composed of the letter x and a hyphen followed by subtags of one to eight characters each, separated by hyphens).
Koine Greek (Alexandrian dialect, common Attic, Hellenistic or Biblical Greek): was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, and the early Byzantine Empire, or late antiquity. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms. Literary Koine was the medium of much of post-classical Greek literary and scholarly writing, such as the works of Plutarch and Polybius; also the language of the Christian New Testament, of the Septuagint (the 3rd-century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), and of most early Christian theological writing by the Church Fathers; continues to be used as the liturgical language of services in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Ancient Macedonian language: either a dialect of Ancient Greek or a separate Hellenic language, was spoken in the kingdom of Macedonia during the 1st millennium BC; gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BC, marginalized by the use of Attic Greek by the Macedonian aristocracy, the Ancient Greek dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period.
Geographical distribution of the dialects of ancient Greek, in the classical era. Not shown: dialects of the western colonies of Magna Graecia.
Ancient Greek colonies and their dialect groupings in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia).
Ruthenian language (dead): With the beginning of romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, literary Belarusian and literary Ukrainian appeared, descendant from the popular spoken dialects and little-influenced by literary Ruthenian. Meanwhile, Russian retained a layer of Church Slavonic "high vocabulary", so that nowadays the most striking lexical differences between Russian on the one hand and Belarusian and Ukrainian on the other are the much greater share of Slavonicisms [sic!] in the former and of Polonisms [sic!] in the latter. The interruption of the literary tradition was especially drastic in Belarusian: In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Polish had largely replaced Ruthenian as the language of administration and literature. After that Belarusian only survived as a rural spoken language with almost no written tradition until the mid-19th century. In contrast to the Belarusians and Eastern Ukrainians, the Western Ukrainians who came to live in Austria-Hungary retained not only the name Ruthenian but also much more of the Church Slavonic and Polish elements of Ruthenian. For disambiguation, in English these Ukrainians are usually called by the native form of their name, Rusyns.
Lechitic languages: language group consisting of Polish and several other languages that are or were spoken in areas of modern Poland and northeastern parts of modern Germany.
South Slavic languages: All South Slavic languages form a dialect continuum. It comprises, from West to East, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Standard Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are each based on a distinct dialect, but the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard varieties of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language are all based on the same dialect, Shtokavian. For that reason Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins communicate fluently with each other in their own standard language. On the other hand, Croats speaking one dialect (Kajkavian) can hardly communicate with Croats speaking a different dialect (Chakavian). Same goes for Serbian Shtokavian and Torlakian dialects. Torlakian is closer to the Eastern branch of South Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian, than to Western South Slavic idioms. South Slavic languages share a set of grammatical features that set them apart from all other Slavic languages. The barrier between East South Slavic and West South Slavic is natural and not political: the speakers' ancestors inhabited their respective lands having taken alternative routes thus being apart for some generations. Because of this, an intermediate dialect linking western and eastern variations came into existence over time: this is called Torlakian and is spoken on the fringes of Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia (northern) and Serbia (eastern).
Eastern:
Bulgarian dialects: The dialects of Macedonian were for the most part classified as part of Bulgarian in the older literature. The Bulgarian linguistics continue to treat it as such in. Since the second half of the 20th century, foreign authors have mostly adopted the convention of treating these in terms of a separate Macedonian language, following the codification of Macedonian as the literary standard language of Yugoslav Macedonia. However, some contemporary linguists still consider Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian.
Dialects of Macedonian: part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial.
Church Slavonic language: conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine.
Transitional:
Torlakian dialect: group of South Slavic dialects of southeastern Serbia (southern Kosovo – Prizren), northeastern Republic of Macedonia (Kumanovo, Kratovo and Kriva Palanka dialects), western Bulgaria (Belogradchik–Godech–Tran-Breznik), which is intermediate between Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Macedonian. Some linguists classify it as an Old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth dialect of Serbo-Croatian along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian. Others classify it as a western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is referred to as a transitional dialect. Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features.
Shtokavian dialect: prestige dialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards.
Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian: Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. With the breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed a 'nationalization' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s.
Yoficator: computer program or extension for a text editor that restores the Cyrillic letter Yo ‹Ё› in Russian texts in places where the letter Ye ‹Е› was used instead.
present-day distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.
Extent of Norse language in CE 900: Western Norse in red and Eastern Norse in orange. Old Gutnish - in pink. Old English - in yellow. In green - the other Germanic languages with which Old Norse retained a certain intercomprehension. In blue, the Gothic dialect of Crimea.
Template:English dialects by continent not unified (but more unified than Chinese or Arabic, which are much older in writing than modern English), English language is not centrally governed (unlike Spanish, French, partly German)
International English (Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, Engas (English as associate language), Globish): More recently, there have been proposals for ELF in which non-native speakers take a highly active role in the development of the language. It has also been argued that International English is held back by its traditional spelling. There has been slow progress in adopting alternate spellings.
Mid-Atlantic accent (Transatlantic accent): a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of American and British characteristics.
World Englishes: term for emerging localized or indigenized varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by UK or USA. The study of World Englishes consists of identifying varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally and analyzing how sociolinguistic histories, multicultural backgrounds and contexts of function influence the use of English in different regions of the world. Currently, there are approximately 75 territories where English is spoken either as a first language (L1) or as an unofficial or institutionalized second language (L2) in fields such as government, law and education. It is difficult to establish the total number of Englishes in the world, as new varieties of English are constantly being developed and discovered. The future of World Englishes: English as the language of 'others', A different world language. There are two academic journals devoted to the study of this topic, titled English World-Wide (since 1980, by John Benjamins Publishing Company) and World Englishes (since 1982, by Wiley).
English language in Europe: native language, is mainly spoken in UK and Ireland. Outside of these states, it has official status in Malta, the Crown dependencies (the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey), Gibraltar and the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (two of the British Overseas Territories). In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, English has an official status as a regional language on the isles of Saba and Sint Eustatius (located in the Caribbean). The English language is the de facto official language of England, the sole official language of Gibraltar and of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, and one of the official languages of the Republic of Ireland, Malta, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey and the European Union. According to a survey published in 2006, 13% of EU citizens speak English as their native language. Another 38% of EU citizens state that they have sufficient English skills to hold a conversation, so the total reach of English in the EU is 51%.
Languages of the European Union: languages used by people within the member states of EU. The EU has 24 official languages, of which three (English, French and German) have the higher status of "procedural" languages of the European Commission (whereas the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages). One language (Irish) previously had the lower status of "treaty language" before being upgraded to an official and working language in 2007, although it has been temporarily derogated as a working language until 2022 due to difficulty in finding qualified translators and interpreters. The three procedural languages are those used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. The designation of Irish as a "treaty language" meant that only the treaties of the European Union were translated into Irish, whereas Legal Acts of the European Union adopted under the treaties (like Directives and Regulations) did not have to be. Luxembourgish and Turkish (which have official status in Luxembourg and Cyprus, respectively) are the only two official languages of EU member states that are not official languages of the EU.
Languages of the European Union#Knowledge: after Brexit, Official EU languages (total): English ≥44%, German 36%, French 30%, Italian 18%, Spanish 17%, Polish 10%, others <7%.
English-language spelling reform: seeks to change English spelling so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle.
Knowledge of English language in EU.
English as a lingua franca (ELF): use of the English language "as a global means of inter-community communication" and can be understood as "any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option". ELF is "defined functionally by its use in intercultural communication rather than formally by its reference to native-speaker norms" whereas English as a second or foreign language aims at meeting native speaker norms and gives prominence to native speaker cultural aspects. While lingua francas have been used for centuries, what makes ELF a novel phenomenon is the extent to which it is used in spoken, written and in computer-mediated communication. Globalization and ELF; Features of spoken ELF communication; "Neutrality" of ELF; ELF and the native speaker; Attitude and motivation; Debates in ELF
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The Chaos: poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. Written by Dutch writer, traveller, and teacher Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870–1946), it includes about 800 examples of irregular spelling.
List of English words with disputed usage: some English words are often used in ways that are contentious between writers on usage and prescriptive commentators. The contentious usages are especially common in spoken English.
Common English usage misconceptions: widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be myths or misconceptions.
Comparison of variant spellings used in different English-speaking countries.
American and British English spelling differences: Latin-derived spellings: -our, -or; -re, -er; -ce, -se; -xion, -ction. Greek-derived spellings: -ise, -ize (-isation, -ization); -yse, -yze; -ogue, -og; ae and oe. Doubled consonants. Dropped e. Past tense differences. Different spellings for different meanings. Different spellings for different pronunciations. Miscellaneous spelling differences. Compounds and hyphens. Acronyms and abbreviations. Punctuation.
Commonly misspelled English words: words that are often unintentionally misspelled in general writing. A selected list of common words is presented below. Although the word "common" is subjective depending on the situation, the focus is on general writing, rather than in a specific field.
German (Deutsch)
High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low German (yellow) and Dutch. NB: map shows the modern boundaries of the languages.
German language (Deutsch): L1=90 mln (Hochdeutsch), 120 mln (all dialects); L2=80 mln
Sprachwarietäten Deutsch.Darstellungskarte des historischen Verlaufes der Benrather und der Speyerer Linie als Trenngrenze zwischen Nieder- und Mitteldeutsch.
Map of the Rheinischer Fächer (Rhenish fan) subdivision of German dialects by Georg Wenker 1877.
de:Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung: wurde im Jahr 2004 als Nachfolger der Zwischenstaatlichen Kommission für deutsche Rechtschreibung von Deutschland, Österreich, der Schweiz, Südtirol, Liechtenstein und der deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens gemeinsam eingerichtet.
Distribution map of the Low Saxon and Low Franconian languages since 1945.
Low German OR Dutch Low Saxon:
Middle Low German (Middle Saxon; 1100-1600): served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic League
Low German (Low Saxon; Plattdüütsch, Nedderdüütsch; de: Plattdeutsch, Niederdeutsch; nl: Nedersaksisch; L1=5 mln (???))
West Low German (Low Saxon; de: Niedersächsisch; nl: Nedersaksisch; L1=4 mln (DE, NL, DK))
East Low German (Pomeranian, Prussian; L1=??? (DE, PL, BR)): before 1945 the dialect was spoken along the entire German Baltic Coast, from Mecklenburg, through Pomerania, West Prussia into certain villages of the East Prussian Memel-Klaipėda Region.
Hochdeutsch:
Mitteldeutsche Mundarten.
Old High German (Althochdeutsch): earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 700 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as "prehistoric" and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason.
High German consonant shift: phonological development (sound change) that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases. It probably began between the third and fifth centuries and was almost complete before the earliest written records in High German were produced in the ninth century. The resulting language, Old High German, can be neatly contrasted with the other continental West Germanic languages, which for the most part did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which remained completely unaffected.
Indo-Aryan languages
Linguistic map of modern Iranian languages: Farsi (green), Pashto (purple) and Kurdish (turquoise), Lurish (red), Baloch (Yellow) and other communities.
Hindustani = Hindi-Urdu = Hindi (mainly India) + Urdu (lingua franca in Pakistan and huge numbers in India)
Sanskrit: historical Indo-Aryan language, the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and a literary and scholarly language in Jainism and Buddhism. Classical Sanskrit is laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini ~4 BCE.
Mahabharata (महाभारतम्, Mahābhāratam): one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India; narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devyani, the story of Ṛṣyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right. Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa. W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.
Ramayana: one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. The epic, traditionally ascribed to the Maharishi Valmiki, narrates the life of Rama, a legendary prince of Ayodhya city in the kingdom of Kosala. The story follows his fourteen-year exile to the forest urged by his father King Dasharatha, on the request of Rama's stepmother Kaikeyi; his travels across forests in the Indian subcontinent with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana, the kidnapping of Sita by Ravana – the king of Lanka, that resulted in war; and Rama's eventual return to Ayodhya to be crowned king amidst jubilation and celebration.
Romance languages: modern languages that evolved from spoken Latin in 6-9th c. A.D.
Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives: realization of coronal fricatives is one of the most prominent features distinguishing various dialect regions. The main three realizations are the phonemic distinction between /θ/ and /s/ (distinción), the presence of only alveolar [s] (seseo), or, less commonly, the presence of only a denti-alveolar [s̟] that is similar to /θ/ (ceceo).
CJK
Character amnesia: phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan. Modern technology, such as mobile phones and computers, allows users to enter Chinese characters using their phonetic transcription without knowing how to write them by hand.
Chinese
Chinese languagecould be considered a group (family) of Sinitic languages
Varieties of Chinese: primary ones - Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min. Chinese people make a strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ).
Chinese writing: at least two ?types? -- traditional and simplified
simple ideograms (e.g. one (一), two (二), three (三), up (上), below (下))
ideogrammatic compounds
rebus (phonetic loan) chars: characters that are "borrowed" to write another homophonous or near-homophonous morpheme, comparable with using "4" as a rebus for English "for" in "4ever"
phono-semantic compound characters (aka: radical-phonetic; form over 90% of Chinese chars)
Spoken Chinese: a group of Sinitic languages; Chinese as a language in the broad sense to the foreigner: at least Mandarin ((vernacular) Standard Mandarin in written form is the main one, still has local vernaculars even in written,
e.g. the chemical element names in PRC vs ROC; official in PRC (HK and nearby Macau) and ROC (Taiwan), Singapore (one of 4 official langs)), but also exist (minority compared to standard Mandarin): Wu, Cantonese, Min, Jin, Xiang, Hakka, Gan, Hui, Ping...
Classical Chinese: from the times of Confucius; only learned in Taiwan at school and in PRC during the specialized university courses. The reading aloud is difficult, as the rhymes in poetry are distorted by Mandarin or other dialect pronunciation. One needs to know how to read aloud Chinese characters in Classical Chinese spoken language (which is not fully known, as it was changing with each emperor, who came always from different corner of the greater historical China)
Standard Chinese (aka: Mandarin, Putonghua): phonology of the standard is based on the Beijing dialect, but its vocabulary is drawn from the large and diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken across northern, central, and southwestern China. The language is usually written using Chinese characters, in either simplified or traditional form, augmented by Hanyu Pinyin romanization for pedagogical purposes. the most popular written Chinese variant after 1920s, when the Classical Chinese was superseded by Written Vernacular Chinese (not to be confused with the broader dialect group --
Mandarin Chinese).
Written vernacular Chinese (aka: Standard Written Chinese, Modern Written Chinese {to avoid ambiguity with spoken vernaculars, with the written vernaculars of earlier eras, and with modern unofficial written vernaculars such as written Cantonese or written Hokkien}): refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used during imperial China to the early twentieth century; written vernacular based on Mandarin Chinese was used in novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and later refined by intellectuals associated with the May Fourth Movement. Since the early 1920s, this modern vernacular form has been the standard style of writing for speakers of all varieties of Chinese throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore as the written form of Modern Standard Chinese.
Simplified Chinese characters: used in PRC and Singapore; in some cases a few traditional chars point to a single simplified char; many simplification rules
Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters: ongoing debate concerning Chinese orthography among users of Chinese characters. It has stirred up heated responses from supporters of both sides in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities with its implications of political ideology and cultural identity. The effect of simplified characters on the language remains controversial decades after their introduction. Automated conversion, from simplified to traditional is not straightforward because there is not a one-to-one mapping of a simplified character to a traditional character; one simplified character may equate to many traditional characters; as a result a computer can be used for the bulk of the conversion but will still need final checking by a human.
Sinophone: neologism that fundamentally means "Chinese-speaking", typically referring to a person who speaks at least one variety of Chinese.
Chinese Wikipedia: proof of variety of Chinese languages/dialects, vernacular vs classical: conversion table for 6 different written variants, and 6 Wikipedias in 6 other varieties of Chinese language (Minnan (Taiwanese), Cantonese (Standard Cantonese), Mindong (Fuzhou dialect), Wu (Shanghai & Suzhou dialects, classical (old) Wu literature), Hakka (Siyen dialect), Gan (Nanchang dialect)) and Classical Chinese Wikipedia (something like Latin Wikipedia for Romance language speakers)
Naming taboo: cultural taboo against speaking or writing the given names of exalted persons in China and neighboring nations in the ancient Chinese cultural sphere; discouraged the use of the emperor's given name and those of his ancestors; discouraged the use of the names of one's own ancestors; discouraged the use of the names of respected people.
Graphic pejoratives in written Chinese: some historical Chinese characters for non-Chinese peoples were graphically pejorative ethnic slurs, where the racial insult derived not from the Chinese word but from the character used to write it. Wilkinson (2000: 38) compared these "graphic pejoratives selected for aborigines and barbarians" with the "flattering characters chosen for transcribing the names of the Western powers in the nineteenth century", for instance, Meiguo 美國 "United States". Almost all logographically pejorative Chinese characters are classified as "phono-semantic compounds", characters that combine a phonetic element approximately or exactly suggesting pronunciation and a radical or determinative approximately indicating meaning. The most common radical among graphic pejoratives is Radical 94 犬 or 犭, called the "dog" or "beast" radical, which is ordinarily used in characters for animal names (e.g., mao 猫 "cat", gou 狗 "dog", zhu 猪 "pig").
Historical Chinese phonology: deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. Progress in Chinese linguistics was seriously hampered up to early 20th c. by the lack of any concept of a phoneme (basic unit of sound, including vowels and vowel-like segments as well as consonants). This made it impossible to go beyond determination of systems of rhyming categories to reconstruction of the actual sounds involved. Methods of reconstruction: rime dictionaries and rime tables; modern Chinese speaking variants; Sino-Xenic data (Chinese loanwords borrowed in large number into Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean in 500-1000); other early cases of Chinese words borrowed into foreign languages or transcribed in foreign sources, e.g. Sanskrit; early cases of transliteration of foreign words from Sanskrit and Tibetan into Chinese; 'Phags-pa script (1270-1360, Yuan dynasty) - alphabetic script; transcriptions of Chinese by foreigners starting in 15th c. (Hangul, Portuguese-Chinese dictionary).
Old Chinese (1122 BC (1300 BC) - 256 BC (early centuries AD) [early and middle Zhou Dynasty]; 上古汉语/上古漢語; pinyin: Shànggǔ Hànyǔ; "Archaic Chinese"; more narrowly: 1000-700 BC [Shījīng, Classic of Poetry]): possesed a rich sound system; probably was without tones.
Middle Chinese (6th - 10th (12th) c. [Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties]; 中古汉语/中古漢語; pinyin: Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ; MC): early MC (6th c.) - Qieyun, late MC - Guangyun.
Modern varieties (13th c - present): most modern varieties appear to have split off from a Late Middle Chinese koine of about 1000 AD (although some remnants of earlier periods are still present).
How come after several thousands of years, the official spoken Chinese was based on Beijing Mandarin dialect (an not on some spoken Southern Chinese variety):
Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會): was established in ROC from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin (Zhuyin (Bopomofo) was the product), and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.
National Languages Committee (en: Mandarin Promotion Council, National Languages Promotion Committee): as established by the Ministry of Education of ROC with the purpose of standardizing and popularizing the usage of Mandarin in ROC. Created 1919.04.21; Commission was renamed to the Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language, headed by Woo Tsin-hang and had 31 members on 1928.12.12
Qieyun (切韻/切韵; pinyin: Qièyùn; 601 CE): Chinese rime dictionary used as the primary source for reconstructing Middle Chinese.
Japanese
Japanese language - one of the most complicated written systems (combines kanji, hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji; arabic and Sino-Japanese numerals) with 'small sound inventory', 'pitch-accent':
Japanese writing system: uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated in current use. Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books — since children tend to know few kanji at an early age — or early electronics such as computers, phones, and video games, which could not display complex graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.
Jōyō kanji: "regular-use Chinese characters") is the guide to kanji characters and their readings, announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education.
Korean
Hangul: Korean alphabet written in blocks (blocks are like Chinese character' blocks) of syllables (similar to written Chinese in this block issue, the blocks represent full morphophonology).
List of modern Hangul syllabic blocks by strokes: 11,172 precomposed Hangul syllables → Is this (Hangul:
featural linear alphabet) easier for reading as compared to alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, ...)?
Sino-Tibetan languages (Trans-Himalayan): family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (six million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.
Afroasiatic languages (Semitic: Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew; Egyptian; Cushitic (Somali))
Egyptian hieroglyphs: were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. The last known inscription is from Philae, known as The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394 CE. Rosetta Stone.
Rosetta Stone: granodiorite stele inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Probably moved in late antiquity or during the Mameluk period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was discovered there in 1799.07 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script. When the British defeated the French they took the stone to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802 and is the most visited object there. Major advances in the decoding were recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (1814); and that phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (1822–1824).
Aramaic language: speakers=approximately 2,105,000 (1994–1996); 3,000-year written history; Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires and as a language of divine worship; day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BC – 70 AD), the language that Jesus Christ probably used the most; language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud. However, Jewish Aramaic was different from the other forms both in lettering and grammar. Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Jewish Aramaic showing the unique Jewish lettering, related to the unique Hebrew script. Modern Aramaic is spoken today as a first language by many scattered, predominantly small, and largely isolated communities of differing Christian, Jewish, and Mandean ethnic groups of West Asia—most numerously by the Assyrians in the form of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic —that have all retained use of the once dominant lingua franca despite subsequent language shifts experienced throughout the Middle East; Aramaic languages are considered to be endangered.
Syriac language: Disappeared as a vernacular language after the 14th century
Egyptian language (ancient Egyptian)
Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century. Rosetta Stone.
Egyptian language: oldest known language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Hieratic: cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia. It developed alongside cursive hieroglyphs, to which it is separate yet intimately related. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs.
Nobiin language: ‘Nobiin’ is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ‘Nubian" and literally means ‘(language) of the Nubians". At least 2,500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile Valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin, the latter of which is a tonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order is subject–object–verb.
Dravidian languages
Dravidian languages: language family spoken by more than 215 million people, mainly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in 4th or 3rd millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and could well be indigenous to India.
Kipchak–Bulgar (Uralian, Uralo-Caspian): Bashkir and Tatar
Kipchak–Cuman (Ponto-Caspian): Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Karaim, Krymchak. Urum and Crimean Tatar appear to have a Kipchak–Cuman base, but have been heavily influenced by Oghuz languages.
Kipchak–Nogay (Aralo-Caspian): Nogay (also Nogai or Nogay Tatar), Karakalpak, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz.
Oghur languages (Bulgar): only extant member is the Chuvash language
List of alphabets used by Turkic languages: main alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic; sometimes: Greek. E.g. Turkish: tur-Arab → tur-Latn; Azerbaijani: Arab ~→ Cyrl/Latn.
Azerbaijani language (Azeri, Azeri-Turkic, Azeri-Turkish): Turkic language from Oghuz sub-branch spoken primarily by the Azerbaijani people, who live mainly in the Republic of Azerbaijan where the North Azerbaijani variety is spoken, and in the Azerbaijan region of Iran, where the South Azerbaijani variety is spoken. Although there is a very high degree of mutual intelligibility between both forms of Azerbaijani, there are significant differences in phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax and sources of loanwords. North Azerbaijani has official status in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Dagestan (a federal subject of Russia) but South Azerbaijani does not have official status in Iran, where the majority of Azerbaijani people live. It is also spoken to lesser varying degrees in Azerbaijani communities of Georgia and Turkey and by diaspora communities, primarily in Europe and North America. Both Azerbaijani varieties are members of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages. The standardized form of North Azerbaijani (spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Russia) is based on the Shirvani dialect, while South Azerbaijani uses the Tabrizi dialect as its prestige variety.
Organization of Turkic States (Turkic Council; Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States): intergovernmental organization comprising prominent independent Turkic countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. It is an intergovernmental organization whose overarching aim is promoting comprehensive cooperation among Turkic-speaking states. First proposed by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2006, it was founded in 2009.10.03, in Nakhchivan. The General Secretariat is in Istanbul. Since late 2018, Hungary has been an observer and may request full membership. Turkmenistan received the observer status in 2021. In 2022, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was admitted to the organisation as an observer member. In 2020, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Ceppar, who is of Crimean Tatar descent, stated Ukraine wanted to be an observer. Crimea, currently under Russian occupation, is the homeland of the Crimean Tatars. Opening of the first Turkic Council Regional Diaspora Center in 2014.12.24 in Kyiv.
Semitic
Approximate historical distribution of Semitic languages.
Varieties of Arabic: five regional forms; native language (vernacular) vs formal language learned in school. The formal language: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic (CA; Quranic Arabic; serves as inspiration for MSA). Further differences Bedouin and sedentiary speech, men and women, the young and the old, social classes, religious groups. Many registers, but (educated) Arabic speakers usually know several registers and use them accordingly. Regional vernaculars are as different as Dutch and German or Italian and French (Roman Empire collapse in 5th c, Muslim Arabic Quran came into existence after 8th c.).
Austronesian languages: divided in several primary branches, all but one of which are found exclusively on Taiwan.
Malayo-Polynesian languages (Extra-Formosan): approximately 385.5 million speakers; language family shows a strong influence of Sanskrit and later Arabic as the region has been a stronghold of Buddhism, Hinduism and since the 10th century, Islam.
Austronesian peoples: various populations in Southeast Asia and Oceania that speak languages of the Austronesian family. Include: Taiwanese aborigines; the majority ethnic groups of Malaysia, East Timor, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Madagascar, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as well as the Polynesian peoples of New Zealand and Hawaii, and the non-Papuan people of Melanesia; also found in Singapore, the Pattani region of Thailand, and the Cham areas of Vietnam (remnants of the Champa kingdom which covered central and southern Vietnam), Cambodia, and Hainan, China.
Papuan languages
Papuan languages: non-Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands, by around 4 mln. people. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some (arguably) 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west.
The language families in Ross' conception of Trans-New Guinea.
Map of the Ethnolinguistic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia.
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area: sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. James Matisoff referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "Indosphere", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.
Austroasiatic languages
Austroasiatic languages (Mon–Khmer): large language family of Mainland Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout parts of Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. There are around 117 million speakers of Austroasiatic languages. Of these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer and Mon have a long-established recorded history and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status as modern national languages (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively). The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official language of Wa State. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
Kra–Dai languages
Kra–Dai languages (Tai–Kadai, Daic): language family of tonal languages found in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. They include Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages, 60% of whom speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.
Caucasus: ethno-linguistic map. CIA, 1995. Put on top of that the religious overlay of Christian (Georgian Eastern Orthodox Church, Armenian Apostolic Church (from 310)) and Islamic (Shia, Sunni). Very mixed.
Languages of the Caucasus: Caucasian languages are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows these languages to be classified into several language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a family of languages. Families indigenous to the Caucasus:
Kartvelian (Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian, Laz)
Northeast Caucasian (Nakho-Dagestanian, or Caspian; 3.8 mln): Chechen language (1.5 mln) , Avar language (1 mln), Ingush language (0.5 mln), Lezgian language (0.79 mln) [10, L], ...
commonly believed that all Caucasian languages have a large number of consonants. While this is certainly true for most members of the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families (inventories range up to the 80–84 consonants of Ubykh), the consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages are not nearly as extensive, ranging from 28 (Georgian) to 30 (Laz) – comparable to languages like Russian (up to 37 consonant phonemes, depending on definition), Arabic (28 phonemes), and Western European languages (often more than 20 phonemes).
External relations: Ibero-Caucasian languages, Hattic, Alarodian - proposed connection between Northeast Caucasian and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages of Anatolia; Dené–Caucasian macrofamily - rejected by most linguists.
Families with wider distribution: Indo-European: Armenian (4 mln), Ossetian (0.7 mln), Greek (Pontic Greek), Persian (including Tat Persian), Kurdish, Talysh, Judeo-Tat, and the Slavic languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian (1/3rd of total population of the Caucasus). Semitic (Afro-Asiatic): Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (30,000), and Bohtan Neo-Aramaic (1,000) - both were brought to the Caucasus by ethnic Assyrians fleeing Assyrian Genocide during WWI; dialect of Arabic known as Shirvani Arabic was spoken natively in parts of Azerbaijan and Dagestan throughout medieval times until the early 20th c. Turkic: Azerbaijani (9 mln in Azerbaijan, 10 mln in North Western Iran), Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Nogai, Turkish, and Turkmen. Mongolic: Kalmyk language.
Hapax legomenon (pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax): word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. The related terms 'dis legomenon', 'tris legomenon', and 'tetrakis legomenon' respectively (/ˈdɪs/, /ˈtrɪs/, /ˈtɛtrəkɪs/) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena. Significance: Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one. For example, many of the remaining undeciphered Mayan glyphs are hapax legomena, and Biblical (particularly Hebrew; see § Hebrew examples) hapax legomena sometimes pose problems in translation. Hapax legomena also pose challenges in natural language processing.
Lexical item (lexical unit, lexical entry): single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (=catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈vocabulary). E.g. cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be generally understood to convey a single meaning, much as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words.
Morphology (linguistics): identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology).
Phonology: branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages.
Metathesis (linguistics) (from Greek μετά-θε-σις, from μετα-τί-θη-μι "I put in a different order": Latin trānspositiō): re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence.
Whistled language: use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication.
Grammar
Category:Grammar
Grammar = morphology + syntax + phonology; often complemented by phonetics + semantics + pragmatics.
Double negative (multiple negation): in most logics and some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative sense; in other languages, doubled negatives intensify the negation. Languages where multiple negatives intensify each other are said to have negative concord, e.g. pt, fr, es. Standard en, de, la do not have negative concord.
Preposition stranding: syntactic construction in which a preposition with an object occurs somewhere other than immediately adjacent to its object. (The preposition is then described as stranded or hanging.) Found in Germanic languages: en, Scandinavian, but maybe not in de or nl.
History of English grammars: begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar (1586). In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were contrasted with those of Latin.
English relative clauses: are formed principally by means of relative pronouns; basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Human or non-human antecedents; Restrictive or non-restrictive relative clauses;
Article (grammar)#Variation among languages (Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles; Balto-Slavic langs, Homeric Greek. Joseph Greenberg describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.),
lt:Artikelis (Artikeliai kilo ypač kalbose, neišsaugojusiose arba stipriai redukavusiose linksnių sistemą???),
de:Artikel (Wortart)#Artikellose Sprachen (jaunas vyras - jaunasis vyras),
ru:Артикль#Определённые_артикли_в_русских_диалектах
Lexeme: abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word.
Topic-prominent language: e.g. East Asian langs (as opposed to Indo-European langs which are subject-prominent)
Standard Mandarin grammar: (other spoken varieties are similar, therefore as well) in both written varieties there is only one grammatical form of words (but this distinction could be obvious from the context; lots of freedom for puns?), i.e. the Standard Mandarin lexemes are invariant (no "see, saw, seen, sees, seeing", just "see" when verb is taken as an example): (e.g. adverbs and adjectives?)
Question sentences have a special character at the end of the sentence, "?" could be added in addition
Iteration mark: ditto mark (〃). CJK(V): ZH: 二 (usually appearing as 〻) or 々; kanji repetition symbol: 々; hiragana: ゝ; katakana: ヽ
Syntactic ambiguity: property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted as having different syntactic structures. In contrast, in semantic ambiguity, the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently.
Textual criticism: branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. Eclecticism; Stemmatics; Copy-text editing; Cladistics (taken from biology); Application of textual criticism to religious documents.
William Jones (philologist) (1746.09.28–1794.04.27): British philologist, a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
List of languages by first written accounts {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History}: Before 1000 BC: Egyptian c. 2690 BC; Sumerian 26th. c. BC; Akkadian c. 2400 BC; Eblaite c. 2400 BC; Elamite c. 2250 BC; Hurrian 21st c. BC; Hittite c. 1700 BC; Palaic 16th c. BC; Mycenaean Greek c. 1450 BC; Luwian c. 1400 BC; Hattic c. 1400 BC; Ugaritic c. 1300 BC; Old Chinese c. 1200 BC.
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language: sign language popularity with relatively huge percentage of death people in the population. Also sign language as a visual communication over the distance vs. spoken word which loses its intensity over distance as .
Abjads: <consonant alphabets>, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. E.g. Arabic, Hebrew
Abugidas, aka alphasyllabary: segmental writing system which is based on consonants, and in which vowel notation is obligatory but secondary. E.g. North Indic, South Indic, Thaana (for Dhivehi; Maldives), Ethiopic (Ge'ez), Canadian Syllabic
Alphabets: e.g. Latin, Cyrrilic, small ones: Greek, Armenian, Georgian
Ideograms and
pictograms (aka pictographs): e.g. SignWriting (e.g. hand signs, flag signs), Aztec, DanceWriting (dance poses), ...
Logograms (aka logographs): grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language). E.g. Chinese, (logo-syllabic: Maya, Cuneiform, ...), (logo-consonantal: hieroglyphs {Ancient Egypt}, derivatives), (numerals: Hindu-Arabic, Roman, Greek (Attic), Abjad)
Cuneiform (Latin: cuneus "wedge" ): one of the earliest systems of writing, invented by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th mil. BC (6-5 kya) to convey the Sumerian language, which was a language isolate (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. Original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian), Eblaite and Amorite languages, the language isolate Elamite and the language isolates Hattic, Hurrian and Urartian languages, as well as Indo-European languages Hittite and Luwian; it inspired the later Semitic Ugaritic alphabet as well as Old Persian cuneiform. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–612 BC). By 2nd c. AD, the script had become extinct, its last traces being found in Assyria and Babylonia, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century. The first documents unequivocally written in Sumerian date to the 31st c. BC at Jemdet Nasr. From about 2900 BC, many pictographs began to lose their original function, and a given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, the direction of writing was changed to left-to-right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictographs 90° counter-clockwise in the process) and a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. Many of the clay tablets found by archaeologists have been preserved by chance, baked when attacking armies burned the buildings in which they were kept. Decipherment.
Old Persian cuneiform: semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran (Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Kharg Island), Armenia, Romania (Gherla), Turkey (Van Fortress), and along the Suez Canal. They were mostly inscriptions from the time period of Darius I and his son, Xerxes I. Later kings down to Artaxerxes III used more recent forms of the language classified as "pre-Middle Persian". Decipherment: Grotefend made a major breakthrough when he noticed that one of the kings' father was not a king - choice between Cyrus-Darius-Xerxes and Cambyses-Cyrus-Cambyses.
Ugaritic alphabet: cuneiform abjad used from around either 15th c. BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician alphabet and its descendants (including Greek and Latin) on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other. Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes; script was written from left to right. The only punctuation is a word divider.
Unicode: writing system of all writing systems (aka "alphabet" of all "alphabets"); a universal charset
Unicode equivalence: specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character.
Universal Character Set characters: The Unicode Consortium (UC) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) collaborate on the Universal Character Set. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate and transmit UCS encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple meanings and thus be improperly decoded if the wrong one is chosen.
Plane (Unicode): in Unicode standard, planes are groups of numerical values (code points) that point to specific characters. Unicode code points are logically divided into 17 planes, each with 65,536 (= 216) code points. Planes: 0 (BMP); 1 (SMP); 2 (SIP); 3-13 (unassigned); 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (SSP)); 15 and 16 (Supplementary Private Use Area-A and -B:
Private Use (Unicode))
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP, plane 0): where most characters have been assigned so far; contains characters for almost all modern languages, and a large number of special characters.
Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP, plane 1): contains historic scripts; historic and modern musical notation; mathematical alphanumerics; Emoji and other pictographic sets; reform orthographies like Shavian and Deseret; and game symbols for playing cards, Mah Jongg, and dominoes.
Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP, plane 2): is used for CJK Ideographs, mostly CJK Unified Ideographs, that were not included in earlier character encoding standards.
Unicode block: defined as one contiguous range of code points. Blocks are named uniquely and have no overlap.
Unicode input: MS Windows, Mac OS, Linux; Vim, Emacs.
RFC1345: Character Mnemonics & Character Sets (1893 chars) for human input; Vim, Emacs
Unicode and HTML: Some web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (from version 7 on), are able to display multilingual web pages by intelligently choosing a font to display each individual character on the page. They will correctly display any mix of Unicode blocks, as long as appropriate fonts are present in the operating system.
Universal Character Set (UCS; ISO/IEC 10646) (& Unicode): standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based. The UCS contains nearly one hundred thousand abstract characters, each identified by an unambiguous name and an integer number called its code point. In 1990, Unicode and ISO 10646 were separate developments, which had meet together and ISO 10646 synchronized the repertoire of the BMP with Unicode. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/EECS#Character encoding}
Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR): project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in the XML format for use in computer applications. Used in Mac OSX, OpenOffice.org, and IBM's AIX.
dash-like: hyphen-minus ("-", U+002D) vs soft hyphen (U+00AD), hyphen ("‐", U+2010), minus sign (−, U+2212)
dashes: figure dash ("‒", U+2012), en dash ("–", U+2013), em dash ("—", U+2014), horizontal bar ("―", U+2015), swung dash ("⁓", U+2053)
Quotation mark (quotes, inverted commas): punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.
Sigma (Σ, σ, ς - lower case in word-final position; Ϲ, ϲ - lunate forms): lunate sigma: in handwritten Greek during the Hellenistic period (4th and 3rd c. BC), the epigraphic form of Σ was simplified into a C-like shape, also found on coins from 4th c. BC onwards.
Many possible nucleotide modifications & even more possible amino acid modifications (like 21st & 22nd amino acids)
More fluid alphabets for lipids, sugars (carbohydrates), and the derivatives of nucleotides, amino acids, sugars, lipids, metabolic intermediates and any combination of them to produce cellular biochemicals ⇒ metabolome
Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts: Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. CJK scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from top-to-bottom, and even vertically from bottom-to-top. Traditionally, CJK are written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the left of the preceding one. Since 19th c., it has become increasingly common for these languages to be written horizontally, from left to right, with successive rows going from top to bottom, under the influence of European languages such as English, although vertical writing is still frequently used in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Korea, and Taiwan.
TrueType: outline font standard developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. Many agreements between Apple and Microsoft/Adobe.
Computer to plate (output the printing plates directly by the machine connected to PC)
Lithography (from
limestone+chemicals and ink to metal drums+emulsion+lasers and oily inks)
Post-press: cutting, binding, covers
Small scale:
Plotter: for vector graphics; not raster image; almost not used today because of raster printer high PPI + huge amount of RAM and CPU power replacing them
Point (typography) = 1/72 inch (e.g. 10 point font; due to DPI and PPI being not the same, the font displayed on LCD is not the same size as the point on the printed paper).
Complex text layout (CTL; complex text rendering; complex scripts): typesetting of writing systems which require complex transformations between text input and text display for proper rendering on the screen or the printed page. E.g. Arabic alphabet, Brahmic script family (Devanagari), Thai alphabet. CTL is a generalization of the concept of ligature. Main CTL characteristics: bi-directional text, context-sensitive shaping (ligatures), ordering - the displayed order is not the same as the logical order.
Homoglyph: one of two or more characters, or glyphs, with shapes that either appear identical or cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. This designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties. Antonym is synoglyph (display variant), which refers to glyphs that look different but mean the same thing. In 2008, the Unicode Consortium published its Technical Report #36
[2] on a range of issues deriving from the visual similarity of characters both in single scripts, and similarities between characters in different scripts. Typefaces containing homoglyphs are considered unsuitable for writing formulas, URLs, source code, IDs and other text where characters cannot always be differentiated from the context. 0-O, 1-l-I, rn-m; cl-d, vv-w; fi-A. Unicode homoglyphs: security risks (internationalized domain names; Greek Α = Latin A = Cyrrilic А); in the Chinese language, many simplified Chinese characters are homoglyphs of the corresponding traditional Chinese characters.
Template:Free and open source typography: DejaVu fonts (tries to cover the whole of Unicode. Work in progress. Bad looking zero {0} in Sans Mono for programming, BUT good looking 1, l, I ("one", "lowercase L", "capitalized I")).
Monotype Corporation: type foundry; conglomerate in typography: Linotype, International Typeface Corporation.
X logical font description (XLFD): font standard used by the X Window System. FontName = sequence of fourteen hyphen-prefixed, X-registered fields (FOUNDRY, FAMILY_NAME, WEIGHT_NAME, SLANT, SETWIDTH_NAME, ADD_STYLE_NAME, PIXEL_SIZE, POINT_SIZE, RESOLUTION_X, RESOLUTION_Y, SPACING, AVERAGE_WIDTH, CHARSET_REGISTRY, CHARSET_ENCODING).
Language and brain
Linguistic relativity (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis): structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view. 2 versions:
the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories (1960s disproved (?) strong version)
the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior (from 1980s some support is found for the weak version)
Color term: All languages distinguishing six colors contain terms for black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. These colors roughly correspond to the sensitivities of the retinal ganglion cells, leading Berlin and Kay to argue that color naming is not merely a cultural phenomenon, but is one that is also constrained by biology—that is, language is shaped by perception.
Distinguishing blue from green in language: green+blue=grue, e.g. Vietnamese: tree leaves and the sky are xanh (xanh lá cây "leaf grue" for green and xanh dương "ocean grue" for blue). CJK: Japan: even though most Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe certain vegetables, apples, and vegetation; Ao is also the word used to refer to the color on a traffic light that signals one to "go"; however, most other objects—a green car, a green sweater, and so forth—will generally be called midori.
Language learning and education
English as a foreign or second language: English as a second language (ESL); English for speakers of other languages (ESOL); English as a foreign language (EFL); all refer to the use or study of English by speakers with different native languages. English language teaching (ELT) is a widely used teacher-centred term. Teaching English as a second language (TESL), teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). English as an additional language (EAL), English as an international language (EIL), ELF; English for specific purposes (ESP), English for academic purposes (EAP). Some terms that refer to those who are learning English: English language learner (ELL), limited English proficiency (LEP) and culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD).
TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language): evaluates the ability of an individual to use and understand English in an academic setting.
Duolingo: learning the language and helping translate the web sources from the language one learns into the language one knows.
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries. Put together by the Council of Europe as the main part of the project "Language Learning for European Citizenship" between 1989 and 1996. [A-C]*[1-2]: A1 - beginner, C2 - mastery or proficiency.
Translation: communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. "Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages."
Computer-assisted translation (CAT; computer-aided translation): human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process. Translation memory; Language Search Engine; Terminology management; Alignment; Interactive machine translation; Crowd translation.
Machine translation (MT): investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. Formal (legal) language is easier to translate than informal (speech). Using statistical methods, huge training set (parallel corpus, e.g. legal texts of UN, EU in many different languages).
Sense-for-sense translation: oldest norm for translating; translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as literal translation).
Untranslatability: property of a text, or of any utterance, in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language when translated. Adaptation (free translation), Borrowing (loanword), Calque (loan translation; word-for-word), Compensation, Paraphrase, Translator's note.
Linguee: web service that provides an online dictionary for a number of language pairs. Linguee incorporates a search engine that provides access to large amounts of bilingual, translated sentence pairs, which come from the World Wide Web. As a translation aid, Linguee therefore differs from machine translation services like Babelfish and is more similar in function to a translation memory.
Translation between different writing systems
Alphabets meet logograms:
Chinese word for "crisis": (simplified Chinese: 危机; traditional Chinese: 危機; pinyin: wēijī, wéijī): in Western popular culture, frequently but incorrectly said to be written with two Chinese characters signifying "danger" (wēi, 危) and "opportunity" (jī, 机; 機). The second character is a component of the Chinese word for "opportunity" (jīhuì, 機會; 机会), but has multiple meanings, and in isolation means something more like "change point". The mistaken etymology became a trope after it was used by John F. Kennedy in his presidential campaign speeches and is widely repeated in business, education, politics and the press in USA.
Language and politics, history
Language secessionism (linguistic secessionism or linguistic separatism): attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it normally belongs, in order to make this variety considered as a distinct language (each dialect tries to become a language of its own with a distinct writing system and grammar). E.g. Occitano-Catalan language (Catalan: Valencian, Balearic languages and La Franja area; Occitan: Auvernhat, Provençal, Gascon dialect {note that the Catalan subdialects are called languages, while Occitan subdialects are called dialects}), English (African American Vernacular English), Romanian (Moldova vs Romania), Serbo-Croatian (Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs: 3 religions, 2 writing systems), Portuguese (Portugal (& Galicia) vs Brazil), Tagalog and Filipino.
Minority language: language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory; such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. Lacking recognition in some countries: ru (RU, co-official in Belarus and Kazakhstan; lacking in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia), hu (HU, co-official in Serbia's Vojvodina; lacking in RO, Slovakia, Ukraine), ro (RO, co-official in Vojvodina; lacking in Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine), Macedonian lang (lacking in Bulgaria, Greece), Bulgarian lang (lacking in Greece).
Language shift (language transfer or language replacement or assimilation): process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language; languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status". Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants. Language/Y-chromosome correlation (NOT mtDNA/language correlation): males were the bringers of technology and military prowess, mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women prefer to transmit the "higher-status" spouse's language to their children. Belarus: Belarusian→Russian; Belgium: Dutch/Flemish→French; China/PRC: Mandarin; Finland: Swedish elite→Finnish; Hong Kong: Mandarin→Cantonese; Singapore: Malay→English, among Chinese→Mandarin
T–V distinction: contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee
Relexification: mechanism of language change by which one language replaces much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with that of another language, without drastic change to its grammar. It is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.
Educational perennialism: Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting pertinence to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Particular strategy with modern perennialists is to teach scientific reasoning, not facts. Although perennialism may appear similar to essentialism, perennialism focuses first on personal development, while essentialism focuses first on essential skills. Essentialist curricula thus tend to be much more vocational and fact-based, and far less liberal and principle-based.
Progressive education: pedagogical movement that began in the late 19th c. and has persisted in various forms to the present. Progressive education finds its roots in present experience.
Ideal of education (utopia):
The Republic (Plato) (Plato, ~380 BC): Socratic dialogue, concerning justice (δικαιοσύνη), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically. Discusses meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man. They consider the natures of existing regimes and then propose a series of different, hypothetical cities in comparison, culminating in Kallipolis (Καλλίπολις), a hypothetical city-state ruled by a philosopher king. They also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and of poetry in society. The dialog's setting seems to be during the Peloponnesian War. Utopistic perspective on education of the person as a whole: body, brain, mind and/or soul is educated at the same time; societal impact upon upbringing and education; separation of children from parents.
Noble lie: myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic. In religion, a pious fiction is a narrative that is presented as true by the author, but is considered by others to be fictional albeit produced with an altruistic motivation. The term is sometimes used pejoratively to suggest that the author of the narrative was deliberately misleading readers for selfish or deceitful reasons.
Latin school: grammar school of 14th to 19th-century Europe, though the latter term was much more common in England. Emphasis was placed, as the name indicates, on learning to use Latin. The education given at Latin schools gave great emphasis to the complicated grammar of the Latin language, initially in its Medieval Latin form. Grammar was the most basic part of the trivium and the Liberal arts — in artistic personifications Grammar's attribute was the birch rod. Latin school prepared students for university, as well as enabling those of middle class status to rise above their station. Latin school curriculum: Ars Dictaminis, Studia Humanitatis.
Numerus clausus (Latin: "closed number"): one of many methods used to limit the number of students who may study at a university. In many cases, the goal of the numerus clausus is simply to limit the number of students to the maximum feasible in some particularly sought-after areas of studies. DE.
School counselor: counselor and an educator who works in elementary, middle, and high schools to provide academic, career, college readiness, and personal/social competencies to all K-12 students through a school counseling program; school counseling core curriculum classroom lessons and annual academic, career/college readiness, and personal/social planning for every student; and group and individual counseling for some students.
Practical education, innovators:
European Graduate School: 2 years coursework and summer seminars with famous academicians + 3 years thesis writing and final oral defense; media + communications, art + health + society
Academia:
Nachlass (Nachlaß): collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies. Alfred North Whitehead, in contrast, asked that his Nachlass be destroyed, a wish that his widow carried out. According to Lowe (1982), Whitehead "idealized youth and wanted young thinkers to develop their own ideas, not spend their best years on a Nachlass." Gilbert Ryle likewise disapproved of scholars spending their time editing a Nachlass. According to Anthony Palmer, he "hated the Nachlass industry and thought that he had destroyed everything of his that he had not chosen to publish himself so that there would be no Ryle Nachlass." ("One or two" papers (Palmer) did survive, however, and were published.)
Timeline of the development of MOOCs and open education.
Massive open online course (MOOC): aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. MOOCs are a recent and widely researched development in distance education which were first introduced in 2008 and emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012. Early MOOCs often emphasized open-access features, such as open licensing of content, structure and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources. Some later MOOCs use closed licenses for their course materials while maintaining free access for students. 2012 "The Year of the MOOC" (NYT). 2011 fall: Standford (S. Thrun and P. Norvig) → Udacity; Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera; MIT launched the MITx not-for-profit with the first course in 2012.03, then Harvard joined MITx and renamed to edX, later to be joined by UC Berkeley in 2012 summer. Less than 10% of the students who sign up typically complete the course. Most participants participate peripherally ("lurk"). In 2016.01 Edx offers 820 courses, Coursera offers 1580 courses and Udacity offers more than 120 courses. What happens to the "traditional universities"?
Khan Academy: non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan with a goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of YouTube videos. Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. All resources are available to users of the website. The website and its content are provided mainly in English, but the content is also available in other languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, French, Bengali, Hindi, and German.
Udacity: private institution of higher education founded by Sebastian Thrun and David Evans with the goal of free, online classes available to everyone.
Coursera: founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University; reduces the cost of courses it offers by making students grade their peers' homework and employing statistical methods to validate the assessment
EdX (2012 Fall-): founded by MIT and Harvard; offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge; nonprofit project. Open sourced on 2013.06.01
Edupunk (DIY education): do it yourself attitude to teaching and learning practices; Tom Kuntz: "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom". E.g. University of British Columbia's course "Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem"
Peer to Peer University (P2PU): nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. An example of the "edupunk" approach to education, P2PU charges no tuition and courses are not accredited.
Mozilla Open Badges (Open Badge Infrastructure or OBI): project is a program by Mozilla that issues digital badges to recognize skills and achievements; allows one to display real-world achievements and skills which may help with future career and education opportunities. NASA, Disney-Pixar, 4H, and DigitalMe have developed badges for the Open Badges project.
LibreTexts: 501(c)(3) nonprofit online educational resource project. The project provides open access to its content on its website, and the site is built on the Mindtouch platform. LibreTexts was started in 2008 by Professor Delmar Larsen at the University of California Davis and has since expanded to 400 texts in 154 courses (as of 2018), making it one of the largest and most visited online educational resources.
Research university: university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. Undergraduate courses at many research universities are often academic rather than vocational and may not prepare students for particular careers, but many employers value degrees from research universities because they teach fundamental life skills such as critical thinking. Globally, research universities are predominantly public universities, with notable exceptions being the United States and Japan.
USA: Roger L. Geiger, a historian specializing in the history of higher education in the United States, has argued that "the model for the American research university was established by five colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago)." In turn, research universities were essential to the establishment of USA hegemony by the end of the 20th c.. In particular, Columbia and Harvard were instrumental in the development of the American film industry (Hollywood), MIT and Stanford were leaders in building the American military–industrial complex, and Berkeley and Stanford played a central role in the development of Silicon Valley.
Colleges of the University of Cambridge: Cambridge has 31 colleges, founded between the 13th and 20th centuries. No colleges were founded between 1596 (Sidney Sussex College) and 1800 (Downing College), which allows the colleges to be distinguished into two groups according to foundation date: the 16 'old' colleges, founded between 1284 and 1596, and the 15 'new' colleges, founded between 1800 and 1977.
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University; MIPT, MIPT (SU) or informally Phystech): leading RU university, originally established in the Soviet Union; prepares specialists in theoretical and applied physics, applied mathematics, and related disciplines; sometimes referred to as "the Russian MIT;" famous in the countries of the former Soviet Union, but is less known abroad. Emphasis on practical research in the educational process, MIPT "outsources" education and research beyond the first two or three years to institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Andre Geim: "The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide."
TED (conference) (Technology, Entertainment and Design): global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading."
Digital Life Design (DLD): global conference network, organized by the Munich based DLD Media, a company of Burda Digital.
Map of the legal systems of the world. Civil law: Nopoleonic, Germanic, Nordic, Chilean (inspired by Napoleonic), Mixed. Common law. Customary law. East Asia: mix of civil and customary laws. Phillippines, SAR: mix of civil and common laws. India: mix of common, customary and muslim laws.
Judgment proof: refers to defendants or potential defendants who are financially insolvent.
Rebuttal: form of evidence that is presented to contradict or nullify other evidence that has been presented by an adverse party. By analogy the same term is used in politics and public affairs. In law, rebuttal evidence or rebuttal witnesses must be confined solely to the subject matter of the evidence rebutted.
Multidistrict litigation (MDL): special federal legal procedure designed to speed the process of handling complex cases such as air disaster litigation or complex product liability suits. Usually involves hundreds or more plaintiffs. United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML or the Panel) decide whether to consolidate the cases under MDL. The cases are one of the most complicated, involving many different law systems (e.g. if plaintiffs are from different states and countries).
Do Not Resuscitate (DNR, allow natural death (AND), No Code): law & death.
Due diligence: term used for a number of concepts, involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or an act with a certain standard of care. E.g. underwrites of mortgages must apply due diligence to evaluate the documents and allow or not to take mortgage; due to people failing to apply the due diligence the mortgage financial crisis of 2007 happened.
Standard of care: degree of prudence and caution required of an individual who is under a duty of care. Professional standard of care: medical standard of care; children; persons with disabilities (but NOT mental disabilities); duty to inform self of responsibilities; person below average intelligence; negligence per se
Legal writing: type of technical writing used by lawyers, judges, legislators, and others in law to express legal analysis and legal rights and duties; legalese: legal writing that is very difficult for laymen to read and understand, the implication being that this abstruseness is deliberate for excluding the legally untrained and to justify high fees.
Police officer (cop, constable; Related jobs: gendarmerie, military police, security guard, bodyguard, detective): warranted law employee of a police force. In most countries, "police officer" is a generic term not specifying a particular rank. In some, the use of the rank "officer" is legally reserved for military personnel. Police officers are generally charged with the apprehension of suspects and the prevention, detection, and reporting of crime, protection and assistance of the general public, and the maintenance of public order. Police officers may be sworn to an oath, and have the power to arrest people and detain them for a limited time, along with other duties and powers. Some officers are trained in special duties, such as counter-terrorism, surveillance, child protection, VIP protection, civil law enforcement, and investigation techniques into major crime including fraud, rape, murder, and drug trafficking. Although many police officers wear a corresponding uniform, some police officers are plain-clothed in order to pass themselves off as members of the public. In most countries police officers are given exemptions from certain laws to perform their duties. E.g., an officer may use force if necessary to arrest or detain a person when it would ordinarily be assault. In some countries, officers can also violate traffic code to perform their duties.
Public figure: term applied in the context of defamation actions (libel and slander) as well as invasion of privacy; public figure (such as a politician, celebrity, or business leader) cannot base a sample on incorrect harmful statements unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with actual malice (knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). Burden of proof in defamation actions is higher in the case of a public figure. Limited purpose public figure.
Piercing the corporate veil (lifting the corporate veil): legal decision to treat the rights or duties of a corporation as the rights or liabilities of its shareholders.
Indictment: common law system - formal accusation that a person has committed a crime (for felony or indictable offence). UK and Wales: all indictments are phrased as "R v Smith", where "R" stands for "Regina" or "Rex" (Queen or King) - indictment is issued by the public prosecutor (in most cases this will be the Crown Prosecution Service) on behalf of the Crown, i.e. the Monarch.
Indictable offence: common law - offence which can only be tried on an indictment after a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is a prima facie case to answer or by a grand jury (in contrast to a summary offence). In US this is felony. Offences triable only on indictment: murder, rape.
Sex and the law: Female genital mutilation, Incest, Age of consent, Sex crimes (sexual acts which are prohibited by law in a jurisdiction)
Sexual abuse (molestation): Spousal sexual abuse, Positions of power, Child sexual abuse, Sexual abuse of people with developmental disabilities, Sexual abuse and minorities, Survivor (to honor and empower the strength of an individual to heal, in particular a living victim of sexual abuse or assault).
Intellectual property (IP): refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law. Common types of IP: copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets. Should copyright/patent be for 100+ years or for 5- years for the fast changing technology or for the slow changing technology (usually all current 20th-21st century techs are fast changing)?
Life-Line: short story by Robert A. Heinlein; "There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Patent law
Patent family: "set of patents taken in various countries to protect a single invention (when a first application in a country – the priority – is then extended to other offices)". "The same invention disclosed by a common inventor(s) and patented in more than one country."
Software patent: "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program" (FFII definition). U.S. patent law excludes "abstract ideas", and this has been used to refuse some patents involving software; in Europe, "computer programs as such" are excluded from patentability and European Patent Office policy is consequently that a program for a computer is not patentable if it does not have the potential to cause a "further technical effect" beyond the inherent technical interactions between hardware and software.
List of software patents: notable patents and patent applications involving computer programs, often labelled software patents; lists patents relating to software which have been the subject of litigation or have achieved notoriety in other ways.
Software patent debate: argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. For patentability: Public disclosure, Protection, Economic benefit, International law, Patent challenges, Copyright limitations; against patentability: Software is math, Hinders R&D, Cost and loss of R&D funds, Copyright is sufficient, Software is different (from electromechanical devices), Trivial patents (are easy to file), Open source disadvantage, Software patents usefulness as an information source is limited, Patent examination is too slow.
USA:
Method (patent) ("process"): in US patent law is one of the four principal categories of things that may be patented through "utility patents"; series of steps or acts, for performing a function or accomplishing a result.
Wright brothers patent war: centers on the patent they received for their method of an airplane's flight control. Wright's legal threats suppressed development of the U.S. aviation industry for several years.
Rule of the shorter term (comparison of terms): provision in international copyright treaties. The provision allows that signatory countries can limit the duration of copyright they grant to foreign works under national treatment, to at most the copyright term granted in the work's origin country.
Open Letter to Hobbyists: by Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft), to early personal computer hobbyists; dismay at the rampant copyright infringement with regard to Microsoft's software; 1976
Trade group efforts against file sharing: RIAA (music labels) & MPAA (film studios) vs. people (some of them sharers). P2P file sharing; Impact of illegal downloading on the film industry.
Amie Street: Demand-based pricing for songs!!! Supply-demand, economics; just need the agreement of artist; the idea did not live long due to (giant) Amazon.com.
End-user license agreement (EULA; software license agreement): license agreement: contract between the licensor and purchaser, establishing the purchaser's right to use the software..
Clickwrap ("clickthrough" agreement or clickwrap license)
Browse wrap (Browserwrap, browse-wrap license): term used in Internet law to refer to a contract or license agreement covering access to or use of materials on a web site or downloadable product. In a browse-wrap agreement, the terms and conditions of use for a website or other downloadable product are posted on the website, typically as a hyperlink at the bottom of the screen.
Freedom of panorama (FOP; de: Panoramafreiheit): provision in the copyright laws of various jurisdictions that permits taking photographs or video footage, or creating other images (such as paintings), of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art which are permanently located in a public place, without infringing any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and to publish such images; exception to the normal rule that the copyright owner has the exclusive right to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works. Exceptions: FR, IT, BE. Anti-terrorism laws in UK conflict with the freedom of panorama laws.
Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG): set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian; part of DSC. debian-legal tests for DFSG compliance: "The Desert Island test"; "The Dissident test"; "The Tentacles of Evil test".
Ensuring that the operating system remains open and free.
Giving improvements back to the community which made the operating system possible.
Not hiding problems with the software or organization.
Staying focused on the users and the software that started the phenomena.
Making it possible for the software to be used with non-free software.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC): independent USA company based in Danvers, MA, (although it is incorporated in New York State), that provides collective copyright licensing services for corporate and academic users of copyrighted materials; procures agreements with rightsholders, primarily academic publishers, and then acts as their agent in arranging collective licensing for institutions and one-time licensing for document delivery services, coursepacks, and other access and uses of texts. CCC earns a 15% commission on the fees it collects. RightsLink (or Rightslink) is a product released by the CCC in 2000 "in recognition of the growing prevalence of digital media and the challenges and opportunities it presents"
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF; 2004.05.24-; Cambridge, UK): nonprofit organization that promotes open knowledge, including open content and open data; published the Open Knowledge Definition and runs several projects (e.g. CKAN).
de:Open Data Commons: ein Projekt der OKF, das rechtliche Lösungen für freie Daten bereitstellt; pflegt eine Reihe von Lizenzen für freie Datenbanken
Open Database License (ODbL): "Share Alike" license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others
Open knowledge: knowledge that one is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it without legal, social or technological restriction; set of principles and methodologies related to the production and distribution of knowledge works in an open manner. Open Knowledge Definition is directly derived from the Open Source Definition
Copyfraud: form of copyright misuse; situations where individuals and institutions illegally claim copyright ownership of the public domain and other breaches of copyright law with little or no oversight by authorities or legal consequence for their actions.
"Infringement" or infringement?
Old media living in stone age? Esp. considering the growth of Internet, ebooks, emails, e-everything (digital everything) from 2D to 3D, to 4D (time included), to video, to audio, to audio-video...
Radio music ripping: old analog audio recording on tapes could do it, but digital age brought exact reproduction (aka lossless) of any media. EU: Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC, also refers to DRM) - still not appeared in court hearing [12/04/03]; UK: brainwash campaign "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC"/"AND IT'S ILLEGAL"; USA: why TiVo survived while ReplayTV didn't (ReplayTV's case never was judged)?
Adblock Plus (ABP): for Firefox; also there is a Google Chrome extension
AdBlock (Chrome): copy-cat of ABP; native Google Chrome extension
These ^ two and others push the content providers into making
Paywalls, but again RefSpoof (for Firefox) and co are going around these paywalls.
As one can see, the most intrusive ads made users/consumers to block all ads. This means that only the most creative ads will be watched as a good entertainment on Youtube (e.g. early Apple ads, which are now a famous history). The only non-blocked places are public places, so street ads will only proliferate.
Legal cases
Golan v. Holder: (2001) challenges the constitutionality of restoring copyright of foreign works that were previously in the United States public domain by the United States Congress.
Kahle v. Ashcroft: (2006) challenges the change in the copyright system of the United States from an opt-in system to an opt-out system. Rejected & denied (2008, Jan. 7).
Eldred v. Ashcroft: (2002) challenges the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). Supreme Court held the CTEA constitutional by a 7-2 decision (2003, Jan. 15).
Freedom of the Press Foundation (2012-): fund and support free speech and freedom of the press; organization is headed by both mainstream and alternative journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Xeni Jardin as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers. Supported organizations include WikiLeaks, MuckRock, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and Truthout.
Enemies of the Internet: Bahrain (2012-), Belarus (2006-2008, 2012-), Burma (2006-2013), China (2008-), Cuba (2006-), Egypt (2006-2010), Ethiopia (2014-), India (2014-), Iran (2006-), North Korea (2006-), Pakistan (2014-), RU (2014-), Saudi Arabia (2006-), Sudan (2014-), Syria (2006-), Tunisia (2006-2010), Turkmenistan (2006-), United Arab Emirates (2014-), UK (2014-), USA (2014-), Uzbekistan (2006-), Vietnam (2006-)
Countries Under Surveillance: Australia (2009-), Belarus (2009-2011), Bahrain (2008-2009 and 2011), Egypt (2011-), Eritrea (2008-2009, 2011-), France (2011-), India (2008-2013), Jordan (2008), Kazakhstan (2008-), Libya (2008 and 2011), Malaysia (2008-2009, 2011-), RU (2010-2013), South Korea (2009-), Sri Lanka (2008-2009, 2011-), Thailand (2008-), Tajikistan (2008), Tunisia (2011-), Turkey (2010-), United Arab Emirates (2008-2013), Venezuela (2011), Yemen (2008-2009).
most countries are communistic-like dictatorships; Arab and/or Muslim countries; former USSR countries and the new "freedom bringers", like UK, USA, Australia (NSA-scandal & co); both Koreas; most of Indian subcontinent; Ethiopia; Russia.
Censorship of YouTube: Armenia (shortly), Brazil (very shortly, single trial case), Bangladesh (one incident), Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Morocco (several times), Pakistan, PRC, Sudan, Russia (block of Chechen posts), Thailand (politics and monarchy), Tunisia (politics), Turkey ((!) religion & politics), Turkmenistan, UAE.
Censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany: Federal Republic of Germany guarantees freedom of speech, expression, and opinion to its citizens as per Article 5 of the constitution. Despite this, censorship of various materials has taken place since the Allied occupation after WWII and continues to take place in Germany in various forms due to a limiting provision in Article 5, Paragraph 2 of the constitution.
Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González (2014): decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It held that an internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal information which appears on web pages published by third parties. The outcome of the ruling is that an internet search engine must consider requests from individuals to remove links to freely accessible web pages resulting from a search on their name. Grounds for removal include cases where the search result(s) "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive in the light of the time that had elapsed."
Cyberlaw, Internet law
Legal aspects of computing (information technology law, IT law); Cyberlaw, Internet law): software law, jurisdiction in case of the Internet: 1) nation where user resides, 2) nation where server hosting the transaction is located, 3) nation of the person/business whom/which the user makes a transaction with; Internet: net neutrality, free speech on the Internet, Internet censorship, privacy (publications, yellow press; electronic communication); electronic signatures.
Internet governance: 2011.09 summit between India, Brazil, and South Africa - proposal to seek to move Internet governance into their sphere of dominance, subordination of ICANN and ITU under the auspices of UN.
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, organized by ITU): as of 2011 US Department of Commerce made it clear it intends to retain control of the Internet's root servers indefinitely and ICANN is US-based; digital divide: Vatican & UN.
Digital solidarity fund (DSF).
Working Group on Internet Governance: 'US gov is inflexible on the need for US control to remain for the foreseeable future in order to ensure the "security and stability of the Internet"'.
United States v. Ivanov: Aleksey Vladimirovich Ivanov of Chelyabinsk, Russia was indicted for conspiracy, computer fraud, extortion, and possession of illegal access devices; all crimes committed against the Online Information Bureau (OIB) whose business and infrastructure were based in Vernon, Connecticut. Ivanov committed the crimes while he was outside USA, but FBI lured him to Seattle, asked him to perform a break-in into a honeypot and after recording Ivanov's actions arrested and charged him. Sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Cases
Mark Whitacre: cooperation, embezzlement, punishment, who knows the truth?
McLibel case (McDonald's Corporation v Steel & Morris [1997] EWHC QB 366): English lawsuit for libel filed by McDonald's Corporation against environmental activists Helen Steel and David Morris over a pamphlet critical of the company; each of two hearings in English courts found some of the leaflet's contested claims to be libellous and others to be true. The partial nature of the victory, the David-and-Goliath nature of the case, and the drawn-out litigation embarrassed McDonald's. Following the decision, ECHR ruled in Steel & Morris v United Kingdom that the pair had been denied a fair trial, in breach of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to a fair trial) and that their conduct should have been protected by Article 10 of the Convention (right to freedom of expression). In 1986, they co-authored a six-page leaflet titled "What's wrong with McDonald's: everything they don't want you to know" of which they distributed "a few hundred copies" in Strand, London. The leaflet accused the company of paying low wages, of cruelty to animals used in its products and other malpractices. UK Court of Appeal: ruled against the argument by Steel and Morris that multinational corporations should no longer be able to sue for libel over public interest issues. In response to the verdict, David Pannick QC said in The Times: "The McLibel case has achieved what many lawyers thought impossible: to lower further the reputation of our law of defamation in the minds of all right thinking people." ECHR criticised the way in which UK laws had failed to protect the public right to criticise corporations whose business practices affect people's lives and the environment (which violates Article 10); they also ruled that the trial was biased because of the defendants' comparative lack of resources and what they believed were complex and oppressive UK libel laws.
Natascha Kampusch (1988.02.17-): Austrian woman who was abducted at the age of 10 on 1998.03.02 and held in a secret cellar by her kidnapper Wolfgang Přiklopil for more than eight years, until she escaped in 2006.08.23. She has written a book about her ordeal, 3,096 Days (2010), upon which the 2013 German film 3096 is based.
Fritzl case: emerged in 2008.04, when a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl (1966.04.06-) told police in the town of Amstetten, Austria, that she had been held captive for 24 years by her father, Josef Fritzl (1935.04.09-). Fritzl had assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment inside a concealed area in the basement of the family home. The abuse by Elisabeth's father resulted in the birth of seven children: three of them remained in captivity with their mother, one had died just days after birth at the hands of Josef Fritzl who disposed of his body in an incinerator, and the other three were brought up by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, having been reported as foundlings.
Kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard: occurred in 1991.06.10, in Meyers, California. Dugard was eleven years old when she was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated even though her stepfather, Carl Probyn, witnessed her kidnapping and chased the kidnappers on his mountain bike. Dugard remained missing until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two girls, now known to be his daughters, on August 24 and 25 that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer to order him to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. He was accompanied by a woman who was finally identified as Dugard herself. Phillip and Nancy Garrido were arrested by police after Dugard's reappearance. On April 28, 2011, they pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assaulting Dugard. Law enforcement officers believe Dugard was later kept in concealed tents, sheds, and lean-tos in an area behind the Garridos' house at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California for eighteen years. During her confinement, Dugard gave birth to two daughters, who were 11 and 15 at the time of her reappearance.
Trial by combat (wager of battle, trial by battle, judicial duel): method of Germanic law to settle accusations in the absence of witnesses or a confession in which two parties in dispute fought in single combat; the winner of the fight was proclaimed to be right. In essence, it was a judicially sanctioned duel. It remained in use throughout the European Middle Ages, gradually disappearing in the course of the 16th c. Holy Roman Empire; Great Britain and Ireland; France; Italy; USA.
Societal collapse: collapse (stronger, e.g. extinction of the Polynesian island dwellers) vs. decline (weaker, e.g. the decline of Western Roman empire, decline (called <collapse>) of Soviet Union). Antidote to collapse: social cohesion (more equality, no "huge class of underdogs" who would incite revolution) and adaptability. Features of collapse: either reversion/simplification or incorporation/absorption into some greater society (e.g. old Egyptian society: Greeks, Romans, Christianity, Arabs & Muslims, Turks & Muslims, nowadays); destratification (become more egalitarian), despecialization, decentralization, destructuralization (large civilization produces profound artifacts; after the collapse: the artifacts become much less profound and much fewer in quantity; simpler tools), depopulation (war, plague, natural disasters, famine contribute to this).
Accelerationism: idea that capitalism, or particular processes that historically characterised capitalism, should be accelerated instead of overcome in order to generate radical social change. Accelerationism may also refer more broadly and usually pejoratively to support for the intensification of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately lead to its collapse. Accelerationist theory has been divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants. Left-wing accelerationism attempts to press "the process of technological evolution" beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism by repurposing modern technology for socially beneficial and emancipatory ends. Right-wing accelerationism supports the indefinite intensification of capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technological singularity. Accelerationist writers have additionally distinguished other variants such as "unconditional accelerationism". A far-right and white nationalist adaptation of the term surfacing during the 2010s eschews the focus on capitalism of the prior variants to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict resulting in a white ethnostate. Other forms of accelerationism: Žižekian accelerationism, Far-right accelerationism.
Integrated ticketing: allows a person to make a journey that involves transfers within or between different transport modes with a single ticket that is valid for the complete journey.
Culture-historical archaeology: emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
Marxist archaeology: developed by archaeologists in USSR during the early twentieth century; "generally adopted a materialist base and a processual approach whilst emphasising the historical-developmental context of archaeological data.".
Processual archaeology (formerly the New Archaeology): genesis in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips; pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment that "[m]y own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing. This idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human society. This was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any information which artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life was lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts.
Post-processual archaeology (interpretative archaeologies): movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations; wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology.
Tell (archaeology) (tel; Arabic: تَل, tall, 'hill' or 'mound'): artificial mound formed from the accumulated refuse of people living on the same site for hundreds or thousands of years. A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with a flat top and sloping sides and can be up to 30 metres high. Tells are most commonly associated with the archaeology of the ancient Near East, but they are also found elsewhere, such as Central Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa and Greece. Within the Near East, they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran.
Pseudoarchaeology (alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, cult archaeology, and spooky archaeology): interpretation of the past from outside the archaeological science community, which rejects the accepted data gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to supplement the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacy, and fabrication of evidence. Others instead hold that there were human societies in the ancient period that were significantly technologically advanced, such as Atlantis, and this idea has been propagated by figures like Graham Hancock in his Fingerprints of the Gods (1995).
Graham Hancock (1950.08.02-): British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. His ideas have been the subject of several films, including the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), and Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss them. He has also written two fantasy novels and in 2013 delivered a controversial TEDx talk promoting the use of ayahuasca. As a journalist, Hancock worked for many British papers, such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He co-edited New Internationalist magazine from 1976 to 1979, and was the East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981 to 1983.
Ancient Apocalypse: The series was produced by ITN Productions, and released by Netflix in 2022.11.10. Hancock's son Sean Hancock is "senior manager of unscripted originals" at Netflix. It was the second most-watched series on Netflix in its week of release.
Cultural anthropology (Socio-cultural anthropology): study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists have argued that culture is "human nature", and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically (i.e. in language), and teach such abstractions to others.
Culture: meaning of the word from Cicero ("cultura animi") to 18th and 19th c. to the 20th c. changed ("culture" emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance). Current meaning: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living differently classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively.
Cultural studies: aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives; cultural studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives; focussed upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations, conflicts and defining traits; how a particular communication medium or message relates to ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and/or gender, rather than providing an encyclopedic identification, categorization or definition of a particular culture or area of the world; seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. Opposition to cultural studies was most dramatically demonstrated with the 2002 closing of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Low context culture &
High context culture: Spectrum: Lower < German-Swiss < German < Scandinavian < American < English Canadian < French Canadian < French < Italian < Spanish < Mexican < Greek < Arab < Chinese < Japanese < Higher
Parallel and cross cousins: parallel cousin (or ortho-cousin) is a cousin from a parent's same-sex sibling, while a cross cousin is from a parent's opposite-sex sibling
Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures: in cultural anthropology, the distinction between a guilt society (or guilt culture), shame society (or shame society), and a fear society (or culture of fear) has been used to categorize different cultures. The differences can apply to how behavior is governed with respect to government laws, business rules, or social etiquette.
guilt-innocence world view focuses on law and punishment. A person in this type of culture may ask, "Is my behavior fair or unfair?"[citation needed] This type of culture also emphasizes individual conscience. In a guilt society, the primary method of social control is the inculcation of feelings of guilt for behaviors that the individual believes to be undesirable. A prominent feature of guilt societies is the provision of sanctioned releases from guilt for certain behaviors, whether before or after the fact. There is opportunity in such cases for authority figures to derive power, monetary and/or other advantages, etc. by manipulating the conditions of guilt and the forgiveness of guilt. "True guilt cultures rely on an internalized conviction of sin as the enforcer of good behavior, not, as shame cultures do, on external sanctions. Guilt cultures emphasize punishment and forgiveness as ways of restoring the moral order; shame cultures stress self-denial and humility as ways of restoring the social order. (Hiebert 1985, 213)". Guilt-Innocence: more associated with Catholicism and Judaism
shame-honor worldview seeks an "honor balance" and can lead to revenge dynamics.[citation needed] A person in this type of culture may ask, "Shall I look ashamed if I do X?" or "How people will look at me if I do Y?" Shame cultures are typically based on the concepts of pride and honour, and appearances are what counts. Shame-Honour: more associated with Islam, Protestantism, and Eastern religions
fear-power worldview focuses on physical dominance. A person in this culture may ask, "Will someone hurt me if I do this?" Fear-Power: more associated with animist and tribal societies
East Asia
Huaxia: although still used in conjunction, Hua (simplified Chinese: 华; traditional Chinese: 華) and Xia (Chinese: 夏) are more often used separately to represent things Chinese. Hua, in particular, has become almost synonymous with the Chinese civilization. The official Chinese names of both PRC and ROC refer to Huaxia in using the term Zhonghua (中华 / 中華) to refer the Chinese civilization. The PRC's Chinese name is "中华人民共和国" and the ROC's Chinese name is "中華民國". Zhongguo (中国 / 中國) usually refers to the country.
Sinocentrism: different and changing over history and places views on sinocentrism from Korea(s), Japan (Ryūkyū Kingdom), Vietnam (constant war with big China after 1000s), Myanmar, the West (UK, USA, continental Europe); gǔ yǐ yǒu zhī (古已有之, literally 'this already existed in ancient times') & Lu Xun: "The True Story of Ah Q" (satirizes the ridiculous way in which the protagonist claimed 'spiritual victories' despite being humiliated and defeated). Nowadays, China (PRC) will never seek hegemony (永不称霸). Not to be confused with
Chinese nationalism and
Han chauvinism.
Kowtow: kneel and bow so that the head touches the ground; ancient East Asian give of absolute respect (to supreme ruler and/or out of fear); not used anymore in the modern times.
Zuiikin' English (Eikaiwa taisō Zuiikin' English): series combines English language lessons with gymnastic exercise programs. At the beginning of the show, the host and mastermind, Fernandez Verde, explains his philosophy in learning languages. He proclaims that different cultures use muscles in different proportions due to their customs. For example, in one episode he states Japanese people have stronger lower back muscles (from bowing and keeping a lower posture), and a different leg muscle structure (due to squatting for long periods of time). He feels that using those particular muscles while learning the language of that culture will create strong connotations in your mind and faster learning.
Dunning–Kruger effect: cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. Dunning and Kruger: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
Laziness (indolence): disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to act or to exert oneself. It is often used as a pejorative; terms for a person seen to be lazy include "couch potato", "slacker", and "bludger". Related concepts include sloth, a Christian sin, abulia, a medical term for reduced motivation, and lethargy, a state of lacking energy. Laziness should not be confused with avolition, a negative symptom of certain mental and neurodevelopmental disorders such as depression, ADHD, ASD, sleep disorders, substance use disorders and schizophrenia. Animals: It is common for animals (even those like hummingbirds that have high energy needs) to forage for food until satiated, and then spend most of their time doing nothing, or at least nothing in particular. They seek to "satisfice" their needs rather than obtaining an optimal diet or habitat. Even diurnal animals, which have a limited amount of daylight in which to accomplish their tasks, follow this pattern. Social activity comes in a distant third to eating and resting for foraging animals. When more time must be spent foraging, animals are more likely to sacrifice time spent on aggressive behavior than time spent resting. Extremely efficient predators have more free time and thus often appear more lazy than relatively inept predators that have little free time.
MRS Degree: term used to describe when a young woman attends college or university with the intention of meeting and finding a husband.
Sexual behavior
Human sexuality: capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Nature vs nurture.
Alfred Kinsey (1894.06.23-1956.08.25): USA biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University (now: Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction). Kinsey Reports: two books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
LGBT symbols: two most-recognized international LGBTQ symbols are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag; pink triangle, employed by the Nazis in World War II as a badge of shame, was re-appropriated but retained negative connotations; rainbow flag was created to be a more organic and natural replacement without any negativity attached to it.
Asexuality (nonsexuality): may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the four types thereof; 2004 study: 1%. Some asexual people do engage in sexual activity despite lacking a desire for sex or sexual attraction, due to a variety of reasons, such as a desire to please romantic partners or a desire to have children
Comparison of online dating websites: IAC (Match.com (owns OkCupid), Chemistry.com), Zoosk, Meetic (Eu), PlentyofFish, Ashley Madison ("Life is short. Have an affair"), Mamba (International Dating Platform; former CIS, RU language), SpeedDate.com, Parship (Eu, DE mainly), GayRomeo (PlanetRomeo; GBT men; DE huge, Eu mainly, world wide), Anastasia International (AnastasiaDate; CIS women and the Western men), eHarmony, SpeedDate.com, Gaydar.
Sex worker, prostitution, call girl/boy:
Belle de Jour (writer) (Brooke Magnanti; 1975.11.05-): research scientist, blogger, and writer, whose identity was revealed in November 2009; while completing her doctoral studies, between 2003 and 2004, Magnanti supplemented her income by working as a London call girl; anonymous blog Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl.
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl: memoir which was adopted into
Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute.
Mustang Ranch (originally known as the Mustang Bridge Ranch): brothel in Storey County, Nevada, about 24 km east of Reno. Under owner Joe Conforte, it became Nevada's first licensed brothel in 1971, eventually leading to the legalization of brothel prostitution in 10 of 17 counties in the state. It became Nevada's largest brothel with 67 ha, and the most profitable. After the negotiations (overheard by a hidden intercom system) were over, the prostitute collected the money and deposited it with a cashier. She returned to the room, washed the male genitals in a basin. After the act, she would again wash the male and slip on her skimpy outfit. The women was require to escort the customer from her room to the door. Some men would relax in the bar or on sofas talking to the girls. In time the men would be rested for "round two." Many men had favorites or wanted variety. They could be with as many women as they could afford. The fantasy of two and three women simultaneously was common. Another frequent fantasy was of an older and younger prostitute being intimate with the customer and each other; he pretended they were mother and daughter. Alexa Albert, who conducted interviews with several women in the Mustang Ranch from 1993 to 1996, reported that at one point, the brothel required all women to have pimps, who were thought to make the women work harder. Although this practice had stopped by the 1990s, many women were still pressured into the work by boyfriends, husbands, or other family members. About half of the women reported having been sexually abused as children. Initially, the brothel did not serve black customers. In 1967, a separate trailer for blacks was built, and the prostitutes were allowed to refuse these men. This segregation was later abandoned, but black customers were still announced by a special signal, so that women could choose not to join the lineup, something not allowed for white customers.
Template:Seduction Community &
Seduction community: also known as the pick-up artist or PUA community, is a movement of men whose goal is sexual success with/access to women. Members of the community often call themselves pickup artists.
Wingman (social): role that a person may take when a friend needs support with approaching potential partners. A wingman is someone who is on the "inside" and is used to help someone with intimate relationships.
Relational aggression (covert aggression, covert bullying): type of aggression in which harm is caused through damage to relationships or social status within a group rather than by means of actual or threatened physical violence. Relational aggression is more common and more studied among girls than boys.
Gender; human gender: male (man), female (woman), other
Intersex: people are individuals born with any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies". Though the range of atypical sex characteristics may be obvious from birth through the presence of physically ambiguous genitalia, in other instances, atypical characteristics may go unnoticed, presenting as ambiguous internal reproductive organs or atypical chromosomes that may remain unknown to an individual all of their life. Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child's anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births where the baby is intersex has been reported to be as low as 0.018% or as high as roughly 1.7%, depending on which conditions are counted as intersex. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%. Other intersex conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones. Some intersex persons may be assigned and raised as a girl or boy but then identify with another gender later in life, while most continue to identify with their assigned sex.
Disorders of sex development (DSDs, differences in sex development; variations in sex characteristics (VSC)): medical conditions involving the reproductive system. More specifically, these terms refer to "congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical."
Mixed-sex sports (mixed-gender, coed sports): individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team (for example teams of one man and one woman). Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants. Mixed-sex play is also common in children's sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less. Direct competition: It is uncommon in most organised sports to find individuals of different genders competing head-to-head at elite levels, principally due to physiological differences between the (adult) sexes. In sports where these differences are less linked to performance, it is standard practice for men and women to compete in mixed-sex fields. These open-class sports prove accommodating to intersex athletes, who challenge sex-defined rules of both single-sex events and mixed-sex teams with distinct male and female composition. Mixed doubles or pairs: dancing (ice dancing, pair figure skating, ballroom dancing and synchronised swimming), mixed doubles (tennis, table tennis, badminton, squash and racquetball), sometimes contract bridge; pairs may also compete in turn-based games (mixed doubles curling, mixed golf, mixed bowling, mixed team darts). Mixed relay. Mixed team ball sports.
Hyperandrogenism is when testosterone levels are elevated beyond the typical levels. Some athletes also have testosterone insensitivity which means they are males but their bodies are unable to process testosterone messages so they develop phenotypically as females. Treatments can range from taking drugs to suppress testosterone levels to undergoing surgery to alter their bodies so that they are unable to produce testosterone.
Warren Farrell (1943.06.26): American educator, activist and author of seven books on men's and women's issues. The Myth of Male Power: "cross-culturally, men's experience of powerlessness involved being socialized, even as boys, to become "the disposable sex" (in war, in work)"; "heterosexual men are conditioned to believe that they can obtain love and affection from women only by earning money"; "men constitute 93% of workplace deaths". Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, and Father and Child Reunion: findings include some 26 ways in which children of divorce do better when three conditions prevail: equally-shared parenting (or joint custody); close parental proximity; and no bad-mouthing. Why Men Earn More: trade-offs include working more hours and for more years; taking technical or more-hazardous jobs; relocating overseas or traveling overnight; never-married women without children earn 13% more than their male counterparts; gender pay gap is largely about married men with children who earn more due to their assuming more workplace obligations; since men earn more, and women have more balanced lives, that men have more to learn from women than women do from men.
Eve teasing: euphemism for the sexual harassment in India, Pakistan.
Groping: why Japan has this problem and the Western nations not? Communism/socialism/Karl Marx gave freedom to women + feminism? Density of people (but think about Amsterdam, New York, Ruhr...)
Hate crime (bias-motivated crimes, race hate; bias-motivated violence; hate crime law)
Murder of Sophie Lancaster (UK, 2007): victim, along with her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, was attacked by a number of males in their mid-teens while walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Rossendale, in Lancashire; 2013.04 the Greater Manchester Police announced that they would officially begin to record offences committed against goths and other alternative groups, as hate crimes, as they do with offences aimed at someone's race, disability or sexual orientation
Rape: type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or against a person who is incapable of valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, or below the legal age of consent. According to the American Medical Association (1995), sexual violence, and rape in particular, is considered the most underreported violent crime. USA Bureau of Justice Statistics (1999): 91% of victims are female, 9% male; 99% of offenders are male. Rape by strangers is usually less common than rape by persons the victim knows, several studies argue that male-male and female-female prison rape are quite common and may be the least reported forms of rape. Definitions: Penetrative and non-penetrative, Consent, Marital rape (Bible: "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another (...)"; Islam's teaching: "Allah's Apostle said, 'If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relations] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning'"). Victim blaming, Honor killings, violence by and forced marriages to the rapist. False accusation
White torture: type of psychological torture that includes extreme sensory deprivation and isolation. Iran, Turkey, UK (Northern Ireland), USA - the only countries which are transparent enough for these practices to leak out into the public. What about USSR, Stasi, WWII?
Population ageing: dependency ratio and generational accounting; increase in health care expenses (reduced gov. role in providing health care?); decrease in education expenses; pensions crisis.
Pensions crisis: reform ideas: a) Addressing the worker-retiree ratio, via raising the retirement age, employment policy and immigration policy; b) Reducing obligations via shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution pension types and reducing future payment amounts (by, for example, adjusting the formula that determines the level of benefits); and c) Increasing resources to fund pensions via increasing contribution rates and raising taxes.
Map of Europe showing the percentage of the population over 65 in 2010 for each country. Based on data from the CIA World Factbook.
Aging of Japan: 21% over 65 (2005); 23.1% ≥65 & 11.4% ≥75 (2011.02; world's highest).
Elderly people in Japan: in USA expansion of the 65-and-over age group from 7% to 14% took 75 years; in UK and Germany this expansion took 45 years; in Japan only took 24.5 years passing 7% in late 1970 and 14% in early 1995. In the 1980s, there was a major trend toward the elderly maintaining separate households rather than co-residing with the families of adult children. The proportion living with children decreased from 77% in 1970 to 65% in 1985, although this rate was still much higher than in other industrialized countries. The number of elderly living in Japan's retirement or nursing homes also increased from around 75,000 in 1970 to more than 216,000 in 1987. People over 60 continue to work for varied reasons: to supplement inadequate pension incomes, to give meaning to their lives, or to keep in touch with society.
Living together
Gated community: form of residential community or housing estate containing strictly controlled entrances for pedestrians, bicycles, and automobiles, and often characterized by a closed perimeter of walls and fences. Some gated communities, usually called guard-gated communities, are staffed by private security guards and are often home to high-value properties, and/or are set up as retirement villages; some gated communities are secure enough to resemble fortresses and are intended as such. Gated communities are very rare in Europe and Japan, but popular in Americas, China, Saudo Arabia (oil industry), South Africa. Mexico has both the largest population of gated community dwellers in the world and the largest number of gated community dwellers as a percentage of national population.
Decision making, leadership
Design by committee (design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor leadership) vs.
Systems architect (high-level designer of a system to be implemented)
Delphi technique: structured communication technique, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts
Ant tribe: neologism used to describe a group of low income college graduates who settle for a poverty-level existence in the cities of PRC. Those who belong to the ant tribe class hope that, in time, they will find the jobs for which they are trained in college. In Taiwan, Belarus, Peru, USA the largest share of unemployed were made up of people with college/university degrees.
Vagrancy (people) (vagrant, vagabond; la: vagari: 'wander'): "tramp", "hobo", "drifter"; person, often in poverty, who wanders from place to place without a home or regular employment or income.
Works council (
de:Betriebsrat): strongest in DE, other EU/Eu countries are modeling on DE model. One of the most commonly examined (and arguably most successful) implementations of these institutions is found in Germany. The model is basically as follows: general labour agreements are made at the national level by national unions (e.g. IG Metall) and national employer associations (e.g. Gesamtmetall), and local plants and firms then meet with works councils to adjust these national agreements to local circumstances. Works council members are elected by the company workforce for a four year term. They don't have to be union members; works councils can also be formed in companies where neither the employer nor the employees are organized.
Iron law of oligarchy: found in the book Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911) by Robert Michels; claims that rule by an elite, or "oligarchy", is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization; "Who says organization, says oligarchy"; "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."
Peter Principle: concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was explained in the 1969 book The Peter Principle (William Morrow and Company) by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull. Hull wrote the text, which was based on Peter's research. Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. The Peter principle has since been the subject of much commentary and research.
Dilbert principle: 1990s theory by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory: framework for cross-cultural communication, developed by Geert Hofstede. Describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis. The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In 2010 Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint. A poor country that is short-term oriented usually has little to no economic development, while long-term oriented countries continue to develop to a point. As a country becomes richer, its culture becomes more individualistic. On average, predominantly Catholic countries show very high uncertainty avoidance, relatively high power distance, moderate masculinity and relatively low individualism, whereas predominantly atheist countries have low uncertainty avoidance, very high power distance, moderate masculinity, and very low individualism.
Business (enterprise, firm): organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers.
Company: in USA company="corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, trust, fund, or organized group of persons, whether incorporated or not, and (in an official capacity) any receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, or similar official, or liquidating agent, for any of the foregoing"
Dutch East India Company (see Indonesia, going to Dutch empire; defunct; empire collapsed)
Disney (still running, industry: entertainment)
East India Company (the other company, going to British empire; defunct; empire collapsed)
United Fruit Company (see USA actions in South and Central America in 19th-20th century, going to "American (i.e. US of A) empire"; renamed, still existing, lost all its previous glory)
United Fruit Company: was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Third World plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. Flourished in the early and mid-20th century and came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies
Banana republic: were mainly in Central America where they grew bananas and other fruits.
comparison of these megacorps: they had the headquarters in the civilized world and in the underdeveloped world, they were ruled by laws in the civ-world, and by blood and war in the not-so-civ-world; they extracted resources from underdeveloped world to bring riches to the developed world. Usually literacy uprooted and national movements ousted these practices (11/12/03)...
Recapitalization: sort of a corporate reorganization involving substantial change in a company's capital structure. Leveraged Recapitalization (company issues bonds to raise money to buy back its own shares), Leveraged Buyout (substitute equity with debt), Nationalization.
Board of directors (the board): executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulations (including the jurisdiction's corporate law) and the organization's own constitution and by-laws. These authorities may specify the number of members of the board, how they are to be chosen, and how often they are to meet. The board of directors appoints the chief executive officer of the corporation and sets out the overall strategic direction. Typically, the board chooses one of its members to be the chairman (often now called the "chair" or "chairperson"), who holds whatever title is specified in the by-laws or articles of association. However, in membership organizations, the members elect the president of the organization and the president becomes the board chair, unless the by-laws say otherwise.
Shareholder rights plan ("poison pill"): type of defensive tactic used by a corporation's board of directors against a takeover. Typically, such a plan gives shareholders the right to buy more shares at a discount if one shareholder buys a certain percentage or more of the company's shares. The plan could be triggered, for instance, if any one shareholder buys 20% of the company's shares, at which point every shareholder (except the one who possesses 20%) will have the right to buy a new issue of shares at a discount. If every other shareholder is able to buy more shares at a discount, such purchases would dilute the bidder's interest, and the cost of the bid would rise substantially. In the field of mergers and acquisitions, shareholder rights plans were devised in the early 1980s as a way to prevent takeover bidders from negotiating a price for sale of shares directly with shareholders, and instead forcing the bidder to negotiate with the board.
Market fundamentalism (free-market fundamentalism): term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as pejorative by critics of said beliefs.
Corporate titles (business titles): given to corporate officers to show what duties and responsibilities they have in the organization. Such titles are used by publicly and privately held for-profit corporations, cooperatives, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, partnerships, and sole proprietorships that also confer corporate titles. Variations: Within the corporate office or corporate center of a corporation, some corporations have a chairman and CEO as the top-ranking executive, while the number two is the president and COO; other corporations have a president and CEO but no official deputy. Typically, senior managers are "higher" than vice presidents, although many times a senior officer may also hold a vice president title, such as executive vice president and CFO. The board of directors is technically not part of management itself, although its chairman may be considered part of the corporate office if he or she is an executive chairman.
Mezzanine capital: type of financing that sits between senior debt and equity in a company's capital structure. It is typically used to fund growth, acquisitions, or buyouts. Technically, mezzanine capital can be either a debt or equity instrument with a repayment priority between senior debt and common stock equity. Mezzanine debt is subordinated debt that represents a claim on a company's assets which is senior only to that of the common shares and usually unsecured. Redeemable preferred stock equity, with warrants or conversion rights, is also a type of mezzanine financing. Mezzanine capital is often a more expensive financing source for a company than secured debt or senior debt. Uses: Leveraged buyouts; Real estate finance.
List of industrial processes: procedures involving chemical, physical, electrical or mechanical steps to aid in the manufacturing of an item or items, usually carried out on a very large scale. Industrial processes are the key components of heavy industry.
Slag: glass-like by-product left over after a desired metal has been separated (i.e., smelted) from its raw ore.
Flash smelting: smelting process for sulfur-containing ores including chalcopyrite. The process was developed by Outokumpu in Finland and first applied at the Harjavalta plant in 1949 for smelting copper ore. It has also been adapted for nickel and lead production.
2008 Chinese heparin adulteration: contaminant was identified as an "over-sulphated" derivative of chondroitin sulfate, a closely related substance obtained from mammal or fish cartilage and often used as a treatment for arthritis. Since over-sulphated chondroitin is not a naturally occurring molecule, costs a fraction of true heparin starting material, and mimics the in-vitro properties of heparin, the counterfeit was almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing. The raw heparin batches were found to have been cut from 2-60% with the counterfeit substance, and motivation for the adulteration was attributed to a combination of cost effectiveness and a shortage of suitable pigs in China.
Lean startup (Eric Ries): methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The central hypothesis of the lean startup methodology is that if startup companies invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers, they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches and failures. Definitions: Minimum viable product; Split testing (A/B test); Actionable metrics; pivot is a "structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth", "changing (or even firing) the plan instead of the executive (the sales exec, marketing or even the CEO)"; Build-Measure-Learn.
Kickstarter (2009-): global crowdfunding platform based in USA.
Indiegogo (2008-): international crowdfunding web site.
Stealth mode: company's temporary state of secretiveness, usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pending product launch or other business initiative. A stealth product is a product a company develops in secret, and a stealth company is a new company that avoids initial disclosure as to its existence, purpose, products, personnel, funding, brand name, or other important attributes. The term stealth innovation has been applied to individual projects and ideas that are developed in secret inside a company.
First-mover advantage: advantage gained by the initial ("first-moving") significant occupant of a market segment. First-movers can be rewarded with huge profit margins and a monopoly-like status. The three primary sources of first-mover advantages are technological leadership, preemption of scarce assets, and switching costs / buyer choice under uncertainty. First-mover disadvantages include “free-rider effects, resolution of technological or market uncertainty, shifts in technology or customer needs, and incumbent inertia.” Second-mover advantage occurs when a firm following the lead of the first-mover is actually able to capture greater market share, despite having entered late; Second-mover advantage can be summarized by the adage: "The second mouse gets the cheese."
Y Combinator (company) (2005.03-): USA startup fund. Fast Company has called YC "the world's most powerful start-up incubator". Fortune has called Y Combinator "a spawning ground for emerging tech giants". Y Combinator was started in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris.
The Principles of Scientific Management (1911): monograph published by Frederick Winslow Taylor. This laid out Taylor's views on principles of scientific management, or industrial era organization and decision theory. Taylor was an American manufacturing manager, mechanical engineer, and then a management consultant in his later years. The term scientific management refers to coordinating the enterprise for everyone's benefit including increased wages for laborers although the approach is "directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work." His approach is also often referred to as Taylor's Principles, or Taylorism. The monograph consisted of three sections: Introduction, Chapter 1: Fundamentals of Scientific Management, and Chapter 2: The Principles of Scientific Management.
Subpopulations, minorities
Chinese American: why Chinese Americans (including Taiwanese Americans) are doing so well in the USA (even slightly above Japanese and Korean Americans)? Do only the best of the best come from PRC (Hong Kong & Macau), ROC, of Chinese descent from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia to USA? Or is it a cultural (Chinese culture) thing?
Face (sociological concept): idiomatically means dignity/prestige. "The concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin", yet many languages have "face" terms that metaphorically mean "prestige; honor; reputation." English semantic field for "face" words meaning "prestige; honor" is smaller than the corresponding Chinese field, but historical dictionaries more accurately record its history. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) documents how the English community in China originated lose face and save face in the late 19th century, and how morphological variants like face-saver subsequently developed. "The fact that Chinese lexicalizes losing face (丟臉, 沒面子), but not gaining face is a potent reminder that losing face has far more serious implications for one's sense of self-esteem or decency than gaining face." Huang (1987:71).
Kulturkarte der Welt nach Inglehart-Welzel2
Inglehart Values Map
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world: scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey. It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis.
Tocqueville effect: phenomenon in which as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on". For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia: one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. Its principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms—"involution". The term has drawn significant attention in China since its introduction in China's social sciences research, making it one of the most popular buzzwords in China.
Incarceration
List of countries by incarceration rate: at the top: USA, Rwanda (after genocide?), Georgia (crime?), Russia (all the politicals & co!), ..., Cuba (politicals?). The highest ever was in USSR in 1934-1953 at ~800/100,000 population (1.2-1.5 mln in GULAGs per 168 mln pop.).
Incarceration in the United States: mainly due to the length of the sentences and "war on drugs" the USA has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (in 2009: 743/100,000 population). Ethnicity: black males are incarcerated about 2.5 times as frequently as hispanic males and hispanic males about 2 times over white males per 100,000 of the same gender and ethnicity pop.
United States incarceration rate.
Edge city (suburban activity centers, megacenters, suburban business districts): term that originated in USA for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban residential or rural area. The term was popularized by the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau. Garreau argues that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Most edge cities develop at or near existing or planned freeway intersections, and are especially likely to develop near major airports. They rarely include heavy industry. History: The edge city is fundamentally impossible without the automobile. Edge cities in the 21st century: Densification; Despite the lessons of USA experience, in rapidly developing countries such as China, India, UAE (Dubai), the edge city is quickly emerging as an important new development form as automobile ownership skyrockets and marginal land is bulldozed for development. Impact of edge cities: Relation with metropolitan area; Garreau: "Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism - our jobs - out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City"
Empire: sovereign state consisting of several territories and peoples subject to a single ruling authority, often an emperor. States can be empires either by narrow definition through having an emperor and being named as such, or by broad definition as stated above in being an aggregated realm under the rule of a supreme authority. An empire can be made solely of contiguous territories, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Russian Empire, or include territories which are far remote from the 'home' country of the empire, such as a colonial empire. Aside from the more formal usage, the word empire can also refer colloquially to a large-scale business enterprise (e.g. a transnational corporation), a political organisation controlled by a single individual (a political boss), or a group (political bosses). The concept of empire is associated with other such concepts as imperialism, colonialism, and globalization, with imperialism referring to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between nations and not necessarily the policy of a state headed by an emperor or empress. Empire is often used as a term to describe displeasure to overpowering situations. Territorial empires (Mongol Empire, Median Empire), maritime republics or thalassocracies (the Athenian (Delian League) and British empires), Holy Roman Empire came together by electing the emperor with votes from member realms through the Imperial election. Doyle examplifies the transformation on the case of the Roman Emperor Caracalla whose legislation in AD 212 extended the Roman citizenship to all inhabitants of the Mediterranean world. To the case of Caracalla, Toynbee added the Abbasid cosmopolitan reformation of 750 AD. Historian Maks Ostrovski finds above mentioned cosmopolitan reformations to be the characteristic fate of persistent empires. When such a reformation occurs in our world, he writes, the green card would be abolished since all earth inhabitants would have it by birth. This cosmopolitan World State, as the records of earlier circumscribed civilizations suggest, will last millennia. Carneiro's circumscription theory: The Empires of Egypt, China and Japan are named the most durable political structures in human history. Correspondingly, these are the three most circumscribed civilizations in human history. The Empires of Egypt (established by Narmer c. 3000 BC) and China (established by Cheng in 221 BC) endured for over two millennia. German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck, criticizing the Western idea of progress, emphasized that China and Egypt remained at one particular stage of development for millennia. This stage was universal empire. The development of Egypt and China came to a halt once their empires "reached the limits of their natural habitat". Sinology does not recognize the Eurocentric view of the "inevitable" imperial fall; Egyptology and Japanology pose equal challenges. Since "the contemporary international system is global, we can rule out the possibility that geographic expansion of the system will contribute to the emergence of a new balance of power, as it did so many times in the past." As Quincy Wright had put it, "this process can no longer continue without interplanetary wars."
List of largest empires: Several empires in world history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a fairly precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy. Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera, who published a series of academic articles about the territorial extents of historical empires between 1978 and 1997, defined an empire as "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign" and its size as the area over which the empire has some undisputed military and taxation prerogatives; these are the criteria from which these lists are formed. Empires at their greatest extent:
British Empire (1920) 35.5 M km² / 26.35%
Mongol Empire (1270 or 1309) 24.0 M km² / 17.81%
Russian Empire (1895) 22.8 M km² / 16.92%
Qing dynasty (1790) 14.7 M km² / 10.91%
Spanish Empire (1810) 13.7 M km² / 10.17%
Timeline of largest empires to date.
Timeline of largest empires at the time: USSR 22.5 M km².
Settler colonialism: type of colonialism in which foreign settlers immigrate and permanently reside on land already inhabited by Indigenous residents. Settler colonialism causes the replacement or reduction of existing peoples and cultures; some, but not all, scholars describe the process as inherently genocidal. It may be enacted by a variety of means, ranging from violent depopulation of the previous inhabitants to less deadly means, such as assimilation or recognition of Indigenous identity within a colonial framework. As with all forms of colonialism, it is based on exogenous domination, typically organized or supported by an imperial authority. Settler colonialism contrasts with exploitation colonialism, which entails an economic policy of conquering territory to exploit its population as cheap or free labor and its natural resources as raw material. In this way, settler colonialism lasts indefinitely, except in the rare event of complete evacuation or settler decolonization.
Informal empire: describes the spheres of influence which a polity may develop that translate into a degree of influence over a region or country, which is not a formal colony, protectorate, tributary or vassal state of empire, as a result of its commercial, strategic or military interests. An informal empire may assume a primarily economic guise. Strategic considerations or other concerns may bring about the creation of an imperial influence over a region not formally a component of empire. Origins: The city-state of Athens exerted control over the Delian league through an informal empire in the 5th c. BCE. According to historian Jeremy Black, the role of chartered companies such as the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, who operated beyond official state channels, were a forerunner to the concept of "informal empire". United Kingdom (British Empire). USA. France. Germany. Japan (Japanese diplomacy and military intervention in China from 1895 to the outbreak of WWII has also been described as an informal empire). Russian Empire → USSR (In a more formal interpretation of "Soviet empire", this meant absolutism, resembling Lenin's description of the tsarist empire as a "prison of the peoples" except that this "prison of the peoples" had been actualized during Stalin's regime after Lenin's death.). Ottoman Empire.
The empire on which the sun never sets (Spanish: el imperio donde nunca se pone el sol): used to describe certain global empires that were so extensive that it seemed as though it was always daytime in at least one part of its territory. It was originally used for the Empire of Charles V, who, as Duke of Burgundy, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to build a universal monarchy. The term was then used for the Spanish Empire of Philip II of Spain and successors when the empire reached a global territorial size, particularly in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was used for the British Empire, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period in which it reached a global territorial size. In the 20th c., the phrase has sometimes been adapted to refer to the global reach of American power (USA).
Hegemonic stability theory (HST): theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon. Thus, the fall of an existing hegemon or the state of no hegemon diminishes the stability of the international system. When a hegemon exercises leadership, either through diplomacy, coercion, or persuasion, it is actually deploying its "preponderance of power." This is called hegemony, which refers to a state's ability to "single-handedly dominate the rules and arrangements ...[of] international political and economic relations." HST can help analyze the rise of great powers to the role of world leader or hegemon. Also, it can be used to understand and to calculate the future of international politics through the discussion of the symbiotic relation between the declining hegemon and its rising successor.
Survival skills: techniques that a person may use in order to sustain life in any type of natural environment or built environment. These techniques are meant to provide basic necessities for human life which include water, food, and shelter. The skills also support proper knowledge and interactions with animals and plants to promote the sustaining of life over a period of time. Survival skills are often associated with the need to survive in a disaster situation. Survival skills are often basic ideas and abilities that ancients invented and used themselves for thousands of years. Outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking, horseback riding, fishing, and hunting all require basic wilderness survival skills, especially in handling emergency situations. Bushcraft and primitive living are most often self-implemented but require many of the same skills.
Barbarian: person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage. In idiomatic or figurative usage, a "barbarian" may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person.
"Barbarian" in Greek historical contexts
"Barbarian" in international historical contexts:
Berber and North African cultures
Hindu culture
Chinese culture: Historically, the Chinese used various words for foreign ethnic groups. They include terms like 夷 Yi, which is often translated as "barbarians." Despite this conventional translation, there are also other ways of translating Yi into English. Some of the examples include "foreigners," "ordinary others," "wild tribes," "uncivilized tribes," and so forth.
Japanese culture
American cultures
Ethnogenesis: process in which a group of people acquire an ethnicity, that is, a group identity that identifies them as an ethnic group. This can originate through a process of self-identification as well as come about as the result of outside identification.
Gender pay gap: difference between male and female earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings, according to the OECD. EU: pay gap ranging from less than 10% in Italy, Slovenia, Malta, Romania, Belgium, Portugal and Poland to more than 20% in Slovakia, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Germany, United Kingdom and Greece and more than 25% in Estonia and Austria.
Global Gender Gap Report: ranks countries according to their gender gaps, and their scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the inequality between women and men that has been closed.
Feminism
Torches of Freedom: phrase used to encourage women’s smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the women’s liberation movement in US. 1920s+
Men's rights movement (MRM): Issues: Adoption, Anti-dowry laws (India), Child custody (Fathers' rights movement), Divorce, Domestic violence, Education, False accusation of rape and Marital rape, Female privilege, Governmental structures, Health (men live shorter than women on average), Marriage strike (fewer males marrying), Military conscription, Parental abduction (India), Paternity fraud (called for compulsory paternity testing of all children), Prison (more males in jail than females), Reproductive rights (women decide abortion), Social security and insurance (women are given superior social security and tax benefits than men).
Arts, media
Arts, media (visual, audio, any other {human} perception)
Ilona Hubay: survey of existing copies of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, Die bekannten Exemplare der zweiundvierzigzeiligen Bibel und ihre Besitzer (1985)
Time loop: plot device in fiction whereby characters re-experience a span of time which is repeated, sometimes more than once, with some hope of breaking out of the cycle of repetition. The term "time loop" is sometimes used to refer to a causal loop; however, causal loops are unchanging and self-originating, whereas time loops are constantly resetting: when a certain condition is met, such as a death of a character or a clock reaching a certain time, the loop starts again, possibly with one or more characters retaining the memories from the previous loop. USA film Groundhog Day (1993).
List of films featuring time loops: characters experience the same period of time which is repeatedly resetting: when a certain condition is met, such as a death of a character or a clock reaches a certain time, the loop starts again, with one or more characters retaining the memories from the previous loop. The Time Travelers (1964); ...; Groundhog Day (1993); ...; The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (anime) (2006); ...; Palm Springs (2020); ...
Retroactive continuity (retcon): literary device in which established diegetic facts in the plot of a fictional work (those established through the narrative itself) are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former. Retcons are common in pulp fiction, and especially in comic books published by long-established publishers such as DC and Marvel. The long history of popular titles and the number of writers who contribute stories can often create situations that demand clarification or revision. Retcons also often appear in manga, soap operas, serial dramas, movie sequels, cartoons, professional wrestling angles, video games, radio series, and other forms of serial fiction.
Comic book death: the apparent death and subsequent return of a long-running character, in the comic book fan community. A comic book death is generally not taken seriously by readers and is rarely permanent or meaningful other than for story or thematic purposes. A common expression regarding comic book death was once "No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben", referring to the seminal importance of those characters' deaths to the title character: Captain America's sidekick (retconned dead in 1964), Batman's second Robin (dead in 1988), and Spider-Man's uncle (dead since 1962), respectively. This long-held tenet was broken in 2005, when Jason Todd returned to life as the Red Hood and Bucky was retconned to have survived the accident that seemingly killed him, and brought back as the Winter Soldier who had remained in the shadows for decades.
Piled Higher and Deeper (Piled Higher and Deeper - Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia; PhD Comics): B.S. = "bullshit"; "M.S." = "More of the Same" ("More Shit"); Ph.D. = "Piled Higher and Deeper". The Nameless Hero; Cecilia; Michael Slackenerny; Tajel...
Howl (poem) (Howl for Carl Solomon): poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature. It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation. 1957.10.03, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene. Overview and structure:
Part I: Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he had encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation".
Part II: "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Part II is about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as "Moloch". Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children. Lines: From "Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!" to "Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!" - A reference to several films by Fritz Lang, most notably Metropolis in which the name "Moloch" is directly related to a monstrous factory. Ginsberg also claimed he was inspired by Lang's M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Philosophical fiction: class of works of fiction which devote a significant portion of their content to the sort of questions normally addressed in philosophy. These might explore any facet of the human condition, including the function and role of society, the nature and motivation of human acts, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of art in human lives, the role of experience or reason in the development of knowledge, whether there exists free will, or any other topic of philosophical interest. Philosophical fiction works would include the so-called novel of ideas, including some science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, and the Bildungsroman.
Science fiction (sci-fi, SF): genre of speculative fiction that typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations. Science fiction, whose roots go back to ancient times, is related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction, and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction literature, film, television, and other media have become popular and influential over much of the world. Besides providing entertainment, it can also criticize present-day society, and is often said to inspire a "sense of wonder".
History: In 2007, Liu Cixin's novel, The Three-Body Problem, was published in China. It was translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books in 2014, and won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Liu the first Asian writer to win the award. Emerging themes in late 20th and early 21st century science fiction include environmental issues, the implications of the Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology, nanotechnology, and post-scarcity societies. Recent trends and subgenres include steampunk, biopunk, and mundane science fiction.
Social influence: As protest literature
Science fiction studies: Classification; As serious literature.
History of science fiction: literary genre of science fiction is diverse, and its exact definition remains a contested question among both scholars and devotees. There are two broad camps of thought, one that identifies the genre's roots in early fantastical works such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (earliest Sumerian text versions c. 2150–2000 BCE). A second approach argues that science fiction only became possible sometime between the 17th and early 19th centuries, following the scientific revolution and major discoveries in astronomy, physics, and mathematics. Scholar Robert Scholes calls the history of science fiction "the history of humanity's changing attitudes toward space and time ... the history of our growing understanding of the universe and the position of our species in that universe." In recent decades, the genre has diversified and become firmly established as a major influence on global culture and thought. Early science fiction: Ancient and early modern precursors: Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 AD), the Old English epic heroic poem Beowulf (8th-11th centuries AD), and the Middle German epic poem Nibelungenlied (c. 1230), their relative lack of references to science or technology puts them closer to fantasy rather than science fiction. French science fiction writer Pierre Versins also argued that Gilgamesh was the first science fiction work due to its treatment of human reason and the quest for immortality. In addition, Gilgamesh features a flood scene that in some ways resembles work of apocalyptic science fiction. Hindu epic Ramayana (5th to 4th century BC) includes Vimana flying machines able to travel into space or under water, and destroy entire cities using advanced weapons. Hindu epic Ramayana, Rigveda, Mahabharata. Aristophanes' The Clouds, The Birds. One frequently cited text is the Syrian-Greek writer Lucian's 2nd-century satire True History, which uses a voyage to outer space and conversations with alien life forms to comment on the use of exaggeration within travel literature and debates. One Thousand and One Nights. Other medieval literature. Proto-science fiction in the Enlightenment and Age of Reason: Thomas More's 1516 Utopia. Several works expanded on imaginary voyages to the moon, first in Johannes Kepler's Somnium (The Dream, 1634), which both Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to as the first work of science fiction. Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610–11) contains a prototype for the "mad scientist story". Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627). Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) contains descriptions of alien cultures and "weird science". 19th-century transitions: Shelley and Europe in the early 19th century: groundbreaking publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. Louis Geoffroy's Napoleon et la Conquête du Monde (1836), an alternate history of a world conquered by Napoleon. Verne and Wells: Verne's: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) mixed daring romantic adventure with technology that was either up to the minute or logically extrapolated into the future. Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make didactic points about his society. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, the technical details of the machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the stratification of English society. The story also uses Darwinian evolution (as would be expected in a former student of Darwin's champion, Huxley), and shows an awareness of Marxism. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by a deus ex machina, albeit a scientifically explained one. Late 19th-century expansion. Early 20th century: Birth of the pulps: Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), in which the first cinematic humanoid robot was seen, and the Italian Futurists' love of machines are indicative of both the hopes and fears of the world between the world wars. Modernist writing. Science fiction's impact on the public. The period of the 1940s and 1950s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Astounding Science Fiction Magazine: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. The Golden Age in other media. End of the Golden Age. The New Wave and its aftermath. Science fiction in the 1980s: Cyberpunk. Contemporary science fiction and its future: Postcyberpunk. Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in works such as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix series, in anime such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the emerging medium of video games, with the critically acclaimed Deus Ex and Metal Gear series.
Sense of wonder: intellectual and emotional state frequently invoked in discussions of science fiction and philosophy. His essay 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Professor of English, DePauw University, states: "The so-called sense of wonder has been considered one of the primary attributes of sf at least since the pulp era. The titles of the most popular sf magazines of that period—Astounding, Amazing, Wonder Stories, Thrilling, Startling, etc.—clearly indicate that the putative cognitive value of sf stories is more than counter-balanced by an affective power, to which, in fact, the scientific content is expected to submit." As a concept especially connected with science fiction: David Hartwell sees SF's 'sense of wonder' in more general terms: "Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe—any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader." David Hartwell in his book Age of Wonders as regards the relationship of the 'sense of wonder' in SF to religion or the religious experience: "... in doing so, it [science fiction] can create a rival sense of wonder, which acts almost as a replacement religion: a religion for those deprived of all traditional certainties in the wake of Darwin, Einstein, Plank, Godel, and Heisenberg."
Clarke's three laws: "3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Cyberpunk (the word coined in 1983 or a bit earlier; focuses on "high tech{leading/cutting/bleeding edge or state of the art} and low life") &
Cyberpunk derivatives:
The Diamond Age (1995): continuation of "Snow Crash" (Y.T.); failure of strong AI (only soft sub-par with human versions exist), nanotech, from the frachulates to phyles, comparing East (China, Celestial (Middle) Kingdom) and West (Neo-Victorians, Vickies)
Science fantasy: Science fantasy vs. science fiction ⇒ high (bleeding edge)-tech = supernatural & fantasy, e.g. "teleportation by matter-transmitter-beam is science fiction, teleportation by incantation is fantasy"
Prometheus Award: award for libertarian science fiction novels given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society, which also publishes a quarterly journal Prometheus
The Culture: fictional interstellar anarchic and utopian society. By the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. The Culture series = science fiction novels and works of short fiction. Egalitarian society of beings and AIs (AIs from super-huge capabilities, to drones, the small AIs), i.e. AIs are equal to beings (made of flesh and many improvements). Sublimation as death into the other dimensions. Post-scarcity economics. Non-interference, but war and secret agencies exist.
We (novel): "A repeated mantra in the novel is that there is no final revolution." (Yevgeny Zamyatin; 1921 written in ru, 1924 published in en) →
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley; 1931, 1932) →
Nineteen Eighty-Four (aka 1984; George Orwell; 1949)
Niven's laws: named after science fiction author Larry Niven, who has periodically published them as "how the Universe works" as far as he can tell. These were most recently rewritten on January 29, 2002 (and published in Analog Magazine in the November 2002 issue).
Never fire a laser at a mirror.
F × S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naïve.
It is easier to destroy than to create.
Ethics change with technology.
The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.
Group mind (science fiction) (group ego, mind coalescence, or gestalt intelligence): plot device in which multiple minds, or consciousnesses, are linked into a single, collective consciousness or intelligence. The first alien hive society was depicted in H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) while the use of human hive minds in literature goes back at least as far as David H. Keller's The Human Termites (published in Wonder Stories in 1929) and Olaf Stapledon's science fiction novel Last and First Men (1930), which is the first known use of the term "group mind" in science fiction. This term may be used interchangeably with hive mind. "Hive mind" tends to describe a group mind in which the linked individuals have no identity or free will and are possessed or mind-controlled as extensions of the hive mind.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".
Shirley Jackson -
The Lottery: "People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch."
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
Classical Latin: The ages of Latin - Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel (1870). Authors of the Golden Age (83 BC - 14 AD): Republican (Ciceronian Age) and Augustan; Authors of the Silver Age: Through the death of Trajan (117 AD) and Through the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD)
q.v. (quod videre): "which to see"; used as an imperative. Used after a term or phrase that should be looked up elsewhere in the current document or book. For more than one term or phrase, the plural is quae videre (qq.v.). Similar: v.s. (vide supra) means "see above"; v.i. (vide infra) means "see below".
cf. (confer): literally meaning "bring together", is used to refer to other material or ideas which may provide similar or different information or arguments. It is mainly used in scholarly contexts, such as in academic (mainly humanities, physics, chemistry, and biology) or legal texts. It is translated, and can be read aloud, as "compare".
sic: added immediately after a quoted word or phrase (or a longer piece of text), indicates that the quoted words have been transcribed exactly as spelled or presented in the original source, complete with any erroneous spelling or other presentation. The usual purpose is to inform the reader that any errors or apparent errors in the transcribed material do not arise from transcription errors, and the errors have been repeated intentionally, i.e. that they are reproduced exactly as set down by the original writer or printer. Sic is generally placed inside square brackets, or in parentheses (round brackets), and traditionally in italic, as is customary when printing a foreign word.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations.
Cliché: expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.
Paremiology (παροιμία (paroimía), meaning 'proverb, maxim, saw'): collection and study of proverbs.
Paremiography (παροιμία - paroimía, "proverb, maxim, saw" and γράφω - grafō, "write, inscribe"): study of the collection and writing of proverbs. It is a sub-field of paremiology, the study of proverbs.
World of A Song of Ice and Fire: The Known World. Most of the story takes place on the continent of Westeros and in a large political entity known as the Seven Kingdoms. Those kingdoms are spread across nine regions: the North (House Stark at Winterfell; Wall & Night's Watch), the Iron Islands (House Greyjoy of Pyke, worship the Drowned God), the Riverlands (Harrenhal, Riverrun (House Tully), The Twins (House Frey)), the Vale (House Arryn at Eyrie), the Westerlands (House Lannister at Casterly Rock), the Stormlands (House Baratheon at Storm's End), the Reach (most lush and fertile region of Westeros, House Tyrell at Highgarden; Oldtown - the oldest city in Westeros, home to the Maester's Citadel, and the previous seat of the Faith of the Seven), the Crownlands (King's Landing is the largest city in Westeros and royal capital; Dragonstone - from here Targaryen family conquered the Seven Kingdoms 100 years after the Doom of Valyria), and Dorne (House Martell at Sunspear). A massive wall of ice and old magic separates the Seven Kingdoms from the largely unmapped area to the north. The vast continent of Essos is east of Westeros, across the "Narrow Sea". The closest foreign nations to Westeros are the Free Cities, which is a collection of independent city-states along the western edge of Essos. The lands along the southern coastline of Essos are called the Lands of the Summer Sea and include Slavers Bay and the ruins of Valyria. The latter is the former home of Westeros' Targaryen kings. George R. R. Martin set the Ice and Fire story in an alternative world of Earth, a "secondary world", such as J. R. R. Tolkien pioneered with Middle-Earth. The Ice and Fire narrative is set in a post-magic world where people no longer believe in supernatural things such as the Others. Although the characters understand the natural aspects of their world, they do not know or understand its magical elements.
Westeros: The first inhabitants of the continent were the Children of the Forest, a nature-worshipping anthropoid species who carved the faces of their gods in weirwood trees. Some time later, the First Men's attempts at cultivating the land led to a war with the Children of the Forest that eventually was settled by an agreement known as "The Pact". This was the beginning of the Age of Heroes. During that time, the First Men adopted the gods of the Children of the Forest. Those gods later became known in Westeros as the Old gods. Eight thousand years before the events of the novels, an enigmatic species called the Others emerged from the furthermost north during the decades-long winter known as "The Long Night". The Children of the Forest and the First Men jointly repelled the Others and then built a massive wall barring passage from the far north. Sometime later, the Andals invaded Westeros and established the Faith of the Seven, writing, and steel. Only the North remained unconquered. The Children of the Forest disappeared from Andal lands. Over time, seven kingdoms were forged across Westeros. Three hundred years before the novels begin, Aegon the Conqueror and his two Targaryen sister-wives came from Dragonstone and landed at present-day King's Landing. The three assembled a temporary battalion, known as "Aegon's Fort", which grew into the capital city. Their powerful dragons overwhelmed six of the Seven Kingdoms through conquest or treaty, with Dorne remaining independent for another two hundred years until it was absorbed through a marriage-alliance. The Targaryens built the Iron Throne, which consists of the swords of defeated rulers, fused together by dragonfire. Targaryens remained the ruling power on the continent until deposed by Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon.
Essos: large eastern continent. Free Cities: Braavos (was not a Valyrian colony, but a secret refuge from Valyrian expansion), Pentos, Volantis (oldest and proudest of the Free Cities); Lorath, Lys, Myr, Norvos, Qohor, Tyrosh. Central Essos: Valyria (Doom of Valyria; Valyrians have silver hair and violet eyes; Targaryens are of the blood of old Valyria, who escaped before The Doom); Dothraki Sea - vast, flat grassland, inhabited by the Dothraki people, a copper-skinned race of warlike nomads with their own language and unique culture, Dothraki live in hordes called khalasars, each led by a chief called a khal; Lhazar - Lhazareen, a peaceful people with bronze skin, flat faces, and almond eyes are shepherds. Slaver's Bay: Astapor, Yunkai, Meeren. Eastern Essos: Red Waste is a great desert-like area; Qarth. Asshai and the Shadow Lands. Ibben. Yi Ti, Plains of Jogos Nhai.
Sothoros or Sothoryos: third continent of the known world. Sothoros is large, plague ridden, covered in jungles and largely unexplored.
Themes in A Song of Ice and Fire: Magic and realism: Martin has said he believes in "judicious use of magic" in epic fantasy; Children of the Forest are presented as the original inhabitants of Westeros, but unseen for thousands of years; The Others (White Walkers); Dragons. Politics and society. Moral ambiguity: Laura Miller of The New Yorker summarized that "Characters who initially seem likable commit reprehensible acts, and apparent villains become sympathetic over time", and The Atlantic said that even the TV adaptation "does not present the viewer with an easily identifiable hero, but with an ensemble of characters with sometimes sympathetic, often imperfect motives"; However, according to Martin, Tyrion Lannister is the most morally neutral main character in the book, which, along with his cynicism, is what makes him his favorite character. Violence and death: scene called the "Red Wedding", which occurs about two thirds through A Storm of Swords and leaves several major characters dead, was the hardest scene Martin had ever written; Martin repeatedly skipped writing the chapter and eventually wrote it last for A Storm of Swords. Sexuality: Martin equipped many of the Ice and Fire characters with a sex drive; Martin was also fascinated by medieval contrasts where knights venerated their ladies with poems and wore their favors in tournaments while their armies raped women in wartime. Identity: point of view characters change their names, even to a point where they lose their identity in the chapter title; Arya - Arry, Nymeria, Nan, Salty and Cat of the Canals, among others, 'The Blind Girl' and 'The Ugly Little Girl'; Theon Greyjoy - Reek, The Prince of Winterfell, The Turncloak, A Ghost in Winterfell, and finally, Theon again. Feminism. Religion: different kinds of magic in the Ice and Fire world may be manifestations of the same forces, whereby readers can puzzle out the relation between the religions and the various magics; but the validity, teachings, and power of the competing religions in Ice and Fire, are left ambiguous, and Martin has said the series' gods are unlikely to appear as dei ex machina in Westeros; Faith of the Seven - predominant religion of Westeros, although it has only a few followers on the Iron Islands and in the North; Old Gods - Children of the Forest revered Weirwood trees, when the First Men (human beings) came to Westeros from Essos, they accepted the Old Gods until the Andal Invasion converted the southern population of Westeros to the Faith of the Seven; Drowned God - local religion of the Iron Islands; R'hllor - Red God and the Lord of Light, is a god worshipped primarily across the Narrow Sea, and his priests have only had a small presence in the Seven Kingdoms at the beginning of A Game of Thrones, strong focus on prophecy and on ecstatic visions, antithesis of R'hllor is the "Great Other": a god of ice, darkness, and death; Many-Faced God - deity worshipped by a guild of assassins from the Free City of Braavos known as the Faceless Men. Food
White Walker (the Others): "Tall ... and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk" with eyes "deeper and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice". Accompanied by intense cold, they wear armor that "seemed to change color as it moved", and wield thin crystal swords capable of shattering steel. The Others move silently, and they speak their own language; Martin writes that their voices are "like the cracking of ice on a winter lake". Creatures killed by the Others soon reanimate as wights: undead with pallid skin, black hands and similarly glowing blue eyes. Dragonglass has no effect on them. The humans who live in the north beyond The Wall—called "wildlings" by the inhabitants of Westeros—burn their dead so that they do not become wights.
Le ChevalierC. Auguste Dupin: fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Dupin is not a professional detective and his motivations for solving the mysteries change throughout the three stories. Using what Poe termed "ratiocination", Dupin combines his considerable intellect with creative imagination, even putting himself in the mind of the criminal. His talents are strong enough that he appears able to read the mind of his companion, the unnamed narrator of all three stories. Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined. The character laid the groundwork for fictional detectives to come, including Sherlock Holmes, and established most of the common elements of the detective fiction genre.
Sherlock Holmes: fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard. First appearing in print in 1887's A Study in Scarlet, the character's popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891; additional tales appeared from then until 1927, eventually totalling four novels and 56 short stories. All but one[His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes (WWI)] are set in the Victorian or Edwardian eras, between about 1880 and 1914. Inspiration for the character: Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin is generally acknowledged as the first detective in fiction and served as the prototype for many later characters, including Holmes. Conan Doyle once wrote, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed ... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Similarly, the stories of Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq were extremely popular at the time Conan Doyle began writing Holmes, and Holmes's speech and behaviour sometimes follow those of Lecoq.
Comic books
Dark Horse Comics: USA comic book, graphic novel, and manga publisher founded in Milwaukie, Oregon by Mike Richardson in 1986. Dark Horse Comics has emerged as the fourth largest comic publishing company in the United States of America. Dividing profits with artists and writers, as well as supporting artistic and creative rights in the comic book industry, Dark Horse Comics has become a strong proponent of publishing licensed material that often does not fit into mainstream media. Several titles include: Sin City, Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 300, and Star Wars. In 2021.12, Swedish gaming company Embracer Group launched its acquisition of Dark Horse Media, Dark Horse Comics' parent company, and completed the buyout in 2022.03.
Galactus: fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Formerly a mortal man, Galactus is a cosmic entity who consumes planets to sustain his life force, and serves a functional role in the upkeep of the primary Marvel continuity. Galactus was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appeared in the comic book Fantastic Four #48, published in March 1966. In the character's first appearance, Galactus was depicted as a god-like figure who feeds by draining living planets of their energy, and operates without regard to the morality and judgments of mortal beings.
Ultron: supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, and initially made his debut as an unnamed character in The Avengers #54 (July 1968), with his first full appearance in The Avengers #55 (August 1968). He is a self-aware and highly intelligent robot who develops a god complex and a grudge against his creator Hank Pym. His goal to destroy humanity has brought him into repeated conflict with the Avengers.
List of DC Multiverse worlds: The original Multiverse: Catalogued; Unclassified. The 52 Multiverse. The Multi-Multiverse: The New 52 and DC Rebirth; The Multiverse-2; The Dark Multiverse. Animated properties. Television series: Smallville; Arrowverse: Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis. DC Films. Video games: Injustice, Infinite Crisis. A convergence of Multiverses.
Superman: Red Son: three-issue prestige format comic book mini-series published by DC Comics that was released under their Elseworlds imprint in 2003. Author Mark Millar created the comic with the premise "What if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union?" It received critical acclaim and was nominated for the 2004 Eisner Award for best limited series. Luthor plans to shrink Moscow, but this plan fails when Brainiac, his collaborator, shrinks Stalingrad instead. Superman intervenes and retrieves both Brainiac's central processing unit and the tiny city, putting an end to the Brainiac-Luthor cooperation. He is unable to restore Stalingrad and its inhabitants to their proper size. This becomes his one failure and a source of great guilt. Superman is committed to "winning the argument" with the U.S., and repeatedly refuses Brainiac's suggestions of an invasion. Stalingrad remains his one failure, now contained within a protective glass "bottle". First Lady Lois Luthor visits Paradise Island to forge an alliance with the Amazon empire, now ruled by an embittered and vengeful Wonder Woman. Superman attacks the East Coast, confronting and defeating the Green Lantern Marine Corps, which is led by Colonel Hal Jordan. The Amazon forces, commanded by Wonder Woman, attack Superman but are quickly defeated, along with a collection of "super-menaces" (including the Atomic Skull, the Parasite and Doomsday) that Luthor had put together over the years. Brainiac's spaceship cuts the U.S. Pacific Fleet to pieces, and the two superbeings meet at the White House. They are greeted by Lois Luthor with the last weapon, a small note written by Lex that reads: "Why don't you just put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?" Realizing he has meddled in affairs that he had no place in, Superman orders Brainiac to end the invasion. Brainiac, however, reveals it has never been under Superman's control, and instead attacks Superman with green radiation. Brainiac is shut down from inside by Luthor, who evaded the surgery. As the singularities powering Brainiac's ship threaten to collapse, Superman rockets it into space, where it explodes. The Earth is saved, but Superman is apparently dead. At Luthor's funeral, it is revealed that Superman survived the explosion of Brainiac's ship and is apparently immortal. Superman attends the funeral wearing a business suit and thick glasses essentially identical to the appearance of Clark Kent, an identity he never adopted in this timeline. Billions of years in the future, Earth is being torn apart by tidal stresses from the sun, which has become a red giant. Luthor's distant descendant, Jor-L, sends his infant son, Kal-L, rocketing back into the past. The final panels of the comic book depict the landing of Kal-L's timeship in a Ukrainian collective in 1938, effectively causing a predestination paradox (and, thus, making Superman a descendant of Luthor and Lois).
Vatican Library (Latin: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Italian: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana): library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City. Formally established in 1475, although it is much older, it is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula. The Vatican Library is a research library for history, law, philosophy, science and theology. The Vatican Library is open to anyone who can document their qualifications and research needs.
Bibliotheca Palatina of Heidelberg: the most important library of the German Renaissance, numbering approximately 5,000 printed books and 3,524 manuscripts. The Bibliotheca was a prominent prize captured during the Thirty Years' War, taken as booty by Maximilian of Bavaria, and given to the Pope in a symbolic and political gesture.
Virtual library, searchable, even viewable. BUT only out-of-copyright works (i.e. 100+ years after the authors death). The legal implications & economics (e.g. monopoly...):
Google Book Search Settlement Agreement: do the USA organisations, like AG, have the right to discuss about the copyright of the books written in the last 100 years by (passport of) DE, ES, FR, Japanese, Chinese, etc. authors?
Book Rights Registry: the outcome of the settlement, a legal "watchdog & distributor"?
Open Content Alliance: opt-in (after asking and receiving permission from the copyright holder); opposite in philosophy to Google Books {obviously, having much fewer books than Google Books}
Ibiblio: "collection of collections"; hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source software, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.
Authority control: process that organizes library catalog and bibliographic information by using a single, distinct name for each topic; one-of-a-kind headings are applied consistently throughout the catalog, and work with other organizing data such as linkages and cross references. Each heading is described briefly in terms of its scope and usage, and this organization helps the library staff maintain the catalog and make it user-friendly for researchers; authority comes from authors. Very similar to the unique Wikipedia URL for any article, topic or category.
National:
Integrated Authority File (
de:Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND)): eine Normdatei für Personen, Körperschaften, Kongresse, Geografika, Sachschlagwörter und Werktitel, die vor allem zur Erschließung von Literatur in Bibliotheken dient, zunehmend aber auch von Archiven, Museen, Projekten und in Web-Anwendungen genutzt wird. Sie wird von der DNB, allen deutschsprachigen Bibliotheksverbünden, der Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) und zahlreichen weiteren Institutionen kooperativ geführt.
Name Authority File (
de:Personennamendatei (PND)): eine Normdatei von Personen, die vor allem zur Erschließung von Literatur in Bibliotheken diente. Die DNB sowie alle deutschen und österreichischen Bibliotheksverbünde führten sie bis 2012 kooperativ. Ende 2012.04 ist die PND in der GND aufgegangen.
International:
Wikipedia:Authority control: template links Wikipedia articles (and user pages) to the corresponding entries in catalogs of national libraries and other authority files all over the world; can display identifiers from the following authority files: GND (German National Library), LCCN (Library of Congress), SELIBR (National Library of Sweden), VIAF and ORCID.
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC; 1967-): "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"
Dublin Core: set of 15 metadata elements to provide a small and fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described and catalogued. ISO Standard 15836.
WorldCat: union catalog (combined catalog from many libraries) which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is built and maintained collectively by the participating libraries.
Virtual International Authority File (VIAF): joint project of several national libraries and operated by OCLC; project was initiated by the German National Library and the U.S. Library of Congress.
National Union Catalog: printed catalog of books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries, issued serially beginning in the 1950s for printed works before 1956. It contains photocopies of printed catalog cards from major American and Canadian libraries, arranged alphabetically by author's last name, or by title for books that have no author, such as the Bible. 754 600-page volumes make 3 ton in weight.
International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI): method for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, TV programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 numerical digits divided into four blocks. Developed under the auspices of ISO as Draft International Standard 27729, the valid standard was published 2012.03.15. The ISO technical committee 46, subcommittee 9 (TC 46/SC 9) is responsible for the development of the standard. ISNI will provide a tool for disambiguating names that might otherwise be confused, and will link the data about names that are collected and used in all sectors of the media industries. ORCID identifiers are reserved block of ISNI identifiers, for scholarly researchers; the two organisations coordinate their efforts.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID): nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors. This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature can be hard to electronically recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems; "author DOI"; open and independent registry intended to be the de facto standard for author identification in science and related academic publishing.
ResearcherID: identifying system for scientific authors; introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters.
Musicology: Music history or historical musicology, ethnomusicology (formerly comparative musicology), popular music studies (aka popular musicology), music theory (analysis and composition), music psychology and cognition and therapy, authentic performance (performance practice and research)
Music and mathematics: sound is part of physics, physics is written in math notation → music is written in maths (and through extension - physics, e.g. frequency (Hz), amplitude (Pa RMS [root mean square],
sound pressure: "zero" reference sound pressure in air is 20 µPa RMS → dB), oscillations (change) in atmospheric pressure), force (N), spectrogram (frequency vs amplitude))
Definition of music: philosophy of art, lexicography, composing, music criticism, musicians, semiotics or semiology, linguistics, sociology, and neurology
Psychoacoustics: scientific study of sound perception. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological and physiological responses associated with sound (including speech and music). Peak sensitivity of human ears is in the range of 1000-Hz to 4000+Hz. Psychoacoustic model provides for high quality lossy signal compression by describing which parts of a given digital audio signal can be removed (or aggressively compressed) safely — that is, without significant losses in the (consciously) perceived quality of the sound.
Equal-loudness contour
Dynamic range compression (DRC, compression): reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range (i.e. silent parts appear louder and the louder parts appear more silent - the loudness of the whole music piece is varying very little after compression). TV commercials, loudness war (and loss of music quality)
Limiting: non-linear clipping, in which a signal is passed through normally but "sheared off" when it would normally exceed a certain threshold.
ReplayGain (Replay Gain): proposed standard, to measure the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats
Auto-Tune: audio processor created by Antares Audio Technologies, which uses a proprietary device to measure and alter pitch in vocal and instrumental music recording and performances through use of a phase vocoder; originally intended to disguise or correct off-key inaccuracies, allowing vocal tracks to be perfectly tuned despite originally being slightly off-key.
Trailer music: background music used for film previews, which is not always from the film's soundtrack.
Big-money blockbusters:
Hollywood accounting: opaque accounting methods used by the film, video and television industry to budget and record profits for film projects.
Black List (survey): annual survey of the "most liked" motion picture screenplays not yet produced. It has been published every year since 2005 on the second Friday of December by Franklin Leonard, a development executive who subsequently worked at Universal Pictures and Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment. The website states that these are not necessarily "the best" screenplays, but rather "the most liked", since it is based on a survey of studio and production company executives.
Visual arts
History of graphic design: a great article full of figures/pictures, but, regrettably, the media of the last ~100+ years are removed due to copyright.
Prada Marfa: art for money, money for art; vandalism story
lt:Virtuali realybė: 2018 m. 75-ame Venecijos kino festivalio programoje „Venice Virtual Reality“ režisierė Kristina Buožytė ir prodiuseris Vitalijus Žukas pristatė virtualios realybės animaciją „Angelų takais“. Ši daugiau nei dvejus metus kurta animacija perkelia dailininko M. K. Čiurlionio paveikslus į virtualią erdvę. Dailininko kūryba įgauna kitą formą, trimatėje aplinkoje ji tarsi atgyja – kiekvienas paveikslo elementas yra animuotas, o fone skamba Čiurlionio ir Mindaugo Urbaičio muzika. Ši instaliacija veikė M.K. Čiurlionio dailės muziejuje, Nacionalinės dailės galerijoje.
CIE 1931 color space (CIE 1931 RGB and CIE 1931 XYZ color spaces): the first mathematically defined color spaces. CIE XYZ color space was derived from a series of experiments done in the late 1920s by William David Wright and John Guild, results were combined into the specification of the CIE RGB color space, from which the CIE XYZ color space was derived.
RGB:
YUV:
Other:
HSL and HSV: are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an RGB color model, which rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be more intuitive and perceptually relevant than the cartesian (cube) representation; 1970s; both are also criticized for not adequately separating color-making attributes, or for their lack of perceptual uniformity.
International Commission on Illumination (CIE; fr: Commission internationale de l'éclairage; 1913-; HQ=Vienna, AT): international authority on light, illumination, colour, and colour spaces; successor to Commission Internationale de Photométrie
Absolute color space: calorimetrically defined; ICC profile. Absolute color spaces: all in the "Template:Color space"?
IT8: set of ANSI standards for color communications and control specifications. Backed by USA gov.
Color calibration: measure and/or adjust the color response of a device (input or output) to establish a known relationship to a standard color space. Color calibration is a requirement for all devices taking an active part of a color managed workflow (e.g. printing shop). Needs colorimeter and software. Are LCDs, CCDs (cameras), and printers calibrated by the producer? If so, to which error?
Planckian locus (black body locus): path or locus that the color of an incandescent black body would take in a particular chromaticity space as the blackbody temperature changes. It goes from deep red at low temperatures through orange, yellowish white, white, and finally bluish white at very high temperatures.
Color filter array (CFA), color filter mosaic (CFM): mosaic of tiny color filters placed over the pixel sensors of an image sensor (e.g. CCD) to capture color information.
Discogs (short for discographies): electronic music releases and releases on vinyl media
Internet radio: legal details:
SoundExchange is non-profit performance rights organization that collects royalties on the behalf of sound recording copyright owners (SRCOs — record labels, generally) and featured artists for non-interactive digital transmissions, including satellite and Internet radio.
Internet Radio Equality Act: proposed legislation (have been abandoned in committee, as of July 19, 2008).
Open Music Model (2002 paper “Advanced Peer-Based Technology Business Models”): Open file sharing, Open file formats, Open membership, Open payment (similar to microtransactions), Open competition. Proposed price: 5$/(month * person). Achievements: iTunes Store removed DRM in 2008, Amazon.com offers DRM-free music since 2007.
Spotify: Swedish DRM-based music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Free accounts supported by visual and radio-style advertising or for paid subscriptions without ads and with a range of extra features such as higher bitrate streams and offline access to music. Despotify & Spot: FOSS client by "group of Swedish computer science researchers and security professionals who "believe strongly in the right to tinker with technology"".
Soundcloud: allows collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio recordings
Pandora Radio: uses the properties of a song or artist (a subset of the 400 attributes provided by the Music Genome Project) in order to seed a "station" that plays music with similar properties. User feedback is used to refine the station's results, deemphasizing certain attributes when a user "dislikes" a particular song and emphasizing other attributes when a user "loves" a song. This is an example of a content-based approach.
Last.fm: creates a "station" of recommended songs by observing what bands and individual tracks that the user has listened to on a regular basis and comparing those against the listening behavior of other users. Last.fm will play tracks that do not appear in the user's library, but are often played by other users with similar interests. As this approach leverages the behavior of users, it is an example of a collaborative filtering technique.
Scribd: document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format
Docstoc: electronic document repository and online store, aimed at providing professional, financial and legal documents for the business community; users can upload, share and sell their own documents, or purchase professional documents written in-house by professionals and lawyers.
Video on demand (VOD) or Audio and Video On Demand (AVOD). Best providers:
Blip (website): 2013.11.07 Blip began removing the content of producers that were not generating enough revenue, replacing their content with the following message, "After many years of being an open platform, Blip is now taking its mission to bring the best original web series to our audience more seriously. To accomplish this, it is essential that we fully support producers who are dedicated to their craft and are committed to making their shows successful. This renewed focus means that we have had to make some tough decisions about how and where we direct Blip’s resources. Over the past few months, we have been reviewing the Blip content library and identifying accounts that don’t meet our Terms of Service. These accounts were removed on November 7, 2013. If you have encountered a Blip page or player with the message "Sorry, this show has been removed from Blip", it means the show you are looking for has been removed."
Curiosity Stream: USA media company and subscription video streaming service that offers documentary programming including films, series, and TV shows. It was launched in 2015 by the founder of the Discovery Channel, John S. Hendricks. As of 2021, it was reported to have approximately 20 million subscribers worldwide across its direct and bundled platforms.
Nebula (streaming service): video-on-demand streaming service provider. It was founded by Dave Wiskus and Standard creators as a complement to creators' other distribution channels, mainly YouTube. Nebula is a joint venture between Standard and the creators, with a minority holding by Curiosity Stream. Profits from subscriptions are divided equally between creators and Standard based on watch time.
Netflix: USA over-the-top content platform and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California. 2020.07.10 Netflix became the largest entertainment/media company by market capitalization.
de:Maxdome: only in DE. No flat rate, must pay per each movie; must use some MaxDome TV or whatever HW. Much worse than Netflix, but Netflix is not in DE [14/03/02].
List of streaming media services: over-the-top media service (OTT) is a streaming media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet. OTT bypasses cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms, the companies that traditionally act as controllers or distributors of such content. Most of these services are owned by a major film studio. Some streaming services started as an add-on to Blu-ray offerings, which are supplements to the programs watched. Streaming video on demand: Over 100 mln. subscribers: Netflix; Disney+, Hulu & ESPN+; Amazon Prime Video; iQIYI (Baidu); Tencent Video. 50–100 mln. subscribers: Max & Discovery+ (Warner Bros. Discovery); Youku (Alibaba); YouTube Premium (combined total of YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers); Paramount+ with Showtime; Vidio (Emtek (Indonesia)); Apple TV+.
Home video:
The Criterion Collection (Criterion): USA home video distribution company which focuses on licensing "important classic and contemporary films" and selling them to film aficionados. Criterion has helped to standardize characteristics of home video such as film restoration, using the letterbox format for widescreen films, and adding bonus features and commentary tracks.
Template:Book Publishing Process (called "the editing process" by Eric Flint, "the central "transmission belt" between authors and readers"):
Editing: process of selecting and preparing (any) media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete work
Publisher's reader (first reader; or film reader for films): person paid by a publisher or book club to read manuscripts from the slush pile
Slush pile: set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts sent either directly to the publisher or literary agent by authors, or to the publisher by an agent not known to the publisher.
authonomy @HarperCollins.
Copy (written): written material, in contrast to photographs or other elements of layout. In advertising: output of copywriters; In publishing: the text in books, magazines, and newspapers; In books, it means the text as written by the author, which the copy editor then prepares for typesetting and printing; In newspapers and magazines: "body copy", "display copy".
Copywriting: use of words and ideas to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Term copywriter is generally limited to promotional situations, regardless of the medium. To write an ad (advertisement) copy.
Publishers:
old-school (dead trees):
Template:Bookstore chains: Barnes & Noble is trying to go to new-school with Nook. Let's see if B&N can compete with Amazon's Kindle (11/12/01).
Future of newspapers: "Simply put," wrote Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed." New media vs. dead-tree media to bring information to the masses.
new-school (e-publication): Amazon (combined with dead-tree delivery)
Pottermore: alternative to Amazon, B&N, Sony & Apple iBooks: when author has all the rights and J.K. Rowling decided to make the ebooks available on her own terms and then struck agreements with Amazon, B&N and Sony, while Apple failed to agree. It is a website and an additional experience beyond the books (games? Additional content?). Is this the future of the published book brands when the author knows that the word-of-mouth is the best ad?
eBooks
History of ebooks; economic practice of "selling books": from free to DRM:
Jim Baen: he and Simon & Schuster created one of the first, if not the first, writer-to-fan discussion forums "Baen's Bar" capable of using a mix of technologies to support the overall promotion and interest in reading books for education and entertainment. Jim Baen disliked Adobe pdf format for reading purposes. Baen was a publisher and editor.
Baen Books: American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen; science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy. Since 1999, Baen emphasized epublishing and Internet-focused promotions. DRM free ebooks. Electronic versions by Baen are produced in five common formats from webwrights (HTML, Palm Pilot/Mobipocket/Kindle format, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader versions), all unencrypted. When you purchase a title from Baen, you can read it online, download in any format you want as often as you want.
Baen's Bar: first a BBS, since early 2000s chat client
Webscriptions: web services company that has sold e-books without DRM since 1999.
Baen Free Library (founded in autumn 1999 by science fiction writer Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen): represents an interesting experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright. It appears that sales of both the books made available free and other books by the same author, even from a different publisher, increase when the electronic version is made available free of charge.
Comparison of e-book readers: table is missing: UTF-8 (Unicode) support. New eBooks should have e-ink + LCD + touch screen and switch between reading and browsing modes (LCD turn on/off, e-ink: disappear, appear)
Amazon Kindle: Business model: Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): authors and publishers independently publish their books directly to Kindle and Kindle Apps worldwide. The published ebooks are different from physical books because Amazon sells a license to the ebooks rather than the copy, just like software licenses of Apple or Microsoft → again a legal battle to determine if ebooks are different from physical books, if one can resell them, if patent-like law or physical-commodity law applies in this case (in software licenses and patents the legal battles are ongoing). DRM of Amazon on licensed copies of ebooks on Kindle.
Michael S. Hart: best known as the inventor of the electronic book (or ebook) and the founder of Project Gutenberg. Most of the early postings were typed in by Hart himself.
CGP Grey: American–Irish YouTube content creator, known for creating the edutainment channel CGP Grey; channel features short explanatory videos on varying subjects, including politics, geography, economics, and British culture.
Humans Need Not Apply (2014.08.13): short Internet documentary film, directed, produced, written, and edited by C. G. P. Grey. The film focuses on the future of the integration of automation into economics, as well as the worldwide workforce.
Kurzgesagt: German animation studio founded by Philipp Dettmer. The studio's YouTube channel focuses on minimalist animated educational content, using the flat design style. It discusses scientific, technological, political, philosophical and psychological subjects.
Numberphile: educational YouTube channel featuring videos that explore topics from a variety of fields of mathematics. In the early days of the channel, each video focused on a specific number, but the channel has since expanded its scope, featuring videos on more advanced mathematical concepts such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Riemann hypothesis.
3Blue1Brown: math YouTube channel created by Grant Sanderson. The channel focuses on higher mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Topics covered include linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, the Riemann hypothesis, Fourier transform, quaternions and topology.
Green brothers: John (born 1977) and Hank (born 1980), are two USA entrepreneurs, social activists, authors, and YouTube vloggers. The two extensively work together, having started their collaborative popularity with a daily vlog project in 2007 titled "Brotherhood 2.0", in which they only communicated in vlogs posted to YouTube for a year. The Greens' portfolio of online work now includes their main Vlogbrothers channel, Crash Course, SciShow, their podcast Dear Hank & John, and several other projects spanning several forms of media. Both brothers have become known for their individual projects as well. John has written several books which have received widespread acclaim and popularity, including The Fault in Our Stars. The novel was made into a 2014 film adaptation, which was number one at the box office during its opening weekend and grossed over $307 million worldwide. Hank has founded several companies, starting when he created "EcoGeek", a blog dedicated to environmentally beneficial advancements in technology. The blog was originally a class project of Hank's, while he studied at the University of Montana, but eventually progressed into becoming a major environmental publication, which would grab the attention of Time.
John Green (1977.08.24-; Children: 2, with Sarah Urist Green (m. 2006)): USA author, YouTuber, podcaster, and philanthropist. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time.
Esther Earl (1994.08.03–2010.08.25): USA author, internet vlogger, online personality and Nerdfighter, as well as an activist in the Harry Potter Alliance. Prior to her death from cancer in 2010, Earl befriended author John Green, who credited her for the inspiration to complete his bestselling 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars.
Hank Green (1980.05.05-): USA vlogger, science communicator, entrepreneur, author, internet producer, and musician.
Crash Course (YouTube): educational YouTube channel started by John Green and Hank Green (collectively the Green brothers). Crash Course was one of the hundred initial channels funded by YouTube's $100 million original channel initiative. The channel launched a preview in 2011.12.02, and as of March 2022, it has accumulated over 14 mln subscribers and 1.6 bln video views. The channel launched with John and Hank presenting their respective World History and Biology series; the early history of the channel continued the trend of John and Hank presenting humanities and science courses, respectively.
Vlogbrothers: video blog channel on YouTube. The Internet-based show is created and hosted by the Green brothers. The first incarnation of the brothers' online broadcasting was the "Brotherhood 2.0" project, preceding the establishment of the pair's regular vlogging activity through the Vlogbrothers channel.
Sam Denby: USA YouTuber, best known for creating the edutainment YouTube channels Wendover Productions, Half as Interesting, Extremities, and Jet Lag: The Game. Across all of Denby's channels, he has accumulated more than a billion views.
Brilliant (website) (brilliant.org): USA for-profit company and associated community that features problems and courses in mathematics, physics, quantitative finance, and computer science. It operates via a freemium business model.
Newspaper of record: term used to denote a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent; they are thus "newspapers of record by reputation" and include some of the oldest and most widely respected newspapers in the world. The level and trend in the number of "newspapers of record by reputation" is regarded as being related to the state of press freedom and political freedom in a country. Newspapers of public record: Official newspaper of record: A more extreme example is where such newspapers of public record are owned and operated by a Government that directs their entire editorial content (not just the legal and public notice content). Such newspapers, while pejoratively termed "state mouthpieces", can also be called "official newspapers of record", as their entire editorial copy represents the official view and doctrine of the State. Inclusion of the word "official" can be used to separate them from "newspapers of record by reputation". Notable examples include Russia's Rossiyskaya Gazeta, North Korea's Rodong Sinmun, and China's People's Daily.
2022 Press Freedom Index: Good; Satisfactory; Problematic; Difficult; Very serious; Not classified
Press Freedom Index: annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders since 2002 based upon the organisation's own assessment of the countries' press freedom records in the previous year. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organisations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom.
Concentration of media ownership (media consolidation, media convergence): progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. Large media conglomerates include Viacom, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann AG, Sony, Comcast, Vivendi, Televisa, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst Corporation, Organizações Globo and Lagardère Group. In nations described as authoritarian by most international think-tanks and NGOs like Human Rights Watch (North Korea, China, Iran, Cuba, Russia), media ownership is generally something very close to the complete state control over information in direct or indirect ways.
AT&T: USA multinational conglomerate holding company, Delaware-registered but headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company, the largest provider of mobile telephone services, and the largest provider of fixed telephone services in USA through AT&T Communications. Since 2018.06.14 it is also the parent company of mass media conglomerate WarnerMedia, making it the world's largest media and entertainment company in terms of revenue. As of 2018, AT&T was ranked #9 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, "Ma Bell", "Baby Bells". The current AT&T reconstitutes much of the former Bell System, and includes ten of the original 22 Bell Operating Companies along with the original long-distance division (AT&T Communications, LLC).
WarnerMedia: USA multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate corporation owned by AT&T and headquartered in New York City, United States. It was originally formed in 1990 by Steve Ross and formerly known as Time Warner from 1990 to 2001 and 2003 to 2018, from the merger of Time Inc. and the original Warner Communications. The company has film, television and cable operations, with its assets including WarnerMedia Studios & Networks (consisting of the entertainment and family-friendly assets of Turner Broadcasting, HBO, and Cinemax as well as Warner Bros., which itself consists of the film, animation, and television studios DC Comics, New Line Cinema, and, together with ViacomCBS, a 50% interest in The CW television network); WarnerMedia News & Sports (consisting of the news and sports assets of Turner Broadcasting, as well as AT&T SportsNet); WarnerMedia Commercial (consisting of digital analytics company Xandr, Otter Media, and the company's home entertainment division); and WarnerMedia Direct (consisting of the HBO Max streaming service). 2016.10.22 AT&T announced an offer to acquire Time Warner for $108.7 billion (including assumed Time Warner debt). The proposed merger was confirmed 2018.06.12, after AT&T won an antitrust lawsuit that USA Justice Department filed in 2017 to attempt to block the acquisition. The merger closed two days later, with the company becoming a subsidiary of AT&T.
Home Box Office, Inc.: USA multinational media and entertainment company operating as a unit of WarnerMedia Studios & Networks, and controlled by AT&T through mass media and entertainment subsidiary WarnerMedia. Main properties include its namesake pay television network Home Box Office (HBO), sister service Cinemax, the HBO streaming service (a secondary HBO-branded service, HBO Max, is operated under an eponymous sister subsidiary of WarnerMedia that shares principal management with Home Box Office, Inc.), and HBO Films.
HBO: USA pay television network owned by WarnerMedia Studios & Networks and the flagship property of parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc. Maintaining a general entertainment format, programming featured on the network consists primarily of theatrically released motion pictures and original television programs as well as made-for-cable movies, documentaries and occasional comedy and concert specials. HBO—also the oldest and longest continuously operating subscription television service (basic or a la carte premium) in the United States—pioneered modern pay television upon its launch on 1972.11.08: it was the first television service to be directly transmitted and distributed to individual cable television systems, and was the conceptual blueprint for the "premium channel," pay television services sold to subscribers for an extra monthly fee that do not accept traditional advertising and present their programming without editing for objectionable material. It eventually became the first television channel in the world to begin transmitting via satellite—expanding the growing regional pay service into a national television network—in 1975.09, and, alongside sister channel Cinemax, was among the first two American pay television services to offer complimentary multiplexed channels in August 1991. The network operates seven 24-hour, linear multiplex channels as well as a traditional subscription video on demand platform (HBO On Demand) and an eponymous streaming service (which launched as HBO Now in 2015.04), and its content is the centerpiece of HBO Max, an expanded streaming platform operated separately from but sharing management with Home Box Office, Inc., which also includes original programming produced exclusively for the service and content from other WarnerMedia properties. Overall HBO business unit is one of WarnerMedia's most profitable assets (after Warner Bros. Entertainment).
Cinemax: USA premium cable and satellite television network owned by the Home Box Office, Inc. subsidiary of WarnerMedia's Studios & Networks division. Developed as a companion "maxi-pay" service complementing the offerings shown on parent network Home Box Office (HBO) and initially focusing on recent and classic films upon its launch on August 1, 1980, programming featured on Cinemax currently consists primarily of recent and older theatrically released motion pictures, and original action series, as well as documentaries and special behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB): advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry; represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets globally, but mostly in USA and in Europe
Ad serving: technology and service that places advertisements on web sites
Vice Media, Inc.: American youth media company and digital content creation studio operating in 36 countries. It was started in 1994 by Shane Smith, Gavin McInnes and Suroosh Alvi as a punk magazine titled Voice of Montreal. In 2006, co-founder Gavin McInnes left Vice Media due to creative differences with the company, and co-founded an advertising agency, where he has since been terminated for expressing a pattern of promoting the freedom of speech.
Vice (magazine): Gavin McInnes, VBS.tv. McInnes left the publication in 2008, citing "creative differences" as the primary issue.
Real-time bidding (RTB): means by which advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis, via programmatic instantaneous auction, similar to financial markets. With real-time bidding, advertising buyers bid on an impression and, if the bid is won, the buyer’s ad is instantly displayed on the publisher’s site.
Post-truth politics: political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary" importance.
List of public domain works with multimedia adaptations: includes works for which installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as books, comic books, films, television series, and video games. Multimedia franchises usually develop through a character or fictional world becoming popular in one media, and then expanding to others through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings. With respect to public domain works, however, adaptations or extensions of the original work may be done without the permission of the author.
List of multimedia franchises: installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as books, comics, films, television series, and video games. Multimedia franchises usually develop due to the popularization of an original creative work, and then its expansion to other media through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings, although the trend later developed wherein franchises would be launched in multiple forms of media simultaneously.
SecureDrop: open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources. It was originally designed and developed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen under the name DeadDrop.
The Intercept: online publication launched in February 2014 by First Look Media, the news organization created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Associated Press: USA multinational nonprofit news agency headquartered in New York City that operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. The AP is owned by its contributing newspapers and radio and television stations in USA, all of which contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists.
Harvard Business Review: general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School.
Business Insider: German-owned USA news website that also operates international editions in Australia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, Italy, and the UK; business and technology news website launched in 2009.02 and based in New York City. Founded by DoubleClick Founder and former C.E.O. Kevin P. Ryan; in addition to providing and analyzing business news, the site aggregates top news stories on various subjects from around the web; its original works are sometimes cited by other, larger, publications such as The New York Times and domestic news outlets like National Public Radio.
Advance Publications: USA media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family.
Condé Nast: USA mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast, based at One World Trade Center and owned by Advance Publications.
The New Yorker: USA magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It is published by Condé Nast. Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.
Ars Technica: website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Many of the site's writers are postgraduates and some work for research institutions. Articles on the website are written in a less-formal tone than those in traditional journals.
Wired (magazine): monthly USA magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and has been in publication since March/April 1993. From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from techno-utopian cofounder Stewart Brand and his associate Kevin Kelly. The founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review and brought with him contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first Wired issue (1.1) had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling (who was highlighted on the first cover) and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson, who was featured on Wired's cover in its first year.
GQ (formerly Gentlemen's Quarterly): international monthly men's magazine based in New York City and founded in 1931. The publication focuses on fashion, style, and culture for men, though articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, sports, technology, and books are also featured.
Scott Trust Limited: British company that owns Guardian Media Group and thus The Guardian and The Observer as well as various other media businesses in the UK. In 2008, it replaced the Scott Trust, which had owned The Guardian since 1936. The company is responsible for appointing the editor of The Guardian (and those of the group's other main newspapers) but, apart from enjoining them to continue the paper's editorial policy on "the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore", it has a policy of not interfering in their decisions.
The Guardian: British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.
Technology Review: by MIT; TR35 (list of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35).
Henry Blodget: 1998.10 he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%); this call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. Agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement in 2003. Co-founder of The Business Insider.
Al Jazeera: Qatari broadcaster owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network and headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
Aeon (digital magazine): digital magazine of ideas, philosophy and culture. Publishing new articles every weekday, Aeon describes itself as a publication which "asks the biggest questions and finds the freshest, most original answers, provided by world-leading authorities on science, philosophy and society." Contributors have included Peter Adamson, Alain Badiou, Julian Baggini, Philip Bal, Shahidha Bari, Sven Birkerts, Armand D'Angour, David Deutsch, Vincent T. DeVita, Frans de Waal, Vincenzo Di Nicola, David Dobbs, Tim Footman, Allen Frances, Karl J Friston, Jessa Gamble, Michael Graziano, Toby Green, Pekka Hämäläinen, Sabine Hossenfelder, A.L. Kennedy, Marek Kohn, Olivia Laing, Janna Levin, Tim Lott, Mahmood Mamdani, Francis T. McAndrew, George Musser, Alondra Nelson, Wendy Orent, David Papineau, Ruth Padel, Massimo Pigliucci, Steven Poole, John Quiggin, Emma Rothschild, Claudio Saunt, Anil Seth, Dava Sobel, Roger Scruton, Eric Schwitzgebel, Camilla Townsend, Nigel Warburton, Margaret Wertheim, E.O. Wilson, and Ed Yong.
Slashdot, aka /.: technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc; "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics
Reason (magazine): libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation
ProPublica: non-profit corporation based in New York City. It describes itself as an independent non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In 2010 it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists and published in The New York Times Magazine as well as on ProPublica.org. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters and the resulting stories are given away to news 'partners' for publication or broadcast.
Center for Public Integrity: nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern.
London Review of Books: fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays
The New York Review of Books: fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. "takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity". Esquire called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." In 1970 writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic".
Lituanus: English language quarterly journal dedicated to Lithuanian and Baltic languages, linguistics, political science, arts, history, literature, and related topics.
Germany's media
de:Landesrundfunkanstalt: neun Rundfunkveranstalter des öffentlichen Rechts, die für ein oder für mehrere deutsche Länder Hörfunk und Fernsehen veranstalten: BR, HR, MDR, NDR, Radio Bremen, RBB, SR, SWR und WDR.
de:DW-TV: der offizielle staatliche deutsche Auslandsfernsehsender der Deutschen Welle.
de:Deutschlandradio (DRadio, DLR): produziert die drei bundesweiten Hörfunkprogramme Deutschlandfunk und DRadio Wissen (im Funkhaus Köln) sowie Deutschlandradio Kultur (im Funkhaus Berlin). Das Deutschlandradio hat einen Jahresetat von 180 Millionen Euro (2006); es bezeichnet sich selbst als der nationale Hörfunk.
East Asian media
Anime News Network (ANN): anime industry news website that reports on the status of anime, manga, video games, Japanese popular music and other otaku-related culture within North America, Australia and Japan.
Protoculture Addicts (1987/1988-2008.07/08): was a Canadian-based North American anime and manga magazine.
Dieter Rams: Rams' ten principles to "good design": Good design is: innovative; makes a product useful; is aesthetic; makes the product understandable; is unobtrusive; is honest; is long-lasting; is thorough down to the last detail; is environment friendly; is as little design as possible ("Less is more" & "Less, but better")
Ethics (philosophy) of mainstream are "mistreated" by minorities and the art of minorities. E.g. obscenity: what's indecent/obscene in art vs. everyday life? We live in the freest expression time due to the Internet, but Internet like art is threatened due to these same reasons by copyright, trademark, patent, obscenity (porn...):
Comics:
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (1986 USA): protect the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers covering legal expenses.
Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund (1987 Canada): protect the free speech rights of comics creators, publishers, retailers, and readers, by helping to cover legal expenses in the defense of cases where its directors feel those issues are at stake.
Plot
MacGuffin (macguffin): plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so desirable; "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, a mysterious but highly desired item or object, or simply something that is entirely unexplained.
Media and consumers
Blurb: short summary accompanying a creative work (book, PC game, piece of art in a museum: drawing, ...).
Comics (from comedy?)
The Dilbert Principle: "The successful moron will have a very high bladder-to-brain ratio" from dilbert.com
Popular culture (mass culture, pop culture): generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are the media, mass appeal, marketing and capitalism; and it is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".
Moloch in literature and popular culture: Canaanite god Moloch was the recipient of child sacrifice according to the account of the Hebrew Bible, as well as Greco-Roman historiography on the god of Carthage. Moloch is depicted in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost as one of the greatest warriors of the rebel angels, vengeful and militant. Bertrand Russell in 1903 used Moloch to describe oppressive religion, and Winston Churchill in his 1948 history The Gathering Storm used "Moloch" as a metaphor for Adolf Hitler's cult of personality. Part II of Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl", "Moloch", is about the state of industrial civilization, Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demonic figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II".
User:Wetman#Concerning Atheism: Many Christianists are disbelieving when they first hear that virtually every European or Near Eastern basilica or cathedral founded before 600 CE occupies the consecrated site of a pagan temple of one kind or another. Church crypts from Rome to Monte Gargano to Toulouse are mithraea, swept scrupulously clean of all identifiable details, but still recognizable by their characteristic layouts.
Earliest religions (known through surviving texts; historicity):
Theistic evolution (theistic evolutionism, evolutionary creationism): view that 'religious teachings about God are compatible with modern scientific understanding about biological evolution.
Acceptance of evolution by religious groups: "In one form or another, Theistic Evolutionism is the view of creation taught at the majority of mainline Protestant seminaries, and it is the official position of the Catholic church" (Eugenie Scott). 2007 poll showed that acceptance among American Buddhists, Hindus and Jews was higher than among any Christian groups.
Implicit and explicit atheism: subsets of atheism coined by George H. Smith (1979, p. 13-18). Implicit atheism is defined by Smith as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it". Explicit atheism is defined as "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it".
Negative and positive atheism: Positive atheism (strong atheism, hard atheism) is the form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. Negative atheism (weak atheism, soft atheism) is any other type of atheism, wherein a person does not believe in the existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be none.
Apatheism: " The eighteenth century French philosopher Denis Diderot, when accused of being an atheist, replied that he simply did not care whether God existed or not. In response to Voltaire, he wrote: “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.” "
New Atheism: coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated. Instead, they should be countered, criticized, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert undue influence, such as in government, education, and politics. Major figures include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett—collectively known as the "Four Horsemen", and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, known as the "plus one horse-woman".
Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions (Semitic religions): monotheistic faiths of West Asian origin, emphasizing and tracing their common origin to Abraham or recognizing a spiritual tradition identified with him
Supersessionism (fulfillment theology, replacement theology): terms used in biblical interpretation for the belief that the Christian Church supersedes or replaces the children of Israel in God's plan, and that the New Covenant nullifies the biblical promises made to the children of Israel, including the Abrahamic Covenant, the Land Covenant, and the Davidic Covenant. More recently, supersessionism and replacement theology are also applied to the parallel case of Islam and its attitude towards Christianity and Judaism.
God in Abrahamic religions: centred on monotheism. The three major monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, alongside the Baháʼí Faith, Samaritanism, Druze, and Rastafari, are all regarded as Abrahamic religions due to their shared worship of the God (referred to as Yahweh in Hebrew and as Allah in Arabic) that these traditions say revealed himself to Abraham.
Great Church: used in the historiography of early Christianity to mean the period of about 180 to 313, between that of primitive Christianity and that of the legalization of the Christian religion in the Roman Empire, corresponding closely to what is called the Ante-Nicene Period. "It has rightly been called the period of the Great Church, in view of its numerical growth, its constitutional development and its intense theological activity."
Bible: sources, criticism, historicity
Sources, source criticism, historicity of the sources; interpretation by the scientists (frequently theologian-scientists) of the sources and their historicity:
Dating the Bible. The New Testament: "Earliest preserved fragment" for each text (New Testament books).
Biblical manuscript: any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible.
Cataloging:
von Soden
Gregory–Aland: Gregory assigned the papyri a prefix of P, often written in blackletter script (n), with a superscript numeral.
Names of God in Christianity: Old Testament: El, Elohim, Elyon, Adonai, El Shaddai; Yahweh (YHWH). Based on Lev, 24:16: "He that blasphemes the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death", Jews generally avoided the use of Yahweh and substituted Adonai or Elohim for it when reading Scripture. The pronunciation of YHWH in the Old Testament can never be certain, given that the original Hebrew text only used consonants. The English form Jehovah was formed during the Middle Ages by combining the Latinization of the four consonants YHWH with the vowel points that Masoretes used to indicate that the reader should say Adonai when YHWH was encountered. Thus Jehovah was obtained by adding the vowels of Adonai to the consonants of YHWH. Jehovah appears in Tyndale's Bible, the King James Version, and other translations from that time period and later. For instance, Jehovah's Witnesses make consistent use of Jehovah. New Testament: The essential uses of the name of God the Father in the New Testament are Theos (θεός the Greek term for God), Kyrios (i.e. Lord in Greek) and Patēr (πατήρ i.e. Father in Greek). The Aramaic word "Abba" (אבא), meaning "Father" is used by Jesus in Mark 14:36 and also appears in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. In the New Testament the two names Jesus and Emmanuel that refer to Jesus have salvific attributes. The name Jesus is given in Luke 1:31 and Matthew 1:21 and in both cases the name is not selected by humans but is received by angelic messages with theological significance, e.g. the statement in Matthew 1:21 "you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins" associates salvific attributes to the name Jesus. Emmanuel which appears in Matthew 1:23 may refer to Isaiah 7:14, and does not appear elsewhere in the New Testament, but in the context of Matthew 28:20 ("I am with you always, even unto the end of the world") indicates that Jesus will be with the faithful to the end of the age.
Great uncial codices (four great uncials): the only remaining uncial codices that contain (or originally contained) the entire text of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testament).
Codex Vaticanus (c. 325–350; Uncial 03, B): Codex is named after its place of conservation in the Vatican Library, where it has been kept since at least the 15th century; written on 759 leaves of vellum in uncial letters; uses the most ancient system of text's division in the Gospels; has a more archaic style of writing than the other manuscripts.
Codex Sinaiticus (c. 330–360; Uncial 01, א): codex is an Alexandrian text-type manuscript in uncial letters on parchment. Along with Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus is considered one of the most valuable manuscripts for establishing the original text (textual criticism) of the Greek New Testament, as well as the Septuagint. The only uncial manuscript with the complete text of the New Testament, and the only ancient manuscript of the New Testament written in four columns per page which has survived to the present day. For the Gospels, Sinaiticus is generally considered among scholars as the second most reliable witness of the text (after Vaticanus); in the Acts of the Apostles, its text is equal to that of Vaticanus; in the Epistles, Sinaiticus is the most reliable witness of the text. In the Book of Revelation, however, its text is corrupted and is considered of poor quality, and inferior to the texts of Codex Alexandrinus, Papyrus 47, and even some minuscule manuscripts in this place.
Codex Alexandrinus (400-440; Uncial 02, A): containing the majority of the Septuagint and the New Testament. It derives its name from Alexandria where it resided for a number of years before it was brought by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris from Alexandria to Constantinople. Then it was given to Charles I of England in the 17th century. Until the later purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus, it was the best manuscript of the Greek Bible deposited in Britain.
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (c. 450; Uncial 04, C): manuscript has not survived in a complete condition, although is believed that the original codex contained the whole Bible. Manuscript received its name as a codex in which Greek translations of Ephraem the Syrian's treatises were written over ("rescriptus") a former text that had been washed off its vellum pages, thus forming a palimpsest. The lower text of the palimpsest was deciphered by biblical scholar and palaeographer Tischendorf in 1840–1843, and was edited by him in 1843–1845. Even with modern aids like ultra-violet photography, not all the text is securely legible.
Saint Catherine's Monastery ("Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai" Greek: Ιερά Μονή του Θεοβαδίστου Όρους Σινά): lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the city of Saint Catherine, Egypt. Monastery is controlled by the autonomous Church of Sinai, part of the wider Eastern Orthodox Church, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Built between 548 and 565, the monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world. The site contains the world's oldest continually operating library, possessing many unique books including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus.
Aleppo Codex: medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias, in what is currently northern Israel, in the 10th century C.E., and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides.
New International Version (NIV): OT in 1978, NT in 1973. One of the most popular modern translations in history.
Old Testament (Tanakh)
The inter-relationship between various significant ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament (some identified by their siglum). LXX - the original septuagint (Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, translated in stages between the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC in Alexandria). MT - Masoretic Text
Documentary hypothesis: proposes that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors (editors). The number of these narratives is usually set at four, but the precise number is not an essential part of the hypothesis. Sources: Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), Priestly (P).
Dead Sea Scrolls: text dating 150 BCE - 70 CE; some are "the earliest known surviving copies of Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism". Found 1947-1956. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek on parchment and some on papyrus.
Synoptic Gospels (gr synoptic: syn "together", optic "seen"): gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories, often in a similar sequence and in similar wording. They stand in contrast to John, whose content is comparatively distinct. This strong parallelism among the three gospels in content, arrangement, and specific language is widely attributed to literary interdependence. The synoptic problem: question of the specific literary relationship among the three synoptic gospels–that is, the question as to the source upon which gospel depended when it was written.
Mark 16: final chapter of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament. Begins with the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome; verse 8 ends with the women fleeing from the empty tomb, and saying "nothing to anyone, because they were afraid". Scholars (following Bruce Metzger) take 16:8 as the original ending and believe the longer ending (16:9-20) was written later by someone else as a summary of Jesus' resurrection appearances and several miracles performed by Christians. In this 12-verse passage, the author refers to Jesus' appearances to Mary Magdalene, two disciples, and then the Eleven (the Twelve Apostles minus Judas); text concludes with the Great Commission, declaring that believers that have been baptized will be saved while nonbelievers will be condemned, and pictures Jesus taken to Heaven and sitting at the Right Hand of God. Because of patristic evidence from the late 2nd century for the existence of copies of Mark with the "Longer Ending," it is contended by a majority of scholars that the "Longer Ending" must have been written and attached no later than the early 2nd century. The vast majority of modern scholars remain convinced that neither of the two endings ("short" or "longer") is Marcan.
Gospel of John: it is notable that, in the gospel, the community appears to define itself primarily in contrast to Judaism, rather than as part of a wider Christian community. John presents a "higher" Christology than the synoptic gospels, meaning that it describes Jesus as the incarnation of the divine Logos through whom all things were made, as the object of veneration. Only in John does Jesus talk at length about himself and his divine role, often sharing such information with the disciples only. Against the synoptics, John focuses largely on different miracles (including the resurrection of Lazarus), given as signs meant to engender faith. Synoptic elements such as parables and exorcisms are not found in John.
Authorship of the Johannine works: historical criticism, representing most liberal Christian and secular scholars, rejects the view that John the Apostle authored any of these works. There may have been a single author for the gospel and the three epistles; some scholars conclude the author of the epistles was different from that of the gospel, although all four works probably originated from the same community. Gospel and epistles traditionally and plausibly came from Ephesus, c. 90-110, although some scholars argue for an origin in Syria. In the case of Revelation, many modern scholars agree that it was written by a separate author, John of Patmos, c. 95 with some parts possibly dating to Nero's reign in the early 60s.
John 21: contains an account of the post-Resurrection appearance in Galilee, which the text describes as the third time Jesus had appeared to his disciples. Some New Testament historians assert that it was not part of the original text of the Gospel of John.
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (Pericope Adulterae; John 7:53-8:11): certain critics argue that it was "certainly not part of the original text of St John's Gospel".
Luke–Acts: name usually given by Biblical scholars to the composite work of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament.
Authorship of Luke–Acts: tradition holds that the text was written by Luke the companion of Paul (Colossians 4:14) and this traditional view of Lukan authorship is “widely held as the view which most satisfactorily explains all the data.” Critical views - Anonymous non-eyewitness: the view that both works were written by an anonymous writer who was not an eyewitness of any of the events he described, and who had no eyewitness sources OR Redaction authorship: the view that Acts in particular was written (either by an anonymous writer or the traditional Luke), using existing written sources such as a travelogue by an eyewitness.
Acts of the Apostles (date to 2nd half of 1st c.): two earliest versions of manuscripts are the Western text-type (as represented by the Codex Bezae) and the Alexandrian text-type (as represented by the Codex Sinaiticus); Western manuscripts contain about 10% more content than Alexandrian version. The third class of manuscripts (Byzantine text-type) developed after the Western and Alexandrian types; the extant Byzantine manuscripts date from 5th c. or later; "today" Byzantine text-type is the subject of renewed interest as the possible original form of the text from which the Western and Alexandrian. The content of the Acts - two distinct parts: first (chs. 1-12) deals with the church in Jerusalem, Peter as the central figure, the Seven Men, relates the story of Paul and the great transition of the Gospel from Judaism to the Greek world (Harnack); second part pursues the history of the apostle Paul and the statements in the Acts can be compared with the Epistles - there are two remarkable exceptions: the account given by Paul of his visits to Jerusalem in Galatians as compared with Acts; and the character and mission of the apostle Paul, as they appear in his letters and in Acts.
Categories of New Testament manuscripts: in Greek are categorized into five groups; categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types. Distribution of Greek manuscripts by century and category.
Alexandrian text-type (Neutral, Egyptian): form of the Greek New Testament that predominates in the earliest surviving documents, as well as the text-type used in Egyptian Coptic manuscripts.
Byzantine text-type (Majority Text, Traditional Text, Ecclesiastical Text, Constantinopolitan Text, Antiocheian Text, or Syrian Text; abbr. Byz): Koine Greek New Testament manuscripts; found in the largest number of surviving manuscripts
Novum Testamentum Graece: Latin name of an original Greek-language version of the New Testament. The first printed edition was the Complutensian Polyglot Bible by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, printed in 1514, but not published until 1520. The first published edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by Erasmus in 1516. Today the designation Novum Testamentum Graece normally refers to the Nestle-Aland editions, named after the scholars who led the critical editing work. Accuracy of the New Testament: total number of verses=7947, variant-free verses=4999, 4999/7947=62.9% agreement. Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland concluded, "Thus in nearly two-thirds of the New Testament text, the seven editions of the Greek New Testament which we have reviewed are in complete accord, with no differences other than in orthographical details (e.g., the spelling of names, etc.). Verses in which any one of the seven editions differs by a single word are not counted. This result is quite amazing, demonstrating a far greater agreement among the Greek texts of the New Testament during the past century than textual scholars would have suspected […]. In the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation the agreement is less, while in the letters it is much greater".
Epistle: writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The letters in the New Testament from Apostles to Christians are usually referred to as epistles. Pauline epistles and
General epistles (Catholic Epistles: most part their intended audience seems to be Christians in general rather than individual persons or congregations as is the case with the Pauline epistles)
The fragment in Romans 13:1–7 dealing with obedience to earthly powers is considered by some, for example James Kallas, to be a gloss incorporated later.
Jewish–Christian gospels: gospels of a Jewish Christian character quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome and probably Didymus the Blind. Most modern scholars have concluded that there was one gospel in Aramaic/Hebrew and at least two in Greek. None of these gospels survives today, but attempts have been made to reconstruct them from references in the Church Fathers.
Gospel of the Ebionites
Gospel of the Hebrews: syncretic Jewish–Christian gospel, the text of which is lost; only fragments of it survive as brief quotations by the early Church Fathers.
Gospel of the Nazarenes
Bibles:
The Books of the Bible (TNIV 2007, NIV 2012): first presentation of an unabridged committee translation of the Bible to remove chapter and verse numbers entirely and instead present the biblical books according to their natural literary structures.
Codex Gigas: largest extant medieval manuscript in the world; thought to have been created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia.
New Testament apocrypha
New Testament apocrypha: number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. These writings often have links with the books generally regarded as "canonical" but Christian denominations disagree on which writings should be regarded as "canonical" and which are "apocryphal".
Acts of Thomas: portraying Christ as the "Heavenly Redeemer", independent of and beyond creation, who can free souls from the darkness of the world. References to the work by Epiphanius of Salamis show that it was in circulation in the 4th c..
Jesus (c. 4 BC – c. 30 / 33 AD; Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ): Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the central figure of Christianity. Most Christians believe him to be the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited Messiah (Christ) prophesied in the Old Testament. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically, although the quest for the historical Jesus has produced little agreement on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus. Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was baptized by John the Baptist and subsequently began his own ministry, preaching his message orally and often being referred to as "rabbi". Jesus debated fellow Jews on how to best follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables and gathered followers. He was arrested and tried by the Jewish authorities, and turned over to the Roman government, and was subsequently crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect. After his death, his followers believed he rose from the dead, and the community they formed eventually became the Christian Church.
Historicity of Jesus: Amy-Jill Levine: "Most scholars agree that Jesus was baptized by John, debated with fellow Jews on how best to live according to God's will, engaged in healings and exorcisms, taught in parables, gathered male and female followers in Galilee, went to Jerusalem, and was crucified by Roman soldiers during the governorship of Pontius Pilate."
Historical Jesus: scholarly reconstructions of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, based on historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and cultural context in which he lived.
Historical background of the New Testament: Canonical Gospels and life of Jesus must be viewed as firmly placed within his historical and cultural context, rather than purely in terms of Christian orthodoxy (most scholars believe);
Christ myth theory (Jesus myth theory or Jesus mythicism): The strongest version of the myth theories contends that there was no real historical figure Jesus and that he was invented by early Christians. Another variant holds that there was a person called Jesus, but much of the teachings and miracles attributed to him were either invented or symbolic references. Yet another version suggests that the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is a composite character constructed from multiple people over a period of time. Only a distinct minority of scholars adhere to the myth. Main arguments: 1) New Testament accounts have no historical value; 2) an argument from silence regarding the scarcity of references to Jesus in contemporary non-Christian sources; 3) Christianity had relied on syncretism from the very beginning and combined various myths to build the gospel accounts. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, thought to have been written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus' death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.
Jesus Christ in comparative mythology: examination of the narratives of the life of Jesus in the Christian gospels, traditions and theology, as it relates to Christian mythology and other religions; various authors have drawn a number of parallels between the Christian views of Jesus and other religious or mythical domains. These include Greco-Roman mysteries, ancient Egyptian myths and more general analogies involving cross-cultural patterns of dying and rising gods in the context of Christ myth theory
George Albert Wells (1926.05.22-; G. A. Wells): Emeritus Professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London; best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is essentially a mythical rather than a historical figure, a theory that was pioneered by German biblical scholars such as theologian/historian Bruno Bauer and philosopher Arthur Drews.
Did Jesus Exist? (1975) book by G. A. Wells. Wells argues there was no historical evidence of Jesus existing. Wells has since modified his position (The Jesus Myth, 1999), saying that Paul's Jesus and the Jesus that appeared in the hypothetical Q Gospel were two different people and that the Gospel Jesus, although flesh and blood, is in essence a composite character.
Language of Jesus: generally agreed that Jesus and his disciples primarily spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine in the first century AD, most likely a Galilean dialect distinguishable from that of Jerusalem; towns of Nazareth and Capernaum in Galilee, where Jesus spent most of his time, were primarily Aramaic-speaking communities.
Historical Jesus:
Mara Bar-Serapion on Jesus (after 73 AD, before 3rd c.): letter by Stoic philosopher (Mara Bar-Serapion) from the Roman province of Syria to his son (also Serapion) mentions Socrates, Pythagoras and "king of the Jews" as three wise men who were killed by their people; "What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king?"
Paul the Apostle (c. 5 - c. 67): sources: Acts & Epistles; Historians: Jews, Romans, Greeks
In 2009.06, Pope Benedict announced excavation results concerning the tomb of Paul at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The sarcophagus was not opened but was examined by means of a probe, which revealed pieces of incense, purple and blue linen, and small bone fragments. The bone was radiocarbon dated to the 1st or 2nd century. According to the Vatican, these findings are consistent with the traditional claim that the tomb is Paul's. The sarcophagus was inscribed in Latin saying, "Paul apostle martyr."
Pauline Christianity: Christianity associated with the beliefs and doctrines espoused by Paul the Apostle through his writings
Oriental Orthodox Churches: group of Christian churches adhering to miaphysite Christology and theology, and together have 60 to 70 million members worldwide. As some of the oldest religious institutions in the world, the Oriental Orthodox Churches have played a prominent role in the history and culture of Armenia, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and parts of the Middle East and India. An Eastern Christian body of autocephalous churches, its bishops are equal by virtue of episcopal ordination, and its doctrines can be summarized in that the churches recognize the validity of only the first three ecumenical councils. The Oriental Orthodox Churches are composed of six autocephalous churches: the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch (including its archdiocese in India the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church), the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.
First seven Ecumenical Councils: represented an attempt to reach an orthodox consensus and to establish a unified Christendom as the state church of the Roman Empire. The East–West Schism, formally dated to 1054, was still almost three centuries off from the last of these councils, but already by 787 the major western sees, although still in communion with the state church of the Byzantine Empire, were all outside the empire, and the Pope was to crown Charlemagne as emperor 13 years later.
First Council of Nicaea: main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the nature of the Son of God and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Creed of Nicaea, establishing uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.
Second Council of Nicaea: seventh of the first seven ecumenical councils by both West and East. Orthodox, Catholics, and Old Catholics unanimously recognize it; to restore the use and veneration of icons (or, holy images), which had been suppressed by imperial edict inside the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Leo III (717–741).
Council of Constance (1414–1418): ecumenical council recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. The council ended the Western Schism, by deposing or accepting the resignation of the remaining papal claimants and electing Pope Martin V. The Council also condemned Jan Hus as a heretic and facilitated his execution by the civil authority. It also ruled on issues of national sovereignty, the rights of pagans, and just war in response to a conflict between the Kingdom of Poland and the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The Council is important for its relationship to ecclesial Conciliarism and Papal supremacy.
Doctor of the Church (Latin doctor "teacher"; Doctor of the Universal Church (Latin: Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis)): title given by the Catholic Church to saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing. As of 2020, the Catholic Church has named 36 Doctors of the Church. Of these, the 17 who died before the Great Schism of 1054 are also held in high esteem by the Eastern Orthodox Church, although it does not use the formal title "Doctor of the Church". Among these 36 are 27 from the West and 9 from the East; 4 women; 18 bishops, 12 priests, 1 deacon, 3 nuns, 1 consecrated virgin; 26 from Europe, 3 from Africa, 7 from Asia. More Doctors (12) lived during the 4th century than any other; eminent Christian writers of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries are usually referred to as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, while the 9th and 20th centuries have so far produced no Doctors at all. The shortest period between death and nomination was that of Alphonsus Liguori, who died in 1787 and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1871 – a period of 84 years; the longest was that of Ephrem the Syrian, which took fifteen and a half centuries. Catholic Church: Latin Church: The requisite conditions are enumerated as three: eminens doctrina, insignis vitae sanctitas, Ecclesiae declaratio (i.e. eminent learning, a high degree of sanctity, and proclamation by the church). Benedict XIV explains the third as a declaration by the supreme pontiff or by a general council.
Split of early Christianity and Judaism: took place during the first centuries of the Common Era. Rejection and crucifixion of Jesus (c. 33), the Council of Jerusalem (c. 50), the destruction of the Second Temple and institution of the Jewish tax in 70, the postulated Council of Jamnia c. 90, and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135. Recently, some scholars have argued that there were many competing Jewish sects in the Holy Land during the Second Temple period, and that those that became Rabbinic Judaism and Proto-orthodox Christianity were but two of these. Some of these scholars have proposed a model which envisions a twin birth of Proto-orthodox Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism rather than a separation of the former from the latter.
John the Apostle (~AD 6 - 100): Church Fathers generally identify him as the author of five books in the New Testament: the Gospel of John, three Epistles of John, and the Book of Revelation. Some modern higher critical scholars have raised the possibility that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist, and John of Patmos were three separate individuals.
Celsus (~ 2nd c.): Greek philosopher and opponent of Early Christianity.
The True Word: Celsus’ main argument against Christianity, and why he attacked it with such vigor, was that he considered it a divisive and destructive force that would harm both the Roman Empire and society.
Theological Library of Caesarea Maritima (Library of Caesarea): was the library of the Christians of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine in ancient times. “large library [30,000 vols in A.D. 630 {O’Connor 1980:161}] survived at Caesarea until destroyed by the Arabs in the 7th cent.”
List of early Christian writers: Various Early Christian writers wrote gospels and other books, some of which were canonized as the New Testament canon developed. The Apostolic Fathers were prominent writers who are traditionally understood to have met and learned from Jesus' personal disciples. The Church Fathers are later writers with no direct connection to the disciples (other than the claim to Apostolic Succession). Apologists defended Christianity against its critics, especially Greek and Roman philosophers.
Patristics: period is generally considered to run from the end of New Testament times or end of the Apostolic Age (c. AD 100) to either AD 451 (the date of the Council of Chalcedon), or to the 8th century Second Council of Nicaea.
Missionaries
Alopen (阿罗本 / Āluóběn; ~600 in Syria - ~600): first recorded Christian missionary to have reached China, during the Tang Dynasty. Missionary from the Church of the East (also known as the Nestorian Church), and probably a Syriac-speaker from Persia. After Alopen's time, the Church of the East was prominent in China for the remainder of the Tang Dynasty's power. Different emperors treated it differently, with some showing it the tolerance it received in the early decades, and some openly persecuting it. Nestorianism disappeared with the fall of the Tang Dynasty in the early 10th century.
Nestorian Stele (erected 781): documents 150 years of early Christianity in China. It is a 279 cm tall limestone block with text in both Chinese and Syriac describing the existence of Christian communities in several cities in northern China. It reveals that the initial Nestorian Christian church had met recognition by the Tang Emperor Taizong, due to efforts of the Christian missionary Alopen in 635. Buried in 845, probably during religious suppression, the stele was not rediscovered until 1625.
John of Montecorvino (1246-1328): founder of the earliest Roman Catholic missions in India and China, and archbishop of Peking, and Latin Patriarch of the Orient. Just about the time of Marco Polo being in Yuan China.
Annuario Pontificio: annual directory of the Holy See of the Catholic Church. It lists the popes in chronological order and all officials of the Holy See's departments. It also provides names and contact information for all cardinals and bishops, the dioceses (with statistics about each), the departments of the Roman Curia, the Holy See's diplomatic missions abroad, the embassies accredited to the Holy See, the headquarters of religious institutes (again with statistics on each), certain academic institutions, and other similar information.
Secretariat of State (Holy See): oldest dicastery in the Roman Curia, the central papal governing bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. It is headed by the Cardinal Secretary of State and performs all the political and diplomatic functions of the Holy See. The Secretariat is divided into three sections, the Section for General Affairs, the Section for Relations with States, and, since 2017, the Section for Diplomatic Staff.
Papist: pejorative term referring to the Roman Catholic Church, its teachings, practices, or adherents. The word gained currency during the English Reformation, as it was used to denote a person whose loyalties were to the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, rather than to the Church of England.
Papal selection before 1059: no uniform procedure before AD 1059. The Bishops of Rome and Supreme Pontiffs (Popes) of the Catholic Church were often appointed by their predecessors or by political rulers. While some kind of election often characterized the procedure, an election that included meaningful participation of the laity was rare, especially as the Popes' claims to temporal power solidified into the Papal States. The practice of papal appointment during this period would later result in the jus exclusivae, i. e., a right to veto the selection that Catholic monarchs exercised into the twentieth century. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II succeeded in limiting future Papal electors to the Cardinals in In nomine Domini, instituting standardized Papal elections that eventually developed into the procedure of the Papal conclave.
Papal appointment: medieval method of selecting a pope. Popes have always been selected by a council of Church fathers, however, Papal selection before 1059 was often characterized by confirmation or "nomination" by secular European rulers or by their predecessors. Appointment might have taken several forms, with a variety of roles for the laity and civic leaders, Byzantine and Germanic emperors, and noble Roman families. The role of the election vis-a-vis the general population and the clergy was prone to vary considerably, with a nomination carrying weight that ranged from near total to a mere suggestion or ratification of a prior election. An important precedent from this period is an edict of Emperor Honorius, issued after a synod he convoked to depose Antipope Eulalius. The power passed to (and grew with) the King of the Ostrogoths, then the Byzantine Emperor (or his delegate, the Exarch of Ravenna). After an interregnum, the Kings of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperor (whose selection the pope also sometimes had a hand in), generally assumed the role of confirming the results of papal elections. For a period (today known as the "saeculum obscurum"), the power passed from the Emperor to powerful Roman nobles—the Crescentii and then the Counts of Tusculum.
Ostrogothic Papacy: period from 493 to 537 where the papacy was strongly influenced by the Ostrogothic Kingdom, if the pope was not outright appointed by the Ostrogothic King. The selection and administration of popes during this period was strongly influenced by Theodoric the Great and his successors Athalaric and Theodahad. This period terminated with Justinian I's (re)conquest of Rome during the Gothic War (535–554), inaugurating the Byzantine Papacy (537-752).
Byzantine Papacy: period of Byzantine domination of the Roman papacy from 537 to 752, when popes required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor for episcopal consecration, and many popes were chosen from the apocrisiarii (liaisons from the pope to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Byzantine-ruled Greece, Syria, or Sicily. Justinian I conquered the Italian peninsula in the Gothic War (535–554) and appointed the next three popes, a practice that would be continued by his successors and later be delegated to the Exarchate of Ravenna. Greek-speakers from Greece, Syria, and Sicily replaced members of the powerful Roman nobles in the papal chair during this period. Rome under the Greek popes constituted a "melting pot" of Western and Eastern Christian traditions, reflected in art as well as liturgy.
Counts of Tusculum: most powerful secular noblemen in Latium, near Rome, in the present-day Italy between the 10th and 12th centuries. Several popes and an antipope during the 11th century came from their ranks. They created and perfected the political formula of noble-papacy, wherein the Pope was arranged to be elected only from the ranks of the Roman nobles. The Pornocracy (Saeculum obscurum), the period of influence by powerful female members of the family, also influenced papal history.
Saeculum obscurum (Latin: the Dark Age): name given to a period in the history of the Papacy beginning with the installation of Pope Sergius III in 904 and lasting for sixty years until the death of Pope John XII in 964. During this period, the popes were influenced strongly by a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti (Counts of Tusculum), and their relatives. The saeculum obscurum was first named and identified as a period of papal immorality by the Italian cardinal and historian Caesar Baronius in his Annales Ecclesiastici in the sixteenth century. Baronius's primary source for his history of this period was a contemporaneous writer, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona. Baronius himself was writing during the Counter-Reformation, a period of heightened sensitivity to clerical corruption. Theodora and Marozia held great sway over the popes during this time. In particular, as political rulers of Rome they had effective control over the election of new popes.
Marozia (Maria; aka Mariuccia, Mariozza; c. 890 – 937): Roman noblewoman who was the alleged mistress of Pope Sergius III and was given the unprecedented titles senatrix ("senatoress") and patricia of Rome by Pope John X. Edward Gibbon wrote: "influence of two sister prostitutes, Marozia and Theodora was founded on their wealth and beauty, their political and amorous intrigues: the most strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman tiara, and their reign may have suggested to darker ages the fable of a female pope (Pope Joan). The bastard son, two grandsons, two great grandsons, and one great great grandson of Marozia—a rare genealogy—were seated in the Chair of St. Peter." Pope John XIII was her nephew, the offspring of her younger sister Theodora. Pornocracy.
Pope Adrian VI (Adriaan Florensz Boeyens; 1459.03.02–1523.09.14): head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1522.01.09 until his death. The only Dutchman to become pope, he was the last non-Italian pope until the Polish John Paul II 455 years later. Born in the Episcopal principality of Utrecht, Adrian studied at the University of Leuven in the Low Countries, where he rose to the position of professor of theology, also serving as its rector (the equivalent of president or vice-chancellor). In 1507, he became the tutor of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who later trusted him as both his emissary and his regent. Adrian came to the papacy in the midst of one of its greatest crises, threatened not only by Lutheranism to the north but also by the advance of the Ottoman Turks to the east. He refused to compromise with Lutheranism theologically, demanding Luther's condemnation as a heretic. However, he is noted for having attempted to reform the Catholic Church administration in response to the Protestant Reformation. Adrian's admission that the Roman Curia itself was at fault for the turmoil in the Church was read at the 1522–1523 Diet of Nuremberg.
Church of the East (Persian Church or the Nestorian Church): an Eastern Christian church of the East Syriac Rite, based in Mesopotamia. It was one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity that arose from the Christological controversies of the 5th and 6th centuries, alongside the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Chalcedonian Church. During the early modern period, a series of schisms gave rise to rival patriarchates, sometimes two, sometimes three. Since the latter half of the 20th century, three churches in Iraq claim the heritage of the Church of the East. Meanwhile, the East Syriac churches in India claim the heritage of the Church of the East in India.
Schism of 1552: important event in the history of the Church of the East. It divided the church into two factions, of which one entered into communion with Rome becoming part of the Catholic Church at this time and the other remained independent until the 19th c.
Catholic Church and evolution: 1859-1950: no authoritative pronouncement on the subject; 1950: Humani generis Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces. Humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins; process of evolution is a planned and purpose-driven natural process, guided by God. {The Church does not argue with scientists on matters such as the age of the earth and the authenticity of the fossil record, seeing such matters as outside its area of expertise.}
Pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani; 1912.10.17–1978.09.28; Papacy: 1978.08.26–1978.09.28, 33 days): first pope born in the 20th c. and the last one to die in the 20th c. His reign is among the shortest in papal history, resulting in the most recent year of three popes and the first to occur since 1605. John Paul I remains the most recent Italian-born pope, the last in a succession of such popes that started with Clement VII in 1523. Before the papal conclave that elected him, he expressed his desire not to be elected, telling those close to him that he would decline the papacy if elected, but, upon the cardinals' electing him, he felt an obligation to say yes. He was the first pontiff to have a double name, choosing "John Paul" in honour of his two immediate predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI. He explained that he was indebted to John XXIII and to Paul VI for naming him a bishop and a cardinal, respectively. Furthermore, he was the first pope to add the regnal number "I", designating himself "the First". A dramatic event, soon after the election, occurred when the leader of the delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad, collapsed and died after a ceremony on 5 September 1978. The new pope immediately came over and prayed for him. Moral theology: Contraception, Abortion, Artificial insemination, Divorce, Homosexuality, Ordination of women. Communism. Interfaith dialogue: Islam: As Patriarch of Venice in 1964.11 he explained the declaration of Dignitatis humanae: "There are 4,000 Muslims in Rome: they have the right to build a mosque. There is nothing to say: you have to let them do it".
Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio; 1936.12.17-): while affirming present Catholic doctrine, has stated that Catholics have concentrated excessively on condemning abortion, contraception, and homosexual acts, while neglecting the greater need for tenderness, mercy and compassion; maintains that he is a "Son of the Church" regarding loyalty to Church doctrine, and has spoken against abortion as "horrific", insisted that women be valued, not clericized; against adoption by same-sex couples, maintained that divorced and re-married Catholics may not receive Holy Communion; Christian obligation to assist the poor and the needy in an optimistic tone, as well as promoting peace negotiations and interfaith dialogue.
Cardinals created by Francis: "cardinalship does not imply promotion; it is neither an honour nor a decoration<...>"
Pietro Parolin: Vietnam talks (Catholic Church in Vietnam = ~6 mln ppl)
Institute for the Works of Religion (Vatican Bank; Istituto per le Opere di Religione – IOR): privately held institute located in Vatican City and run by a Board of Superintendence which reports to a Cardinals' Commission and the Pope; because its assets are not the property of the Holy See, it is outside the jurisdiction of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. On 24 June 2013, Pope Francis created a special investigative Pontifical Commission to study IOR reform. In 2014, he fired four of the five cardinals in attempt to fix corruption within the institute.
Lapsed Catholic: Examples in literature and entertainment: "He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic" (Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman (1963), chapter 8); "I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest." (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited).
Countries that have the headquarters of Eastern Catholic particular churches. Deep red: Byzantine rite; Green: Alexandrian rite; Yellow: Others (West Syriac, East Syriac and Armenian).
Eastern Catholic Churches (Oriental Catholic Churches, Eastern-rite Catholic Churches, Eastern Rite Catholicism, Eastern Churches): 23 Eastern Christian sui iuris (autonomous) particular churches of the Catholic Church, in full communion with the Pope in Rome. Although they are distinct theologically, liturgically, and historically from the Latin Church, they are all in full communion with it and with each other. The majority of the Eastern Catholic Churches are groups that, at different points in the past, used to belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, or the historic Church of the East, but are now in communion with the Bishop of Rome. The five liturgical traditions of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, comprising the Alexandrian Rite, the Armenian Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite, and the West Syriac Rite, are shared with other Eastern Christian churches. Consequently, the Catholic Church consists of six liturgical rites, including the aforementioned five liturgical traditions of the Eastern Catholic Churches along with the Latin liturgical rites of the Latin Church.
Eastern Orthodox Church (Orthodox Catholic Church): the second-largest Christian church, with approximately 260 mln. baptised members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops in local synods. Roughly half of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Russia. The church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the Bishop of Rome, but the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by all as primus inter pares ("first among equals") of the bishops. As one of the oldest surviving religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played a prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Near East.
Church of Sinai: Greek Orthodox autonomous church whose territory consists of St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, along with several dependencies. There is a dispute as to whether the church is fully autocephalous or merely autonomous. The church is headed by the Archbishop of Mount Sinai and Raithu, who is traditionally consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem and also serves as abbot for the monastery. The Church of Sinai owes its existence to the Monastery of the Transfiguration (better known as St. Catherine's Monastery). The monastery's origins are traced back to the Chapel of the Burning Bush that Constantine the Great's mother, Helena, had built over the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush. Between 527 and 565, Emperor Justinian I ordered the monastery built to enclose the chapel. The monastery became associated with St. Catherine of Alexandria through the belief that her relics were miraculously transported there. The monastery’s library is renowned for its great antiquity and its manuscripts. In 1859, Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus here.
Talmud: central text of Rabbinic Judaism. The term "Talmud" normally refers to the collection of writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli), although there is also an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem Talmud, or Palestinian Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi). The Talmud has two components: the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), a written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism's Oral Torah, and the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature.
Mishnah: the first major written redaction of the Jewish oral traditions known as the "Oral Torah". It is also the first major work of Rabbinic literature.
Protestantism: second largest form of Christianity with collectively more than 900 million adherents worldwide or nearly 40% of all Christians. It originated with the Reformation, a movement against what its followers considered to be errors in the Roman Catholic Church. Ever since, Protestants reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and sacraments, but disagree among themselves regarding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Lutheranism: major branch of Protestant Christianity which identifies with the theology of Martin Luther (1483–1546), a German friar, ecclesiastical reformer and theologian.
Calvinism (Reformed tradition, Reformed Christianity, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed faith): major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice of John Calvin and other Reformation-era theologians.
Baptists: Christians distinguished by baptizing professing believers only (believer's baptism, as opposed to infant baptism), and doing so by complete immersion (as opposed to affusion or sprinkling). Baptist churches also generally subscribe to the tenets of soul competency/liberty, salvation through faith alone, scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists generally recognize two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's supper. Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant, though some Baptists disavow this identity.
Counter-Reformation (Contrareformatio, Catholic Reformation (Reformatio Catholica), Catholic Revival): period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and largely ended with the conclusion of the European wars of religion in 1648. Initiated to address the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort composed of apologetic and polemical documents and ecclesiastical configuration as decreed by the Council of Trent. The last of these included the efforts of Imperial Diets of the Holy Roman Empire, exiling/forcibly converting Protestant populations, heresy trials and the Inquisition, anti-corruption efforts, spiritual movements, and the founding of new religious orders. Such policies had long-lasting effects in European history with exiles of Protestants continuing until the 1781 Patent of Toleration, although smaller expulsions took place in the 19th century.
Nontrinitarianism: form of Christianity that rejects the mainstream Christian doctrine of the Trinity—the teaching that God is three distinct hypostases or persons who are coeternal, coequal, and indivisibly united in one being, or essence (from the Greek ousia). In terms of number of adherents, nontrinitarian denominations comprise a small minority of modern Christianity: largest - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormons"), Jehovah's Witnesses and the Iglesia ni Cristo, smaller groups - Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, Dawn Bible Students, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Universalist Christians, The Way International, The Church of God International and the United Church of God.
Christian Science: set of beliefs and practices belonging to the metaphysical family of new religious movements. It was developed in 19th-century New England by Mary Baker Eddy, who argued in her 1875 book Science and Health that sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer alone. The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies. Mark Twain was a prominent contemporaneous critic of Eddy's; Twain described Eddy as "[g]rasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish"; "vain, untruthful [and] jealous," but "[i]n several ways ... the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary."
Muhammad (Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim; c. 570-c. 632.06.08): orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib; being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, he later reported that it was there, at age 40, that he received his first revelation from God. Early followers; first hijra (migration to Abyssinia); to Medina with followers in 622 (Hijra); in 630 his followers took control of Mecca in the Conquest of Mecca; he destroyed idols and pagan temples. In 632, a few months after returning to Medina from The Farewell Pilgrimage, Muhammad fell ill and died; by the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam, and he had united Arabia into a single Muslim religious polity.
Muhammad's wives: 11-13 wives; Aisha was 6 when married Muhammad. Only a few kids.
People of the Book: Islamic term which refers to Jews, Christians and Sabians and is sometimes applied to members of other religions such as Zoroastrians. It is also used in Judaism to refer to the Jewish people and by members of some Christian denominations to refer to themselves. Judaism: The Hai Gaon in 998 in Pumbeditah comments, "Three possessions should you prize-a field, a friend, and a book." However the Hai Gaon mentions that a book is more reliable than even friends for sacred books span across time, indeed can express external ideas, that transcend time itself. The love and reverence for Jewish books is seen in Jewish law. It is not permissible for a sacred Jewish text to lie on the ground and if by accident a book is dropped to the floor it should be picked up and given a kiss. A Jewish book is not to be left open unless it is being read, nor is it to be held upside down. It is not permitted to place a book of lesser sanctity on top of a book of higher holiness, so for example one must never place any book on top of the Tanakh.
Islamic revival (الصحوة الإسلامية aṣ-Ṣaḥwah l-ʾIslāmiyyah, "Islamic awakening"): revival of the Islamic religion throughout the Islamic world, that began roughly sometime in 1970s and is manifested in greater religious piety and in a growing adoption of Islamic culture, dress, terminology, separation of the sexes, speech and media censorship, and values by Muslims. From Western perspective two most important events for this are: Arab oil embargo and subsequent quadrupling of the price of oil in the mid 1970s, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution that established an Islamic republic in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. Oil money allowed to fund Islamic books, scholarships, fellowships, and mosques around the world; Iran's Islamic revolution undermined the assumption that Westernization strengthened Muslim countries and was the irreversible trend.
The Satanic Verses controversy (Rushdie Affair): heated and sometimes violent reaction of some Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. In 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwā ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from Muslim anger over the novel.
A Common Word Between Us and You (2007.10.13): open letter from leaders of the Muslim faith to leaders of the Christian faith. It calls for peace between Muslims and Christians and tries to work for common ground and understanding among both faiths.
Islam in Europe: Muslim European countries: Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Albania; ~50%: Bosnia and Herzegovina; 20%-40%: Cyprus (divided), Macedonia; 10%-20%: Georgia, Montenegro, Russia; <1%: new EU members from the former Soviet bloc (except Bulgaria (5%-10%)) [13/06/23].
Biographical evaluation: discipline of Islamic religious studies within hadith terminology in which the narrators of hadith are evaluated. Its goal is to distinguish authentic and reliable hadiths from unreliable hadiths in establishing the credibility of the narrators, using both historic and religious knowledge. History: Beginning of narrator evaluation; Time of the Companions; After the Companions; Early specialists
Ulama ("the learned ones"): "those recognized as scholars or authorities" in the "religious hierarchy" of the Islamic religious studies. Students did not associate themselves with a specific educational institution, but rather sought to join renowned teachers. By tradition, a scholar who had completed his studies was approved by his teacher. At the teacher's individual discretion, the student was given the permission for independent reasoning (ijtihad) and for the issuing of legal opinions (fatwa). Essentially, an unbroken chain of teachers ensured the authenticity of the teaching back to the Prophet Muhammad, a process called Isnād (Arabic: إسناد, "support"). Thus, biographical evaluation (Arabic: عِلْمُ الرِّجال, translit. `Ilm al-Rijāl), a process by which the narrators of hadith are evaluated, using both historic and religious knowledge, is regarded as the key to establishing the credibility of a doctrine.
Places of learning: madrasa (likely came up in Khurasan during the 10th century AD, and spread to other parts of the Islamic world from the late 11th c. onwards).
Branches of learning: Mysticism (sufism); Philosophy and ethics (In general, the Islamic philosophers saw no contradiction between philosophy and the religion of Islam. However, according to Hourani, al-Farabi also wrote that philosophy in its pure form was reserved for an intellectual elite, and that ordinary people should rely for guidance on the sharia.); Law (Sharia); Theology.
Political history of the ulama:
Early Muslim communities (ruler and ulama forming a sort of "separation of powers" in government; Laws were decided based on the Ijma (consensus) of the Ummah (community), which was most often represented by the legal scholars).
Early modern Islamic empires: Ottoman imperial Sunni ulama, Shi'a state religion of Safavid Persia.
19th century: A new Ottoman elite, Orthodox Shi'a ulama in Iran.
19th/20th century: Ulama and Muslim reform: Islah, Wahhabism and the Salafi Movement; Muslim mass organizations.
Ulama in the secular national states of the 20th century: Republic of Turkey (In the kemalist Republic of Turkey, traditional Ottoman religious institutions were abolished like the Ottoman Caliphate, the office of the Shaykh ul-Islam, as well as the dervish brotherhoods); Iran (Shi'a ulama had maintained their religious authority together with considerable sources of income by waqf endowments and the zakat tax. Thus, they maintained their ability to exert political pressure); Syria; Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq; Pakistan.
Islamic revival and the origin of extremism: Islam, unlike Christianity, does not know a centralised process of ordination of its clergy. The traditional way of education and training relied largely on personal relationships between a teacher and his students. Whenever Islamic national governments tried to influence their regional ulama, they did so by controlling their income, or by establishing state-controlled schools and high schools. Traditional madrasas, representing merely decentralised "places of learning" and not institutions comparable to Western universities, often remained beyond state control. Whenever the state failed to control the resources of the madrasas, e.g., by controlling the income from religious endowments, or collecting Muslim taxes on behalf of the clergy, the ulama also retained the independence of their teaching. Saudi Arabian humanitarian organizations use the madrasas they sponsor to spread their wahhabitic doctrine, whilst Shiite madrasas are frequently influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic revival originated largely from institutions which were financially independent from the state, and beyond its control. This led to a resurgence of the social and political influence of the traditional ulama in at least some countries.
Modern challenges: Some opinions from within the Muslim world have criticized the lack of scientific training of the ulama, and argued that those proficient in the sciences should qualify for this title. In Egypt, the Al-Azhar University has begun to introduce scientific and practical subjects in its traditional theological colleges to help the ulama face the challenges of the modern world.
The Satanic Verses controversy (Rushdie Affair): heated and frequently violent reaction of Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from violent Muslims over the novel. The issue was said to have divided "Muslims from Westerners along the fault line of culture," and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression—that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write"—against the view of many Muslims—that no one should be free to "insult and malign Muslims" by disparaging the "honour of the Prophet".
Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (Muhammad cartoons crisis): began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 editorial cartoons 2005.09.30, most of which depicted Muhammad, a principal figure of the religion of Islam. The newspaper announced that this was an attempt to contribute to the debate about criticism of Islam and self-censorship. The cartoons were reprinted in newspapers around the world both in a sense of journalistic solidarity and as an illustration in what became a major news story. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen described the controversy as Denmark's worst international relations incident since WWII.
Akkari-Laban dossier: 43-page document which was created by a group of Danish Muslim clerics from multiple organizations set out to present their case and ask for support in the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.
Sana'a manuscript: one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence. Found, along with many other Quranic and non-Quranic fragments, in Yemen in 1972 during restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a. Written on parchment, and comprises two layers of text.
History of the Quran: compilation of the written Quran (as opposed to the recited Quran) spanned several decades and forms an important part of early Islamic history. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike disagree on whether Muhammad compiled the Quran during his lifetime or if this task began with the first caliph Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (632-634). Once the Quran was compiled, due to the unanimity of the sources, Muslims agree that the Quran we see today was canonized by Uthman ibn Affan (653-656). Upon the canonization of the Quran, Uthman ordered the burning of all personal copies of the Quran. Nevertheless, even according to secular scholars what was done to the Quran in the process seems to have been extremely conservative and the content was formed in a mechanical fashion as to avoid redactional bias. ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd’s codex; Ubayy ibn Kaʿb’s codex. Other secular scholars, such as John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, and Patricia Crone, are less willing to attribute the entire Quran to Muhammad (or Uthman), arguing that there "is no hard evidence for the existence of the Quran in any form before the last decade of the 7th century...[and that]...the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth".
The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (2007; Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (2000)): book by Christoph Luxenberg. The book argues that the Qur'an at its inception was drawn from Christian Syro-Aramaic texts, in order to evangelize the Arabs in the early 8th century.
Christoph Luxenberg: pseudonym of the author of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Qur'an. The real identity of the person behind the pseudonym remains unknown. The most widely circulated version claims that he is a German scholar of Semitic languages. Hans Jansen, professor at Leyden University, has conjectured that Luxenberg is a Lebanese Christian, whereas François de Blois, writing in the Journal of Quranic Studies, has questioned Luxenberg's knowledge of Arabic.
Biblical and Quranic narratives: the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, contains references to more than fifty people and events also found in the Bible. Anything in the Bible that agrees with the Quran is accepted by Muslims, and anything in the Bible that disagrees with the Quran is not accepted by Muslims. Many stories in the Bible are not mentioned at all in the Quran; with regard to such passages, Muslims are instructed to maintain neutral positions, but to read them and pass them on if they wish to do so. From a modern scholarly perspective, similarities between Biblical and Quranic accounts of the same person or event are evidence for the influence of pre-existing traditions on the composition of the Quran. Muslims believe that the Biblical tradition was corrupted over time, whereas the Quranic tradition was uncorrupted.
The Koran Interpreted (1955; by Arthur John Arberry): title acknowledges the orthodox Islamic view that the Quran cannot be translated, merely interpreted.
Creationism
talk.origins (Talk.Origins, t.o.): moderated Usenet discussion forum concerning the origins of life, and evolution. It remains a major venue for debate in the creation-evolution controversy, and its official purpose is to draw such debates out of the science newsgroups, such as sci.bio.evolution.
TalkOrigins Archive: presents mainstream science perspectives on the antievolution claims of young-earth, old-earth, and "intelligent design" creationists
c decay: The concept of c-decay was first proposed by Barry Setterfield in 1981 in an article for the Australian creationist magazine, Ex Nihilo, as an alternative to physical cosmology. Setterfield's proposal was that the speed of light (c), was infinite in the past, but has slowed substantially over time. Setterfield argues that this resolves the so-called "starlight problem", since light may have traveled fast enough in the past to reach Earth in thousands of years, despite being billions of light years away.
Zoroastrianism : one of the world's oldest extant religions, "combining a cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism in a manner unique [...] among the major religions of the world". Ascribed to the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), it exalts a deity of wisdom, Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord), as its Supreme Being. Major features of Zoroastrianism, such as messianism, heaven and hell, and free will have, some believe, influenced other religious systems, including Second Temple Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam. With possible roots dating back to the second millennium BCE, Zoroastrianism enters recorded history in the 5th-century BCE, and along with a Mithraic Median prototype and a Zurvanist Sassanid successor it served as the state religion of the pre-Islamic Iranian empires from around 600 BCE to 650 CE. Zoroastrianism was suppressed from the 7th century onwards following the Muslim conquest of Persia of 633-654. Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. The most important texts of the religion are those of the Avesta, which includes the writings of Zoroaster known as the Gathas, enigmatic poems that define the religion's precepts, and the Yasna, the scripture.
Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae): name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek (but also in Old Coptic, Demotic, etc.), which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward.
Abraxas (Biblical Greek: ἀβραξάς, romanized: abraxas, variant form ἀβρασάξ romanized: abrasax): word of mystic meaning in the system of the Gnostic Basilides, being there applied to the "Great Archon" (megas archōn), the princeps of the 365 spheres (ouranoi). The word is found in Gnostic texts such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and also appears in the Greek Magical Papyri. It was engraved on certain antique gemstones, called on that account Abraxas stones, which were used as amulets or charms. As the initial spelling on stones was Abrasax (Αβρασαξ), the spelling of Abraxas seen today probably originates in the confusion made between the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and xi (Ξ) in the Latin transliteration.
East Asian religions
Budai (布袋 (Bùdài); Hotei in JA): Chinese folkloric deity; means "Cloth Sack"; Budai is usually identified with (or as an incarnation of) Maitreya Buddha, so much so that the Budai image is one of the main forms in which Maitreya Buddha is depicted in East Asia; Laughing Buddha (笑佛 (xiào-fó)); fat bald man wearing a robe. Many people confuse Budai with Gautama Buddha.
Indian religions
Indian religions: religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent; namely Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism
Hinduism
Puruṣārtha (पुरुषार्थ, literally means an "object of human pursuit"): key concept in Hinduism, and refers to the four proper goals or aims of a human life. The four puruṣārthas are Dharma (righteousness, moral values), Artha (prosperity, economic values), Kama (pleasure, love, psychological values) and Moksha (liberation, spiritual values). All four Purusarthas are important, but in cases of conflict, Dharma is considered more important than Artha or Kama in Hindu philosophy. Moksha is considered the ultimate ideal of human life.
History of Buddhism: spans the 6th c. BC to the present, starting with the birth of Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Lumbini, Nepal. Spread from the northeastern region of the Indian subcontinent through Central, East, and Southeast Asia.
Early Buddhist texts (early Buddhist literature, early Buddhist discourses): parallel texts shared by the early Buddhist schools. The most widely studied EBT material are the first four Pali Nikayas, as well as the corresponding Chinese Āgamas. However, some scholars have also pointed out that some Vinaya material, like the Patimokkhas of the different Buddhist schools, as well as some material from the earliest Abhidharma texts could also be quite early. Setting and date: Regarding the setting, the EBTs generally depict the world of the second urbanisation period, which features small scale towns and villages, and small competing states (the mahajanapadas) with a lower level of urbanisation compared to that of the Mauryan era. As such, the EBTs depict the Gangetic Plain before the rise of the Nanda empire, who unified all these small competing states during the 4th c. They also depict Pataliputra as the small village of Pataligama, while it would later become the capital of the Mauryan empire and the largest city in India. They do not mention Ashoka but they mention the Jain leader Mahavira (a.k.a. Nātaputta) as a contemporary of the Buddha.
Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent: gradual process of dwindling and replacement of Buddhism in India, which ended around the 12th century. According to Lars Fogelin, this was "not a singular event, with a singular cause; it was a centuries-long process." The decline of Buddhism has been attributed to various factors, especially the regionalisation of India after the end of the Gupta Empire (320–650 CE), which led to the loss of patronage and donations as Indian dynasties turned to the services of Hindu Brahmins. Another factor was invasions of north India by various groups such as Huns, Turco-mongols and Persians and subsequent destruction of Buddhist institutions such as Nalanda and religious persecutions. Religious competition with Hinduism and later Islam were also important factors. Islamization of Bengal and demolitions of Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a general of the Delhi Sultanate are thought to have severely weakened the practice of Buddhism in East India. Socio-political change and religious competition: Religious competition: The growth of new forms of Hinduism (and to a lesser extent Jainism) was a key element in the decline in Buddhism in India, particularly in terms of diminishing financial support to Buddhist monasteries from laity and royalty. According to Hazra, Buddhism declined in part because of the rise of the Brahmins and their influence in socio-political process. One of the reasons of this conversion was that the brahmins were willing and able to aid in local administration, and they provided councillors, administrators and clerical staff. Moreover, brahmins had clear ideas about society, law and statecraft (and studied texts such as the Arthashastra and the Manusmriti) and could be more pragmatic than the Buddhists, whose religion was based on monastic renunciation and did not recognize that there was a special warrior class that was divinely ordained to use violence. As Johannes Bronkhorst notes, Buddhists could give "very little" practical advice in response to that of the Brahmins and Buddhist texts often speak ill of kings and royalty. Religious convergence and absorption. Patronage. Internal social-economic dynamics. Islamic invasions and conquest (10th to 12th century): Decline under Islamic rule. Revival.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835 02 13 – 1908 05 26): claimed to be the Mujaddid (divine reformer) of the 14th Islamic century, the promised Messiah (Second Coming of Christ), and the Mahdi awaited by the Muslims in the end days.
Sun Myung Moon: South Korean (born in North Korea; was in jail there); Unification Church; Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church
Religion and mythology: differ in but have overlapping aspect. Both terms refer to systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion. Religion is the broader term: besides mythological aspects, it includes aspects of ritual, morality, theology, and mystical experience. A given mythology is almost always associated with a certain religion such as Greek mythology with Ancient Greek religion. Disconnected from its religious system, a myth may lose its immediate relevance to the community and evolve—away from sacred importance—into a legend or folktale.
Demiurge: artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the familiar monotheistic sense, because both the demiurge itself plus the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are considered either uncreated and eternal, or the product of some other being, depending on the system.
Mephistopheles: demon featured in German folklore; originally appeared in literature as the demon in the Faust legend.
Baphomet: deity allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar that subsequently became incorporated into various occult and Western esoteric traditions. The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar starting in 1307. It first came into popular English usage in the 19th century during debate and speculation on the reasons for the suppression of the Templar order. Baphomet is a symbol of balance in various occult and mystical traditions, the origin of which some occultists have attempted to link with the Gnostics and Templars, although occasionally purported to be a deity or a demon. Since 1856 the name Baphomet has been associated with the "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Éliphas Lévi, composed of binary elements representing the "symbolization of the equilibrium of opposites": half-human and half-animal, male and female, good and evil, etc. Lévi's intention was to symbolize his concept of balance, with Baphomet representing the goal of perfect social order.
Game: structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games). Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both.
Chariot racing: one of the most popular Iranian, ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine sports. Chariot racing was dangerous to both drivers and horses as they often suffered serious injury and even death, but these dangers added to the excitement and interest for spectators. Chariot races could be watched by women, who were banned from watching many other sports. In the Roman form of chariot racing, teams represented different groups of financial backers and sometimes competed for the services of particularly skilled drivers. As in modern sports like football, spectators generally chose to support a single team, identifying themselves strongly with its fortunes, and violence sometimes broke out between rival factions. The rivalries were sometimes politicized, when teams became associated with competing social or religious ideas. This helps explain why Roman and later Byzantine emperors took control of the teams and appointed many officials to oversee them. The sport faded in importance in the West after the fall of Rome. It survived much longer in the Byzantine Empire, where the traditional Roman factions continued to play a prominent role for several centuries, gaining influence in political matters. Their rivalry culminated in the Nika riots, which marked the gradual decline of the sport. Early chariot racing. Olympic Games: four-horse (tethrippon, Greek: τέθριππον) and two-horse (synoris, Greek: συνωρὶς) chariot races, which were essentially the same aside from the number of horses.
Roman era: Equirria; The main centre of chariot racing was the Circus Maximus in the valley between Palatine Hill and Aventine Hill, which could seat 250,000 people. It was the earliest circus in the city of Rome. The Circus supposedly dated to the city's earliest times, but Julius Caesar rebuilt it around 50 BC to a length and width of about 650 m and 125 m, respectively. The circus was the only place where the emperor showed himself before a populace assembled in vast numbers, and where the latter could manifest their affection or anger. While the entertainment value of chariot races tended to overshadow any sacred purpose, in late antiquity the Church Fathers still saw them as a traditional "pagan" practice, and advised Christians not to participate.
Byzantine era: Constantine I (r. 306–337) preferred chariot racing to gladiatorial combat, which he considered a vestige of paganism. However, the end of gladiatorial games in the Empire may have been more the result of the difficulty and expense that came with procuring gladiators to fight in the games, than the influence of Christianity in Byzantium. The Olympic Games were eventually ended by Emperor Theodosius I (r. 379–395) in 393, perhaps in a move to suppress paganism and promote Christianity, but chariot racing remained popular. The fact that chariot racing became linked to the imperial majesty meant that the Church did not prevent it, although gradually prominent Christian writers, such as Tertullian, began attacking the sport.
Cinderella (sports) ("Cinderella story", Cinderella team): refer to situations in which competitors achieve far greater success than would reasonably have been best expected. Cinderella stories tend to gain much media and fan attention as they move closer to the championship game at the end of the tournament. Esports: Dota 2: OG at The International 2018: needing three new members just a few weeks before the qualifiers began, OG quickly signed Topias "Topson" Taavitsainen, a newcomer to the scene who had never performed at a major LAN event prior to the event, Sébastien "Ceb" Debs, who had previously served as the team's coach and has not played on professional level for nearly 3 years, and Anathan "ana" Pham, returning to the team from a year-long break after their previous elimination at The International 2017. Finishing outside of the top eight in the Dota Pro Circuit final standings, which granted a direct invite to The International 2018, OG earned theirs by playing through and winning the European-region open qualifiers. Following their win at the European qualifiers, OG were then placed into group A, finishing fourth with a record of 9–7, which seeded them into the upper bracket. There, OG won every series to advance to the grand finals. Facing the lower bracket winner PSG.LGD in it, whom OG had just defeated in the upper bracket finals, OG won the game one, but lost the next two games. Needing another win to avoid losing the series, OG forced a late-game comeback in game four, and subsequently won game five, making them International champions and winning them over US$11 million in prize money. OG would then go on to win The International 2019 with the same roster, becoming the first team to win two The Internationals and first team to win back to back The Internationals.
Play (activity): range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment; most commonly associated with children and their juvenile-level activities, but play can also be a useful adult activity, and occurs among other higher-functioning animals as well. Play is often interpreted as frivolous; yet the player can be intently focused on their objective, particularly when play is structured and goal-oriented, as in a game. Accordingly, play can range from relaxed, free-spirited and spontaneous through frivolous to planned or even compulsive.
Tickling: act of touching a part of the body so as to cause involuntary twitching movements and/or laughter. Tickling as physical abuse: An article in the British Medical Journal describes a European method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet after they had been dipped in salt water; In his book Sibling Abuse, Vernon Wiehe published his research findings regarding 150 adults who were abused by their siblings during childhood; Several reported tickling as a type of physical abuse they experienced, and based on these reports it was revealed that abusive tickling is capable of provoking extreme physiological reactions in the victim, such as vomiting, fainting or brief loss of consciousness, incontinence and unconsciousness.
Chess, checkers, board games, eSports etc. are excluded from this category.
Swimming:
Swimsuits:
Bodyskin:
LZR Racer allowed in 2008 Summer Olympics for the 23 out of 25 world records broken. In 2010.01 these bodyskin swimsuits were banned by FINA.
Masters athletics (masters are sometimes known as veterans): class of the sport of athletics for veteran athletes in the events of track and field, road running and cross country running; competitions feature five-year age groups beginning at age 35.
John Whittemore (1899.11.20-2005.04.13) "world's oldest athlete"; quote: "If I don't drop it on my foot, I set a world record".
Freediving (free diving): form of underwater diving that relies on divers' ability to hold their breath until resurfacing rather than on the use of a breathing apparatus such as scuba gear. The term 'freediving' is often associated with competitive breath-hold diving or competitive apnea. However, while some regard freediving as a specific group of underwater activities, for others it is merely a synonym for breath-hold diving. The activity that attracts the most public attention is the extreme sport of competitive apnea in which competitors attempt to attain great depths, times, or distances on a single breath.
Tennis pros:
Male:
Roger Federer (1981.08.08): Swiss professional tennis player, turned professional in 1998 and was continuously ranked in the top ten from October 2002 to November 2016. He has won 19 Grand Slam singles titles, the most in history for a male tennis player, and held the world No. 1 spot in the ATP rankings for a record total of 302 weeks.
Female:
Venus Williams (1980.06.17): USA professional tennis player who is generally regarded as one of the all-time greats of women's tennis and who, along with younger sister Serena Williams, is credited with ushering in a new era of power and athleticism on the women's professional tennis tour.
Serena Williams (1981.09.26): USA professional tennis player. The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) has ranked her world no. 1 in singles on eight occasions, from 2002 to 2017. She became the world no. 1 for the first time in 2002.07.08. On the sixth occasion, she held the ranking for 186 consecutive weeks, tying the record set by Steffi Graf for the most consecutive weeks as world no. 1 by a female tennis player. In total, she has been world no. 1 for 319 weeks, which ranks her third in the Open Era among female tennis players. Some commentators, players and sports writers regard her as the greatest female tennis player of all time. In 2017.04.19 she announced a hiatus from tennis until 2018 because of her pregnancy.
Rabbit punch: blow to the neck or to the base of the skull. It is considered especially dangerous because it can damage the cervical vertebrae and subsequently the spinal cord, which may lead to serious and irreparable spinal cord injury. A rabbit punch can also detach the victim's brain from the brain stem, which can kill instantly.
Hybrid martial arts (hybrid fighting systems): martial arts or fighting systems that incorporate techniques and theories from several particular martial arts (eclecticism). While numerous martial arts borrow or adapt from other arts and to some extent could be considered hybrids, a hybrid martial art emphasizes its disparate origins.
Mixed martial arts (MMA): full-contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, from a variety of other combat sports and martial arts.
Pankration (Greek : Παγκράτιο): was a sporting event introduced into the Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC and founded as a blend of boxing and wrestling but with scarcely any rules. The only things not acceptable were biting and gouging of the opponent's eyes. In extreme cases a pankration competition could even result in the death of one of the opponents, which was considered a win. However, pankration was more than just an event in the athletic competitions of the ancient Greek world; it was also part of the arsenal of Greek soldiers – including the famous Spartan hoplites and Alexander the Great's Macedonian phalanx. At the time of the revival of the Olympic Games (1896), pankration was not reinstated as an Olympic event.
Dioxippus: was an ancient Greek pankratiast, renowned for his Olympic victories in the sport of pankration. His fame and skill were such that he was crowned Olympic champion by default in 336 BC when no other pankratiast dared meet him on the field. This kind of victory was called "akoniti" (literally: without getting dusted) and remains the only one ever recorded in the Olympics in this discipline.
Arrhichion of Phigalia (died 564 BC): was a champion pankratiast in the ancient Olympic Games. He died while successfully defending his championship in the pankration at the 54th Olympiad (564 BC).
Krav maga: noncompetitive eclectic self-defense system developed in Israel that involves striking techniques, wrestling and grappling. Relative to other systems, Krav Maga is known for its focus on real-world situations, efficient and versatile counter-attacks, and ease of learning. Developed by Imi Lichtenfeld in Bratislava in the mid-to late-1930s for the Jews to defend on the streets.
Systema: Russian martial art; hand to hand combat, grappling, knife fighting and fire arms training as well. Training involves drills and sparring without set kata. It focuses mainly on controlling the six body levers (elbows, neck, knees, waist, ankles, and shoulders) through pressure point application, striking and weapon applications.
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC): UFC 12 saw the introduction of weight classes and the banning of fish-hooking. For UFC 14 gloves became mandatory, while kicks to the head of a downed opponent were banned. UFC 15 saw limitations on hair pulling, and the banning of strikes to the back of the neck and head, headbutting, small-joint manipulations, and groin strikes. With five-minute rounds introduced at UFC 21, the UFC gradually re-branded itself as a sport rather than a spectacle. In fact, the UFC had already broken the pay-per-view industry's all-time records for a single year of business, generating over $222,766,000 in revenue in 2006, surpassing both WWE and boxing.
Boxing: Professional boxing is forbidden in Iceland, Iran and North Korea. It was banned in Sweden until 2007 when the ban was lifted but strict restrictions, including four three-minute rounds for fights, were imposed. It was banned in Albania from 1965 till the fall of Communism in 1991; it is now legal there. Norway legalized professional boxing in December 2014.
Death:
Manuel Velazquez: "Death Under the Spotlight: The Manuel Velazquez Boxing Fatality Collection," which documents "Western" boxing deaths since 1741.
Brazil v Germany (2014 FIFA World Cup): 2014.07.08 at the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was the first semi-final match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The game ended in a shocking loss for Brazil; Germany led 5–0 at half time with 4 goals scored in a span of just 6 minutes (between the 23rd and 29th minute). Germany subsequently brought the score up to 7–0 in the second half before Brazil scored a goal at the last minute, ending the match 7–1.
Athletes, sportspeople
Sportsman/sportswoman:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr.; 1947.04.16) professional USA basketball player.
Doping
Cycling - the most doped sport (?):
Festina affair: events that surrounded several doping scandals, doping investigations and confessions by riders to doping that occurred during and after the 1998 Tour de France. How come this event did NOT clean up the doping in cycling?
Christophe Bassons: spoke out about doping; in 1999 Tour de France fellow cyclists neglected him, L.A. even "warned" him. Bassons retired in 1999.
Lance Armstrong (Lance Edward Armstrong; né Gunderson; L.A.): in Oprah Winfrey interview aired 2013.01.17 L.A. admitted that he doped for all 7 Tour de France winnings and that without doping one could not have achieved that.
L.A. Confidentiel (2004, French): book by sports journalist Pierre Ballester and The Sunday Times sports correspondent David Walsh; book contains circumstantial evidence of cyclist Lance Armstrong having used performance enhancing drugs. L.A. sued them all and got quite some "defamation" money. Will money be going back?
Outdoors
Outdoors (+Virtual,+electronics (HW,SW))
What's the relationship between ARG, metapuzzles/puzzlehunts/puzzles, The Game, Location-based game (Encounter, Orienteering/Geocaching/Letterboxing)?
Location-based game (location-enabled game): game play somehow evolves and progresses via a player's location. Thus, location-based games almost always support some kind of localization technology, for example by using satellite positioning like GPS. "Urban gaming" or "Street Games" are typically multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.
Template:Geocaching: Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use GPS receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world.:
Travel Bug (a tag that moves from cache to cache)
Letterboxing: Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and distribute clues to finding the box in printed catalogs, on one of several web sites, or by word of mouth. Stamps are in the letterboxes and carried by letterboxers, so that a stamp is left by a letterboxer in the letterbox "logbook" and a stamp is left in the letterboxer's own "logbook".
Template:Mixed reality (Virtual reality · Augmented reality · Mixed reality): like gargoyles in Snow Crash
Alternate reality game (ARG): interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers.
Metapuzzle: puzzle that unites several puzzles that feed into it.
Puzzlehunt: puzzle game where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles at a particular site, in multiple sites and/or via the internet. Groups of puzzles in a puzzle hunt are often connected by a metapuzzle, leading to answers which combine into a final set of solutions.
ru:Шаблон:Ночные поисковые игры (RU equivalent; Template):
Dozor: RU codebreaking/geolocation game played at night
The Game (treasure hunt): since 1973; non-stop 24–48 hour treasure hunt, puzzlehunt or road rally that has run in the San Francisco Bay and Seattle areas
Live-action game: participants act out their characters' actions (e.g. Humans vs. Zombies)
Metaverse: network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets. The term "metaverse" has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of "meta" and "universe". Various metaverses have been developed for popular use such as virtual world platforms like Second Life. Some metaverse iterations involve integration between virtual and physical spaces and virtual economies. Demand for increased immersion means metaverse development is often linked to advancing virtual reality technology. Implementations: In 2019, the social network company Facebook launched a social VR world called Facebook Horizon. In 2021, Facebook was renamed "Meta Platforms" and its chairman Mark Zuckerberg declared a company commitment to developing a metaverse.
Game design
What's the relationship between gameplay and game mechanics?
Gameplay: a very broad, somewhat abstract concept in game design; specific way in which players interact with a game, and in particular with video games. Gameplay is the pattern defined through the game rules, connection between player and the game, challenges and overcoming them, plot and player's connection with it. Video game gameplay is distinct from graphics, and audio elements. Playability: unplayable, static, non-playable character (NPC); satisfaction, learning, efficiency, immersion, motivation, emotion, socialization.
Game mechanics: constructs of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game or gameplay. Game mechanics is more of an engineering concept while gameplay is more of a design concept. Turns (time in games); action points; (playing) cards: randomizers, game resource; auction or bidding; capture/eliminate; catch-up (in the game); dice: randomizers; movement; resource management; risk and reward; role-playing; tile-laying; game modes (e.g. single vs multi player; capture the flag vs deathmatch). Victory condition mechanics: many.
real-time: game time in video games is in fact subdivided into discrete units due to the sequential nature of computing, these intervals or units are typically so small as to be imperceptible to the player.
turn-based: simultaneously-executed games (phase-based, "We-Go"), player-alternated games ("I-Go-You-Go" ("IGOUGO")). IGOUGO order under which players start within a turn: ranked (same player being the first every time), round-robin (first player is selected), random.
sub types: timed turns (chess), time compression (flight simulators: to shorten the subjective duration of relatively uneventful periods of gameplay); ticks and rounds; active time battle (Final Fantasy); pausable real-time (pause the game and issue orders such that once a game is un-paused, orders are automatically put into effect; SimCity, Homeworld)
Game balance: gimp, nerf (opposite: buff), overpowered (OP)
Kingmaker scenario: in a game of three or more players, is an endgame situation where a player unable to win has the capacity to determine which player among others is the winner
Ben Brode: USA video game designer. He was the game director and public face of Hearthstone until 2018 when he left to found his own game studio, Second Dinner, where he is now Chief Creative Officer. After 15 years working at Blizzard, Brode left the company in 2018 to start his own game development studio called Second Dinner along with several other ex-Blizzard employees. In 2019 the company announced that it had received a US$30 million investment from NetEase, along with the license to create a mobile game for Marvel. The game, Marvel Snap, was first revealed in May 2022, for mobile devices and personal computers.
Brian Kibler (1980.09.07): USA collectible card game player, game designer, and streamer. Kibler is also a professional card player, and has had great success at Magic: The Gathering with five Pro Tour Top 8s, winning Pro Tour Austin in 2009 and Pro Tour Honolulu in 2012. Hearthstone: winning the ChallengeStone tournaments in May 2015 and November 2016, the latter taking place at BlizzCon 2016. In October 2019, Kibler announced that he would no longer be working with Blizzard as a commentator on their events, as a result of their controversial decision to ban esport competitor Ng Wai Chung for saying "liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times" in a post-game interview. Kibler stated that although he agreed that Blizzard should issue a penalty, the actual penalty was too harsh. As such, he could "realistically never work with Hearthstone again". He still frequently streams Hearthstone.
Tabletop Simulator (2015.06.05): independent video game that allows players to play and create tabletop games in a multiplayer physics sandbox. Developed by Berserk Games as their first title after a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014.02. Gameplay: Tabletop Simulator is a player-driven physics sandbox, without set victory or failure conditions. After selecting a table to play on, players interact with the game by spawning and moving virtual pieces, which are subject to a physics simulation. Online multiplayer is supported with a maximum of ten players. Aside from spawning and moving pieces, the game includes mechanics to assist with common styles of board game play, such as automatic dice rolling and hiding players' pieces from one another; other mechanics aid in administrating a game, for example saving the state of the board or undoing moves. In an interview with Gamasutra, the pair described the game Desperate Gods as being an inspiration, though they wanted to expand the "free-form shared board game" concept to cover all tabletop games.
Spiel (Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, often called Essen)
Deutscher Spiele Preis (DSP): collects votes from the industry's stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs; contrast to Spiel des Jahres, DSP is awarded for "gamers' games" with particularly good or innovative gameplay
BoardGameGeek (BGG): online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 101,000 different tabletop games, including European-style board games, wargames, and card games. In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games.
BrettspielWelt: large, popular, and entirely free German online gaming site
International Mind Sports Association: association of the world governing bodies for contract bridge, chess, draughts (checkers), and go, namely the World Bridge Federation (WBF), World Chess Federation (FIDE), World Draughts Federation (FMJD), and International Go Federation (IGF). Poker and xiangqi (Chinese chess) are affiliated sports; as of summer 2011, the International Federation of Poker (IFP) and World Xiangqi Federation (WXF) have observer status in the association. Xiangqi competition was included in the first Games and duplicate poker under the auspices of the IFP will be included in the second.
World Mind Sports Games: quadrennial multi-sport event created by the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA) as a "stepping stone on the path of introducing a third kind of Olympic Games (after the Summer and the Winter Olympics)". The Games are considered to be very prestigious and are the equivalent of the Olympics for Bridge, Chess, Go, and Draughts.
Hearthstone (video game): free-to-play online collectible card video game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.
Gameplay of Hearthstone: one-versus-one battle between two opponents. Cards and minions. Decks: constructed deck of 30 cards selected from the player's collection, using a mix of neutral cards available to all classes and specific class-based cards available to the chosen Hero. Each deck can only feature two of each card and only one of each legendary card. Card library and crafting: Each card is classified as neutral or specific to one of the nine classes; with the introduction of Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, tri-class cards were added, meaning the card can be used by three different classes. Game modes: Play, Solo Adventures, Arena, Tavern Brawl, Duels. Game regions: Americas, Europe, Asia and China.
Magic: The Gathering (MTG; Magic): trading card game created by Richard Garfield. First published in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first trading card game produced and it continues to thrive, with approximately 20 mln. players as of 2015. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay of Magic bears little similarity to pencil-and-paper adventure games, while having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games. Luck vs. skill
Roguelike deck-building game: hybrid genre of video games that combine the nature of deck-building card games with procedural-generated randomness from roguelike games.
Gameplay aspects: Most roguelike deck-building games present the player with one or more playable characters, each character having a pre-established deck of cards that are used within the game, typically in turn-based combat. As the player progresses through the game, they gain the ability to add cards to this deck, most often through either a choice of one or more random reward cards, or sometimes through an in-game shop. There also may be mechanism to remove cards from the deck, or to update a card already in the deck. Because the player cannot predict which cards will be presented as rewards, they must build their deck "on the fly", trying to develop potential combinations and synergies between cards and other gameplay elements, while at the same time avoid diluting their deck with cards that do not work as well. Many games in this genre use turn-based combat, similar to console role-playing games. On the player's turn, they are drawn a hand of cards, and may play one or more cards, frequently based on limited amount of "mana" or "action cost" used in other collectible cards games. Card effects can range from simple damage, defense or healing to complicated effects that may linger for several turns, similar to other collectible card games. Enemies typically follow more straight-forward combat, attacking, defending, or applying buffs and debuffs to themselves or the player. Many games in this genre utilize permadeath, another roguelike feature; should the player's character lose all their health, the character is dead and the player must start anew with the original starting deck for the character. Often, these games include metagame aspects, with players unlocking the potential for new cards to be obtained with each runthrough, or gaining a small bonus perk on starting a new runthrough.
History: Dominion was introduced in 2008 as the first tabletop deck-building game, inspiring several tabletop card games that followed. While other roguelike deck-building games emerged following Dream Quest such as Hand of Fate, the genre gained more attention with Slay the Spire, which was developed by Megacrit. Slay the Spire was released into early access for Microsoft Windows computers in November 2017, and had its full release in January 2019, eventually expanding to release on several consoles as well. The developers of the game had wanted to make a game like Dominion, while using some of the concepts of the tabletop card game Netrunner, and had used the Netrunner community to test the game's balance before release.
Netrunner (1996): out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published by Wizards of the Coast and introduced in April 1996. The game took place in the setting for the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game (RPG), but it also drew from the broader cyberpunk genre.
Android: Netrunner (2012-2018): Living Card Game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. It is a two-player game set in the dystopian future of the Android universe. Each game is played as a battle between a megacorporation and a hacker ("runner") in a duel to take control of data. It is based on Richard Garfield's Netrunner collectible card game, produced by Wizards of the Coast in 1996.
Dominion (card game) (2008.10 (1st ed) / 2016.10 (2nd ed)): deck-building game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. It was the first game of its kind, and inspired a genre of games building on its central mechanic. Each player begins with a small deck of cards, which they improve by purchasing cards from a common supply that varies from game to game. Cards can help the player's deck function, impede their opponents, or provide victory points. The game has a medieval theme with card names referencing pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures. Comparisons about the game's feel are often drawn with collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering. Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration.
Slay the Spire (early access late 2017; official release 2019.01): roguelike deck-building video game developed by American studio MegaCrit and published by Humble Bundle. In Slay the Spire, the player, through one of four characters, attempts to ascend a spire of multiple floors, created through procedural generation, battling through enemies and bosses. Combat takes place through a collectible card game-based system, with the player gaining new cards as rewards from combat and other means, requiring the player to use strategies of deck-building games to construct an effective deck to complete the climb. Slay the Spire has been well-received. It was nominated for several accolades in 2019, and is considered the game that launched a number of roguelike deck-building games.
Viktor Blom (1990.09.26-) is a Swedish high-stakes online poker player, best known by the online poker name Isildur1.
Digitized board/card games (computer games)
PokerTH (MS, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Maemo): open source Texas hold 'em simulator; allows for up to ten human players; online.
Internet Diplomacy: any of a number of online implementations of Diplomacy, a board game in which seven players, each controlling one of the major European powers of the early 20th century, fight for control over Europe.
Gaming as an entertainment or an art form? Aesthetics in real-life games: e.g. Olympics, chess? Beauty in maths, games (chess; math-based), art? Why mathematicians play instruments, draw, make visual arts? Is there a region in the brain responsible for gaming, maths & artistic expression in the same place? Programming: art or science? ...
Art Game: work of interactive new media digital software art as well as a member of the "art game" subgenre of the serious video game. The term "art game" was first used academically in 2002 and it has come to be understood as describing a video game designed to emphasize art or whose structure is intended to produce some kind of reaction in its audience.
Video games as an art form: controversial topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical proposition that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of expressive elements such as graphics, storytelling and music. Roger Ebert: "games are not art"; games are for entertainment, art is to "make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic". Blending between game and art, e.g. Second Life. Two-way art (aka "interactive art") vs. PC/video games. Money making in games, non-money in art. "Games are a waste of time".
Real-time strategy: micro- vs. macro- management; tactics vs. strategy; turn-based vs. real-time; real-time strategy games on the consoles - only Halo Wars on Xbox 360; graphics: Total Annihilation, Homeworld (3D space) & Warzone 2100 (3D on "2D" surface)
Template:Real-time strategy gameplay: actions per minute, build order, fog of war, metagaming, technology tree, rush (Swarming, Cheese, Mobbing, Goblin Tactics or Zerging), turtling
Real-time tactics: Total War, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Sid Meier's Gettysburg!
Battle royale game: blends the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game with last-man-standing gameplay. Battle royale games challenge a large number of players, starting with minimal equipment, to search for weapons and armor and eliminate all other opponents while avoiding being trapped outside of a shrinking "safe area", with the winner being the last competitor in the game. The name for the genre is taken from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, which presents a similar theme of a last-man-standing competition in a shrinking play zone; arose from mods for large-scale online survival games like Minecraft and ARMA 2; 2017: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG); 2018: free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale, "Blackout" mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4; 2019.02: Electronic Arts released free-to-play Apex Legends.
The Sims (series): the game series which brought the female gender to computer games en masse. Are females about social interactions much more than males, while males are into competition much more than females?
Playfish: now at EA;
The Sims Social (on Facebook; spiritual successor of The Sims Online): the ultimate in the "The Sims" universe. cf. FarmVille/Mafia Wars to The Sims Social.
RPG, MUD, MMORPG: Player versus player (PvP), Player versus environment (PvE) ; Realm versus Realm
Progress Quest: parody of RPGs, ARPGs, MUDs and MMORPGs. 1) slay monsters; 2) returning to town to sell plunder looted from the monsters' corpses; and 3) using the resultant lucre to upgrade one's equipment, so as to more effectively facilitate the efficient slaughter of further monsters.
Theorycraft (from "StarCraft" & "game theory"): reverse engineering the game mechanics; "theorycraft breaks the barrier between game players and developers, since players try to discover the mechanics that usually are accessible only to developers."
Let's Play (video gaming): series of screenshots or a recorded video documenting a playthrough of a video game, usually including commentary by the gamer.
Template:Blizzard Entertainment &
Blizzard Entertainment: Starcraft, Warcraft (and WOW), Diablo (Blizz acquired Condor which contained at its heart: Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik; Condor renamed as Blizzard North to finish Diablo); Battle.net 2.0. Privacy controversy and Real ID; Warden Client.
Template:Valve games &
Template:Valve technology &
Valve Corporation: (Valve Software; Valve; VALVE): USA video game development and digital distribution company; founded in 1966 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Valve became famous for its critically acclaimed Half-Life (released in November 1998) and Portal series (released in October 2007).
Don't Starve (initial release: Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux 2013.04.23): survival video game developed by the Canadian indie video game developer Klei Entertainment. The game follows a scientist named Wilson who finds himself in a dark, dreary world and must survive as long as possible. To this end, the player must keep Wilson healthy, fed, and mentally stable as he avoids a variety of surreal and supernatural enemies that will try to kill and devour him. The game's Adventure mode adds depth to the sparse plot and pits Wilson against the game's antagonist, Maxwell. Releases and updates: Don't Starve: Reign of Giants; Don't Starve Together; Don't Starve: Shipwrecked; Don't Starve: Hamlet.
Experience point: unit of measurement used in many role-playing games (RPGs) and role-playing video games to quantify a player character's progression through the game. Power-Leveling
Grinding (video gaming): term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games.
Min-maxing: practice of playing RPG, wargame or video game with the intent of creating the "best" character by means of minimizing undesired or unimportant traits and maximizing desired ones.
Powergaming: style of interacting with games or game-like systems with the aim of maximising progress towards a specific goal, to the exclusion of other considerations such as (in video games, boardgames, and roleplaying games) storytelling, atmosphere and camaraderie.
Gold farming: playing MMOG to acquire in-game currency that other players purchase in exchange for real-world money.
Video game bot: type of weak AI expert system software which for each instance of the program controls a player in deathmatch, team deathmatch and/or cooperative human player, most prominently in FPSs.
PCGamingWiki (2012.02.9-): collaboratively edited, free Internet encyclopedia focused on collecting game behavior data (such as save locations and startup parameters) to optimizing gameplay and fixing issues found in PC video games. Intended fixes and optimizations range from simple cutscene removals to modifications that allow for wide-screen resolutions and more. The wiki runs on MediaWiki software and was created by Andrew Tsai.
The Ancient Art of War (1984, USA): generally recognized as one of the first real-time strategy or real-time tactics games.
Modem Wars (1988, USA): real-time tactics. Features such as fog of war, varied unit types, terrain, and formations, all now standards in the genre, were implemented despite the daunting technical limitations of late 1980s computers.
Herzog Zwei (1989, Japan): early real-time strategy game, predating the genre-popularizing Dune II.
Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA ("We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA"): song by Swedish dance DJ Basshunter which samples a remixed version of the French song "Daddy DJ" by Daddy DJ. The lyrics, in Swedish, are about using the voice chat program Ventrilo while playing DotA.
Dota 2 (beta: since 2011.07; released: 2013.07.09; esport; by Valve Corporation; platforms: Windows (Linux and OS X TBA)): stand-alone sequel to the Defense of the Ancients mod (of Warcraft III). Notoriously long development cycle: Valve's investment in Dota was sparked from the collective interest of several veteran employees, including Team Fortress designer Robin Walker, programmer Adrian Finol and project manager Erik Johnson, all of whom had attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level; they began corresponding with DotA's developer, IceFrog; invitation from Erik Johnson, offering IceFrog a tour of the company's facilities and as a result, hired him to develop a sequel; first public notification regarding the development of Dota 2 was a blog post made by IceFrog on 2009.10.05, stating that he would be leading a team at Valve; Dota 2 debut at Gamescom 2011 (Cologne). 2013.05: 330k concurrent players; 2014.06.21: ~800k concurrent players; 2015.02.15: ~ 1 mln. Professional competition.
Dawngate: MOBA video game developed by Waystone Games and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows. Testing period began on 2013.05.24, and the community beta was released on 2014.04.09. The open beta was released on 2014.05.19; on 2014.11.04, it was announced that because the beta was not shaping up as they had hoped, all development would stop and the game would be fully shut down in 90 days.
Role-playing video game (RPG): video game genre where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immersed in some well-defined world, usually involving some form of character development by way of recording statistics. Many role-playing video games have origins in tabletop role-playing games[1] and use much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. Other major similarities with pen-and-paper games include developed story-telling and narrative elements, player character development, complexity, as well as replay value and immersion. The electronic medium removes the necessity for a gamemaster and increases combat resolution speed. RPGs have evolved from simple text-based console-window games into visually rich 3D experiences.
Characteristics: Story and setting; Exploration and quests; Items and inventory; Character actions and abilities; Experience and levels; Combat; Interface and graphics.
MMORPGs (MUDs)
Sandbox RPGs
Tactical RPGs
Relationship to other genres: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, a real-time strategy game, features heroes that can complete quests, obtain new equipment, and "learn" new abilities as they advance in level. A community-created mod based on 'Warcraft III, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), served as significant inspiration for the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre. Due to its Warcraft III origins, MOBA is a fusion of role-playing games, real-time strategy games, and action games, with RPG elements built in its core gameplay. A key features, such as control over one character in a party, growth in power over the course of match, learning new thematic abilities, using of mana, leveling and accumulation of experience points, equipment and inventory management, completing quests, and fighting with the stationary boss monsters, have resemblance with role-playing games.
Roguelike: subgenre of role-playing computer games traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Though Beneath Apple Manor predates it, the 1980 game Rogue, which is an ASCII based game that runs in terminal or terminal emulator, is considered the forerunner and the namesake of the genre, with derivative games mirroring Rogue's character- or sprite-based graphics. These games were popularized among college students and computer programmers of the 1980s and 1990s, leading to hundreds of variants.
Universe: Anor Londo (Ornstein and Smough), Sif, Solaire of Astora
Soulslike: subgenre of action role-playing and action-adventure games known for high levels of difficulty and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. It had its origin in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series by FromSoftware, the themes and mechanics of which directly inspired several other games.
Addiction
Gaming is addictive. One can make money from games as from selling guns or drugs on the street
Neopets (1999.11.15-): mostly female users; Nielsen/NetRatings of Neopets was the highest in 2001.
eSports
Electronic sports (e-sports, eSports, competitive gaming, professional gaming, cybersports, v-sports): real-time strategy (RTS) [notable: StarCraft: Brood War & StarCraft II; Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne], Multiplayer online battle arena [Defense of the Ancients & Dota 2; League of Legends], fighting [Street Fighter series], first-person shooter (FPS) [Counter Strike (mainly 1.6, but also Source & Condition Zero), Quake (series), Halo (series), Painkiller, Unreal (series)], massively-multiplayer online (MMOG) [WoW], sports games [FIFA, TrackMania Nations].
Total earnings for each game by game group
BarCraft: portmanteau for watching StarCraft at bars; started in 2011.spring in USA with NASL. Spread to Street Fighter's "Barfights" and Dota 2's "Pubstomps".
ESL
Intel Extreme Masters: organizer of ESL Major Series & ESL Pro Series. RTS: WIII (2007-2008), SC2 (2011-), LoL (2011-), DotA (2011, Shanghai). FPS: CS (2007-2012-?), Quake Live (2010-2011), WoW (2009-2010)
Major League Gaming (MLG): 1v1 SC2 from 2010. No SC:BW previously. In January 2016, video game publisher Activision Blizzard announced its acquisition of Major League Gaming. MLG, which lost large profits during the COVID-19 pandemic, was announced to be acquired by Microsoft in 2022.01, through its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Dendi (gamer) (Danil Ishutin, Данило Ішутін; 1989.12.30): Ukrainian professional Dota 2 player. He is best known for his time with Natus Vincere (Na'Vi) for whom he played between 2010 and 2018. He left Na'Vi in 2018 and formed his own Dota 2 organization in 2020, known as B8. Was born in Lviv. As a child, at the insistence of his mother-musician, he played the piano, as well as acrobatics and dancing. As Danil told, the first computer in their house was his brother's, who did not allow him to play for a long time . Gaming world was opened to him by Quake and Doom. Dendi later began playing Warcraft III at local computer clubs. The total fascination with computer games was influenced by the death of Danil's father from cancer. According to the recollections of Danil Ishutin, games became an attempt to distract himself .
KuroKy (کورو صالحی تخاصمی): German-Iranian professional Dota 2 player for Nigma Galaxy. He was a member of Team Liquid that won The International 2017. 2008-2011: in team mousesports where he met initial stand-in player Clement "Puppey" Ivanov, and started what was to become a long-standing relationship. 2011–2014: Early career, Natus Vincere: introduction of Dota 2 and its annual tournament The International, KuroKy's team struggled to find success and the signing of Puppey by Natus Vincere almost prompted KuroKy to quit professionally. Moving between teams Virtus.pro, Uebelst gamynG and mousesports, KuroKy's breakthrough came in 2013 when he joined Natus Vincere as a support player, finishing as runners-up in The International 2013. 2014-2015: Team Secret: KuroKy left Natus Vincere after a lackluster 2014 campaign, and formed Team Secret with his Natus Vincere teammate Puppey, Fnatic players Fly and N0tail and from The Alliance, s4. A roster shuffle later saw them win 4 consecutive LAN finals, but disappointed in The International 2015 having gone in as the heavy favorites. 2015–2019: Team Liquid: Following The International 2015, KuroKy left Team Secret to form a new team, 5Jungz composed of himself, FATA-, MATUMBAMAN, JerAx and MinD_ContRoL. 5Jungz was signed by the esports organisation Team Liquid and found immediate success, coming 2nd in The Shanghai Major 2016, The Manila Major 2016 and 1st at EPICENTER 2016. With further roster adjustments including the additions of then unknown pubstars Miracle- and GH, Team Liquid became the strongest team in the competition, winning several LANs in succession culminating in winning The International 2017. Their success had continued to The International 2019, as they had made a miraculous run to the finals through the lower bracket of the Main Event after failing to obtain an upper bracket seed in the Group Stage. This involved beating Fnatic, TNC Predator, RNG, Evil Geniuses, Team Secret and PSG.LGD but ultimately falling to defending champions OG in the best-of-five series 3–1, therefore taking a grand total of $4,462,909. 2019–present: Nigma.
Puppey (Clement Ivanov; 1990.03.06-): Estonian professional Dota 2 player for Team Secret. He is the founding member of Team Secret. Together with Natus Vincere, Puppey won The International 2011 in August 2011 for a one million dollar first place prize. They also took runner-up for the next two Internationals. Controversies: On 16 February 2016, former team manager Evany Chang accused Team Secret of not paying prize winnings to her and former players. He also backed EternaLEnVy's claim that Puppey was the only player aware of the organization taking a 10% cut.
S4 (gamer) (Gustav Magnusson; 1992.04.01-): Swedish professional Dota 2 player for Alliance. As a member of Alliance, s4 won The International 2013.
N0tail (Johan Sundstein): Danish professional Dota 2 player and captain for OG. With them, he has played in four iterations of The International, winning in 2018 and 2019, and has also won four Major championships. Notail became one of the youngest professional Heroes of Newerth player at the early age of 15, playing the role of solo middle back then. He started by playing random pub games on HoN servers and later on decided to match up with Jascha "NoVa" Markuse and Tal "Fly" Aizik. They were recognized by the manager of Fnatic, who took them under his wing as an unofficial side project.
Fly (gamer) (Hebrew: טל אייזיק): Israeli professional Dota 2 player for Evil Geniuses. He was former co-founder of esports team OG. Aizik won four Dota Major Championships with team OG. He is the son of Krav Maga instructor Moni Aizik. Tal has done instructor courses and has an active interest in Krav Maga himself. He says that if he weren't a professional Dota 2 player, he would be a Krav Maga teacher. In 2018.05, he left OG to join Evil Geniuses, along with s4.
Ppd (gamer) (Peter Dager; 1991/1992-): USA former professional Dota 2 player and current coach for Alliance. He was the former CEO of the esports organization Evil Geniuses, where he also won The International 2015 as a player-captain, later playing for OpTic Gaming and Ninjas in Pyjamas.
Ceb (gamer) (Sébastien Debs; 1992/1993-): French professional Dota 2 player for OG. He was a member of the team that won the multi-million dollar International 2018 and 2019 tournaments, as well as the team's coach when they won four Dota Major Championships.
Arteezy (Artour Babaev; 1996.07.01-): Canadian-Uzbekistani professional Dota 2 player for Evil Geniuses. He is also one of the most popular streamers among the community. In 2013.11, he made his professional debut in MLG Columbus as a stand-in for Speed Gaming. In January 2014, Babaev, along with North American Dota players Universe and Fear, as well as former Heroes of Newerth players ppd and zai created "S A D B O Y S", who were later signed by Evil Geniuses.
Topson (Topias Miikka Taavitsainen; 1998.04.14-): Finnish professional Dota 2 player for OG. As a member of OG, he won The International 2018 and The International 2019.
Sumail (Syed Sumail Hassan, سمیل حسن; 1999.02.13): Pakistani professional Dota 2 player for OG. Sumail was a member of the Evil Geniuses team that won The International 2015. He was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and lives in Rosemont, Illinois as a resident of USA. In 2019, Hassan left EG to briefly play alongside his brother on the Quincy Crew before signing with OG in 2020. Upon his arrival to USA, Sumail began playing in the North American Elite League. Hassan quickly became the highest rated player in the in-house league, establishing himself as one of the best unsigned talents in North America. Evil Geniuses (EG) signed him in 2015.01, joining Fear, Aui 2000, Universe, and ppd. TI5 (2015): EG experienced a setback of their own after losing the upper bracket finals 0–2 to CDEC Gaming. EG defeated LGD Gaming in the lower bracket finals and prevailed 3–1 in a rematch with CDEC in the grand finals to win the tournament and a US$6.6 million grand prize, which made Sumail the youngest player ever to surpass a million in esports winnings. In 2016, Sumail was named by Time as among 'the 30 Most Influential Teens' that year.
Ana (gamer) (Anathan Pham; 1999.10.26-): Australian former professional Dota 2 player. He was a member of the team (OG) that won the multi-million dollar International 2018 and 2019 tournaments, and has also won two Major championships. In his early career, Pham played in the position solo mid, with comparatively little success. He received significant criticism for his solo mid performance and comparatively low creep score. Prior to the International 2018, Pham transitioned to playing as a carry, leaving the solo mid position to Topson. Pham has been described as an integral piece to OG's success. He developed a novel carry Io strategy which kept his opponents off balance throughout The International 2019. He was noted for his so-called "game sense". Commentators have called him as one of the best carry players, and one of the best Dota 2 players overall. Pham is noted for his long breaks from professional play, something that is generally recommended against
de:Riot League of Legends World Championship: alljährlich stattfindendes E-Sport-Turnier, das von Riot Games veranstaltet wird. Season 1 (2011): 1. Fnatic, 2. against All authority, 3. Team SoloMid; Season 2 (2012): 1. Taipei Assassins, 2. Azubu Frost, 3./4. Moscow Five & Counter Logic Gaming EU
Evil Geniuses: USA esports organization based in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1999, the organization has fielded players in various fighting games, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Fortnite Battle Royale, Halo, League of Legends, StarCraft II, Rocket League, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, and World of Warcraft.
SK Gaming: CS; SC2 (MC); LoL; shortly lived Dota (with Loda) / Dota 2 team
Team Secret: esports team based in Europe formed in 2014, best known for their Dota 2 team. N0tail and Fly were confirmed to leave Fnatic in 2014.07.27. 2014.08.03 s4 left Alliance. Some rumors of a new all-star team began to rise on Reddit. Na`Vi posted on their website they released Puppey and KuroKy. 2014.08.27 Team Secret debuted and showed their roster in a match against Alliance.
Korean teams (see Korean Wikipedia): FXOpen, Incredible Miracle, MvP (Most Valuable Player), New Star Hoseo, oGs (Old Generations; 2010.05.01-2012.05.15), SlayerS, TSL (Team SCV Life), ZeNEX, STARTALE, Prime
Sean Plott (Day[9]; 1986.06.27): USA esports commentator, player, event host, and game designer. Plott is best known for his contributions in the professional StarCraft scene, where he regularly appeared first as a player and later as a commentator and host at various tournaments for the game for many years. More recently, Plott has branched out to other competitive games, such as Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, and Dota 2.
Nick Plott (Tasteless; 1984.08.11): USA esports commentator. He moved to Seoul, Korea in 2007 to give commentary to e-sports competitions. He has provided commentary for multiple Starcraft and Starcraft 2 tournaments. Together with Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski, he currently provides commentary for Global StarCraft II League and AfreecaTV StarLeague games.
Characters of StarCraft: The story of the StarCraft series revolves around interstellar affairs in a distant sector of the galaxy, where three species are vying for supremacy: the Terrans, a highly factionalised future version of humanity, the Protoss, a theocratic race of vast psionic ability; and the Zerg, an insectoid species commanded by a hive mind persona. The latter two of these species were genetically engineered by the Xel'Naga, a fourth species believed extinct. The series was begun with Blizzard Entertainment's 1998 video game StarCraft, and has been expanded with sequels Insurrection, Retribution, Brood War, Ghost, Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void. Terrans: Raynor's Raiders; Terran Dominion; United Earth Directorate (UED); Umojan Protectorate. Protosses: Khalai; Nerazim; Tal'Darim; Purifiers. Zergs: Overmind's Zerg Swarm; Feral and Renegade Broods; Queen of Blade's Zerg Swarm (Kerrigan); Xel'Naga characters.
Team Liquid: SC:BW, SC2, Dota 2 info and team, Wiki (Liquipedia), and statistics (Player Database, TLPD). Team Liquid Starleague (TSL) for SC:BW and SC2.
Guillaume Patry (Grrrr...; 1982.06.19-): French-Canadian former pro of SC:BW (the only non-Korean Starleague (OSL) winner); learned Korean language; played poker.
Lee Jae-dong (Jaedong): South Korean professional StarCraft: Brood War and StarCraft 2 player; earned over $500,000 in tournament prize money alone through his career - the most of any professional gamer
Entropia Universe: MMORPG by Swedish software company MindArk, based in Gothenburg. Uses a micropayment business model, in which players may buy in-game currency (PED - Project Entropia Dollars) with real money that can be redeemed back into U.S. dollar at a fixed exchange rate of 10:1. Some virtual tycoons managed to make money in Entropia Universe by developing the content and selling the use of it ("taxing" the players for the use). Has virtual planets, virtual banks.
OpenSimulator: server platform for hosting virtual worlds. Compatible with Second Life client.
Virtual world (massively multiplayer online world (MMOW)): computer-based simulated environment. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others. These avatars can be textual, two or three-dimensional graphical representations, or live video avatars with auditory and touch sensations. In general, virtual worlds allow for multiple users.
Second Life (2003.06.23-): online virtual world, developed by Linden Lab (a company based in San Francisco). 1 mln regular users in 2014. In many ways, Second Life is similar to MMORPGs; however, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective". Intended for people aged 16 and over. Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based on simple geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects. There is also a procedural scripting language, Linden Scripting Language, which can be used to add interactivity to objects. Sculpted prims (sculpties), mesh, textures for clothing or other objects, animations, and gestures can be created using external software and imported. Fraud and intellectual property protection.
Mathematical Kangaroo (International Mathematical Kangaroo): international mathematical competition with more than 50 countries that take an active part in it. There are twelve levels of participation: from grade 1 to grade 12. The competition is held annually on the third Thursday of March. According to the organizers, the key competence tested by the Kangaroo is logical combination, not just pure knowledge of formulas. Because of the rising popularity of the Mathematical Kangaroo in many participating countries, it is currently the most participated scholar math competition: over 5,000,000 students from 47 countries took part in 2009.
International Science Olympiad: a group of worldwide annual competitions in various areas of science. The competitions are designed for the 4-6 best high school students from each participating country selected through internal National Science Olympiads, with the exception of the IOL, which allows two teams per country, the IOI, which allows two teams from the hosting country, and the IJSO, which is designed for junior secondary students. Early editions of the Olympiads were limited to the Eastern Bloc, but later they gradually spread to other countries. 12 are:
International Mathematical Olympiad: annual six-problem, 42-point mathematical olympiad for pre-collegiate students and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except in 1980. About 100 countries send teams of up to six students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and observers.
International Physics Olympiad: annual physics competition for high school students. The first IPhO was held in Warsaw, Poland in 1967.
Asian Physics Olympiad: annual physics competition for high school students from Asia and Oceania regions. It is one of the International Science Olympiads and is also the only regional competition in physics to date.
International Olympiad in Informatics: annual competitive programming competition for secondary school students. It is the second largest olympiad, after International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries (IOI 2014 saw participation of 84 countries). The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria.
Veteran (vetus 'old'): person who has significant experience (and is usually adept and esteemed) and expertise in an occupation or field. A military veteran is a person who is no longer in a military. A military veteran that has served directly in combat in a war is further defined as a war veteran (although not all military conflicts, or areas in which armed combat took place, are necessarily referred to as wars). Military veterans are unique as a group as their lived experience is so strongly connected to the conduct of war in general and application of professional violence in particular. Therefore, there are a large body of knowledge developed through centuries of scholarly studies that seek to describe, understand and explain their lived experience in and out of service.
Force multiplication: attribute or a combination of attributes which make a given force more effective than that same force would be without it. Common force multipliers: morale, technology, geographical features, weather, recruitment through diplomacy, training and experience, fearsome reputation, deception, military strategy, military tactics (e.g. force concentration)
Armored spearhead: formation of armored fighting vehicles, mostly tanks, that form the front of an offensive thrust during a battle. The idea is to concentrate as much firepower into a small front as possible, so any defenders in front of them will be overwhelmed.
List of aircraft carriers by country: in service: USA (11), UK (2 (a shadow of British Empire!)), IT (2 (WHY more than FR?)), FR (1), RU (1), India (2), ES (1 (!)), Brazil (1 (!!)), PRC (2), Japan (2), Thailand (1 (Helicopter carrier)) [2023/09/30]. Under construction: USA (3), PRC (1), India (1), FR (1), IT (1).
Just war theory (Latin: jus bellum iustum): doctrine, also referred to as a tradition, of military ethics studied by military leaders, theologians, ethicists and policy makers. The purpose of the doctrine is to ensure war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. The criteria are split into two groups: "right to go to war" (jus ad bellum) and "right conduct in war" (jus in bello). The first concerns the morality of going to war, and the second the moral conduct within war. Recently there have been calls for the inclusion of a third category of Just War theory—jus post bellum—dealing with the morality of post-war settlement and reconstruction.
Rules of engagement (ROE): internal rules or directives among military forces (including individuals) that define the circumstances, conditions, degree, and manner in which the use of force, or actions which might be construed as provocative, may be applied. They provide authorization for and/or limits on, among other things, the use of force and the employment of certain specific capabilities. In some nations, ROE has the status of guidance to military forces, while in other nations, ROE is lawful commands.
Urban warfare: combat conducted in urban areas such as towns and cities. Urban combat is very different from combat in the open at both the operational and tactical level. Complicating factors in urban warfare include the presence of civilians and the complexity of the urban terrain. Fighting in urban areas negates the advantages that one side may have over the other in armour, heavy artillery, or air support. Ambushes laid down by small groups of soldiers with handheld anti-tank weapons can effectively destroy entire columns of modern armour (as in the First Battle of Grozny), while artillery and air support can be severely reduced if the 'superior' party wants to limit civilian casualties as much as possible, but the defending party does not (or even uses civilians as human shields). Urban warfare tactics: Battle of Monterrey, Mexico; Battle of Berlin; First Chechen War (Grozny); Operation Defensive Shield (Nablus, Jenin).
Electronic warfare (EW): any action involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EM spectrum) or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy assaults. The purpose of electronic warfare is to deny the opponent the advantage of—and ensure friendly unimpeded access to—the EM spectrum. EW can be applied from air, sea, land, and/or space by crewed and uncrewed systems, and can target communication, radar, or other military and civilian assets.
Full-spectrum dominance (full-spectrum superiority): military entity's achievement of control over all dimensions of the battlespace, effectively possessing an overwhelming diversity of resources in such areas as terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, extraterrestrial, psychological, and bio- or cyber-technological warfare. Full spectrum dominance includes the physical battlespace; air, surface and sub-surface as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space.
List of defense contractors: defense contractor is a business organization or individual that provides products or services to a military or intelligence department of a government. Products typically include military or civilian aircraft, ships, vehicles, weaponry, and electronic systems, while services can include logistics, technical support and training, communications support, and engineering support in cooperation with the government. Security contractors do not generally provide direct support of military operations. Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, military contractors engaged in direct support of military operations may be legitimate targets of military interrogation. USA: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics Corp., L3Harris Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Honeywell, Booz Allen Hamilton. China (PRC): NORINCO, AVIC, CETC, CASIC, CSGC. UK: BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce. EU: Airbus. Italy: Leonardo. France: Thales Group. Russia: Almaz-Antey, United Aircraft.
Lanchester's laws: mathematical formulae for calculating the relative strengths of military forces. The Lanchester equations are differential equations describing the time dependence of two armies' strengths A and B as a function of time, with the function depending only on A and B. In 1915 and 1916, during WWI, M. Osipov and Frederick Lanchester independently devised a series of differential equations to demonstrate the power relationships between opposing forces. Lanchester's linear law. Lanchester's square law.
The Green Book (IRA): training and induction manual issued by the Irish Republican Army to new volunteers. It was used by the post-Irish Civil War Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Cumann na mBan, ("League of Women"), along with later incarnations such as the Provisional IRA (PIRA). It includes a statement of military objectives, tactics and conditions for military victory against the British government. This military victory was to be achieved as part of "the ongoing liberation of Ireland from foreign occupiers". The Green Book has acted as a manual of conduct and induction to the organisation since at least the 1950s.
Decapitation (military strategy): aimed at removing the leadership or command and control of a hostile government or group. The strategy of shattering or defeating an enemy by eliminating its military and political leadership has long been utilized in warfare. Genocide. In nuclear warfare: decapitation strike is a pre-emptive first strike attack that aims to destabilize an opponent's military and civil leadership structure in the hope that it will severely degrade or destroy its capacity for nuclear retaliation. Conventional warfare, assassination and terrorist acts
Separation of military and police roles: principle by which the military and law enforcement perform clearly differentiated duties and do not interfere with each other's areas of discipline. Whereas the military's purpose is to fight wars, law enforcement is meant to enforce domestic law. Neither is trained specifically to do the other's job. Military and law enforcement differ, sometimes fundamentally, in areas such as source of authority, training in use of force, training in investigation and prosecution, and training in enforcing laws and ensuring civil liberties. The presence of a heavily-armed military standing in for the law enforcement personnel may reassure anxious civilians or not, but it should at best be partial and short-term.
Military police: law enforcement agencies connected with, or part of, the military of a state. In wartime operations, the military police may support the main fighting force with force protection, convoy security, screening, rear reconnaissance, logistic traffic management, counterinsurgency, and detainee handling. In different countries it may refer to:
A section of military forces assigned to police, or garrison, occupied territories, usually during a war.
A section of military forces assigned to policing Prisoners of war (POW) detentions.
A section of the military responsible for policing the areas of responsibility of the armed forces (referred to as provosts) against all criminal activity by military or civilian personnel
A section of the military responsible for policing in both the armed forces and in the civilian population (most gendarmeries, such as the French Gendarmerie or the Spanish Guardia Civil)
A section of the military solely responsible for policing the civilian population (such as the Romanian Gendarmerie or the Chilean Carabineros)
The status of military police is usually prominently displayed on the helmet or peaked cap, with an armband, brassard, or arm or shoulder flash. Military police personnel may also wear a more traditional police badge, usually on the front of their uniform; They may also wear other accoutrements exclusive to military police personnel.
Naval police personnel are sometimes called "coast guard", "naval security forces", "masters-at-arms" and/or "shore patrol". Law enforcement personnel of an air force are sometimes called "air police", "security police" or "security forces".
Gendarmerie: military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population. The term gendarme (English: /ˈʒɒndɑːrm/) is derived from the medieval French expression gens d'armes, which translates to "men-at-arms" (lit. 'armed people'), or "rural police". In France and some Francophone nations, the gendarmerie is a branch of the armed forces that is responsible for internal security in parts of the territory (primarily in rural areas and small towns in the case of France), with additional duties as military police for the armed forces. It was introduced to several other Western European countries during the Napoleonic conquests. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of former French mandates and colonial possessions (such as Lebanon, Syria, the Ivory Coast and the Republic of the Congo) adopted a gendarmerie after independence. A similar concept exists in Eastern Europe in the form of Internal Troops, which are present in many countries of the former Soviet Union and its former allied countries.
Bomb damage assessment (BDA; battle damage assessment): the practice of assessing damage inflicted on a target from a stand-off weapon, most typically a bomb or air launched missile. It is part of the larger discipline of combat assessment. Assessment is performed using many techniques including footage from in-weapon cameras, gun cameras, forces on the ground near the target, satellite imagery and follow-up visits to the target. Preventing information on battle damage reaching the enemy is a key objective of military censorship. For nuclear weapons special techniques may be required due to the extensive damage caused and difficulty in approaching the site.
Military deception (MILDEC): attempt by a military unit to gain an advantage during warfare by misleading adversary decision makers into taking actions detrimental to the adversary. This is usually achieved by creating or amplifying an artificial fog of war via psychological operations, information warfare, visual deception, or other methods. As a form of disinformation, it overlaps with psychological warfare. Military deception is also closely connected to operations security (OPSEC) in that OPSEC attempts to conceal from the adversary critical information about an organization's capabilities, activities, limitations, and intentions, or provide a plausible alternate explanation for the details the adversary can observe, while deception reveals false information in an effort to mislead the adversary. The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise, emphasizes the importance of deception as a way for outnumbered forces to defeat larger adversaries.
Pole weapon: close combat weapon in which the main fighting part of the weapon is fitted to the end of a long shaft, typically of wood, thereby extending the user's effective range and striking power. Because many pole weapons were adapted from agricultural implements or other tools in fairly large amount of abundance, and contain relatively little metal, they were cheap to make and readily available. When warfare breaks out and the belligerents have a poorer class who cannot pay for dedicated weapons made for war, military leaders often resort to the appropriation of tools as cheap weapons. The cost of training was minimal, since these conscripted farmers had spent most of their lives in the familiar use of these "weapons" in the fields. This made polearms the favored weapon of peasant levies and peasant rebellions the world over.
Multiple rocket launcher (MRL; multiple launch rocket system (MLRS)): type of rocket artillery system that contains multiple launchers which are fixed to a single platform, and shoots its rocket ordnance in a fashion similar to a volley gun. Rockets are self-propelled in flight and have different capabilities than conventional artillery shells, such as longer effective range, lower recoil, typically considerably higher payload than a similarly sized gun artillery platform, or even carrying multiple warheads. Unguided rocket artillery is notoriously inaccurate and slow to reload compared to gun artillery. A multiple rocket launcher helps compensate for this with its ability to launch multiple rockets in rapid succession, which, coupled with the large kill zone of each warhead, can easily deliver saturation fire over a target area. However, modern rockets can use GPS or inertial guidance to combine the advantages of rockets with the higher accuracy of precision-guided munitions.
Man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS): portable surface-to-air missiles. They are guided weapons and are a threat to low-flying aircraft, especially helicopters. MANPADS were developed in the 1950s to provide military ground forces with protection from jet aircraft. They have received a great deal of attention, partly because armed groups have used them against commercial airliners.
Bombs:
Unguided bomb (free-fall bomb, gravity bomb, dumb bomb, iron bomb): conventional or nuclear aircraft-delivered bomb that does not contain a guidance system and hence, simply follows a ballistic trajectory. This described all aircraft bombs in general service until the latter half of WWII, and the vast majority until the late 1980s.
Carpet bombing: large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. The phrase evokes the image of explosions completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor. Carpet bombing is usually achieved by dropping many unguided bombs.
Precision-guided munition (PGM, smart weapon, smart munition, smart bomb): guided munition intended to precisely hit a specific target, to minimize collateral damage and increase lethality against intended targets. During the First Gulf War guided munitions accounted for only 9% of weapons fired, but accounted for 75% of all successful hits. Despite guided weapons generally being used on more difficult targets, they were still 35 times more likely to destroy their targets per weapon dropped.
Ballistic missile: follows a ballistic trajectory to deliver one or more warheads on a predetermined target. These weapons are guided only during relatively brief periods—most of the flight is unpowered. Short-range ballistic missiles stay within the Earth's atmosphere, while ICBMs are launched on a sub-orbital trajectory. These weapons are in a distinct category from cruise missiles, which are aerodynamically guided in powered flight.
9K720 Iskander (Искандер): mobile short range ballistic missile system produced and deployed by the Russian military. The missile systems (Искандер-М) are to replace the obsolete OTR-21 Tochka systems, still in use by the Russian armed forces, by 2020. Iskander-M: published range 415 km, rumoured 500 km, speed Mach 6–7, flight altitude up to 6–50 km, nuclear capable stealth missile, controlled at all stages, not ballistic flight path. Iskander-K (Krylataya): intended to carry various types of cruise missiles; 9M728 (R-500): flight altitude up to 6 km, published range up to 500 km; 9M729: new long-range missile that is reportedly land-based version of the 3M14 Caliber-NK missile complex with a range 480–5,470 km and may be based even on the air-launched Kh-101 cruise missile with a range over 5,500 km; Iskander-E (Eksport): director of the state corporation Rostec Sergey Chemezov commented that the Iskander missile complex is a serious offensive weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV): exoatmospheric ballistic missile payload containing several warheads, each capable of being aimed to hit a different target. The concept is almost invariably associated with ICBMs carrying thermonuclear warheads, even if not strictly being limited to them. By contrast, a unitary warhead is a single warhead on a single missile. Only USA, UK, France, Russia and China are currently confirmed to possess functional MIRV missile systems. Pakistan and India are developing MIRV missile systems. Israel is suspected to possess or be in the process of developing MIRVs.
Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM): missile with a minimum range of 5,500 km primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads). Similarly, conventional, chemical, and biological weapons can also be delivered with varying effectiveness, but have never been deployed on ICBMs. Most modern designs support MIRVs, allowing a single missile to carry several warheads, each of which can strike a different target. Russia, the United States, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, and North Korea are the only countries that have operational ICBMs.
LGM-30 Minuteman: USA land-based ICBM in service with the Air Force Global Strike Command. As of 2021, the LGM-30G Minuteman III (1970-) version is the only land-based ICBM in service in the United States and represents the land leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. 1962-1969 Minuteman-I; 1965-1994 Minuteman-II. In 1970, the Minuteman-III became the first deployed ICBM with MIRV: three smaller warheads that improved the missile's ability to strike targets defended by ABMs.
LGM-35 Sentinel: future USA land-based ICBM currently in the early stages of development.
Submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM): capable of being launched from submarines. Modern variants usually deliver MIRVs each of which carries a nuclear warhead and allows a single launched missile to strike several targets. SLBMs operate in a different way from Submarine-Launched Cruise Missiles. Modern submarine-launched ballistic missiles are closely related to ICBMs.
Cruise missile: guided missile used against terrestrial or naval targets that remains in the atmosphere and flies the major portion of its flight path at approximately constant speed. Cruise missiles are designed to deliver a large warhead over long distances with high precision. Modern cruise missiles are capable of travelling at high subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic speeds, are self-navigating, and are able to fly on a non-ballistic, extremely low-altitude trajectory.
Missile defense: system, weapon, or technology involved in the detection, tracking, interception, and destruction of attacking missiles. Conceived as a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs, its application has broadened to include shorter-ranged non-nuclear tactical and theater missiles. China/PRC, France, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Russia, Taiwan/ROC, UK and USA have all developed such air defense systems.
M142 HIMARS (M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System): light multiple rocket launcher developed in the late 1990s for the United States Army and mounted on a standard United States Army M1140 truck frame. The M142 carries one pod with either six GMLRS rockets (M30, M31) or one ATACMS missile on the United States Army's new Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) five-ton truck, and can launch the entire Multiple Launch Rocket System Family of Munitions (MFOM). M142 ammunition pods are interchangeable with the M270 MLRS; however, it is able to carry only one pod rather than the standard two for the M270 and its variants.
M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System: USA armored, self-propelled, multiple rocket launcher. The first M270s were delivered to the U.S. Army in 1983. The MLRS has since been adopted by several NATO countries. Rockets and missiles: MLRS: M26, M26A1 ER, M26A2 ER, M28, M28A1, M28A2, AT2; GMLRS: M30, M30A1, M30A2, M31, M31A1, M31A2, M32 SMArt, ER GMLRS (extended range of up to 150 km); ATACMS: M39, M39A1, M48, M57, M57E1; PrSM.
MGM-140 ATACMS (MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System): surface-to-surface missile (SSM) manufactured by USA defense company Lockheed Martin. It has a range of up to 300 km, with solid propellant, and is 4.0 m high and 610 mm in diameter.
Nuclear triad: three-pronged military force structure that consists of land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-missile-armed submarines, and strategic aircraft with nuclear bombs and missiles. Specifically, these components are land-based ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers. The purpose of having this three-branched nuclear capability is to significantly reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all of a nation's nuclear forces in a first-strike attack. This, in turn, ensures a credible threat of a second strike, and thus increases a nation's nuclear deterrence. Triad powers: India, China (PRC), Russia (Soviet nuclear triad during the Cold War; ICBMs; SLBMs), USA (Nuclear triad during the Cold War (1960–1990); Nuclear triad after the Cold War (1990–2010); Modern nuclear triad (2010–present)). Former triad powers: France. Suspected triad powers: Israel.
Neutron bomb (enhanced radiation weapon (ERW)): low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself. The neutron release generated by a nuclear fusion reaction is intentionally allowed to escape the weapon, rather than being absorbed by its other components. The neutron burst, which is used as the primary destructive action of the warhead, is able to penetrate enemy armor more effectively than a conventional warhead, thus making it more lethal as a tactical weapon.
Category:Tactical nuclear weapons (TNW, non-strategic nuclear weapon (NSNW)): designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war. Tactical nuclear weapons include gravity bombs, short-range missiles, artillery shells, land mines, depth charges, and torpedoes which are equipped with nuclear warheads. Also in this category are nuclear armed ground-based or shipborne SAMs and air-to-air missiles.
Autocannon: automatic cannon or machine cannon is a fully automatic gun that is capable of rapid-firing large-caliber (20 mm or more) armour-piercing, explosive or incendiary shells, as opposed to the smaller-caliber kinetic projectiles (bullets) fired by a machine gun. Autocannons have a longer effective range and greater terminal performance than machine guns, due to the use of larger/heavier munitions (most often in the range of 20–57 mm), but bigger calibers also exist), but are usually smaller than tank guns, howitzers, field guns or other artillery. When used on its own, the word "autocannon" typically indicates a non-rotary weapon with a single barrel. When multiple rotating barrels are involved, such a weapon is referred to as a "rotary autocannon" or occasionally "rotary cannon", for short (particularly on aircraft).
Rotary cannon (rotary autocannon, rotary gun, Gatling cannon): any large-caliber multiple-barreled automatic firearm that uses a Gatling-type rotating barrel assembly to deliver a sustained saturational direct fire at much greater rates of fire than single-barreled autocannons of the same caliber. The loading, firing and ejection functions are performed simultaneously in different barrels as the whole assembly rotates, and the rotation also permits the barrels some time to cool. The rotating barrels on nearly all modern Gatling-type guns are powered by an external force such as an electric motor, although internally powered gas-operated versions have also been developed. Each barrel fires a single cartridge when it reaches a certain position in the rotation, after which the spent casing is ejected at a different position and then a new round loaded at another position. During the cycle, the barrel has more time to dissipate some heat away to the surrounding air. Due to the usually cumbersome size and weight of rotary cannon, they are typically mounted on weapons platforms such as vehicles, aircraft, or ships, where they are often used in close-in weapon systems.
Command of the sea (control of the sea, sea control): naval military concept regarding the strength of a particular navy to a specific naval area it controlled. A navy has command of the sea when it is so strong that its rivals cannot attack it directly. This dominance may apply to its surrounding waters (i.e., the littoral) or may extend far into the oceans, meaning the country has a blue-water navy. With command of the sea, a country (or alliance) can ensure that its own military and merchant ships can move around at will, while its rivals are forced either to stay in port or to try to evade it. It also enables free use of amphibious operations that can expand ground-based strategic options. The British Royal Navy held command of the sea for most of the period between the 18th to the early 20th c., allowing Britain and its allies to trade and to move troops and supplies easily in wartime, while its enemies could not. In the post-WWII period, USA Navy has had command of the sea. Historic command of the sea during the age of sail: National capabilities; Asymmetric countermeasures: An annex to the Treaty of Paris (1856) banned privateering. That treaty was an oddity in that it was ratified by relatively few countries, but quickly became the de facto law of the sea. Historic command of the sea in the era of steam. Historic command of the sea in the era of naval aviation. Modern command of the sea: Requirements for modern sea control; Countermeasures to imposed command.
Carrier battle group (CVBG): naval fleet consisting of an aircraft carrier (designated CV) capital ship and its large number of escorts, together defining the group. The first naval task forces built around carriers appeared just prior to and during Second World War. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the first to assemble many carriers into a single task force, known as Kido Butai. This task force was used with devastating effect in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Kido Butai operated as the IJN's main carrier battle group until four of its carriers were sunk at the Battle of Midway. In contrast, USA Navy deployed its large carriers in separate formations, with each carrier assigned its own cruiser and destroyer escorts. These single-carrier formations would often be paired or grouped together for certain assignments, most notably the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway. With the construction of the large "supercarriers" of the Cold War era, the practice of operating each carrier in a single formation was revived. During the Cold War, the main role of the CVBG in case of conflict with USSR would have been to protect Atlantic supply routes between USA and its allies in NATO Europe, while the role of the Soviet Navy would have been to interrupt these sea lanes, a fundamentally easier task. Because the Soviet Union had no large carriers of its own, a situation of dueling aircraft carriers would have been unlikely. However, a primary mission of the Soviet Navy's attack submarines was to track every allied battle group and, on the outbreak of hostilities, sink the carriers. Understanding this threat, the CVBG expended enormous resources in its own anti-submarine warfare mission.
Naval warfare: combat in and on the sea, the ocean, or any other battlespace involving major body of water such as a large lake or wide river. Mankind has fought battles on the sea for more than 3,000 years. Even in the interior of large landmasses, transportation before the advent of extensive railroads was largely dependent upon rivers, canals, and other navigable waterways. Athenian fleet and Greek city-states vs Persian Empire; Phoenicia's and Egypt's power, Carthage's and even Rome's largely depended upon control of the seas. Vikings; Venetian Republic vs Ottoman Empire. Mediterranean Sea. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#New Kingdom (1550 - 1069 BC) Battle of the Delta}. The Islamic Caliphate, or Arab Empire, became the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean Sea from the 7th to 13th centuries, during what is known as the Islamic Golden Age. As Arab power in the Mediterranean began to wane, the Italian trading towns of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice stepped in to seize the opportunity, setting up commercial networks and building navies to protect them.
Tonnage war: military strategy aimed at merchant shipping. The premise is that the enemy has only a finite number of ships, and a finite capacity to build replacements for them. Most anti-shipping strategies primarily aim at a relatively narrow set of goals. For example, a traditional practice of the Royal Navy during wars between Britain and France was blockade. By concentrating available naval units forces near the major French ports, the Royal Navy was usually able to strangle French trade and create significant economic difficulties. Similarly, the enemy may focus on ships carrying strategically vital cargos such as hemp and timber or, in modern times, oil and iron.
During WWII, three tonnage wars were fought:
The largest and best known of them was Dönitz's U-boat campaign, aimed mainly against UK. Although the primary venue for the campaign was the North Atlantic, Dönitz sent U-boats and surface raiders to all corners of the globe in search of the most efficient way to sink the maximum number of ships at minimum cost. The U-boats campaign was very successful especially in the two happy periods (in 1940 and in 1942), and was able to reduce the total shipping available to the Allies up to a breaking point until 1943, when the tide of war was turning against Germany.
Allied campaign against Axis shipping (mostly Italian) from Europe to North Africa, in the Battle of the Mediterranean. British submarines based in Malta and the aircraft of several Allied air forces, in conjunction with British and Commonwealth surface ships, reduced shipments of essential military supplies to Axis forces under Rommel to the point where the German commander was unable to fight effectively. By the close of the campaign, Italy had very few merchant ships left.
Early years of the Pacific War, the submarines of the US Navy were allocated a great variety of tasks and were unable to achieve any of them effectively, particularly given major technical problems with the Mark 14 torpedoes early in the war. From about the middle of 1943, however, substantial numbers of American submarines were tasked with disrupting Japanese trade, in particular, with cutting off the flow of oil and other vital materials from the occupied territories of South-east Asia. This, too, became a tonnage war, with rapidly building results, and by mid to late 1944 Allied submarines and aircraft were experiencing difficulty in finding targets large enough to be worth a torpedo. The Japanese merchant navy was all but wiped out, and despite desperate measures to make do without strategic materials, the war economy ground to a virtual standstill.
Air supremacy: degree of air superiority where a side holds complete control of air power over opposing forces. They are levels of control of the air in warfare. Air power has increasingly become a powerful element of military campaigns; military planners view having an environment of at least air superiority as a necessity. Air supremacy allows increased bombing efforts, tactical air support for ground forces, paratroop assaults, airdrops and simple cargo plane transfers, which can move ground forces and supplies. Air power is a function of the degree of air superiority and numbers or types of aircraft, but it represents a situation that defies black-and-white characterization. The achievement of aerial supremacy does not guarantee a low loss rate of friendly aircraft, as hostile forces are often able to adopt unconventional tactics or identify weaknesses irrespectively. For example, NATO forces which held air superiority over Kosovo still lost a stealth strike aircraft to a Serbian ground-based air defense system, despite it being considered to be "obsolete". During both the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, insurgents found a greater degree of success in attacking coalition aircraft on the ground than when they were operating above them in the skies.
Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD): military actions to suppress enemy surface-based air defenses, including not only surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) but also interrelated systems such as early-warning radar and command, control and communication (C³) functions, while also marking other targets to be destroyed by an air strike. Suppression can be accomplished both by physically destroying the systems or by disrupting and deceiving them through electronic warfare. In modern warfare SEAD missions can constitute as much as 30% of all sorties launched in the first week of combat and continue at a reduced rate through the rest of a campaign. One quarter of American combat sorties in recent conflicts have been SEAD missions. Despite generally being associated with aircraft, SEAD missions may be performed using any means, including through actions by ground forces.
Airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system: airborne radar system designed to detect aircraft, ships, vehicles, missiles, and other incoming projectiles at long ranges and perform command and control of the battlespace in an air engagement by directing fighter and attack aircraft strikes. AEW&C units are also used to carry out surveillance, including over ground targets and frequently perform BMC2 (battle management command and control). When used at altitude, the radar on the aircraft allows the operators to detect and track targets and distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft much farther away than a similar ground-based radar. Like a ground-based radar, it can be detected by opposing forces, but because of its mobility and extended sensor range, it is much less vulnerable to counter-attacks. So useful is the advantage of command and control aircraft operating at a high altitude, that some navies operate such aircraft from their warships at sea. In the case of US Navy, the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye AEW&C aircraft is assigned to its supercarriers to protect them and augment their onboard command information centers (CICs). The designation airborne early warning (AEW) was used for earlier similar aircraft used in the less-demanding radar picket role, such as the Fairey Gannet AEW.3 and Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star, and continues to be used by the RAF for its Sentry AEW1, while AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) emphasizes the command and control capabilities that may not be present on smaller or simpler radar picket aircraft.
Anti-aircraft warfare (counter-air, air defence): battlespace response to aerial warfare, defined by NATO as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action". It includes surface based, subsurface (submarine launched), and air-based weapon systems, associated sensor systems, command and control arrangements, and passive measures (e.g. barrage balloons). It may be used to protect naval, ground, and air forces in any location. However, for most countries the main effort has tended to be homeland defence. In some countries, such as Britain and Germany during WWII, USSR, and modern NATO and USA, ground-based air defence and air defence aircraft have been under integrated command and control. However, while overall air defence may be for homeland defence (including military facilities), forces in the field, wherever they are, provide their own defences against air threats. Until the 1950s, guns firing ballistic munitions ranging from 7.62 mm (.30 in) to 152.4 mm (6 in) were the standard weapons; guided missiles then became dominant, except at the very shortest ranges (as with close-in weapon systems, which typically use rotary autocannons or, in very modern systems, surface-to-air adaptations of short range air-to-air missiles, often combined in one system with rotary cannons).
List of Ilyushin aircraft: list of aircraft produced by Ilyushin, a Soviet/Russian aircraft manufacturer.
Ilyushin Il-76 (Илью́шин Ил-76; Introduction: 1974.06; Number built: 960+): multi-purpose, fixed-wing, four-engine turbofan strategic airlifter designed by the Soviet Union's Ilyushin design bureau. It was first planned as a commercial freighter in 1967, as a replacement for the Antonov An-12. It was designed to deliver heavy machinery to remote, poorly served areas. Military versions of the Il-76 have been widely used in Europe, Asia and Africa, including use as an aerial refueling tanker or command center. The Il-76 has seen extensive service as a commercial freighter for ramp-delivered cargo, especially for outsized or heavy items unable to be otherwise carried. It has also been used as an emergency response transport for civilian evacuations as well as for humanitarian aid and disaster relief around the world. Due to its ability to operate from unpaved runways, it has been useful in undeveloped areas. Specialized models have also been produced for aerial firefighting and zero-G training.
Space warfare: combat that takes place in outer space. The scope of space warfare therefore includes ground-to-space warfare, such as attacking satellites from the Earth; space-to-space warfare, such as satellites attacking satellites; and space-to-ground warfare, such as satellites attacking Earth-based targets. As of 2021, no actual warfare is known to have taken place in space, though a number of tests and demonstrations have been performed. International treaties are in place that attempt to regulate conflicts in space and limit the installation of space weapon systems, especially nuclear weapons.
Stay-behind: country places secret operatives or organisations in its own territory, for use in the event that an enemy occupies that territory. Many hidden weapons caches were found, in Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries, at the disposition of these "secret armies". In some cases, stay-behind operations have deviated from their stated purpose, and have become active against elements in their own countries which they deem to be subversive — rather than fighting an outright invasion, they claimed to be fighting a quieter subversion of their country.
Genetics and war
War rapes: rapes committed by soldiers, other combatants or civilians during armed conflict or war, or during military occupation. It is distinguished from sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service. Almost every war, rebellion, occupation or any other event where a huge group of men/army wielding guns entered "new territory" resulted in war rapes, usually against the local women (?).
Hoover Institution (Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace): conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. Located in Stanford, California, on the campus of Stanford University, it began as a library founded in 1919 by Stanford alumnus Herbert Hoover, before he became President of the United States. The library, known as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, houses multiple archives related to Hoover, WWI, WWII, and other world-historical events. Hoover was ranked as the tenth most influential think tank in the world in 2020 by Academic Influence, and the 22nd of the "Top Think Tanks in the United States" by the Global Go To Think Tank Index Report in 2019.
Identification friend or foe (IFF): identification system designed for command and control. It uses a transponder that listens for an interrogation signal and then sends a response that identifies the broadcaster. IFF systems usually use radar frequencies, but other electromagnetic frequencies, radio or infrared, may be used. It enables military and civilian air traffic control interrogation systems to identify aircraft, vehicles or forces as friendly, as opposed to neutral or hostile, and to determine their bearing and range from the interrogator. IFF is used by both military and civilian aircraft. IFF was first developed during WWII, with the arrival of radar, and several friendly fire incidents.
World Economic Forum (WEF; 1971-): international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by Klaus Schwab. The foundation, which is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with more than five billion US dollars in turnover – as well as public subsidies, views its own mission as "improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas". The WEF is mostly known for its annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, a mountain resort in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 3,000 paying members and selected participants – among which are investors, business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists – for up to five days to discuss global issues across 500 sessions. The Forum suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations (CSOs), which it expresses through initiatives like the "Great Reset" and the "Global Redesign". It sees periods of global instability – such as the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – as windows of opportunity to intensify its programmatic efforts. The World Economic Forum and its annual meeting in Davos are criticised regarding the public cost of security while having amassed several hundred million Swiss francs in reserves and not paying federal taxes, the formation of a wealthy global elite without attachment to the broader societies, undemocratic decision processes, gender issues, a lack of financial transparency, unclear selection criteria, the environmental footprint of its annual meetings, the corporate capture of global and democratic institutions, the non-accreditation of critical media outlets and institutional whitewashing initiatives. As a reaction of criticism within Swiss society, the Swiss federal government decided in February 2021 to reduce its annual contributions to the WEF.
Klaus Schwab (1938.03.30-): German engineer and economist best known as the founder and executive chairman of WEF. WEF and other foundations: Schwab had originally appointed José María Figueres as CEO and his potential successor at the World Economic Forum. In October 2004, the WEF however gained attention through the resignation of Figueres over the undeclared receipt of more than US$900,000 in consultancy fees from the French telecommunications firm Alcatel. Transparency International had highlighted this incident in their Global Corruption Report in 2006. Criticism: Salary level and lack of financial transparency; Capture of democratic structures and institutions; Controversy with Davos municipality.
Transnational Institute (TNI): international non-profit research and advocacy think tank that was founded in 1974, Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to their website, the organization promotes a "... just, democratic and sustainable world." Work: Drugs and democracy: The program analyses worldwide trends on drugs-policies and promotes a pragmatic approach to drugs based on damage-control. It has written on countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia; Public alternatives; Trade and investment.
World Social Forum (2001-): annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization.
Occupy Wall Street (2011.09.17): inspired by anti-austerity protests in Spain coming from the 15-M movement. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the perceived undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector.
Alter-globalization (alternative globalization): name of a social movement whose proponents support global cooperation and interaction, but oppose what they describe as the negative effects of economic globalization, feeling that it often works to the detriment of, or does not adequately promote, human values such as environmental and climate protection, economic justice, labor protection, protection of indigenous cultures, peace and civil liberties.
The graph shows two periods of deglobalization (1930s and 2010s) alongs side the trend increase inglobalization since 1880.
Deglobalization: process of diminishing interdependence and integration between certain units around the world, typically nation-states. It is widely used to describe the periods of history when economic trade and investment between countries decline. It stands in contrast to globalization, in which units become increasingly integrated over time, and generally spans the time between periods of globalization. While globalization and deglobalisation are antitheses, they are no mirror images.
Ian Bremmer (1969.11.12): USA political scientist and author with a focus on global political risk. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm with principal offices in New York City. He is also a founder of the digital media firm GZERO Media. Key concepts:
The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall: outlines the link between a country's openness and its stability. While many countries are stable because they are open (the United States, France, Japan), others are stable because they are closed (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq under Saddam Hussein). States can travel both forward (right) and backward (left) along this J curve, so stability and openness are never secure. The J is steeper on the left-hand side, as it is easier for a leader in a failed state to create stability by closing the country than to build a civil society and establish accountable institutions; the curve is higher on the far right because states that prevail in opening their societies (Eastern Europe, for example) ultimately become more stable than authoritarian regimes.
State capitalism: system in which the state dominates markets primarily for political gain. In his 2010 book The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations, Bremmer describes China (PRC) as the primary driver for the rise of state capitalism as a challenge to the free market economies of the developed world, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
G-Zero: breakdown in global leadership brought about by a decline of Western influence and the inability of other nations to fill the void. It is a reference to a perceived shift away from the pre-eminence of the ["G7"] ("Group of Seven") industrialized countries and the expanded Group of Twenty, which includes major emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and others.
Weaponization of finance: describe the ways in which the United States is using its influence to affect global outcomes
Pivot state: nation that is able to build profitable relationships with multiple other major powers without becoming overly reliant on any one of them. This ability to hedge allows a pivot state to avoid capture—in terms of security or economy—at the hands of a single country. At the opposite end of the spectrum are shadow states, frozen within the influence of a single power. Canada is an example of a pivot state: with significant trade ties with both the United States and Asia, and formal security ties with NATO, it is hedged against conflict with any single major power. Mexico, on the other hand, is a shadow state due to its overwhelming reliance on the US economy.
Geopolitical recession: unwinding of the former US-led global order. Unlike economic recessions, linked to frequent boom and bust cycles, Bremmer sees geopolitical recessions as much longer cycles that are less likely to be recognized. He sees the present geopolitical recession as defined by deteriorating relations between the US and its traditional allies—particularly the Europeans—as China is rising and creating an alternative international political and economic architecture.
World Data Organization: to forestall a division in technology ecosystems due to conflict between the United States and China. He described it as a digital version of the World Trade Organization, arguing that the United States, Europe, Japan, and other “governments that believe in online openness and transparency” should collaborate to set standards for artificial intelligence, data, privacy, citizens’ rights, and intellectual property.
Special economic zone (SEZ): geographical region that is designed to export goods and provide employment; exempt from federal laws regarding taxes, quotas, FDI-bans, labour laws and other restrictive laws in order to make the goods manufactured in the SEZ at a globally competitive price.
Free trade zone (FTZ; export processing zone (EPZ); foreign-trade zone; formerly: free port): area within which goods may be landed, handled, manufactured or reconfigured, and reexported without the intervention of the customs authorities. Only when the goods are moved to consumers within the country in which the zone is located do they become subject to the prevailing customs duties.
Free economic zone (sometimes: free port): designated areas in which companies are taxed very lightly or not at all in order to encourage economic activity.
List of free ports: port, port area or other area with relaxed jurisdiction with respect to the country of location; special customs area or small customs territory with generally less strict customs regulations (or no customs duties and/or controls for transshipment); many international airports have free ports. LT:
Port of Klaipėda.
Klaipėda Free Economic Zone (Klaipėda FEZ; lt: Klaipėdos laisvoji ekonominė zona; 1996-): offers tax incentives to qualified investors that invest at least 1 mln €. 2008: due to overcrowding the zone was expanded from 205 hectares to 412 hectares of developed land. Investors:
Lazard, Al Ibrahim family of Saudi Arabia
Kaunas Free Economic Zone (1996.10.22-; next to A6 and A1): 534 hectare industrial development area which offers favorable and smaller taxes for the investors that invest at least 1 mln €.
European Union Association Agreement: main huge economies: Balkan countries; Israel; Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia; Mexico; EFTA & EEA (Norway, Switzerland (not EEA member), Iceland, Liechtenstein); South Africa; Turkey
Marie von Brühl (1779.06.03–1836.01.28): member of the noble German von Brühl family originating in Thuringia. Despite her own career as a patron of the arts in Berlin, she is known for editing and publishing the work of her husband Carl von Clausewitz, especially his military treatise On War. The two frequently discussed politics, literature, current events together. They considered each other equals, which was rare for a man to think of regarding his own wife. Carl and Marie were unable to conceive children. Present day theories point to Carl's chronic illness as the culprit. From 1832 to 1834, following Clausewitz's unexpected death from cholera in 1831, she edited and published several of his books, including his most famous one, On War. Throughout their correspondence, Marie insisted that Carl send her his drafts and notes for safekeeping. He was known to have an unorganized writing process that would often lead to lost papers and unfinished ideas. In fact, when Carl was writing On War, Marie acted as the researcher and copywriter for the book. Marie's handwriting can be found on some of the pages of the On War manuscript, listing notes and references. Additionally, von Brühl wrote a preface to On War. In the summer of 1832, less than a year after Carl's death, a publishing house in Berlin had put out announcements advertising the upcoming publication of On War. With the help of her brother, Marie transcribed drafts and inserted changes for On War in a manner of months.
August Landmesser (1910.05.24; KIA 1944.10.17; confirmed in 1949): worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, best known for his appearance in a photograph refusing to perform the Nazi salute at the launch of the naval training vessel Horst Wessel on 1936.06.13.
Polymaths (esp. the ancient ones)
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero; 106 BC.01.3 - 43 BC.12.07): Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, who served as consul in the year 63 BC. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. Following Julius Caesar's death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches; Cicero was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed by soldiers in 43 BC. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture.
Cicero was elected consul for the year 63 BC. His co-consul for the year, Gaius Antonius Hybrida, played a minor role. During his year in office, he thwarted a conspiracy centered on assassinating him and overthrowing the Roman Republic with the help of foreign armed forces, led by Lucius Sergius Catilina. The Orations listed Catiline and his followers' debaucheries, and denounced Catiline's senatorial sympathizers as roguish and dissolute debtors clinging to Catiline as a final and desperate hope. Cicero demanded that Catiline and his followers leave the city. At the conclusion of his first speech, Catiline hurriedly left the Senate
Governorship of Cilicia
Opposition to Mark Antony and death
Works: Cicero was declared a righteous pagan by the Early Church, and therefore many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation.
Legacy: Cicero was greatly admired by influential Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, who credited Cicero's lost Hortensius for his eventual conversion to Christianity, and St. Jerome, who had a feverish vision in which he was accused of being "follower of Cicero and not of Christ" before the judgment seat. This influence further increased after the Early Middle Ages in Europe, which more of his writings survived than any other Latin author.
Writings of Cicero: Roman senator and consul (chief-magistrate) who played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. A contemporary of Julius Caesar, Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists; one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome. He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary, distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. His voluminous correspondence, much of it addressed to his friend Atticus, has been especially influential, introducing the art of refined letter writing to European culture.
Philippicae: series of 14 speeches Cicero gave condemning Mark Antony in 44 and 43 BC. When Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and heir, arrived in Italy in April, Cicero formed a plan to play him against Antony. In September Cicero began attacking Antony in a series of speeches he called the Philippics, in honour of his inspiration, Demosthenes. In praise of Octavian, he labelled him a "god-sent child" and said that the young man desired only honour and would not make the same mistake as did Caesar. Meanwhile, his attacks on Antony, whom he called a "sheep", rallied the Senate in firm opposition to Antony. During this time, Cicero's popularity as a public figure was unrivalled and, according to the historian Appian, he "had the [most] power any popular leader could possibly have". Cicero’s plan to drive out Antony failed, however. After the successive battles of Forum Gallorum and Mutina, Antony and Octavian reconciled and allied with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate. Immediately after legislating their alliance into official existence for a five-year term with consular imperium, the Triumvirate began proscribing their enemies and potential rivals. Cicero and his younger brother Quintus Tullius Cicero, formerly one of Caesar's legati, and all of their contacts and supporters were numbered among the enemies of the state though, reportedly, Octavian argued for two days against Cicero being added to the list. Among the proscribed, Cicero was one of the most viciously and doggedly hunted. Other victims included the tribune Salvius, who, after siding with Antony, moved his support directly and fully to Cicero. Cicero was viewed with sympathy by a large segment of the public and many people refused to report that they had seen him. Antony requested that the hands that wrote the Philippics also be removed. His head and hands were publicly displayed in the Roman Forum to discourage any who would oppose the new Triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Marci filius Cato; 234–149 BC): Roman soldier, senator and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write history in Latin.
Cato the Younger (Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis; 95 BC – April 46 BC): statesman in the late Roman Republic, and a follower of the Stoic philosophy. A noted orator, he is remembered for his stubbornness and tenacity (especially in his lengthy conflict with Julius Caesar), as well as his immunity to bribes, his moral integrity, and his famous distaste for the ubiquitous corruption of the period.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1150.01.26 - 1210.03.29; Sultan of the theologians): Persian polymath, Islamic scholar and a pioneer of inductive logic. He wrote various works in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, literature, theology, ontology, philosophy, history and jurisprudence. He was one of the earliest proponents and skeptics that came up with the concept of Multiverse, and compared it with the astronomical teachings of Quran. A rejector of the geocentric model and the Aristotelian notions of a single universe revolving around a single world, Al-Razi argued about the existence of the outer space beyond the known world.
Niccolò Machiavelli (Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli; 1469.05.03–1527.06.21): Florentianhistorian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer during the Renaissance; was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs; was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics; wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry; wrote his masterpiece, The Prince, after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence. Medici subjected him to torture "with the rope", but he denied involvement and was released after three weeks in 1513.
Paracelsus (c. 1493 – 1541.09.24; born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim)): Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works. "The dose makes the poison"
Henri Poincaré (1854.04.29–1912.07.17): French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. Poincaré made clear the importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Hendrik Lorentz in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity. In 1905, Poincaré first proposed gravitational waves (ondes gravifiques) emanating from a body and propagating at the speed of light as being required by the Lorentz transformations.
Albert Schweitzer (1875.01.14–1965.09.04): Alsatian-German polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", becoming the eighth Frenchman to be awarded that prize. His philosophy was expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, which up to 1958 was situated in French Equatorial Africa, and after this in Gabon.
Walter J. Ong (1912.11.30–2003.08.12): USA Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. Summary of Ong's works and interests: A major concern of Ong's works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation. Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.
Herbert A. Simon (1916.06.15–2001.02.09): Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978), USA political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making.
Douglas Hofstadter (1945.02.15-): USA professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Charles Lindbergh (1902.02.04–1974.08.26): USA aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist. As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from the Roosevelt Field in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. "America First" involvement; Thoughts on race and racism.
Phil Radford (1976.02.02-): leader of Greenpeace USA since 2009.
Laura Poitras (1962.01.16-): USA documentary film director and producer; 2012 MacArthur Fellow; one of the initial supporters of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. According to Glenn Greenwald, Poitras and Greenwald are the only two people with full archives of the global surveillance disclosure initiated by the former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.
PZ Myers (1957.03.09-): USA scientist and associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. Atheist; widely regarded as a confrontationalist; outspoken critic of intelligent design and the creationist movement. Received American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award in 2009 and International Humanist Award in 2011. Eucharist controversy.
Pharyngula (blog): blog founded by PZ Myers and written by Myers and formerly Chris Clarke, hosted on ScienceBlogs (2005-2011, in full, and 2011-present, in part) and FreeThoughtBlogs (2011–present). In 2006, the science journal Nature listed it as the top-ranked blog written by a scientist. "The virtues are critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural." Myers is strongly feminist and has written about discrimination against women in the skeptical movement.
Garry Kasparov (13 April 1963): Russian chess grandmaster, former world chess champion, writer, and political activist, whom many consider to be the greatest chess player of all time. From 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for 225 out of 228 months. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. After Kasparov retired, he devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin. In 2008, he announced an intention to run as a candidate in that year's Russian presidential race, but failure to find a sufficiently large rental space to assemble the number of supporters that is legally required to endorse such a candidacy led him to withdraw. Kasparov blamed "official obstruction" for the lack of available space. In the wake of the Russian mass protests that began in 2011, he announced in 2013 that he had left Russia for the immediate future out of fear of persecution. Since 2014, he holds Croatian citizenship and has a summer residence in Podstrana near Split. He lives in New York City with his family. Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein (Russian: Гарик Ки́мович Вайнштейн, Garik Kimovich Vainshtein) in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR (now Azerbaijan), Soviet Union. His father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, was Jewish, and his mother, Klara Shagenovna Gasparian, was Armenian. Kasparov has described himself as a "self-appointed Christian", although "very indifferent" and identifies as Russian: "although I'm half-Armenian, half-Jewish, I consider myself Russian because Russian is my native tongue, and I grew up with Russian culture." Kasparov responded with several sardonic Twitter postings to 2013.09 The New York Times op-ed by Putin. "I hope Putin has taken adequate protections," he tweeted. "Now that he is a Russian journalist his life may be in grave danger!" Also: "Now we can expect NY Times op-eds by Mugabe on fair elections, Castro on free speech, & Kim Jong-un on prison reform. The Axis of Hypocrisy." Putin, argued Kasparov, "did not have to outplay or outthink anyone. He and Bashar Assad won by forfeit when President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and the rest of the so-called leaders of the free world walked away from the table." There is, he lamented, "a new game at the negotiating table where Putin and Assad set the rules and will run the show under the protection of the U.N." Kasparov said in September 2013 that Russia was now a dictatorship. In the same month he told an interviewer that "Obama going to Russia now is dead wrong, morally and politically," because Putin's regime "is behind Assad." Sochi Olympics: Coca-Cola, for example, could put "a rainbow flag on each Coca-Cola can" and NBC could "do interviews with Russian gay activists or with Russian political activists." Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped: Kasparov likens Putin to Adolf Hitler, and explains the need for the west to oppose Putin sooner, rather than appeasing him and postponing the eventual confrontation. In 2018.10, he wrote that Erdoğan's regime in Turkey "has jailed more journalists than any country in the world and scores of them remain in prison in Turkey. Since 2016, Turkey's intelligence agency has abducted at least 80 people in operations in 18 countries." In 2021, Kasparov stated that "the only language that Putin understands is power, and his power is his money," arguing that the United States should target the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs to force Russia to rein in its criminals' cyberattacks against American agencies and companies.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky (1963.06.26-): exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist and former oligarch, now resident in Switzerland; worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares"); described by The Economist as "the Kremlin’s leading critic-in-exile". Khodorkovsky's father was Jewish, and his mother was Russian Orthodox Christian. They were both opponents of Communism, though they kept this from their son, who was born in 1963. Masha Gessen wrote that they faced a dilemma raising Mikhail: “Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or try to raise a contented conformist. They chose the second path, with results that far exceeded their expectations. Mikhail became a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct.” My Fellow Prisoners
Noah Smith (writer): USA blogger, journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was an assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University. He has written articles or columns that demonstrate a left leaning perspective, expressing support for affordable healthcare reform, mass expansion of public transit, green energy, immigration reform, labor unions, and YIMBY positions. Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism as well as the degrowth movement, or a post growth world. He has views on the education of economics, particularly microeconomics, stating that more of the focus of economics education should be data driven, and less of a theory emphasis. In a similar vein, he has criticized macroeconomics for being too theory focused, despite it being the most popular field.
Maria Popova (1984-): Bulgarian writer, blogger, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her blog BrainPickings.org, which features her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects off and on the Internet.
Mark Manson (1984.03.09-): USA self-help author, blogger and entrepreneur; author of the website MarkManson.net and two books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living the Good Life, and Models: Attract Women through Honesty.
CGP Grey: YouTube channel name of an American-Irish educational YouTuber and podcaster who has been posting on YouTube under the channel name since 2010.08.12; channel's most popular video is an explanation of the terminology of the British Isles, which went viral in 2011.
Wait But Why: site founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Tim Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. In 2015.06 Elon Musk asked Urban if he would be willing to write about his companies and their surrounding industries, leading to a five-part series of Wait But Why posts on Elon Musk and his companies. Urban interviewed Musk multiple times, and the two discussed the importance of sustainable transport, solar energy, and the future of space exploration. 2017.04.20 Tim Urban posted the first deep insight into Elon Musk's transhumanist brain-machine interface company, Neuralink.
LessWrong: community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Posts often focus on avoiding biases related to decision-making and the evaluation of evidence. One suggestion is the use of Bayes' theorem as a decision-making tool. There is also a focus on psychological barriers that prevent good decision-making, including fear conditioning and cognitive biases that have been studied by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. LessWrong is also concerned with transhumanism, existential threats and the singularity. History: Roko's basilisk. LessWrong played a significant role in the development of the effective altruism (EA) movement, and the two communities are closely intertwined.
Science and art people
Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace; born: Augusta Ada Byron; 1815.12.10-1852.11.27): referred to herself as a "poetical scientist" and "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)"; English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine; her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine → she is often considered the world's first computer programmer.
Geographers, cartographers
Marinus of Tyre (active 100-150; Marinos of Tyre): Greek geographer, cartographer and mathematician, who founded mathematical geography. Marinus and his work were a precursor to Ptolemy and Ptolemy's work Geographia.
Geography (Ptolemy): treatise on cartography and a compilation of what was known about the world's geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century; Ptolemy relied mainly on the work of Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empire. Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe (from Canary Islands to China ~180°; from Arctic to the East Indies and deep into Africa ~80°).
Chris Anderson (entrepreneur) (1957-): curator of TED; formerly: editor of early computer magazines (Personal Computer Games, then on Zzap!64); launched Future Publishing, Business 2.0
Artists
Hokusai (1760.10.31 (exact date questionable) – 1849.05.10): Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period.
M. C. Escher: (1898.06.17–1972.03.27): Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for long somewhat neglected in the art world; even in his native Netherlands; he was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the twenty-first century, he became more widely appreciated, with exhibitions across the world.
Naji al-Ali (1938-1987.08.29): Palestinian cartoonist, noted for the political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel in his works; creator of the character Handala, pictured in his cartoons as a young witness of the satirized policy or event depicted. Was shot outside the London office of Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas on 1987.07.22 - fallout between Mossad and Margaret Thatcher due to Mossad employing double agents inside the PLO and not notifying UK of the assassination attempt on al-Ali.
Gottfried Helnwein (1948.10.08-): AT fine artist, painter, photographer, installation and performance artist. Epiphany I – Adoration of the Magi; Marilyn Manson
H. R. Giger (1940.02.05-): CH surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer; was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for their design work on the film Alien.
Giger Bar: 1st - the H.R. Giger Bar in Chur, Switzerland (1992), and 2nd - The Museum HR Giger Bar, located in Château St. Germain, Gruyères, Switzerland (2003.04.12).
Li Tobler (1948-1975.05.19): CH stage actress; model to several of H. R. Giger's works (including his famous Li paintings), as well as for being his life partner up until her suicide in 1975.
Greta Garbo (1905.09.18–1990.04.15) was a Swedish film actress and an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Although she was offered many opportunities to return to the screen, she declined all of them. Instead, she lived a private life, shunning publicity. Garbo never married, had no children and lived alone as an adult. She was something of an art collector and her art collection was worth millions at the time of her death.
Ridley Scott (1937.11.30-): English film director and producer. Following his commercial breakthrough with the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), his best known works include the neo-noir dystopian science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), historical drama and Best Picture Oscar winner Gladiator (2000), and science fiction film The Martian (2015). His films frequently showcase memorable imagery of urban environments, whether 2nd century Rome (Gladiator), 12th century Jerusalem (Kingdom of Heaven), Medieval England (Robin Hood), contemporary Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down), or the future cityscapes of Blade Runner; strong female characters.
Blade Runner: loose adaptation of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
Replicant: fictional bioengineered or biorobotic android; replicant can only be detected by means of the fictional Voight-Kampff test, in which emotional responses are provoked; replicants’ nonverbal responses differ from humans'.
Themes in Blade Runner: Genetic engineering and cloning: Eyes. Religious and philosophical symbolism. Environment and globalization. Deckard: human or replicant?
Michael Crichton (1942.10.23–2008.11.04): USA author and filmmaker. His literary works heavily feature technology and are usually within the science fiction, techno-thriller, and medical fiction genres. His novels often explore technology and failures of human interaction with it, especially resulting in catastrophes with biotechnology. The Andromeda Strain (1969). "Why Speculate?": In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.
Stellan Skarsgård (1951.06.13-): Swedish actor. Skarsgård was brought up by humanist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.
Ben Affleck (1972.08.15-): USA actor, film director, screenwriter, producer and activist. Outspoken member of the Democratic Party. Believes paparazzi attention is "part of the deal" of stardom, he has spoken out against paparazzi interest in his children, attributes the media interest to "housewives who hold up their child rearing to the child rearing of these [famous] parents". An avid poker player, Affleck has regularly entered local events. Argued in favor of universal health care; pro-choice; supports legalizing gay marriage; does not support the death penalty:"As long we have a flawed system of determining guilt and innocence, I think capital punishment is a bad idea" (2008); supporter of the Second Amendment; believes "more in people than political parties ... I know some pretty exceptional people who are Republicans" (2004).
Yale student abortion art controversy: was a Yale University art student who caused major controversy in 2008 for her proposed senior performance art project. 2008.04.17: the Yale Daily News printed an article detailing the process by which Shvarts reportedly inseminated herself artificially as many times as possible over the course of nine months, during which she also induced abortions using abortifacient drugs; The proposed exhibition of the project was to feature video recordings of the forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process; Shvarts declared that the goal of the project was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.
Madonna (entertainer) (1958.08.16-): singer, songwriter, actress, and businesswoman. She achieved popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a fixture on MTV. Madonna is known for reinventing both her music and image, and for maintaining her autonomy within the recording industry. Music critics have acclaimed her musical productions, which have generated some controversy. Often referred to as the "Queen of Pop", she is cited as an influence by numerous other artists around the world. Madonna's use of sexual imagery has benefited her career and catalyzed public discourse on sexuality and feminism. She noted that her favorite style was baroque, and loved Mozart and Chopin because she liked their "feminine quality". Madonna's major influences include Karen Carpenter, The Supremes and Led Zeppelin, as well as dancers Martha Graham and Rudolf Nureyev. She also grew up listening to David Bowie, whose show was the first rock concert she ever attended.
Musicians, composers
Carl Orff (1895.07.10–1982.03.29): German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). Born in Munich. His paternal grandfather was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. By the time he was a teenager, having studied neither harmony nor composition, Orff was writing songs; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Served in the German Army during WWI, when he was severely injured and nearly killed when a trench caved in.
ABBA (ᗅᗺᗷᗅ): were a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972. With members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, ABBA became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1975 to 1982. They won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974 at the Dome in Brighton, UK, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest, and were the most successful group ever to take part in the competition.
David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/; 1947.01.08–2016.01.10; born: David Robert Jones): English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, and was considered by critics and other musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Major Tom: persona of David Bowie's, mentioned in songs "Space Oddity", "Ashes to Ashes", "Hallo Spaceboy", and "Blackstar". Bowie's own interpretation of the character evolved throughout his career. "Space Oddity" (1969) depicts an astronaut who casually slips the bonds of the world to journey beyond the stars. In the song "Ashes to Ashes" (1980), Bowie reinterprets Major Tom as an oblique autobiographical symbol for himself. Major Tom is described as a "junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low". This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of Bowie's album Low (1977), which was inspired by the withdrawal symptoms he suffered while undergoing treatment for drug addiction. Additionally, the choked and self-recriminating tone used in the lyrics "Time and again I tell myself I'll stay clean tonight" reinforces an autobiographical and retrospective interpretation. A short time later, there is another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal, turning 'outwards' or towards space.
Space Oddity: song that was written and recorded by English singer-songwriter David Bowie. It was first released in 1969.07.11 by Philips Records as a 7-inch single then as the opening track of his second studio album David Bowie. After the commercial failure of his self-titled debut album in 1967, Bowie's manager Kenneth Pitt commissioned Love You till Tuesday, a promotional film that was intended to introduce Bowie to a larger audience. For the film, Bowie wrote "Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut named Major Tom; its title and subject matter were partly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Bowie's feelings of alienation at that point in his career. Musically, "Space Oddity" was one of the most complex songs Bowie had written up to that point, and marked a change from the music hall-influenced sound of his debut to a sound that is akin to psychedelic folk and inspired by the music of the Bee Gees. The single was rush-released ahead of the moon landing; it received praise from music critics and the BBC used it as background music during its coverage of the landing. The single, however, initially sold poorly in the United Kingdom and was banned by radio stations in the United States. After it reached number 48 in the UK by September, Bowie performed the song on the British television programme Top of the Pops in early October. The broadcast helped "Space Oddity" climb to number five, becoming Bowie's first and only chart hit for another three years. "Space Oddity" was a mainstay during Bowie's concerts throughout his career. A range of artists have covered "Space Oddity" and others have released songs that reference the character Major Tom. A 2013 cover by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gained widespread media attention; its accompanying music video, which was filmed aboard the International Space Station, was the first video to be recorded in space. Initially viewed as a novelty track, "Space Oddity" is now considered one of Bowie's finest recordings and remains one of his most popular songs.
Writers
William Shakespeare (bapt. 1564.04.26 – 1616.04.23): English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hailed Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".
Spelling of Shakespeare's name: varied over time. It was not consistently spelled any single way during his lifetime, in manuscript or in printed form. The standard spelling of the surname as "Shakespeare" was the most common published form in Shakespeare's lifetime, but it was not one used in his own handwritten signatures. It was, however, the spelling used as a printed signature to the dedications of the first editions of his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. It is also the spelling used in the First Folio, the definitive collection of his plays published in 1623, after his death.
Portraits of Shakespeare: only two portraits that definitively portray William Shakespeare, both of which are posthumous.
First Folio (Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies): considered one of the most influential books ever published.
Edgar Allan Poe (né Edgar Poe; 1809.01.19–1849.10.07): USA writer, poet, editor, and literary critic best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in USA, and of USA literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at age 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.
Charles Dickens (1812.02.07-1870.06.09): English writer and social critic. Generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.
Samuel Butler (novelist) (1835.12.04–1902.06.18): English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 in an altered version titled The Way of All Flesh, and published in 1964 as he wrote it. Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted.
Mark Twain (1835.11.30–1910.04.21; Samuel Langhorne Clemens): USA writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain was born shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well; he died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. His father was an attorney and judge, who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11. The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, joining the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers trade union. He educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
Olivia Langdon Clemens (1845.11.27–1904.06.05): wife of the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Clemens courted her throughout 1868, mainly by letter. She rejected his first proposal of marriage, but they became engaged two months later, in November 1868. Clemens was quoted later as saying, "I do believe that young filly has broken my heart. That only leaves me with one option, for her to mend it." The engagement was announced in February 1869, and in February 1870, they were married. The wedding was in Elmira, and the ceremony was performed by the Congregational ministers Joseph Twichell and Thomas K. Beecher.
Ambrose Bierce (1842.06.24 – circa 1914): American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer. Prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and he was considered an influential and feared literary critic. His parents were a poor but literary couple who instilled in him a deep love for books and writing.
The Devil's Dictionary: satirical dictionary written by Ambrose Bierce consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce’s witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
Edith Wharton (1862.01.24-1937.08.11): Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. Style: characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony
Jack London (1876.01.12-1916.11.22): American author, journalist, and social activist.
Stefan Zweig (1881.11.28–1942.02.22): Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters), and decisive historical events in Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; published in English in 1940 as The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941). In 1934, as a result of the Nazi Party's rise in Germany, Zweig emigrated to England and then, in 1940, moved briefly to New York and then to Brazil, where he settled. In his final years, he would declare himself in love with the country, writing about it in the book Brazil, Land of the Future. Nonetheless, as the years passed Zweig became increasingly disillusioned and despairing at the future of Europe, and he and his wife Lotte were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in Petrópolis on 23 February 1942; they had died the previous day.
de:Franz Kafka (1883.07.03-1924.06.03): deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller. Kafkas Werke wurden zum größeren Teil erst nach seinem Tod und gegen seine letztwillige Verfügung von Max Brod veröffentlicht, einem engen Freund und Vertrauten, den Kafka als Nachlassverwalter bestimmt hatte. Kafkas Werke zählen zum unbestrittenen Kanon der Weltliteratur. Kafka hatte ein zwiespältiges Verhältnis zu Frauen („Junggeselle der Weltliteratur“); „Das Urteil“; Judentum und Palästina-Frage („Palästina blieb ein Traum, den sein Körper schließlich zunichte machte“); Krankheit und Tod (1917: Lungentuberkulose; 1918: Spanischen Grippe); Zur Frage der Nationalität („Deutsch ist meine Muttersprache, aber das Tschechische geht mir zu Herzen“; „Ich habe niemals unter deutschem Volk gelebt“; jüdische Minderheit). Die Romanfragmente: Der Process, Das Schloss, Der Verschollene.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892.01.03–1973.09.02): English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Erich Maria Remarque (Erich Paul Remark; 1898.06.22–1970.09.25): German-born novelist. His landmark novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during WWI, was an international bestseller which created a new literary genre, and was adapted into multiple films. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic". He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and USA, where he became a naturalized citizen. During WWI, Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army at the age of 18. 1917.06.12, he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division at Hem-Lenglet. 1917.06.26 he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 2nd Company, Engineer Platoon Bethe, and fought in the trenches between Torhout and Houthulst. 1917.07.31 he was wounded by shell shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck. In 1943, the Nazis arrested his youngest sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a trial at the notorious Volksgerichtshof (Hitler's extra-constitutional "People's Court"), she was found guilty of "undermining morale" for stating that she considered the war lost. Court President Roland Freisler declared, "Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt—Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen". Scholz was beheaded in 1943.12.16. Remarque later said that his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899.08.24–1986.06.14; Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo): Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion; contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre. He became completely blind by the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture. Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party."
George Orwell (1903.06.25-1950.01.21; Eric Arthur Blair): English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.
Charles Addams (1912.01.07–1988.09.29): USA cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of his recurring characters became known as the Addams Family, and were subsequently popularized through various adaptations.
The Addams Family: fictional family created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. They originally appeared in a series of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker over a 50-year period from their inception in 1938. They have since been adapted to other media, such as television, film, video games, comic books, a musical, and merchandise. The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening.
Romain Gary (1914.05.21–1980.12.02; born רומן קצב Roman Katsev, Russian: Рома́н Ле́йбович Ка́цев): French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names. Gary later claimed that his actual father was the celebrated actor and film star Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mosjoukine appears in his memoir Promise at Dawn. Deported to central Russia in 1915, they stayed in Moscow until 1920. They later returned to Vilnius, then moved on to Warsaw. When Gary was fourteen, he and his mother emigrated illegally to Nice, France. Converted to Catholicism by his mother, Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges. In December 1980, Seberg's former husband Romain Gary committed suicide. His suicide note, addressed to his publisher, indicated that he had not killed himself over the loss of Seberg, but because he could no longer produce literary works.
Frank Herbert (1920.10.08–1986.02.11): USA science fiction writer best known for the novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer. Dune saga, set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, deals with complex themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. Dune itself is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time and the series is widely considered to be among the classics of the genre. Dune was the first major ecological science fiction novel, embracing a multitude of sweeping, inter-related themes and multiple character viewpoints, a method that ran through all Herbert's mature work. Criticism of government. Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology, which have caused many of his readers to take an interest in these areas; The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Herbert never again equalled the critical acclaim he received for Dune; Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula Award, although almost all of them were New York Times Best Sellers.
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist; Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster. It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.
Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.
Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.
Italo Calvino (1923.10.15–1985.09.19): Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Other legacies include the parents' beliefs in Freemasonry, Republicanism with elements of Anarchism and Marxism. Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred of the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and Mario also refused to give their sons any education in the Catholic Faith or any other religion. World War II. Turin and communism. After communism: In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party. In his letter of resignation published in L'Unità on 7 August, he explained the reason of his dissent (the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes) while confirming his "confidence in the democratic perspectives" of world Communism. He withdrew from taking an active role in politics and never joined another party.
Georgi Markov (Георги Иванов Марков; 1929.03.01–1978.09.11): Bulgarian dissident writer. He originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright in his native country, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, until his defection in 1978. After relocating to London, he worked as a broadcaster and journalist for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany's Deutsche Welle. Assassination: 1978.09.07, Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames and waited to take a bus to his job at the BBC. While at the bus stop, he felt a slight sharp pain, as a bug bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He looked behind him and saw a man picking up an umbrella off the ground. The man hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street and got in a taxi which then drove away. Bernard Riley, the attending physician treating Markov, considered many possible causes of his illness, including that he had been bitten by a venomous tropical snake. Riley had the inflamed area at the back of his leg x-rayed, but no foreign object was detected at this time. Due to the circumstances and statements Markov made to doctors expressing the suspicion that he had been poisoned, the Metropolitan Police ordered a thorough autopsy of his body. Rufus Crompton performed the autopsy, noting a red mark on the back of Markov's leg. He cut a tissue sample from the area, with a matching sample from the other leg. These samples were sent for further analysis at the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons laboratory. There, David Gall, the Research Medical Officer, found a tiny pellet in the tissue sample. Annabel Markov recalled her husband's view about the umbrella, telling the BBC's Panorama programme, in 1979.04, "He felt a jab in his thigh. He looked around and there was a man behind him who'd apologized and dropped an umbrella. I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn't been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face." It was reported after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Soviet KGB had assisted the Bulgarian Secret Service.
Michael Crichton (1942.10.23–2008.11.04): USA best-selling author, physician, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction and thriller genres. In 1994, Crichton became the only creative artist ever to have works simultaneously charting at No. 1 in US television (ER), film (Jurassic Park), and book sales (Disclosure). Crichton's works were frequently cautionary; his plots often portrayed scientific advancements going awry, commonly resulting in worst-case scenarios. A notable recurring theme in Crichton's plots is the pathological failure of complex systems and their safeguards, whether biological (Jurassic Park), military/organizational (The Andromeda Strain), technical (Airframe), or cybernetic (Westworld). His 1973 movie Westworld contains one of the earliest references to a computer virus, and the first mention of the concept of a computer virus in a movie. The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Westworld
Ian McEwan (1948.06.21-): English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Vladimir Sorokin (1955.08.07-): contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist. He has been described as one of the most popular writers in modern Russian literature. His 2006 novel, Day of the Oprichnik, describes a dystopian Russia in 2027, with a Tsar in the Kremlin, a Russian language with numerous Chinese expressions, and a "Great Russian Wall" separating the country from its neighbors. He was awarded in 2015 the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for this novel. 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: Three days later Sorokin published a piece highly critical of Vladimir Putin. In it he compared Putin to Ivan the Terrible and power in Russia to a medieval pyramid. He writes, "the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin," and faults the destruction of the TV channel NTV for this opening. "Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption.". For Sorokin, Putin's goal is not Ukraine. It is the dismemberment of NATO and the destruction of western civilization.
Nicholas Kristof (1959.04.27-): USA journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict.
Liu Cixin (刘慈欣 1963.06.23-): Chinese science fiction writer and electrical engineer. He is a nine-time winner of China's Galaxy Award and has also received the 2015 Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem as well as the 2017 Locus Award for Death's End. He is also a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award.
Ken Liu (1976-): USA author of science fiction and fantasy. His epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty, which he describes as silkpunk, is published by Simon & Schuster; born in Lanzhou, China. His mother, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, is a pharmaceutical chemist, while his father is a computer engineer. The family immigrated to the United States when Liu was 11 years old. At Harvard College, he studied English Literature and Computer Science, receiving his A. B. in 1998. After graduation, Liu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft, and then joined a start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004 and after working as a corporate lawyer, eventually became a high-tech litigation consultant. His translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin helped the book become a best seller to English readers.
Andy Weir (1972.06.16-): USA novelist and former computer programmer. His 2011 novel The Martian was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name directed by Ridley Scott. He received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016 and his 2021 novel Project Hail Mary was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He worked as a programmer for several software companies, including AOL, Palm, MobileIron, and Blizzard, where he worked on the video game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Weir has said that he is agnostic, and has described his political views as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
The Egg (Weir short story) (2009): Weir's most popular short story, and has been translated into over 30 languages by readers. Summary: The story is about the main character, who is referred to as "you" (in the second person), and God, who is "me" (in the first person). You, a 48-year-old man who dies in a car crash, meet God, the narrator, who says that you have been reincarnated many times before, and that you are next to be reincarnated as a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD. God then explains that you are, in fact, constantly reincarnated across time, and that all human beings who have ever lived and will ever live are incarnations of you. The reason God created the universe was for the main character, you, to understand this point: "Every time you victimized someone...you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
Maddox (writer) (1978.01.01-; George Ouzounian): USA humorist, satirist, Internet personality, and author. He gained fame on the Internet in the early 2000s for his opinion-oriented website, The Best Page in the Universe, which he still maintains.
The Best Page in the Universe: personal satirical humor website created by Maddox. Launched in 1997 without any high expectations, the website became known by word of mouth.
John Green (author) (1977.08.24-): USA author of young adult fiction. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and his sixth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012, and its 2014 film adaptation opened at number one on the box office.
Journalists
Joseph Roth (1894.09.02–1939.05.27): Austrian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English in The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of WWI and the Russian Revolution. Emigration: 1933.01.30, dem Tag von Hitlers Ernennung zum Reichskanzler, verließ Roth Deutschland. In einem Brief an Stefan Zweig urteilte er: „Inzwischen wird es Ihnen klar sein, daß wir großen Katastrophen zutreiben. Abgesehen von den privaten – unsere literarische und materielle Existenz ist ja vernichtet – führt das Ganze zum neuen Krieg. Ich gebe keinen Heller mehr für unser Leben. Es ist gelungen, die Barbarei regieren zu lassen. Machen Sie sich keine Illusionen. Die Hölle regiert.“
Seymour Hersh (1937.04.08-): USA investigative journalist, and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War.
Nord Stream 2: 2023.02, in a post to Substack, Hersh claimed that the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was carried out by the US Navy, the CIA, and the Norwegian Navy, under the direct order of President Biden. Hersh's report relied on an anonymous source who stated that, in June 2022, US Navy divers placed explosive C4 charges on the pipelines at strategic locations selected by the Norwegians. The source said that charges were placed under the cover of a multi-nation wargame simulation, and remotely detonated three months later by a signal from a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian Navy P-8 surveillance plane. In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh's credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh's allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings. Hersh's article was criticized by some journalists. Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative journalism group Bellingcat, said that Hersh was unable to get his article published in a reputed newspaper and that his reporting would only impress the likes of people who support Putin and al-Assad. Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev described Hersh's report as "total fiction" and stated that his reporting is seriously damaging to journalism. In Russia, Hersh's publication was picked up by RT and the news agency TASS.
Thomas Friedman (1953.07.20-): USA journalist, columnist and author. Writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues, and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.
Eliot Higgins (1979.01-): British citizen journalist and former blogger, known for using open sources and social media for investigations. He is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. He has investigated incidents including the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. He first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict.
Directors, screenwriters, producers
Fritz Lang (Friedrich Christian Anton Lang; 1890.12.05–1976.08.02): Austrian film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later USA. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor. His 1929 film Woman in the Moon showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket, and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad (a rocket standing upright against a tall building before launch having been slowly rolled into place) and the rocket-launch countdown clock. His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and after moving to Hollywood in 1934, Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). He became a naturalized citizen of USA in 1939. In 1920, Lang met his future wife, the writer Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933. During the climactic final scene in M, Lang allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. Lang, who was known for being hard to work with, epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical Germanic film director, a type embodied also by Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; Lang wore a monocle adding to the stereotype.
Actors
Kirk Douglas (1916.12.09-): USA retired actor, producer, director, and author.
Stellan Skarsgård: (1951.06.13-): Swedish actor. Skarsgård has had a vasectomy, stating that he felt eight children was enough. Skarsgård was brought up by humanist, atheist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.
Comedians
George Carlin (1937.05.12–2008.06.22): USA stand-up comedian, social critic, actor, and author. Carlin was noted for his black comedy and his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. Carlin and his "Seven dirty words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5–4 decision affirmed the government's power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians: One newspaper called Carlin "the dean of counterculture comedians."
Seven dirty words: seven English-language words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in 1972 in his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". The words are: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation: In 1997, Pacifica Radio "Living Room" host Larry Bensky prefaced an interview with Carlin by saying: "George Carlin, you're a very unusual guest for Pacifica Radio. You're probably the only person in the United States that we don't have to give The Carlin Warning to about which words you can't say on this program, because it's named after you."
Dave Chappelle (1973.08.24-): USA stand-up comedian and actor. He is best known for his satirical comedy sketch series Chappelle's Show (2003–2006), which he starred in until quitting in the middle of production during the third season. After a hiatus, Chappelle returned to performing stand-up comedy across USA.
Motivational speakers
Simon Sinek (1973.10.09-): an author, speaker, and consultant who writes on leadership and management. He joined the RAND Corporation in 2010 as an adjunct staff member, where he advises on matters of military innovation and planning. He is known for popularizing the concepts of "the golden circle" and to "Start With Why".
Businesspeople, entrepreneurs, company founders
Timothy Dexter (1748.01.22–1806.10.23): USA businessman noted for his writing and eccentricity. Known for: business sense, eccentricity.
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. (1895.05.24–1979.08.29): USA broadcasting businessman, magazine and newspaper publisher. He was the founder of Advance Publications; born Solomon Isadore Neuhaus in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of eight children born to Jewish immigrants. His father, Meier Neuhaus, was an immigrant from Vitebsk, Belarus; and his mother, Rose (née Arenfeldt), was from Austria-Hungary. Business strategy: Newhouse focused on purchasing bargain-priced papers in growing communities; he had no interest in starting papers or in unrelated ventures (he even declined an offer to purchase the New York Yankees). He typically acquired a city's oldest newspaper and then purchase the city's second newspaper thereby allowing him to set advertising rates. Although he generally promised to keep both papers in business and in competition, he typically merged the two, generally closing the afternoon paper and keeping the morning, effectively establishing a monopoly and then using the profits to purchase additional newspapers. Newhouse largely ran his various interests out of a brown leather briefcase and kept its figures in his head, even as they grew into an empire of 20 newspapers, as well as numerous magazines, radio stations and television stations. He never had what could be called a formal headquarters; to this day Advance Publications' corporate address is the same as that of the Staten Island Advance. Timeline of acquisitions: 1959: Condé Nast Publications purchased for $5 million at the suggestion of his wife; according to Newhouse, "She asked for a fashion magazine and I went out and got her Vogue"; Condé Nast also published Glamour, House & Garden, and Young Bride. He soon purchased another magazine publisher, Street & Smith and merged it with Condé Nast, becoming a major magazine publisher. Upon his death, he passed his voting common stock in the principal family company, Advance Publications, in trust to his six grandchildren and made his two sons the sole trustees.
Howard Hughes (1905.12.24–1976.04.05): USA business tycoon, entrepreneur, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. During his lifetime, he was known as the wealthiest self-made man in the world. He is remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Charlie Munger (1924.01.01-): USA billionaire investor, businessman, and former real estate attorney. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; Buffett has described Munger as his closest partner and right-hand man.
Warren Buffett (1930.08.30-): USA business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is one of the most successful investors in the world and has a net worth of over $95 billion as of October 2022, making him the world's sixth-wealthiest person.
Steve Jobs (1955.02.24–2011.10.05; 4 children: Lisa Brennan-Jobs with Laurene Powell, 3 with Laurene Powell): USA business magnate and investor; chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Bill Gates (1955.10.28-; 3 children with Melinda French): USA business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, humanitarian, and principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.
Jack Sim (沈锐华/沈銳華; 1957-): founder of the Restroom Association of Singapore and World Toilet Organization; broke the global taboo of toilet and sanitation by bringing it to global media centre-stage with his unique mix of humour and serious facts since 2001. After attaining financial independence at age of 40 as a businessman, he decided to devote the rest of his life to social work.
Yuri Milner (Юрий Борисович (Бенционович) Мильнер; born 11 November 1961): Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He is a cofounder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (now VK) and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Byju’s, Facebook, Wish, and many others. Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Yuri Milner was the second child of Russian intellectuals. Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University, graduating in 1985.
Jeff Bezos (1964.01.12-; 4 children with MacKenzie Tuttle): USA technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the founder, chairman, and CEO of Amazon.
Paul Graham (computer programmer) (1964.11.13-): English computer scientist, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is known for his work on Lisp, for co-founding Viaweb (which eventually became Yahoo! Store), and for co-founding the Y Combinator seed capital firm. He is the author of some programming books, such as: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 2008, Paul Graham married Jessica Livingston.
Jessica Livingston: author and a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator. She also organizes Startup School. Previously, she was the VP of marketing at Adams Harkness Financial Group. In 2008, she married fellow Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. In 2015.12 it was announced that Livingston is one of the financial backers of OpenAI.
Robert Tappan Morris (1965.11.08-) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur; best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988; co-found the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, and later the funding firm Y Combinator—both with Paul Graham.
Trevor Blackwell (1969.11.04): computer programmer, engineer and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley; co-founder of Y Combinator in 2005.
Reid Hoffman (1967.08.05-) USA internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn.
Sheryl Sandberg (1969.08.28-): USA technology executive, activist, and author; COO of Facebook (2008.03-).
Rony Abovitz (1971-): USA entrepreneur. Abovitz founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, in 2004. MAKO was acquired by Stryker Corporation in 2013 for $1.65B. Abovitz is the founder of the Mixed reality/Augmented Reality (MR/AR) company Magic Leap and served as its CEO from its founding in 2010. In May 2020, amid financial strife for the company, Abovitz stepped down from his position. Abovitz attended the University of Miami, where he eventually obtained a master's degree in biomedical engineering. While attending the University of Miami, he also was a cartoonist.
Elon Musk (1971.06.28-; 6 children (1 deceased from SIDS at 10 weeks) with Justine Wilson; 1 child with Grimes): career: Zip2, X.com and PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAI.
The Boring Company: infrastructure and tunneling company founded by Elon Musk in late 2016 after he mentioned the idea of making tunnels on his Twitter account. Musk cited difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the current 2-D transportation network as inspiration for the tunneling project.
Neuralink: USA neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others, reported to be developing implantable brain–computer interfaces.
Jack Dorsey (1976.11.19-): creator of Twitter, founder of Square.
Naval Ravikant (1974.11.05-): Indian-USA entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
Sergey Brin (1973.08.21-; 2 children with Anne Wojcicki): USA computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin is the President of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. 2018.10: 13th-richest, US$50.6 billion. Brin immigrated to USA with his family from USSR at the age of 6. Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, encouraged him to learn mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin's data mining system to build a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park.
Larry Page (1973.03.26-; 2 children with Lucinda Southworth): USA computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin. After stepping aside as Google CEO in 2001.08, in favor of Eric Schmidt, he re-assumed the role in 2011.04. He announced his intention to step aside a second time in 2015.07, to become CEO of Alphabet, under which Google's assets would be reorganized. Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google's best-known search ranking algorithm. Page's house "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place", an environment in which he immersed himself. Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines". Page also played Flute and studied music composition while growing up. Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me". In an interview Page said that "In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing" and that "If you think about it from a music point of view, if you're a percussionist, you hit something, it's got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second". Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to "play with the stuff lying around"—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his parents. He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor". His older brother also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked". He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually." Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan, from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991.
Sam Altman (1985.04.22-): entrepreneur, programmer, venture capitalist and blogger. He is the President of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI; received his first computer aged 8, and studied computer science at Stanford University until dropping out in 2005. At age 19, Altman was a co-founder and CEO of Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. Loopt was acquired in 2012 by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.
Historical figures
John II Casimir Vasa (1609.03.22–1672.12.16): King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania during the era of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Duke of Opole in Upper Silesia, and titular King of Sweden 1648–1660. He was the last ruler of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth bearing a blood connection to the Jagiellon dynasty. His father Sigismund, grandson of Gustav I of Sweden, had in 1592 succeeded his own father to the Swedish throne, only to be deposed in 1599 by his uncle, Charles IX of Sweden. This led to a long-standing feud wherein the Polish kings of the House of Vasa claimed the Swedish throne, resulting in the Polish–Swedish War of 1600–1629. John Casimir for most of his life remained in the shadow of his brother, Władysław IV Vasa. He had few friends among the Polish nobility (szlachta), as he openly sympathised with Austria and showed disregard and contempt for Polish culture. Unfriendly, secretive, dividing his time between lavish partying and religious contemplation, and disliking politics, he did not have a strong power base nor influence at the Polish court. He did, however, display talent as a military commander, showing his abilities in the Smolensk War against Muscovy (1633).
Maria Theresa (Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina; 1717.05.13–1780.11.29): the only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions and the last of the House of Habsburg; sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma. She started her 40-year reign when her father, Emperor Charles VI, died in October 1740. Charles VI paved the way for her accession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 and spent his entire reign securing it. Upon the death of her father, Saxony, Prussia (invasion of Silesia by Frederick the Great was the start of a lifelong enmity; she referred to him as "that evil man"), Bavaria, and France all repudiated the sanction they had recognised during his lifetime. Neither Maria Theresa's parents nor her grandparents were closely related to each other, making Maria Theresa one of few members of the House of Habsburg who was not inbred. Maria Theresa was a serious and reserved child who enjoyed singing and archery. She was barred from horse riding by her father, but she would later learn the basics for the sake of her Hungarian coronation ceremony. Even though he had spent the last decades of his life securing Maria Theresa's inheritance, Charles always expected a son and never prepared his daughter for her future role as sovereign. France drew up a plan to partition Austria between Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Spain. Vienna was in a panic, as none of Maria Theresa's advisors expected France to betray them. Contrary to all expectations, a significant amount of support for the young Queen came from Hungary. To appease those who considered her sex to be the most serious obstacle, Maria Theresa assumed masculine titles. Thus, in nomenclature, Maria Theresa was archduke and king; normally, however, she was styled as queen. No 18th-century commentary saw this crossing of gendered titles as inappropriate or impossible. In 1750, Maria Theresa recalled in her Political Testament the circumstances under which she had ascended: "I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own and finally, also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop."
Samuel Pepys (1633.02.23-1703.05.26): English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. The detailed private diary Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London.
Nadezhda Durova (Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova (RU: Наде́жда Андре́евна Ду́рова), aka Alexander Durov, Alexander Sokolov and Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov; 1783.09.17-1866.03.21): woman who, while disguised as a man, became a decorated soldier in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic wars; the first known female officer in the Russian military; memoir The Cavalry Maiden - one of the earliest autobiographies in RU lang.
Chiune Sugihara (1900.01.01-1986.07.31): Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania. During WWII, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan.
Historical Alexander the Great: none of the surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources on Alexander are contemporary. All contemporary works are lost.
Wars of Alexander the Great (336–323 BC): fought by King Alexander III of Macedon ("The Great"), first against the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Darius III, and then against local chieftains and warlords as far east as Punjab, India. Alexander the Great was one of the most successful military commanders of all time. He was undefeated in battle. By the time of his death, he had conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks.
Alexander romance: any of several collections of legends concerning the mythical exploits of Alexander the Great. The earliest version is in the Greek language, dating to the 3rd c. Several late manuscripts attribute the work to Alexander's court historian Callisthenes, but the historical person died before Alexander and could not have written a full account of his life. The unknown author is still sometimes known as Pseudo-Callisthenes.
Tadeusz Kościuszko: Tadeusz was baptized by the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox Church, thereby receiving the names Andrzej, Tadeusz and Bonawentura. His paternal family was ethnically Lithuanian-Ruthenian and traced their ancestry to Konstanty Fiodorowicz Kostiuszko, a courtier of Polish King and Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund I the Old. Kościuszko's maternal family, the Ratomskis, were also Ruthenian. Modern Belarusian writers interpret his Ruthenian or Lithuanian heritage as Belarusian; he once described himself as a Litvin, which at the time meant a Polish-speaking inhabitant, whatever their ethnicity may have been, of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, however now would be interpreted by modern Belarusian sources as a term used for Belarusians before the word "Belarusian" appeared.
Hindustani, Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit philosophers
Shastra: Sanskrit word that means "precept, rules, manual, compendium, book or treatise" in a general sense. The word is generally used as a suffix in the Indian literature context, for technical or specialized knowledge in a defined area of practice. Shastra has a similar meaning to English -logy.
Sutra: in Indian literary traditions refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text. Sutras are a genre of ancient and medieval Indian texts found in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The oldest manuscripts that have survived into the modern era, that contain extensive sutras, are part of the Vedas dated to be from the late 2nd millennium BCE through mid 1st-millennium BCE.
Arthashastra: ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Arthashastra includes books on the nature of government, law, civil and criminal court systems, ethics, economics, markets and trade, the methods for screening ministers, diplomacy, theories on war, nature of peace, and the duties and obligations of a king. The text incorporates Hindu philosophy, includes ancient economic and cultural details on agriculture, mineralogy, mining and metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests and wildlife. Authorship: Likely to be the work of several authors over centuries: Kauṭilya or Kauṭalya, Vishnugupta, Chanakya. In Machiavelli's The Prince, the king and his coterie are single-mindedly aimed at preserving the monarch's power for its own sake, states Paul Brians for example, but in the Arthashastra, the king is required "to benefit and protect his citizens, including the peasants". Kautilya asserts in Arthashastra that, "the ultimate source of the prosperity of the kingdom is its security and prosperity of its people", a view never mentioned in Machiavelli's text. The text advocates "land reform", states Brians, where land is taken from landowners and farmers who own land but do not grow anything for a long time, and given to poorer farmers who want to grow crops but do not own any land.
Vātsyāyana: name of an ancient Indian philosopher, known for writing the Kama Sutra, the most famous book in the world on human sexuality. He lived in India during the second or third century CE, probably in Pataliputra (modern day Patna). His name is sometimes erroneously confused with Mallanaga, the prophet of the Asuras, to whom the origin of erotic science is attributed. Hardly anything is known about Vātsyāyana, although it is believed that his disciples went on his instructions, on the request of the Hindu Kings in the Himalayan range to influence the hill tribals to give up the pagan cult of sacrifices. He is said to have created the legend of Tara among the hill tribes as a tantric goddess. Later as the worship spread to the east Garo hills, the goddess manifest of a 'yoni' goddess Kamakhya was created. His interest in human sexual behavior as a medium of attaining spirituality was recorded in his treatise Kama Sutra.
Kama Sutra: ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but written as a guide to the "art-of-living" well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. Kamasutra is the oldest surviving Hindu text on erotic love. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhasya (exposition and commentaries). The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad. According to Doniger, this paradigm of celebrating pleasures, enjoyment and sexuality as a dharmic act began in the "earthy, vibrant text known as the Rigveda" of the Hindus. The Kamasutra and celebration of sex, eroticism and pleasure is an integral part of the religious milieu in Hinduism and quite prevalent in its temples. Johann Meyer: Though she is reserved and selective, "a woman stands in very great need of surata (amorous or sexual pleasure)", and "the woman has a far stronger erotic disposition, her delight in the sexual act is greater than a man's". Burton used the terms lingam and yoni instead throughout the translation. This conscious and incorrect word substitution, states Doniger, thus served as an Orientalist means to "anthropologize sex, distance it, make it safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of weird, dark people far away." Though Burton used the terms lingam and yoni for human sexual organs, terms that actually mean a lot more in Sanskrit texts and its meaning depends on the context. However, Burton's Kamasutra gave a unique, specific meaning to these words in the western imagination.
Muslim, Arabic, Persian, Turkic philosophers
Brethren of Purity (Arabic: اخوانالصفا ikhwãn al-safã): secret society of Muslim philosophers in Basra, Iraq, in the 8th century CE. The structure of this mysterious organization and the identities of its members have never been clear. A good deal of Muslim and Western scholarship has been spent on just pinning down the identities of the Brethren and the century in which they were active. "In this Brotherhood, self is forgotten; all act by the help of each, all rely upon each for succour and advice, and if a Brother sees it will be good for another that he should sacrifice his life for him, he willingly gives it". They define a perfect man in their Rasa'il as "of East Persian derivation, of Arabic faith, of Iraqi, that is Babylonian, in education, Hebrew in astuteness, a disciple of Christ in conduct, as pious as a Syrian monk, a Greek in natural sciences, an Indian in the interpretation of mysteries and, above all a Sufi or a mystic in his whole spiritual outlook".
Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity: large encyclopedia in 52 treatises (rasā'il) written by the mysterious Brethren of Purity of Basra, Iraq sometime in the second half of the 10th c. CE (or possibly later, in the 11th c.). It had a great influence on later intellectual leading lights of the Muslim world, such as Ibn Arabi, and was transmitted as far abroad within the Muslim world as Al-Andalus. The Encyclopedia contributed to the popularization and legitimization of Platonism in the Arabic world. The subject of the work is vast and ranges from mathematics, music, astronomy, and natural sciences, to ethics, politics, religion, and magic—all compiled for one, basic purpose, that learning is training for the soul and a preparation for its eventual life once freed from the body.
European philosophers, modern philosophers
Epictetus (Ἐπίκτητος; c. 50 – c. 135 AD): Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece for the rest of his life. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses and Enchiridion. Epictetus taught that philosophy is a way of life and not simply a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. However, individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.
Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius; c. 477–524 AD): Roman senator, consul, magister officiorum, and philosopher. Boethius entered public service under Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great, who later imprisoned and executed him in 524 on charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy. As the author of numerous handbooks and translator of Aristotle, he became the main intermediary between Classical antiquity and following centuries. De topicis differentiis: it is largely due to Boethius that the Topics of Aristotle and Cicero were revived, and the Boethian tradition of topical argumentation spans its influence throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance. De arithmetica. De institutione musica: Like his Greek predecessors, Boethius believed that arithmetic and music were intertwined, and helped to mutually reinforce the understanding of each, and together exemplified the fundamental principles of order and harmony in the understanding of the universe as it was known during his time. Opuscula sacra: supported Catholicism and condemned Arianism and other heterodox forms of Christianity; De fide catholica.
The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae): philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues, which became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. Written in AD 523 during a one-year imprisonment Boethius served while awaiting trial – and eventual execution – for the alleged crime of treason under the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. Boethius was at the very heights of power in Rome, holding the prestigious office of magister officiorum, and was brought down by treachery. This experience inspired the text, which reflects on how evil can exist in a world governed by God (the problem of theodicy), and how happiness is still attainable amidst fickle fortune, while also considering the nature of happiness and God. It has been described as "by far the most interesting example of prison literature the world has ever seen." Boethius writes the book as a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy. Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius by discussing the transitory nature of fame and wealth ("no man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune"), and the ultimate superiority of things of the mind, which she calls the "one true good". On human nature, Boethius says that humans are essentially good and only when they give in to “wickedness” do they “sink to the level of being an animal.” On justice, he says criminals are not to be abused, rather treated with sympathy and respect, using the analogy of doctor and patient to illustrate the ideal relationship between prosecutor and criminal. It has often been said Boethius was the “last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics”.
Baltasar Gracián (Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J.; 1601.01.08–1658.12.06): Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud (Aragon). His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. El Criticón, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia → Manual Oracle and Art of Discretion)
El Criticón: Spanish novel by Baltasar Gracián. It was published in three parts in the years 1651, 1653 and 1657. It is considered his greatest work and one of the most influential works in Spanish literature, along with Don Quixote and La Celestina. El Criticón collects and expands his previous works. The work takes the form of an allegory covering the life of Andrenio, representing two facets of his life: his impulsiveness and lack of experience. It outlines the philosophical vision of Gracián's world in the form of an epic tale.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709.11.23 – 1751.11.11) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L'homme machine "Machine man" (aka "The Human Mechanism"). Philosophy: considered one of the most influential determinists of 18th c. Along with aiding the furthering of determinism he considered himself a mechanistic materialist. Believed that mental processes were caused by the body. He expressed these thoughts in his most important work L'homme machine. There he also expressed his belief that humans worked like a machine.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895.05.11–1986.02.17): philosopher, speaker and writer. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the Theosophy organization behind it. His subject matter included psychological revolution, the nature of mind, meditation, inquiry, human relationships, and bringing about radical change in society. He constantly stressed the need for a revolution in the psyche of every human being and emphasised that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social.
Theosophical Society: organization formed in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky to advance Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments, currently has several successors. The "World Teacher": Jiddu Krishnamurti
Karl Popper (1902.07.28–1994.09.17): Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th c.'s most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraced ideas from major democratic political ideologies, including socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism, and attempted to reconcile them.
3 Philosophy
3.1 Background to Popper's ideas
3.2 Philosophy of science
3.2.1 Falsifiability and the problem of demarcation
3.2.2 Falsification and the problem of induction
3.3 Rationality
3.4 Philosophy of arithmetic
3.5 Political philosophy
3.5.1 The paradox of tolerance
3.5.2 The "conspiracy theory of society"
3.6 Metaphysics
3.6.1 Truth
3.6.2 Popper's three worlds
3.6.3 Origin and evolution of life
3.6.4 Free will
3.7 Religion and God
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959): about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): work on political philosophy by the philosopher Karl Popper, in which the author presents a "defence of the open society against its enemies", and offers a critique of theories of teleological historicism, according to which history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws. Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.
Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis): association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922.
Frank Ramsey (mathematician) (1903.02.22–1930.01.19): British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908.01.09–1986.04.14): French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905.06.21–1980.04.15): French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.
Albert Camus (1913.11.07–1960.01.04): French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked...".
John Rawls (1921.02.21–2002.11.24): American moral and political philosopher; held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford; magnum opus: A Theory of Justice - "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of WWII" and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy". Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's childhood". Military Service, 1943-46: infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New Guinea and was awarded a Bronze Star; and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed horrific scenes; there, he lost his Christian faith. A Theory of Justice focused on distributive justice and attempted to reconcile the competing claims of the values of freedom and equality; Political Liberalism addressed the question of how citizens divided by intractable religious and philosophical disagreements could come to endorse a constitutional democratic regime; The Law of Peoples focused on the issue of global justice, "well-ordered" peoples could be either "liberal" or "decent".
Gilles Deleuze (1925.01.18–1995.11.04): French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.
Epistemology: Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift." Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."[47] In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine). In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"
Susan Schneider (philosopher): USA philosopher. Work: The Language of Thought; The Metaphysics of Mind; Astrobiology and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.); Uploading, Cognitive Enhancement and the Singularity.
Medical doctors
Archie Cochrane (1909-1988): Scottish doctor noted for his book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. He spent his career urging the medical community to adopt the scientific method; pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials.
Lawyers
Brad Smith (American lawyer) (1959.01.17-): USA attorney and technology executive currently serving as President of Microsoft, concurrently serving as chief legal officer. Smith joined Microsoft in 1993. Smith's application for the job of general counsel in late 2001 included a PowerPoint presentation of a single slide that said: "time to make peace." Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer agreed. By 2014, Smith was the longest serving member of Microsoft's top leadership, and considered "a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large". Smith was promoted to president and chief legal officer of Microsoft in 2015 by CEO Satya Nadella, becoming the first President of Microsoft since Richard Belluzzo in 2002. In these roles, Smith is responsible for Microsoft's corporate, external, and legal affairs, and is also the firm's chief compliance officer.
Tim Wu: professor at Columbia Law School, the former chair of media reform group Free Press, and a writer for Slate Magazine. Specialties: Law & Technology ("net neutrality" was coined by him).
Who Controls the Internet? with Jack Goldsmith.
Public figures
ru:Городские проекты («Городские проекты Ильи Варламова и Максима Каца»): российский некоммерческий фонд, созданный политиком Максимом Кацем и журналистом Ильёй Варламовым, призванный улучшить городскую среду с помощью данных современной урбанистики. Фонду принадлежит ряд инициатив в Москве, встретивших смешанные реакции властей.
Maxim Katz (1984.12.23-): Russian political and public figure, co-founder of the Urban Projects Foundation, author of the YouTube channel of the same name, Russian champion in sports poker, wikipedian, former deputy of the municipal assembly of the Moscow region Schukino (III convocation 2012–2016) from Party "Yabloko".
ru:Кац, Максим Евгеньевич (1984.12.23-): российский политический и общественный деятель, директор фонда «Городские проекты». Автор одноимённого канала на YouTube, первый чемпион России по спортивному покеру, бывший депутат муниципального собрания московского района Щукино (III созыв 2012—2016 годов) от партии «Яблоко»
ru:Варламов, Илья Александрович (1984.01.07-): российский общественный деятель, журналист, предприниматель и видеоблогер. Создатель авторского СМИ на базе блог-платформы «Живой Журнал» (позднее — на Teletype). Основатель рекламно-девелоперского агентства «iCube», сооснователь фонда «Городские проекты», основатель и руководитель фонда сохранения культурного наследия «Внимание». Известен своими фоторепортажами с акций политической оппозиции в России и в мире, а также материалами о городской среде в российских городах. С 2017 года — активно ведёт канал на YouTube под названием «varlamov», в котором Илья большинство материалов посвящает теме урбанистики.
Economists, politicians, political scientists, social scientists, revolutionaries
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767.06.22-1835.04.8): German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949.
Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796.02.17–1866.10.18): German physician, botanist, and traveler. He taught some pupils Western medicine in Japan. He achieved prominence for his study of Japanese flora and fauna, and was the father of female Japanese doctor, Kusumoto Ine.
Henry George (1839.09.02–1897.10.29): USA political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in the 19th century, and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. His writings also inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value derived from land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value tax and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems.
Winston Churchill (1874.11.30 – 1965.01.24): British politician who was the Prime Minister of UK 1940-1945 and 1951-1955. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer (under the pen name Winston S. Churchill), and an artist. Churchill is the only British Prime Minister to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since its inception in 1901, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.
The Second World War (book series): largely responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Churchill wrote the book, with a team of assistants, using both his own notes and privileged access to official documents while still working as a politician; the text was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions throughout the world; overing the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914).
Ludwig von Mises (1881.09.29–1973.10.10): "The captain is the consumer…the consumers determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities…They are merciless egoistic bosses, full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction…In their capacity as buyers and consumers they are hard-hearted and callous, without consideration for other people…Capitalists…can only preserve and increase their wealth by filling best the orders of the consumers… In the conduct of their business affairs they must be unfeeling and stony-hearted because the consumers, their bosses, are themselves unfeeling and stony-hearted." from Human action.
Max Eastman (1883.01.04–1969.03.25): "In 1922, Eastman embarked on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union to learn about the Soviet enactment of Marxism. Upon returning to the United States in 1927, Eastman published several works that were highly critical of the Stalinist system, beginning with Since Lenin Died, which was written in 1925 (description of Lenin's Testament, a copy of which Eastman had smuggled out of Russia). Although Eastman's view of the Soviet Union was sharply altered by his experiences there and by subsequent study, his commitment to left-wing political ideas continued unabated." [...] He published several works in which he criticized James Joyce and other modernist writers who, he claimed, fostered "the Cult of Unintelligibility". These were controversial at a time when the modernists were highly admired. When Eastman had asked Joyce why his book was written in a very difficult style, Joyce famously replied: "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years". Changing political beliefs: In 1941, he was hired as a roving editor for Reader's Digest magazine, a position he held for the remainder of his life. About this time, he also became a friend and admirer of the noted free market economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke. He allied with the American writers James Burnham, John Chamberlain and John Dos Passos. Nobel laureate economist Hayek referred to Eastman's life and to his repudiation of socialism in his widely read The Road to Serfdom.
Friedrich Hayek (1899.05.8 - 1992.03.23)
Milton Friedman (1912.07.31 - 2006.11.16)
Murray Rothbard (1926.03.2 - 1995.01.7)
Hal Varian (Hal Ronald Varian; 1947.03.18-): economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics; Chief Economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information.
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung, Chairman Mao; 1893.12.26–1976.09.09): Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of PRC, which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. Son of a prosperous peasant in Shaoshan, Hunan. He supported Chinese nationalism and had an anti-imperialist outlook early in his life, and was particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. He later adopted Marxism–Leninism while working at Peking University and became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP, Mao helped to found the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land policies, and ultimately became head of the CCP during the Long March. Although the CCP temporarily allied with the KMT under the Second United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), China's civil war resumed after Japan's surrender, and Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan in 1949. In 1955, Mao launched the Sufan movement, and in 1957 he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals and dissidents, were persecuted. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial, which led to the deadliest famine in history and the deaths of 15–55 million people between 1958 and 1962. In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement, and in 1966 he initiated the Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements in Chinese society which lasted 10 years and was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts, and an unprecedented elevation of Mao's cult of personality. Tens of millions of people were persecuted during the Revolution, while the estimated number of deaths ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Liu Shaoqi (1898.11.24–1969.11.12): Chinese (PRC) revolutionary, politician, and theorist. He was Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1954 to 1959, First Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1956 to 1966 and Chairman of the People's Republic of China, the de jure head of state, from 1959 to 1968, during which he implemented policies of economic reconstruction in China. Originally considered as a successor to Mao, Liu antagonized him in the early 1960s before the Cultural Revolution. From 1966 onward, he was purged, imprisoned, and tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution
Vyacheslav Molotov (Вячеслав Михайлович Молотов; né Skryabin (Скрябин); 1890.03.09 [O.S. 25 February] – 1986.11.08): Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the USSR government from the 1920s onward. He served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1941 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. During the 1930s, he ranked second in the Soviet leadership, after Joseph Stalin, whom he supported loyally for over 30 years, and whose reputation he continued to defend after Stalin's death, having himself been deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the Stalin years – the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s, and the Great Purge, during which he signed 373 lists of people condemned to execution.
Polina Zhemchuzhina (Полина Семёновна Жемчужина, born Perl Solomonovna Karpovskaya (Перл Соломоновна Карповская); 1897.02.27–1970.04.01): Soviet politician and the wife of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Zhemchuzhina was the director of the Soviet national cosmetics trust from 1932 to 1936, Minister of Fisheries in 1939, and head of textiles production in the Ministry of Light Industry from 1939 to 1948. In 1948, Zhemchuzhina was arrested by the Soviet secret police, charged with treason, and sent into internal exile, where she remained until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, she was released from captivity by Lavrentiy Beria and reunited with her husband. Her first question upon her release was "How's Stalin?" Upon being told he had died only days before, she fainted.
Samuel P. Huntington (1927.04.18-2008.12.24): influential political scientist from USA whose works covered multiple sub-fields of political science. :
The Clash of Civilizations (and the Remaking of World Order; 1996): theory that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington proposed in 1992 lecture. Divided the world into the "major civilizations" in his thesis as such: Western civilization (USA, EU, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Oceania); Latin American (Mexico and further South); Orthodox world of the former Soviet Union (excluding Baltics & most of Central Asia), Armenia, Georgia, the former Yugoslavia (excluding Slovenia and Croatia), Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Romania; Eastern world (Buddhist (Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand), Chinese/Sinic (PRC/China, ROC/Taiwan, Singapore; Koreas, Vietnam; Chinese diaspora in SEA), Hindu (India, Bhutan, Nepal; Indian diaspora), and Japonic); Muslim world (Greater Middle East (excluding Armenia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Georgia, Israel, Malta and South Sudan), northern West Africa, Albania, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Maldives); civilization of Sub-Saharan Africa (possible 8th civilization by Huntington). Distinct entities: Ethiopia and Haiti ("lone" countries), Israel (very similar to the West), Anglophone Caribbean. "Cleft countries" (kinda "melting pot of USA"?): India (Hindu majority + Muslim minority); Ukraine (Eastern Rite Catholic-dominated western section + Orthodox-dominated east) [2014; 2022 - Huntington was in a way correct]; France (French Guiana + the West); Benin, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Togo (Islam + Sub-Saharan Africa); Guyana and Suriname (Hindu + Sub-Saharan African); China (Sinic + Buddhist (Tibet) + the West (Hong Kong and Macau)); Philippines (Islam (Mindanao) + Sinic + the West); Sudan was "cleft" (Islam and Sub-Saharan Africa) - independence by South Sudan in 2011.01. "The West versus the Rest". "Torn countries": Russia (Orthodox vs West), Mexico (Latin vs West), Turkey (Muslim vs West: if Turkey were to become part of EU, Turkey would be the first to redefine its civilizational identity). Critics: Edward Said: "The Clash of Ignorance" ("the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims"); Noam Chomsky: new justification for the United States (military-industrial complex?) "for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out" (as USSR collapsed);
Dialogue Among Civilizations (Mohammad Khatami);
Alliance of Civilizations was proposed at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005 by the President of the Spanish Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and co-sponsored by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In the
Intermediate Region one cannot speak of a civiliational clash or external conflict, but rather an internal conflict, not for cultural domination, but for political succession (hellenized Roman Empire → Christianity; Byzantine Empire (Christian) → Islamic caliphates; Byzantine + Islamic caliphates → Ottoman rule { Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul}).
Huntington 1996.
Geert Hofstede (1928.10.02-): Dutch social psychologist, former IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations; developing cultural dimensions theory. He describes national cultures as describable along six dimensions: Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation , and Indulgence vs restraint.
Madeleine Albright (1937.05.15): Czechoslovak Jew who became a naturalized USA citizen; the first woman to become the USA Secretary of State.
Jeremy Rifkin (1945.01.26-): economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist; bestselling author of nineteen books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), The European Dream (2004), The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The Age of Access (2000), The Biotech Century (1998), and The End of Work (1995).
Francis Fukuyama (1952.10.27): USA political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.
Religion personalities
Richard Sipe (1932.12.11-): former Benedictine monk-priest of 18 years, a sociologist and author of 6 books about Catholicism American Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor trained specifically to deal with the mental health problems of Roman Catholic Priests
Founders
Aleister Crowley (1875.10.12-1947.12.01; Edward Alexander Crowley, Frater Perdurabo & The Great Beast 666 (To Mega Therion)): English occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, poet and mountaineer, who was responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema; became a member of the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a young man; grounded A∴A∴; rose to become a leader of Ordo Templi Orientis; founded a religious commune in Cefalù known as the Abbey of Thelema (1920-1923).
Rajneesh (1931.12.11–1990.01.19; Chandra Mohan Jain, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Osho): Indian godman and founder of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader and mystic. In the 1960s he traveled throughout India as a public speaker and was a vocal critic of socialism, arguing that India was not ready for socialism and that socialism, communism, and anarchism could evolve only when capitalism had reached its maturity. Rajneesh also criticised Mahatma Gandhi, and the orthodoxy of mainstream religions. Rajneesh emphasized the importance of meditation, mindfulness, love, celebration, courage, creativity, and humour—qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition, and socialisation. In advocating a more open attitude to human sexuality he caused controversy in India during the late 1960s and became known as "the sex guru". In 1974, Rajneesh relocated to Pune, where an ashram was established and a variety of therapies, incorporating methods first developed by the Human Potential Movement, were offered to a growing Western following. Rajneesh's teachings have had a notable impact on Western New Age thought, and their popularity has increased markedly since his death.
Theologians
Paolo Sarpi: had contact with Galileo; was a true Venetian; did a lot for Venice and against Rome, Roman Catholic Church and popes at that time; started on the side of Rome and ended in Venice and with Venice against Rome; maybe helped Galileo to go against Rome as well
Religious study scholars, writers
Paul de Lagarde (1827.11.02–1891.12.22): German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist. He has been cited as one of the greatest orientalists of 19th c. Parallel to his academic work, he attempted to establish a German national religion whose most striking manifestations were an aggressive anti-Semitism and expansionism. The historian Ulrich Sieg classifies his position as follows: "He despised the Christianity that he considered bland and lukewarm and hoped for a folkish religion of the future."
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam: "the notion that historical context should play no role in the interpretation of the Quran – that what applied to Muhammad's community applies to all Muslim communities for all time – is simply an untenable position in every sense"
Albert Schweitzer (1875.01.14–1965.09.04): Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, literally "From Reimarus to Wrede: a History of Life-of-Jesus Research"): 1906 work of Biblical historical criticism written by Albert Schweitzer during the previous year, before he began to study for a medical degree.
Sam Harris (author) (1967.04.09-): father: Quaker background, mother: Jewish. Leaving Stanford in his second year of B.A., he went to India, where he studied meditation with Hindu and Buddhist religious teachers, including Dilgo Khyentse. Eleven years later, in 1997, he returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000. Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at UCLA fMRI research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. Views: religion is especially rife with bad ideas, calling it "one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised"; "We don't have a word for not believing in Zeus, which is to say we are all atheists in respect to Zeus. And we don't have a word for not being an astrologer"; idea of free will is incoherent, humans are not free and no sense can be given to the concept that they might be; postulates that religion is essentially a failed science. Morality and ethics: points out that even the Golden Rule is not unique to any one religion and was taught by such figures as Confucius and the Buddha centuries before the New Testament was written.
Bill Maher (1956.01.20-): USA stand-up comedian, television host, political commentator, satirist, author, and actor; known for his sarcastic attitude, political satire and sociopolitical commentary, which targets a wide swath of topics including religion, politics, bureaucracies of many kinds, political correctness, the mass media, greed among people and persons in positions of high political and social power, and the lack of intellectual curiosity in the electorate. Politics: eschews political labels, referring to himself as "practical"; in the past, he has described himself as a libertarian, and has also referred to himself "as a progressive, as a sane person"; referred to himself as a "9/11 liberal", noting that his formerly liberal view of Muslims changed as a result of the attacks in 2001.09.11, and he differentiates himself from liberals of the opinion that all religions are equal; favors legalization of gambling, prostitution, and marijuana; environmentalist, and he has spoken in favor of the Kyoto treaty on global warming; noted the paradox of people claiming they distrusted "elite" politicians while at the same time wanting elite doctors to treat them and elite lawyers to represent them in court; supports the death penalty; since the 9/11 attacks, he has endorsed the use of racial profiling at airports; gun owner. Religion: Religulous, been described variously as an agnostic, atheist, and apatheist; "I don't know what happens when you die, and I don't care"; "idiots must stop claiming that atheism is a religion. [...] believe it or not, I don't really enjoy talking about religion all the time. In fact, not only is atheism not a religion, it's not even my hobby. And that's the best thing about being an atheist. It requires so little of your time." Health care: "if Jesus was in charge of the country we’d probably have health care for everybody"; expressed the view that most illness is generally the result of poor diet and lack of exercise, and that medicine is often not the best way of addressing illness; "If you believe you need to take all the pills the pharmaceutical industry says you do, then you're already on drugs!".
Rulers, dynasties
Jagiellonian dynasty: royal dynasty, founded by Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, who in 1386 was baptized as Władysław, married Queen regnant (also styled "King") Jadwiga of Poland, and was crowned King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło. The dynasty reigned in several Central European countries between the 14th and 16th centuries. Members of the dynasty were Kings of Poland (1386–1572), Grand Dukes of Lithuania (1377–1392 and 1440–1572), Kings of Hungary (1440–1444 and 1490–1526), and Kings of Bohemia (1471–1526). The personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and GDL (converted in 1569 with the Treaty of Lublin into PLC) is the reason for the common appellation "Poland–Lithuania" in discussions about the area from the Late Middle Ages onward.
The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars...likely to have planets circling around them.... The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge.... Yearning for fresh worlds...they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. – "And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?" – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: "They are among us," he said, "but they call themselves Hungarians."
"
The Martians (scientists)": term used to refer to a group of prominent Jewish Hungarian scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated to the United States in the early half of the 20th c. Leó Szilárd, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians." This account is featured in György Marx's book The Voice of the Martians. Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner are included in this group. Dennis Gabor, Ervin Bauer, Róbert Bárány, George de Hevesy, Nicholas Kurti, George Klein, Eva Klein, Michael Polanyi and Marcel Riesz are also sometimes named, though they did not emigrate to the United States. Loránd Eötvös, Kálmán Tihanyi, Zoltán Lajos Bay, Victor Szebehely, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Georg von Békésy and Maria Telkes are often mentioned in connection.
Multidisciplinary, founders of new (sub)branches of sciences, polymaths, science-politics
Ptolemy (c. 100 - c. 170; Koinē Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Klaúdios Ptolemaîos; Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus): Greek mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt under the rule of the Roman Empire, had a Latin name (which several historians have taken to imply he was also a Roman citizen), cited Greek philosophers, and used Babylonian observations and Babylonian lunar theory. Ptolemy wrote several scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic and Western European science: Almagest (Mathematical Treatise; Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις, Mathēmatikē Syntaxis), Geography (thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world), Apotelesmatika (Tetrabiblos).
Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600 – 1662.03.10): polymath of German origin who settled, married and died in England. He was an active promoter and expert writer in many fields, interested in science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle, whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard, London, in the early 1660s. 'Hartlib circle' {similar to
Salomon's House (Francis Bacon)} →
Invisible College (Robert Boyle) →
Royal Society of London (aka the Royal Society) (
John Wilkins was the founding Secretary of the Royal Society). Wrote in German and English. Civil war in England (Oliver Cromwell paid Hartlib a pension). The glue of intellectuals of Europe.
Hermeticism (Western Hermetic Tradition)
Isaac Newton (1643.01.04-1727.03.31): English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, laid the foundations of classical mechanics; made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing the infinitesimal calculus; built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum, book Opticks. Fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian, who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and who, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, refused to take holy orders in the Church of England. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death.
Religious views of Isaac Newton: considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his contemporaries. He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies and religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646.07.01 [O.S. 21 June] – 1716.11.14): German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, and philology. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He also contributed to the field of library science: while serving as overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany, he devised a cataloging system that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German, but also in English, Italian and Dutch.
Charles Darwin (1809.02.12–1882.04.19): English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839.02.11–1903.04.28): USA scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous deductive science. Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created statistical mechanics (a term that he coined), explaining the laws of thermodynamics as consequences of the statistical properties of ensembles of the possible states of a physical system composed of many particles. Working in relative isolation, he became the earliest theoretical scientist in the United States to earn an international reputation and was praised by Albert Einstein as "the greatest mind in American history". In 1901, Gibbs received what was then considered the highest honor awarded by the international scientific community, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, "for his contributions to mathematical physics". Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband Addison Van Name, who was the Yale librarian. It was Gibbs who first combined the first and second
laws of thermodynamics by expressing the infinitesimal change in the internal energy, dU, of a
closed system in the form: . That Gibbs succeeded in interesting his European correspondents in his work is demonstrated by the fact that his monograph "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" was translated into German (then the leading language for chemistry) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892 and into French by Henri Louis Le Châtelier in 1899. According to Robert A. Millikan, in pure science, Gibbs "did for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (300 pages; 1875-1878): "the Principia of thermodynamics" and as a work of "practically unlimited scope"; solidly laid the foundation for physical Chemistry.
Nikola Tesla (1856.07.10–1943.01.07): Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures.
Ronald Fisher (1890.02.17–1962.07.29): British statistician and geneticist. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors". Developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Fisher held strong views on race. Throughout his life, he was a prominent supporter of eugenics, an interest which led to his work on statistics and genetics. Notably, he was a dissenting voice in the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question, insisting on racial differences.
John von Neumann (1903.12.28-1957.02.08): Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to have been "the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both pure and applied mathematics". He integrated pure and applied sciences. During WWII, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project with theoretical physicist Edward Teller, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and others, problem-solving key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon and coined the term "kiloton" (of TNT) as a measure of the explosive force generated. As a Hungarian émigré, concerned that the Soviets would achieve nuclear superiority, he designed and promoted the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) to limit the arms race, additionally, he played a key role, alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner, in contributing to the development of America's first ICBM programs. Von Neumann was born to a wealthy, acculturated and non-observant Jewish family. His Hungarian birth name was Neumann János Lajos.
Child prodigy: when he was six years old, he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and could converse in Ancient Greek. When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, "What are you calculating?"
Career and private life: Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did. He knew by heart much of the material in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and after dinner liked to engage in various historial discussions. Von Neumann liked to eat and drink. His wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly. Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he enjoyed driving—frequently while reading a book—occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. A later friend of Ulam's, Gian-Carlo Rota, wrote, "They would spend hours on end gossiping and giggling, swapping Jewish jokes, and drifting in and out of mathematical talk." When von Neumann was dying in the hospital, every time Ulam visited, he came prepared with a new collection of jokes to cheer him up. Von Neumann believed that much of his mathematical thought occurred intuitively; he would often go to sleep with a problem unsolved and know the answer upon waking up. Ulam noted that von Neumann's way of thinking might not be visual, but more aural.
Illness and death: In 1955, von Neumann was diagnosed with what was either bone, pancreatic or prostate cancer after he was examined by physicians for a fall, whereupon they inspected a mass growing near his collarbone. The cancer was possibly caused by his radiation exposure during his time in Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was not able to accept the proximity of his own demise, and the shadow of impending death instilled great fear in him.
Mathematics: Set theory (Von Neumann paradox); Proof theory; Ergodic theory; Measure theory; Topological groups; Functional analysis; Operator algebras; Geometry; Lattice theory; Mathematical statistics; Other work in pure mathematics.
Physics: Quantum mechanics (Von Neumann entropy, Quantum mutual information, Density matrix, Von Neumann measurement scheme, Quantum logic); Fluid dynamics; Other work in physics.
Economics: Game theory; Mathematical economics; Linear programming.
Computer science: Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing; Cellular automata, DNA and the universal constructor; Scientific computing and numerical analysis; Weather systems and global warming; Technological singularity hypothesis.
Defense work:
Manhattan Project
Atomic Energy Commission
Mutual assured destruction: Von Neumann's assessment that the Soviets had a lead in missile technology, considered pessimistic at the time, was soon proven correct in the Sputnik crisis. Von Neumann entered government service primarily because he felt that, if freedom and civilization were to survive, it would have to be because the United States would triumph over totalitarianism from Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism. During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
Consultancies.
Personality: He knew Hungarian, French, German and English fluently, and maintained at least conversational level Italian, Yiddish, Ancient Latin and Greek. His Spanish was less perfect, but once on a trip to Mexico he tried to create his own "neo-Castilian" mix of English and Spanish; Mathematical style.
Recognition: Cognitive abilities: Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man", and later Bethe wrote that "[von Neumann's] brain indicated a new species, an evolution beyond man". Seeing von Neumann's mind at work, Eugene Wigner wrote, "one had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch." Accolades and anecdotes were not limited to those from the physical or mathematical sciences either, neurophysiologist Leon Harmon, described him in a similar manner, "Von Neumann was a true genius, the only one I’ve ever known. I’ve met Einstein and Oppenheimer and Teller and—who’s the mad genius from MIT? I don’t mean McCulloch, but a mathematician. Anyway, a whole bunch of those other guys. Von Neumann was the only genius I ever met. The others were supersmart .... And great prima donnas. But von Neumann’s mind was all-encompassing. He could solve problems in any domain. ... And his mind was always working, always restless."
Legacy: "It seems fair to say that if the influence of a scientist is interpreted broadly enough to include impact on fields beyond science proper, then John von Neumann was probably the most influential mathematician who ever lived," wrote Miklós Rédei in John von Neumann: Selected Letters. James Glimm wrote: "he is regarded as one of the giants of modern mathematics". Mastery of mathematics.
Qian Xuesen (钱学森; 1911.12.11–2009.10.31): Chinese mathematician, cyberneticist, aerospace engineer, and physicist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. Recruited from MIT, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at Caltech. During the Second Red Scare, in the 1950s, the US federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues, he was stripped of his security clearance. He decided to return to mainland China, but he was detained at Terminal Island, near Los Angeles. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. Upon his return, he helped lead the Chinese nuclear weapons program. This effort ultimately led to China's first successful atomic bomb test and hydrogen bomb test, making China the fifth nuclear weapons state, and achieving the fastest fission-to-fusion development in history. Additionally, Qian's work led to the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry".
Graph with the benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself and causes to others. According to Carlo M. Cipolla. Intelligent people contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits. Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (and especially by the "bandit" sector of it); note, however, that extreme altruists and pacifists may willingly and consciously (rather than helplessly) accept a place in this category for moral or ethical reasons. Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare. Stupid people's efforts are counterproductive to both their and others' interests. Ineffectual people.
Carlo M. Cipolla (1922.08.15–2000.09.05): The Fundamental Laws of Human Stupidity. Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.
Stephen Wolfram (1959.08.29-): GB scientist known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics; book A New Kind of Science. Founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he worked as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. As a young child, Wolfram initially struggled in school and had difficulties learning arithmetic; at the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics; by 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics. PhD in particle physics on 1979.11.19 at age 20; Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field. Complex systems and cellular automata. Symbolic Manipulation Program → Mathematica.
John Ioannidis (1965.08.21-): Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. Best known for his research and published papers on scientific studies, particularly the 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". Ioannidis is one of the most-cited scientists across the scientific literature, especially in the fields of clinical medicine and social sciences, according to Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researchers 2015.
Daniel J. Bernstein (djb; 1971.10.29-): USA German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer programmer. He is a professor ("persoonlijk hoogleraar") in the department of mathematics and computer science at the TU Eindhoven, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fibonacci (Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Bigollo Pisano; c. 1170 – c. 1240–50): Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be "the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages". Fibonacci popularized the Indo–Arabic numeral system in the Western world primarily through his composition in 1202 of Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). Fibonacci sequence
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887.12.22–1920.04.26): Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research. Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. In 1919, ill health—now believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously)—compelled Ramanujan's return to India, where he died in 1920 at the age of 32. A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. Mathematicians' views of Ramanujan: Hardy: "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"
Frank P. Ramsey (1903.02.22-1930.01.19): British Mathematician; close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus from de to en). Economical contributions: "how much of its income should a nation save?" (1928; mathematical theory of saving). Died young due to chronic liver problems.
Jaron Lanier (1960.05.03-): USA computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of virtual reality (a term he is credited with popularizing), Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. From 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 forward he works at Microsoft Research as Interdisciplinary Scientist. Wikipedia and the omniscience of collective wisdom: Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. You Are Not a Gadget (2010). Who Owns the Future (2013).
Geoffrey Hinton (1947.12.06-): a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. Since 2013 he divides his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto. In 2017, he cofounded and became the Chief Scientific Advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto. With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularized the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks, although they were not the first to propose the approach. Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community. The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision. Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning". Hinton has petitioned against lethal autonomous weapons. Regarding existential risk from artificial intelligence, Hinton typically declines to make predictions more than five years into the future, noting that exponential progress makes the uncertainty too great. However, in an informal conversation with the AI risk researcher Nick Bostrom in November 2015, overheard by journalist Raffi Khatchadourian, he is reported to have stated that he did not expect general A.I. to be achieved for decades (“No sooner than 2070”), and that, in the context of a dichotomy earlier introduced by Bostrom between people who think managing existential risk from artificial intelligence is probably hopeless versus easy enough that it will be solved automatically, Hinton "[is] in the camp that is hopeless." He has stated, "I think political systems will use it to terrorize people" and has expressed his belief that agencies like NSA are already attempting to abuse similar technology. Hinton does not categorically rule out human beings controlling an artificial superintelligence, but warns that "there is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence".
Alan Kay (1940.05.17-): USA computer scientist; best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:
I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me.
Ole Rømer (1644.09.25–1710.09.19; also "Roemer", "Römer", or "Romer"): Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light; also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points, namely the points at which water respectively boils and freezes.
Rømer's determination of the speed of light: demonstration in 1676 that light has a finite speed, and so does not travel instantaneously. The discovery is usually attributed to Danish astronomer Ole Rømer, who was working at the Royal Observatory in Paris at the time. By timing the eclipses of the Jupiter moon Io, Rømer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. This would give light a velocity of about 220,000 km/s, about 26% lower than the true value.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742.07.01–1799.02.24): German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile; the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany; remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. Lichtenberg became a hunchback owing to a malformation of his spine. This left him unusually short, even by 18th-century standards. Over time, this malformation grew worse, ultimately affecting his breathing. Proposed the standardized paper size system used globally today (except in Canada and the US) defined by ISO 216, which has A4 as the most commonly used size. Since the initial publications, however, notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to have contained sensitive materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are now preserved in Göttingen University.
Nikola Tesla (1856.07.10–1943.01.07): Serbian-USA inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Marie Curie (Marie Skłodowska Curie; born Maria Salomea Skłodowska; 1867.11.07–1934.07.04): the woman who won 2 Nobel prizes: 1903 Physics ("in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel", Pierre Curie, Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel), 1911 Chemistry ("in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium {in honor of her native Poland}, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element", Marie Curie alone; she did not patent the radium-isolation process, so that the scientific community could do research unhindered).
Lise Meitner (Elise Meitner, 1878.11.07–1968.10.27): Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of Nature in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during WWII, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
Otto Robert Frisch (1904.10.01–1979.09.22): Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner (his aunt) he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940. During the Christmas holiday in 1938, he visited his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv. While there she received the news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced the element barium as one of its byproducts. Hahn, in a letter to Meitner, called this new reaction a "bursting" of the uranium nucleus. Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that the uranium nucleus had split in two, explained the process, and estimated the energy released, and Frisch coined the term fission, adopted from a process in biology, to describe it. Political restraints of the Nazi era forced the teams of Hahn and Strassmann and that of Frisch and Meitner (both of whom were Jewish) to publish separately. Hahn's paper described the experiment and the finding of the barium byproduct. Meitner's and Frisch's paper explained the physics behind the phenomenon.
Albert Einstein (1879.03.14–1955.04.18): German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. Specializing in physics and mathematics, he received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (eidgenössische polytechnische Schule, later ETH) in Zürich in 1900. The following year, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for his entire life. After initially struggling to find work, from 1902 to 1909 he was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, called his annus mirabilis, he published four groundbreaking papers, which attracted the attention of the academic world; the first outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, the second paper explained Brownian motion, the third paper introduced special relativity, and the fourth mass-energy equivalence. That year, at the age of 26, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. In 1914, he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he remained for 19 years. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting USA, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany. He settled in USA and became an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of WWII, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting FDR to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan Project. He was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein stated that he believed in the pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified however that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever." Einstein also stated he did not believe in life after death, adding "one life is enough for me." He was closely involved in his lifetime with several humanist groups. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein was more inclined to denigrate atheists than religious people. Einstein said in correspondence, "[T]he fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot hear the music of the spheres." Although he did not believe in a personal God, he indicated that he would never seek to combat such belief because "such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook." Einstein, in a one-and-a-half-page hand-written German-language letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, dated Princeton, New Jersey, 1954.01.03, a year and three and a half months before his death, wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this. [...] For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. [...] I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them [the Jewish people]." "As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indoctrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws."
Leo Szilard (born Leó Spitz; 1898.02.11–1964.05.30): Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. Szilard was the first scientist of note to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory. In addition to the nuclear reactor, Szilard coined and submitted the earliest known patent applications and the first publications for the concepts of electron microscope (1928), the linear accelerator (1928), and the cyclotron (1929) in Germany, proving him as the originator of the idea of these devices. Between 1926 and 1930, he worked with Einstein on the development of the Einstein refrigerator. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Szilard urged his family and friends to flee Europe while they still could. Foreseeing another war in Europe, Szilard moved to the United States in 1938, where he worked with Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn on means of creating a nuclear chain reaction. He was present when this was achieved within the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942.12.02. He worked for the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on aspects of nuclear reactor design. He drafted the Szilard petition advocating a demonstration of the atomic bomb, but the Interim Committee chose to use them against cities without warning. He publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, a new kind of nuclear weapon that might annihilate mankind. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, he underwent a cobalt-60 treatment that he had designed. He helped found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he became a resident fellow.
Ernest Lawrence (1901.08.08–1958.08.27): pioneering USA nuclear scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
de:Werner Heisenberg (1901.12.05-1976.02.01,
Werner Heisenberg): German theoretical physicist and one of the key creators of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg war musisch begabt, und er spielte recht gut Klavier.
Paul Dirac (1902.08.08–1984.10.20): English theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." In another letter concerning the Compton effect he wrote, "I don't understand the details of Dirac at all."
Early years: Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who died by suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much ... I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew." Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919. Dirac's father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a strained relationship with his father, so much so that after his father's death, Dirac wrote, "I feel much freer now, and I am my own man." Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French so that they might learn the language. When Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent. University of Bristol. University of Cambridge: He completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere. He then continued his research in Copenhagen and Göttingen. In the spring of 1929, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Family: In 1937, Dirac married Margit Wigner, a sister of physicist Eugene Wigner and a divorcee. Dirac raised Margit's two children, Judith and Gabriel, as if they were his own. Paul and Margit Dirac also had two daughters together, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica. Margit, known as Manci, had visited her brother in 1934 in Princeton, New Jersey, from their native Hungary and, while at dinner at the Annex Restaurant, met the "lonely-looking man at the next table". This account from a Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else".
Personality: Dirac criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?"
Career: Dirac established the most general theory of quantum mechanics and discovered the relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name. The remarkable notion of an antiparticle to each fermion particle – e.g. the positron as antiparticle to the electron – stems from his equation. He was the first to develop quantum field theory, which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or "elementary" particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of the forces of nature.
Quantum theory: Dirac was famously not bothered by issues of interpretation in quantum theory. In fact, in a paper published in a book in his honour, he wrote: "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things."
The Dirac equation; Magnetic monopoles; Gravity; University of Cambridge - Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969; Florida State University and University of Miami - After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research. His last paper (1984), entitled "The inadequacies of quantum field theory," contains his final judgment on quantum field theory: "These rules of renormalisation give surprisingly, excessively good agreement with experiments. Most physicists say that these working rules are, therefore, correct. I feel that is not an adequate reason. Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observation does not prove that one's theory is correct." The paper ends with the words: "I have spent many years searching for a Hamiltonian to bring into the theory and have not yet found it. I shall continue to work on it as long as I can and other people, I hope, will follow along such lines."
Students: Polkinghorne recalls that Dirac "was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations."
Honours: Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".
Dirac large numbers hypothesis: observation made by Paul Dirac in 1937 relating ratios of size scales in the Universe to that of force scales. The ratios constitute very large, dimensionless numbers: some 40 orders of magnitude in the present cosmological epoch. According to Dirac's hypothesis, the apparent similarity of these ratios might not be a mere coincidence but instead could imply a cosmology with these unusual features:
The strength of gravity, as represented by the gravitational constant, is inversely proportional to the age of the universe:
The mass of the universe is proportional to the square of the universe's age: .
Physical constants are actually not constant. Their values depend on the age of the Universe.
Edward Teller (1908.01.15–2003.09.09): a Hungarian-USA theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he claimed he did not care for the title; numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular, the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects) and surface physics. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality, and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." Like Einstein and Feynman, Teller was a late talker. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller. When he was a young student, his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident in Munich, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot, and leaving him with a lifelong limp. Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. In 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community, but was still quite welcome in the government and military science circles. Teller was one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. For some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular. In 1991 he was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". He was also rumored to be one of the inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film of the same name (others speculated to be RAND theorist Herman Kahn, mathematician John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara).
Frank Oppenheimer (1912.08.14–1985.02.03): USA particle physicist, cattle rancher, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment. After the war, Oppenheimer's earlier involvement with the American Communist Party placed him under scrutiny, and he resigned from his physics position at the University of Minnesota. Oppenheimer was a target of McCarthyism and was blacklisted from finding any physics teaching position in USA until 1957, when he was allowed to teach science at a high school in Colorado. This rehabilitation allowed him to gain a position at the University of Colorado teaching physics.
David Bohm (1917.12.20–1992.10.27): USA scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was targeted during the McCarthy era, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. His main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but rather an unending process of movement and unfoldment. "So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction". "...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything – that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us."
Richard Feynman (1918.05.11-1988.02.15) American theoretical physicist. Quantum electrodynamics: path integral formulation & Feynman diagrams; superfluidity; model of weak decay. Teacher/professor and books based on his lectures at CalTech. Born in Queens, NY, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, his father from Minsk in Russian Empire. Like Einstein and Edward Teller, Feynman was a late talker, and by his third birthday had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new; from his mother he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life; as a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they didn't look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the d's. In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree, and was named a Putnam Fellow; he attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal, and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and blackmailed him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. That this sort of behavior was illegal was not overlooked; Feynman had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but eventually decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in 1959.06. She made a point of dating other men but Feynman proposed in the spring of 1960. They were married on 1960.09.24 at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Feynman tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech; also tried marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness; gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911.07.09–2008.04.13): USA theoretical physicist; largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in USA after WWII. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission.
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912.05.31–1997.02.16): Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".
Lev Landau (1908.01.22-1968.04.01): prominent USSR physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C). Born to Jewish parents in Baku; learned to differentiate at age 12 and to integrate at age 13. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at the Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, and the Department of Chemistry. Subsequently he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.
Wang Ganchang (1907.05.28–1998.12.10): nuclear physicist from China.
Julian Schwinger (1918.02.12-1994.07.16) American theoretical physicist. Theory of QED; for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
Paul Peter Ewald (1888.01.23-1985.08.22): German-born American crystallographer and physicist; pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods.
Hans Bethe (1906.07.02-2005.03.06): German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis (CNO cycle). Professor at Cornell University. Married Ewald's daughter.
Steven Weinberg (1933.05.03–2021.07.23): USA theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Stephen Hawking (1942.01.08-): English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. Theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set forth a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Suffers from a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of ALS. He now communicates using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device.
Edward Witten (1951.08.26-): USA mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.
Chemists
Fritz Haber (1868.12.09–1934.01.29): German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilisers and explosives. It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponising chlorine and other poisonous gases during WWI. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement, to develop Zyklon B, used for the extermination of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Haber was forced to resign from his positions because he was Jewish. Already in poor health, he spent time in various countries, before Chaim Weizmann invited him to become the director of the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, Mandatory Palestine. He accepted the offer, but died of heart failure mid-journey in a Basel hotel aged 65. Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.
Otto Hahn (1879.03.08–1968.07.28): German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. A graduate of the University of Marburg, which awarded him a doctorate in 1901, Hahn studied under Sir William Ramsay at University College London and at McGill University in Montreal under Ernest Rutherford, where he discovered several new radioactive isotopes. He returned to Germany in 1906; Emil Fischer placed a former woodworking shop in the basement of the Chemical Institute at the University of Berlin at his disposal to use as a laboratory. Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907 and became a Privatdozent. In 1912, he became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Working with the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner in the building that now bears their names, he made a series of groundbreaking discoveries, culminating with her isolation of the longest-lived isotope of protactinium in 1918. He was an opponent of national socialism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazi Party that caused the removal of many of his colleagues, including Meitner, who was forced to flee Germany in 1938. During WWII, he worked on the German nuclear weapons program, cataloguing the fission products of uranium. Hahn served as the last president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in 1946 and as the founding president of its successor, the Max Planck Society from 1948 to 1960. In 1959 he co-founded in Berlin the Federation of German Scientists, a non-governmental organization, which has been committed to the ideal of responsible science. As he worked to rebuild German science, he became one of the most influential and respected citizens of the post-war West Germany. History: Discovery of radiothorium and other "new elements"; Discovery of mesothorium I; Discovery of radioactive recoil; Marriage to Edith Junghans; WWI; Discovery of protactinium; Discovery of nuclear isomerism; Applied Radiochemistry - In 1966, Glenn T. Seaborg: "In fact, I read the entire volume repeatedly and I recall that my chief disappointment with it was its length. It was too short."; National socialism; Rubidium–strontium dating; Discovery of nuclear fission; WWII; Incarceration (Operation Epsilon);
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944: 1945.11.16 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei." Hahn was still at Farm Hall when the announcement was made; thus, his whereabouts were a secret, and it was impossible for the Nobel committee to send him a congratulatory telegram. Instead, he learned about his award on 18 November through the Daily Telegraph. His fellow interned scientists celebrated his award by giving speeches, making jokes, and composing songs. Hahn gave 10,000 krona of his prize to Strassmann, who refused to use it.
Founder and President of the Max Planck Society: The suicide of Albert Vögler in 1945.04.14 left the KWS without a president. The British chemist Bertie Blount was placed in charge of its affairs while the Allies decided what to do with it, and he decided to install Max Planck as an interim president. Now aged 87, Planck was in the small town of Rogätz, in an area that the Americans were preparing to hand over to the Soviet Union. The Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper from the Alsos Mission fetched Planck in a jeep and brought him to Göttingen on 16 May. Planck wrote to Hahn, who was still in captivity in England, 1945.07.25, and informed Hahn that the directors of the KWS had voted to make him the next president, and asked if he would accept the position. Hahn did not receive the letter until September, and did not think he was a good choice, as he regarded himself as a poor negotiator, but his colleagues persuaded him to accept. After his return to Germany, he assumed the office on 1 April 1946. However, the British, who had voted against the dissolution, were more sympathetic, and offered to let the Kaiser Wilhelm Society continue in the British Zone, on one condition: that the name be changed. Hahn and Heisenberg were distraught at this prospect. To them it was an international brand that represented political independence and scientific research of the highest order. Hahn noted that it had been suggested that the name be changed during the Weimar Republic, but the Social Democratic Party of Germany had been persuaded not to. To Hahn, the name represented the good old days of the German Empire, however authoritarian and undemocratic it was, before the hated Weimar Republic. Heisenberg asked Niels Bohr for support, but Bohr recommended that the name be changed. Lise Meitner wrote to Hahn.
Spokesman for social responsibility;
Irving Langmuir (1881.01.31–1957.08.16): USA American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis. While at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, Langmuir advanced several fields of physics and chemistry, inventing the gas-filled incandescent lamp and the hydrogen welding technique. In fiction: According to author Kurt Vonnegut, Langmuir was the inspiration for his fictional scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker in the novel Cat's Cradle. The character's invention of ice-nine eventually destroyed the world by seeding a new phase of ice water.
George M. Sheldrick (1942.11.17-): British chemist who specialises in molecular structure determination. He is one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011. Sheldrick was awarded a Major Scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. He specialised in chemistry in his final year. He graduated in 1963 with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. PhD 1966: investigation of inorganic hydrides using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and was title "N.M.R. Studies of Inorganic Hydrides".
Biologists, medicine doctors, physicians, medical researchers
Medical researchers, biochemists
Erasistratus (Ἐρασίστρατος; c. 304 – c. 250 BC): Greek anatomist and royal physician under Seleucus I Nicator of Syria. Along with fellow physician Herophilus, he founded a school of anatomy in Alexandria, where they carried out anatomical research. He is credited for his description of the valves of the heart, and he also concluded that the heart was not the center of sensations, but instead it functioned as a pump. Erasistratus was among the first to distinguish between veins and arteries. He is credited with one of the first in-depth descriptions of the cerebrum and cerebellum.
Galen (Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus; September 129 AD – c. 200/c. 216): Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Arguably the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic. Born in Pergamon, Galen travelled extensively, exposing himself to a wide variety of medical theories and discoveries before settling in Rome, where he served prominent members of Roman society and eventually was given the position of personal physician to several emperors. His theories dominated and influenced Western medical science for more than 1,300 years. His anatomical reports, based mainly on dissection of monkeys, especially the Barbary macaque, and pigs, remained uncontested until 1543, when printed descriptions and illustrations of human dissections were published in the seminal work De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius where Galen's physiological theory was accommodated to these new observations. Galen saw himself as both a physician and a philosopher, as he wrote in his treatise entitled That the Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868.05.14-1935.05.14): German physician and sexologist; outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which Dustin Goltz called "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights."
Félix d'Hérelle (1873.04.25–1949.02.22): French-Canadian microbiologist. He was co-discoverer of bacteriophages and experimented with the possibility of phage therapy. D'Herelle has also been credited for his contributions to the larger concept of applied microbiology. Guatemala and Mexico; Return to France; France and phages; Egypt; India; United States and commercial failures; Soviet Union: Tbilisi, Georgia, he was welcomed to the Soviet Union as a hero, bringing knowledge of salvation from diseases ravaging the eastern states, D'Hérelle worked at the Tbilisi Institute off and on for about a year; Final return to France.
Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883.10.08–1970.08.01): Warburg investigated the metabolism of tumors and the respiration of cells, particularly cancer cells, and in 1931 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his "discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme". In 1935, Hitler had a polyp removed from his vocal cords. It is believed that afterwards, he feared that could develop cancer, which may have allowed Warburg to survive. In 1941, Warburg lost his post briefly, when he made critical remarks about the regime but a few weeks later a personal order from Hitler's Chancellery ordered him to resume work on his cancer research. Göring also arranged for him to be classified as one-quarter Jewish. Warburg’s combined work in plant physiology, cell metabolism and oncology made him an integral figure in the later development of systems biology. {q.v.
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Jonas Salk (1914.10.28 - 1995.06.23): USA medical researcher and virologist, best known for discovery of the first polio vaccine. When asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"; founded Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
James Collins (Boston University): USA bioengineer, professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, HHMI investigator; fundamental discoveries regarding the actions of antibiotics and the emergence of resistance.
Drew Berry: biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. Collaborated with Björk on Biophilia.
Giulio Superti-Furga (1962.05.17-): Italian molecular and systems biologist; most significant scientific achievements to date are the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers and the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome of higher organisms. His work has directly contributed to a systems-level understanding of pathogen infections in host cells and of the mechanism of action of specific drugs. He is an advocate for the adoption of systems biology approaches for medicine and in particular for drug discovery and aims to bridge basic research and the clinical world.
Shinya Yamanaka (山中 伸弥, Yamanaka Shin'ya; 1962.09.04-): Japanese stem cell researcher, winner of the Nobel Prize. He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Yamanaka is also a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).
Abraham Ortelius (1527.04.14-1598.06.28): Flemish cartographer and geographer, generally recognized as the creator of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World); also believed to be the first person to imagine that the continents were joined together before drifting to their present positions.
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (printed: 1570.05.20, Antwerp): considered to be the first true modern atlas; consisted of a collection of uniform map sheets and sustaining text bound to form a book for which copper printing plates were specifically engraved. The Ortelius atlas is sometimes referred to as the summary of sixteenth-century cartography.
Ortelius World Map "Typvs Orbis Terrarvm" 1570.
Science writers, encyclopedists
Louis de Jaucourt (1704.09.16-1799.02.03): French scholar and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote about 18,000 articles on subjects including physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history, or about 25% of the entire encyclopedia, all done voluntarily.
Historians
Tacitus (Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus; AD 56 - after 117): senator and a historian of the Roman Empire; surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors. Other writings by him discuss oratory (in dialogue format, Dialogus de oratoribus), Germania (in De origine et situ Germanorum), and the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, the Roman general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain, mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia (De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae). Known for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.
Alexis de Tocqueville: (1805.07.29–1859.04.16) was a French diplomat, political scientist and historian. Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856): analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. Argued the importance of the French Revolution was to continue the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state which had begun under King Louis XIV. The failure of the Revolution came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals. Tocqueville was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government, but he was skeptical of the extremes of democracy.
Bernard Lewis (1916-): British-American historian, scholar in Oriental studies, and political commentator. Armenian genocide; Views on Islam.
Norman Davies (Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies; 1939.06.08-) &
Template:Davies (Books by Norman Davies): English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and UK.
God's Playground (: a history of Poland; 1979): vol I - origins to 1795; vol II - 1795 to the present.
Managers, management theorists
Peter Drucker (esp.
Peter Drucker#Key ideas): concepts: knowledge worker, worker is the best company's asset, serve customers and derive profit from that, decentralization & simplification, outsourcing; NGO and non-profits will become more important (these "organizations" and "philosophical societies" are replacing religion very fast; people donate money to these non-profits/NGOs because they have "faith" in them)
Management by objectives (MBO): process of defining objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they need to do in the organization in order to achieve them.
W. Edwards Deming (1900.10.14-1993.12.20): American statistician, professor, author, lecturer and consultant. In Japan, from 1950 onwards, he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.
PDCA (plan–do–check–act, plan–do–check–adjust; Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control circle/cycle, plan–do–study–act (PDSA)): iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products.
Intellectual property
Benjamin Mako Hill: Debian/Ubuntu/Linux; One Laptop per Child; serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Ubuntu Community Council, the Free Software Foundation.
Donald Knuth (1938.01.10-): creator of TeX (it was before HTML/internet/MP3s were even in the dreams!). Fun:
Knuth reward check.
WEB: computer programming system created by Donald E. Knuth as the first implementation of what he called "literate programming": the idea that one could create software as works of literature, by embedding source code inside descriptive text, rather than the reverse (as is common practice in most programming languages), in an order that is convenient for exposition to human readers, rather than in the order demanded by the compiler. WEB consists of two secondary programs: TANGLE, which produces compilable Pascal code from the source texts, and WEAVE, which produces nicely-formatted, printable documentation using TeX.
Larry Tesler (1945.04.24–2020.02.16): computer scientist working on human-computer interaction; worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazano, Yahoo. Made
Gypsy (software) (the first document preparation system based on mouse and GUI to eliminate modes; 2nd WYSIWYG doc preparation system). Has strong preference for modeless software, in which a user action has a consistent effect; license plate "NO MODES"; been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years as a rally cry to eliminate or reduce modes.
Mitch Kapor (1950.11.01): founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Joel Spolsky (1965-): worked at Microsoft on Excel 4.0 and 5.0 and VBA (1991); Fog Creek Software (2000); Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow & co)
Jeff Atwood (1970-):
Coding Horror programming blog; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange Network (2012.02.06 left Stack Exchange to have time with family); "Atwood's Law" (corollary to the Rule of least power design principle): any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript. His new company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.: open source next-generation discussion platform called Discourse (2013.02.05-).
Tom Preston-Werner (1979.10.28-): CEO of GitHub, one of the 3 founders. "The efficiency of large groups working together is very low in large enterprises. We want to change that…Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow." (same like Valve)
Jamie Zawinski (jwz; 1968.11.03-): USA impresario, computer programmer, and blogger. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco. Notable Quotes: Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can"; Now you have two problems: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems"; "Linux is only free if your time has no value". Principles: Zawinski first attained prominence as a Lisp programmer, but most of his larger projects are written in C. Despite that, he has long been critical of languages lacking memory safety and automatic storage management. He has particularly proselytized against C++. Though he has written and published many utilities in Perl, he is not without his criticisms, characterizing Perl as "combining all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript."
Ben Horowitz (1966.06.13-): USA businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Andreessen. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups, and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.
Marc Andreessen (1971.07.09-): USA businessman and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Luis von Ahn (1978.08.19-): helped on CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, Duolingo.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-): professor of Anthropology and director of the program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. Organ trade: she investigated an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel.
Victor H. Mair (1943.03.25-): USA sinologist. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers. Mair specializes in early written vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the Dao De Jing (the Mawangdui Silk Texts version), the Zhuangzi and The Art of War; long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script (viz., pinyin), which he considers advantageous for Chinese education, computerization, and lexicography.
Engineers and inventors
{q.v.
Ada Lovelace
Nikola Tesla
Howard Hughes
Rony Abovitz
Trevor Blackwell
James Collins
}
Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – 1468.02.03): German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.
Vannevar Bush (1890.03.11-1974.06.28): USA engineer, inventor, science administrator. Work on analog computers; WWII: initiation and administration of Manhattan project, proximity fuze; founder of Raytheon; memex: analogous to the structure of WWW or Wikipedia or PC-human interface; from his science administration starts the huge military-industrial complex in the USA.
"
As We May Think" (1945.07): essay by Vannevar Bush; memex: collective memory machine, cross-referencing (hyperlinking) system. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified" - Wikipedia; "The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk"
Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890.12.18–1954.02.01): fought till his death against regulations and corporations
Walter Dornberger (1895.09.06–1980.06.26): German Army artillery officer whose career spanned World War I and World War II. He was a leader of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket programme and other projects at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre. Postwar: Along with some other German rocket scientists, Dornberger was released and brought to the United States under the auspices of Operation Paperclip and worked for the United States Air Force for three years, developing guided missiles. From 1950 to 1965, he worked for the Bell Aircraft Corporation, where he worked on several projects, rising to the post of Vice-President. He played a major role in the creation of the North American X-15 aircraft and was a key consultant for the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar project. He also had a role on the creation of ideas and projects, which, in the end, led to the creation of the Space Shuttle. Dornberger also developed Bell's ASM-A-2, the world's first guided nuclear air-to-surface missile developed for the Strategic Air Command. Dornberger advised West Germany on a European space program. During the 1950s he had some differences with von Braun and was instrumental in recruiting several engineers out of the Huntsville's team for Air Force projects. The most remarkable of them was Krafft Ehricke, who later created the Centaur rocket stage and actively participated in several more Defense projects. Following retirement, Dornberger went to Mexico and later returned to West Germany, where he died in 1980 in Baden-Württemberg.
Wernher von Braun (1912.03.23–1977.06.16): German and USA aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. As a young man, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during WWII. The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space in 1944.06.20. Following the war, he was secretly moved to USA, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip. He worked for USA Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the USA's first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in USA and beyond from 1955 to 1957. In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science.
Dean Kamen (1951.04.05-) is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT, as well as founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. Kamen holds over 1,000 patents.
Fravia (Francesco Vianello; 1952.08.30–2009.05.03): software reverse engineer, and hacker, who maintained a web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. He also worked on steganography. He taught on subjects such as data mining, anonymity and stalking.
Jim Keller (engineer): (1958/1959-): microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture (including the original Athlon 64) and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015, he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures. Jim Keller's wife, Bonnie, is the sister of Canadian author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Architects
Albert Kahn (architect) (1869.03.21–1942.12.08): USA industrial architect. He was accredited the architect of Detroit and designed industrial plant complexes such as the Ford River Rouge automobile complex. He designed the construction of Detroit skyscrapers and office buildings as well as mansions in the city suburbs. He led an organization of hundreds of architect associates and in 1937, designed 19% of all architect-designed industrial factories in the United States. Under a unique contract in 1929, Kahn established a design and training office in Moscow, sending twenty-five staff there to train Soviet architects and engineers, and to design hundreds of industrial buildings under their first five-year plan. They trained more than 4,000 architects and engineers using Kahn's concepts. In Soviet Union: 1929.05.08, through an agreement signed with Kahn by Saul G. Bron, President of Amtorg, the Soviet government contracted Albert Kahn Associates to help design the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the first tractor plant in the USSR. 1930.01.09, a second contract with Kahn was signed for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in USSR.
Artists
Jaron Lanier: famous for virtual reality; computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism": the works made by many are not as good as the work made by several or one very interested into the topic person, e.g. online encyclopedia - Wikipedia vs. what? Capitalism vs. Maoism in creating anything new and innovative: financial incentive is very strong, "open source and free and open content" is giving little incentive; BUT: art in the end is for its own end, nobody had to pay to van Gogh while he still lived for his drawings - only after his death people started to see value in these drawings.
Painters/drawers
Albrecht Dürer, self-portrait.
Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze (active 1343 – 1377): Italian painter active in Florence. Andrea di Bonaiuto is known for his stained glass window of the Coronation of Mary in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and his fresco decorations in the Spanish chapel (then called Cappellone degli Spagnoli) of the chapter house there. The central theme of the fresco's in the Spanish chapel is the glorification of the Dominican Order. From mid 1366 to mid 1367 Andrea di Bonaiuto was one of the artists advising on the construction of the Florence Cathedral.
Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528): German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I. Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are more Gothic than the rest of his work. Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance.
Aubrey Beardsley (1872.08.21–1898.03.16): English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style) figures.
Theater/Cartoons/Animation/Cinema/movies
Stanley Kubrick (1928.07.26–1999.03.07): USA film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and photographer. Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century", and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinematic history. His films, which are typically adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres, and are noted for their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music. A demanding perfectionist, he assumed control over most aspects of the filmmaking process, from direction and writing to editing, and took painstaking care with researching his films and staging scenes, working in close coordination with his actors and other collaborators. He often asked for several dozen retakes of the same scene in a movie, which resulted in many conflicts with his casts. Despite the resulting notoriety among actors, many of Kubrick's films broke new ground in cinematography. Kirk Douglas: "You don't have to be a nice person to be extremely talented. You can be a shit and be talented and, conversely, you can be the nicest guy in the world and not have any talent. Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit". Peter Sellers: "Kubrick is a god as far as I'm concerned". William Friedkin: "Speaking personally, I think Stanley Kubrick is the best American film-maker of the year. In fact, not just this year, but the best, period". Kubrick explained: "Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try" ... "When you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself".
Stanley Kubrick's personal life and beliefs: Michael Herr: "Stanley had views on everything, but I would not exactly call them political... He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist." Kubrick: "Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure." Kubrick: "2001 would give a little insight into my metaphysical interests... I'd be very surprised if the universe wasn't full of an intelligence of an order that to us would seem God-like. I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside the Earth."; "When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans."; "The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, 2001 shows that what some people call "god" is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call "god"..." Jack Nicholson recalls that Kubrick said The Shining is an overall optimistic story because "anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story."
Normal lens: lens that reproduces a field of view that generally looks "natural" to a human observer under normal viewing conditions, as compared with lenses with longer or shorter focal lengths which produce an expanded or contracted field of view that distorts the perspective when viewed from a normal viewing distance. For still photography, a lens with a focal length about equal to the diagonal size of the film or sensor format is considered to be a normal lens; its angle of view is similar to the angle subtended by a large-enough print viewed at a typical viewing distance equal to the print diagonal; this angle of view is about 53° diagonally. For cinematography, where the image is normally viewed at a greater distance, a lens with a focal length of roughly double the film or sensor diagonal is considered 'normal'.
Long-focus lens: camera lens which has a focal length that is longer than the diagonal measure of the film or sensor that receives its image
Wide-angle lens: lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a normal lens for a given film plane
Linear magnification vs axial magnification:
Magnification (Linear or transverse magnification; Angular magnification)
Perspective distortion (photography) (axial magnification (related concept) - the perceived depth of objects at a given magnification): warping or transformation of an object and its surrounding area that differs significantly from what the object would look like with a normal focal length, due to the relative scale of nearby and distant features. Perspective distortion takes two forms: extension distortion and compression distortion, also called wide-angle distortion and long-lens or telephoto distortion.
Carl von Ossietzky (3 October 1889 – 4 May 1938): German pacifist and the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize; convicted of high treason and espionagein 1931 after publishing details of Germany's alleged violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force, the predecessor of the Luftwaffe, and training pilots in the Soviet Union.
CryptoParty: grassroots global endeavor to introduce the basics of practical cryptography such as the Tor anonymity network, key signing parties, TrueCrypt, and virtual private networks to the general public.
Whistleblowers
Thomas Andrews Drake: persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. 2011.06.09 all 10 original charges against him were dropped.
William Binney (U.S. intelligence official): former highly placed intelligence official with NSA turned whistleblower who resigned on 2001.10.31, after more than 30 years with the agency. He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and was the subject of FBI investigations, including a raid on his home in 2007.
Thomas Tamm: former attorney in the United States Department of Justice Office of Intelligence Policy and Review during the period in 2004 when senior Justice officials fought against the widening scope of warrantless NSA surveillance that consisted of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. He was an anonymous whistleblower to The New York Times, making the initial disclosure regarding the issue.
Russ Tice: former intelligence analyst; in 2005.12 Tice helped spark a national controversy over claims that the NSA and the DIA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens.
Edward Snowden: disclosure of PRISM and FISA orders related to NSA data capture efforts was an effort to blow the whistle on what he believes is excessive government surveillance of the American people. Technology: three big impacts (on IT industry, industrial espionage): increased interest in encryption, business leaving US companies, reconsideration of the safety of cloud technology. [2013/12]
Edward Snowden asylum in Russia: part of the aftermath from the global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. 2013.06.23 Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport. Observing that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, Russian authorities restricted him to the airport terminal. On August 1, after 39 days in the transit section, Snowden left the airport. He was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year. 2014.08.07, six days after Snowden's one-year temporary asylum expired, his Russian lawyer announced that Snowden had received a three-year residency permit. It allowed him to travel freely within Russia and to go abroad for up to three months. In 2020.10, after Snowden applied to renew his temporary permit, Russia granted him unlimited permanent residency. In 2020.11, Snowden announced that he and his wife were applying for Russian citizenship, but that they "remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love". [21/08/29]
Adrian Lamo (1981.02.20-): American threat analyst and former hacker. Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest. In 2010, Lamo reported U.S. soldier PFC Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning) to federal authorities, claiming that Manning had leaked hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. Manning was arrested and incarcerated in the U.S. military justice system and later sentenced to 35 years in confinement.
People with disabilities
Helen Keller (1880.06.27-1968.06.01): USA author, political activist, and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at the age of nineteen months. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan, who taught her language, including reading and writing; Sullivan's first lessons involved spelling words on Keller's hand to show her the names of objects around her. She also learned how to speak and to understand other people's speech using the Tadoma method. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, she attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter; met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain.
Virtual real people
Anshe Chung (Ailin Graef): first online millionaire; made fortune from/in Second Life.
Jon Jacobs (actor) (Neverdie, NEVERDIE; 1966.09.10): English actor, entrepreneur, director, producer, writer and creator of the avatar Neverdie; made money in Entropia Universe.
Infamous people
Ted Bundy (Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell); 1946.11.24-1989.01.24): USA serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier.
Typhoid Mary (1869.09.23-1938.11.11; better known as Typhoid Mary): was the first person in USA identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was presumed to have infected 53 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook. She was twice forcibly isolated by public health authorities and died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation.
Stu Ungar (1953.09.08-1998.11.22): professional poker, blackjack, and gin rummy player, widely regarded to have been the greatest Texas hold 'em and gin rummy player of all time. Betting, drugs (cocaine) and divorce. Gameplay: ultra-aggressive playing style and well-timed bluffs.
Jason Somerville (1987.04.15) is an American professional poker player and Team PokerStars Pro specializing in Texas Hold'em.
Chris Moneymaker (1975.11.21-): USA poker player who won the main event at the 2003 WSOP. His 2003 win is said to have "revolutionized poker" because he was the "first person to become a world champion by qualifying" at an online poker site.
Demis Hassabis (1976.07.27-) is AI researcher, neuroscientist, computer game designer, and world-class gamer; child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335, and is 4 days older than Hassabis) and captained many of the England junior chess teams. In 2011, he co-founded and was CEO of DeepMind Technologies, a London-based machine learning startup, specializing in building general-purpose learning algorithms. Hassabis won the world games championship (called the 'Pentamind') at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times, prior to his retirement from competitive play in 2003, and at the time was regarded as the best all-round games player in the world. He is an expert player of many games including chess, Diplomacy, shogi and poker. He has cashed at the World Series of Poker six times including in the Main Event. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/EECS#Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning}
Judit Polgár (1976.07.23-) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player in history. In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She is the youngest ever player, to date, to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, being ranked No. 55 in the January 1989 rating list, at the age of 12. Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family. Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a "socialist" approach. They also received criticism at the time from some western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.
Warriors, soldiers, generals
Ernest J. King (1878.11.23–1956.06.25): fleet admiral in USA Navy who served as Commander in Chief, USA Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) during WWII. As COMINCH-CNO, he directed the USA Navy's operations, planning, and administration and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was USA Navy's second most senior officer in WWII after Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, King was appointed as Commander in Chief of USA Fleet. Surface ships; Submarines; Aviation: Among King's accomplishments was to corroborate Admiral Harry E. Yarnell's 1932 war game findings in 1938 by staging his own successful simulated naval air raid on Pearl Harbor, showing that the base was dangerously vulnerable to aerial attack, although he was taken no more seriously than his contemporary until 1941.12.07, when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the base by air for real.; WWII: King's career was resurrected by his friend, Admiral Harold "Betty" Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) who realized King's talent for command was being wasted on the General Board. Stark appointed him Commander, Atlantic Squadron, in 1940. In December 1940 King said the US was already at war with Germany. After turning 64 in 1942.11.23, he wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt to say he had reached mandatory retirement age. Roosevelt replied with a note reading, "So what, old top?". In January 1941 King issued Atlantic Fleet directive Cinclant Serial 053, encouraging officers to delegate and avoid micromanagement, which is still cited widely in today's armed forces. King was advocate of the “Japan First” approach, as opposed to the Europe First position that was eventually agreed upon. He has been heavily criticized for ignoring British advice regarding convoys and up-to-date British intelligence on U-boat operations in the Atlantic, leading to high losses among the US Merchant Marine.
Lauri Törni (28 May 1919 – 18 October 1965; later known as Larry Alan Thorne): Finnish born USA soldier who fought under three flags: as a Finnish Army officer in the Winter War and the Continuation War ultimately gaining a rank of captain; as a Waffen-SS captain (under the alias Larry Lane) of the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen-SS when he fought the Red Army on the Eastern Front in WWII; and as US Army Major (under the alias "Larry Thorne") when he served in the US Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War. Törni died in a helicopter crash during the Vietnam War and he was promoted to the rank of major posthumously. His remains were located three decades later and then buried in Arlington National Cemetery; he is the only former member of the Waffen-SS known to be interred there.
Europeans
Male line of Landsberg, Landsbergis, Landsbergis-Žemkalnis families:
lt:Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis (1852.11.02-1916.11.28): dramaturgas, publicistas, teatro veikėjas, draudžiamosios lietuviškos spaudos platintojas.
Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis: Lithuanian playwright and activists of the early Lithuanian amateur theater. Born to an old noble family, Landsbergis attended Šiauliai Gymnasium where his friend Petras Vileišis encouraged him to speak Lithuanian and support the Lithuanian National Revival. After finishing a telegraph school in Riga in 1871, he worked at the telegraph offices in Moscow and Crimea. He returned to Lithuania in 1884 and joined the Lithuanian cultural life. He contributed articles to the illegal Lithuanian periodicals Varpas and Ūkininkas and his house was a gathering place of many Lithuanian intellectuals. Due to these activities, he was forced to leave Lithuania in 1894 but continued to maintain contacts with Lithuanian activists. He was arrested and imprisoned for ten weeks in 1900 and sentenced to two years of exile in Smolensk in 1902. He returned in 1904 and became administrator of Vilniaus žinios, the first legal Lithuanian daily established by Petras Vileišis. At the same time, Landsbergis devoted his energy to the Lithuanian amateur theater.
lt:Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis (1893.03.10–1993.05.21 [100 y.o.!]): inžinierius architektas.
Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis: Lithuanian modernist architect most active in interwar Lithuania (1926–1939). Landsbergis studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. During WWI, he was drafted to the Imperial Russian Army and completed a school for junior officers. Upon return to Lithuania, he joined the newly established Lithuanian Army and fought in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence. He was taken prisoner by Poland, but managed to escape. He then continued his studies of architecture at the Higher School of Architecture in Rome (now a department of the Sapienza University). Landsbergis returned to Lithuania in 1926 and became one of the most popular and sought-after architects in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania. He was one of the leaders of a group of about 40 modernist architects working in Kaunas. Eight of his buildings were included in a group 44 buildings awarded the European Heritage Label in 2015. Overall, the modernist architecture of interwar Kaunas has been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2017. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Lithuanians started the anti-Soviet June Uprising, Landsbergis became the minister of infrastructure in the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania. When his son Gabrielius was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944, Landsbergis followed his son from one prison to another until Gabrielius was freed by the Americans in April 1945. Landsbergis became a displaced person (DP) and taught at a Lithuanian DP camp and later at the University of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Munich. In 1949, he emigrated to Australia and worked there as an architect at the Housing and Construction Department in Melbourne. In 1959, he returned to Kaunas in Soviet Lithuania and worked as architect and restorer of monuments until retirement in 1984.
lt:Vytautas Landsbergis (1932.10.18): lietuvių politikas, visuomenės veikėjas, meno, muzikos ir kultūros istorikas.
Vytautas Landsbergis: Lithuanian politician and former Member of the European Parliament. He was the first Head of Parliament of Lithuania after its independence declaration from USSR. He has written 20 books on a variety of topics, including a biography of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, as well as works on politics and music. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Landsbergis entered politics, in 1988, as one of the founders of Sąjūdis. After Sąjūdis' victory in the 1990 elections, he became the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Lithuania. Landsbergis was somewhat critical of certain Western powers (such as USA and UK/GB) for not showing enough support in Lithuania's bid to restore its independence after more than 40 years of Soviet occupation, although he did accept the recommendation from his government that the newly independent Lithuania immediately seek to establish full diplomatic relations with the UK and USA. In 1993, Landsbergis led much of Sąjūdis into a new political party, the Homeland Union (Tėvynes Sąjunga). It gained a landslide victory in the 1996 parliamentary elections.
Creation science (scientific creationism): pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
Rejection of evolution by religious groups (creation–evolution controversy, the creation vs. evolution debate, the origins debate): in accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact. Any such debate is universally considered religious, not scientific, by professional scientific organizations worldwide: in the scientific community, evolution is accepted as fact, and efforts to sustain the traditional view are universally regarded as pseudoscience. While the controversy has a long history, today it has retreated to be mainly over what constitutes good science education, with the politics of creationism primarily focusing on the teaching of creationism in public education. Among majority-Christian countries, the debate is most prominent in USA, where it may be portrayed as part of a culture war. Parallel controversies also exist in some other religious communities, such as the more fundamentalist branches of Judaism and Islam. In Europe and elsewhere, creationism is less widespread (notably, the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion both accept evolution), and there is much less pressure to teach it as fact.
Young Earth creationism: form of creationism which holds as a central tenet that the Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by supernatural acts of the God of Abraham between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. In its most widespread version, YEC is based on the religious belief in the inerrancy of certain literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis. Its primary adherents are Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six literal days, in contrast with old Earth creationism.
Omphalos (book) (Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot; 1857 (two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species)): book by Philip Gosse, in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is. The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why Adam (who would have had no mother) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry. Thus, the name of the book, Omphalos, which means 'navel' in Greek. Darwin is mentioned several times within the book, but always with considerable respect. Gosse had attended meetings at the Royal Society where evolutionary theory was tested by Darwin before the publication of Origin—and had even made similar observations himself about variation of species in his own studies into marine biology—and considered Darwin's reasoning scientifically sound.
Quantum mysticism: set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered by most scientists and philosophers to be pseudoscience or quackery. In 1961 Eugene Wigner wrote a paper, titled Remarks on the mind–body question, suggesting that a conscious observer played a fundamental role in quantum mechanics, a part of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. Appropriation by New Age thought
Moon landing conspiracy theories: claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969–1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples. Conspiracists have managed to sustain public interest in their theories for more than 40 years, despite the rebuttals and third-party evidence. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked.
Big Pharma conspiracy theory: which claim that the medical establishment in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular operate for sinister purposes and against the public good. Manifestations: Alternative treatments, HIV/AIDS, Hidden cancer cure. In 2016 David Robert Grimes published a research paper elaborating about the mathematical non-viability of conspiracy theories in general. He specifically showed that if there was an actual big pharma conspiracy to conceal a cure for cancer that it would take about 3.2 years for it get exposed due to the sheer number of people required to keep it secret.
Rupert Sheldrake (1942.06.28-): English author, and researcher in the field of parapsychology, who proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture which lacks mainstream acceptance and has been characterised as pseudoscience. Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development, inheritance, and memory.
European Committee for Standardization (fr: Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN); founded 1961): national members work together to develop European Standards (ENs) in various sectors to build a European internal market for goods and services and to position Europe in the global economy; officially recognised as a European standards body by EU
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abcdeDanilovic, Vesna. "When the Stakes Are High—Deterrence and Conflict among Major Powers", University of Michigan Press (2002), pp 27, 225–228
(PDF chapter downloads)(PDF copy).
^
abcdefgT. V. Paul; James J. Wirtz; Michel Fortmann (2005).
Balance of Power. United States of America: State University of New York Press, 2005. pp. 59, 282.
ISBN0791464016. Accordingly, the great powers after the Cold War are Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States p.59
^
abcdefgSterio, Milena (2013).
The right to self-determination under international law : "selfistans", secession and the rule of the great powers. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. p. xii (preface).
ISBN978-0415668187. Retrieved 13 June 2016. ("The great powers are super-sovereign states: an exclusive club of the most powerful states economically, militarily, politically and strategically. These states include veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia), as well as economic powerhouses such as Germany, Italy and Japan.")
^
abcdefgBaron, Joshua (22 January 2014). Great Power Peace and American Primacy: The Origins and Future of a New International Order. United States: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN978-1137299482.
^Chalmers, Malcolm (May 2015).
"A Force for Order: Strategic Underpinnings of the Next NSS and SDSR"(PDF). Royal United Services Institute. Briefing Paper (SDSR 2015: Hard Choices Ahead): 2. While no longer a superpower (a position it lost in the 1940s), the UK remains much more than a 'middle power'.
^Walker, William (22 September 2015).
"Trident's Replacement and the Survival of the United Kingdom". International Institute for Strategic Studies, Global Politics and Strategy. 57 (5): 7–28. Retrieved 31 December 2015. Trident as a pillar of the transatlantic relationship and symbol of the UK's desire to remain a great power with global reach.
^Best, Antony; Hanhimäki, Jussi; Maiolo, Joseph; Schulze, Kirsten (2008). International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. United States of America:
Routledge. p. 9.
ISBN978-0415438964.
^Carter, Keith Lambert (2019).
Great Power, Arms, And Alliances. Retrieved 25 January 2021. U.S., Russia, China, France, Germany, U.K. and Italy - Table on page 56,72 (Major powers-great power criteria)
^Kuper, Stephen.
"Clarifying the nation's role strengthens the impact of a National Security Strategy 2019". Retrieved 22 January 2020. Traditionally, great powers have been defined by their global reach and ability to direct the flow of international affairs. There are a number of recognised great powers within the context of contemporary international relations – with Great Britain, France, India and Russia recognised as nuclear capable great powers, while Germany, Italy and Japan are identified as conventional great powers
^"The
Prime Minister of Canada (during the
Treaty of Versailles) said that there were 'only three major powers left in the world the United States, Britain and Japan' ... (but) The Great Powers could not be consistent. At the instance of Britain, Japan's ally, they gave Japan five delegates to the Peace Conference, just like themselves, but in the Supreme Council the Japanese were generally ignored or treated as something of a joke." from
MacMillan, Margaret (2003). Paris 1919. United States of America: Random House Trade. p. 306.
ISBN0-375-76052-0.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP): combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide. Authors contributing to the encyclopedia give Stanford University the permission to publish the articles, but retain the copyright to those articles.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): scholarly online encyclopedia, dealing with philosophy, philosophical topics, and philosophers. The IEP combines open access publication with peer reviewed publication of original papers. Contribution is generally by invitation, and contributors are recognized and leading international specialists within their field.
Philosophy (φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom'): study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Historically, philosophy encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a philosopher. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics. Today, major subfields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of existence and reality; epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge and belief; ethics, which is concerned with moral value; and logic, which studies the rules of inference that allow one to derive conclusions from true premises. Other notable subfields include philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.
Historical overview: Western philosophy: Ancient era (Greco-Roman), Medieval era, Modern era; Middle Eastern philosophy: Pre-Islamic philosophy, Islamic philosophy; Eastern philosophy: Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, East Asian philosophy (CJKV); African philosophy; Indigenous American philosophy; Women in philosophy.
Branches of philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic, Other subfields: Mind and language, Philosophy of science, Political philosophy, Philosophy of religion, Metaphilosophy.
Phenomenology (philosophy) (φαινόμενον, phainómenon "that which appears" and λόγος, lógos "study"): philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th c. by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
Escapism: mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an "escape" from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life. It can also be used as a term to define the actions people take to help relieve persisting feelings of depression or general sadness (boredom?). J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Karl Marx (religion - "opium of the people")
Digital philosophy: direction in philosophy and cosmology advocated by certain mathematicians and theoretical physicists, e.g., Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse; grew out of an earlier digital physics (both terms are due to Fredkin), which proposes to ground much of physical theory in cellular automata.
Dream argument: postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality. Synopsis: While one dreams, one does not normally realize one is dreaming. On more rare occasions, the dream may be contained inside another dream with the very act of realizing that one is dreaming, itself, being only a dream that one is not aware of having. This has led philosophers to wonder whether it is possible for one ever to be certain, at any given point in time, that one is not in fact dreaming, or whether indeed it could be possible for one to remain in a perpetual dream state and never experience the reality of wakefulness at all. In Western philosophy this philosophical puzzle was referred to by Plato (Theaetetus 158b-d), Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011a6), and the Academic Skeptics. It is now best known from René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In Eastern philosophy this type of argument is sometimes referred to as the "Zhuangzi paradox" ("The Butterfly Dream"). The Yogachara philosopher Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century C.E.) referenced the argument in his "Twenty verses on appearance only." Simulated reality and Simulation hypothesis. René Descartes: "Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once." Critical discussion: In the past, philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have separately attempted to refute Descartes's account of the dream argument. Locke claimed that you cannot experience pain in dreams. Various scientific studies conducted within the last few decades provided evidence against Locke's claim by concluding that pain in dreams can occur, but on very rare occasions. Philosopher Ben Springett has said that Locke might respond to this by stating that the agonizing pain of stepping in to a fire is non-comparable to stepping in to a fire in a dream. Hobbes claimed that dreams are susceptible to absurdity while the waking life is not.
Dehellenization: disillusionment with Greek Philosophy stemming from the Hellenistic Period and the use of reason in particular, usually committed by a religion or faith-based system. Coined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 during his speech entitled “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections,” in order to refer to the attempt of some recent scholars to separate Christianity from Greek philosophical thought.
Platonic Academy: founded by Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) in ca. 387 BC in Athens. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) studied there for twenty years (367 BC – 347 BC) before founding his own school, the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic period as a skeptical school, until coming to an end after the death of Philo of Larissa in 83 BC.
Socrates (470/469 – 399 BC): classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. He is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Plato's dialogues are among the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity, though it is unclear the degree to which Socrates himself is "hidden behind his 'best disciple', Plato". As British philosopher Martin Cohen has put it, "Plato, the idealist, offers an idol, a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of 'the Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic." For a time, Socrates fulfilled the role of hoplite, participating in the Peloponnesian war—a conflict which stretched intermittently over a period spanning 431 to 404 B.C. Several of Plato's dialogues refer to Socrates' military service. Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on the pursuit of virtue rather than the pursuit, for instance, of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. It is argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. In Plato's dialogue the Republic, Socrates openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates found short of ideal any government that did not conform to his presentation of a perfect regime led by philosophers, and Athenian government was far from that. It is, however, possible that the Socrates of Plato's Republic is colored by Plato's own views.
Socratic problem: term for the situation in the history of scholarship with respect to the existing materia pertaining to the individual known as Socrates which scholars rely upon as the only extant sources for knowing anything at all about this individual, but when compared, show contradictions and do not agree. It is apparent to scholarship (c.2011) that this problem is now deemed a task seeming impossible to clarify and thus perhaps now classified as unsolvable. It is widely understood that in later dialogues Plato used the character Socrates to give voice to views that were his own. Besides Plato, three other important sources exist for the study of Socrates: Aristophanes, Aristotle, and Xenophon.
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire œuvre is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. In addition to being a foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, and mathematics, Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality, particularly Christianity, which Friedrich Nietzsche, amongst other scholars, called "Platonism for the people."
Epistles (Plato): series of thirteen letters traditionally included in the Platonic corpus. Their authenticity has been the subject of some dispute, and scholarly consensus has shifted back and forth over time.
Epicureanism: system of philosophy based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus—about whom very little is known—Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" is the greatest good, but the way to attain such pleasure is to live modestly and to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of one's desires. This led one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia). The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure to be the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life makes it different from "hedonism" as it is commonly understood. Epicurus defined justice as an agreement "neither to harm nor be harmed". It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly (agreeing "neither to harm nor be harmed"), and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Existence precedes essence: central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Since the world "in-itself" is absurd, that is, not "fair", then a meaningful life can at any point suddenly lose all its meaning; Albert Camus, for instance, famously claimed in Le Mythe de Sisyphe that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Pessimism: mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. Philosophical pessimism is the related idea that views the world in a strictly anti-optimistic fashion. This form of pessimism is not an emotional disposition as the term commonly connotes. Instead, it is a philosophy or worldview that directly challenges the notion of progress and what may be considered the faith-based claims of optimism. Philosophical pessimists are often existential nihilists believing that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Etymology: first used by Jesuit critics of Voltaire's 1759 novel 'Candide, ou l'Optimisme', in their attacks on Voltaire, the Jesuits of the Revue de Trévoux accused him of pessimisme. Ancient Greeks; Baltasar Gracián; Voltaire; Voltaire; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"); Giacomo Leopardi; Arthur Schopenhauer, Post-Schopenhauerian pessimism; Friedrich Nietzsche; Albert Camus.
Solipsism (solus 'alone', and ipse 'self'): philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
Ancient philosophy: philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history (c. 600 CE). Ancient Chinese philosophy: Hundred Schools of Thought; Early Imperial China. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy: Pre-Socratic philosophers; Classical Greek philosophers; Hellenistic philosophy; Hellenistic schools of thought; Early Roman and Christian philosophy; Philosophers during Roman times. Ancient Indian philosophy: Vedic philosophy; Sramana philosophy; Classical Indian philosophy; Ancient Indian philosophers: Philosophers of Vedic Age (c. 1500 – c. 600 BCE), Philosophers of Axial Age (600–185 BCE), Philosophers of Golden Age (184 BCE – 600 CE). Ancient Iranian philosophy: Schools of thought: Zoroastrianism, Pre-Manichaean thought, Manichaeism, Mazdakism, Zurvanism; Philosophy and the Empire; Literature. Ancient Jewish philosophy: First Temple (c. 900 to 587 BCE), Assyrian exile (587 to 516 BCE), Second Temple (516 BCE to 70 CE), Second Temple (516 BCE to 70 CE).
Graphical relationship among the various pre-socratic philosophers and thinkers; red arrows indicate a relationship of opposition.
Pre-Socratic philosophy: early Greek philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of these early philosophers spanned the workings of the natural world as well as human society, ethics, and religion. They sought explanations based on natural law rather than the actions of gods. Their work and writing has been almost entirely lost. Knowledge of their views comes from testimonia, i.e. later authors' discussions of the work of pre-Socratics. Philosophy found fertile ground in the ancient Greek world because of the close ties with neighboring civilizations and the rise of autonomous civil entities, poleis. Pre-Socratic philosophy began in the 6th century BCE with the three Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They all attributed the arche (a word that could take the meaning of "origin," "substance" or "principle") of the world to, respectively, water, apeiron (the unlimited), and air governed by nous (mind or intelligence). Another three pre-Socratic philosophers came from nearby Ionian towns: Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. Xenophanes is known for his critique of the anthropomorphism of gods. Heraclitus, who was notoriously difficult to understand, is known for his maxim on impermanence, ta panta rhei, and for attributing fire to be the arche of the world. Pythagoras created a cult-like following that advocated that the universe was made up of numbers. The Eleatic school (Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Melissus) followed in the 5th century BCE. Parmenides claimed that only one thing exists and nothing can change. Zeno and Melissus mainly defended Parmenides' opinion. Anaxagoras and Empedocles offered a pluralistic account of how the universe was created. Leucippus and Democritus are known for their atomism, and their views that only void and matter exist. The Sophists advanced critical thinking and philosophical relativism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889.04.26–1951.04.29): Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: the only book-length philosophical work published by the German-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project – to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science – and is recognized as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century.
Haidbauer incident (Der Vorfall Haidbauer): took place in April 1926 when Josef Haidbauer, an 11-year-old schoolboy in Otterthal, Austria, reportedly collapsed unconscious after being hit on the head during class by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Apology: "Last year with God's help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then."
Ontology
Mathematical universe hypothesis (Ultcimate Ensemble): speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by the cosmologist Max Tegmark.
Epistemology (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē 'knowledge', and -logy): branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. The Gettier problem
Private language argument: argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent, and was introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later work, especially in the Philosophical Investigations. The argument was central to philosophical discussion in the second half of the 20th c.
Seriousness: attitude of gravity, solemnity, persistence, and earnestness toward something considered to be of importance. Some notable philosophers and commentators have criticised excessive seriousness, while others have praised it. Seriousness and comedy; detecting presence and absence of seriousness in humor; detecting degree of seriousness in developmental psychology; measuring degree of seriousness in crime; medical triage; cultural variation in measurement and detection (of seriousness).
Finite and Infinite Games (1986): book by religious scholar James P. Carse. Finite vs. infinite games: "There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants..." Theatrical vs. Dramatic: If motherhood is a requirement and a duty, there are rules to be obeyed and goals to be achieved. This is motherhood as theatrical role. If motherhood is a choice and a process, it becomes a living drama.
The Infinite Game (2019): book by Simon Sinek, applying ideas from James P. Carse's similarly titled book, Finite and Infinite Games to topics of business and leadership. As Sinek explains, finite games (e.g. chess and football) are played with the goal of getting to the end of the game and winning, while following static rules. Every game has a beginning, middle, and end, and a final winner is distinctly recognizable. In contrast, infinite games (e.g. business and politics) are played for the purpose of continuing play rather than to win. Sinek claims that leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, aligned with infinite play, will build stronger, more innovative, inspiring, resilient organizations, though these benefits may accrue over larger timescales than benefits associated with a finite mindset.
Waist–hip ratio (WHR): 0.8-0.9 in Africa, S. America; 0.7 in Indo-European, 0.6 in China.
The four most common female body shapes: banana (straight, rectangular), apple (triangle downward), pear (spoon, bell, triangle upward), and hourglass (triangles opposing, facing in)
Physical attractiveness: Sexual dimorphism; Symmetry; Body scent; Genetics; Hairiness; Skin color
Apollonian and Dionysian: philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, loosely based on Apollo and Dionysus in Greek mythology. Some Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche and later followers. In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, and appeals to emotions and instincts. The Ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although often the two deities were entwined by nature.
Entertainment: something that holds the attention and interest of an audience, or gives pleasure and delight; can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience's attention; storytelling, music, drama, dance, and different kinds of performance exist in all cultures. Entertainment evolves and can be adapted to suit any scale, ranging from an individual who chooses a private entertainment from a now enormous array of pre-recorded products; to a banquet adapted for two; to any size or type of party, with appropriate music and dance; to performances intended for thousands; and even for a global audience. Amusement, fun, laughter; serious entertainment (e.g. ceremony, celebration, religious festival, or satire). Audience turns a private recreation or leisure activity into entertainment; passive audience for play, opera, television show, or film; active: games (participant/audience roles may be routinely reversed). Public or private; unscripted and spontaneous vs formal, scripted performance. Some activities that once were considered entertaining, particularly public punishments, have been removed from the public arena; fencing or archery were necessary skills - now are serious sports and professions, developing into entertainment. Entertainment for one group or individual may be regarded as work by another.
Woodstock (Woodstock Music & Art Fair, Woodstock Festival; White Lake, NY, USA; 1969: 500,000 concert-goers)
Wave-Gotik-Treffen (1987: Potsdam, GDR; 1992: Eiskeller club, Leipzig, DE): considered the largest gothic festival on this planet. "Dark music": Gothic rock, Gothic Metal, Dark Electro, EBM, Industrial, Noise, Darkwave, Neofolk, Neoclassical, Medieval Music, Acoustic Folk, Experimental, Deathrock, Symphonic Metal, Punk... Goth-, Cybergoth-, Steampunk and Rivethead- subcultures.
de:Wave-Gotik-Treffen: Seit Jahren bezeichnen Antifa-Gruppen das Wave-Gotik-Treffen als „Nazi-Treffen“. Antifa-Gruppen kritisieren, Besucher mit Uniformen, die den Uniformen der Schutzstaffel oder der Wehrmacht zum Verwechseln ähnlich seien, würden toleriert. Die Veranstalter betonen, ein unpolitisches Festival auszurichten, distanzieren sich jedoch nicht von rechts. {dressing style from sci-fi/neo-Victorians and a bit of military, rave: steampunk, cyberpunk, the Matrix, the Dark City, militaristic fashion}
Fusion Festival (Lärz, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, DE): slogan: "5 days of Holiday communism"; political theme: pronounced anti-fascist, anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-homophopia and of course somewhat anti-government.
Teknival: large free parties which take place worldwide; grown out of the rave, UK traveller and Burning Man scenes and spawned an entire subculture; summer time. French Teknivals (Teknival negotiators deal directly with the Ministry of Interior, not the Ministry of Culture (with whom the commercial ventures seeking official status must deal) indicating that they are largely not cultural but security concerns); UK Teknivals; Czech Teknivals; Bulgarian Teknivals
Legendary Entertainment (Legend Pictures, LLC): USA media company based in Burbank, CA. The company was founded by Thomas Tull in 2000 and in 2005, concluded an agreement to co-produce and co-finance films with Warner Bros. In 2014, Legendary began a similar arrangement with Universal Studios. Since 2016, Legendary has been a subsidiary of the Chinese, PRC, conglomerate Wanda Group ($3.5 bln purchase).
Political philosophy
Category:Political philosophy (study of topics such as politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a laws by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.)
Hyperreality: in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world. Some famous theorists of hyperreality/hyperrealism include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman and Umberto Eco. Key relational themes: Simulation; Simulacrum. Definitions: "A real without origin or reality" – Jean Baudrillard; "The authentic fake" – Umberto Eco. Examples: Disneyland; Filmography: Existenz; Other examples: In A Clockwork Orange when Alex says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" when he undergoes Ludovico's Technique, Second Life.
Philosophical zombie (p-zombie): in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that from the outside is indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie was poked with a sharp object it would not feel any pain sensation, yet could behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch", recoil from the stimulus, and say that it is feeling pain).
Abstraction: thought process in which ideas are distanced from objects. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification of detail, wherein formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus speaking of things in the abstract demands that the listener have an intuitive or common experience with the speaker, if the speaker expects to be understood.
Map–territory relation: relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself. The relationship has also been expressed in other terms, such as Alan Watts's "The menu is not the meal." The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[6] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").
Systems thinking: process of understanding how those things which may be regarded as systems influence one another within a complete entity, or larger system. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization "healthy" or "unhealthy".
Humanity, survival of humanity, economics, natural resources:
The Limits to Growth (1972, LTG): book about the computer modeling of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies. The report's findings suggest that in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization, it is highly likely that there would be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity. Despite facing severe criticism and scrutiny upon its initial release, subsequent research aimed at verifying its predictions consistently supports the notion that there have been inadequate modifications made since 1972 to substantially alter its essence.
World3: model is a system dynamics model for computer simulation of interactions between population, industrial growth, food production and limits in the ecosystems of the Earth. It was originally produced and used by a Club of Rome study that produced the model and the book The Limits to Growth. ince World3 was originally created it has had minor tweaks to get to the World3/91 model used in the book Beyond the Limits, later improved to get the World3/2000 model distributed by the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research and finally the World3/2004 model used in the book Limits to growth: the 30 year update. Model: Agricultural system, Nonrenewable resources system, Reference run predictions.
Beyond the Limits (1992): book continuing the modeling of the consequences of a rapidly growing global population that was started in Limits to Growth.
Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996; by Joseph Tainter): paper on energy economics. "Industrialism illustrates this point. It generated its own problems of complexity and costliness. <...> such elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy." "<...> Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations." "Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be."
Twelve leverage points (1997; by Donella Meadows): She started with the observation that there are levers, or places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being, an ecosystem, an ecoregion) where a "small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". Leverage points to intervene in a system: 1. Power to transcend paradigms; 2. Mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises from; 3. Goal of the system; 5. Rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints); 6. Structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information); 7. Gain around driving positive feedback loops; 8. Strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the effect they are trying to correct against; 9. Length of delays, relative to the rate of system changes; 10. Structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures); 11. The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows; 12. Constants, parameters, numbers.
Natural Capitalism (1999 book by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins): "next industrial revolution" depends on the espousal of four central strategies: "the conservation of resources through more effective manufacturing processes, the reuse of materials as found in natural systems, a change in values from quantity to quality, and investing in natural capital, or restoring and sustaining natural resources"
Cybernetics: transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. In the 21st century, the term is often used in a rather loose way to imply "control of any system using technology;" this has blunted its meaning to such an extent that many writers avoid using it.
Norbert Wiener (1894.11.26–1964.03.18): USA mathematician and philosopher; famous child prodigy. Early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. Considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback. Strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, whose government he advised during the 1950s. Wiener equation; Wiener filter
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950; revised 1954): argues for the benefits of automation to society. It analyzes the meaning of productive communication and discusses ways for humans and machines to cooperate, with the potential to amplify human power and release people from the repetitive drudgery of manual labor, in favor of more creative pursuits in knowledge work and the arts. People could be free to expand their minds, pursue artistic careers, while automatons take over assembly line production to create necessary commodities. These machines must be "used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf". Automatons must not be taken for granted, because with advances in technology that allow them to learn, the machines may be able to escape human control if humans do not continue proper supervision of them; we might become entirely dependent on them, or even controlled by them; There is danger in trusting decisions to something which cannot think abstractly, and may therefore be unlikely to identify with intellectual human values which are not purely utilitarian. Machines, in Wiener's opinion, are meant to interact harmoniously with humanity and provide respite from the industrial trap we have made for ourselves. Wiener describes the automaton as inherently necessary to humanity's societal evolution.
Von Neumann universal constructor: self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer.
Autopoiesis (Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production'): a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The original definition can be found in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
Systems engineering, optimization, information retrieval, search algorithms
Branch and bound: algorithm design paradigm for discrete and combinatorial optimization problems, as well as general real valued problems.
Beam search: heuristic search algorithm that explores a graph by expanding the most promising node in a limited set. Beam search is an optimization of best-first search that reduces its memory requirements.
Continuous optimization:
Quasi-Newton method: methods used to either find zeroes or local maxima and minima of functions, as an alternative to Newton's method. They can be used if the Jacobian or Hessian is unavailable or is too expensive to compute at every iteration.
Statistical process control (SPC): method of quality control which uses statistical methods. SPC is applied in order to monitor and control a process. Monitoring and controlling the process ensures that it operates at its full potential. At its full potential, the process can make as much conforming product as possible with a minimum (if not an elimination) of waste (rework or scrap). SPC can be applied to any process where the "conforming product" (product meeting specifications) output can be measured. Key tools used in SPC include control charts; a focus on continuous improvement; and the design of experiments. An example of a process where SPC is applied is manufacturing lines.
Ishikawa diagram (fishbone diagrams, herringbone diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, or Fishikawa): causal diagrams created by Kaoru Ishikawa (1968) that show the causes of a specific event. The categories typically include: People, Methods, Machines, Materials, Measurements, Environment.
Design of experiments (DOE, experimental design): design of any task that aims to describe or explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associated with true experiments in which the design introduces conditions that directly affect the variation, but may also refer to the design of quasi-experiments, in which natural conditions that influence the variation are selected for observation.
Factorial experiment: experiment whose design consists of two or more factors, each with discrete possible values or "levels", and whose experimental units take on all possible combinations of these levels across all such factors; allows the investigator to study the effect of each factor on the response variable, as well as the effects of interactions between factors on the response variable.
Process management: ensemble of activities of planning and monitoring the performance of a business process. The term usually refers to the management of business processes and manufacturing processes. Application of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to define, visualize, measure, control, report and improve processes with the goal to meet customer requirements profitably.
Workflow application: software application which automates, to at least some degree, a process or processes. The processes are usually business-related but can be any process that requires a series of steps to be automated via software. Some steps of the process may require human intervention, such as an approval or the development of custom text, but functions that can be automated should be handled by the application. Advanced applications allow users to introduce new components into the operation.
Workflow management system: provides an infrastructure for the set-up, performance and monitoring of a defined sequence of tasks, arranged as a workflow application.
Scientific workflow system: specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application. The simplest computerized scientific workflows are scripts that call in data, programs, and other inputs and produce outputs that might include visualizations and analytical results.
Bioinformatics workflow management system: specialized form of workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or a workflow, that relate to bioinformatics.
UGENE (FOSS; OS: cross-paltform): computer software for bioinformatics; provides GUI for the pre-built tools so biologists with no computer programming skills can access those tools more easily. Sequence View; Alignment Editor; Phylogenetic Tree Viewer; Assembly Browser; Workflow Designer.
Galaxy (computational biology) (OS: Linux, OSX): aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming experience; largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system; an open, web-based platform for performing accessible, reproducible, and transparent genomic science
Apache Taverna (FOSS; OS: Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows): allows users to integrate many different software components, including WSDL SOAP or REST Web services, such as those provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ), SoapLab, BioMOBY and EMBOSS.
Introduction to entropy: idea of "irreversibility" is central to the understanding of entropy. In a physical system, entropy provides a measure of the amount of thermal energy that cannot be used to do work.
Entropy: measure of the number of specific realizations or microstates that may realize a thermodynamic system in a defined state specified by macroscopic variables. Entropy is commonly understood as a measure of molecular disorder within a macroscopic system. According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.
Kullback–Leibler divergence: measure of the difference between two probability distributions P and Q. It is not symmetric in P and Q. In applications, P typically represents the "true" distribution of data, observations, or a precisely calculated theoretical distribution, while Q typically represents a theory, model, description, or approximation of P.
Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction: one of a class of reactions that serve as a classical example of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, resulting in the establishment of a nonlinear chemical oscillator. The only common element in these oscillators is the inclusion of bromine and an acid. The reactions are important to theoretical chemistry in that they show that chemical reactions do not have to be dominated by equilibrium thermodynamic behavior. These reactions are far from equilibrium and remain so for a significant length of time and evolve chaotically. An essential aspect of the BZ reaction is its so called "excitability"; under the influence of stimuli, patterns develop in what would otherwise be a perfectly quiescent medium. The mechanism for this reaction is very complex and is thought to involve around 18 different steps which have been the subject of a number of research papers.
Lyapunov exponent (Lyapunov characteristic exponent): of a dynamical system is a quantity that characterizes the rate of separation of infinitesimally close trajectories. Quantitatively, two trajectories in phase space with initial separation vector diverge (provided that the divergence can be treated within the linearized approximation) at a rate given by , here is the Lyapunov exponent.
Lyapunov time: characteristic timescale on which a dynamical system is chaotic; defined as the inverse of a system's largest Lyapunov exponent.
Wolfram code: naming system often used for one-dimensional cellular automaton rules, introduced by Stephen Wolfram in a 1983 paper and used in his book A New Kind of Science.
Moore neighborhood: comprises the eight cells surrounding a central cell on a two-dimensional square lattice.
Speed of light (cellular automaton): propagation rate across the grid of exactly one step (either horizontally, vertically or diagonally) per generation.
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation (S23: Stays alive).
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction (B3: Born).
Glider (Conway's Life) (1970; Richard K. Guy): pattern that travels across the board in Conway's Game of Life. Gliders are the smallest spaceships, and they travel diagonally at a speed of c/4. Hacker emblem.
Life without Death (Toffoli & Margolus (1987); B3/S012345678): in contrast to the more complex patterns that exist within Conway's Game of Life, Life without Death commonly features still life patterns, in which no change occurs, and ladder patterns, that grow in a straight line.
Day & Night (1997; Nathan Thompson; rule notation B3678/S34678): dead cell becomes live (is born) if it has 3, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, and a live cell remains alive (survives) if it has 3, 4, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, out of the eight neighbors in the Moore neighborhood. Name "Day & Night" because its on and off states are symmetric: if all the cells in the Universe are inverted, the future states are the inversions of the future states of the original pattern.
Brian's Brain: In each time step, a cell turns on if it was off but had exactly two neighbors that were on, just like the birth rule for Seeds. All cells that were "on" go into the "dying" state, which is not counted as an "on" cell in the neighbor count, and prevents any cell from being born there. Cells that were in the dying state go into the off state. The "dying state" cells tend to lead to directional movement, so almost every pattern in Brian's Brain is a spaceship.
Still life (cellular automaton): a pattern that does not change from one generation to the next. Common examples: Blocks; Hives; Loaves; Tubs, barges, boats and ships. Eaters and reflectors. Maximum density.
Spaceship (cellular automaton): is a finite pattern which reappears after a certain number of generations in the same orientation but in a different position.
Speed of light (cellular automaton): propagation rate across the grid of exactly one step (either horizontally, vertically or diagonally) per generation. In a single generation, a cell can only influence its nearest neighbours, and so the speed of light (by analogy with the speed of light in physics) is the maximum rate at which information can propagate. It is therefore an upper bound to the speed at which any pattern can move.
Breeder (cellular automaton): a pattern that exhibits quadratic growth, by generating multiple copies of a secondary pattern, each of which then generates multiple copies of a tertiary pattern.
Control theory: interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems with inputs, and how their behavior is modified by feedback.
PID controller (proportional-integral-derivative controller): control loop feedback mechanism (controller) widely used in industrial control systems. A PID controller calculates an error value as the difference between a measured process variable and a desired setpoint. The controller attempts to minimize the error by adjusting the process through use of a manipulated variable. P depends on the present error, I on the accumulation of past errors, and D is a prediction of future errors, based on current rate of change.
Role of chance in scientific discoveries: many domains, especially psychology, are concerned with the way science interacts with chance — particularly "serendipity" (accidents that, through sagacity, are transformed into opportunity). Psychologist Kevin Dunbar and colleagues estimate that between 30% and 50% of all scientific discoveries are accidental in some sense. Psychologist Alan A. Baumeister says a scientist must be "sagacious" (attentive and clever) to benefit from an accident. Dunbar quotes Louis Pasteur's saying that "Chance favors only the prepared mind". The prepared mind, Dunbar suggests, is one trained for observational rigor. Research suggests that scientists are taught various heuristics and practices that allow their investigations to benefit, and not suffer, from accidents. First, careful control conditions allow scientists to properly identify something as "unexpected". Once a finding is recognized as legitimately unexpected and in need of explaining, researchers can attempt to explain it: They work across various disciplines, with various colleagues, trying various analogies in order to understand the first curious finding. Preparing to make discoveries: The word "Serendipity" is frequently understood as simply "a happy accident", but Horace Walpole used the word 'serendipity' to refer to a certain kind of happy accident: the kind that can only be exploited by a "sagacious" or clever person. Thus Dunbar and Fugelsang talk about, not just luck or chance in science, but specifically "serendipity" in science.
Scientific revolution: emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed views of society and nature.
The central science: Chemistry is often called the central science because of its role in connecting the physical sciences, which include chemistry, with the life sciences and applied sciences such as medicine and engineering. The nature of this relationship is one of the main topics in the philosophy of chemistry and in scientometrics.
Unity of science: thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole.
Hard and soft science: colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor and legitimacy. Roughly speaking, the natural sciences are considered "hard" while the social sciences are usually described as "soft". There are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs, and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.
The central science: Chemistry is often called the central science because of its role in connecting the physical sciences, which include chemistry, with the life sciences and applied sciences such as medicine and engineering. The nature of this relationship is one of the main topics in the philosophy of chemistry and in scientometrics. The central role of chemistry can be seen in the systematic and hierarchical classification of the sciences by Auguste Comte in which each discipline provides a more general framework for the area it precedes (mathematics → astronomy → physics → chemistry → physiology and medicine → social sciences). Balaban and Klein have more recently proposed a diagram showing partial ordering of sciences in which chemistry may be argued is “the central science” since it provides a significant degree of branching. In forming these connections the lower field cannot be fully reduced to the higher ones.
International Science Council (ISC): international non-governmental organization that unites scientific bodies at various levels across the social and natural sciences. The ISC was formed with its inaugural general assembly in 2018.07.04 by the merger of the former International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), making it one of the largest organisations of this type.
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: scientific conference held yearly in Lindau, Germany, inviting Nobel prize winners to present to and interact with young researchers from all over the world.
Uniformitarianism: assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe; key principle of geology and virtually all fields of science, but naturalism's modern geologists, while accepting that geology has occurred across deep time, no longer hold to a strict gradualism
Thomas Kuhn (1922.07.18–1996.06.17): USA physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift", which has since become an English-language idiom.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): book about the history of science by philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities; argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. One of the aims of science is to find models that will account for as many observations as possible within a coherent framework. Together, Galileo's rethinking of the nature of motion and Keplerian cosmology represented a coherent framework that was capable of rivaling the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic framework.
E-folding: time interval in which an exponentially growing quantity increases by a factor of e; it is the base-e analog of doubling time.
Technology Life Cycle (TLC): different Technologies, different lifespans: steel, paper - long; electronic or pharmaceutical products - short. TLC is concerned with the time and cost of developing the technology, the timeline of recovering cost and modes of making the technology yield a profit proportionate to the costs and risks involved. TLC may, further, be protected during its cycle with patents and trademark seeking to lengthen the cycle and to maximize the profit from it. R&D phase, ascent phase (strongest phase of the TLC because it is here that the technology is superior to alternatives and can command premium profit or gain), maturity phase, decline/decay phase. Licensing options: in R&D phase (small firms (SMEs), venture capitalists, strategic alliances, IPO, cross-licensing); technology-owning firm would tend to exclusively enjoy technology's profitability, preferring not to license it in ascent phase; maturity phase: joint ventures rather than licensing (e.g. in regions (developing country) where the technology would be in the ascent phase); decline phase: to prolong the lifetime, the originator can license at lower cost the technology, also if the licensees cannot learn the technique and the technology without the help of the originator - (encountered often in developing country contracts) technical service and technical assistance contracts.
Technology adoption lifecycle: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority adopters, laggards.
Technology lifecycle (technology maturity lifecycle): bleeding edge, leading edge, state of the art, dated, obsolete.
Hype cycle: maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Technology Trigger → Peak of Inflated Expectations → Trough of Disillusionment → Slope of Enlightenment → Plateau of Productivity. Hype in new media
Types of Innovation:
Disruptive technology, aka disruptive innovation: an innovation that disrupts an existing market
Ford Model T: John Steinbeck's Cannery Row: "Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than about the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire iron belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered." :D. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where Henry Ford is regarded as a messianic figure, graveyard crosses have been topped off and become T's.
Technologies and innovations, R&D (Civilization (game) style):
Knock-down kit: production of parts in one set of "countries" and assembly in another set, because of cheap labor, tax incentives, "buy-national products": how the business people circumvent politics.
Cannibalization#Maintenance: practice of removing parts or subsystems necessary for repair from another similar device, rather than from inventory, usually when resources become limited. The source system is usually crippled as a result, if only temporarily, in order to allow the recipient device to function properly again.
Technological utopianism (techno-utopianism; e/acc = effective accelerationism): any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death. Principles: 1. Technology reflects and encourages the best aspects of human nature; 2. Technology improves our interpersonal communication, relationships, and communities; 3. Technology democratizes society (PRC - not); 4. Technology inevitably progresses (lost technologies of Antique); 5. Unforeseen impacts of technology are positive (ICE, AI, AGI); 6. Technology increases efficiency and consumer choice; 7. New technology can solve the problems created by old technology.
Creative destruction (Schumpeter's gale): theory of economic innovation and the business cycle; "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".
Technological convergence (Telecommunications convergence, network convergence, convergence): tendency for different technological systems to evolve toward performing similar tasks. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications), and video that now share resources and interact with each other synergistically; emerging telecommunications technologies, and network architecture used to migrate multiple communications services into a single network. Rise of digital communication in the late 20th c.; deliver text, audio, and video material over the same wired, wireless, or fiber-optic connections. Convergence services, such as VoIP, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc., will replace the old technologies and is a threat to the current service providers.
Template:Home theater PC (application software): HDTV & PC & gaming console become one; super PC in combination with screens (LCD) of various sizes and in various places for all uses prevails
Telecommunication convergence: cable connection (also optical fiber connection), wireless connections (from mobiles (e.g. GSM), to Wi-Fi, to any antenna, satellite dish); all could be driven into one where only (digital) information quantity is shuffled around at different latency and speed (conversations/conferences: chat, voice, video; streaming, watching, online gaming); the unifying principle is Internet.
Usually any technological battles (involving lots of lawyers at the level of patent, trademark, copyright & co litigation) produce the losers and the winners, and the winners make some standards:
The battles about non-Internet during pre-Internet (Microsoft didn't know that Internet will become important):
IE (1995.08.15; outcompeted Netscape; but then Netscape turned into Firefox) vs Safari (web browser) (2003.01.07) vs Google Chrome (2008.09.02)
iTunes (2001.01.09) & Apple Retail Store (Apple Store; 2001) vs Google doesn't sell hardware nor has an official media player
Mac OS X (2001.03.24) vs Google Chrome OS (announced: 2009.07.07; shipped 2011.06.15 with HW)
iLife (2003.01.07) & iWork (2005.01.11) & iWork.com (2009.01.06) vs Google Docs (2007.02; Writely (2005.08) + Google Labs Spreadsheets (2006.06.06)) vs Microsoft Office Web Apps (2010.06.07) & Microsoft Office website (2004.05-) & Microsoft Office Live (2006-)
Battle between Apple and Google (per Tim Wu "battle for the Internet" in 21st c.):
iTunes Store (2003.04.28; includes iBookstore, App Store, Video, Audiobooks, Music) vs Google Play (2012.03.06; includes Android Market (Apps and games), Movies, Music, Books)
iOS (2007.06.29; EULA) vs Android (2008.09.20; Apache License; Linux kernel under GPL2)
App Store (iOS) (2008.07.10) vs Android Market (2008.10.22)
Google Cloud Storage (2010.05.19) vs iCloud (2011.10.12)
iBooks & iBookstore (2010.04.02) vs Google Books ?? (Google Book Search; 2004)
Research and development
Research and development (R&D)
SRI International (founded as Stanford Research Institute): one of the world's largest contract research institutes. 2010 financials: US DoD 67%, NIH 10%, US companies 5%.
SoftBank Group: Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. SoftBank owns stakes in many technology, energy, and financial companies. It also runs Vision Fund, the world's largest technology-focused venture capital fund, with over $100 billion in capital. SoftBank was ranked in the Forbes Global 2000 list as the 36th largest public company in the world, and the second largest publicly traded company in Japan after Toyota.
Process engineering: understanding and application of the fundamental principles and laws of nature that allow humans to transform raw material and energy into products that are useful to society, at an industrial level. Principal areas of focus in process engineering: process design; process control; process operations; supporting tools; process economics; Process Data Analytics. History of process engineering: the set of knowledge that is now known as process engineering was then forged out of trial and error throughout the industrial revolution. By 1980, the concept of process engineering emerged from the fact that chemical engineering techniques and practices were being used in a variety of industries. By this time, process engineering had been defined as "the set of knowledge necessary to design, analyze, develop, construct, and operate, in an optimal way, the processes in which the material changes". By the end of the 20th c., process engineering had expanded from chemical engineering-based technologies to other applications, including metallurgical engineering, agricultural engineering, and product engineering.
Neuromorphic engineering: concept developed by Carver Mead, in the late 1980s, describing the use of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system. In recent times the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, and mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI and software systems that implement models of neural systems (for perception, motor control, or multisensory integration). The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, threshold switches and transistors.
Machine: man-made device that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action. Machines can be driven by animals and people, by natural forces such as wind and water, and by chemical, thermal, or electrical power, and include a system of mechanisms that shape the actuator input to achieve a specific application of output forces and movement. They can also include computers and sensors that monitor performance and plan movement, often called mechanical systems.
Self-replicating machine: type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle.
Self-replicating spacecraft: has been applied – in theory – to several distinct "tasks". The particular variant of this idea applied to the idea of space exploration is known as a von Neumann probe. Other variants include the Berserker and an automated terraforming seeder ship.
Theory: Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing large-scale mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by self-replicating spacecraft, taking advantage of their exponential growth. Given this pattern, and its similarity to the reproduction patterns of bacteria, it has been pointed out that von Neumann machines might be considered a form of life. It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Applications for self-replicating spacecraft: Von Neumann probes: Von Neumann universal constructor; Berserkers: programmed to seek out and exterminate lifeforms and life-bearing exoplanets whenever they are encountered; Replicating seeder ships.
History of the electric vehicle: EVs first appeared in the mid-19th century. An electric vehicle held the vehicular land speed record until around 1900. The high cost, low top speed, and short range of battery electric vehicles, compared to later internal combustion engine vehicles, led to a worldwide decline in their use; although electric vehicles have continued to be used in the form of electric trains and other niche uses. Since 2010, combined sales of all-electric cars and utility vans achieved 1 million units delivered globally in 2016.09. Golden age: Electric vehicles had a number of advantages over their early-1900s competitors. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. They also did not require gear changes. (While steam-powered cars also had no gear shifting, they suffered from long start-up times of up to 45 minutes on cold mornings.) The cars were also preferred because they did not require a manual effort to start, as did gasoline cars which featured a hand crank to start the engine. In order to overcome the limited operating range of electric vehicles, and the lack of recharging infrastructure, an exchangeable battery service was first proposed as early as 1896; Hartford Electric Light Company; Milburn Wagon Company cars. Decline: by 1912, an electric car sold for almost double the price of a gasoline car. California electric car maker Tesla Motors began development in 2004 on the Tesla Roadster, which was first delivered to customers in 2008. The Roadster was the first highway legal serial production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells, and the first production all-electric car to travel more than 320 km per charge. 2009.08 edition of The New Yorker, GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz was quoted as saying, "All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us – and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam." The Nissan Leaf, introduced in Japan and USA in 2010.12, became the first modern all-electric, zero tailpipe emission five door family hatchback to be produced for the mass market from a major manufacturer.
Electric car use by country: Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are generally divided into all-electric or battery electric vehicles (BEVs), that run only on batteries, and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), that combine battery power with internal combustion engines. The popularity of electric vehicles has been expanding rapidly due to government subsidies, their increased range and lower battery costs, and environmental sensitivity.
Propulsion: action or process of pushing or pulling to drive an object. The term is derived from two Latin words: pro, meaning before or forward; and pellere, meaning to drive. A propulsion system consists of a source of mechanical power, and a propulsor (means of converting this power into propulsive force). A technological system uses an engine or motor as the power source (commonly called a powerplant), and wheels and axles, propellers, or a propulsive nozzle to generate the force. Biological propulsion systems use an animal's muscles as the power source, and limbs such as wings, fins or legs as the propulsors. Vehicular propulsion: Air propulsion (Powered aircraft); Ground propulsion; Maglev; Marine propulsion; Spacecraft propulsion; Cable car (railway). Animal locomotion.
Heat engine: system that converts heat to mechanical energy, which can then be used to do mechanical work. It does this by bringing a working substance from a higher state temperature to a lower state temperature. A heat source generates thermal energy that brings the working substance to the higher temperature state. The working substance generates work in the working body of the engine while transferring heat to the colder sink until it reaches a lower temperature state. During this process some of the thermal energy is converted into work by exploiting the properties of the working substance. The working substance can be any system with a non-zero heat capacity, but it usually is a gas or liquid. During this process, some heat is normally lost to the surroundings and is not converted to work. Also, some energy is unusable because of friction and drag.
Gas turbine: combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the direction of flow: a rotating gas compressor; a combustor; a compressor-driving turbine. A propelling nozzle is added to produce thrust for flight. An extra turbine is added to drive a propeller (turboprop) or ducted fan (turbofan) to reduce fuel consumption (by increasing propulsive efficiency) at subsonic flight speeds. An extra turbine is also required to drive a helicopter rotor or land-vehicle transmission (turboshaft), marine propeller or electrical generator (power turbine). Greater thrust-to-weight ratio for flight is achieved with the addition of an afterburner.
Afterburner (BE: reheat): additional combustion component used on some jet engines, mostly those on military supersonic aircraft. Its purpose is to increase thrust, usually for supersonic flight, takeoff, and combat. The afterburning process injects additional fuel into a combustor in the jet pipe behind (i.e., "after") the turbine, "reheating" the exhaust gas. Afterburning significantly increases thrust as an alternative to using a bigger engine with its attendant weight penalty, but at the cost of increased fuel consumption (decreased fuel efficiency) which limits its use to short periods.
Reciprocating engine (piston engine): typically a heat engine that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert high temperature and high pressure into a rotating motion.
Journal of Structural Engineering: principal professional peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the oldest professional civil engineering society in the United States.
The Boring Company: infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. Musk has cited difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the current 2-D transportation network as inspiration for the project. In March 2017, Musk announced that sometime in April the company would start using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) to begin digging a usable tunnel at SpaceX. At the end of April 2017, a TBM was seen at SpaceX with the company's name on the side. The TBM was revealed to be named "Godot" in May 2017, after the Beckett play Waiting for Godot. 2017.07 Musk said that The Boring Company had received verbal government approval to build an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. 2017.10 the company obtained a utility permit for the construction of the Baltimore-Washington tunnel from the Maryland’s Department of Transportation. This part of the tunnel - some 35 miles between Penn Station in Baltimore to Washington Union Station - will start near Fort Meade. Boring machines: Proof-rock, a "fully-Boring-Company-designed machine", anticipated to be ten times faster than conventional boring machines, with hopes of making it even faster. Currently under development as of May 2018. According to Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson, tunnels specifically built for electric vehicles have reduced size and complexity, and thus decreased cost. “The insight I think that’s so powerful is that if you only envision electric vehicles in your tunnels you don’t need to do the air handling for all carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, you know, basically pollutants for exhaust. You could have scrubbers and a variety of simpler things that make everything collapse to a smaller tunnel size, which dramatically lowers the cost … The whole concept of what you do with tunnels changes.”
Christopher Alexander (1936.10.04–2022.03.17): Austrian-born British-USA architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor. In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.
Pattern language: organized and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language. What is a pattern? Many patterns form a language. Design problems in a context: Balancing of forces; Patterns contain their own rationale.
Computer science (CS) and Electrical engineering (EE)
Quality (philosophy): attribute or a property characteristic of an object in philosophy. In contemporary philosophy the idea of qualities, and especially how to distinguish certain kinds of qualities from one another, remains controversial. In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig examines concepts of quality in classical and romantic, seeking a Metaphysics of Quality and a reconciliation of those views in terms of non-dualistic holism.
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ): theory of reality introduced in Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and expanded in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). The MOQ incorporates facets of Sophism, East Asian philosophy, pragmatism, the work of F. S. C. Northrop, and indigenous American philosophy. Pirsig argues that the MOQ is a better lens through which to view reality than the subjective/objective mindset that Pirsig attributes to Aristotle. Quality: Static quality patterns and dynamic quality: Dynamic quality; Static quality patterns.
Quality (business), the non-inferiority or superiority of something ↓
Quality (physics), in response theory
Energy quality, used in various science disciplines
Logical quality, philosophical categorization of statements
Service quality, comparison of expectations with performance in a service
Vapor quality, in thermodynamics, the ratio of mass of vapor to that of vapor and liquid
Data quality, refers to the condition of a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables
Practices: Quality assurance (QA), Quality control (QC)
Quality (business) (high quality): pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something (goods or services); it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose (fitness for purpose) while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people.
Description:
Quality planning
Quality assurance (QA): means of providing enough confidence that business requirements and goals (as outlined in quality planning) for a product and/or service will be fulfilled. This error prevention is done through systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, and monitoring of processes
Quality control (QC): means of fulfilling quality requirements, reviewing all factors involved in production. The business confirms that the good or service produced meets organizational goals, often using tools such as operational auditing and inspection.
Quality improvement: continuous improvement.
Market sector perspectives
Operations management (OPS MGMT)
Manufacturing (MFG)
Service sector
Quality in Japanese culture: atarimae hinshitsu – The idea that things will work as they are supposed to (e.g. a pen will write); miryokuteki hinshitsu （魅力的品質）– The idea that things should have an aesthetic quality which is different from "atarimae hinshitsu" (e.g. a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer, and leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader).
Seven Basic Tools of Quality: designation given to a fixed set of graphical techniques identified as being most helpful in troubleshooting issues related to quality. 7 are: cause-and-effect diagram (Ishikawa diagram), check sheet, control chart, histogram, Pareto chart, scatter plot, stratified sampling.
5S (methodology): name of a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke. The list describes how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and storing the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new order. In some quarters, 5S has become 6S, the sixth element being safety. 5S was developed in Japan and was identified as one of the techniques that enabled Just in Time manufacturing.
Six Sigma: set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by engineers Bill Smith & Mikel J Harry while working at Motorola in 1986. Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy at General Electric in 1995. It seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization who are experts in these methods.
Kaizen: Japanese word for "continual improvement". In business, kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain.
Toyota Production System (TPS): integrated socio-technical system, developed by Toyota, that comprises its management philosophy and practices. The TPS organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers. The system is a major precursor of the more generic "lean manufacturing". Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, Japanese industrial engineers, developed the system between 1948 and 1975.
Lean manufacturing (lean production, often simply "lean"): systematic method for waste minimization ("Muda") within a manufacturing system without sacrificing productivity. Lean also takes into account waste created through overburden ("Muri") and waste created through unevenness in work loads ("Mura"). Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA).
Kanban: scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). Kanban is an inventory-control system to control the supply chain. Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency.
Verification and validation: independent procedures that are used together for checking that a product, service, or system meets requirements and specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. Validation can be expressed by the query "Are you building the right thing?" and verification by "Are you building it right?". Verification of machinery and equipment usually consists of design qualification (DQ), installation qualification (IQ), operational qualification (OQ), and performance qualification (PQ). Aspects of validation: Selectivity/specificity, Accuracy and precision, Repeatability, Limit of detection, Limit of quantification, Curve fitting and its range, System suitability
Ishikawa diagram (fishbone diagrams): causal diagrams created by Kaoru Ishikawa that show the potential causes of a specific event. Common uses of the Ishikawa diagram are product design and quality defect prevention to identify potential factors causing an overall effect.
Taguchi methods (タグチメソッド): statistical methods, sometimes called robust design methods, developed by Genichi Taguchi to improve the quality of manufactured goods, and more recently also applied to engineering, biotechnology, marketing and advertising.
Loss functions: Loss functions in the statistical theory, Taguchi's use of loss functions, Reception of Taguchi's ideas by statisticians
Off-line quality control: Taguchi's rule for manufacturing - best opportunity to eliminate variation of the final product quality is during the design of a product and its manufacturing process; strategy for quality engineering (System design, Parameter design, Tolerance design (Pareto principle))
Design of experiments (DOE): Outer arrays, Management of interactions (Interactions, as treated by Taguchi; Inefficiencies of Taguchi's designs)
One-way function: (in computer science) is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, specifically the theory of polynomial time problems. Not being one-to-one is not considered sufficient of a function for it to be called one-way.
Cryptographic hash function: hash function that can be defined as a deterministic procedure that takes an arbitrary block of data and returns a fixed-size bit string, the (cryptographic) hash value, such that an accidental or intentional change to the data will change the hash value. The data to be encoded is often called the "message," and the hash value is sometimes called the message digest or simply digest.
Preimage attack: (First-) preimage attack: given a hash h, find a message m (a preimage) such that hash(m) = h; Second-preimage attack: given a fixed message m1, find a different message m2 (a second preimage) such that hash(m2) = hash(m1).
Rainbow table: precomputed lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function
Avalanche effect: is evident if, when an input is changed slightly (for example, flipping a single bit) the output changes significantly (e.g., half the output bits flip)
Confusion and diffusion: Claude Shannon in his paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, published in 1949: confusion refers to making the relationship between the key and the ciphertext as complex and involved as possible; diffusion refers to the property that the redundancy in the statistics of the plaintext is "dissipated" in the statistics of the ciphertext.
Salt (cryptography): consists of random bits that are used as one of the inputs to a one-way function. The other input is usually a password or passphrase.
Not so secured hash functions (many attacks and at least one collision are found):
MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5)
Public-key cryptography: cryptographic system requiring two separate keys, one to lock or encrypt the plaintext, and one to unlock or decrypt the cyphertext. Neither key will do both functions. One of these keys is published or public and the other is kept private. No fully satisfactory solution to the public key authentication problem is known: i.e. if you receive a public key, there is no reliable verification, that this public key came from the specific source (MITM).
Digital signature (digital signature scheme): mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document.
Public key infrastructure (PKI): a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates. In cryptography, a PKI is an arrangement that binds public keys with respective user identities by means of a certificate authority (CA).
Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM): form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker. It is an attack on mutual authentication. Public keys can be verified by a Certificate Authority (CA), but CAs can be attacked and the certificates on behalf of the compromised CAs be issued.
Alice and Bob: party A and B in cryptography. Mallory: malicious attacker
Certificate authority (certification authority, CA): entity that issues digital certificates. The digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate; CA is a trusted third party that is trusted by both the subject (owner) of the certificate and the party relying upon the certificate.
Diffie–Hellman key exchange: specific method of exchanging cryptographic keys. It is one of the earliest practical examples of key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography. The Diffie–Hellman key exchange method allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel. This key can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher.
Elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman: anonymous key agreement protocol that allows two parties, each having an elliptic curve public–private key pair, to establish a shared secret over an insecure channel. This shared secret may be directly used as a key, or better yet, to derive another key which can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher.
Forward secrecy (perfect forward secrecy (PFS)): property of key-agreement protocols that ensures that a session key derived from a set of long-term keys will not be compromised if one of the long-term keys is compromised in the future.
Security and anonymity
Tor (anonymity network): weaknesses: users should not mistake Tor's anonymity for end-to-end encryption (always use HTTPS with Tor); in March 2011, researchers with the Rocquencourt, France based National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique, INRIA) have documented an attack ("bad apple attack") that is capable of revealing the IP addresses of BitTorrent users on the Tor network.
I2P (Invisible Internet Project): computer network layer that allows applications to send messages to each other pseudonymously and securely (web surfing, chatting, blogging, file transfers).
de:Sofortüberweisung: Online-Zahlungssystem der Sofort AG zur bargeldlosen Zahlung im Internet. Es handelt sich um keinen in der Finanzwelt feststehenden oder allgemeinen Begriff. Bei der Sofortüberweisung übermittelt der „Zahlende“ neben seinen Kontoinformationen seine persönliche PIN sowie eine gültige TAN auf einer Website an die Sofort AG, woraufhin diese die eigentliche Transaktion im Namen des Kunden ausführt. Das Zahlungsverfahren ist unsicher gegenüber Man-in-the-middle-Angriffen. Da ITAN-Verfahren hiergegen typischerweise nicht schützen, funktionieren diese mit Sofortüberweisung. Mit modernen, sichereren Zahlungsverfahren wie HBCI funktioniert das Verfahren nicht.
Mint.com USA free web-based personal financial management service for the US and Canada created by entrepreneur Aaron Patzer; primary service allows users to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan transactions and balances through a single user interface as well make budgets and goals. MITM attack?
Browser (the most frequently used program on any OS; the default way to connect to internet, LAN, to a huge network):
Browser Security Handbook, CC-3.0-BY; ultimate reading for anyone designing a browser and to know the weaknesses of the Internet usage
Man in the Browser: form of Internet threat related to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), is a trojan that infects a web browser and has the ability to modify pages, modify transaction content or insert additional transactions, all in a completely covert fashion invisible to both the user and host application.
Metasploit Project: open-source computer security project which provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing
Backdoor (computing): method of bypassing normal authentication, securing illegal remote access to a computer, obtaining access to plaintext, and so on, while attempting to remain undetected. "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson: modified version of the Unix C compiler that would put backdoors into compiled code of programs or of compilers (and itself, the modified Unix C compiler!); Davi A. Wheeler counters this with "diverse double-compiling".
Cryptovirology: field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software. Asymmetric backdoor: can be used only by the attacker, even after it is found. The vast majority of cryptovirology attacks are covert in nature.
Kleptography: study of stealing information securely and subliminally; natural extension of the theory of subliminal channels (pioneered by Gustavus J. Simmons); related to steganography.
Remote administration software (RAT): piece of software that allows a remote "operator" to control a system as if he has physical access to that system. Many trojans and backdoors have RAT capabilities, aka RAT trojans.
Warden (software): what's the difference between anti-cheat SW and spyware? What are the limits? E-sports pro-competition and privacy?
LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon, per Command&Conquer series): license=Public domain (!!!); DDoS attack
Major malwares:
Conficker (first detected Nov. 2008): computer worm targeting the MS Windows OS. Formed largest till that time botnet.
Stuxnet (discovered in June 2010): advanced malware. 500 kB size. Infects in this order: Windows (uses 4 zero-day exploits plus CPLINK vulnerability); PCS7, WinCC and STEP7; Siemens S7 PLCs. Still under heavy research (11/12/14). Developed by a pro-team of programmers (5-30 ppl). C, C++. Target: Natanz uranium enrichment centrifuges, Iran (?).
Realtek &
JMicron: both in Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan; their digital signatures for SW were stolen for the digital signature of Stuxnet (for Windows infections).
Duqu (discovered 1 September, 2011; "~DQ"): thought to be related to Stuxnet. Nomenclature: Duqu malware, Duqu flaw, Operation Duqu (related to Op. Stuxnet?). Duqu has valid, but abused digital signature (stolen from C-Media, Taipei), and collects information to prepare for future attacks. Duqu uses a 54×54 pixel jpeg file and encrypted dummy files as containers to smuggle data to its command and control center; original malware sample automatically removes itself after 36 days.
Flame (malware) (first detected 2012.05; Flamer, sKyWIper, Skywiper): modular computer malware for MS Windows OS. '"twenty times" more complicated than Stuxnet' Kaspersky Lab. 20 MB; Lua + compiled C++ code linked in; 5 different encryption methods; SQLite DB; detects antivirus SW and adopts file extensions to minimize being detected; fake audio driver to maintain persistenc on the compromised system. Infected mainly Iranian and other Middle Eastern (also Western-Bank Israel) PCs.
Zeus (malware): Trojan horse malware package that runs on versions of Microsoft Windows. While it can be used to carry out many malicious and criminal tasks, it is often used to steal banking information by man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing. It is also used to install the CryptoLocker ransomware. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in 2007.07 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in 2009.03. In 2009.06 security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster.com, ABC, Oracle, Play.com, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek.
Gameover ZeuS: 2015.02.24 the FBI announced a reward of up to $3 million in exchange for information regarding alleged Russian cyber criminal Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev over his suspected association with Gameover ZeuS.
CryptoLocker: ransomware trojan that targets computers running Microsoft Windows, believed to have first been posted to the Internet on 5 September 2013. CryptoLocker propagated via infected email attachments, and via an existing botnet; when activated, the malware encrypts certain types of files stored on local and mounted network drives using RSA public-key cryptography, with the private key stored only on the malware's control servers. The malware then displays a message which offers to decrypt the data if a payment (through either bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucher) is made by a stated deadline, and it will threaten to delete the private key if the deadline passes. If the deadline is not met, the malware offered to decrypt data via an online service provided by the malware's operators, for a significantly higher price in bitcoin.
Mirai (malware) (Japanese for "the future", 未来): malware that turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled "bots", that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as remote cameras and home routers.
2016 Dyn cyberattack (2016.10.21): involved multiple DDoS attacks targeting systems operated by DNS provider Dyn, which caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America.
WannaCry ransomware attack: May 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Petya (malware): family of encrypting ransomware that was first discovered in 2016. The malware targets Microsoft Windows-based systems, infecting the master boot record to execute a payload that encrypts the NTFS file table, demanding a payment in Bitcoin in order to regain access to the system. Variants of Petya were first seen in March 2016, which propagated via infected e-mail attachments. In June 2017, a new variant of Petya was used for a global cyberattack, primarily targeting Ukraine. The new variant propagates via the EternalBlue exploit, which is generally believed to have been developed by NSA and was used earlier in the year by the WannaCry ransomware.
Security companies live on being little known, but they can attract big fishes/clients only by "showing off". How to balance exposure and keeping anonymity and security intact?
Stuxnet (discovered in June 2010), {q.v.}
Operation Aurora (began in mid-2009; disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010): attack on Google, Adobe, Juniper, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Dow Chemical. Primary goal of the attack was to gain access to and potentially modify source code repositories. Aurora exploited zero-day vulnerabilities (unfixed and previously unknown to the target system developers) in Internet Explorer.
GhostNet (discovered in March 2009): large-scale cyber spying operation; C&C infrastructure is based mainly in PRC and has infiltrated high-value political, economic and media locations in 103 countries. Social engineering through emails with attachments; Trojan:
Ghost Rat (Gh0st RAT)
Operation Shady RAT (starting mid-2006): attack on defense contractors, businesses worldwide, the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee; "a five year targeted operation by one specific actor".
Moonlight Maze (began in March 1998, for 2 years): incident in which U.S. officials accidentally discovered a pattern of probing of computer systems at The Pentagon, NASA, United States Department of Energy, private universities, and research labs.
Farewell Dossier: collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector (code-named "Farewell"), gathered and gave to the French DST in 1981–82 (Cold War).
DarkSide (hacking group): Eastern Europe-based cybercriminal hacking group that targets victims using ransomware and extortion; it is believed to be behind the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and the recent attack on a Toshiba unit.
Colonial Pipeline cyberattack (2021.05.07): Colonial Pipeline, an American oil pipeline system that originates in Houston, Texas, and carries gasoline and jet fuel mainly to the Southeastern United States, suffered a ransomware cyberattack that impacted computerized equipment managing the pipeline. In response, Colonial Pipeline Company halted all of the pipeline's operations to contain the attack. Colonial Pipeline paid the requested ransom (75 bitcoin or nearly $5 million) within several hours after the attack. The hackers then sent Colonial Pipeline a software application to restore their network, but it operated very slowly. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a regional emergency declaration for 17 states and Washington, D.C., to keep fuel supply lines open on 2021.05.09. It was the largest cyberattack on an oil infrastructure target in the history of USA. The FBI and various media sources identified the criminal hacking group DarkSide as the responsible party. The same group is believed to have stolen 100 gigabytes of data from company servers the day before the malware attack.
Information Warfare Monitor (IWM): advanced research activity tracking the emergence of cyberspace as a strategic domain; in Canada:
Citizen Lab + SecDev Group;
Advanced persistent threat (APT): group, such as a foreign government, with both the capability and the intent to persistently and effectively target a specific entity. The term is commonly used to refer to cyber threats, in particular that of Internet-enabled espionage, but applies equally to other threats such as that of traditional espionage or attack.
Cyberwarfare: involves the battlespace use and targeting of computers, online control systems and networks in warfare. It involves both offensive and defensive operations pertaining to the threat of cyberattacks, espionage and sabotage. There has been controversy over whether such operations can be called "war". Nevertheless, nations have been developing their capabilities and engaged in cyberwarfare either as an aggressor, defendant, or both.The United States, China, Russia, Israel and the United Kingdom are believed to have the most developed cyber warfare capabilities.Two other notable players are Iran and North Korea. Espionage; Sabotage; Denial-of-service attack; Electrical power grid; Propaganda. Saudi Arabia: Shamoon virus began destroying over 35,000 computer systems, rendering them inoperable; virus used to target the Saudi government by causing destruction to the state owned national oil company Saudi Aramco. USA: The Economist describes cyberspace as "the fifth domain of warfare," and William J. Lynn, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, states that "as a doctrinal matter, the Pentagon has formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare . . . [which] has become just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space." Controversy over terms.
Democratic National Committee cyber attacks: 2016.12.09 the CIA told U.S. legislators the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted the cyberattacks and other operations during the 2016 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump in winning the presidency. These intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia hacked the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) as well as the D.N.C. — and chose not to leak information obtained from the R.N.C.
Cyberwarfare by Russia: denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, participation of state-sponsored teams in political blogs, internet surveillance using SORM technology, persecution of cyber-dissidents and other active measures. According to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, some of these activities have been coordinated by the Russian signals intelligence, which is part of the FSB and was formerly a part of the 16th KGB department, but others have been directed by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Military of Russia.
Hacktivism: hacking + activism; hacking = "illegally breaking into computers" OR "clever computer usage/programming" (depends on the person or organization, e.g. popular media vs. EFF), activism includes both explicitly non-violent action (Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi) and violent revolutionary activities (Malcolm X and Che Guevara)
LulzSec (Lulz Security): compromise of user accounts from Sony Pictures in 2011 and several other high profile attacks
Cyber intrusion in literature:
Daemon (technothriller series)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo : Lisbeth Salander
Equation Group (classified as an advanced persistent threat): highly sophisticated threat actor suspected of being tied to TAO unit of US NSA. Kaspersky Labs describes them as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world and "the most advanced ... we have seen", operating alongside the creators of Stuxnet and Flame. Most of their targets have been in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria, and Mali. The name originated from the group's extensive use of encryption. By 2015, Kaspersky documented 500 malware infections by the group in at least 42 countries, while acknowledging that the actual number could be in the tens of thousands due to its self-terminating protocol. 2016 breach of the Equation Group: in 2016.08, a hacking group calling itself "The Shadow Brokers" announced that it had stolen malware code from the Equation Group. Kaspersky Lab noticed similarities between the stolen code and earlier known code from the Equation Group malware samples it had in its possession including quirks unique to the Equation Group's way of implementing the RC6 encryption algorithm, and therefore concluded that this announcement is legitimate. The most recent dates of the stolen files are from June 2013, thus prompting Edward Snowden to speculate that a likely lockdown resulting from his leak of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance efforts stopped The Shadow Brokers' breach of the Equation Group. Exploits against Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances and Fortinet's firewalls were featured in some malware samples released by The Shadow Brokers.
Japanese domestic market (JDM): Japan's home market for Japanese vehicles and components. For the importer, these terms refer to Japanese-brand automobiles and parts designed to conform to Japanese regulations and to suit Japanese buyers. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#Japan}
Veteran era: first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in DE and, under license from Benz, in FR by Emile Roger. First motor car in Central Europe was produced by Czech company Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau (later renamed to Tatra) in 1897, the Präsident automobil.
Präsident: automobile was more of a carriage without horses than a car in modern sense.
Term "
Brass Era car": retronym for "horseless carriage", the original name for such vehicles, which is still in use today. Within the 15 years that make up this era, the various experimental designs and alternative power systems would be marginalised. Key developments included the electric ignition system (by dynamotor on the Arnold in 1898, though Robert Bosch, 1903, tends to get the credit), independent suspension (actually conceived by Bollée in 1873), and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909). Leaf springs were widely used for suspension, though many other systems were still in use, with angle steel taking over from armored wood as the frame material of choice. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted, allowing a variety of cruising speeds, though vehicles generally still had discrete speed settings, rather than the infinitely variable system familiar in cars of later eras. Safety glass also made its debut, patented by John Wood in England in 1905.
Vintage car: old automobile, and in the narrower senses of car enthusiasts and collectors, it is a car from the period of 1919 to 1930.
Shanghai Maglev Train (30.5 km): magnetic levitation train, or maglev line that operates in Shanghai, China. The line is the first commercially operated high-speed magnetic levitation line in the world. Connect Shanghai Pudong International Airport and the outskirts of central Pudong where passengers could interchange to the Shanghai Metro to continue their trip to the city center. It cost $1.2 billion to build. Built by a joint venture of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp in Kassel.
Map of the world's railways, color coded to show rail gauge, the distance between tracks. Black is standard gauge, Red is Russian gauge, Yellow is Indian gauge, Orange is Iberian gauge, Blue is cape gauge and purple is meter gauge.
Break of gauge: occurs where a line of one track gauge (the distance between the rails, or between the wheels of trains designed to run on those rails) meets a line of a different gauge. Trains and rolling stock generally cannot run through without some form of conversion between gauges, leading to passengers having to change trains and freight requiring transloading or transshipping; this can add delays, costs, and inconvenience to travel on such a route.
Bus rapid transit: bus-based mass transit system. A true BRT system generally has specialized design, services and infrastructure to improve system quality and remove the typical causes of delay. Sometimes described as a "surface subway", BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of light rail or metro with the flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system. The first BRT system was the Rede Integrada de Transporte ('Integrated Transportation Network') in Curitiba, Brazil, which entered service in 1974.
BRT Standard: evaluation tool for Bus Rapid Transit corridors around the world, based on international best practices. The Standard establishes a common definition for BRT and identifies BRT best practices, as well as functioning as a scoring system to allow BRT corridors to be evaluated and recognized for their superior design and management aspects.
Shared mobility: refers to the shared used of a vehicle, bicycle, or other transportation mode. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, bikesharing, peer-to-peer ridesharing, on-demand ride services, microtransit, and other modes.
early: Chanakya's Arthashastra or Xenophon's Oeconomicus (both 4th c. BC), Aristotle's Politics (c.a. 350 BC)
mid: mercantilism and nationalism
modern:
British enlightenment: John Locke, Dudley North, David Hume
Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edmund Burke;
Classical political economy: Jeremy Bentham: utilitarianism; Jean-Baptiste Say vs Thomas Malthus; David Ricardo: comparative advantage, economy is bound to tend towards a steady state
John Stuart Mill proposed 4 scenarios: Malthus' - population grew quicker than supplies, leading to falling wages and rising profits, Smith's - if capital accumulated faster than population grew then real wages would rise, Ricardo's - should capital accumulate and population increase at the same rate, yet technology stay stable, there would be no change in real wages because supply and demand for labour would be the same, fourth - technology advanced faster than population and capital stock increased, result would be a prospering economy (that's what's happening since industrial revolution?)
Karl Marx: defined "Capitalism"; Robert Owen: first capitalist to have better working conditions for the lower pay; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Friedrich Engels; Das Kapital. Marx never suggested how Communism would work but criticized the then-current situation of boom and bust in capitalist societies.
Neoclassical: Marginal utility; mathematical analysis. Lausanne school: Vilfredo Pareto - "Pareto efficiency"; Cambridge school: Alfred Marshall - supply and demand graph, "Marshallian cross"; Vienna school (aka Austrian school; advocated the use of deductive logic instead): Schumpeter - entrepreneurs, von Mises - praxeology ("science of human action"), von Hayek - The Road to Serfdom, socialism requires central economic planning leading to totalitarianism.
Depression and reconstruction: John Maynard Keynes - dissatisfied with Versailles conference quit it and proposed: 1) reduce war reparation payment by Germany (or it could lead to WWII), 2) arrangement to set off debt repayments between the Allies, 3) complete reform of international currency exchange and international loan fund, 4) reconciliation of trade relations with Russia and Eastern Europe. Keynesian economics: deficit spending (printing money?) to avert crises and maintain full employment.
"American Way": John R. Commons - government ought to be the mediator between the conflicting groups (monopolies, large corporations, labor disputes and fluctuating business cycles). Adolf Berle's and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932): detailed the evolution in the contemporary economy of big business, and argued that those who controlled big firms should be better held to account. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958): argued voters reaching a certain material wealth begin to vote against the common good; big business set prices and use advertising to create artificial demand for their own products, distorting people's real preferences (private-bureaucracy: a technostructure of experts who manipulate marketing and public relations channels). Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), 2 assumptions: people and firms will act to maximise their self interested goals, markets tend towards an equilibrium of prices, where demand matches supply; adapted thermodynamics formulae to economic theory. Ronald Coase The Nature of the Firm, law and economics. Milton Friedman advocated the quantity theory of money (Capitalism and Freedom), permanent income hypothesis - rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income and windfall gains would mostly be saved.
New classical macroeconomics (new classical economics): analysis entirely on a neoclassical economics framework; emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations; in contrast with its rival new Keynesian school. 1970s and early 1980s: stagflation occurred - Keynesians were puzzled by it because the original Phillips curve ruled out concurrent high inflation and high unemployment. New Classical school emerged in the 1970s as a response to the failure of Keynesian economics to explain stagflation. Productivity/efficiency wedge is a simple measure of aggregate production efficiency (economy is less productive given the capital and labor resources available in the economy); capital wedge is a gap between the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution in consumption and the marginal product of capital (“deadweight” loss that affects capital accumulation and savings decisions acting as a distortionary capital (savings) tax); Labor wedge is the ratio between the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure and the marginal product of labor (acts as a distortionary labor tax, making hiring workers less profitable (i.e. labor market frictions)).
Law of one price: economic concept which posits that "a good must sell for the same price in all locations"; constitutes the basis of the theory of purchasing power parity. Assume different prices for a single identical good in two locations, no transport costs and no economic barriers between both locations.
Income elasticity of demand (IED): measures the responsiveness of the demand for a good to a change in the income of the people demanding the good, ceteris paribus; calculated as the ratio of the percentage change in demand to the percentage change in income. Inferior goods: IED<0; normal goods: IED>0, necessity good: 1>IED>0, luxury good or superior good: IED>1, sticky good: IED=0.
Kuznets curve: represents graphically the hypothesis advanced by Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and 1960s that as an economy develops, a natural cycle of economic inequality occurs, driven by market forces which at first increase inequality, and then decrease it after a certain average income is attained. Criticisms: East Asian miracle. Environmental Kuznets curve: externalities - whether pollution actually begins to decline for good when an economic threshold is reached or whether the decrease is only in local pollutants and pollution is simply exported to poorer developing countries. Wealthy nations have a trend of exporting the activities that create the most pollution, like manufacturing of clothing and furniture, to poorer nations that are still in the process of industrial development.
Value of life: economic value assigned to life in general, or to specific living organisms; marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life "priceless", thus illegalizing any form of slavery; i.e., humans cannot be bought for any price. However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made. $50,000 per year of quality life (international standard whether to cover a new medical procedure) [2008]; $129,000 per year of quality life (based on analysis of kidney dialysis procedures) in USA [2008].
Slavery in the 21st century (modern slavery, neo-slavery): institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 38 mln to 46 mln, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (8 mln), PRC (3.86 mln), Pakistan (3.19 mln), North Korea (2.64 mln), Nigeria (1.39 mln), Indonesia (1.22 mln), Congo DR (1 mln), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000).
Race to the bottom: socio-economic phrase to describe either government deregulation of the business environment or reduction in corporate tax rates, in order to attract or retain usually foreign economic activity in their jurisdictions. While this phenomenon can happen between countries as a result of globalization and free trade, it also can occur within individual countries between their sub-jurisdictions (states, localities, cities). It may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production. The effect and intent of these actions is to lower labor rates, cost of business, or other factors (pensions, environmental protection and other externalities) over which governments can exert control. This deregulation lowers the cost of production for businesses. Countries/localities with higher labor, environmental standards, or taxes can lose business to countries/localities with less regulation, which in turn makes them want to lower regulations in order to keep firms’ production in their jurisdiction, hence driving the race to the lowest regulatory standards.
Hubbert peak theory: water (partly renewable, intensive on energy) and phosphorus are needed for food (and energy), fisheries are renewable; energy: oil, gas, coal, uranium; helium (inert gas!) - special case; transition metals, precious metals
Pareto efficiency: state of allocation of resources in which it is impossible to make any one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off. The term is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. The concept has applications in academic fields such as economics, engineering, and the life sciences. Pareto improvement is defined to be a change to a different allocation that makes at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off, given a certain initial allocation of goods among a set of individuals. An allocation is defined as "Pareto efficient" or "Pareto optimal" when no further Pareto improvements can be made.
Econophysics: interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics; statistical finance.
Complexity economics: application of complexity science to the problems of economics; computer simulations to gain insight into economic dynamics, and avoids the assumption that the economy is a system in equilibrium.
The Observatory of Economic Complexity: multidisciplinary effort between the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab and the Center for International Development at Harvard University; develop new tools that can help visualize and make sense of large volumes of data.
The Product Space: network that formalizes the idea of relatedness between products traded in the global economy
Economic complexity index (ECI): holistic measure of the production characteristics of large economic systems, usually whole countries; attempt to synthesize the collective knowledge of a society.
List of countries by economic complexity: ECI was calculated with trade data from the UN Comtrade, thus the information is only based on exports (and not goods produced)
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): USA private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community"; well known for providing start and end dates for recessions in US; largest economics research organization in US; many USA Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences and many members of the Council of Economic Advisers (to the USA president). Aging, Asset Pricing, Children, Corporate Finance, Development of the American Economy, Economics of Education, Economics of Fluctuation Growth, Energy and the Environment, Health Care, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, International Finance and Macroeconomics, International Trade and Investment, Labor Studies, Law and Economics, Monetary Economics, Political Economy, Productivity, and Public Economics.
Law and economics (economic analysis of law): application of economic theory (specifically microeconomic theory) to the analysis of law. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Cobra effect: occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. as a type of unintended consequence. The term is used to illustrate the causes of incorrect stimulation in economy and politics.
Campbell's law: adage developed by Donald T. Campbell, an example of the cobra effect: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." (p. 85)
Infrastructure-based development (infrastructure-driven development): combines key policy characteristics inherited from the Rooseveltian progressivist tradition and Neo-Keynesian economics in the United States, France's Gaullist and Neo-Colbertist centralized economic planning, Scandinavian social democracy as well as Singaporean and Chinese state capitalism : it holds that a substantial proportion of a nation’s resources must be systematically directed towards long term assets such as transportation, energy and social infrastructure (schools, universities, hospitals…) in the name of long term economic efficiency (stimulating growth in economically lagging regions and fostering technological innovation) and social equity (providing free education and affordable healthcare). According to a study by D.A. Aschauer, there is a positive and statistically significant correlation between investment in infrastructure and economic performance. Furthermore, the infrastructure investment not only increases the quality of life, but, based on the time series evidence for the post-WWII period in USA, infrastructure also has positive impact on both labor and multifactor productivity. The multifactor productivity can be defined as the variable in the output function not directly caused by the inputs, private and public capital. Thus, the impact of infrastructure investment on multifactor productivity is important because the higher multifactor productivity implies higher economic output and hence higher growth. According to an overview of multiple studies by Louis Cain, the infrastructure investments have also been profitable. For example, Fogel estimated the private rate of return on the Union Pacific Railroad at 11.6%, whereas the social rate that accounts for social benefits, such as improved firm efficiencies and government subsidies, was estimated at 29.9%. In another study, Heckelman and Wallis estimated that the first 500 miles of railroad in a given state led to major increases in property values between 1850 and 1910. They calculated the revenue gain from the land appreciation to be $33,000-$200,000 per mile, while construction costs were $20,000-$40,000 per mile. Roller and Waverman, utilizing data for 21 OECD countries conclude that there is a causal relationship between telecommunications infrastructure investment and aggregate output. “Successful countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and South Korea still remember the harsh adjustment mechanisms imposed abruptly upon them by the IMF and World Bank during the 1997-1998 ‘Asian Crisis’ […] What they have achieved in the past 10 years is all the more remarkable: they have quietly abandoned the “Washington consensus” by investing massively in infrastructure projects […] this pragmatic approach proved to be very successful.” Research conducted by the World Pensions Council (WPC) suggests that while China invested roughly 9% of its GDP in infrastructure in the 1990s and 2000s, most Western and non-Asian emerging economies invested only 2% to 4% of their GDP in infrastructure assets. In the West, the notion of pension fund investment in infrastructure has emerged primarily in Australia and Canada in the 1990s notably in Ontario and Quebec and has attracted the interest of policy makers in sophisticated jurisdictions such as California, New York, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK. Trumponomics: unconventional (by American standards) policy mix favoring renewed federal government involvement in infrastructure investment and co-investment across the board (at national, state, municipal and local level).
Deskilling: process by which skilled labor within an industry or economy is eliminated by the introduction of technologies operated by semi- or unskilled workers. This results in cost savings due to lower investment in human capital, and reduces barriers to entry, weakening the bargaining power of the human capital. Deskilling is the decline in working positions through the machinery introduced to separate workers from the production process. Deskilling can also refer to individual workers specifically. The term refers to a person becoming less proficient over time. Examples of how this can occur include changes in one's job definition, moving to a completely different field, chronic underemployment (e.g. working as a cashier instead of an accountant), and being out of the workforce for extended periods of time (e.g. quitting a position in order to focus exclusively on child-rearing). It can also apply to immigrants who held high-skilled jobs in their countries of origin but cannot find equivalent work in their new countries and so are left to perform low-skilled work they are overqualified for.
Sudden stop (economics): in capital flows is defined as a sudden slowdown in private capital inflows into emerging market economies, and a corresponding sharp reversal from large current account deficits into smaller deficits or small surpluses.
Total factor productivity (TFP): variable which accounts for effects in total output not caused by traditionally measured inputs of labor and capital. Technology growth and efficiency are regarded as two of the biggest sub-sections of Total Factor Productivity, the former possessing "special" inherent features such as positive externalities and non-rivalness which enhance its position as a driver of economic growth. TFP may account for up to 60% of growth within economies.
Asset–liability mismatch: financial terms of an institution's assets and liabilities do not correspond. Currency mismatch: one currency for borrowing, another currency for using (e.g. lending, national currency (original sin)). Maturity mismatch: duration gap; long-term assets vs short-term liabilities. Asset–liability mismatches are important to insurance companies and various pension plans, which may have long-term liabilities (insurance/pension plans) that must be backed by assets; choosing assets that are appropriately matched to their financial obligations is therefore an important part of their long-term strategy.
de:Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau): die größte nationale Förderbank der Welt. Die Gründung der KfW erfolgte auf der Grundlage des „KfW-Gesetzes“ als eine Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts (AöR). Die Rechtsaufsicht hat das Bundesministerium der Finanzen. 1948.12.16 mit dem Ziel gegründet, den Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft zu finanzieren; Das Startkapital stammte vor allem aus Marshallplan.
Shadow banking system: term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. The phrase "shadow banking" contains the pejorative connotation of back alley loan sharks. Many in the financial services industry find this phrase offensive and prefer the euphemism "market-based finance". Shadow banking has grown in importance to rival traditional depository banking, and was a primary factor in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 and the global recession that followed. Like regular banks, shadow banks provide credit and generally increase the liquidity of the financial sector. Yet unlike their more regulated competitors, they lack access to central bank funding or safety nets such as deposit insurance and debt guarantees. Shadow banks can be involved in the provision of long-term loans like mortgages, facilitating credit across the financial system by matching investors and borrowers individually or by becoming part of a chain involving numerous entities, some of which may be mainstream banks. Due in part to their specialized structure, shadow banks can sometimes provide credit more cost-efficiently than traditional banks. In USA prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the shadow banking system had overtaken the regular banking system in supplying loans to various types of borrower; including businesses, home and car buyers, students and credit users. In 2016, Benoît Cœuré (ECB executive board member) stated that controlling shadow banking should be the focus to avoid a future financial crisis, since the banks' leverage had been lowered. The concept of credit growth by unregulated institutions, though not the term "shadow banking system", dates at least to 1935, when Friedrich Hayek stated: "There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money.... The characteristic peculiarity of these forms of credit is that they spring up without being subject to any central control, but once they have come into existence their convertibility into other forms of money must be possible if a collapse of credit is to be avoided."
BlackRock: USA global investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with $7.4 trillion in assets under management as of end-Q4 2019. Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world's largest shadow bank. USA government contracted with BlackRock to help resolve the fallout of the financial meltdown of 2008. According to Vanity Fair, the financial establishment in Washington and on Wall Street believed BlackRock was the best choice for the job. In 2009, BlackRock first became the No. 1 asset manager worldwide.
Wall Street
Den of Thieves (book) (1992; James B. Stewart): recounts the insider trading scandals involving Ivan Boesky,
Michael Milken (junk bond and
Drexel Burnham Lambert (in)fame) and others during the 1980s such as Martin Siegel, Dennis Levine, Robert Freeman, Richard Wigton, Timothy Tabor, John A. Mulheren, Lowell Milken, Robert Wilkis, ...
High-yield debt (non-investment-grade bond, speculative-grade bond, or junk bond): bond that is rated below investment grade.
Sovereign default: failure or refusal of the government of a sovereign state to pay back its debt in full; formal declaration of a government not to pay (repudiation) or only partially pay its debts (due receivables), or the de facto cessation of due payments; sometimes countries escape the real burden of some of their debt through inflation; sometimes countries devaluate their currency by ending or altering the convertibility of their currency into precious metals or foreign currency at fixed rates. Most authorities will limit the use of "default" to mean failure to abide by the terms of bonds or other debt instruments. Dramatic rise in the interest rate faced by a government due to fear that it will fail to honor its debt is sometimes called a sovereign debt crisis. Since a sovereign government, by definition, controls its own affairs, it cannot be obliged to pay back its debt; governments may face severe pressure from lending countries; in the most extreme cases, a creditor nation may declare war on a debtor nation for failing to pay back debt, in order to enforce creditor's rights (e.g. UK invaded Egypt 1882, gunboat diplomacies, 1915 USA occupied Haiti); government which defaults may also be excluded from further credit and some of its overseas assets may be seized. Governments rarely default on the entire value of their debt - they often enter into negotiations with their bondholders to agree on a delay or partial reduction of their debt payments, which is often called a debt restructuring or 'haircut'. IMF often assists in sovereign debt restructurings. Causes: insolvency/over-indebtedness of the state; change of government; decline of the state.
List of sovereign debt crises: world economic elite: FR (1812), DE (Prussia (1807, 1813); 1932, 1939, 1948), JP (1942, 1946-1952), RU (1839, 1885, 1918, 1947, 1957, 1991, 1998.08.17), UK (1822, 1834, 1888-1889, 1932), USA (1779, 1790, 1798, 1862, 1933, 1971 (Nixon Shock)); China (1921, 1932, 1939), India (1958, 1969, 1972), Brazil (1898, 1902, 1914, 1931, 1937, 1961, 1964, 1983, 1986–1987, 1990).
By country:
USA:
Financial position of the United States: assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP,) as of Q1 2014.
Long Depression: worldwide price recession, beginning in 1873 and running through the spring of 1879; most severe in Europe and USA, which had been experiencing strong economic growth fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution in the decade following the American Civil War. The episode was labeled the "Great Depression" at the time, and it held that designation until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Economy of UK had been in continuous depression from 1873 to as late as 1896 and some texts refer to the period as the Great Depression of 1873–96. While the production of iron doubled between the 1870s and 1890s, the price of iron halved; steel production increased twentyfold (0.5 mln. t to 11 mln. t), and railroad development boomed.
1997 Asian financial crisis: hardest hit: Indonesia (-83%), the rest only by about -40%: Thailand, Phillippines, Malaysia, South Korea (why South Korea among these nations in 1997?).
South Korean won: started floating just before 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Great Recession (Lesser Depression, Long Recession, global recession of 2009): major global recession characterized by various systemic imbalances and was sparked by the outbreak of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and financial crisis of 2007–08; European sovereign debt crisis, austerity, high levels of household debt, trade imbalances, high unemployment and limited prospects for global growth in 2013 and 2014 continue to provide obstacles to full recovery from the Great Recession. Countries that avoided recession: Poland (the only one in EU); China, India, and Iran; South Korea (the only large OECD country); Australia (experiencing only one quarter of negative growth in 2008.Q4); financial crisis did not affect developing countries to a great extent.
Financial crisis of 2007–08 (Global Financial Crisis, 2008 financial crisis): considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s; resulted in the threat of total collapse of large financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments, and downturns in stock markets around the world.
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: ten-member commission appointed by US government with the goal of investigating the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–08
Synthetic CDO: is a variation of a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) that generally uses credit default swaps and other derivatives to obtain its investment goals; synthetic CDOs have been criticized as serving as a way of hiding short position of bets against the subprime mortgages from unsuspecting triple-A seeking investors, and contributing to the 2007-2008 financial crisis by amplifying the subprime mortgage housing bubble. From value of $5 trl in 2006 to $2 bln in 2012.
Naked Capitalism: blog published by Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors, Inc., a management consulting firm; focus on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process. Banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis.
Yanis Varoufakis (1961.03.24-): political economist and author of dual Greek-Australian nationality; active participant in the current debates on the global and European crisis; professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens and a private consultant for Valve Corporation. 2004.01-2006.12: economic adviser to George Papandreou, whose government he was to become an ardent critic of a few years later. Varoufakis compares the role of the US economy since the 1970s in relation to the rest of the world with the minotaur.
2014–15 Russian financial crisis: result of the collapse of the Russian ruble beginning in the second half of 2014, and the associated shrinking of the Russian economy.
Eurozone crisis
Eurozone crisis (previously [2013.07.15]: European sovereign-debt crisis): ongoing crisis that has been affecting the countries of the Eurozone since early 2009, when a group of 10 central and eastern European banks asked for a bailout. In 1992, members of the European Union signed the Maastricht Treaty, under which they pledged to limit their deficit spending and debt levels {UTOPISTIC agreement? Is this agreement even possible to abide? Can ECB NOT print more € notes?}. It allowed the sovereigns to mask ("Enronise") their deficit and debt levels through a combination of techniques, including inconsistent accounting, off-balance-sheet transactions as well as the use of complex currency and credit derivatives structures. Structure of the Eurozone as a currency union (i.e. all use €) without fiscal union (e.g., different tax and public pension rules {there are tax heavens in EU which use euros}) contributed to the crisis and harmed the ability of European leaders to respond. European banks own a significant amount of sovereign debt, such that concerns regarding the solvency of banking systems or sovereigns are negatively reinforcing. 2010 and later: EFSF and ESM; crisis had a major political impact on the ruling governments in 8 out of 17 eurozone countries, leading to power shifts in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands [13/06/23]. Odious debt (e.g. Siemens sold to Greece). (OLD: to get money from EFSF, EFSM, IMF, the Eurozone country should be unable to borrow on markets at acceptable rates and then it would take three to four weeks to draw up a support programme including sending experts from the Commission, the IMF and the ECB to the Eurozone country in difficulty. Greece got €110 bln in 2010 before EFSF was there, so those moneys are on bilateral commitment by the Eurozone countries (excluding Slovakia and newest Euro member Estonia [11/12/19]).)
Causes of the European sovereign-debt crisis: Ireland's banks lent the money to property developers, generating a massive property bubble. When the bubble burst, Ireland's government and taxpayers assumed private debts. Greek government increased its commitments to public workers in the form of extremely generous wage and pension benefits, with the former doubling in real terms over 10 years. Iceland's banking system grew enormously, creating debts to global investors (external debts) several times GDP.
Controversies surrounding the European sovereign-debt crisis: European sovereign-debt crisis resulted from a combination of complex factors, including the globalization of finance; easy credit conditions during the 2002–2008 period that encouraged high-risk lending and borrowing practices; the 2007–2012 global financial crisis; international trade imbalances; real-estate bubbles that have since burst; the 2008–2012 global recession; fiscal policy choices related to government revenues and expenses; and approaches used by nations to bail out troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socializing losses. Ireland's banks lent the money to property developers, generating a massive property bubble; bubble burst, Ireland's government and taxpayers assumed private debts. Greek government increased commitments to public workers in the form of extremely generous wage and pension benefits, with the former doubling in real terms over 10 years. Iceland's banking system grew enormously, creating debts to global investors (external debts) several times GDP. Greece hid its growing debt and deceived EU officials with the help of derivatives designed by major banks; some financial institutions clearly profited from the growing Greek government debt in the short run. European bailouts are largely about shifting exposure from banks and others, who otherwise are lined up for losses on the sovereign debt they have piled up, onto European taxpayers. Speculation about the breakup of the eurozone: Breakup vs. deeper integration.
2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis: 2013.03.25 €10bln bailout was announced in return for Cyprus agreeing to close its second largest bank, the Cyprus Popular Bank (also known as Laiki Bank), levying all uninsured deposits there, and possibly around 40% of uninsured deposits in the Bank of Cyprus (the Island's largest commercial bank), many held by wealthy citizens of other countries - many of them from Russia - who were using Cyprus as a tax haven. No insured deposit of 100,000 Euros or less would be affected.
Greek government-debt crisis: statistical credibility - problems with unreliable data had existed ever since Greece applied for membership of the Euro in 1999; tax evasion and corruption. Downgrading of creditworthiness. German banks were lenders & Greek government was the borrower - both sides were corrupt & made huge mistakes? Bailout of the Greek debts is the bailout of the German banks which financed those debts.
2011.10.26 (EU summit): Euro countries agreed on a plan to cut the debt of Greece from today's 160% to 120% of GDP by 2020. As part of that plan, it was proposed that all owners of Greek governmental bonds should "voluntarily" accept a 50% haircut of their bonds (resulting in a debt reduction worth €100bn), and moreover accept interest rates being reduced to only 3.5%.
2012.03: According to Forbes magazine Greece’s restructuring represents a default; Combined this will result in a 53.5% haircut of the face value, so that the Greek debt pile overall will decrease from its current level at €350bn, to a more sustainable [sic?!] level around €250bn.
2012.05: several EU officials reminded Greece, that no matter the outcome of the parliamentary elections, they had a choice to either: "respect and follow the agreed debt rescue plan, with the needed requirement to approve the next round of €11.9bn fiscal austerity for the budget years 2013 and 2014" XOR "have the second bailout loan immediately cancelled, followed by an uncontrolled default and exclusion from the eurozone".
Public pensions in Greece: For decades pensions in Greece were known to be among the most generous in the European Union, allowing many pensioners to retire earlier than pensioners in other European countries. This placed a heavy burden on Greece's public finances which (coupled with an aging workforce) made the Greek state increasingly vulnerable to external economic shocks, culminating in a recession due to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent European debt crisis. This series of crises has forced the Greek government to implement economic reforms aimed at restructuring the pension system and eliminating inefficiencies within it. Measures in the Greek austerity packages imposed upon Greek citizens by the European Central Bank have achieved some success at reforming the pension system despite having stark ramifications for standards of living in Greece, which have seen a sharp decline since the beginning of the crisis. Prior to 2010, most employees had a contribution rate of 6.67%, while employers contributed 13.33% (double the employee rate), with a higher rate for hazardous occupations. As of 2016 when the Greek government reformed the pension scheme, the self-employed sector and other white-collar sectors have had their respective contribution rates equalized and unified, standing at 20% of their annual income (regardless of assumed earnings).
Tax evasion and corruption in Greece: tax evasion has been described by Greek politicians as “a national sport” - with up to €30 billion per year going uncollected. 2009.08 size of the Greek black market to be around €65bn (equal to 25% of GDP). Fakelaki ("little envelope").
Greek government-debt crisis countermeasures: tax evasion and tax collection improvements: seven out of 10 self-employed Greeks significantly under-report their earnings, only 200 Greeks declaring incomes of over €500,000. By 2012, wages have been cut to the level of the late 1990s. Purchasing power equals that of 1986. The suicide rate in Greece used to be the lowest in Europe, but by 2012.03 it had increased by 40%. Estimates in 2012.03 were that 1/11th residents of greater Athens (~400,000 people) were visiting a soup kitchen daily.
Greek bailout referendum, 2015: as a result of the referendum, the bailout conditions were rejected by a majority of over 61% to 39% approving, with the "No" vote winning in all of Greece's regions.
Proposed long-term solutions for the Eurozone crisis. Proposals: European fiscal union; European bank recovery and resolution authority; Eurobonds; European Monetary Fund (EMF); Drastic debt write-off financed by wealth tax.
Actors fueling the crisis: Credit rating agencies; Media; Speculators
Speculation about the breakup of the eurozone: Breakup vs. deeper integration
Odious debt
Manipulated debt and deficit statistics
Collateral for Finland
Effects of IMF/EU austerity policies
USA
Bankruptcy in the United States: largest corps going bust post 2007-2009 mess (bust date): Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. (2008.9.15), Washington Mutual (2008.9.26), Worldcom, Inc. (2002.7.21), General Motors (2009.6.1), CIT Group (2009.11.1), MF Global (2011.11.08), Chrysler (2009.4.30), Thornburg Mortgage (2009.5.01), IndyMac Bancorp (2008.7.31), General Growth Properties (2009.4.16), Lyondell Chemical (2009.1.06). Exempt property; Spendthrift trusts; Debtor's discharge ("fresh start"); Entities that cannot be debtors = banks and other deposit institutions, insurance companies, railroads, and certain other financial institutions and entities regulated by the federal and state governments (in legalese: "insolvent", "in liquidation", "in receivership", but NOT "bankrupt"). Social and economic factors: majority of personal bankruptcies involve substantial medical bills.
Panic of 1837: financial crisis in USA that touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins.
State bankruptcies in the 1840s: in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and the territory of Florida.
Orange County, California#bankruptcy (1994.12.06): county lost at least $1.5 billion through high-risk investments in derivatives; criminal prosecution of County of Orange treasurer Robert Citron. 1996.06.12: emergence from bankruptcy.
Chrysler Chapter 11 reorganization (2009.04.30): equity ownership of the "New Chrysler": Fiat=20%, US gov.=9.85%, CA gov.=2.46%, UAW retiree medical fund=67.69%. US fed. gov. paid $6.6 bln in financing of the "Old Chrysler".
General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization (2009.06.01): total debt: before=$94.7bln, after=$17bln; employees: before=91k, after=68.5k. 2009.07.10 new entity completed the purchase of continuing operations, assets and trademarks of GM as a part of the 'pre-packaged' Chapter 11 reorganization. New entity with the backing of US Treasury was formed to acquire profitable assets, under section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code, with the new company planning to issue IPO of stock in 2010.
Detroit bankruptcy (2013.07.18; pop(2012): city=700k, urban=3.8mln, metro=4.3mln, CSA=5.3mln): debt=$18-20bln (largest municipal bankruptcy filing in USA history by debt); one-third of the city’s budget was going toward retiree benefits. 2013.06 the government of Detroit stopped making payments on some of its unsecured debts, including pension obligations.
Decline of Detroit: local crime rates are among the highest in the United States, and vast areas of the city are in a state of severe urban decay. Detroit riots:
Detroit race riot of 1943: it occurred in a period of dramatic population increase associated with the military buildup as Detroit's auto industry was converted to the war effort; nearly 400,000 migrants, both African American and European American, came from the Southeastern United States from 1941 to 1943 and were competing for jobs and housing in an already crowded city, both between each other and with foreign immigrants.
1967 Detroit riot: precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in the history of USA, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot.
Humans and economics
Sex-selective abortion (and sex-selective infanticide): practice of terminating a pregnancy based upon the predicted sex of the baby. The selective abortion of female fetuses is most common in areas where cultural norms value male children over female children, especially in parts of PRC, India, Pakistan, the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia), and Southeast Europe (Albania, Montenegro; Macedonia, Kosovo).
Missing women of Asia: "Das Gupta observed that the preference for boys and the resulting shortage of girls was even more pronounced in the more highly developed Haryana and Punjab regions of India than in poorer areas, and also the high prevalence of this prejudice among the more educated and affluent women (mothers) there"; "The bias against girls is very evident among the relatively highly developed, middle-class dominated nations (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and the immigrant Asian communities in the United States and Britain."; "A different development occurred in South Korea which in the early 1990s had one of the highest male to female ratios in the world. By 2007 however, South Korea, had a male to female ratio comparable to that found in Western Europe, US and Sub Saharan Africa."
Brain drain (human capital flight): large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge; coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe.
brain drain from Germany to US in terms of Nobel laureates
Lump of labor fallacy (lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity): contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. Historically, the term "lump of labour" originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours that employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term has also been used to describe the commonly held beliefs that increasing labour productivity and immigration cause unemployment.
List of largest consumer markets: "% of GDP" is of interest: if it is ~>100% (or maybe even >80%), these countries are supported by other governments or by NGOs (receiving foreign aid); those with ~<50% are living on oil money or have huge amounts of currency in the banks - these countries are investing into the other countries or the leaders are accruing money in their Swiss/Bermuda accounts. Or?
List of countries by research and development spending: sort by % of GDP (PPP) and at the top are the developed, in the middle - developing, at the bottom - poor or natural resources rich (e.g. oil, tourism) countries.
Selection of GDP PPP data (top 10 countries and blocs) and respective trade blocs, ordered by trade bloc, 2018.
List of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita: the growth in PPP of the core of EU is envied by neighbors (Spain, Portugal) and the Eastern Europe, Russia. Japan and tiny East Asian nations set the stage for PRC and maybe South East Asia and South Asia (Indian subcontinent). In Americas, the North American PPP is envied by the Central and South. Africa as a continent lags behind all other continents [12/12/16].
A world map of countries by trading status, late 20th century, using the world system differentiation into core countries, semi-periphery countries and periphery countries.
Core countries: industrialized capitalist countries on which periphery countries and semi-periphery countries depend. Core countries control and benefit from the global market. They are usually recognized as wealthy states with a wide variety of resources and are in a favorable location compared to other states. They have strong state institutions, a powerful military and powerful global political alliances. Core countries do not always stay core permanently. Throughout history, core states have been changing and new ones have been added to the core list. The most influential countries in the past have been what would be considered core. Today, it is currently perceived that the heart of the core countries currently consists of United States, Canada, most of Western Europe, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. The population of the core is by far the wealthiest and best educated on the planet.
Countries designated by IMF in 2009.04 World Economic Outlook as advanced economies are in blue, while countries designated as emerging and developing economies are in orange and red; of these, those designated by the United Nations as least developed countries are in red, while others are in orange.
Developing country (less developed country, underdeveloped country): nation with an underdeveloped industrial base, and a low HDI relative to other countries. On the other hand, since the late 1990s developing countries tended to demonstrate higher growth rates than the developed ones.
Least developed country: country that, according to the United Nations, exhibits the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development, with the lowest HDI ratings of all countries in the world. A country is classified as a Least Developed Country if it meets three criteria: Poverty, Human resource weakness, Economic vulnerability.
Newly industrialized country: countries whose economies have not yet reached developed country status but have, in a macroeconomic sense, outpaced their developing counterparts. Another characterization of NICs is that of nations undergoing rapid economic growth (usually export-oriented). South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey.
Graph of Major Developing Economies by Real GDP per capita at PPP 1990-2013
Social Progress Index: measures the extent to which countries provide for the social and environmental needs of their citizens. Fifty-four indicators in the areas of basic human needs, foundations of well-being, and opportunity to progress show the relative performance of nations. The index is published by the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative, and is based on the writings of Amartya Sen, Douglass North, and Joseph Stiglitz. The SPI measures the well-being of a society by observing social and environmental outcomes directly rather than the economic factors. The social and environmental factors include wellness (including health, shelter and sanitation), equality, inclusion, sustainability and personal freedom and safety.
Developed country#Comparative table (2020): 2018 - LT; 2016 - LV; 2011 - EE; 2010 - IL, SI; 2009 - CZ & SK; 2005 - PT, KR; 2002 - GR; 2001 - NZ; 1999 - ES; 1997 - FI, IE; 1996 - IS, GB/UK; 1994 - AU, BE, CA, FR; 1993 - JP; 1992 - AT, LU; 1991 - DK, DE, NL; 1989 - USA; 1987 - NO, CH/Swiss.
World map showing percent of population living on less than $1.25 (ppp) per day using the latest data from 2000-2006.
Theories of poverty: foundation upon which poverty reduction strategies are based. Grondona, Harrison, and Lindsay all feel that at least some aspects of development-resistant cultures need to change in order to allow under-developed nations (and cultural minorities within developed nations) to develop effectively.
Feminization of poverty: concept that describes the idea that women represent disproportionate percentages of the world's poor. UNIFEM describes it as "the burden of poverty borne by women, especially in developing countries". This concept is not only a consequence of lack of income, but is also the result of the deprivation of capabilities and gender biases present in both societies and governments. This includes the poverty of choices and opportunities, such as the ability to lead a long, healthy, and creative life, and enjoy basic rights like freedom, respect, and dignity. Women's increasing share of poverty is related to the rising incidence of lone mother households.
Market research
Mystery shopping (mystery consumer): tool used externally by market research companies or watchdog organizations or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service or compliance to regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services.
Stiftung Warentest (since 1964.12.4, by BRD): German consumer organisation and foundation involved in investigating and comparing goods and services in an unbiased way. Financed by its publications (test and Finanztest) and €6 mln. by Federal Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture and Consumer Protection to have no ads.
Finanztest: consumer magazine which focuses on providing objective information about financial services. "Legal and Everyday Life Issues", "Investment and Provision for Retirement", "Home and Living", "Tax", "Health and Insurance".
Money creation: process by which the money supply of a country, or of an economic or monetary region, is increased. In most modern economies, most of the money supply is in the form of bank deposits. Central banks monitor the amount of money in the economy by measuring the so-called monetary aggregates. Money creation by government spending. The central bank is the banker of the government and provides to the government a range of services at the operational level, such as managing the Treasury's single account, and also acting as its fiscal agent (e.g. by running auctions), its settlement agent, and its bond registrar. Central banks can become insolvent in liabilities on foreign currency. Fractional reserve theory of money creation: Money multiplier. Banks first lend and then cover their reserve ratios: The decision whether or not to lend is generally independent of their reserves with the central bank or their deposits from customers; banks are not lending out deposits or reserves, anyway. Banks lend on the basis of lending criteria, such as the status of the customer's business, the loan's prospects, and/or the overall economic situation. Monetary financing: Monetary financing used to be standard monetary policy in many countries, such as Canada or France, while in others it was and still is prohibited. In the Eurozone, Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty explicitly prohibits the European Central Bank from financing public institutions and state governments. In Japan, the nation's central bank "routinely" purchases approximately 70% of state debt issued each month, and owns, as of Oct 2018, approximately 440 trillion JP¥ (approx. $4trillion) or over 40% of all outstanding government bonds.
Optimum currency area: geographical region in which it would maximize economic efficiency to have the entire region share a single currency. It describes the optimal characteristics for the merger of currencies or the creation of a new currency. The theory is used often to argue whether or not a certain region is ready to become a currency union, one of the final stages in economic integration.
Monetary hegemony: economic and political concept in which a single state has decisive influence over the functions of the international monetary system. The term monetary hegemony appeared in Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism, describing not only an asymmetrical relationship that the US dollar has to the global economy, but the structures of this hegemonic edifice that Hudson felt supported it, namely the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The US dollar continues to underpin the world economy and is the key currency for medium of international exchange, unit of account (e.g. pricing of oil), and unit of storage (e.g. treasury bills and bonds) and, despite arguments to the contrary, is not in a state of hegemonic decline. The international monetary system has borne witness to two monetary hegemons: UK and USA. British monetary hegemony. American monetary hegemony.
Exorbitant privilege: refers to the benefit the United States has due to its own currency (i.e., the US dollar) being the international reserve currency. Accordingly, the US would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency. The position puzzle consists of the difference between the (negative) USA net international investment position (NIIP) and the accumulated USA current account deficits, the former being much smaller than the latter. The income puzzle consists of the fact that despite a deeply negative NIIP, the USA income balance is positive, i.e. despite having much more liabilities than assets, earned income is higher than interest expenses. Opposition in France: In the Bretton Woods system put in place in 1944, USA dollars were convertible to gold. In France, it was called "America's exorbitant privilege" as it resulted in an "asymmetric financial system" where foreigners "see themselves supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals". In 1965.02 President Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to exchange its USA dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. He sent the French Navy across the Atlantic to pick up the French reserve of gold and was followed by several countries. As it resulted in considerably reducing USA gold stock and USA economic influence, it led USA President Richard Nixon to end unilaterally the convertibility of the dollar to gold on 1971.08.15 (the "Nixon Shock"). This was meant to be a temporary measure but the dollar became permanently a floating fiat money and in 1976.10, the USA government officially changed the definition of the dollar; references to gold were removed from statutes.
Interchange fee: fee paid between banks for the acceptance of card based transactions.
Black market (underground economy): there is also grey market. Black market provides 1.8 billion jobs. Sexual exploitation and forced labor; Illegal drugs; Prostitution; Weapons; Illegally logged timber; Animals and animal products; Alcohol; Tobacco (differences in taxes between the US states); Biological organs; Racketeering; Transportation providers; Counterfeit medicine, essential aircraft and automobile parts; Copyrighted media (Since digital information can be duplicated repeatedly with no loss of quality, and passed on electronically at little to no cost, the effective underground market value of media is zero, differentiating it from nearly all other forms of underground economic activity; crime of duplication, with no physical property being stolen); Currency; Fuel prices in EU (exchange rate between Euro and Pound Sterling: smuggling between Norther Ireland and Republic of Ireland). Appearance and disappearance (prohibition in USA; marijuana). Wars;
Indian black money (According to the data provided by the Swiss Banking Association, India has more black money than the rest of the world combined).
Capital:
Capital flight: occurs when assets or money rapidly flow out of a country, due to an event of economic consequence.
Illicit financial flows: form of illegal capital flight and occurs when money is illegally earned, transferred, or spent; money is intended to disappear from any record in the country of origin, and earnings on the stock of illicit financial flows outside of a country generally do not return to the country of origin.
Silver Thursday: event that occurred in USA in the silver commodity markets on Thursday, 1980.03.27. A steep fall in silver prices led to panic on commodity and futures exchanges. Hunt brothers (Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt) tried to corner the silver market.
Finance: study of how people allocate their assets over time under conditions of certainty and uncertainty; time value of money; aims to price assets based on their risk level, and expected rate of return.
Financial system: allows the transfer of money between savers (and investors) and borrowers. Financial Services and Systems: "a set of complex and closely interconnected financial institutions, markets, instruments, services, practices, and transactions."
Global financial system (GFS): consists of institutions, their customers, and financial regulators that act on a global level. Banks, hedge funds, IMF, Bank for International Settlements (BIS); central banks of G20, finance ministries of EU, NAFTA, OPEC; regulators of the GFS: IMF, BIS, USA (many regulatory authorities), EU (ECB), Bank of China, a few others.
Nasdaq, Inc.: USA multinational financial services corporation that owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market and eight European stock exchanges, namely Armenian Stock Exchange, Copenhagen Stock Exchange, Helsinki Stock Exchange, Iceland Stock Exchange, Riga Stock Exchange, Stockholm Stock Exchange, Tallinn Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ OMX Vilnius. It is headquartered in New York City.
OMX (Aktiebolaget Optionsmäklarna/Helsinki Stock Exchange): Swedo-Finnish financial services company, formed in 2003 through a merger between OM AB and HEX plc and is a part of the NASDAQ OMX Group since February 2008.
Global Settlement (2003.04.28): enforcement agreement between the SEC, NASD, NYSE, and ten of the United States's largest investment firms to address issues of conflict of interest within their businesses; firms would have to literally insulate their banking and analysis departments from each other physically and with Chinese walls.
Net present value (NPV, net present worth (NPW)): measurement of the profitability of an undertaking that is calculated by subtracting the present values (PV) of cash outflows (including initial cost) from the present values of cash inflows over a period of time. Incoming and outgoing cash flows can also be described as benefit and cost cash flows, respectively. Time value of money dictates that time affects the value of cash flows.
Contango (forwardation): situation where the futures price (or forward price) of a commodity is higher than the anticipated spot price at maturity of the futures contract.
Normal backwardation (backwardation): market condition wherein the price of a commodities' forward or futures contract is trading below the expected spot price at contract maturity.
Decentralized finance (DeFi): blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum. DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts. Some DeFi applications promote high interest rates but are subject to high risk.
Central securities depository (CSD): specialized financial organization holding securities like shares, either in certificated or uncertificated (dematerialized) form, allowing ownership to be easily transferred through a book entry rather than by a transfer of physical certificates. This allows brokers and financial companies to hold their securities at one location where they can be available for clearing and settlement. This is usually done electronically, making it much faster and easier than was traditionally the case where physical certificates had to be exchanged after a trade had been completed. Scope: Domestic central securities depository; International central securities depository (ICSD). Functions: Safekeeping; Deposit and withdrawal; Dividend, interest, and principal processing, as well as corporate actions including proxy voting; Other services; Pledge.
Depository Trust Company (DTC; 1973-): New York corporation that performs the functions of a central securities depository as part of the US National Market System. DTC annually settles transactions worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, processes hundreds of millions of book-entry deliveries, and custodies millions of securities issues worth tens of trillions of dollars issued in the United States and over 100 other countries. "Chills and freezes"
American depositary receipt (ADR; sometimes spelled depository): negotiable security that represents securities of a foreign company and allows that company's shares to trade in the U.S. financial markets. Shares of many non-U.S. companies trade on U.S. stock exchanges through ADRs, which are denominated and pay dividends in U.S. dollars, and may be traded like regular shares of stock. ADRs are also traded during U.S. trading hours, through U.S. broker-dealers. ADRs simplify investing in foreign securities because the depositary bank "manage[s] all custody, currency and local taxes issues". The first ADR was introduced by J.P. Morgan in 1927 for the British retailer Selfridges on the New York Curb Exchange, the American Stock Exchange's precursor.
2 European international CSDs:
Euroclear: Belgium-based financial services company that specializes in the settlement of securities transactions, as well as the safekeeping and asset servicing of these securities. It was founded in 1968 as part of J.P. Morgan & Co. to settle trades on the then developing eurobond market. Euroclear provides securities services to financial institutions located in more than 90 countries. In addition to its role as an international central securities depository (ICSD), Euroclear also acts as the central securities depository (CSD) for Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French, Irish, Swedish, and UK securities. Euroclear also owns EMXCo, the UK's leading provider of investment-fund order routing. 2022: Aftermath of Russian invasion of Ukraine
Clearstream (2000-): financial services company that specializes in the settlement of securities transactions and is owned by Deutsche Börse AG. It provides settlement and custody as well as other related services for securities across all asset classes. Clearstream operates securities settlement systems based in both Luxembourg and Germany, which allow for the holding and transfer of securities. Clearstream has around 2,500 customers in 110 countries. Clearstream accepts central banks and AML-regulated credit institutions (such as regulated banks) as customers. Clearstream does not accept natural persons as customers and no account is opened in the name of a natural person. Clearstream has therefore been described as a "bank for banks". History: Clearstream affair; Iranian funds controversy; 2022: Aftermath of Russian invasion of Ukraine.
National Settlement Depository (Russia) (NSD): headquartered in Moscow, is a Russian non-bank financial institution and CSD. It provides depository, settlement (bank account), and related services to financial market entities. Its services cover both securities listed in Russia's 2011 Federal Law "On the Central Securities Depository", and other Russian and foreign equity and debt securities. NSD is the CSD of the Russian Federation, and was assigned CSD status by the Russian Federal Financial Markets Service in 2012. It is the largest securities depository in Russia by market value of equity and debt securities held in custody, which in June 2022 were 70 trillion roubles ($1.12 trillion). It is a member of the Moscow Exchange Group. In March 2022, in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NSD's accounts were blocked and frozen at international CSDs Euroclear and Clearstream (CSDs which together held €50tn of assets on behalf of investors). In addition, the European Union added NSD to its sanctions list, blocking NSD's accounts in euros, and in Euroclear and Clearstream; as a result, NSD could not service forex-denominated bonds issued by Russia and Russian companies. NSD suspended transactions in euros. In 2014, the large international securities depositories Euroclear and Clearstream gained full access to the Russian securities market, thus providing non-Russian companies and investment funds with investment opportunities. In 2014, in compliance with the FATCA requirements, NSD was registered with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and was assigned a Global Intermediary Identification Number.
Renaissance Technologies: East Setauket, New York-based USA investment management firm founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker, which specializes in systematic trading using only quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses; one of the first highly successful hedge funds using quantitative trading— known as "quant hedge funds"—that rely on powerful computers and sophisticated mathematics to guide investment strategies. In 1988 the firm established its most profitable portfolio, the Medallion Fund, which used an improved and expanded form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, improved by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which they could profit. Simons and Ax started a hedge fund and christened it Medallion in honor of the math awards that they had won. Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, which is run mostly for fund employees, "is famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning >35% annualized over a 20-year span." Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009. The company is now jointly run by Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, two computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. By 2015.10, Renaissance had roughly $65 billion worth of assets under management, most of which belong to employees of the firm. Firm is intensely secretive about the inner workings of its business and very little is known about it; is known for its ability to recruit and retain top scientific talent, for having a personnel turnover that's nearly non-existent, and for requiring its researchers to agree to stringent intellectual property obligations by signing iron clad non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. “the best physics and mathematics department in the world” and, according to Weatherall, “avoids hiring anyone with even the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides”. Renaissance is the top financial firm contributing to federal campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, donating $33,108,000 by July. During the 2016 campaign cycle Simons contributed $26,277,450, ranking as the 5th largest individual contributor. Simons directed all but $25,000 of his funds towards liberal candidates. Mercer contributed $25,059,300, ranking as the 7th largest individual contributor. Mercer directed all funds contributed towards conservative candidates.
Jim Simons (mathematician) (1938.04.25-): USA mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is known as a quantitative investor and in 1982 founded Renaissance Technologies. Due to the success of Renaissance in general and its Medallion Fund in particular, Simons has been described as the greatest investor on Wall Street. As reported by Forbes, his net worth as of October 2019 is estimated to be $21.6 billion, making Simons the 21st-richest man in the United States.
Robert Mercer (1946.07.11-): USA hedge fund manager, former principal investor in the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, computer scientist who was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer, and former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies. Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.
Rebekah Mercer: USA heiress, foundation director, and major Republican donor who oversees the day-to-day operations of philanthropic and political projects for the Mercer family. She began managing the family foundation when the Mercers started getting involved in conservative causes. Her father, billionaire Robert Mercer, said in November 2017 that he had sold his stake in Breitbart to his daughters.
Quantum Group of Funds: privately owned hedge funds based in Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) and Cayman Islands. They are advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Soros started the fund in 1973 in partnership with Jim Rogers. In 1992, the lead fund, Soros' Quantum Fund, became famous for 'breaking' the Bank of England, forcing it to devalue the pound. Soros had bet his entire fund in a short sale on the ultimately fulfilled prediction that the British currency would drop in value, a coup that netted him a profit of $1 billion, also known as Black Wednesday.
Sovereign wealth fund (SWF; sovereign investment fund, social wealth fund): state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity fund or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by revenues from commodity exports or from foreign-exchange reserves held by the central bank. Some sovereign wealth funds may be held by a central bank, which accumulates the funds in the course of its management of a nation's banking system; this type of fund is usually of major economic and fiscal importance. Other sovereign wealth funds are simply the state savings that are invested by various entities for the purposes of investment return, and that may not have a significant role in fiscal management. There have been attempts to distinguish funds held by sovereign entities from foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks. Sovereign wealth funds can be characterized as maximizing long-term return, with foreign exchange reserves serving short-term "currency stabilization", and liquidity management. Many central banks in recent years possess reserves massively in excess of needs for liquidity or foreign exchange management. Moreover, it is widely believed most have diversified hugely into assets other than short-term, highly liquid monetary ones, though almost no data is publicly available to back up this assertion. History: SWFs invest in a variety of asset classes such as stocks, bonds, real estate, private equity and hedge funds. Many sovereign funds are directly investing in institutional real estate.
Russian Direct Investment Fund (Российский фонд прямых инвестиций; RDIF): Russia's sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 by the Russian government to make investments in companies of high-growth sectors of the Russian economy. Its mandate is to co-invest alongside the world’s largest institutional investors, direct investment funds, sovereign wealth funds and leading companies. RDIF’s reserved capital under management equals $10 billion.
China Investment Corporation (CIC; 中国投资有限责任公司): SWF that manages part of PRC's foreign exchange reserves. China's largest sovereign wealth fund, CIC was established in 2007 with about US$200 billion of assets under management, a number that grew to US$941 billion in 2017 and US$1.2 trillion in 2021.
State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE): of PRC is an administrative agency under the State Council tasked with drafting rules and regulations governing foreign exchange market activities, and managing the state foreign-exchange reserves, which at the end of December 2016 stood at $3.01 trillion for the People's Bank of China. Brad Setser said: "SAFE has built up one of the largest US equity portfolios of any foreign government entity investing abroad, including the major sovereign wealth funds....It appears SAFE began diversifying into equities early in 2007 and, rather than being deterred by the subprime crisis, it continued to buy."
Payment systems, Alternative currencies, Cryptocurrencies
Payment service provider: offers shops online services for accepting electronic payments by a variety of payment methods including credit card, bank-based payments such as direct debit, bank transfer, and real-time bank transfer based on online banking. Typically, they use a software as a service model and form a single payment gateway for their clients (merchants) to multiple payment methods.
Worldpay: provides payment services for mail order and Internet retailers, as well as point of sale transactions. Customers are a mix of multinational, multichannel retailers, with the majority being small business merchants. Worldpay started as an electronic payment provider called Streamline in 1989 in the UK but has extended into mail order/telephone order, "unattended" payments and handling secure payments over the Internet through merger and acquisition of several other companies.
SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication): Belgian cooperative society providing services related to the execution of financial transactions and payments between banks worldwide. Its principal function is to serve as the main messaging network through which international payments are initiated. It also sells software and services to financial institutions, mostly for use on its proprietary "SWIFTNet", and assigns ISO 9362 Business Identifier Codes (BICs), popularly known as "SWIFT codes". The SWIFT messaging network is a component of the global payments system. However, the organization does not manage accounts on behalf of individuals or financial institutions, and it does not hold funds from third parties. It also does not perform clearing or settlement functions. After a payment has been initiated, it must be settled through a payment system, such as TARGET2 in Europe. In the context of cross-border transactions, this step often takes place through correspondent banking accounts that financial institutions have with each other.
SPFS (Система передачи финансовых сообщений (СПФС)): Russian equivalent of the SWIFT financial transfer system, developed by the Central Bank of Russia. The system has been in development since 2014, when USA government threatened to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system. The Russian Government is also in talks to expand SPFS to developing countries such as Turkey and Iran. Owing to its limitations, the SPFS system is seen as a last resort, rather than as a replacement for the SWIFT network. Since 2019 many agreements have been reached to link SPFS to other countries' payment systems in China, India, Iran, as well as the countries inside the EAEU who are planning to use SPFS directly. At the end of 2020, there were 23 foreign banks connected to the SPFS from Armenia, Belarus, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Switzerland.
Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS): payment system which offers clearing and settlement services for its participants in cross-border RMB payments and trade. Backed by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), China launched the CIPS in 2015 to internationalise RMB use. CIPS also counts several foreign banks as shareholders including HSBC, Standard Chartered, the Bank of East Asia, DBS Bank, Citi, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and BNP Paribas.
Proof of stake currencies: Algorand, Cardano, EOS.IO, Gridcoin, Nxt, Peercoin, Polkadot, Steem, Tezos, TRON
ERC-20 tokens
Stablecoins: Dai, Diem, Tether, USD Coin
Other currencies
Blockchain (database): distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision. It consists of data structure blocks—which hold exclusively data in initial blockchain implementations, and both data and programs in some of the more recent implementations—with each block holding batches of individual transactions and the results of any blockchain executables. Each block contains a timestamp and information linking it to a previous block.
Ethereum: public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality. It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute P2P contracts using a cryptocurrency called ether.
The DAO (organization): digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. The DAO is stateless, and is not tied to any particular nation state. As a result, many questions of how government regulators will deal with a stateless fund have not yet been dealt with. 2016.06 users exploited a vulnerability in the DAO code to enable them to siphon off one third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. 2016.07.20 the Ethereum community decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This was controversial, and led to a fork in Ethereum, where the original unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum Classic, thus breaking Ethereum into two separate active cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum Classic: People who held Ether from before the DAO hard fork have both a balance of Ethereum Classic (ETC) and an equal amount of Ethereum (ETH).
Vitalik Buterin (1994.01.31-): programmer and writer. He is primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum, and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. In 2014 Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship.
Hal Finney (computer scientist) (1956.05.04–2014.08.28): USA software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. Finney later worked for PGP Corporation. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In October 2009, Finney announced in an essay on the blog Less Wrong that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2009.08.
Adam Back (1970.07-): British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.
Nick Szabo: computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science and received a law degree from George Washington University Law School.
On governance
"Blockchain governance generally comes in only three varieties:(1) Lord of the Flies, (2) lawyers, or (3) ruthlessly minimized." Someone asked, "Why ruthless?" and Szabo wrote, "Otherwise the children or the lawyers will win."
Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker
Gavin Andresen (Gavin Bell): software developer best known for his involvement with bitcoin. Andresen graduated from Princeton University in 1988.
Mark Karpelès (1985.06.01-): former CEO of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. He moved to Japan in 2009. Karpelès was born in 1985 in Chenôve, France, the child of Anne-Robert Karpelès, a geologist. He was raised in Dijon. Arrest and prosecution. Bankruptcy proceedings.
"As of April 2020, China accounts for more than 75% of Bitcoin blockchain operation around the world. Some rural areas in China are considered as the ideal destination for Bitcoin mining mainly due to the cheaper electricity price and large undeveloped land for pool construction. The mining pool statistics is obtained from
https://btc.com/stats."
List of bitcoin forks: defined variantly as changes in the protocol of the bitcoin network or as the situations that occur "when two or more blocks have the same block height". A fork influences the validity of the rules. Forks are typically conducted in order to add new features to a blockchain, to reverse the effects of hacking or catastrophic bugs. Forks require consensus to be resolved or else a permanent split emerges. Forks of the client software: Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited. Intended hard forks splitting the cryptocurrency: Bitcoin Cash: Forked at block 478558 2017.08.01 → Bitcoin SV: Forked at block 556766 2018.11.15; Bitcoin Gold: Forked at block 491407 2017.10.24.
Wei Dai (戴维): computer engineer known for contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. He developed the Crypto++ cryptographic library, created the b-money cryptocurrency system, and co-proposed the VMAC message authentication algorithm. The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him. Wei Dai was member of the Cypherpunks, Extropians, and SL4 mailing lists in the 1990s. On SL4 he exchanged with people such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, and others in the nascent "rationalist" community.
Proof of stake (PoS): protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. Unlike a proof of work (PoW) protocol, PoS systems do not incentivize extreme amounts of energy consumption. Attacks: PoS protocols can suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem, where validator nodes validate conflicting copies of the blockchain because there is minimal cost to doing so, and a smaller chance of losing out on rewards by validating a block on the wrong chain. If this persists, it can allow double-spending. This can be mitigated through penalizing validators who validate conflicting chains or by structuring the rewards so that there is no economic incentive to create conflicts.
Cardano (blockchain platform): public blockchain platform. It is open-source and decentralized, with consensus achieved using proof of stake. It can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its internal cryptocurrency, Ada. Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. The development of the project is overseen and supervised by the Cardano Foundation based in Zug, Switzerland. It is also the largest cryptocurrency to use a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a greener alternative to proof-of-work protocols.
Direct operations: central bank purchases bonds directly from its government. "Essentially, the government prints and sells bonds to the central bank on an ad-hoc basis; the central bank in turns issues currency to pay for them. Essentially the government is provided with cash to meet its needs, although it has created a corresponding liability."
Gresham's law: monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will disappear from circulation.
Shipping industry of the People's Republic of China:
COSCO (China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company) {PRC government owned company}. PRC is the hugest shipper of containers, hugest ISO container producer. The Port of Shanghai is the busiest in the world.
Economic integration: The degree of economic integration can be categorized into seven stages: (1) Preferential trading area, (2) Free trade area, (3) Customs union, (4) Common market, (5) Economic union, (6) Economic and monetary union, (7) Complete economic integration.
Customs union: type of trade bloc which is composed of a free trade area with a common external tariff. Most famous: EU + 3 countries; CAN, MERCOSUR, EAC, SACU.
Economics and psychology
Choice overload (people are confronted with many choices versus just a few choices),
Overchoice (problem facing consumers in the postindustrial society: too many choices),
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Schwartz argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers)
Human economic behavior
Homo economicus (Economic human): concept in some economic theories of humans as rational and narrowly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments toward their subjectively defined ends.
Homo reciprocans (Reciprocal human): concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment.
The map shows different (political as well as economic) spaces in Europe, such as EU, the Eurozone, EEA, the Schengen Area, but also (potential) EU accession candidates and former EU member states.
in the center: "Eurozone"; other circles: EU, EEA, Schengen Area, EU Customs Union, Monetary Agreement with EU, CEFTA. Periphery: Council of Europe. Neighboring "union": Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
European integration: process of industrial, economic, political, legal, social and cultural integration of states wholly or partially in Europe or nearby. European integration has primarily come about through EU and its policies.
Multi-speed Europe (two-speed Europe): idea that different parts of the European Union should integrate at different levels and pace depending on the political situation in each individual country. Indeed, multi-speed Europe is currently a reality, with only a subset of EU countries being members of the eurozone and of the Schengen area. Like other forms of differentiated integration such as à la carte and variable geometry, "multi-speed Europe" arguably aims to salvage the "widening and deepening of the European Union" in the face of political opposition (euroscepticism).
EU in the world; areas of EU members which are not in EU. Map of European Union in the world (with overseas countries and territories (OCT) and outermost regions (OMR))
In EU, but not in NATO: Ireland (why?), Sweden (is trying [2023/12/26] to join NATO, but Turkey and Hungary say no (with no small help from Russian gov.)), Austria (due to "losing" WWII, foreign USSR policy, extremely good relations with Russia [2023/12/26]). Finnland due to "losing" WWII, foreign USSR policy, joined NATO in 2023.04.04 (signed 2022.07.05). In NATO, but not in EU: Iceland (fishery policy), Norway (über rich land, oil), Albania (Muslim?), Turkey (Muslim?).
European Union VAT area: "Goods are only considered as imported or exported if they enter or leave the area. The VAT percentage does, however, differ from country to country within the area, which is a complicating factor, especially when, for example, an Internet-based reseller in one EU country sells to an EU customer in a different EU country." Amazon suffers in service due to EU politics?
Excluded areas: UK: Gibraltar, Channel Islands, British Overseas; Spain: Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla; Netherlands: Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Caribbean Netherlands; Italy: Campione d'Italia, Livigno, Lake Lugano; Greece: Mount Athos (autonomous monastic region); Germany: Büsingen am Hochrhein, Heligoland; France: overseas; Finland: Åland; Denmark: Faroe Islands, Greenland.
VAT Information Exchange System (VIES): electronic means of transmitting information relating to VAT-registration (i.e., validity of VAT-numbers) of companies registered in EU.
Eurosphere (European Empire): grown in popularity in the early years of the 21st century
Citizenship of the European Union: Multiple nationality permitted: CZ: Yes [effective 2014.01.01]. DE & AT: No (some exceptions: USA/CA, ...); LT, EE, DK: No; all others: Yes. Acquisition by birth; Acquisition by descent; Acquisition by marriage; Acquisition by naturalisation.
Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification (CVM): safeguard measure invoked by the European Commission when a new member or acceding state of EU has failed to implement commitments undertaken in the context of the accession negotiations in the fields of the Area of freedom, security and justice or internal market policy.
Enhanced cooperation: procedure where a minimum of nine EU member states are allowed to establish advanced integration or cooperation in an area within EU structures but without the other members being involved. [As of 2013.02] this procedure is being used in the fields of divorce law and patents, and is approved for the field of a financial transaction tax.
European External Action Service (EEAS): diplomatic service and combined foreign and defence ministry of EU. The EEAS is led by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP), who is also President of the Foreign Affairs Council and Vice-President of the European Commission, and carries out the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), including CSDP. The EEAS, as well as the office of the HR, was initiated following the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009.12.01. It was formally established in 2010.12.01. The EEAS was formed by merger of the external relations departments of the European Commission and of the Council, which were joined by staff seconded from national diplomatic services of the Member States. Although it supports both the Commission and the Council, the EEAS is independent from them and has its own staff, as well as a separate section in the EU budget.
EU three: FR, DE, UK who collectively wield most influence within EU.
Big Four (European Union): FR, DE, IT, UK; they are the EU countries individually represented as full members of the G7, the G8 and the G20.
G6 (EU): unofficial group of the interior ministers of the six European Union member states – DE, FR, UK, Italy, Spain, and PL – with the largest populations and so with the majority of votes in the Council of the European Union.
New Hanseatic League (Hansa): established in 2018.02 by EU finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a two-page foundational document which set out the countries' "shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of EMU.
Institutional seats of the European Union: Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, rather than being concentrated in a single capital city. The Hague is the only exception, as the fixed seat of European Police Office (Europol).
Agencies of the European Union (>40): decentralised body of EU, which is distinct from the institutions. Agencies are established to accomplish specific tasks. Each agency has its own legal personality. Some answer the need to develop scientific or technical know-how in certain fields, others bring together different interest groups to facilitate dialogue at European and international level.
United States of Europe ((USE), the Federal States of Europe (FSE), the European State, the European Superstate, the European Federation): similar hypothetical scenarios of a single sovereign state in Europe (hence superstate), organised as a federation similar to USA, as contemplated by political scientists, politicians, geographers, historians, futurologists, and fiction writers.
Baltoscandia (Baltoscandian Confederation): geopolitical concept of a Baltic–Scandinavian union (consisting of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). The idea was proposed by a Swedish professor Sten de Geer (1886–1933) in the journal Geografiska Annaler in 1928 and further developed by Professor Kazys Pakštas (1893–1960), a Lithuanian scientist in the field of geography and geopolitics.
Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8): regional co-operation format that includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries were amongst the strongest supporters of the Baltic countries' independence and later they were the first to open their borders, introducing visa-free regimes with the Baltic countries. The Nordic countries actively assisted the Baltic countries in their preparations for integration into EU and NATO. On the political level, co-operation in the NB8 format is conducted primarily in the form of annual meetings of the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers. Since 2004.05.01, six Nordic and Baltic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are EU members. Regular informal NB6 Prime Ministers’ meetings on EU matters take place on the eve of Council meetings as well as Foreign Affairs Ministers of these six countries meet on the eve of General Affairs Council and Foreign Affairs Council meetings. NB8 and Visegrad Group.
Visegrád Group: cultural and political alliance of four Central European states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, that are members of EU and NATO – for the purposes of advancing military, cultural, economic and energy cooperation with one another along with furthering their integration in the EU. Visegrád was chosen as the location for the 1991 meeting as an intentional allusion to the medieval Congress of Visegrád in 1335 between John I of Bohemia, Charles I of Hungary and Casimir III of Poland. Neighbor relations: Austria, Germany, Ukraine.
The utility of EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (civilian and military components) compared to that of NATO, depending on level of conflict.
EU and peace, crisis, war:
European Union–NATO relations: two main treaty-based Western organisations for cooperation between member states, both headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Their natures are different and they operate in different spheres: NATO is a purely intergovernmental organisation functioning as a military alliance whose primary task is to implement article 5 in the North Atlantic Treaty on collective territorial defence. The EU on the other hand is a partly supranational and partly intergovernmental sui generis entity akin to a confederation that entails wider economic and political integration. Unlike NATO, the EU pursues a foreign policy in its own right - based on consensus, and member states have equipped it with tools in the field of defence and crisis management; CSDP structure. The EU and NATO have respectively 27 and 31 member states, of which 22 are members of both.. Another four NATO members are EU applicants—Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey—and another one, UK, is a former EU member. Iceland and Norway have opted to remain outside of the EU, but do participate in the European Single Market as part of their EEA membership. The memberships of the EU and NATO are distinct, and some EU member states are traditionally neutral on defence issues. Several EU and NATO member states were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact. Denmark has an opt-out from the CSDP.
2022 Danish European Union opt-out referendum: abolition of the defence opt-out, one of the country's opt-outs from the European Union, was held in Denmark in 2022.06.01. The referendum was announced in 2022.03.06 following a broad multi-party defence agreement reached during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The referendum resulted in the "Yes" side winning with approximately two-thirds of the vote.
Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO): part of EU's CSDP in which 26 of the 27 national armed forces pursue structural integration. Based on Article 42.6 and Protocol 10 of the Treaty on European Union, introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, PESCO was first initiated in 2017. The initial integration within the PESCO format is a number of projects which launched in 2018. Non-participating EU member states: Denmark has a permanent opt-out from the common defence policy; Malta wants to see how PESCO develops first since it may violate the Maltese Constitution (Neutrality Clause). Denmark did not participate as (prior to its abolition in July 2022) it had an opt-out from the Common Security and Defence Policy, nor did the United Kingdom, which withdrew from the EU in 2020. The Council of the EU approved Denmark joining PESCO in 2023.05.23.
Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP): EU's course of action in the fields of defence and crisis management, and a main component of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The CSDP involves the deployment of military or civilian missions to preserve peace, prevent conflict and strengthen international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. Military missions are carried out by EU forces established with secondments from the member states' armed forces. The CSDP also entails collective self-defence amongst member states as well as PESCO in which 25 of the 27 national armed forces pursue structural integration. The EU command & control structures are much smaller than NATO's Command Structure (NCS), which has been established for territorial defence. It has been agreed that NATO's Allied Command Operations (ACO) may be used for the conduct of the EU's missions. The MPCC, established in 2017 and to be strengthened in 2020, is the EU's first permanent military OHQ. In parallel, the newly established European Defence Fund (EDF) marks the first time the EU budget is used to finance multinational defence projects.
Association Trio (2021.05.17): tripartite format for the enhanced cooperation, coordination, and dialogue between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine with EU on issues of common interest related to EU, enhancing cooperation within the framework of the Eastern Partnership, and committing to the prospect of joining EU. All three members of the Association Trio currently maintain free trade agreements with the EU through the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area and are members of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly.
Template:EU institutions &
Institutions of the European Union: 7 institutions. European Parliament ("lower house") + Council of EU ("upper house") = legislative; European Commission = executive; European Council = sets impetus and direction; Court of Justice of EU = judiciary; ECB = central bank / euro; European Court of Auditors = financial auditor.
President of the European Commission: head of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. The President of the Commission leads a Cabinet of Commissioners, referred to as the College, collectively accountable to the European Parliament. The President is empowered to allocate portfolios amongst, reshuffle or dismiss Commissioners as necessary. The College directs the Commission's civil service, sets the policy agenda and determines the legislative proposals it produces. The Commission is the only body that can propose] EU laws. The Commission President also represents the EU abroad, together with the President of the European Council and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The post was established in 1958. Each new President is nominated by the European Council and formally elected by the European Parliament, for a five-year term.
President of the European Council: representative of the European Union (EU) on the world stage, and the person presiding over and driving forward the work of the European Council
Eurostat: Directorate-General of the European Commission located in Luxembourg; provide statistical information to the institutions of EU and to promote the harmonisation of statistical methods across its member states and candidates for accession as well as EFTA countries.
Supremacy (European Union law): principle by which the laws of European Union member states that conflict with laws of the European Union must be ignored by national courts so that the European Union law can take effect. The legal doctrine emerged from the European Court of Justice through a number of decisions.
Treaties of the European Union: sets out the EU's constitutional basis; establish the various EU institutions together with their remit, procedures and objectives.
Treaty on European Union (2007): one of the primary Treaties of EU. The TEU form the basis of EU law, by setting out general principles of the EU's purpose, the governance of its central institutions (such as the Commission, Parliament, and Council), as well as the rules on external, foreign and security policy.
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, 1957.03.25 signed by BeNeLux, DE (West Germany), FR, IT): one of two treaties forming the constitutional basis of EU, the other being TEU. It was previously known as the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC). The Treaty originated as the Treaty of Rome (fully the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best-known of the European Communities (EC).
Opt-outs in the European Union: occasionally member states negotiate certain opt-outs from legislation or treaties of the European Union, meaning they do not have to participate in certain policy areas. Denmark (four opt-outs: euro, AFSJ (defense), CSDP), Ireland (two opt-outs: Schengen, AFSJ), Poland (one opt-out: Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU) and the United Kingdom (four opt-outs: Schengen, euro, Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU, AFSJ). Sweden has "opt-out" de facto (euro).
Edinburgh Agreement (1992) (1992.12): agreement that granted Denmark four exceptions to the Maastricht Treaty so that it could be ratified by Denmark. The opt-outs are outlined in the Edinburgh Agreement and concern the EMU (as above), CSDP, Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and the citizenship of the European Union (this opt-out was rendered meaningless when the Amsterdam Treaty adopted the same wording for all members).
Opt outs out of Schengen Area: Ireland; Andorra: special case. UK left EU 23:00 GMT in 2020.01.31 (00:00 2020.02.01 CET).
Eurozone: opt outs: Denmark, Sweden does NOT enter ERM II and does NOT hold a referendum on euro on purpose. UK left EU 00:00 2020.02.01 CET.
Community acquis (acquis communautaire, EU acquis, FR: acquis - "that which has been agreed upon"): accumulated legislation, legal acts, and court decisions which constitute the body of EU law.
Area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ): ensure security, rights and free movement within the EU; cross border police cooperation had to increase to counter cross border crime, and thus also minimum judicial standards. European Arrest Warrant, the Schengen Area and Frontex. European crimes (7): counterfeiting euro notes and coins; credit card and cheque fraud; money laundering; people-trafficking; computer hacking and virus attacks; corruption in the private sector; and marine pollution (possible others: racial discrimination and incitement to racial hatred; trafficking in human organs and tissue; and corruption in awarding public contracts).
Schengen Area: EU opt outs: UK & Ireland; Eu microstate opt outs: Andorra; still to join: Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus (Cyprus dispute), Croatia.
Official Journal of the European Union: official gazette of record for EU; published every working day in all of the official languages of the member states. Only legal acts published in the Official Journal are binding.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; implementation date 2018.05.25): regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within EU and EEA. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. The GDPR aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. Business processes that handle personal data must be built with data protection by design and by default, meaning that personal data must be stored using pseudonymization or full anonymization, and use the highest-possible privacy settings by default, so that the data is not available publicly without explicit, informed consent, and cannot be used to identify a subject without additional information stored separately. No personal data may be processed unless it is done under a lawful basis specified by the regulation, or if the data controller or processor has received an unambiguous and individualized affirmation of consent from the data subject. The data subject has the right to revoke this consent at any time.
Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH): EU regulation dating from 2006.12.18. REACH addresses the production and use of chemical substances, and their potential impacts on both human health and the environment. Its 849 pages took seven years to pass, and it has been described as the most complex legislation in the Union's history and the most important in 20 years. It is the strictest law to date regulating chemical substances and will affect industries throughout the world. REACH entered into force on 2007.06.01, with a phased implementation over the next decade.
Substance of very high concern (SVHC): chemical substance (or part of a group of chemical substances) concerning which it has been proposed that use within EU be subject to authorisation under the REACH Regulation. Indeed, listing of a substance as an SVHC by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is the first step in the procedure for authorisation or restriction of use of a chemical. The first list of SVHCs was published on 2008.10.28 and the list has been updated many times to include new candidates. The most recent update occurred on 2020.06 to include a total 209 SVHC.
Prüm Convention (Signed: 2005.05.27; Effective: 2006.11.01): law enforcement treaty which was signed by Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain in the town of Prüm in Germany, and which is open to all members of the European Union, 14 of which are currently parties. Contents of the Convention: The Convention was adopted so as to enable the signatories to exchange data regarding DNA, fingerprints and vehicle registration of concerned persons and to cooperate against terrorism. It also contains provisions for the deployment of armed sky marshals on flights between signatory states, joint police patrols, entry of (armed) police forces into the territory of another state for the prevention of immediate danger (hot pursuit), and cooperation in case of mass events or disasters. Furthermore, a police officer responsible for an operation in a state may, in principle, decide to what degree the police forces of the other states that were taking part in the operation could use their weapons or exercise other powers.
EU economics, finances, budget, currencies, crisis
European Exchange Rate Mechanism#Exchange rate bands: if nominally the currency is pegged and the inflation is several times higher than EU-15 average, who pays for the debts & the risk of the would-be Eurozone member at the introduction of Euro? - Eurozone members.
European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF): agreed by the 27 member states of the European Union on 9 May 2010 (€440 bln); 2011 7 21 : €780 bln; 2011 10 27: €1 trln ⇒ money put to good use, used at risk, or wasted?
European Stability Mechanism (ESM): intergovernmental organization located in Luxembourg City, which operates under public international law for all eurozone Member States having ratified a special ESM intergovernmental treaty. It was established 2012.09.27 as a permanent firewall for the eurozone, to safeguard and provide instant access to financial assistance programmes for member states of the eurozone in financial difficulty, with a maximum lending capacity of €500 billion. Replaces two earlier temporary EU funding programmes: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). All new bailouts for any eurozone member state will now be covered by ESM, while the EFSF and EFSM will continue to handle money transfers and programme monitoring for the previously approved bailout loans to Ireland, Portugal and Greece.
European Fiscal Compact (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union)
Budget of the European Union: 5% of expenditure is on administration, 95% on policies. Policies (2006 percentages):
Common Agricultural Policy (47%): income support for farmers (70%), rural development (20%), market support (10%; e.g. bad weather).
Regional policy of the European Union (30%; Cohesion Policy): stated aim of improving the economic well-being of regions in the EU and also to avoid regional disparities. Convergence objective (82%; poorest regions), regional competitiveness and employment (the other regions; funding managed by ERDF or ESF)
Horizon 2020: project became embroiled with the 2014 referendums held by Switzerland, which opted to impose a quota on immigration between that country and the EU. Switzerland, which maintains bilateral agreements with the EU, was intended to be a participant of Horizon 2020, but negotiations that would have ensured this were put on hold in the aftermath of the decision. Turkey joined this funding program. This funding programme also includes Israel, which joined after protracted negotiations about whether funding could be directed to projects beyond the Green Line; eventually the two parties agreed to disagree, and Israel published its views in an Appendix to the official documents. Open access is an underlying principle of Horizon 2020.
European Investment Bank (EIB): international financial institution, a publicly owned bank (owners: Member States of the European Union, who subscribe to the Bank's capital – EUR 232 billion (end of 2009)). Subscribed capital: end-2009 EUR 232 billion.
European Investment Fund (EIF): provision of finance to SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), EIF does not lend money to SMEs directly; rather it provides finance through private banks and funds. Its main operations are in the areas of venture capital and guaranteeing loans. EIB: 62%, Eu Communities (EC)/Eu Commission 29%, 9% - private.
Interreg (1989-): initiative that aims to stimulate cooperation between regions in EU.
Free trade areas in Europe: BAFTA was a free trade agreement between Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that existed between 1994 and 2004. EFTA; CEFTA. CISFTA.
European Free Trade Association (EFTA): free trade organisation between four European countries that operates in parallel with – and is linked to – EU. Today's EFTA members are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, of which the latter two were founding members. Three of the EFTA countries are part of the European Union Internal Market through the Agreement on EEA, which took effect in 1994; the fourth, Switzerland, opted to conclude bilateral agreements with the EU. In 1999, Switzerland concluded a set of bilateral agreements with EU covering a wide range of areas, including movement of people, transport, and technical barriers to trade.
Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA): trade agreement between non-EU countries in Southeast Europe. Former Yugoslavian nations (except: Croatia and Slovenia are in EU) + Albania + Moldova (Moldova is also in CISFTA).
European Economic Area (EEA): comprises three member states of EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), and 27 member states of EU, excluding Croatia which is set to join once its accession agreement is ratified by all EEA countries [2014].
European Union Customs Union (EUCU): consists of all the member states of the European Union and Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Turkey {q.v. European Union–Turkey Customs Union}.
Eurozone (euro area): economic and monetary union (EMU) of 18 EU member states that have adopted the euro (€) as their common currency and sole legal tender.
Sweden and the euro: Sweden does not currently use the euro as its currency and has no plans to replace the krona in the near future. Sweden maintains that joining the ERM II (a requirement for euro adoption) is voluntary, and has chosen to remain outside ERM II pending public approval by a referendum, thereby intentionally avoiding the fulfilment of the adoption requirements.
Eurogroup: meeting of the finance ministers of the eurozone.
Railteam: alliance of European high-speed rail operators: Deutsche Bahn, SNCF, Kingdom Eurostar UK, NS Hispeed, ÖBB, SBB-CFF-FFS, SNCB
Rail Baltica: ongoing greenfield railway infrastructure project to link Finland (via ferry or an undersea tunnel), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania with Poland and through this with the European standard gauge rail line network. Its purpose is to provide passenger and freight service between participating countries and improve rail connections between Central and Northern Europe. Furthermore, it is intended to be a catalyst for building the economic corridor in Northeastern Europe. The project envisages a continuous rail link from Tallinn (Estonia) to Warsaw (Poland). Link Finland (Helsinki-Tallinn Tunnel?), the Baltic States (Tallinn, Pärnu, Riga, Panevėžys, Kaunas), Poland (Białystok, Warsaw), and Germany (Berlin). Planned off-routes to Vilnius, to Riga Airport. As of 2020.01, the high-speed railway connection from Tallinn to the Lithuanian-Polish border was expected to be completed by 2026.
Trans-European Transport NetworkO (TEN-T): planned network of roads, railways, airports and water infrastructure in EU. The TEN-T network is part of a wider system of Trans-European Networks (TENs), including a telecommunications network (eTEN) and a proposed energy network (TEN-E or Ten-Energy). The European Commission adopted the first action plans on trans-European networks in 1990. TEN-T envisages coordinated improvements to primary roads, railways, inland waterways, airports, seaports, inland ports and traffic management systems, providing integrated and intermodal long-distance, high-speed routes.
Energy policy of EU
EU taxonomy for sustainable activities: classification system established to clarify which investments are environmentally sustainable, in the context of the European Green Deal. The aim of the taxonomy is to prevent greenwashing and to help investors make greener choices. Investments are judged by six objectives: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, the circular economy, pollution, effect on water, and biodiversity. Debate over natural gas and nuclear energy: Regarding nuclear power, concerns about safety and waste disposal had led to Spain, Belgium and Germany committing to abandoning nuclear power in the coming years, even though Belgium later pushed forward its nuclear phase-out by ten years following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On the inclusion of nuclear power in the taxonomy, a group of four countries (Spain, Denmark, Austria and Luxembourg) has co-signed an open letter to criticize the inclusion project of the Commission. Austria and Luxembourg have even threatened to sue the Commission in the Court of Justice if it included the two power sources into the taxonomy, on the ground that it would weaken its credibility. On the other hand, France is promoting the inclusion of nuclear power into the taxonomy, supported by Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The economy and energy minister of these countries published a joint opinion article on the 11th October 2021 to defend the role of nuclear power in the fight against climate change. Moreover, they support that it would lead to a better control on the energy prices, as nuclear power price is more stable than the power of gas which is mainly imported. Furthermore, a joint letter to the Commission from Finland and Sweden asked to remove the deadline for investment in nuclear energy and criticized the stringent criteria for waste disposal, which in their view fail to account the advances achieved in the two countries.
European Union–Turkey Customs Union: 1995.03.06 decision of the EC-Turkey Association Council to implement a customs union (tr: Gümrük Birliği) between Turkey and EU on 1995.12.31. Goods can travel between the two entities without any customs restrictions. Customs Union does not cover essential economic areas, such as agriculture, services or public procurement, to which bilateral trade concessions apply.
Switzerland:
Switzerland–European Union relations: Swiss Franc is pegged to € from 2011.08.06. 1.20 francs=1 €. It is pseudo ERM II, maintained by the Swiss National Bank (SNB).
[[Swiss referendum, February 2009]: on extending the freedom of movement for workers within the European Union to Bulgaria and Romania. 60% Yes, 40% No.
Microstates and the European Union: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City. All have Euro except Liechtenstein (has Swiss Franc). EU law application is fishy; still to be dragged to court in any of these microstates and see if EU law would apply.
European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP): foreign relations instrument of the EU which seeks to tie those countries to the east and south of the EU into the EU. Action Plan: EU offers financial assistance to countries within the European Neighbourhood, so long as they meet the strict conditions of government reform, economic reform and other issues surrounding positive transformation. The ENP does not cover countries which are in the current EU enlargement agenda, the European Free Trade Association or the western European microstates.
EU-Russia Common Spaces: RU did not want to participate in ENP, because RU sees ENP as "junior partnership", therefore the 4 Common Spaces (which are seen by RU as "equal partnering") were developed. EU treats these Common Spaces as another ENP (same laws, same source of funding, just different naming per request from RU).
Union for the Mediterranean (UfM): created in July 2008 as a relaunched Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (the Barcelona Process), when a plan to create an autonomous Mediterranean Union was dropped
Euro-Mediterranean free trade area (EU-MED FTA, EMFTA; Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area or Euromed FTA): based on UfM/Barcelona Process and ENP
Eastern Partnership (EaP): Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine.
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area: three free trade areas established between the European Union, and Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine respectively. The DCFTAs are part of each country's EU Association Agreement. They allow Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine access to the EU's internal market in selected sectors and grant EU investors in those sectors the same regulatory environment in the associated country as in the EU. The agreements with Moldova and Georgia have been ratified and officially entered into force in July 2016, although parts of them were already provisionally applied. The agreement with Ukraine was provisionally applied since 2016.01.01 and formally entered into force on 2017.09.01. Unlike standard free trade areas, the DCFTA is aimed to offer the associated country the "four freedoms" of the EU Single Market: free movement of goods, services, capital, and people. Movement of people however, is in form of visa-free regime for short stay travel, while movement of workers remains within the remit of the EU Member States.
in 2011.10: row between UK and its fellow EU members reached a head as the UK had blocked more than 70 EU statements to UN committees. The row was over the wording used; the statements read they were on behalf of the EU, rather than "EU and its member states" as the UK insisted. The UK's actions were intended to stop the perceived drift towards a common EU foreign policy and were insisted upon by British Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague.
EU foreign trade and foreign policy
energy (oil & gas):
Russia in the European energy sector - RU is the largest exporter of oil and natural gas to EU. West financed
Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod pipeline in 1982-1984. Gazprom invested in infrastructure in EU countries (piping, distribution) and in collecting the moneys (pricing, services). Transneft.
Nord Stream: gas from RU to DE (NEL pipeline (Norddeutsche Erdgasleitung) & OPAL pipeline (Ostsee-Pipeline-Anbindungsleitung)) by pipeline on the Baltic seabed.
Map of the major existing and proposed Russian natural gas transportation pipelines to Europe.
Baltic Pipe: natural gas pipeline between Europipe II (which traverses the North Sea between Norway and Germany) and Poland. It is a strategic infrastructure project to create a new European gas supply corridor. The Baltic Pipe officially became operational in 2022.09.27, one day after a series of as of yet unexplained explosions in 2022.09.26 rendered the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines from Russia to Germany inoperable.
EU Military
Berlin Plus agreement: short title of a comprehensive package of agreements made between NATO and the EU 2002.12.16:
The use of NATO assets by the EU is subject to a "right of first refusal": NATO must first decline to intervene in a given crisis.
Approval of the use of assets has to be unanimous among NATO states. For example, Turkish reservations about Operation Concordia using NATO assets delayed its deployment by more than five months.
EU Border and immigration
Melilla: Spanish city on the north coast of Morocco; area=12.3 km². Immigration.
Asylum applicants in Europe between 1 January and 30 June 2015. Central Mediterranean Route, Eastern Mediterranean Route (Turkey) → Western Balkan Route.
European migrant crisis: of 2015 arose through the rising number of refugees and migrants going to the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea, or through Southeast Europe, and applying for asylum. They come from areas such as the Middle East (Syria, Iraq), Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Gambia), South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh), and the Western Balkans (Serbia, Kosovo, Albania). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of November 2015, the top three nationalities of the over half a million Mediterranean Sea arrivals since the beginning of the year are Syrian (52%), Afghan (19%) and Iraqi (6%), all overwhelmingly Muslim entrants. Most of the refugees and migrants are adult men (65%): of the unauthorized entrants arriving in Europe by sea in 2015, 58% were adult males over 18 years of age, 17% were adult females over 18 years of age, and 25% were minor males and minor females under 18 years of age. Individual countries have at times reintroduced border controls within the Schengen Area, and rifts have emerged between countries willing to allow entry of asylum seekers for processing of refugee claims and others countries trying to discourage their entry for processing. Article 26 of the Schengen Convention says that carriers which transport people into the Schengen area shall, if they transport people who are refused entry into the Schengen Area, be responsible to pay for the return of the refused people, and pay penalties; Further clauses on this topic are found in EU directive 2001/51/EC; This has had the effect that migrants without a visa are not allowed on aircraft, boats or trains going into the Schengen Area, so migrants without a visa have resorted to migrant smugglers.
Austrian border barrier: border barriers and migration management facilities constructed by Austria 2015.11-2016.01 on its border with Slovenia and in 2016 on its border with Italy, as a response to European migrant crisis. They are located on internal European Union borders, since Austria, Italy and Slovenia are members of the EU and the free travel Schengen Area with a common visa policy. The barrier on the Slovenian border is several kilometers long, located near the busiest border crossing, Spielfeld-Šentilj and includes police facilities for screening and processing migrants. Foreign ministers of Austria, Slovenia and other Balkan countries met in Austria without Greece and agreed to reduce the flow of migrants into Central Europe and "sooner or later (...) to shut their doors entirely".
Hungarian border barrier: built by Hungary in 2015 on its border with Serbia and Croatia. The fence was constructed during the European migrant crisis (see timeline), with the aim to ensure border security by preventing immigrants from entering illegally, and enabling the option to enter through official checkpoints and claim asylum in Hungary in accordance with international and European law.
Democracy in Europe Movement 2025: a Pan-European political movement launched in 2015 by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. The movement was officially presented at a ceremonial event held on 9 February 2016 in the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin and on the 23rd March in Rome. The movement aims to reform the European Union's existing institutions to create a "full-fledged democracy with a sovereign Parliament respecting national self-determination and sharing power with national Parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils". Movement is supported by Julian Assange, Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, English musician Brian Eno, American economist James K. Galbraith, former Labour MP Stuart Holland and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. To highlight the urgency of democratizing Europe before reaching a point of no return, the movement sets the horizon for the year 2025 to draft a democratic constitution that will replace all the European treaties that are in force today. First among these is "hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika they formed together with unelected ‘technocrats’ from other international and European institutions". The organization cites the emerging extremist nationalism of some new political parties as well as the so-called Brexit and Grexit state departure initiatives as evidence of this impending European fracture.
Federal Reserve of USA
Federal Reserve (Federal Reserve System; the Fed): central banking system of USA. It was created in 1913.12.23, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907) led to the desire for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises. Over the years, events such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s have led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System. Congress established three key objectives for monetary policy in the Federal Reserve Act: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates.
Chair of the Federal Reserve (chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System): head of the Federal Reserve, and is the active executive officer of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The chair shall preside at the meetings of the Board.
Paul Volcker (1927.09.05–2019.12.08): USA economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended the high levels of inflation seen in the United States throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He previously served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979. President Jimmy Carter nominated him to succeed G. William Miller as Fed chairman and President Ronald Reagan renominated him once. Volcker did not seek a third term at the Fed and was succeeded by Alan Greenspan. After his retirement from the Board, he chaired the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 during the subprime mortgage crisis.
China, Greater China
Bamboo network: network of overseas Chinese businesses operating in Southeast Asia; usually family owned and managed through a centralized bureaucracy. ASEAN & bamboo network?
Beijing Consensus (北京共识; China Model (中国模式), Chinese Economic Model): political and economic policies of PRC that began to be instituted by Deng Xiaoping after Mao Zedong's death in 1976. The policies are thought to have contributed to China's "economic miracle" and eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. In 2004, the phrase "Beijing Consensus" was coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo to frame China's economic development model as an alternative—especially for developing countries—to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies promoted by the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury. Characteristics of the China Model or the "Beijing Consensus": replacing trust in the free market for economic growth with "a more muscular state hand on the levers of capitalism"; an absence of political liberalization; strong leading role of ruling political party; population control. Criticism: The Economist have called the model "unclear" and an invention of "American think-tank eggheads" and "plumage-puffed Chinese academics". Instead of strong government, critics have stated that China's success results from its "vast, cheap labor supply", its "attractive internal market for foreign investment", and its access to the American market, which provides a perfect spendthrift counterpart for China's exports and a high savings rate.
Post-Soviet alliances (ex-USSR, Russia in the center)
G-20 major economies: 19 countries and EU (European Commission European Central Bank). 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China (PRC), FR, DE, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, RU, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, UK, USA. Collectively, the G-20 economies account for around 85% of the gross world product (GWP), 80% of world trade (or, if excluding EU intra-trade, 75%), and two-thirds of the world population.
Economic Cooperation Organization: Eurasian political and economic intergovernmental organization which was founded in 1985 in Tehran by the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development): intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1960 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members. Most OECD members are high-income economies with a very high HDI and are regarded as developed countries. OECD is an official UN Observer.
Development Assistance Committee (DAC): forum to discuss issues surrounding aid, development and poverty reduction in developing countries. It describes itself as being the "venue and voice" of the world's major donor countries. The Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD), sometimes called the "Secretariat of the DAC", is the OECD Directorate within which the DAC operates.
Union of South American Nations (USAN; nl: Unie van Zuid-Amerikaanse Naties, UZAN; pt: União de Nações Sul-Americanas, UNASUL; es: Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, UNASUR): intergovernmental union integrating two existing customs unions – Mercosur and CAN.
Bank of the South (BancoSur): monetary fund and lending organization established in 2009.09.26 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela with an initial capital of US$20 billion.
Mercosur (or Mercosul): full customs union of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela; Bolivia (2012). Purpose is to promote free trade and the fluid movement of goods, people, and currency.
Andean Community of Nations (es: Comunidad Andina, CAN): customs union of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Africa
Economics and politics, ruling
Low-ball: persuasion and selling technique in which an item or service is offered at a lower price than is actually intended to be charged, after which the price is raised to increase profits.
Competition regulator: government agency, typically a statutory authority, sometimes called an economic regulator, which regulates and enforces competition laws, and may sometimes also enforce consumer protection laws; ECA (European Competition Authorities), ICN (International Competition Network), and OECD
Criticisms of welfare: Classical liberals, libertarians and conservatives often argue that the provision of tax-funded services or transfer payments reduces the incentive for workers to seek employment, thereby by reducing the need to work, reducing the rewards of work, and exacerbating poverty. Socialists typically criticize the welfare state as championed by liberals and social democrats as an attempt to legitimize and strengthen the capitalist economic system, which conflicts with the socialist goal of replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system.
Welfare state: "concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms of economic and social organization". T.H. Marshall: distinctive combination of democracy, welfare, and capitalism. E.g. Nordic countries. Progressive tax. In the period following the World War II, many countries in Europe moved from partial or selective provision of social services to relatively comprehensive coverage of the population. Paxton: "All the modern twentieth-century European dictatorships of the right, both fascist and authoritarian, were welfare states…. They all provided medical care, pensions, affordable housing, and mass transport as a matter of course, in order to maintain productivity, national unity, and social peace". DE: Otto von Bismarck created the modern welfare state by building on a tradition of welfare programs in Prussia and Saxony that began as early as in the 1840s, and by winning the support of business; introduced old age pensions, accident insurance and medical care. Esping-Andersen (1990): 1) Social Democracy, 2) Christian Democracy (conservatism), 3) Liberalism; 18 OECD countries are divided as follows: 1) Social Democratic: Nordics and the Netherlands, 2) Christian Democratic: AT, BE, FR, DE, ES and IT, 3) Liberal: AU, CA, JA, CH and USA, 4) Not clearly classified: IE, NZ and UK.
Nordic model (Nordic capitalism, Nordic social democracy): although there are significant differences among the Nordic countries, they all share some common traits; support for a "universalist" welfare state (relative to other developed countries) which are aimed specifically at enhancing individual autonomy, promoting social mobility and ensuring the universal provision of basic human rights, as well as for stabilizing the economy; maximizing labor force participation, promoting gender equality, egalitarian and extensive benefit levels, the large magnitude of wealth redistribution, and liberal use of expansionary fiscal policy. Neither fully capitalistic or socialistic, and attempts to merge the most desirable elements of both into a "hybrid" system. Overall tax burdens (%GDP) are among the world's highest: SE (51.1%), DK (46% in 2011), and FI (43.3%), compared to non-Nordic countries like DE (34.7%), CA (33.5%), IE (30.5%).
Flexicurity (flexibility and security): welfare state model with a pro-active labour market policy. The term was first coined by the social democratic Prime Minister of Denmark Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in the 1990s; “golden triangle” with a “three-sided mix of (1) flexibility in the labour market combined with (2) social security and (3) an active labour market policy with rights and obligations for the unemployed”.
Welfare in Finland: compared internationally, very comprehensive. Created almost entirely during the first three decades after WWII, the social security system was an outgrowth of the traditional Nordic belief that the state was not inherently hostile to the well-being of its citizens, but could intervene benevolently on their behalf. Child-Care services: charge relatively low fees, also based on law; availability of quality day care (the staff are university-educated in early childhood education) has allowed the female population to pursue careers more commonly than in other parts of the world. Services for the disabled. Services for substance abusers: alcoholism.
Maternity package: kit granted by the Finnish social security institution Kela, to all expectant or adoptive parents who live in Finland or are covered by the Finnish social security system. Since 1949 it has been given to all mothers-to-be, provided they visited a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy, and the pregnancy has lasted at least 154 days.
Social protection in France: make up for about 500 billion euros annually, or more than 30% of GDP. However, the desire to establish a universal system has faced opposition; this explains why the French welfare system is plural, with a wide variety of actors. The most important is the general scheme for employees of industry, commerce and services.
French special retirement plan: enjoyed by employees of some government-owned corporations: SNCF (national railways), the RATP (Parisian transport), the electrical and gas companies (EDF and GDF) which used to be government-owned; as well as some employees whose functions are directly related to the State such as the military, French National Police, sailors, Civil law notaries' assistants, employees of the Opéra de Paris... The main differences between the special retirement plan and the usual private sector retirement plans are the retirement age and the number of years a worker must contribute to the fund before being allowed a full pension.
Grenelle Insertion (concluded 2008.05.27): open multi-party debate in France that gathered representatives of national and local government and organizations (industry, labor, professional associations, non-governmental organizations) on an equal footing, with goal of unifying a position on the reform of the national policy of insertion. It insisted on the need to reform the insertion system to make it more attractive for people to return to work.
Revenu de solidarité active: French form of in work welfare benefit aimed at reducing the barrier to return to work. It was implemented 2009.06.01 by the French government.
Welfare in South Korea: National Pension Service (NPS), introduced in 1988; about one-fifth of the elderly receive pensions, which is a major factor contributing to the fact that nearly a half of the South Korean elderly live in relative poverty, which is the highest proportion among OECD countries; South Korean tax and welfare system is the least effective in reducing inequality among all of OECD countries.
Welfare in Japan: Beginning in the 1920s, the government enacted a series of welfare programs, based mainly on European models, to provide medical care and financial support. During the postwar period, a comprehensive system of social security was gradually established. Government expenditures for all forms of social welfare increased from 6% of the national income in the early 1970s, to 18% in 1989. But a much older tradition calls for support within the family and the local community.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ): independent Washington D.C.-based international network. Launched in 1997 by the Center for Public Integrity, ICIJ was spun off in February 2017 into a fully independent organisation which includes more than 200 investigative journalists and 100 media organizations in over 70 countries who work together on "issues such as "cross-border crime, corruption, and the accountability of power." The ICIJ has exposed smuggling and tax evasion by multinational tobacco companies (2000), "by organized crime syndicates; investigated private military cartels, asbestos companies, and climate change lobbyists; and broke new ground by publicizing details of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts."
Offshore Leaks: name of a report disclosing details of 130,000 offshore accounts in 2013.04. Some observers have called it the biggest hit against international tax fraud of all times (to date), although it has been pointed out that normal businesses may use the offshore legislation to ease formalities in international trade.
Panama Papers: 1.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source. The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. "John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", he told them. In a May 6 statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realise the scale of the injustices they described". He added that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the ICIJ posted the full document on its website.
Paradise Papers: set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investments that were leaked to the German reporters Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper shared them with the ICIJ, and a network of more than 380 journalists. Some of the details were made public in 2017.11.05 and stories are still being released. The documents originate from legal firm Appleby, the corporate services providers Estera and Asiaciti Trust, and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions. They contain the names of more than 120,000 people and companies. At 1.4 TB in size, this is second only to the Panama Papers of 2016 as the biggest data leak in history.
Tax inversion (corporate inversion): practice of relocating a corporation's legal domicile to a lower-tax country, while retaining its material operations (including management, functional headquarters and majority shareholders) in its higher-tax country of origin. In practice, it means replacing the existing USA-based parent company with a foreign-based parent company, thus making the original USA company a subsidiary of the new foreign-based parent.
Shadow banking system: term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. The phrase "shadow banking" contains the pejorative connotation of back alley loan sharks. Many in the financial services industry find this phrase offensive and prefer the euphemism "market-based finance".
Tax haven: enerally defined as a country or place with very low "effective" rates of taxation for foreigners ("headline" rates may be higher). In some traditional definitions, a tax haven also offers financial secrecy. However, while countries with high levels of secrecy but also high rates of taxation (e.g. the United States and Germany in the Financial Secrecy Index ("FSI") rankings), can feature in some tax haven lists, they are not universally considered as tax havens. In contrast, countries with lower levels of secrecy but also low "effective" rates of taxation (e.g. Ireland in the FSI rankings), appear in most § Tax haven lists. Traditional tax havens, like Jersey, are open about zero rates of taxation, but as a consequence have limited bilateral tax treaties. Modern corporate tax havens have non-zero "headline" rates of taxation and high levels of OECD-compliance, and thus have large networks of bilateral tax treaties. However, their BEPS tools enable corporates to achieve "effective" tax rates closer to zero, not just in the haven but in all countries with which the haven has tax treaties; putting them on tax haven lists. Tax havens are mostly successful and well-governed economies, and being a haven has often brought prosperity. The top 10–15 GDP-per-capita countries, excluding oil and gas exporters, are tax havens.
Corporate haven (corporate tax haven, multinational tax haven): jurisdiction that multinational corporations find attractive for establishing subsidiaries or incorporation of regional or main company headquarters, mostly due to favourable tax regimes (not just the headline tax rate), and/or favourable secrecy laws (such as the avoidance of regulations or disclosure of tax schemes), and/or favourable regulatory regimes (such as weak data-protection or employment laws). Modern corporate tax havens (such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and Singapore), differ from traditional corporate tax havens (such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Jersey), in their ability to maintain OECD-compliance, while using OECD-whitelisted § IP-based BEPS tools and § Debt-based BEPS tools, which don't file public accounts, to still enable the corporate to avoid taxes, not just in the corporate haven, but in all operating countries that have tax treaties with the haven. Main features: Denial of status; Financial impact; Conduits and Sinks; Employment tax; UK transformation; Distorted GDP/GNP. IP-based BEPS tools. IP-based Tax inversions: Apple vs. Pfizer-Allergan; Apple's IP-based BEPS inversion. Debt-based BEPS tools: Dutch "Double Dip"; Irish Section 110 SPV. Ranking corporate tax havens. Failure of OECD BEPS Project: Departure of U.S. and EU; U.S. as BEPS winner
Offshore financial centre (OFC): country or jurisdiction that provides financial services to nonresidents on a scale that is incommensurate with the size and the financing of its domestic economy. "Offshore" does not refer to the location of the OFC (many FSF-IMF OFCs, such as Luxembourg and Hong Kong, are located "onshore"), but to the fact that the largest users of the OFC are nonresident (e.g. they are "offshore"). The IMF lists OFCs as a third class of financial centre, with International Financial Centres (IFCs), and Regional Financial Centres (RFCs); there is overlap (e.g. Singapore is an RFC and an OFC). Academics now consider the activities of OFCs to be synonymous with tax havens, with a particular focus on corporate tax planning BEPS tools, tax-neutral asset structuring vehicles, and shadow banking/asset securitization.
Base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS): refers to corporate tax planning strategies used by multinationals to "shift" profits from higher-tax jurisdictions to lower-tax jurisdictions, thus "eroding" the "tax-base" of the higher-tax jurisdictions. The OECD defines BEPS strategies as also: "exploiting gaps and mismatches in tax rules"; however, academics proved corporate tax havens (e.g. Ireland, the Caribbean, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, and HK), who are the largest global BEPS hubs, use OECD-whitelisted tax structures and OECD-compliant BEPS tools. Corporate tax havens offer BEPS tools to "shift" profits to the haven, and additional BEPS tools to avoid paying taxes within the haven (e.g. Ireland's "Green Jersey"). BEPS tools are mostly associated with U.S. technology and life science multinationals. Tax academics showed use of BEPS tools by U.S. multinationals, via tax havens, maximised long-term U.S. exchequer receipts and/or shareholder returns, at the expense of other jurisdictions. An important academic study in July 2017 published in Nature, "Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network", showed that the pressure to maintain OECD-compliance had split corporate-focused tax havens into two different classifications: Sink OFCs, which act as the terminus for BEPS flows, and Conduit OFCs, which act as the conduit for flows from higher-tax locations to the Sink OFCs. It was noted that the 5 major Conduit OFCs, namely, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Switzerland, all have a top-ten ranking in the 2018 Global Innovation Property Centre (GIPC) IP Index. Complex agendas: Other tax experts, including a founder of academic tax haven research, James R. Hines Jr., note that USA multinational use of BEPS tools and corporate tax havens had actually increased the long-term tax receipts of the USA exchequer, at the expense of other higher-tax jurisdictions, making the USA a major beneficiary of BEPS tools and corporate-tax havens. OECD BEPS Project: In 2017.06, USA Treasury official explained that the reason why USA refused to sign up to the OECD's MLI, or any of its Actions, was because: "USA tax treaty network has a low degree of exposure to base erosion and profit shifting issues". However, by mid-2018, U.S. multinationals had not repatriated any BEPS tools, and the evidence is that they have increased exposure to corporate tax havens. In March-May 2018, Google committed to doubling its office space in Ireland, while in June 2018 it was shown that Microsoft is preparing to execute Apple's Irish BEPS tool, the "Green Jersey" (see Irish experience post-TCJA).
Double Irish arrangement: BEPS corporate tax tool, used mostly by USA multinationals since the late 1980s, to avoid corporate taxation on most non-USA profits. It is the largest tax avoidance tool in history and by 2010, was shielding USD 100 billion annually in USA multinational foreign profits from taxation, and was the main tool by which USA multinationals built up untaxed offshore reserves of USD 1 trillion from 2004 to 2018. Traditionally, it was also used with the Dutch Sandwich BEPS tool, however, changes to Irish tax law in 2010 dispensed with this requirement for most users. However, by mid-2018, other tax academics, including the IMF, noted technical flaws in the TCJA had increased the attractiveness of Ireland's BEPS tools, and the CAIA BEPS tool in particular, which post-TCJA, delivered a total effective tax rate ("ETR") of 0–3% on profits that can be fully repatriated to the U.S. without incurring any additional U.S. taxation. In July 2018, one of Ireland's leading tax economists forecasted a "boom" in the use of the Irish CAIA BEPS tool, as U.S. multinationals close existing double Irish BEPS schemes before the 2020 deadline.
Base erosion and profit shifting (OECD project): OECD/G20 project to set up an international framework to combat tax avoidance by multinational enterprises ("MNEs") using BEPS tools. Currently, after the BEPS report has been delivered in 2015, the project is now in its implementation phase, 116 countries are involved, including a majority of developing countries. During two years, the package was developed by participating members on an equal footing, as well as widespread consultations with jurisdictions and stakeholders, including business, academics and civil society. The European Commission and the US have unilateraly taken actions in 2017-2018 that implement several key measures of the BEPS project, even going beyond in some cases.
Leprechaun economics: term used by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to describe 26.3% increase in Irish 2015 GDP, that was later revised to 34.4%, in 2016.07.12 publication by the Irish Central Statistics Office ("CSO") restating 2015 Irish national accounts. While the event which caused the artificial Irish GDP growth occurred in Q1 2015, the Irish CSO had to delay the Irish 2015 GDP revision, and redact the release of its regular economic data in 2016-2017, to protect the source's identity. Only in Q1 2018, could economists confirm Apple as the source, and that "leprechaun economics" was the largest individual BEPS action, and the largest quasi-tax inversion of a USA corporation, in history. "Leprechaun economics" marked the first known replacement of Ireland's prohibited BEPS tool, the double Irish, with the more powerful Irish BEPS tool, the "capital allowances for intangible assets" ("CAIA") tool, also called the "Green Jersey". Whereas Washington blocked the proposed USD 160 billion Pfizer-Allergan Irish tax inversion in 2016.04, Apple executed a USD 300 billion tax inversion of its entire non-U.S. business to Ireland. Research in 2018.06, using 2015 data, confirmed Ireland, already a "major tax haven", was now the world's largest tax haven.
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers.
Conduit and Sink OFCs: empirical quantitative method of classifying corporate tax havens, offshore financial centres and tax havens. Rather than analyzing taxation and legal structures to identify and classify potential tax havens (the preferred EU, IMF, and OECD route), this approach analyses the ownership chains of 98 million global companies (a purely empirical, or outcomes-based, route), relative to the size of countries of their incorporation. The technique gives both a method of classification and a method of understanding the relative scale of corporate tax havens/offshore financial centers.
24 global Sink OFCs: jurisdictions in which a disproportional amount of value disappears from the economic system (i.e. the traditional tax havens).
CORPNET's top 5 global Conduit OFCs channel 47% of corporate offshore connections and include the following:
NL – the largest global Conduit OFC (by total connections), with dense links from the EU–28 (via the "Dutch Sandwich"), to the EU Sink OFC of Luxembourg, and the Caribbean Sink OFC "triad" of Bermuda/BVI/Cayman.
UK – 2nd largest Conduit OFC (by total connections), with dense links from Europe to Asia; 18 of the 24 Sink OFCs are current, or past, dependencies of the U.K. (see table on Sink OFCs).
CH – a major Conduit OFC with a very dense network of connections with Jersey, the 4th largest Sink OFC.
SG – the main Conduit OFC for Asia, and densely connected to the two major Asian Sink OFCs of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
IE – very dense connections with the US (see Ireland as a tax haven), with very dense connections to Sink OFC Luxembourg, an established "backdoor" out of the Irish tax system.
report published in Nature in 2017: The report used the Moody's Orbis corporate database to examine 98 million global companies and their 71 million ownership connections (using big data computer modelling) to identify 5 global Conduit OFCs. These are countries of high financial reputation (i.e. not formally labelled "tax havens" by OECD/EU), but who have "advanced" legal and tax structuring vehicles (and SPVs) that help legally route funds to the 24 tax havens (called Sink OFCs), without incurring tax in the Conduit OFC (or even tax in the source of funds location, where royalty payment schemes can be used).
British Virgin Islands (BVI) - in terms of connections, is the "Netherlands of Sink OFCs" and heavily linked with the Conduit OFC United Kingdom.
Luxembourg and Hong Kong - would have been considered Conduit OFCs, but the research shows they are even bigger Sink OFCs (i.e. longer-term homes for funds), Luxembourg (for routing funds from high-tax EU countries) and Hong Kong (for routing funds out of China)
Jersey - remains a unique link with major Conduit OFC, Switzerland (because the study could not capture individual "trusts", Jersey could be understated).
Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Triad - these three classic offshore tax havens are heavily interlinked and starting to present as one large Sink OFC.
Taiwan - has been a controversial entrant on several tax haven lists (the Tax Justice Network calls Taiwan the "Switzerland of Asia", however, Taiwan is not on any EU/OECD/IMF tax-haven list), and is identified as the 2nd largest Asian Sink OFC.
Cayman Islands - the Cayman Islands are becoming the biggest financial centre for the Central and Latin America.
Malta - the report highlights the rise of Sink OFC Malta as an emerging tax haven "inside" the EU, which has been a source of wider media scrutiny.
Mauritius - has become a major Sink OFC for both SE Asia (especially India) and African economies, and now ranking 8th overall.
Isle of Man omitted. Ireland underestimated: By aggregating national account data, Zucman can identify an excess of liabilities over assets, implying that the missing assets (to balance the equation), are hidden in tax-havens. On this basis, in 2015, he estimated that 8% of the world's wealth (or $7.6 trillion) was "missing" in offshore tax-havens.
Press materials from the EU Commission findings against Apple in Ireland regarding illegal State aid.
Ireland as a tax haven: Ireland is labelled a tax haven or corporate tax haven, which it rejects. Ireland's base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools give foreign corporates § Effective tax rates of 0% to 3% on global profits re-routed to Ireland via Ireland's tax treaty network. Ireland's BEPS tools are the world's largest BEPS flows, exceeding the entire Caribbean system, and artificially inflating the US-EU trade deficit. Ireland's QIAIF & LQIAIF regimes, and Section 110 SPVs, enable foreign investors to avoid Irish taxes on Irish assets, and can be combined with Irish BEPS tools to create confidential routes out of the Irish corporate tax system. As these structures are OECD-whitelisted, Ireland uses data protection, data privacy laws, and opt-outs from filing of public accounts, to obscure their effects. There is evidence Ireland acts as a § Captured state fostering tax avoidance strategies. Ireland is on all academic "tax haven lists", including the § Leaders in tax haven research, and tax NGOs. Ireland does not meet the 1998 OECD definition of a tax haven, but no OECD member, including Switzerland, has ever met this definition. Similarly, no EU-28 country is amongst the 64 listed in the 2017 EU tax haven blacklist and greylist. 2016.09, Brazil became the first G20 country to "blacklist" Ireland as a tax haven. A reliance on USA corporates (80% of Irish tax, 25% of Irish labour, 25 of top 50 Irish firms, and 57% of Irish value-add), is a concern in Ireland. Technical issues with TCJA: Some tax experts, noting Google and Microsoft's actions in 2018, assert these flaws in the TCJA are deliberate, and part of the USA Administration's original strategy to reduce aggregate effective global tax rates for USA multinationals to circa 10-15% (i.e. 21% on USA income, and 3% on non-USA income, via Irish BEPS tools). There has been an increase in USA multinational use of Irish intangible capital allowances, and some tax experts believe that the next few years will see a boom in USA multinationals using the Irish "Green Jersey" BEPS tool and on-shoring their IP to Ireland (rather than the USA). As discussed in § Hines-Rice 1994 definition and § Source of contradictions, the USA Treasury's corporation tax policy seeks to maximise long-term USA. taxes paid by using corporate tax havens to minimise near-term foreign taxes paid. In this regard, it is possible that Ireland still has a long-term future as a USA corporate tax haven.
International Financial Services Centre (IFSC): began in 1987 as a special economic zone on a derelict 11 hectare site near the centre of Dublin, with EU approval to apply a 10% corporate tax rate for designated financial services activities on the site. Before the expiry of this EU approval in 2005, the Irish Government legislated in 1998/99 to effectively "turn the entire country into an IFSC" by reducing the overall Irish corporate tax rate from 32% to 12.5% (full effect by 2003). The legal requirement for a specific IFSC geographic area was thus removed, and the term International Financial Services ("IFS") sector is now sometimes used.
Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland: While Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, the evidence is that foreign multinationals pay an § Effective tax rate (ETR) of under 4% on all global profits that they can "shift" to Ireland, via Ireland's 72 bilateral tax treaties. These lower effective tax rates are achieved by a complex set of Irish BEPS tools which handle the largest BEPS flows in the world (e.g. the double Irish as used by Google and Facebook, the single malt as used by Microsoft and Allergan, and capital allowances for intangible assets as used by Accenture, and by Apple post Q1 2015).
Irish Section 110 Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV): Irish tax resident company, which qualifies under Section 110 of the Irish Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 ("TCA") for a special tax regime that enables the SPV to attain "tax neutrality": i.e. the SPV pays no Irish taxes, VAT, or duties. Section 110 was created to help International Financial Services Centre ("IFSC") legal and accounting firms compete for the administration of global securitisation deals. Section 110 is the core of the IFSC structured finance regime, and now dominates EU securitisation. In 2016, it was discovered that US distressed debt funds used Section 110 SPVs, structured by IFSC service firms, to avoid Irish taxes on €80bn of Irish domestic investments. Research shows that IFSC Section 110 SPVs are largely unregulated, operating like brass plate companies with little supervision from the Irish Revenue or the Central Bank of Ireland (also noted by the IMF). It shows the rise in use of IFSC Section 110 SPVs by sanctioned/prohibited Russian banks. A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland has warned that the Irish Government underestimates the risks of Irish SPVs in shadow banking. Abuses: Vulture fund tax avoidance; Unregulated shadow banking
EU illegal State aid case against Apple in Ireland: 2016.08.29, after a two-year EU investigation, Margrethe Vestager of the European Commission announced: "Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple". The Commission ordered Apple to pay €13 billion, plus interest, in unpaid Irish taxes from 2004–14 to the Irish State. It was the largest corporate tax fine in history. On the 7 September 2016, the Irish State secured a majority in Dail Eireann to reject payment of the back-taxes, which including penalties, could reach €20 billion, or 10% of 2014 Irish GDP. In November 2016, the Irish State formally appealed the ruling, claiming there was no departure from Irish taxation law, and that the Commission's action was "an intrusion into Irish sovereignty", as national tax policy is excluded from EU treaties. In November 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook, announced Apple would appeal, and in September 2018, Apple lodged €13 billion to an escrow account, pending appeal. Ireland's rejection of the EU Commission's "windfall" in back-taxes surprised some. However, in § Understanding Irish decision, U.S.-controlled multinationals are 25 of Ireland's top 50 companies, pay over 80% of all Irish corporate taxes (circa. €8 billion per annum), directly employ 25% of the Irish labour force (and indirectly pay half of all Irish salary taxes), and are 57% of all non-farm OECD value-add in the Irish economy. In contrast, there are no non-U.S./non-U.K. foreign multinationals in Ireland's top 50 firms. The U.K. firms are either selling into Ireland, like Tesco, or date pre-2009, after which the U.K. reformed to a "territorial" tax system. Multinationals from "territorial" systems rarely use tax havens, and in 2016, the U.S. was one of the last "worldwide" tax systems in operation. The cost of U.S. multinationals abandoning Ireland as a U.S. corporate-tax haven, would greatly exceed the EU's €13 billion "windfall".
Modified gross national income (GNI*): created by the Central Bank of Ireland in February 2017 as a new way to measure the Irish economy, and Irish indebtedness, due to the considerable distortion that BEPS tools of USA multinational tax schemes, were having on Irish GNP and Irish GDP. While a "distorted GDP-per-capita" is a known feature of corporate-tax havens, Ireland was the first to replace its GDP/GNP metrics.
"The land and freshwater footprints for the production of essential amino acids from various nutritional sources. All estimates are based on data reported by Moomaw et al. (2017). Land footprints are reported in hectares per metric ton of product. Freshwater footprints are reported in cubic meters of freshwater per metric ton of product."
Algaculture: form of aquaculture involving the farming of species of algae.
Economics and war
Map of separation barriers in the world. A separation barrier is not necessarily a border barrier.
Separation barrier (separation wall): barrier, wall or fence, constructed to limit the movement of people across a certain line or border, or to separate peoples or cultures. A separation barrier that runs along an internationally recognized border is known as a border barrier. David Henley opines in The Guardian that separation barriers are being built at a record-rate around the world along borders and do not only surround dictatorships or pariah states. In 2014, The Washington Post listed notable 14 separation walls as of 2011, indicating that the total concurrent number of walls and barriers which separate countries and territories is 45.
Border barrier (border fence, border wall): separation barrier that runs along or near an international border. Such barriers are typically constructed for border control purposes such as curbing illegal immigration, human trafficking, and smuggling. Some such barriers are constructed for defence or security reasons. In cases of a disputed or unclear border, erecting a barrier can serve as a de facto unilateral consolidation of a territorial claim that can supersede formal delimitation. A border barrier does not usually indicate the location of the actual border, and is usually constructed unilaterally by a country, without the agreement or cooperation of the other country.
Hunger Plan (der Hungerplan, der Backe-Plan): economic management scheme that was put in place to ensure that Germans were given priority over food supplies, at the expense of everyone else. Historian Timothy Snyder estimates: “4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944.” In the Western Europe no large starvation occurred.
Odd pricing: Consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being significantly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 is associated with spending $1 rather than $2. Another phenomenon noted by economists is that a price point for a product (such as $4.99) remains stable for a long period of time, with companies slowly reducing the quantity of product in the package until consumers begin to notice. At this time the price will increase marginally (to $5.05) and then within an exceptionally short time will increase to the next price point (to $5.99).
Disintermediation: removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet. Disintermediation may decrease the total cost of servicing customers and may allow the manufacturer to increase profit margins and/or reduce prices. Disintermediation initiated by consumers is often the result of high market transparency, in that buyers are aware of supply prices direct from the manufacturer. Buyers may choose to bypass the middlemen (wholesalers and retailers) to buy directly from the manufacturer, and pay less. Buyers can alternatively elect to purchase from wholesalers. Often, a business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C) company functions as the bridge between buyer and manufacturer. Reintermediation: Amazon, eBay. Examples: Dell, Apple; In the automotive industry: Tesla.
Point of sale (POS, Checkout): place where a retail transaction is completed; point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or services; merchant will also normally issue a receipt for the transaction. Customized hardware and software as per their requirements
Automated sales suppression device (zapper): software program that falsifies the electronic records of POS systems for the purpose of tax evasion.
Square, Inc.: merchant services aggregator and mobile payments company based in San Francisco, CA. Two applications & services: Square Register and Square Wallet; allows individuals and merchants in USA and CA to accept debit and credit cards on their iOS or Android smartphone or tablet computer. The app supports manually entering the card details or swiping the card through the Square Reader, a small plastic device which plugs into the audio jack of a supported smartphone or tablet and reads the magnetic stripe. On the iPad version of the Square Register app, the interface resembles a traditional cash register.
Corporate group ("group of companies"): collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control.
Concern (business) (German: Konzern, Cyrillic: Концерн): type of business group common in Europe, particularly in Germany. It results from the merger of several legally independent companies an economic entity under unified management. These associated companies are called "Group" companies.
Pay what you want (PWYW): pricing strategy where buyers pay any desired amount for a given commodity, sometimes including zero. In some cases, a minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price for the commodity.
Planning, product development (product management), projects (project management)
Project management triangle: model of the constraints of project management. It is a graphic aid where the three attributes show on the corners of the triangle to show opposition. It is useful to help with intentionally choosing project biases, or analyzing the goals of a project. It is used to illustrate that project management success is measured by the project team's ability to manage the project, so that the expected results are produced while managing time and cost. Like any human undertaking, projects need to be performed and delivered under certain constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been listed as "scope" (features and quality, what's the end result), "time", and "cost". You are given the options of Fast (time), Good (quality), and Cheap (cost, $, €, £), and told to pick any two.
Work breakdown structure: deliverable-oriented decomposition of a project into smaller components. A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into manageable sections. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK 5) defines the work breakdown structure as a "A hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables." "On Time, On Spec, On Budget."
Critical path method: The Nome Trilogy (part 2 "Diggers" by Terry Pratchett) mentions "the doctrine of the Critical Path" and says that it means that "There's always something that you should have done first."
Non-recurring engineering (NRE): refers to the one-time cost to research, design, develop and test a new product or product enhancement. When budgeting for a new product, NRE must be considered to analyze if a new product will be profitable. Even though a company will pay for NRE on a project only once, NRE costs can be prohibitively high and the product will need to sell well enough to produce a return on the initial investment. NRE is unlike production costs, which must be paid constantly to maintain production of a product. It is a form of fixed cost in economics terms. Once a system is designed any number of units can be manufactured without increasing NRE cost.
Earned value management: project management technique for measuring project performance and progress in an objective manner.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP): business-management software—typically a suite of integrated applications—that an organization can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities (product planning & cost, manufacturing or service delivery, marketing & sales, inventory management, shipping & payment). Backend: database.
Microsoft Dynamics: Microsoft markets Dynamics applications through a network of reselling partners who provide specialized services.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly: Navision): ERP software product from Microsoft. The product is part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and intended to assist with finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, supply chains, analytics and electronic commerce for small and medium-sized companies and local subsidiaries of large international groups. For modifications of the system, the proprietary programming language C/AL is used. NAV Add-ons: NAV CfMD (Certified for Microsoft Dynamics). Navision originated at PC&C A/S (Personal Computing and Consulting), a company founded in Denmark in 1984. PC&C released its first accounting package, PCPlus, in 1985—a single-user application with basic accounting functionality. There followed in 1987 the first version of Navision, a client/server-based accounting application that allowed multiple users to access the system simultaneously. The success of the product prompted the company to rename itself to Navision Software A/S in 1995. The Navision product sold primarily in Denmark until 1990. From Navision version 3 the product was distributed in other European countries, including Germany and UK. In 1995 the first version of Navision based on Microsoft Windows 95 was released. 2002.07.11 Microsoft bought Navision A/S to go with its previous acquisition of Great Plains. Navision became a new division at Microsoft, named Microsoft Business Solutions (Microsoft Dynamics), which also handled Microsoft CRM. 2005.09 Microsoft re-branded the product and re-released it as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
C/AL (Client/server Application Language): the programming language used within C/SIDE the Client/Server Integrated Development Environment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Formerly known as Navision Attain) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central up until (and including) version 14. C/AL resembles the Pascal language on which it is based. The original C/AL compiler was written by Michael Nielsen.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and shares the same codebase as NAV and NAV's C/AL language is being phased out in favor of the new AL language. Product is primarily a web-based SaaS solution accessed via dynamics.com, though presently there is an on-premise version available, which included the option to use the NAV role-tailored "thick" client through version 14, while versions 15 and later are web-only.
Network effect (network externality, demand-side economies of scale): effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. Positive feedback: telephone, Facebook, Twitter. Negative feedback: "congestion" (as in traffic congestion or network congestion). Over time, positive network effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, in a positive feedback loop.
Information economics: studies how information and information systems affect an economy and economic decisions. Information is easy to create but hard to trust; easy to spread but hard to control; influences many decisions.
Information asymmetry: study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case. E.g. adverse selection, moral hazard, and information monopoly. Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz studied the influence of artificial intelligence on the theory of asymmetric information and observed that artificial intelligent agents decrease the degree of information asymmetry and thus the market where these agents are used are more efficient than when they are not used.
Motherhood penalty: term coined by sociologists who argue that in the workplace, working mothers encounter systematic disadvantages in pay, perceived competence, and benefits relative to childless women. Specifically, women may suffer a per-child wage penalty, resulting in a pay gap between non-mothers and mothers that is larger than the gap between men and women. Mothers may also suffer worse job-site evaluations indicating that they are less committed to their jobs, less dependable, and less authoritative than non-mothers. Thus, mothers may experience disadvantages in terms of hiring, pay, and daily job experience. The motherhood wage penalty is not limited to the United States, and has been documented in over a dozen other industrialized nations including Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Australia. A study by Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll found that employers perceived mothers as less competent than childless women, and also perceived childless men as less competent and committed than men who were fathers.
Maternity leave in the United States: includes a provision mandating 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for mothers of newborn or newly adopted children. This policy is distinct to other industrialized countries for its relative scarcity of benefits, in terms of the short length of protected maternity leave and not offering some form of wage compensation for the leave of absence.
by economist Branko Milanovic. He analyzed global income inequality, comparing 1988 and 2008. His analysis indicated that the global top 1% and the middle classes of the emerging economies (e.g., China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt) were the main winners of globalization during that time. The real (inflation adjusted) income of the global top 1% increased approximately 60%, while the middle classes of the emerging economies (those around the 50th percentile of the global income distribution in 1988) rose 70-80%. On the other hand, those in the middle class of the developed world (those in the 75th to 90th percentile in 1988, such as the American middle class) experienced little real income gains. The richest 1% contains 60 million persons globally, including 30 million Americans (i.e., the top 12% of Americans by income were in the global top 1% in 2008).
Economic inequality: difference found in various measures of economic well-being among individuals in a group, among groups in a population, or among countries. Economic inequality sometimes refers to income inequality, wealth inequality, or the wealth gap. Economists generally focus on economic disparity in three metrics: wealth, income, and consumption. According to PolitiFact the top 400 richest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined." According to the New York Times on July 22, 2014, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent". Inherited wealth may help explain why many Americans who have become rich may have had a "substantial head start". In September 2012, according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), "over 60 percent" of the Forbes richest 400 Americans "grew up in substantial privilege". A 2017 report by the IPS said that three individuals, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, or 160 million people, and that the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor has created a "moral crisis", noting that "we have not witnessed such extreme levels of concentrated wealth and power since the first gilded age a century ago."
International inequality: economic differences between countries. According to UN Human Development Report 2004, the gross domestic per capita in countries with high, medium and low human development (a classification based on the UN Human Development Index) was 24,806 PPP$, 4,269 PPP$ and 1,184 PPP$, respectively.
6% of the world's population owns 52% of the global assets. The richest 2% own more than 51% of the global assets and the richest 10% own 85% of the global assets.
Over 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day. over 50% of the world population lives on less than 2 US$/day; over 20% of the world population lives on less than $1.25/day
Colonial origins of comparative development: 2001 article written by Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson and published in American Economic Review. It is considered a seminal contribution to development economics through its use of European settler mortality as an instrumental variable of institutional development in former colonies. The theory proposed in the article is that Europeans only set up growth-inducing institutions in areas where the disease environment was favourable, so that they could settle. In areas with unfavourable disease environment to Europeans, such as central Africa, they instead set up extractive institutions which persist to the present day and explain much of the variation in income across countries.
Basic income pilots: smaller-scale preliminary experiments which are carried out on selected members of the relevant population to assess the feasibility, costs and effects of the full-scale implementation of basic income or the related concept of negative income tax, including partial basic income and similar programs. Northern America: Pilots in United States in the 1960s and 1970s; Mincome in Manitoba; Native American casinos and tribal profit sharing; Y Combinator; Ontario Basic Income Pilot Project; Stockton, California. Africa: Namibia; Uganda; GiveDirectly in Kenya. Asia: Madhya Pradesh, India; Iran; Israel. Latin America: Bolsa Familia, Quatinga Velho. Europe: Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Scotland, Spain (ingreso mínimo vital), Germany, Wales.
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED): database maintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that has more than 500,000 economic time series from 81 sources. The data can be viewed in graphical and text form or downloaded for import to a database or spreadsheet, and viewed on mobile devices. They cover banking, business/fiscal, consumer price indexes, employment and population, exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, monetary aggregates, producer price indexes, reserves and monetary base, USA trade and international transactions, and USA financial data. The time series are compiled by the Federal Reserve and collected from government agencies such as the US Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Simon–Ehrlich wager: 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run." Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
Price of oil: by the end of 2009.10 one in twelve of the largest oil tankers was being used more for temporary storage of oil, rather than transportation. From 2014.06 to 2015.01, as the price of oil dropped 60% and the supply of oil remained high, the world's largest traders in crude oil purchased at least 25 million barrels to store in supertankers to make a profit in the future when prices rise. Trafigura, Vitol, Gunvor, Koch, Shell and other major energy companies began to book booking oil storage supertankers for up to 12 months. In 2015 as global capacity for oil storage was out-paced by global oil production, and an oil glut occurred. Crude oil storage space became a tradable commodity with CME Group— which owns NYMEX— offering oil-storage futures contracts in 2015.03. By 2015.03.05, as oil production outpaces oil demand by 1.5 million barrels a day, storage capacity globally is dwindling. In USA alone, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, USA crude-oil supplies are at almost 70% of USA storage capacity, the highest to capacity ratio since 1935.
Impact of declining oil price: The decline on oil price during 1985–1986 is considered to have contributed to the fall of USSR. Research shows that declining oil prices make oil-rich states less bellicose; "both oil importers and exporters vote more often with USA in the United Nations General Assembly" during oil slumps.
2010s oil glut: a considerable surplus of crude oil that started in 2014–2015 and accelerated in 2016, with multiple causes. They include general oversupply as US and Canadian tight oil (shale oil) production reached critical volumes, geopolitical rivalries amongst oil-producing nations, falling demand across commodities markets due to the deceleration of the Chinese economy, and possible restraint of long-term demand as Environmental policy promotes fuel efficiency and steers an increasing share of energy consumption away from fossil fuels. The world price of oil was above US$125 per barrel in 2012, and remained relatively strong above $100 until 2014.09, after which it entered a sharp downward spiral, falling below $30 by January 2016. The North Sea oil and gas industry was financially stressed by the reduced oil prices, and called for government support in 2016.05.
Oil-storage trade ("contango"): market strategy in which large, often vertically-integrated oil companies purchase oil for immediate delivery and storage—when the price of oil is low—and hold it in storage until the price of oil increases. Investors bet on the future of oil prices through a financial instrument, oil futures in which they agree on a contract basis, to buy or sell oil at a set date in the future. Crude oil is stored in salt mines, tanks and oil tankers. USA SPR is the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil—727 million barrels— stored in huge underground salt caverns along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. An emergency oil stockpile was recommended by several Presidents throughout the twentieth century, in 1944, in 1952, 1956 and in 1970. The SPR is a "deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool of foreign policy" but it has rarely been used.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (United States) (SPR): emergency fuel storage of petroleum maintained underground in Louisiana and Texas by DOE. It is the largest emergency supply in the world, with the capacity to hold up to 115,600,000 m³. USA started the petroleum reserve in 1975 after oil supplies were interrupted during the 1973–1974 oil embargo, to mitigate future supply disruptions. Maximum total withdrawal capability from the SPR is only 4.4 million barrels per day (700,000 m3/d), so it would take over 150 days to use the entire inventory.
Soft despotism: term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people. Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds FUD in the general populace.
Soft tyranny: idea first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 work titled Democracy in America. It is described as the individualist preference for equality and its pleasures, requiring the state - as a tyrant majority or a benevolent authority - to step in and adjudicate. In this regime, political leaders operate under a blanket of restrictions and, while it retains the practical virtues of democracy, citizens influence policymaking through bureaucrats and non-governmental organizations. This is distinguished from despotism or tyranny (hard tyranny) in the sense that state of government in such democratic society is composed of guardians who hold immense and tutelary (protective) power. According to Tocqueville, the danger of this form of government comes amid the satisfaction of material well-being because it puts the individuals' critical faculties to sleep. In this condition, people who are used to a culture of gain, comfort, career, and wealth shudder at the thought of revolution and the emergent consumerism drives the society's cultural decline.
Crown land (crownland, royal domain): territorial area belonging to the monarch, who personifies the Crown. It is the equivalent of an entailed estate and passes with the monarchy, being inseparable from it. Today, in Commonwealth realms such as Canada and Australia, crown land is considered public land and is apart from the monarch's private estate. In Britain, the hereditary revenues of Crown lands provided income for the monarch until the start of the reign of George III, when the profits from the Crown Estate were surrendered to the Parliament of Great Britain in return for a fixed civil list payment. The monarch retains the income from the Duchy of Lancaster.
Democratization (democratisation): transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction. It may be the transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy, a transition from an authoritarian political system to a semi-democracy or transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a democratic political system. The outcome may be consolidated (as it was for example in the United Kingdom) or democratization may face frequent reversals (as happened in Chile). Different patterns of democratization are often used to explain other political phenomena, such as whether a country goes to a war or whether its economy grows. Causes: Economic development and modernization; Equality and inclusive institutions; Culture; Social capital and civil society; Elite-driven democratization; Waves of democracy; Class alliances and cleavages; Rulers' need for taxation; Promotion, and foreign influence and intervention; Scrambled constituencies; Education; Natural resources; Death or ouster of dictator; War and national security; Contingency and negotiations; International institutions.
Red marks countries where the LDI (V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index) has declined substantially and significantly over the past ten years. Blue marks countries where the level of democracy has advanced. Countries in grey are substantially unchanged.
Eu: mostly multi party (esp. Northern Eu), except: two party: GE, MT, ES, LI, MC; dominant party: AZ, RU; no party: VA.
Americas:
SA: mostly multi party, except: two party: Guyana, Honduras; single party: Cuba
NA: multi party: CA; two party: USA, MX
CA: multi party: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama; two party: Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua
Caribbean: mostly two party, except: multi party: Aruba, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, Puerto Rico, Suriname, US Virgin Islands; single party: Cuba.
Asia:
Central Asia: mostly dominant party, except: multi party: Kyrgyzstan; single party: Turkmenistan
Eastern Asia: mostly multi party, except: dominant party: Japan; single party: PRC, North Korea
Southern Asia: mostly multi party, except: two party: Sri Lanka.
South-Eastern Asia: many multi party, except: dominant party: Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore; single party: Laos, Vietnam
Western Asia: many multi party, except: dominant party: AZ, JO, SY, YE; no party: KW (in practice several political groups act as de facto parties), OM, QA, SA, UAE
Australasia: Australia: 2.7 for MPs, 3.3 for Senators.
The descent into barbarism has comparable structural elements:
Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
Dictatorship of one party;
Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory.
European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (International Black Ribbon Day; 23 August): esignated by the European Parliament in 2008/2009 as "a Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, to be commemorated with dignity and impartiality"
Prometheism (Prometheanism; PL: "Prometeizm"): political project initiated by Poland's Józef Piłsudski; aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor states, including the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union. During Interwar Prometheism and Piłsudski's other concept of an "Intermarum federation" constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and some of his political heirs.
The Black Book of Communism: documents a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines.
Declaration of independence (declaration of statehood): assertion by a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. In 2010, UN's International Court of Justice ruled in the an advisory opinion in Kosovo that "International law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence", though the state from which the territory wishes to secede may regard the declaration as rebellion, which may lead to a war of independence or a constitutional settlement to resolve the crisis. Not all declarations of independence succeed in the formation of an independent state.
Siege mentality: shared feeling of victimization and defensiveness—a term derived from the actual experience of military defences of real sieges. It is a collective state of mind in which a group of people believe themselves constantly attacked, oppressed, or isolated in the face of the negative intentions of the rest of the world. The result is a state of being overly fearful of surrounding peoples, and an intractably defensive attitude. At a national level, siege mentalities existed in USSR, Communist Albania, Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland, as a result of ideological isolation; while a similar mentality is currently to be seen in North Korea, Russia, USA, West Bank, Israel, Taiwan, Venezuela and Poland, where it is arguably encouraged by both the government—to help justify their continuance in power—and the opposition—to help justify their overthrowing the government through violent means.
Gerontocracy: form of oligarchical rule in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are significantly older than most of the adult population. In many political structures, power within the ruling class accumulates with age, making the oldest the holders of the most power. Those holding the most power may not be in formal leadership positions, but often dominate those who are. In a simplified definition, a gerontocracy is a society where leadership is reserved for elders. Plato famously stated that "it is for the elder man to rule and for the younger to submit". One example of the ancient Greek gerontocracy can be seen in the city state of Sparta, which was ruled by a Gerousia, a council made up of members who were at least 60 years old and who served for life. In USSR: In 1980, the average Politburo member was 70 years old (as opposed to 55 in 1952 and 61 in 1964), and by 1982, Brezhnev's Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, his Minister of Defense Dmitriy Ustinov and his Premier Nikolai Tikhonov were all in their mid-to-late seventies. Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's 68-year-old successor, was seriously ill with kidney disease when he took over, and after his death fifteen months later, he was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, then 72, who lasted thirteen months before his death and replacement with Gorbachev. USA: In 2021, the average age of USA senator was 64, and positions of power within the legislatures – such as chairmanships of various committees – are usually bestowed upon the more experienced, that is, older, members of the legislature. Under President Donald Trump, the United States government more generally has been described as a gerontocracy. At 70, Trump was the oldest person ever to be inaugurated president of the United States, until the inauguration of Joe Biden. Many senior officials in Trump's administration, such as Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have been septuagenarians or older. Biden was 78 when he was sworn in on 20 January 2021, making him the oldest person to be inaugurated president of the United States. The Biden administration's cabinet appointments have also reflected these gerontocratic tendencies. For example, Janet Yellen, Biden's Treasury Secretary, is 75. The Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and the Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are also both the oldest holders of their offices in American history. Representative Don Young and Senators Diane Feinstein and Chuck Grassley are the oldest members of congress at 88 years old. Theocracy: Gerontocracy is common in theocratic states and religious organizations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which leadership is concentrated in the hands of religious elders. Despite the age of the senior religious leaders, however, parliamentary candidates in Iran must be under 75. Nominally a theocratic monarchy, Saudi Arabia, likened to various late communist states, has been ruled by gerontocrats. Aged king Saud and his aged relatives held rule along with many elder clerics. Other countries: Present-day Italy is often considered a gerontocracy,[24] even in the internal Italian debate.[25][26] The Monti government had the highest average age in the western world (64 years), with its youngest members being 57. Former Italian prime minister Mario Monti was 70 when he left office, his immediate predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was 75 at the time of resignation (2011), the previous head of the government Romano Prodi was 70 when he stepped down (2008). The Italian president Sergio Mattarella is 75, while his predecessors Giorgio Napolitano and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi were 89 and 86 respectively. In 2013, the youngest among the candidates for prime minister (Pier Luigi Bersani) was 62, the others being 70 and 78.
Multitude: term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. The term has a history of use reaching back to antiquity, but took on a strictly political concept when it was first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt.
Stateless nation: ethnic group, religious group, linguistic group or other cohesive group which is not the majority population in any nation state. The term implies that the group "should have" such a state, and thus expresses irredentism.
Horseshoe theory: asserts that the extreme left and the extreme right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.
Austrian School: school of economic thought that is based on the concept of methodological individualism – that social phenomena result from the motivations and actions of individuals. Originated in the late-19th and early-20th c. Vienna with the work of Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and others. According to economist Bryan Caplan, by the late twentieth century, a split had developed among those who self-identify with the Austrian School: 1) building on the work of Hayek, follows the broad framework of mainstream neoclassical economics, including its use of mathematical models and general equilibrium; 2) following Mises and Rothbard, rejects the neoclassical theories of consumer and welfare economics, dismisses empirical methods and mathematical and statistical models as inapplicable to economic science, and asserts that economic theory went entirely astray in 20th c.; they offer the Misesian view as a radical alternative paradigm to mainstream theory.
Praxeology: "Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life" von Mises. Is "Praxeology" science, social science, pseudoscience, philosophy?
Economic calculation problem: criticism of using economic planning as a substitute for market-based allocation of the factors of production. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" and later expanded upon by Friedrich Hayek.
Methodenstreit: intellectual history beyond German-language discourse, was an economics controversy commenced in the 1880s and persisting for more than a decade, between that field's Austrian School and the (German) Historical School; debate concerned the place of general theory in social science and the use of history in explaining the dynamics of human action. It also touched on policy and political issues, including the roles of the individual and state.
Historical school of economics (Prussian Historical School): approach to academic economics and to public administration that emerged in the 19th century in Germany, and held sway there until well into the 20th c. Among the central tenets of this School was that "from her origins, it had been Prussia's historical mission to unite Germany".
Essays in Positive Economics (1953; Milton Friedman): collection of earlier articles with its lead an original essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics".
Non-aggression principle (non-aggression axiom, anti-coercion principle, zero aggression principle, non-initiation of force, or NAP)
Social justice: idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. Criticism: no full definition; how one can treat somebody in a socially just way if the other does not treat you that way? Whats the difference between "justice" and "social justice"? Is "social justice" injustice?
American Enterprise Institute (AEI; 1938-): center-right think tank based in Washington, D.C., that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. AEI is an independent nonprofit organization supported primarily by contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Organization is aligned with conservatism and neoconservatism but does not support political candidates. AEI advocates in favor of private enterprise, limited government, and democratic capitalism. Political stance and impact: The institute is a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution; however, the two entities have often collaborated. From 1998 to 2008, they co-sponsored the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and in 2006 they launched the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.
Federation of American Scientists (FAS; 1946-): USA nonprofit global policy think tank with the stated intent of using science and scientific analysis to attempt to make the world more secure; founded by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs. FAS also aims to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons that are in use, and prevent nuclear and radiological terrorism. They hope to present high standards for nuclear energy's safety and security, illuminate government secrecy practices, as well as track and eliminate the global illicit trade of conventional, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Hudson Institute (1961.07.20-): conservative USA think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation.
Herman Kahn (1922.02.15–1983.07.07): founder of the Hudson Institute and one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He became known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability. Cultural influence: Along with John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, Kahn was, reportedly, an inspiration for the character "Dr. Strangelove" in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick released in 1964. After Kubrick read Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War, he began a correspondence with him which led to face-to-face discussions between Kubrick and Kahn. In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for the "Doomsday Machine", a device which would immediately cause the destruction of the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. Both the name and the concept of the weapon are drawn from the text of On Thermonuclear War.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI; 1966-): international institute based in Stockholm; provides data, analysis and recommendations for armed conflict, military expenditure and arms trade as well as disarmament and arms control. The research is based on open sources and is directed to decision-makers, researchers, media and the interested public. SIPRI's organizational purpose is to conduct scientific research in issues on conflict and cooperation of importance for international peace and security, with the goal of contributing to an understanding for the conditions for a peaceful solution of international conflicts and sustainable peace.
Union of Concerned Scientists (1969-): nonprofit science advocacy organization based in the United States. The UCS membership includes many private citizens in addition to professional scientists.
Mont Pelerin Society: international organization composed of economists, philosophers, historians, intellectuals, business leaders, and others who favor classical liberalism. It advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies, and the political values of an open society. Had strong influence on many governments (including USA). Secretive? What did they accomplish? Where did they fail?
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): bipartisan Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank; conducts policy studies and strategic analyses on political, economic and security issues, focusing on technology, public policy, international trade and finance, and energy
Google Ideas: cross-sector, inter-disciplinary "think tank" or "think/do tank" based in New York City, dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions.
Edge Foundation, Inc.: association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Currently, its main activity is contributing to the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. The site is an online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas.
Milken Institute: independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California with offices in Washington, DC, New York, Miami, London, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. It publishes research and hosts conferences that apply market-based principles and financial innovations to social issues in the US and internationally. The Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and presents itself as nonpartisan and non-ideological.
GlobalSecurity.org: USA nonpartisan, independent, nonprofit organization that serves as a think tank, and research and consultancy group; focused on national and international security issues; military analysis, systems, and strategies; intelligence matters; and space policy analysis. In part it seeks to find new approaches to international security, and promotes achieving cooperative international security and preventing nuclear proliferation. To this end it seeks to improve intelligence-community capabilities to respond to new threats and to prevent the need for military action, while at the same time enhancing the effectiveness of military forces when needed.
RethinkX (2016-): think tank founded by Tony Seba and James Arbib that focuses on identifying disruptive innovations that could soon impact society. Rethinking Transportation 2020–2030: published in 2017, builds on the ideas described in two of Seba's previously published books. The thesis of "Rethinking Transportation" is that, by 2030, a convergence of exponentially-improving factors will make it cheaper for urban and suburban dwellers to subscribe to Transportation as a Service (TaaS), using self-driving electric cars, than to own their own car. Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020–2030: convergence of exponentially-improving factors will make manufactured protein "five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute—more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace." Rethinking Humanity: "the same processes and dynamics that drive S-curve adoption of new products at a sector level repeat at the level of civilizations," and that, second, human civilization was now "on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago." each of the five "foundational sectors" that underpin the global economy—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—"will be disrupted in the period 2020–2033, costs will fall by 10x or more, while production processes an order of magnitude (10x) more efficient will use 90% fewer natural resources with 10x-100x less waste." It further asserts that these technological disruptions have the potential to disrupt human civilization, for good or ill, and that humanity must develop a new social, political, and economic "Organizing System" to ensure that the outcome of this disruption is "A New Age of Freedom."
Sphere of influence (SOI): spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity, accommodating to the interests of powers outside the borders of the state that controls it. Historical remnants: Many areas of the world are considered to have inherited culture from a previous sphere of influence, that while perhaps today halted, continues to share the same culture, e.g. Anglosphere, Arab World, Eurosphere, Francophonie, Françafrique, Greater India, legacy of the Roman Empire/Latin America, East Asian cultural sphere (Chinese cultural sphere), Slavisphere (RU vs other slavs?), Spanish sphere of influence (i.e. language?). Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: WWII (Axis vs USSR; later Axis vs USSR + Allies); Cold War.
Map reflecting the categories of power in international relations.Major regional powers in their political regions.
Power (international relations): Those states that have significant amounts of power within the international system are referred to as middle powers, regional powers, great powers, superpowers, or hyperpowers/hegemons, although there is no commonly accepted standard for what defines a powerful state. The G-20 is seen as a meeting of governments that exercise varying degrees of influence within the international system. Entities other than states can have power in international relations. Such entities can include multilateral international organizations, military alliance organizations like NATO, multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, non-governmental organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, or other institutions such as the Hanseatic League and technology companies like Facebook and Google. Concepts of political power: Power as a goal; Power as influence; Power as security; Power as capability. Power as status: Categories of power: Superpower, Great power, Middle power, Small power; Other categories: Regional power, Cultural superpower, Energy superpower. Hard, soft and smart power.
Power projection (force projection or strength projection): term used in international relations to refer to the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory. The ability of a state to project its power into an area may serve as an effective diplomatic lever, influencing the decision-making process and acting as a potential deterrent on other states' behavior. Even states with sizable hard power assets (such as a large standing army) may only be able to exert limited regional influence so long as they lack the means of effectively projecting their power on a global scale. Generally, only a select few states are able to overcome the logistical difficulties inherent in the deployment and direction of a modern, mechanized military force. Allies and partners can take up or share some of the burden of power projection. Assets for power projection can often serve dual uses, as the deployment of various countries' militaries during the humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake illustrates. Types:
Soft power
Gray zone competition: "By 2020 the Army's programs for modernization were now framed as a decades-long process of cooperation with allies and partners, for competition with potential adversaries who historically have blurred the distinction between peace and war"—from: Reorganization plan of United States Army: The list of armies, a mixture of allies, partners, and competitors is estimated to be: Russia, China, India: faces Pakistan, Japan: faces North Korea.
Applications of Power projection
Hard power
Power projection#Power Projection capabilities: Maritime force: Green-/Blue-water navy; Heli/Aircraft carries; Overseas bases; Troops deployed in operations abroad; Nuclear deterrence.
Superpower: Alice Lyman Miller: "a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony". British Empire (WWII) → USA + USSR (Cold War) → USA.
Superpower collapse: USSR; USA: PRC's Government views USA as "a superpower in decline"; UK: Suez Crisis of 1956 is generally considered as the beginning of the end of Britain's period as a superpower.
Great power: state that is recognized as having the ability to exert its influence on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess military and economic strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence, which may cause small powers to consider the great powers' opinions before taking actions of their own.
Potential superpowers: state or a political and economic entity that is speculated to be, or is in the process of becoming, a superpower at some point during the 21st century. Presently, only USA fulfills the criteria to be considered a superpower. States most commonly mentioned as being potential superpowers are PRC, EU, India, and Russia. {Obsolete [2014]: Comparison by: population, HDI, GDP, Global 2000 firms, Patents in force, Oil reserves, Security Council, IMF voting power, IBRD voting power, Defense spending, Military personnel, Nuclear weapons}. Notably, the EU as a whole has some of the world's largest and most influential languages being official within its borders.
American Century: characterization of the 20th century as being largely dominated by USA in political, economic, and cultural terms.
European balance of power: international relations concept that applies historically and currently to the states of Europe. It is often known by the term European State System. Its basic tenet is that no single European power should be allowed to achieve hegemony over a substantial part of the continent and that this is best curtailed by having a small number of ever-changing alliances contend for power.
Conflict continuum: model or concept various social science researchers use when modeling conflict on a continuum from low to high-intensity, such as from aggression to irritation to explosiveness. The mathematical model of game theory originally posited only a winner and a loser (a zero-sum game) in a conflict, but was extended to cooperation (a win-win situation and a non-zero sum game), and lets users specify any point between cooperation, peace,[Nash equilibrium] rivalry, contest, crisis,: 2 and conflict among stakeholders.
Category:Proportional representation electoral systems
Closed list: variant of party-list proportional representation where voters can (effectively) only vote for political parties as a whole and thus have no influence on the party-supplied order in which party candidates are elected. If voters have at least some influence then it is called an open list. In closed list systems the party has pre-decided on who will receive the votes for the political parties in the elections, that is, the candidates positioned highest on this list tend to always get a seat in the parliament while the candidates positioned very low on the closed list will not.
Testimonial party (nl: beginselpartij/getuigenispartij): political party that focuses on its principles, instead of adapting them to local or temporal issues in the pursuit of coalition government participation. Specific phenomenon in NL, because of the Dutch system of proportional representation, in which any party which has over 0.66% of the vote can enter parliament, resulting in a large number of relatively small political parties, none of which are able to obtain a supermajority in the house of representatives. As a result, Dutch political parties will negotiate and compromise to form a coalition government. Testimonial parties will not compromise, and combined with the fact that they are usually small parties, participation in a coalition government is extremely unlikely.
Semi-presidential system: dual executive system, is a system of government in which a president exists alongside a prime minister and a cabinet, with the latter two responding to the legislature of the state. It differs from a parliamentary republic in that it has a popularly elected head of state who is more than a ceremonial figurehead, and from the presidential system in that the cabinet, although named by the president, responds to the legislature, which may force the cabinet to resign through a motion of no confidence. While the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and Finland (from 1919 to 2000) exemplified an early semi-presidential system, the term "semi-presidential" was actually first introduced in a 1959 article by journalist Hubert Beuve-Méry, and popularized by a 1978 work written by political scientist Maurice Duverger, both of whom intended to describe the French Fifth Republic (established in 1958). Subtypes: premier-presidential system - the prime minister and cabinet are exclusively accountable to parliament (France, Poland (de facto, however, according to the Constitution, Poland is a parliamentary republic), Portugal, Romania, Lithuania, Mongolia, ...); president-parliamentary system - the prime minister and cabinet are dually accountable to the president and to the parliament (Taiwan, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambic, (Russia)).
Cohabitation (government): system of divided government that occurs in semi-presidential systems, such as France, whenever the president is from a different political party than the majority of the members of parliament. It occurs because such a system forces the president to name a premier (prime minister) who will be acceptable to the majority party within parliament. Thus, cohabitation occurs because of the duality of the executive: an independently elected president and a prime minister who must be acceptable both to the president and to the legislature. France: Mitterrand–Chirac period (1986–1988); Mitterrand–Balladur period (1993–1995); Chirac–Jospin period (1997–2002)
Political processes
Mediatisation: loss of imperial immediacy; subsumption of one monarchy into another monarchy in such a way that the ruler of the annexed state keeps his sovereign title and, sometimes, a measure of local power.
German Mediatisation (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss): series of mediatisations and secularisations that took place in the Holy Roman Empire 1795-1814 and that drastically altered the political map of the country under relentless military and diplomatic pressure from revolutionary France and later Napoleon.
Intelligence, espionage, secret agencies, "privacy is dead"
Agent handling: management of agents, principal agents, and agent networks (called "assets") by intelligence officers typically known as case officers.
Chilling Effects (group): Google sends the cease-and-desist letters it receives to this group; backed by EFF and many law schools in USA
Industrial espionage: Concerns of national governments: DE: main perpetrator was thought to be China, although it has been revealed that a significant amount of economic espionage on Germany was conducted by USA
Treason: crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's nation or sovereign. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant. Treason against the king was known as high treason and treason against a lesser superior was petty treason. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor. At times, the term "traitor" has been used as a political epithet, regardless of any verifiable treasonable action. In a civil war or insurrection, the winners may deem the losers to be traitors. Likewise the term "traitor" is used in heated political discussion – typically as a slur against political dissidents, or against officials in power who are perceived as failing to act in the best interest of their constituents.
Analytic confidence: rating employed by intelligence analysts to convey doubt to decision makers about a statement of estimative probability. The need for analytic confidence ratings arise from analysts' imperfect knowledge of a conceptual model. Scientific methods for determining analytic confidence remain in infancy.
Radome (portmanteau of radar and dome): structural, weatherproof enclosure that protects a microwave (e.g. radar) antenna. The radome is constructed of material that minimally attenuates the electromagnetic signal transmitted or received by the antenna. In other words, the radome is transparent to radar or radio waves. Radomes protect the antenna surfaces from weather and conceal antenna electronic equipment from public view. They also protect nearby personnel from being accidentally struck by quickly rotating antennas.
Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF): enclosed area within a building that is used to process SCI level classified information. A SCIF prevents physical, electromagnetic and any other eavesdropping in SCIF facilities.
Mass surveillance in the United States: dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through USA. After WWI and WWII, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of USA' rival at the time, USSR. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters. The formation of the international UKUSA surveillance agreement of 1946 evolved into the ECHELON collaboration by 1955 of five English-speaking nations, also known as the Five Eyes, and focused on interception of electronic communications, with substantial increases in domestic surveillance capabilities. Following the September 11th attacks of 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities grew immensely. Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush 2001.09.14 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama. Many details about the surveillance activities conducted in the United States were revealed in the disclosure by Edward Snowden in 2013.06. Regarded as one of the biggest media leaks in the United States, it presented extensive details about the surveillance programs of the NSA, that involved interception of Internet data and telephonic calls from over a billion users, across various countries.
Intellipedia: online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community. Uses MediaWiki and Google was contracted to provide the servers and search to rank the pages. Three separate wikis running on JWICS, SIPRNet, Intelink-U.
SIPRNet: "a system of interconnected computer networks used by the United States Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information (up to and including information classified SECRET) by packet switching over the TCP/IP protocols in a 'completely secure' environment". Bradley Manning & WikiLeaks; US diplomatic cables.
Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS): system of interconnected computer networks primarily used by the United States Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to transmit classified information by packet switching over TCP/IP in a secure environment. Cleared up to Top Secret and SCI.
Intelink: group of secure intranets used by the United States Intelligence Community. Intelink refers to the web environment on protected top secret, secret, and unclassified networks. Intelink-U: sensitive but unclassified; Intelink-S: secret-level variant of Intelink, operates on SIPRNet; Intelink-TS: sharing intelligence products up to the Top Secret and SCI level, operates on JWICS; Intelink-P (CapNet): CIA’s sole-source link to the White House and other high-level, intelligence consumers; Intelink-C (Commonwealth; STONEGHOST): links the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia intelligence communities at the TS/SCI level.
In 1975Church Committee;
Frank Church (about NSA): "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide", "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge... I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return".
Utah Data Center (Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center): data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data on the scale of yottabytes (1024 bytes).
KH-9 Hexagon: series of photographic reconnaissance satellites launched by USA between 1971 and 1986. Of twenty launch attempts by the National Reconnaissance Office, all but one were successful. Photographic film aboard Big Bird was sent back to Earth in recoverable film return capsules for processing and interpretation. The best ground resolution achieved by the main cameras was better than 0.6 meters.
Global surveillance: Main targets: China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan were ranked highly on the NSA's list of spying priorities, followed by France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. Irrelevant : From a US intelligence perspective, countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Nepal were largely irrelevant, as were most European countries like Finland, Denmark, Croatia and the Czech Republic.
Terrorist Surveillance Program (~2001.09.11-): NSA implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person
NSA call database: NSA maintains a database containing hundreds of billions of records of telephone calls made by U.S. citizens from the four largest telephone carriers in the United States: AT&T, SBC, BellSouth (all three now called AT&T), and Verizon.
Stellar Wind (STELLARWIND): open secret code name for certain information collection activities performed by NSA and revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. W. Binney goes on to say that the NSA has highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.
SIGINT Activity Designator (SIGAD): SIGINT line of collection activity; associated with a signals collection stations, which may be a base or a ship.
PRISM (surveillance program): in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information; provides for the targeting of any customers of participating corporations who live outside the United States, or American citizens whose communications include people outside the USA; allegedly includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice over IP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details.
XKeyscore: searching and analyzing Internet data about foreign nationals across the world
Tailored Access Operations (TAO): cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of NSA; active since at least circa 1998. TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on computer systems being used by entities foreign to USA. TAO is reportedly "now (2013.06.10) the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA's huge Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) (SIGINT), consisting of more than 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers". Microsoft provides advance warning to the NSA of vulnerabilities it knows about, before fixes or information about these vulnerabilities is available to the public; this enables TAO to execute so-called zero-day attacks. A Microsoft official who declined to be identified in the press confirmed that this is indeed the case, but said that Microsoft can't be held responsible for how the NSA uses this advance information.
NSA ANT catalog: 50-page classified document listing technology available to NSA TAO by the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) Division to aid in cyber surveillance. Most devices are described as already operational and available to US nationals and members of the Five Eyes alliance. According to Der Spiegel, which released the catalog to the public in 2013.12.30, "The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets' data." The document was created in 2008.
Equation Group: classified as an advanced persistent threat, is a highly sophisticated threat actor suspected of being tied to the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of USA NSA. Kaspersky Labs describes them as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world and "the most advanced (...) we have seen", operating alongside the creators of Stuxnet and Flame. Most of their targets have been in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria and Mali. The name originated from the group's extensive use of encryption.
The Shadow Brokers: hacker group who first appeared in the summer of 2016. They published several leaks containing hacking tools from NSA, including several zero-day exploits. Specifically, these exploits and vulnerabilities targeted enterprise firewalls, anti-virus products, and Microsoft products. Speculations and theories on motive and identity: NSA insider threat / whistleblower; Theory on ties to Russia.
UKUSA Agreement (United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement; Five Eyes (FVEY)): multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 9 Eyes, 14 Eyes, other "third parties": NATO members, other European democracies (Sweden), Pacific allies (Singapore, South Korea), Israel, Japan...
MUSCULAR (surveillance program): located in the United Kingdom, is the name of a surveillance programme jointly operated by GCHQ and NSA that was revealed by documents which were released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. GCHQ is the primary operator of the program. GCHQ and NSA have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google. Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013. In early 2013.11, Google announced that it was encrypting traffic between its data centers. In mid-November, Yahoo! announced similar plans.
First Chief Directorate: organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence in USSR.
GRU (Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба Вооружённых сил Росси́йской Федера́ции); formerly Main Intelligence Directorate (Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние)): foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units. Unlike Russia's other security and intelligence agencies—such as SVR, FSB, and FSO, whose heads report directly to the president of Russia—the director of the GRU is subordinate to the Russian military command, reporting to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff. The directorate is reputedly Russia's largest foreign-intelligence agency, and is distinguished among its counterparts for its willingness to execute riskier "complicated, high stakes operations". An investigation by Bellingcat and Capital identified GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev (using the alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov) as a suspect in the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian businessman Emiliyan Gebrev (Емилиян Гебрев) in Sofia, following an attack that mirrored the techniques used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. That attack has been specifically tied to Unit 29155.
Spetsnaz GRU (Special Forces of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces; Части и подразделения специального назначения (спецназ) Главного управления Генерального штаба Вооружённых сил Российской Федерации (СпН ГУ ГШ ВС РФ)): special forces (spetsnaz) of the G.U., the foreign military intelligence agency of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The Spetsnaz GRU was formed in 1949, the first spetsnaz force in the Soviet Union, as the military force of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Armed Forces. The force was designed in the context of the Cold War to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage against enemy targets in the form of special reconnaissance and direct action attacks. The Spetsnaz GRU inspired additional spetsnaz forces attached to other Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the Vympel and Alpha Group of the KGB.
GRU Unit 29155: Russian (GRU) unit tasked with foreign assassinations and other activities aimed at destabilizing European countries. The unit is thought to have operated in secret since at least 2008, though its existence only became publicly known in 2019.
Russian bounty program: alleged project of Russian military intelligence to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing American and other allied service members during the war in Afghanistan. The existence of the alleged program was reported in the media in 2020 and became an issue in the 2020 presidential election campaign. In June 2020, The Washington Post reported that intelligence suggesting the existence of a bounty operation dated to as early as 2018. The Washington Post and Associated Press both reported that Trump administration White House officials were informed of the intelligence reports in early 2019. In June 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed, several months earlier, that Unit 29155 of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had secretly offered Taliban-associated militants bounties to kill U.S. troops and other coalition personnel in Afghanistan, including during peace talks with the Taliban.
Mitrokhin Archive: collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate.
First Chief Directorate (of KGB): responsible for foreign operations and intelligence collection activities by the training and management of the covert agents, intelligence collection management, and the collection of political, scientific and technical intelligence. After USSR collapse it became
Foreign Intelligence Service.
Active measures (активные мероприятия): Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it. Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents. Against the United States: stirring up racial tensions in USA by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, placing an explosive package in "the Negro section of New York" (operation PANDORA), and spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had been planned by the US government; starting rumors that the moon landings were hoaxes and the money ostensibly used by NASA was in actuality used by the CIA...
Igor Gouzenko (Игорь Сергеевич Гузенко; 1919.01.26–1982.06.25): cipher clerk for USSR embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected in 1945.09.05, three days after the end of WWII, with 109 documents on the USSR's espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada. Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence's efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa". Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage".
Gouzenko Affair: name given to events in Canada surrounding the defection of Igor Gouzenko from USSR in 1945 and his subsequent allegations regarding the existence of a Soviet spy ring of Canadian Communists. Gouzenko's defection and revelations are considered by historians to have marked the beginning of the Cold War in Canada, as well as potentially setting the stage for the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Gouzenko's information, prior to the Commission, led to a sweeping investigation and arrests under the War Measures Act of 21 Canadians, along with 11 convictions. Among them was the Labor-Progressive Party Member of Parliament for Cartier, Fred Rose, the only Communist ever elected to Parliament. Other notable people among those accused of passing over secrets were Canadian Army Captain Gordon Lunan, and Sam Carr, a senior organizer of the Labor-Progressive Party.
Oleg Gordievsky (1938.10.10-): former colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985.
Pavel Sudoplatov (1907.07.07–1996.09.26) was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was involved in several famous episodes, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, and Operation Scherhorn, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks, made him well-known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
Metro-2: informal name for a purported secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro (known as Metro-1 when in comparison with Metro-2). The system was supposedly built, or at least started, during the time of Joseph Stalin and was codenamed D-6 (Д-6) by the KGB. It is said to connect the Kremlin with FSB headquarters, the government airport at Vnukovo-2, and an underground town at Ramenki, in addition to other locations of national importance.
Shabtai Kalmanovich (Hebrew: שבתאי קלמנוביץ', Lithuanian: Šabtajus Kalmanovičius, Russian: Шабтай Генрихович Калманович; 1947.12.18–2009.11.02): KGB spy, who later became known in Russia as a successful businessman, concert promoter and basketball sponsor. Born in Kaunas, Soviet Lithuania to an impoverished Jewish family in 1947. His mother was a Holocaust survivor who had been sheltered by a Lithuanian family after escaping Nazi captivity in the Ninth Fort. He studied chemical engineering, and joined the Soviet Army soon after his studies. When his commanders learned that his family was planning to emigrate to Israel, he was summoned to the Jewish administration of the KGB, and was recruited as a spy in exchange for expediting the emigration procedures for himself and his family. In 1971, he emigrated to Israel with his family after they received exit permits. Kalmanovich had been instructed to infiltrate Nativ by his KGB case officer and pass intelligence on its activities. According to his indictment, Kalmanovich handed over information to the Soviets over a period of 17 years. Kalmanovich became a businessman after the KGB funded investments for him in Israel. He became wealthy by exploiting cheap labor in South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana, in conjunction with other Israeli, South African and Taiwanese businessmen. He lived and worked for a time in Sierra Leone, where he made a fortune in the diamond trade and worked as a representative for Israel. His frequent trips to the Soviet Union and East Germany had aroused the suspicion of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency. Shin Bet had conducted an investigation and discovered evidence that he was passing information to the Soviets. In 1988, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for spying for the KGB. He was released after five years. Following his release in 1993, he sponsored an Israeli women's basketball team, and relocated to post-Soviet Russia to further his business career. In Russia, he promoted concerts for stars such as Michael Jackson, José Carreras and Liza Minnelli. Since 1994, Kalmanovich was director general of the large Tishinsky shopping center in Moscow. He also sponsored three basketball clubs (Žalgiris Kaunas of Lithuania, Spartak Moscow and UGMK Yekaterinburg of Russia) and became general manager of the Russia women's national basketball team in 2008. In 1999, when Žalgiris Kaunas became the champions of the EuroLeague, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus awarded Kalmanovich with Lithuanian citizenship and the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. 2009.11.02 Kalmanovich was assassinated by unknown gunmen in a passing Lada Priora vehicle as he was sitting in his car, a Mercedes S500, in Moscow.
Yuri Bezmenov (Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Безме́нов; 1939 – 1993.01.05; alias: Tomas David Schuman): Soviet journalist for RIA Novosti and a former PGU KGB informant who defected to Canada. Life in India, propaganda work, and disillusionment (1963–1970). Defection to the West and life in Canada (1970–1983). Pro-American literature and lectures (Los Angeles, 1981–1986)
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections: intelligence community assessment stated, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Hillary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
Fancy Bear (APT28, Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, STRONTIUM): cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU. Security firms SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and Fireeye's Mandiant have also said the group is sponsored by the Russian government. Likely operating since the mid-2000s, Fancy Bear's methods are consistent with the capabilities of nation-state actors. The threat group is known to target government, military, and security organizations, especially Transcaucasian and NATO-aligned states. Fancy Bear is thought to be responsible for cyber attacks on the German parliament, the French television station TV5Monde, the White House, NATO, the Democratic National Committee, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. The group serves the political interests of the Russian government, which includes helping foreign candidates that are favored by it to win elections (such as when they leaked Hillary Clinton's emails to help gain traction for Donald Trump during the United States 2016 Elections). Fancy Bear's behavior has been classified as an advanced persistent threat. They employ zero-day vulnerabilities and use spear phishing and malware to compromise targets.
Cozy Bear: classified as advanced persistent threat APT29, Russian hacker group believed to be associated with Russian intelligence. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has suggested that it may be associated with either FSB or Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)..
Sandworm (hacker group) (Telebots, Voodoo Bear, Iron Viking): Advanced Persistent Threat operated by Military Unit 74455, a cyberwarfare unit of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. The team is believed to be behind the December 2015 Ukraine power grid cyberattack, the 2017 cyberattacks on Ukraine using the NotPetya malware, various interference efforts in the 2017 French presidential election, and the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Then-United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania Scott Brady described the group's cyber campaign as "representing the most destructive and costly cyber-attacks in history." In February 2022, Sandworm allegedly released the Cyclops Blink as malware. The malware is similar to VPNFilter. The malware allows a botnet to be constructed, and affects Asus routers and WatchGuard Firebox and XTM appliances. CISA issued a warning about this malware. In April 2022, Sandworm attempted a blackout in Ukraine. It is said to be the first attack in five years to use an Industroyer malware variant called Industroyer2.
Vulkan files: leaked set of emails, and other documents, implicating the Russian company NTC Vulkan (НТЦ Вулкан) in acts of cybercrime, political interference in foreign affairs (such as in the 2016 United States presidential election) through social media, censorship of domestic social media, and espionage, in collusion with Russia's FSB, their armed forces (GOU and GRU); and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections: Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum: a debated subject and remains unproven, though multiple sources argue evidence exists demonstrating that the Russian government attempted to influence British public opinion in favor of leaving the European Union. Investigations into this subject have been undertaken by the UK Electoral Commission, the UK Parliament's Culture Select Committee and Intelligence and Security Committee, and the United States Senate. "The Russia Report" published by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament in 2020.07 did not specifically address the Brexit campaign, but it concluded that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace. It also found substantial evidence that there had been interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Germany's secret services and secrecy
Enigma machine: any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used in the twentieth century for enciphering and deciphering secret messages. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. An estimated 100,000 Enigma machines were constructed. After the end of World War II, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, still widely considered secure, to a number of developing countries. As these countries did not know that the machine had been broken, their supposedly secure communications were in fact being read regularly by the major Western intelligence agencies.
B-Dienst (Beobachtungsdienst): Department of the German Naval Intelligence Service (Marinenachrichtendienst, MND III) of the OKM, that dealt with the interception and recording, decoding and analysis of the enemy, in particular British radio communications before and during WWII. B-Dienst broke British Naval Combined Cypher No. 3 in October 1941, which was used to encrypt all communications between naval personnel, for Allied North Atlantic convoys, providing intelligence for the Battle of the Atlantic, until the British Admiralty introduced Naval Cypher No. 5 on 1943.06.10 and became effectively secure with the introduction of the stencil subtractor system that was used to recypher Naval Cypher No. 5, in 1944.01. It is worth noting that from 1942 on-wards, due to the high demand for men at the front, B-Dienst was forced to employ women cryptographers. By the end of the war, employment was split at 50% women and 50% men.
Stasi 2.0: 2013.08 German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected the comparison between NSA and the Stasi, suggesting that the comparison trivialises what state security did to people in East Germany
de:Volkszählungsboykott#Volkszählungsboykott: interesting; why? Before people were asked even stronger and stranger questions? Anonymity and privacy vs (efficient) service provision and open society... What is "open society"? Freedom of speech? Freedom to be anonymous?..
Britain's, United Kingdom's secrecy
Stewart Menzies (1890.01.30–1968.05.29): Chief of MI6 (SIS), British Secret Intelligence Service from 1939 to 1952, during and after WWII. Following the end of the war, Menzies entered MI6 (also known as SIS). He was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Soon after the war, Menzies was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the Imperial General Staff, General Staff Officer, first grade. Within MI6, he became assistant director for special intelligence. Admiral Hugh Sinclair became director-general of MI6 in 1924, and he made Menzies his deputy by 1929, with Menzies being promoted to full colonel soon afterwards. Menzies was certainly adept at bureaucratic intrigue, a virtual necessity in his position, but his efforts as Chief had a major role in winning WWII, as evidenced by his nearly 1,500 meetings with Prime Minister Churchill during the war.
Special Operations Executive (SOE): British WWII organisation to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. SOE operated in all countries or former countries occupied by or attacked by the Axis forces, except where demarcation lines were agreed with Britain's principal Allies (USSR and USA). It also made use of neutral territory on occasion, or made plans and preparations in case neutral countries were attacked by the Axis.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC): covert organisation set up in New York City by MI6 in 1940.05 upon the authorisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. purpose was to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage against British interests in the Americas, and mobilise pro-British opinion in the Americas. As a 'huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda', the BSC influenced news coverage in the Herald Tribune, the New York Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Radio New York Worldwide. The stories disseminated from Rockefeller Center would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, before being relayed to the American public. Through this, anti-German stories were placed in major American media outlets to turn public opinion. BSC benefitted from support given by the chief of the US Office of Strategic Services, William J. Donovan (whose organisation was modelled on British activities), and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was staunchly anti-Nazi.
Ultra: designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence thus obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra secret. In order to ensure that the successful code breaking did not become apparent to the Germans, British intelligence created a fictional MI6 master spy, Boniface, who controlled a fictional series of agents throughout Germany. Information obtained through code-breaking was often attributed to the human intelligence from the Boniface network. The term "Ultra" has often been used almost synonymously with "Enigma decrypts". However, Ultra also encompassed decrypts of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machines that were used by the German High Command, and the Hagelin machine. Safeguarding of sources: The Allies were seriously concerned with the prospect of the Axis command finding out that they had broken into the Enigma traffic. The British were more disciplined about such measures than the Americans, and this difference was a source of friction between them. In the Battle of the Atlantic, the precautions were taken to the extreme. In most cases where the Allies knew from intercepts the location of a U-boat in mid-Atlantic, the U-boat was not attacked immediately, until a "cover story" could be arranged. For example, a search plane might be "fortunate enough" to sight the U-boat, thus explaining the Allied attack.
Bombe: electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during WWII. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently from each other and from the British Bombe. The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company.
Colossus computer: set of computers developed by British codebreakers in 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. Colossus was designed by research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.
Israel's secret services and secrecy
National Security Council (Israel) (NSC): Israel's central body for coordination, integration, analysis and monitoring in the field of national security and is the staff forum on national security for the Israeli Prime Minister and Government. However, national security decisions typically made by national security councils in other countries are handled by the Security Cabinet. The Council draws its authority from the government and operates according to guidelines from the Prime Minister. The NSC was established in 1999 by the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu following Government Resolution 4889, in the framework of drawing lessons from the Yom Kippur War.
Israeli Intelligence Community: made up of Aman (military intelligence), Mossad (overseas intelligence) and Shabak (internal security).
Mossad: national intelligence agency of Israel. Mossad is responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counter-terrorism. Its director answers directly and only to the Prime Minister. Its annual budget is estimated to be around US$2.73 bln and it is estimated that it employs around 7,000 people directly, making it the one of the world's largest espionage agencies. Unlike other security bodies (such as the Israeli Army or the Israel Security Agency), its purpose, objectives, roles, missions, powers or budget have not been defined in any law.
Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel) (Aman): central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Aman was created in 1950, when the Intelligence Department was spun off from the IDF's General Staff (the Intelligence Department itself was composed largely of former members of the Haganah Intelligence Service). Aman is an independent service, and not part of the ground forces, Navy or the Air Force.
Unit 8200: Israeli Intelligence Corps unit responsible for collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning. Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as a feeder programs for the unit. Former Unit 8200 soldiers have, after completing their military service, gone on to founding and occupying top positions in many international IT companies and in Silicon Valley.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency; Shabak): Israel's internal security service. Its motto is "Magen veLo Yera'e" (מָגֵן וְלֹא יֵרָאֶה, lit. "Shield and not seen" or "The unseen shield"). Organization: The Arab Department: responsible primarily for Arab-related counterterrorism activities in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip; The Israel and Foreigners Department: formerly named the Non-Arab Affairs Department. As its original concerns mostly related to the Communist Bloc, it shrank after the fall of the Soviet Union, but rose again in importance in response to Jewish terrorist activity beginning in the early 80s; The Protective Security Department: responsible for protecting high-value individuals and locations in the country such as government officials, embassies, airports, and research facilities.
Jonathan Pollard (1954.08.07-): former intelligence analyst for USA government. In 1987, as part of a plea agreement, Pollard pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. Pollard is the only American who has received a life sentence for passing classified information to an ally of the U.S. In defense of his actions, Pollard declared that he committed espionage only because "the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information". Israeli officials, U.S.-Israeli activist groups, and some U.S. politicians who saw his punishment as unfair lobbied continually for reduction or commutation of his sentence. The Israeli government acknowledged a portion of its role in Pollard's espionage in 1987, and issued a formal apology to the U.S., but did not admit to paying him until 1998. Opposing any form of clemency were many active and retired U.S. officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet; several former U.S. Secretaries of Defense; a bi-partisan group of U.S. congressional leaders; and members of the U.S. intelligence community. Pollard revealed aspects of the U.S. intelligence gathering process, its "sources and methods". He sold numerous closely guarded state secrets, including NSA's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. While Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Pollard worked exclusively for Israel, Pollard admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries.
Black propaganda: false information and material that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side. It is typically used to vilify, embarrass or misrepresent the enemy. Black propaganda is covert in nature in that its aims, identity, significance, and sources are hidden.
Active measures: form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB) to influence the course of world events; "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs" - retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin.
Big lie (große Lüge): gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in WWI on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting WWI. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and USA. U.S. psychological profile of Hitler: His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. Subsequent use: Cold War era; Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election; 21st-century use by American conservatives; Uyghur genocide: Government of China (PRC) has falsely denied committing human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and has labelled declarations of Uyghur genocide as a "big lie" perpetrated by hostile forces; Russo-Ukrainian War: Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations described the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as "the War of the Big Lie. The Lie that Ukraine doesn't exist. The Lie that Ukraine has no right to full sovereignty because it is a puppet state of the West. The Lie that A invaded B because C is to blame – the West, the expansion of NATO, the USA's global hegemony."
Information privacy (data privacy): relationship between collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. Privacies: medical, financial, political (voting), Internet (ISPs, websites, databases, logging of data).
Personally identifiable information (PII): information technology and the Internet have made it easier to collect PII, leading to a profitable market in collecting and reselling PII. Forensics: criminals hide their PII (wear masks, gloves, no handwriting, proxy IP address). Intelligence agencies: sometimes employees do not disclose to their family and friends where they work.
@DE:
de:Datenkrake (data + octopus): "steht für Systeme und Organisationen, die personenbezogene Informationen in großem Stil auswerten und/oder sie an Dritte weitergeben".
Expectation of privacy (in US constitutional law): legal test which is crucial in defining the scope of the applicability of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Organizations:
Privacy International (PI): UK-based non-profit organisation formed in 1990, "as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations": rankings of countries by Privacy index.
de:FoeBuD (
FoeBuD, Verein zur Förderung des öffentlichen bewegten und unbewegten Datenverkehrs): DE privacy and digital rights organisation. Moto: "a world worth living in the digital age". Has links with CCC.
Freiheit statt Angst (Freedom not Fear): yearly demonstration for data/info privacy and against surveillance, in DE from 2006; from 2008 in other countries.
Some companies using the web users for their financial gain (and privacy breach):
Claria Corporation (formerly: Gator Corporation) [1998-2006/2008]: produced spyware containing products. Going for advertisement money: replace websites' ads with their own ads.
NebuAd [2006-2009]: developing behavioral targeting advertising systems, seeking deals with ISPs to enable them to analyse customer's websurfing habits in order to provide them with more relevant, micro-targeted advertising.
Phorm (previously: 121Media): at first produced spyware containing products. Then produced Webwise - behavioral targeting service (similar to NebuAd) that uses deep packet inspection to examine traffic. UK ISPs used/use Phorm.
Stierlitz (Шти́рлиц): lead character in a popular Russian book series written in the 1960s by novelist Yulian Semyonov and of the television adaptation Seventeen Moments of Spring. Stierlitz has become a stereotypical spy in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, similar to James Bond in Western culture. Ivan Zassoursky notes that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, has been portrayed as "embod[ying] the image—very important for the Russian television audience—of Standartenführer von Stierlitz... If anyone missed the connection between Putin, who served in Germany, and von Stierlitz, articles in the press reminded them of the resemblance and helped create the association." The connection went both ways; Putin was strongly influenced by the novels, commenting: "What amazed me most of all was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not."
Minarchism: small government, or limited-government libertarianism. The only governmental institutions would be the military, police, courts, and legislatures, with some theories also including prisons.
Template:Anarcho-capitalism:
Anarcho-capitalist literature: Neal Stephenson's: Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: "franchise operated quasi-national entities": free market for sovereignty services; Ayn Rand's: Atlas Shrugged: isolated community with no government, that operates strictly according to the non-aggression principle
Free market / Laissez-faire vs. Socialism/Communism:
Libertarian socialism (social anarchism, sometimes left libertarianism): group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless societywithout private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialism is opposed to all coercive forms of social organization, and promotes free association in place of government and opposes what it sees as the coercive social relations of capitalism, such as wage labor. The term libertarian socialism is used by some socialists to differentiate their philosophy from state socialism or by some as a synonym for left anarchism.
Japan–United States relations: notion that Japan is becoming the "Great Britain of the Pacific", or the key and pivotal ally of USA in the region.
United States–European Union relations: Cooperation: NATO Quint = US and EU big four (France, Germany, Italy and the UK), Arms embargo on the People's Republic of China
Territorial disputes in the South China Sea#Background: involve both island and maritime claims among seven sovereign states within the region: Brunei, PRC (China), Taiwan (ROC), Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Haiyang Shiyou 981 standoff: tensions between China and Vietnam arising from the Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation moving its Haiyang Shiyou 981 (known in Vietnam as "Hải Dương - 981") oil platform to waters near the disputed Paracel Islands in South China Sea, and the resulting Vietnamese efforts to prevent the platform from establishing a fixed position.
Aksai Chin#Strategic importance: China National Highway 219 runs through Aksai Chin connecting Lazi and Xinjiang in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Despite this region being nearly uninhabitable and having no resources, it remains strategically important for China as it connects Tibet and Xinjiang. Construction started in 1951 and the road was completed in 1957. The construction of this highway was one of the triggers for the Sino-Indian War of 1962.
March (territory) (mark): border region similar to a frontierq; during the Frankish Carolingian Dynasty, usage of the word spread throughout Europe. Generally circumscribed the same or similar land area as a county but was differentiated from other counties by its special position at the border of the state. In contrast to regular counties, which were ruled over by counts, marches were (at least in theory) ruled over by nobles with the title of Marquess (English), Marquis (French or Scots), Margrave (Markgraf i.e. count of the mark) or nobles with corresponding titles (other European states).
Marches of Neustria: two Marches created in 861 by the Carolingian king of West Francia Charles the Bald that were ruled by officials appointed by the crown, known as wardens, prefects or margraves (or "marquis" in French).
List of divided islands: New Guinea, Borneo, Ireland, Hispaniola, (Isla Grande de) Tierra del Fuego, Timor, Cyprus...
Geostrategy: subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends —in this case, a country's resources (whether they are limited or extensive) with its geopolitical objectives (which can be local, regional, or global).
String of Pearls (Indian Ocean): geopolitical hypothesis proposed by United States political researchers in 2004. The term refers to the network of Chinese military and commercial facilities and relationships along its sea lines of communication, which extend from the Chinese mainland to Port Sudan in the Horn of Africa. The sea lines run through several major maritime choke points such as the Strait of Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Lombok Strait as well as other strategic maritime centres in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Somalia. Many commentators in India believe this plan, together with the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and other parts of China's Belt and Road Initiative under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping, is a threat to India's national security.
Peter Zeihan (1973.01.18-): USA geopolitical analyst and author. Accidental Superpower (2014): focuses on topographical and geographical landmarks (rivers, oceans, mountains, etc.) as distinct advantages in a nation's ability to dominate others economically, industrially and militarily. With the use of maps, Zeihan is able to point out that navigable rivers, or access to the oceans, along with a reliable road or rail network make a critical difference, of which the USA is featured to have twelve navigable rivers, two oceans on either of its flanks, which are key in relying less on large land infrastructure projects, which in turn encourage small government.
Revolutionary wave: series of revolutions occurring in various locations in a similar time period. In many cases, past revolutions and revolutionary waves may inspire current ones, or an initial revolution inspires other concurrent "affiliate revolutions" with similar aims.
Atlantic Revolutions: United States (1775–1783), France and French-controlled Europe (1789–1814), Haiti (1791–1804), and Spanish America (1810–1825).
Revolutions of 1848 (Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples, the Year of Revolution)
Caricature by Ferdinand Schröder on the defeat of the revolutions of 1848/49 in Europe (published in Düsseldorfer Monatshefte, 1849.08.)
Revolutions of 1917–23: formed a revolutionary wave precipitated by the end of World War I in general and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 in particular.
Government, government intervention and government regulation
Democracy (EL: δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) "rule of the people"): all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives; contemporary governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic elements. Concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions.
Criticism of democracy: Economic: irrational voters, efficiency of the system, wealth disparity. Sociological: lack of political education, benefits of a specialised society. Political: uncontested good, cyclical theory of government, Political Coase Theorem, political instability (many people have put forward the idea that democracy is undesirable for a developing country in which economic growth and the reduction of poverty are top priority). Philosophical: mob rule (Plato's the Republic: "Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike"), violation of Property Rights (libertarians), timocracy and oligarchy, role of republicanism, moral decay. Administrative: short-termism (instability of coalition governments), corruption within democratic governments, volatility/unsustainability.
Democracy Index: index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. 4 regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
Anti-democratic thought: 1.1 Plato's rejection of Athenian democracy; 1.2 Nietzsche on democracy; 1.5 Michels on democracy (iron law of oligarchy)
Democracy: The God That Failed (BOOK): by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949.09.02-) is a German-born academic, libertarian theorist and an Austrian School economist; containing thirteen essays on democracy. Passages in the book oppose universal suffrage and favor "natural elites". The book helped popularize Hoppe on the far-right. Hoppe attributes democracy's failures to pressure groups seeking increased government expenditures, regulations and taxation and a lack of counter-measures to them. Potential solutions he discusses include secession, "shifting of control over the nationalised wealth from a larger, central government to a smaller, regional one" and "complete freedom of contract, occupation, trade and migration introduced". Hoppe concludes that democracy is the primary cause of a wave of decivilization sweeping the world since WWI, and that democracy must be delegitimized. Hoppe characterizes democracy as "publicly owned government", and when he compares it with monarchy—"privately owned government"—he concludes that the latter is preferable; however, Hoppe aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure for advancing civilization—something he calls the natural order, a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in which jurisdictions freely compete for adherents. The title of the work is an allusion to {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#Soviet Union, USSR (1922-1991)The God that Failed}.
The Economist's Democracy Index survey for 2012.
Democracy in America (De La Démocratie en Amérique; published in two volumes, 1st in 1835 and 2nd in 1840): classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville, examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead: collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. Main themes: The Puritan Founding, The Federal Constitution (USA people play a more prominent role in the protection of freedom: Township democracy; Mores, laws, and circumstances; Tyranny of the majority; Religion and beliefs; The family; Individualism; Associations; Self-interest rightly understood; Materialism), Situation of women. Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve". He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself. According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals.
Regulatory capture: examples: USA: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) (formerly: Minerals Management Service (MMS)) - Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC): ponzi scheme in silver and gold trading; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): hydraulic fracturing of rocks "posed little or no threat" to drinking water; Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): unsafe planes flying; New York Fed: flirting with Wall Street; FDA: Monsanto's rBGH (growth hormone); ICC; Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): 1979 Three Mile Island accident; OCC: financial crisis of 2008 and banks OCC controls; SEC: Wall Street, crisis of 2008. Japan: Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA): Fukushima.
Crony capitalism: "The larger the government budget and the more the economy is regulated, the more opportunities for cronyism exists." Examples: military-industrial complex of USA; USDA (US dept. of Agriculture: Creekstone Farms); Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Government failure: when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. Government's failure to intervene in a market failure that would result in a socially preferable mix of output is referred to as passive Government failure. Government vs. economics = Politicians vs. economists.
Continuity of government: principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of nuclear war or other catastrophic event.
Government self-regulation
JASON (advisory group): independent group of scientists which advises the USA government on matters of science and technology. The group was first created as a way to get a younger generation of scientists—that is, not the older Los Alamos and MIT Radiation Laboratory alumni—involved in advising the government. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members.
Various forms of government, and their associated political systems, located along the pathway of regional integration or separation.The territorial organization of European countries.
Democratic consolidation: process by which a new democracy matures, in a way that it becomes unlikely to revert to authoritarianism without an external shock, and is regarded as the only available system of government within a country. This is the case when: no significant political group seriously attempts to overthrow the democratic regime, the democratic system is regarded as the most appropriate way to govern by the vast majority of the public, and all political actors are accustomed to the fact that conflicts are resolved through established political and constitutional rules.
Federation (Latin: foedus, foederis, 'covenant'; aka federal state): political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions under a central (federal) government. Important ones: Argentina, Mexico, USA. Alleged de facto federations: Spain, European Union, Russian Federation, South Africa.
Regional state: more centralized than a federation, but more decentralized than a unitary state. Important ones: China, France, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
Unitary state: state governed as a single entity in which the central government is ultimately supreme. Unitary states stand in contrast with federations, also known as federal states. Unitary republics, Unitary monarchies.
Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO; HQ=The Hague; 1991.02.11-): purpose is to facilitate the voices of unrepresented and marginalised nations and peoples worldwide. Technically, it is not a non-governmental organisation (NGO) as some of its members are governments or government agencies of unrecognized states
Eurasia:
Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM; 1996-): EU Commission, ASEAN Plus Three (the Three: China (PRC), Korea, Japan); from 2008: India, Mongolia, Pakistan; from 2010: Australia, Russia, New Zealand; from 2012: Bangladesh, Norway, Switzerland.
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE; langs=en, fr, de, it, ru, es): world's largest regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization with observer status at UN. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, promotion of human rights, freedom of the press, and free and fair elections. The OSCE is concerned with early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict rehabilitation. Most of its 57 participating countries are in Europe, but there are a few members present in Asia and North America. The participating states cover much of the land area of the Northern Hemisphere. It was created during the Cold War era as a forum for discussion between the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc.
Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty: post–Cold War adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed 1999.11.19 during OSCE's 1999 Istanbul summit. The main difference with the earlier treaty is that the troop ceilings on a bloc-to-bloc basis (NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact) would be replaced with a system of national and territorial ceilings. NATO member-states link their ratification of the Adapted CFE Treaty with the fulfillment by Russia of the political commitments it undertook at the 1999 OSCE Istanbul Summit (so called "Istanbul commitments") to withdraw its forces from Georgia and Moldova. Russia has strongly criticized this linkage, which it considers artificial, and has on several occasions questioned the relevance of the Adapted CFE Treaty, given its continued non-ratification by NATO states. Russia suspended its ratification in 2007.07.14 amidst cooling relations between the US and Russia.
Science and Development Network: not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology in the developing world to policymakers, researchers, the media and civil society.
International Criminal Court (ICC): permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (although jurisdiction for the crime of aggression will not be active until 2017 at the earliest). Intended to complement existing national judicial systems, and may only exercise its jurisdiction when national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute such crimes.
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO): Eurasian political, economic and military organisation which was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB): multilateral development bank that aims to support the building of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The bank started operation after the agreement entered into force in 2015.12.25, after ratifications were received from 10 member states holding a total number of 50% of the initial subscriptions of the Authorized Capital Stock. Major economies that are not members include Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, and the United States. The United Nations has addressed the launch of AIIB as having potential for "scaling up financing for sustainable development" for the concern of global economic governance. The capital of the bank is $100 billion, equivalent to 2⁄3 of the capital of the Asian Development Bank and about half that of the World Bank. The bank was proposed by China in 2013 and the initiative was launched at a ceremony in Beijing in October 2014. It received the highest credit ratings from the three biggest rating agencies in the world, and is seen as a potential rival to World Bank and IMF.
Template:United Nations &
United Nations (UN): international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace. Founded in 1945 after WWII to replace League of Nations. General Assembly (the main deliberative assembly); the Security Council (for deciding certain resolutions for peace and security); the Economic and Social Council (for assisting in promoting international economic and social cooperation and development); the Secretariat (for providing studies, information, and facilities needed by the UN); the International Court of Justice (the primary judicial organ); and the United Nations Trusteeship Council (which is currently inactive). FAO (food and agriculture), ICAO (aviation), IFAD, ILO, IMO (maritime), IMF, ITU, UNESCO, UNIDO (industrial development), UPU (postal), WB (World Bank, or World Bank Group (WBG)?), WFP, WHO, WIPO, WMO (meteorological), UNWTO (tourism).
United Nations Secretariat (French: Secrétariat des Nations unies) is one of the six major organs of the United Nations, with the others being (a) the General Assembly; (b) the Security Council; (c) the Economic and Social Council; (d) the defunct Trusteeship Council; and (e) the International Court of Justice. The Secretariat is the United Nations' executive arm. The Secretariat has an important role in setting the agenda for the deliberative and decision-making bodies of the UN (the General Assembly, Economic and Social Council, and Security Council), and the implementation of the decision of these bodies. The Secretary-General, who is appointed by the General Assembly, is the head of the secretariat.
Defamation of religion and the United Nations: issue that has been repeatedly addressed by some member states of UN since 1999. Several non-binding resolutions have been voted on and accepted by the UN condemning "defamation of religion". The motions, sponsored on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, aim to prohibit expression that would "fuel discrimination, extremism and misperception leading to polarization and fragmentation with dangerous unintended and unforeseen consequences". Religious groups, human rights activists, free-speech activists, and several countries in the West have condemned the resolutions arguing it amounts to an international blasphemy law. Critics of the resolutions including human rights groups argue that they are used to politically strengthen domestic anti-blasphemy and religious defamation laws, which are used to imprison journalists, students and other peaceful political dissidents.
Durban Review Conference: 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). Conference was boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and USA. The Czech Republic discontinued its attendance on the first day, and twenty-three other EU countries sent low-level delegations. The western countries had expressed concerns that the conference would be used to promote anti-Semitism and laws against blasphemy perceived as contrary to the principles of free speech, and that the conference would not deal with discrimination against homosexuals. European countries also criticized the meeting for focusing on the West and ignoring problems of racism and intolerance in the developing world.
List of specialized agencies of the United Nations: autonomous organizations working with the United Nations and each other through the co-ordinating machinery of the United Nations Economic and Social Council at the intergovernmental level, and through the Chief Executives Board for co-ordination (CEB) at the inter-secretariat level. At present the UN has in total 15: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO); International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); International Labour Organization (ILO); International Maritime Organization (IMO); International Monetary Fund (IMF); International Telecommunication Union (ITU); United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); Universal Postal Union (UPU); World Bank Group (WBG: IBRD, IFC, IDA); World Health Organization (WHO); World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); World Meteorological Organization (WMO); World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Related organizations: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission; International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); International Organization for Migration (IOM); Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons; WTO.
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
World Digital Library (WDL): international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress; aims to expand non-English and non-western content on the Internet, and contribute to scholarly research; make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishing WIPO, WIPO was created to promote and protect IP across the world by cooperating with countries as well as international organizations. It began operations on 1970.04.26 when the convention entered into force.
International Court of Justice (ICJ): primary judicial branch of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. Its main functions are to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to provide advisory opinions on legal questions submitted to it by duly authorized international branches, agencies, and the UN General Assembly.
United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs: office of the U.N. Secretariat that promotes and facilitates peaceful international cooperation in outer space. It works to establish or strengthen the legal and regulatory frameworks for space activities, and assists developing countries in using space science and technology for sustainable socioeconomic development.
Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies): multilateral treaty that forms the basis of international space law. Negotiated and drafted under the auspices of UN, it was opened for signature in USA, UK, and USSR in 1967.01.27, entering into force on 1967.10.10. As of February 2021, 111 countries are parties to the treaty—including all major spacefaring nations—and another 23 are signatories.
World Heritage Site: landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, scientific or other form of significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity".
World Bank Group (WBG): family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and most famous development bank in the world and is an observer at the United Nations Development Group. Technically the World Bank is part of the United Nations system, but its governance structure is different: each institution in the World Bank Group is owned by its member governments, which subscribe to its basic share capital, with votes proportional to shareholding. Membership gives certain voting rights that are the same for all countries but there are also additional votes which depend on financial contributions to the organization. The President of the World Bank is nominated by the President of USA and elected by the Bank's Board of Governors.
World Bank: international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs. Official goal is the reduction of poverty. However, according to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of Capital investment.
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development: international financial institution that offers loans to middle-income developing countries. It was established in 1944 with the mission of financing the reconstruction of European nations devastated by WWII.
International Development Association: international financial institution which offers concessional loans and grants to the world's poorest developing countries.
International Finance Corporation: international financial institution that offers investment, advisory, and asset management services to encourage private sector development in developing countries. It was established in 1956 as the private sector arm of the World Bank Group to advance economic development by investing in strictly for-profit and commercial projects that purport to reduce poverty and promote development. The IFC's stated aim is to create opportunities for people to escape poverty and achieve better living standards by mobilizing financial resources for private enterprise, promoting accessible and competitive markets, supporting businesses and other private sector entities, and creating jobs and delivering necessary services to those who are poverty-stricken or otherwise vulnerable.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
International Monetary Fund (IMF): "hedge fund of the world" run by US (~17% of all votes)? SDRs are proportional to vote percentage. Is it socialist or libertarian or somebody-to-get-rich (like in arms trading)? IMF's impact on: access to food, public health, environment. IMF's support to dictators during the Cold War.
Special Drawing Rights: supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets. Not a currency, SDRs instead represent a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged. As they can only be exchanged for Euros, Japanese yen, UK pounds, or US dollars, SDRs may actually represent a potential claim on IMF member countries' nongold foreign exchange reserve assets, which are usually held in those currencies. ISO 4217 code: XDR. As of March 2011, the amount of SDRs in existence is around XDR 238.3 billion, but this figure is expected to rise to XDR 476.8 by 2013.
Institute of International Finance (IIF): world's only global association or trade group of financial institutions - world's largest commercial banks and investment banks, as well as a growing number of insurance companies and investment management firms; associate members include multinational corporations, trading companies, export credit agencies, and multilateral agencies. Created by 38 banks of leading industrialized countries in 1983 in response to the international debt crisis of the early 1980s. IIF played a role in the global financial crisis of 2008 by advocating to relax subsequent attempts of self-regulation (Basel III rules), the debt crises of Latin American, Asia, and the Euro zone. Greek debt crisis
World Trade Organization (WTO)
World Trade Organization (WTO, NOT part of UN; i.e. UN is for politics, WTO is for economics and trade, but UN & WTO work "closely" together politically as economics goes hand-in-hand with politics, e.g.
International Trade Centre (ITC)): supervise and liberalize international trade. Before Jan. 1, 1995 -
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Provides a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements, and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their parliaments. The WTO is governed by a ministerial conference, meeting every two years; a general council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the ministerial conference. Languages: en, fr, es.
International Trade Organization (ITO): Bretton Woods Conference 1944; but by 1950 ITO still was non-existent, while "GATT 1947" gained significance leading to GATT and later WTO to be the replacement for never-to-be ITO.
World Trade Organization accession and membership: huge economies joining WTO (all others, like EU, USA, Japan, South Korea were from GATT times): India (1995 1 01), Indonesia (1995 1 01), China (PRC, 2001 12 11), Taiwan (ROC, 2002 1 01), Russia (2011 12 16).
Multi Fibre Arrangement: Bangladesh for the cheapest clothing, China for better quality "bras". EU & USA fight Chinese textile imports outside WTO/GATT agreement.
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS): TRIPS contains requirements that nations' laws must meet for copyright rights, including the rights of performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting organizations; geographical indications, including appellations of origin; industrial designs; integrated circuit layout-designs (Mickey-Mouse copyright by Disney meets the IC "copyright-like" IP rights of Intel); patents; monopolies for the developers of new plant varieties; trademarks; trade dress; and undisclosed or confidential information. TRIPS also specifies enforcement procedures, remedies, and dispute resolution procedures.
Doha Declaration (Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, 2001 Nov.): the old guard of patents and the new cheap "essential medicines". Similar to Linux vs. MS Windows/Mac OS X patent battles, just now human lives are at stake.
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE): central command of NATO military forces. Location: at Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons (at first located in Paris (1951-1967), but then France (under de Gaulle) left NATO). From 1951, SHAPE was the headquarters of operational forces in the European theatre (Allied Command Europe, ACE), but since 2003 SHAPE has been the headquarters of Allied Command Operations (ACO) controlling all allied operations worldwide. The commanding officer of Allied Command Operations has also retained the title "Supreme Allied Commander Europe" (SACEUR), and continues to be a U.S. four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as Commander, U.S. European Command.
Contact Countries (2000): Australia (AUSCANNZUKUS) [formerly also UK], New Zealand (AUSCANNZUKUS) [formerly also UK], Japan [WWII & USA occupation of Japan], South Korea [USA and Korean War]
AUSCANNZUKUS ("Five Eyes"): Anglosphere nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA.
Enlargement of NATO: After the Cold War ended, and Germany reunited in 1990, there was a debate in NATO about continued expansion eastward. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the organization, amid much debate within the organization and Russian opposition. Cyprus and Macedonia are stalled from accession by, respectively, Turkey and Greece, pending the resolution of disputes between them. Other countries which have a stated goal of eventually joining include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Georgia. The incorporation of countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of influence has been a cause of increased tension between NATO countries and Russia.
NATO Response Force (NRF): high-readiness force comprising land, air, sea and special forces units capable of being deployed quickly. Until 2022.02, when NATO activated it in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, units assigned to the NRF had only been used to assist with disaster relief and security at high-profile security events. In 2022.02.25 after a NATO meeting, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) was activated for the defense of members of the alliance, for the first time.
Exercise Trident Juncture 2018 (2018.10.25–11.23): NATO-led military exercise held in Norway with an Article 5 collective defence scenario. The exercise was the largest of its kind in Norway since the 1980s. An expected 50,000 participants from 31 nations partook, including 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft and 65 vessels. The exercise was mainly held in the central and eastern parts of Norway, in addition to air and sea areas in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The stated goal of Trident Juncture was to train the NRF and to test the alliance's defence capability.
2008 Bucharest summit (2–4 April 2008): NATO summit organized in the Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest, Romania. Among other business, Croatia and Albania were invited to join the Alliance. The Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia was not invited to join NATO due to its ongoing naming dispute with Greece. Georgia and Ukraine had hoped to join the NATO Membership Action Plan, but, while welcoming the two countries’s aspirations for membership and agreeing that "these countries will become members of NATO", the NATO members decided to review their request in December 2008. NATO–Russia meeting: Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to the summit, and he arrived on the second day (3 April) to participate in bilateral NATO–Russia talks. He opposed the US plans to deploy missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, which was discussed at the summit. Russia also opposed Georgia and Ukraine's NATO membership bids.
2022 Madrid summit (2022.06.29–30): Australia, Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Sweden, ROC (Taiwan) and Thailand are not member states of NATO but were invited to attend and participate in the summit. The presidents of the European Council and European Commission were also invited, as well as the ministers of Jordan, Mauritania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. President Zelenskyy was invited to the summit and made an appearance via video link.
Foreign relations of NATO: NATO runs a number of programs which provide a framework for the partnerships between itself and these non-member nations, typically based on that country's location. These include the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace. Global NATO: Australia, Colombia, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia (More recently, Mongolia has been working together with NATO on Science for Peace and Security Programme, which focuses on cybersecurity and reducing the environmental impact of military sites), New Zealand, Pakistan.
Finland–NATO relations: became a member of NATO on 2023.04.04 (finalizing the fastest accession process in the treaty's history). Finland has had formal relations with NATO since 1994, when it joined the Partnership for Peace program. Finland has historically maintained a position of neutrality in the face of its often complicated relations with Russia. The possibility of membership became a topic of debate in the country after the end of the Cold War, and following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country officially applied to join NATO in 2022.05.18. Cooperation before joining: Before joining NATO, Finland participated in nearly all sub-areas of the Partnership for Peace programme, and provided peacekeeping forces to both the Afghanistan and Kosovo missions. The Finnish government's 1997 defense white paper strongly advocated the development of interoperability to support international crisis management in line with the PfP concept. The 1998–2008 defense program began in May 1997 at the "Spirit of PfP" training in northern Norway. Foreign opinion: In 2014.06 interview in the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, Vladimir Putin's personal envoy Sergey Alexandrovich Markov accused Finland of extreme "Russophobia" and suggested that Finland joining NATO could start World War III. In 2016.07, Putin stated on a visit to Finland that Russia would increase the number of troops on the Finnish border if Finland were to join NATO. He also warned that NATO would "fight to the last Finn against Russia". After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the radical shift in Finnish positions toward joining NATO, Maria Zakharova and Dmitry Medvedev warned that joining NATO would have consequences for Finland, including the deployment of nuclear weapons; Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the Finnish lease on the Saimaa canal may be terminated. By the end of 2022.09, 28 of 30 NATO member states had ratified the accession protocol, the remaining two being Hungary and Turkey, who would both ratify it by early 2023.04.
Sweden–NATO relations: have a close relationship and regularly carry out joint exercises, cooperate in peacekeeping operations and share information. Historically, a minority of the Swedish population has been in favour of NATO membership, but the question of membership rose in popularity following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Sweden applied to join the organisation in 2022.05.18. 2022.07.05, NATO signed the accession protocol for Sweden to join the alliance. While Sweden's membership has not been fully ratified by NATO member states and it is not yet a full member, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in 2023.03 it was "inconceivable" NATO would not respond if Sweden's security were threatened. By November, Sweden's NATO membership had been ratified by 28 out of 30 member states, with only Hungary and Turkey not having so far done so. During the process of application, Sweden held elections resulting in a center-right government that pledged to continue the NATO process, reaffirming a united front with Finland's application, and suggesting that they would be more able to meet Turkish requirements. 2022.11.24 Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced he was backing Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO, promising Hungary would have ratified NATO membership in January. 2023.03, Jens Stoltenberg pushed for Hungary and Turkey to finalize the accession of Finland and Sweden by the July summit. Hungary's Orban stated in March that while he and his party Fidesz supported NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, he objected to their support for the EU's freezing of funds for Hungary due to concerns about rule-of-law and corruption. Orban said "it’s not right for them to ask us to take them on board while they’re spreading blatant lies about Hungary, about the rule of law in Hungary, about democracy, about life here". A Hungarian delegation was sent to both countries to discuss the issue. On 15 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkish officials indicated that Finland's application would be approved in mid-April while Sweden's would be approved independently. The United States informally held up a Turkish purchase of F-16 fighter jets because of the Swedish NATO membership issue. Analysts said that aid and financing required to respond to 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake increased the importance of good relations with Western countries. They noted agreement would be easier after a Swedish anti-terrorism law took effect on 1 June, and after Turkish elections in May.
Other military alliances, USA is a member of
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad): informal strategic dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia and India that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney of USA, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. The diplomatic and military arrangement was widely viewed as a response to increased Chinese economic and military power, and the Chinese government responded to the Quadrilateral dialogue by issuing formal diplomatic protests to its members. In a 2021 joint statement, "The Spirit of the Quad," Quad members described "a shared vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific," and a "rules-based maritime order in the East and South China Seas," which Quad members state are needed to counter Chinese maritime claims. The Quad pledged to respond to COVID-19, and held a first Quad Plus meeting that included representatives from New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam to work on its response to it. Widely viewed as intending to curb "China's growing power," the Quad's joint statement drew criticism from China's foreign ministry, which said the Quad "openly incites discord" among regional powers in Asia. Creation and cessation of the Quad (2007-2008): China's opposition; Australia's departure. Intermission (2009-2017): Continued naval exercises; Australia's foreign policy under the Liberal-National governments; The US "Pivot to Asia"; Japan's reorientation to the Indo-Pacific; China's foreign policy under Xi; India's shift in position. Restarting the Quad (2017-): 2017 ASEAN Summit; Follow-up meetings; Quad Plus meeting on COVID-19; An Asian NATO? Expanding scope; Other meetings and upcoming events; European and Canadian pivot to the Indo-Pacific: Canada, European Union, France, Germany, The Netherlands, The UK. Concept of the Indo-Pacific. Analysis.
Malabar (naval exercise): trilateral naval exercise involving the United States, Japan and India as permanent partners. Originally begun in 1992 as a bilateral exercise between India and the United States, Japan became a permanent partner in 2015. Past non-permanent participants include Singapore and Australia. The annual Malabar exercises includes diverse activities, ranging from fighter combat operations from aircraft carriers through maritime interdiction operations, anti-submarine warfare, diving salvage operations, amphibious operations, counter-piracy operations, cross–deck helicopter landings and anti–air warfare operations.
AUKUS (2021.09.15): trilateral security pact between Australia, UK and USA for the Indo-Pacific region. Under the pact, the US and the UK will help Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The pact also includes cooperation on "cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities". Under the pact, Australia will acquire new long-range strike capabilities for its air force, navy and army. The pact will focus on military capability, separating it from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance that also includes New Zealand and Canada. The government of China was vocal in its contempt for the deal, accusing the three western powers of having a "cold-war mentality", as the deal was widely seen as being, at least in part, a response to China's status as an increasingly assertive emerging superpower. It was also criticised for not involving New Zealand, an important strategic ally in the Pacific region, which was presumed to be because of the country's nuclear-free policy. International responses:
Japan: Prior to this, in 2021.11, former prime minister Shinzo Abe in a virtual address to the Sydney Dialogue, welcomed the creation of AUKUS in the midst of an increasingly severe security environment, and called for greater Japan-AUKUS cooperation and integration concerning artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities. 2022.12.10, Australia's Minister for Defence announced their desire for Japan to join the pact.
France: 2021.09.17, France, which is an ally of the three countries, recalled its ambassadors from Australia and USA; French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the pact a "stab in the back" following Australia's cancellation of a French–Australian submarine deal worth €56 billion (A$90 billion) without notice, ending efforts to develop a deeper strategic partnership between France and Australia. After a call between the French and USA presidents, the French ambassador returned to USA in 2021.09.30. Beaune described the United Kingdom as a junior partner and vassal of the United States due to the pact, saying in an interview: "Our British friends explained to us they were leaving the EU to create Global Britain. We can see that this is a return into the American lap and a form of accepted vassalisation."
Anonymous terrorism: terrorist attacks (acts using intentional violence to achieve political aims) that no group or person has been publicly claimed responsibility for — constitutes about six out of seven terrorist attacks in the world at least since 1998. This proportion has been called "surprisingly high" and is in conflict with the conventional wisdom that terrorists "mount an operation to call attention to their grievances" and to "the costs of ignoring" those grievances, which can't happen if the perpetrators don't make public the "cost", i.e. announce that an event of killing and/or destruction was their work. A number of theories have been advanced as to why terror groups sometimes don't claim an attack, including: a motivation not to force concessions from the enemy, but to punish or destroy them, by killing and demoralizing them; an interest in plausible deniability; avoiding retaliation; and a byproduct of a disconnect between terror leadership and operatives.
Genocides in history: Before 1490: Neanderthals, Ancient gendercides, Destruction of Carthage; Mongol Empire, Tamerlane; Wu Hu and Jie. 1490 to 1914: Congo, French conquest of Algeria, German South West Africa; Americas, United States; Afghanistan, Dzungar genocide, Japanese colonization of Hokkaido; Ottoman Empire; Russian Empire: Circassians; Kyrgyz; 13th-century extermination of the Cathars; Vendee; War of the Three Kingdoms (Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Cromwellian Plantation), British Empire: Great Irish Famine; Australia (aborigines), New Zealand. 20th century (from WWI): Ottoman Empire/Turkey: Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide, Greek genocide, Great Famine of Mount Lebanon, Dersim Massacre; Soviet Union: Decossackization, Holodomor, Poles in the Soviet Union, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachay and Kalmyks and volga germans, Deportations of Baltic people, Crimean Tatars; Japan (Nanking massacre and Japanese war crimes); Republic of China and Tibet; Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe: The Holocaust, Non-Jewish victims, Slavic population in the Soviet Union, Independent State of Croatia, Serbs, Muslims and Croats, Poland, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, Romani people, Disabled and mentally ill. Post–WWII Central and Eastern Europe: Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950); Partition of India. 1951 onwards: Australia 1900–1969 (Stolen Generation, History wars, and Bringing them home), Zanzibar, Algerian War, Cambodian genocide, Guatemalan civil war and Guatemalan genocide, Bangladesh Liberation War Genocide of 1971, Burundi 1972 and 1993, Equatorial Guinea; Indonesia: East Timorese genocide & Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66; West New Guinea/West Papua; Persecution of Biharis in Bangladesh & Indigenous Chakmas; Argentina; Ethiopia; Baathist Iraq: Genocide of Kurds, Marsh Arabs; PRC: Tibet; Brazil: Genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Hutus (Rwandan genocide); Somalia: 1988–1991 Isaaq genocide, 2007 Bantu attacks; Chechnya; Sri Lanka; Myanmar; ISIL; Yemen.
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP; 2006-): consortium of investigative centers, media and journalists operating in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Central America. OCCRP is the only full-time investigative reporting organization that specializes in organized crime and corruption. It publishes its stories through local media and in English and Russian through its website. Broke new ground on the Magnitsky case, the largest tax fraud in Russian history, and demonstrated that funds stolen from the Russian treasury ended up in a company now owned by the son of Moscow's former transportation minister. Some of the money was used to buy high-end real estate near Wall Street. Since 2012, OCCRP has dedicated the Person of the Year Award that "recognizes the individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption":
2012 – Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan – Other mentions: Naser Kelmendi, Milo Đukanović, Vladimir Putin, Miroslav Mišković, Islam Karimov, Darko Šarić
2013 – Parliament of Romania – Other mentions: Darko Šarić, Gulnara Karimova
2014 – Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation – Other mentions: Viktor Orbán, Milo Đukanović
2015 – Milo Đukanović, Prime Minister of Montenegro – Other mentions: First Family of Azerbaijan, Nikola Gruevski
2016 – Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela – Other mentions: Rodrigo Duterte, Bashar al-Assad, ISIL/ISIS, Raúl Castro/Luis Alberto Rodríguez, Vladimir Putin
2017 – Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines – Other mentions: Jacob Zuma, Robert Mugabe
2018 – Danske Bank, for the money laundering scandal
2019 – Joseph Muscat, for the flourishing of criminality and corruption under his leadership as Prime Minister of Malta – Other mentions: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Denis-Christel Sassou Nguesso
2020 – Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, for "surrounding himself with corrupt figures, using propaganda to promote his populist agenda, undermining the justice system, and waging a destructive war against the Amazon region that has enriched some of the country’s worst land owners." – Other mentions: President of USA Donald Trump, President of Turkey Recep Erdoğan, and Ihor Kolomoyskyi
2021 – Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, "in recognition of all he has done to advance organized criminal activity and corruption." – Other mentions: Former President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, President of Syria Bashar al-Assad, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Former Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz
2022 – Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and mercenary leader, "for his tireless efforts to “extend Russia's vicious and corrupt reach, to steal for Vladimir Putin, and to punish those who resist.”" – Other mentions: European Court of Justice, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega
Russian Laundromat: scheme to move $20–80 billion out of Russia from 2010 to 2014 through a network of global banks, many of them in Moldova and Latvia. The Guardian reported that around 500 people were suspected of being involved, many of whom were wealthy Russians.
Danske Bank money laundering scandal: ongoing investigations and media attention on the Copenhagen-based Danske Bank's involvement in suspicious transactions by non-resident accounts between 2007–2015. It has been claimed to possibly be the largest money laundering scandal in the world. The total amount of suspicious funds has been quoted by sources as having been either $30 billion US dollars, $130 billion US dollars or up to $230 billion US dollars. According to the Danish FSA, non-resident portfolios from Russia in 2012 made up 35% of the profits of the local branch. The overall percentage of Russian clients in the branch was 8%. A former executive of the Estonian branch of Danske Bank was found dead in 2019.09.25. Estonian police discovered the body of Aivar Rehe, who was in charge of the branch from 2007 until 2015, during a search operation after his disappearance that began two days earlier. Rehe was a key witness in the ongoing criminal investigation. The cause of his death has been reported as suicide.
WikiLeaks: international, online, non-profit, journalistic organisation which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph Farrell, and Sarah Harrison are the only other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange.
GlobaLeaks: open-source, free software intended to enable anonymous whistleblowing initiatives.
@Mathematics: maths is also a language
@@Physics: formulae
@@Chemistry: Chemical formulae & Skeletal formulae are languages (2D & 3D languages!)
@@EECS: CS is written in various computer languages
Vernacular: literary language variant vs vernacular, e.g. Classical Latin vs Vulgar Latin or classical Arabic vs spoken Arabic. The vernacular (idiom, dialect, mother tongue, {"spoken"}) is evolving all the time according to (small) groups of persons, but the literary variant is slower to evolve and more "frozen" in time, as it will be read at the time when vernacular will be so far away from the classical/written language as French/Italian/Spanish & Portuguese/Romanian from Classical Latin. Undefined concept.
Programming/Computer language ⇒
Computer programming, but programming languages are written in English (keywords!) with strict math-logic (syntax, semantics; specification (idealism) and implementation (realism); type system; library(ies)), but it's also an art of writing in the same sense as writing book/poem/Wikipedia article...
7,000 or more human languages all over the world. Half the world population speaks one of 10 languages (>1%). Most everybody else speaks one of 300 languages (4%). 5% of the world speaks one of 6,500 languages (95%).
Lingua franca (lit. 'Frankish tongue'; bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, link language): language or dialect systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages. Lingua francas have developed around the world throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages" facilitated trade), but also for cultural, religious, diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Romance-based pidgin language used (especially by traders and seamen) as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th century. A world language – a language spoken internationally and by many people – is a language that may function as a global lingua franca.
First language (native language, mother tongue, arterial language, L1)
Multilingualism: Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population; becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness
What is language? "Dialect" or "language:
Dialect continua in Europe.
Dialect continuum (dialect chain, dialect area, L-complex): spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties are not mutually intelligible. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves. In this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, dialectologists map variation of various language features across a dialect continuum, drawing lines called isoglosses between areas that differ with respect to some feature. Since the early 20th century, the increasing dominance of nation-states and their standard languages has been steadily eliminating the nonstandard dialects that comprise dialect continua, making the boundaries ever more abrupt and well-defined.
Kashmir, in which local Muslims usually regard their language as Urdu, the national standard of Pakistan, while Hindus regard the same speech as Hindi, an official standard of India.
In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties within a continuum with Serbia to the north and Bulgaria to the east. The standard was deliberately based on varieties from the west of the republic that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the national standard of North Macedonia, but viewed by Bulgarians as a dialect of Bulgarian. Ex-Yugoslavia: Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs can communicate easily.
Europe: Germanic languages (North Germanic continuum {Scandinavia}, Continental West Germanic continuum {High/Low German, Dutch, Frisian}, Anglic continuum {English in England, English language in southern England, Scots}); Romance languages (Western Romance continuum, Eastern Romance continuum {Romania}); Slavic languages (West and East Slavic (also North Slavic); South Slavic continuum); Uralic languages (Sami languages, Baltic-Finnic languages).
Middle East: Turkic dialect continuum (Turkish, Azeri, Khalaj language, Turkmen); Arabic - diglossia (Modern Standard Arabic: written standard; modern vernacular dialects/languages); Assyrian Neo-Aramaic; Persian (Iran and Central Asia (Persian, Dari and Tajik))
Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India (Indic dialect continuum)
Chinese (continuum comparable to that of the Romance languages, however they share a common written language - firstly Classical Chinese (till early 20th c.), nowadays - from báihuà {Written Vernacular Chinese} to Pǔtōnghuà {Modern Standard Chinese; Modern Standard Mandarin}; Mandarin continuum, Yue continuum, Min Nan continuum);
Cree and Ojibwa.
Dialect levelling: refers to the assimilation, mixture and/or eradication of certain dialects, often due to language standardisation. Dialect levelling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after the industrialisation and modernisation of the area or areas in which they are spoken. Standard German: Urbanization and Standard Language (five forms of ‘Printer’s Language’ in 15th - 16th c.; Luther); Mandarin tonal levelling in Taiwan.
India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and around them are the areas that are the most linguistically diverse in the world.
Endangered language: While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they are currently disappearing at an accelerated rate due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages. The general consensus is that there are between 6000 and 7000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50-90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with fewer than 10,000 speakers.
endangeredlanguages.com
Language documentation: process by which a language is documented from a documentary linguistics perspective; aims to “to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community”.
Fusional language: type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes to denote grammatical, syntactic or semantic change.Indo-European languages are: Sanskrit (and the modern Indo-Aryan languages), Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Icelandic, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Czech; another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group.
Classification, taxonomy of languages - difficult:
Language code: assigns letters and/or numbers as identifiers or classifiers for languages. Difficulties of classification - language code schemes attempt to classify within the complex world of human languages, dialects, and variants. Most schemes make some compromises between being general and being complete enough to support specific dialects.
IETF language tag: BCP 47; each language tag is composed of one or more "subtags" separated by hyphens (-), each subtag is made with basic Latin letters or digits only. There are exceptions and grandfathered cases, but the subtags occur in the following order: single primary language subtag (2 letter: ISO 639-1 or 3 letter: ISO 639-2/3/5); up to three optional extended language subtags composed of three letters each, separated by hyphens; optional script subtag (composed of a four letter script code from ISO 15924 (usually written in title case)); optional region subtag (composed of a two letter country code from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (usually written in upper case), or a three digit code from UN M.49 for geographical regions); optional variant subtags; optional extension subtags; optional private use subtag (composed of the letter x and a hyphen followed by subtags of one to eight characters each, separated by hyphens).
Koine Greek (Alexandrian dialect, common Attic, Hellenistic or Biblical Greek): was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, and the early Byzantine Empire, or late antiquity. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms. Literary Koine was the medium of much of post-classical Greek literary and scholarly writing, such as the works of Plutarch and Polybius; also the language of the Christian New Testament, of the Septuagint (the 3rd-century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), and of most early Christian theological writing by the Church Fathers; continues to be used as the liturgical language of services in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Ancient Macedonian language: either a dialect of Ancient Greek or a separate Hellenic language, was spoken in the kingdom of Macedonia during the 1st millennium BC; gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BC, marginalized by the use of Attic Greek by the Macedonian aristocracy, the Ancient Greek dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period.
Geographical distribution of the dialects of ancient Greek, in the classical era. Not shown: dialects of the western colonies of Magna Graecia.
Ancient Greek colonies and their dialect groupings in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia).
Ruthenian language (dead): With the beginning of romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, literary Belarusian and literary Ukrainian appeared, descendant from the popular spoken dialects and little-influenced by literary Ruthenian. Meanwhile, Russian retained a layer of Church Slavonic "high vocabulary", so that nowadays the most striking lexical differences between Russian on the one hand and Belarusian and Ukrainian on the other are the much greater share of Slavonicisms [sic!] in the former and of Polonisms [sic!] in the latter. The interruption of the literary tradition was especially drastic in Belarusian: In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Polish had largely replaced Ruthenian as the language of administration and literature. After that Belarusian only survived as a rural spoken language with almost no written tradition until the mid-19th century. In contrast to the Belarusians and Eastern Ukrainians, the Western Ukrainians who came to live in Austria-Hungary retained not only the name Ruthenian but also much more of the Church Slavonic and Polish elements of Ruthenian. For disambiguation, in English these Ukrainians are usually called by the native form of their name, Rusyns.
Lechitic languages: language group consisting of Polish and several other languages that are or were spoken in areas of modern Poland and northeastern parts of modern Germany.
South Slavic languages: All South Slavic languages form a dialect continuum. It comprises, from West to East, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Standard Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are each based on a distinct dialect, but the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard varieties of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language are all based on the same dialect, Shtokavian. For that reason Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins communicate fluently with each other in their own standard language. On the other hand, Croats speaking one dialect (Kajkavian) can hardly communicate with Croats speaking a different dialect (Chakavian). Same goes for Serbian Shtokavian and Torlakian dialects. Torlakian is closer to the Eastern branch of South Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian, than to Western South Slavic idioms. South Slavic languages share a set of grammatical features that set them apart from all other Slavic languages. The barrier between East South Slavic and West South Slavic is natural and not political: the speakers' ancestors inhabited their respective lands having taken alternative routes thus being apart for some generations. Because of this, an intermediate dialect linking western and eastern variations came into existence over time: this is called Torlakian and is spoken on the fringes of Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia (northern) and Serbia (eastern).
Eastern:
Bulgarian dialects: The dialects of Macedonian were for the most part classified as part of Bulgarian in the older literature. The Bulgarian linguistics continue to treat it as such in. Since the second half of the 20th century, foreign authors have mostly adopted the convention of treating these in terms of a separate Macedonian language, following the codification of Macedonian as the literary standard language of Yugoslav Macedonia. However, some contemporary linguists still consider Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian.
Dialects of Macedonian: part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial.
Church Slavonic language: conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine.
Transitional:
Torlakian dialect: group of South Slavic dialects of southeastern Serbia (southern Kosovo – Prizren), northeastern Republic of Macedonia (Kumanovo, Kratovo and Kriva Palanka dialects), western Bulgaria (Belogradchik–Godech–Tran-Breznik), which is intermediate between Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Macedonian. Some linguists classify it as an Old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth dialect of Serbo-Croatian along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian. Others classify it as a western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is referred to as a transitional dialect. Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features.
Shtokavian dialect: prestige dialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards.
Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian: Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. With the breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed a 'nationalization' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s.
Yoficator: computer program or extension for a text editor that restores the Cyrillic letter Yo ‹Ё› in Russian texts in places where the letter Ye ‹Е› was used instead.
present-day distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.
Extent of Norse language in CE 900: Western Norse in red and Eastern Norse in orange. Old Gutnish - in pink. Old English - in yellow. In green - the other Germanic languages with which Old Norse retained a certain intercomprehension. In blue, the Gothic dialect of Crimea.
Template:English dialects by continent not unified (but more unified than Chinese or Arabic, which are much older in writing than modern English), English language is not centrally governed (unlike Spanish, French, partly German)
International English (Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, Engas (English as associate language), Globish): More recently, there have been proposals for ELF in which non-native speakers take a highly active role in the development of the language. It has also been argued that International English is held back by its traditional spelling. There has been slow progress in adopting alternate spellings.
Mid-Atlantic accent (Transatlantic accent): a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of American and British characteristics.
World Englishes: term for emerging localized or indigenized varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by UK or USA. The study of World Englishes consists of identifying varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally and analyzing how sociolinguistic histories, multicultural backgrounds and contexts of function influence the use of English in different regions of the world. Currently, there are approximately 75 territories where English is spoken either as a first language (L1) or as an unofficial or institutionalized second language (L2) in fields such as government, law and education. It is difficult to establish the total number of Englishes in the world, as new varieties of English are constantly being developed and discovered. The future of World Englishes: English as the language of 'others', A different world language. There are two academic journals devoted to the study of this topic, titled English World-Wide (since 1980, by John Benjamins Publishing Company) and World Englishes (since 1982, by Wiley).
English language in Europe: native language, is mainly spoken in UK and Ireland. Outside of these states, it has official status in Malta, the Crown dependencies (the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey), Gibraltar and the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (two of the British Overseas Territories). In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, English has an official status as a regional language on the isles of Saba and Sint Eustatius (located in the Caribbean). The English language is the de facto official language of England, the sole official language of Gibraltar and of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, and one of the official languages of the Republic of Ireland, Malta, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey and the European Union. According to a survey published in 2006, 13% of EU citizens speak English as their native language. Another 38% of EU citizens state that they have sufficient English skills to hold a conversation, so the total reach of English in the EU is 51%.
Languages of the European Union: languages used by people within the member states of EU. The EU has 24 official languages, of which three (English, French and German) have the higher status of "procedural" languages of the European Commission (whereas the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages). One language (Irish) previously had the lower status of "treaty language" before being upgraded to an official and working language in 2007, although it has been temporarily derogated as a working language until 2022 due to difficulty in finding qualified translators and interpreters. The three procedural languages are those used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. The designation of Irish as a "treaty language" meant that only the treaties of the European Union were translated into Irish, whereas Legal Acts of the European Union adopted under the treaties (like Directives and Regulations) did not have to be. Luxembourgish and Turkish (which have official status in Luxembourg and Cyprus, respectively) are the only two official languages of EU member states that are not official languages of the EU.
Languages of the European Union#Knowledge: after Brexit, Official EU languages (total): English ≥44%, German 36%, French 30%, Italian 18%, Spanish 17%, Polish 10%, others <7%.
English-language spelling reform: seeks to change English spelling so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle.
Knowledge of English language in EU.
English as a lingua franca (ELF): use of the English language "as a global means of inter-community communication" and can be understood as "any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option". ELF is "defined functionally by its use in intercultural communication rather than formally by its reference to native-speaker norms" whereas English as a second or foreign language aims at meeting native speaker norms and gives prominence to native speaker cultural aspects. While lingua francas have been used for centuries, what makes ELF a novel phenomenon is the extent to which it is used in spoken, written and in computer-mediated communication. Globalization and ELF; Features of spoken ELF communication; "Neutrality" of ELF; ELF and the native speaker; Attitude and motivation; Debates in ELF
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The Chaos: poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. Written by Dutch writer, traveller, and teacher Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870–1946), it includes about 800 examples of irregular spelling.
List of English words with disputed usage: some English words are often used in ways that are contentious between writers on usage and prescriptive commentators. The contentious usages are especially common in spoken English.
Common English usage misconceptions: widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be myths or misconceptions.
Comparison of variant spellings used in different English-speaking countries.
American and British English spelling differences: Latin-derived spellings: -our, -or; -re, -er; -ce, -se; -xion, -ction. Greek-derived spellings: -ise, -ize (-isation, -ization); -yse, -yze; -ogue, -og; ae and oe. Doubled consonants. Dropped e. Past tense differences. Different spellings for different meanings. Different spellings for different pronunciations. Miscellaneous spelling differences. Compounds and hyphens. Acronyms and abbreviations. Punctuation.
Commonly misspelled English words: words that are often unintentionally misspelled in general writing. A selected list of common words is presented below. Although the word "common" is subjective depending on the situation, the focus is on general writing, rather than in a specific field.
German (Deutsch)
High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low German (yellow) and Dutch. NB: map shows the modern boundaries of the languages.
German language (Deutsch): L1=90 mln (Hochdeutsch), 120 mln (all dialects); L2=80 mln
Sprachwarietäten Deutsch.Darstellungskarte des historischen Verlaufes der Benrather und der Speyerer Linie als Trenngrenze zwischen Nieder- und Mitteldeutsch.
Map of the Rheinischer Fächer (Rhenish fan) subdivision of German dialects by Georg Wenker 1877.
de:Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung: wurde im Jahr 2004 als Nachfolger der Zwischenstaatlichen Kommission für deutsche Rechtschreibung von Deutschland, Österreich, der Schweiz, Südtirol, Liechtenstein und der deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens gemeinsam eingerichtet.
Distribution map of the Low Saxon and Low Franconian languages since 1945.
Low German OR Dutch Low Saxon:
Middle Low German (Middle Saxon; 1100-1600): served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic League
Low German (Low Saxon; Plattdüütsch, Nedderdüütsch; de: Plattdeutsch, Niederdeutsch; nl: Nedersaksisch; L1=5 mln (???))
West Low German (Low Saxon; de: Niedersächsisch; nl: Nedersaksisch; L1=4 mln (DE, NL, DK))
East Low German (Pomeranian, Prussian; L1=??? (DE, PL, BR)): before 1945 the dialect was spoken along the entire German Baltic Coast, from Mecklenburg, through Pomerania, West Prussia into certain villages of the East Prussian Memel-Klaipėda Region.
Hochdeutsch:
Mitteldeutsche Mundarten.
Old High German (Althochdeutsch): earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 700 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as "prehistoric" and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason.
High German consonant shift: phonological development (sound change) that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases. It probably began between the third and fifth centuries and was almost complete before the earliest written records in High German were produced in the ninth century. The resulting language, Old High German, can be neatly contrasted with the other continental West Germanic languages, which for the most part did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which remained completely unaffected.
Indo-Aryan languages
Linguistic map of modern Iranian languages: Farsi (green), Pashto (purple) and Kurdish (turquoise), Lurish (red), Baloch (Yellow) and other communities.
Hindustani = Hindi-Urdu = Hindi (mainly India) + Urdu (lingua franca in Pakistan and huge numbers in India)
Sanskrit: historical Indo-Aryan language, the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and a literary and scholarly language in Jainism and Buddhism. Classical Sanskrit is laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini ~4 BCE.
Mahabharata (महाभारतम्, Mahābhāratam): one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India; narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devyani, the story of Ṛṣyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right. Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa. W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.
Ramayana: one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. The epic, traditionally ascribed to the Maharishi Valmiki, narrates the life of Rama, a legendary prince of Ayodhya city in the kingdom of Kosala. The story follows his fourteen-year exile to the forest urged by his father King Dasharatha, on the request of Rama's stepmother Kaikeyi; his travels across forests in the Indian subcontinent with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana, the kidnapping of Sita by Ravana – the king of Lanka, that resulted in war; and Rama's eventual return to Ayodhya to be crowned king amidst jubilation and celebration.
Romance languages: modern languages that evolved from spoken Latin in 6-9th c. A.D.
Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives: realization of coronal fricatives is one of the most prominent features distinguishing various dialect regions. The main three realizations are the phonemic distinction between /θ/ and /s/ (distinción), the presence of only alveolar [s] (seseo), or, less commonly, the presence of only a denti-alveolar [s̟] that is similar to /θ/ (ceceo).
CJK
Character amnesia: phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan. Modern technology, such as mobile phones and computers, allows users to enter Chinese characters using their phonetic transcription without knowing how to write them by hand.
Chinese
Chinese languagecould be considered a group (family) of Sinitic languages
Varieties of Chinese: primary ones - Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min. Chinese people make a strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ).
Chinese writing: at least two ?types? -- traditional and simplified
simple ideograms (e.g. one (一), two (二), three (三), up (上), below (下))
ideogrammatic compounds
rebus (phonetic loan) chars: characters that are "borrowed" to write another homophonous or near-homophonous morpheme, comparable with using "4" as a rebus for English "for" in "4ever"
phono-semantic compound characters (aka: radical-phonetic; form over 90% of Chinese chars)
Spoken Chinese: a group of Sinitic languages; Chinese as a language in the broad sense to the foreigner: at least Mandarin ((vernacular) Standard Mandarin in written form is the main one, still has local vernaculars even in written,
e.g. the chemical element names in PRC vs ROC; official in PRC (HK and nearby Macau) and ROC (Taiwan), Singapore (one of 4 official langs)), but also exist (minority compared to standard Mandarin): Wu, Cantonese, Min, Jin, Xiang, Hakka, Gan, Hui, Ping...
Classical Chinese: from the times of Confucius; only learned in Taiwan at school and in PRC during the specialized university courses. The reading aloud is difficult, as the rhymes in poetry are distorted by Mandarin or other dialect pronunciation. One needs to know how to read aloud Chinese characters in Classical Chinese spoken language (which is not fully known, as it was changing with each emperor, who came always from different corner of the greater historical China)
Standard Chinese (aka: Mandarin, Putonghua): phonology of the standard is based on the Beijing dialect, but its vocabulary is drawn from the large and diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken across northern, central, and southwestern China. The language is usually written using Chinese characters, in either simplified or traditional form, augmented by Hanyu Pinyin romanization for pedagogical purposes. the most popular written Chinese variant after 1920s, when the Classical Chinese was superseded by Written Vernacular Chinese (not to be confused with the broader dialect group --
Mandarin Chinese).
Written vernacular Chinese (aka: Standard Written Chinese, Modern Written Chinese {to avoid ambiguity with spoken vernaculars, with the written vernaculars of earlier eras, and with modern unofficial written vernaculars such as written Cantonese or written Hokkien}): refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used during imperial China to the early twentieth century; written vernacular based on Mandarin Chinese was used in novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and later refined by intellectuals associated with the May Fourth Movement. Since the early 1920s, this modern vernacular form has been the standard style of writing for speakers of all varieties of Chinese throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore as the written form of Modern Standard Chinese.
Simplified Chinese characters: used in PRC and Singapore; in some cases a few traditional chars point to a single simplified char; many simplification rules
Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters: ongoing debate concerning Chinese orthography among users of Chinese characters. It has stirred up heated responses from supporters of both sides in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities with its implications of political ideology and cultural identity. The effect of simplified characters on the language remains controversial decades after their introduction. Automated conversion, from simplified to traditional is not straightforward because there is not a one-to-one mapping of a simplified character to a traditional character; one simplified character may equate to many traditional characters; as a result a computer can be used for the bulk of the conversion but will still need final checking by a human.
Sinophone: neologism that fundamentally means "Chinese-speaking", typically referring to a person who speaks at least one variety of Chinese.
Chinese Wikipedia: proof of variety of Chinese languages/dialects, vernacular vs classical: conversion table for 6 different written variants, and 6 Wikipedias in 6 other varieties of Chinese language (Minnan (Taiwanese), Cantonese (Standard Cantonese), Mindong (Fuzhou dialect), Wu (Shanghai & Suzhou dialects, classical (old) Wu literature), Hakka (Siyen dialect), Gan (Nanchang dialect)) and Classical Chinese Wikipedia (something like Latin Wikipedia for Romance language speakers)
Naming taboo: cultural taboo against speaking or writing the given names of exalted persons in China and neighboring nations in the ancient Chinese cultural sphere; discouraged the use of the emperor's given name and those of his ancestors; discouraged the use of the names of one's own ancestors; discouraged the use of the names of respected people.
Graphic pejoratives in written Chinese: some historical Chinese characters for non-Chinese peoples were graphically pejorative ethnic slurs, where the racial insult derived not from the Chinese word but from the character used to write it. Wilkinson (2000: 38) compared these "graphic pejoratives selected for aborigines and barbarians" with the "flattering characters chosen for transcribing the names of the Western powers in the nineteenth century", for instance, Meiguo 美國 "United States". Almost all logographically pejorative Chinese characters are classified as "phono-semantic compounds", characters that combine a phonetic element approximately or exactly suggesting pronunciation and a radical or determinative approximately indicating meaning. The most common radical among graphic pejoratives is Radical 94 犬 or 犭, called the "dog" or "beast" radical, which is ordinarily used in characters for animal names (e.g., mao 猫 "cat", gou 狗 "dog", zhu 猪 "pig").
Historical Chinese phonology: deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. Progress in Chinese linguistics was seriously hampered up to early 20th c. by the lack of any concept of a phoneme (basic unit of sound, including vowels and vowel-like segments as well as consonants). This made it impossible to go beyond determination of systems of rhyming categories to reconstruction of the actual sounds involved. Methods of reconstruction: rime dictionaries and rime tables; modern Chinese speaking variants; Sino-Xenic data (Chinese loanwords borrowed in large number into Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean in 500-1000); other early cases of Chinese words borrowed into foreign languages or transcribed in foreign sources, e.g. Sanskrit; early cases of transliteration of foreign words from Sanskrit and Tibetan into Chinese; 'Phags-pa script (1270-1360, Yuan dynasty) - alphabetic script; transcriptions of Chinese by foreigners starting in 15th c. (Hangul, Portuguese-Chinese dictionary).
Old Chinese (1122 BC (1300 BC) - 256 BC (early centuries AD) [early and middle Zhou Dynasty]; 上古汉语/上古漢語; pinyin: Shànggǔ Hànyǔ; "Archaic Chinese"; more narrowly: 1000-700 BC [Shījīng, Classic of Poetry]): possesed a rich sound system; probably was without tones.
Middle Chinese (6th - 10th (12th) c. [Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties]; 中古汉语/中古漢語; pinyin: Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ; MC): early MC (6th c.) - Qieyun, late MC - Guangyun.
Modern varieties (13th c - present): most modern varieties appear to have split off from a Late Middle Chinese koine of about 1000 AD (although some remnants of earlier periods are still present).
How come after several thousands of years, the official spoken Chinese was based on Beijing Mandarin dialect (an not on some spoken Southern Chinese variety):
Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會): was established in ROC from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin (Zhuyin (Bopomofo) was the product), and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.
National Languages Committee (en: Mandarin Promotion Council, National Languages Promotion Committee): as established by the Ministry of Education of ROC with the purpose of standardizing and popularizing the usage of Mandarin in ROC. Created 1919.04.21; Commission was renamed to the Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language, headed by Woo Tsin-hang and had 31 members on 1928.12.12
Qieyun (切韻/切韵; pinyin: Qièyùn; 601 CE): Chinese rime dictionary used as the primary source for reconstructing Middle Chinese.
Japanese
Japanese language - one of the most complicated written systems (combines kanji, hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji; arabic and Sino-Japanese numerals) with 'small sound inventory', 'pitch-accent':
Japanese writing system: uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated in current use. Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books — since children tend to know few kanji at an early age — or early electronics such as computers, phones, and video games, which could not display complex graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.
Jōyō kanji: "regular-use Chinese characters") is the guide to kanji characters and their readings, announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education.
Korean
Hangul: Korean alphabet written in blocks (blocks are like Chinese character' blocks) of syllables (similar to written Chinese in this block issue, the blocks represent full morphophonology).
List of modern Hangul syllabic blocks by strokes: 11,172 precomposed Hangul syllables → Is this (Hangul:
featural linear alphabet) easier for reading as compared to alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, ...)?
Sino-Tibetan languages (Trans-Himalayan): family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (six million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.
Afroasiatic languages (Semitic: Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew; Egyptian; Cushitic (Somali))
Egyptian hieroglyphs: were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. The last known inscription is from Philae, known as The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394 CE. Rosetta Stone.
Rosetta Stone: granodiorite stele inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Probably moved in late antiquity or during the Mameluk period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was discovered there in 1799.07 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script. When the British defeated the French they took the stone to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802 and is the most visited object there. Major advances in the decoding were recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (1814); and that phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (1822–1824).
Aramaic language: speakers=approximately 2,105,000 (1994–1996); 3,000-year written history; Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires and as a language of divine worship; day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BC – 70 AD), the language that Jesus Christ probably used the most; language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud. However, Jewish Aramaic was different from the other forms both in lettering and grammar. Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Jewish Aramaic showing the unique Jewish lettering, related to the unique Hebrew script. Modern Aramaic is spoken today as a first language by many scattered, predominantly small, and largely isolated communities of differing Christian, Jewish, and Mandean ethnic groups of West Asia—most numerously by the Assyrians in the form of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic —that have all retained use of the once dominant lingua franca despite subsequent language shifts experienced throughout the Middle East; Aramaic languages are considered to be endangered.
Syriac language: Disappeared as a vernacular language after the 14th century
Egyptian language (ancient Egyptian)
Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century. Rosetta Stone.
Egyptian language: oldest known language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Hieratic: cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia. It developed alongside cursive hieroglyphs, to which it is separate yet intimately related. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs.
Nobiin language: ‘Nobiin’ is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ‘Nubian" and literally means ‘(language) of the Nubians". At least 2,500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile Valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin, the latter of which is a tonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order is subject–object–verb.
Dravidian languages
Dravidian languages: language family spoken by more than 215 million people, mainly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in 4th or 3rd millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and could well be indigenous to India.
Kipchak–Bulgar (Uralian, Uralo-Caspian): Bashkir and Tatar
Kipchak–Cuman (Ponto-Caspian): Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Karaim, Krymchak. Urum and Crimean Tatar appear to have a Kipchak–Cuman base, but have been heavily influenced by Oghuz languages.
Kipchak–Nogay (Aralo-Caspian): Nogay (also Nogai or Nogay Tatar), Karakalpak, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz.
Oghur languages (Bulgar): only extant member is the Chuvash language
List of alphabets used by Turkic languages: main alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic; sometimes: Greek. E.g. Turkish: tur-Arab → tur-Latn; Azerbaijani: Arab ~→ Cyrl/Latn.
Azerbaijani language (Azeri, Azeri-Turkic, Azeri-Turkish): Turkic language from Oghuz sub-branch spoken primarily by the Azerbaijani people, who live mainly in the Republic of Azerbaijan where the North Azerbaijani variety is spoken, and in the Azerbaijan region of Iran, where the South Azerbaijani variety is spoken. Although there is a very high degree of mutual intelligibility between both forms of Azerbaijani, there are significant differences in phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax and sources of loanwords. North Azerbaijani has official status in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Dagestan (a federal subject of Russia) but South Azerbaijani does not have official status in Iran, where the majority of Azerbaijani people live. It is also spoken to lesser varying degrees in Azerbaijani communities of Georgia and Turkey and by diaspora communities, primarily in Europe and North America. Both Azerbaijani varieties are members of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages. The standardized form of North Azerbaijani (spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Russia) is based on the Shirvani dialect, while South Azerbaijani uses the Tabrizi dialect as its prestige variety.
Organization of Turkic States (Turkic Council; Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States): intergovernmental organization comprising prominent independent Turkic countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. It is an intergovernmental organization whose overarching aim is promoting comprehensive cooperation among Turkic-speaking states. First proposed by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2006, it was founded in 2009.10.03, in Nakhchivan. The General Secretariat is in Istanbul. Since late 2018, Hungary has been an observer and may request full membership. Turkmenistan received the observer status in 2021. In 2022, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was admitted to the organisation as an observer member. In 2020, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Ceppar, who is of Crimean Tatar descent, stated Ukraine wanted to be an observer. Crimea, currently under Russian occupation, is the homeland of the Crimean Tatars. Opening of the first Turkic Council Regional Diaspora Center in 2014.12.24 in Kyiv.
Semitic
Approximate historical distribution of Semitic languages.
Varieties of Arabic: five regional forms; native language (vernacular) vs formal language learned in school. The formal language: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic (CA; Quranic Arabic; serves as inspiration for MSA). Further differences Bedouin and sedentiary speech, men and women, the young and the old, social classes, religious groups. Many registers, but (educated) Arabic speakers usually know several registers and use them accordingly. Regional vernaculars are as different as Dutch and German or Italian and French (Roman Empire collapse in 5th c, Muslim Arabic Quran came into existence after 8th c.).
Austronesian languages: divided in several primary branches, all but one of which are found exclusively on Taiwan.
Malayo-Polynesian languages (Extra-Formosan): approximately 385.5 million speakers; language family shows a strong influence of Sanskrit and later Arabic as the region has been a stronghold of Buddhism, Hinduism and since the 10th century, Islam.
Austronesian peoples: various populations in Southeast Asia and Oceania that speak languages of the Austronesian family. Include: Taiwanese aborigines; the majority ethnic groups of Malaysia, East Timor, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Madagascar, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as well as the Polynesian peoples of New Zealand and Hawaii, and the non-Papuan people of Melanesia; also found in Singapore, the Pattani region of Thailand, and the Cham areas of Vietnam (remnants of the Champa kingdom which covered central and southern Vietnam), Cambodia, and Hainan, China.
Papuan languages
Papuan languages: non-Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands, by around 4 mln. people. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some (arguably) 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west.
The language families in Ross' conception of Trans-New Guinea.
Map of the Ethnolinguistic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia.
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area: sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. James Matisoff referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "Indosphere", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.
Austroasiatic languages
Austroasiatic languages (Mon–Khmer): large language family of Mainland Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout parts of Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. There are around 117 million speakers of Austroasiatic languages. Of these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer and Mon have a long-established recorded history and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status as modern national languages (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively). The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official language of Wa State. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
Kra–Dai languages
Kra–Dai languages (Tai–Kadai, Daic): language family of tonal languages found in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. They include Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages, 60% of whom speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.
Caucasus: ethno-linguistic map. CIA, 1995. Put on top of that the religious overlay of Christian (Georgian Eastern Orthodox Church, Armenian Apostolic Church (from 310)) and Islamic (Shia, Sunni). Very mixed.
Languages of the Caucasus: Caucasian languages are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows these languages to be classified into several language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a family of languages. Families indigenous to the Caucasus:
Kartvelian (Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian, Laz)
Northeast Caucasian (Nakho-Dagestanian, or Caspian; 3.8 mln): Chechen language (1.5 mln) , Avar language (1 mln), Ingush language (0.5 mln), Lezgian language (0.79 mln) [10, L], ...
commonly believed that all Caucasian languages have a large number of consonants. While this is certainly true for most members of the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families (inventories range up to the 80–84 consonants of Ubykh), the consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages are not nearly as extensive, ranging from 28 (Georgian) to 30 (Laz) – comparable to languages like Russian (up to 37 consonant phonemes, depending on definition), Arabic (28 phonemes), and Western European languages (often more than 20 phonemes).
External relations: Ibero-Caucasian languages, Hattic, Alarodian - proposed connection between Northeast Caucasian and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages of Anatolia; Dené–Caucasian macrofamily - rejected by most linguists.
Families with wider distribution: Indo-European: Armenian (4 mln), Ossetian (0.7 mln), Greek (Pontic Greek), Persian (including Tat Persian), Kurdish, Talysh, Judeo-Tat, and the Slavic languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian (1/3rd of total population of the Caucasus). Semitic (Afro-Asiatic): Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (30,000), and Bohtan Neo-Aramaic (1,000) - both were brought to the Caucasus by ethnic Assyrians fleeing Assyrian Genocide during WWI; dialect of Arabic known as Shirvani Arabic was spoken natively in parts of Azerbaijan and Dagestan throughout medieval times until the early 20th c. Turkic: Azerbaijani (9 mln in Azerbaijan, 10 mln in North Western Iran), Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Nogai, Turkish, and Turkmen. Mongolic: Kalmyk language.
Hapax legomenon (pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax): word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. The related terms 'dis legomenon', 'tris legomenon', and 'tetrakis legomenon' respectively (/ˈdɪs/, /ˈtrɪs/, /ˈtɛtrəkɪs/) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena. Significance: Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one. For example, many of the remaining undeciphered Mayan glyphs are hapax legomena, and Biblical (particularly Hebrew; see § Hebrew examples) hapax legomena sometimes pose problems in translation. Hapax legomena also pose challenges in natural language processing.
Lexical item (lexical unit, lexical entry): single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (=catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈vocabulary). E.g. cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be generally understood to convey a single meaning, much as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words.
Morphology (linguistics): identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology).
Phonology: branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages.
Metathesis (linguistics) (from Greek μετά-θε-σις, from μετα-τί-θη-μι "I put in a different order": Latin trānspositiō): re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence.
Whistled language: use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication.
Grammar
Category:Grammar
Grammar = morphology + syntax + phonology; often complemented by phonetics + semantics + pragmatics.
Double negative (multiple negation): in most logics and some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative sense; in other languages, doubled negatives intensify the negation. Languages where multiple negatives intensify each other are said to have negative concord, e.g. pt, fr, es. Standard en, de, la do not have negative concord.
Preposition stranding: syntactic construction in which a preposition with an object occurs somewhere other than immediately adjacent to its object. (The preposition is then described as stranded or hanging.) Found in Germanic languages: en, Scandinavian, but maybe not in de or nl.
History of English grammars: begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar (1586). In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were contrasted with those of Latin.
English relative clauses: are formed principally by means of relative pronouns; basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Human or non-human antecedents; Restrictive or non-restrictive relative clauses;
Article (grammar)#Variation among languages (Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles; Balto-Slavic langs, Homeric Greek. Joseph Greenberg describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.),
lt:Artikelis (Artikeliai kilo ypač kalbose, neišsaugojusiose arba stipriai redukavusiose linksnių sistemą???),
de:Artikel (Wortart)#Artikellose Sprachen (jaunas vyras - jaunasis vyras),
ru:Артикль#Определённые_артикли_в_русских_диалектах
Lexeme: abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word.
Topic-prominent language: e.g. East Asian langs (as opposed to Indo-European langs which are subject-prominent)
Standard Mandarin grammar: (other spoken varieties are similar, therefore as well) in both written varieties there is only one grammatical form of words (but this distinction could be obvious from the context; lots of freedom for puns?), i.e. the Standard Mandarin lexemes are invariant (no "see, saw, seen, sees, seeing", just "see" when verb is taken as an example): (e.g. adverbs and adjectives?)
Question sentences have a special character at the end of the sentence, "?" could be added in addition
Iteration mark: ditto mark (〃). CJK(V): ZH: 二 (usually appearing as 〻) or 々; kanji repetition symbol: 々; hiragana: ゝ; katakana: ヽ
Syntactic ambiguity: property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted as having different syntactic structures. In contrast, in semantic ambiguity, the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently.
Textual criticism: branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. Eclecticism; Stemmatics; Copy-text editing; Cladistics (taken from biology); Application of textual criticism to religious documents.
William Jones (philologist) (1746.09.28–1794.04.27): British philologist, a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
List of languages by first written accounts {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History}: Before 1000 BC: Egyptian c. 2690 BC; Sumerian 26th. c. BC; Akkadian c. 2400 BC; Eblaite c. 2400 BC; Elamite c. 2250 BC; Hurrian 21st c. BC; Hittite c. 1700 BC; Palaic 16th c. BC; Mycenaean Greek c. 1450 BC; Luwian c. 1400 BC; Hattic c. 1400 BC; Ugaritic c. 1300 BC; Old Chinese c. 1200 BC.
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language: sign language popularity with relatively huge percentage of death people in the population. Also sign language as a visual communication over the distance vs. spoken word which loses its intensity over distance as .
Abjads: <consonant alphabets>, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. E.g. Arabic, Hebrew
Abugidas, aka alphasyllabary: segmental writing system which is based on consonants, and in which vowel notation is obligatory but secondary. E.g. North Indic, South Indic, Thaana (for Dhivehi; Maldives), Ethiopic (Ge'ez), Canadian Syllabic
Alphabets: e.g. Latin, Cyrrilic, small ones: Greek, Armenian, Georgian
Ideograms and
pictograms (aka pictographs): e.g. SignWriting (e.g. hand signs, flag signs), Aztec, DanceWriting (dance poses), ...
Logograms (aka logographs): grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language). E.g. Chinese, (logo-syllabic: Maya, Cuneiform, ...), (logo-consonantal: hieroglyphs {Ancient Egypt}, derivatives), (numerals: Hindu-Arabic, Roman, Greek (Attic), Abjad)
Cuneiform (Latin: cuneus "wedge" ): one of the earliest systems of writing, invented by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th mil. BC (6-5 kya) to convey the Sumerian language, which was a language isolate (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. Original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian), Eblaite and Amorite languages, the language isolate Elamite and the language isolates Hattic, Hurrian and Urartian languages, as well as Indo-European languages Hittite and Luwian; it inspired the later Semitic Ugaritic alphabet as well as Old Persian cuneiform. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–612 BC). By 2nd c. AD, the script had become extinct, its last traces being found in Assyria and Babylonia, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century. The first documents unequivocally written in Sumerian date to the 31st c. BC at Jemdet Nasr. From about 2900 BC, many pictographs began to lose their original function, and a given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, the direction of writing was changed to left-to-right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictographs 90° counter-clockwise in the process) and a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. Many of the clay tablets found by archaeologists have been preserved by chance, baked when attacking armies burned the buildings in which they were kept. Decipherment.
Old Persian cuneiform: semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran (Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Kharg Island), Armenia, Romania (Gherla), Turkey (Van Fortress), and along the Suez Canal. They were mostly inscriptions from the time period of Darius I and his son, Xerxes I. Later kings down to Artaxerxes III used more recent forms of the language classified as "pre-Middle Persian". Decipherment: Grotefend made a major breakthrough when he noticed that one of the kings' father was not a king - choice between Cyrus-Darius-Xerxes and Cambyses-Cyrus-Cambyses.
Ugaritic alphabet: cuneiform abjad used from around either 15th c. BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician alphabet and its descendants (including Greek and Latin) on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other. Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes; script was written from left to right. The only punctuation is a word divider.
Unicode: writing system of all writing systems (aka "alphabet" of all "alphabets"); a universal charset
Unicode equivalence: specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character.
Universal Character Set characters: The Unicode Consortium (UC) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) collaborate on the Universal Character Set. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate and transmit UCS encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple meanings and thus be improperly decoded if the wrong one is chosen.
Plane (Unicode): in Unicode standard, planes are groups of numerical values (code points) that point to specific characters. Unicode code points are logically divided into 17 planes, each with 65,536 (= 216) code points. Planes: 0 (BMP); 1 (SMP); 2 (SIP); 3-13 (unassigned); 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (SSP)); 15 and 16 (Supplementary Private Use Area-A and -B:
Private Use (Unicode))
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP, plane 0): where most characters have been assigned so far; contains characters for almost all modern languages, and a large number of special characters.
Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP, plane 1): contains historic scripts; historic and modern musical notation; mathematical alphanumerics; Emoji and other pictographic sets; reform orthographies like Shavian and Deseret; and game symbols for playing cards, Mah Jongg, and dominoes.
Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP, plane 2): is used for CJK Ideographs, mostly CJK Unified Ideographs, that were not included in earlier character encoding standards.
Unicode block: defined as one contiguous range of code points. Blocks are named uniquely and have no overlap.
Unicode input: MS Windows, Mac OS, Linux; Vim, Emacs.
RFC1345: Character Mnemonics & Character Sets (1893 chars) for human input; Vim, Emacs
Unicode and HTML: Some web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (from version 7 on), are able to display multilingual web pages by intelligently choosing a font to display each individual character on the page. They will correctly display any mix of Unicode blocks, as long as appropriate fonts are present in the operating system.
Universal Character Set (UCS; ISO/IEC 10646) (& Unicode): standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based. The UCS contains nearly one hundred thousand abstract characters, each identified by an unambiguous name and an integer number called its code point. In 1990, Unicode and ISO 10646 were separate developments, which had meet together and ISO 10646 synchronized the repertoire of the BMP with Unicode. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/EECS#Character encoding}
Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR): project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in the XML format for use in computer applications. Used in Mac OSX, OpenOffice.org, and IBM's AIX.
dash-like: hyphen-minus ("-", U+002D) vs soft hyphen (U+00AD), hyphen ("‐", U+2010), minus sign (−, U+2212)
dashes: figure dash ("‒", U+2012), en dash ("–", U+2013), em dash ("—", U+2014), horizontal bar ("―", U+2015), swung dash ("⁓", U+2053)
Quotation mark (quotes, inverted commas): punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.
Sigma (Σ, σ, ς - lower case in word-final position; Ϲ, ϲ - lunate forms): lunate sigma: in handwritten Greek during the Hellenistic period (4th and 3rd c. BC), the epigraphic form of Σ was simplified into a C-like shape, also found on coins from 4th c. BC onwards.
Many possible nucleotide modifications & even more possible amino acid modifications (like 21st & 22nd amino acids)
More fluid alphabets for lipids, sugars (carbohydrates), and the derivatives of nucleotides, amino acids, sugars, lipids, metabolic intermediates and any combination of them to produce cellular biochemicals ⇒ metabolome
Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts: Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. CJK scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from top-to-bottom, and even vertically from bottom-to-top. Traditionally, CJK are written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the left of the preceding one. Since 19th c., it has become increasingly common for these languages to be written horizontally, from left to right, with successive rows going from top to bottom, under the influence of European languages such as English, although vertical writing is still frequently used in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Korea, and Taiwan.
TrueType: outline font standard developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. Many agreements between Apple and Microsoft/Adobe.
Computer to plate (output the printing plates directly by the machine connected to PC)
Lithography (from
limestone+chemicals and ink to metal drums+emulsion+lasers and oily inks)
Post-press: cutting, binding, covers
Small scale:
Plotter: for vector graphics; not raster image; almost not used today because of raster printer high PPI + huge amount of RAM and CPU power replacing them
Point (typography) = 1/72 inch (e.g. 10 point font; due to DPI and PPI being not the same, the font displayed on LCD is not the same size as the point on the printed paper).
Complex text layout (CTL; complex text rendering; complex scripts): typesetting of writing systems which require complex transformations between text input and text display for proper rendering on the screen or the printed page. E.g. Arabic alphabet, Brahmic script family (Devanagari), Thai alphabet. CTL is a generalization of the concept of ligature. Main CTL characteristics: bi-directional text, context-sensitive shaping (ligatures), ordering - the displayed order is not the same as the logical order.
Homoglyph: one of two or more characters, or glyphs, with shapes that either appear identical or cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. This designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties. Antonym is synoglyph (display variant), which refers to glyphs that look different but mean the same thing. In 2008, the Unicode Consortium published its Technical Report #36
[2] on a range of issues deriving from the visual similarity of characters both in single scripts, and similarities between characters in different scripts. Typefaces containing homoglyphs are considered unsuitable for writing formulas, URLs, source code, IDs and other text where characters cannot always be differentiated from the context. 0-O, 1-l-I, rn-m; cl-d, vv-w; fi-A. Unicode homoglyphs: security risks (internationalized domain names; Greek Α = Latin A = Cyrrilic А); in the Chinese language, many simplified Chinese characters are homoglyphs of the corresponding traditional Chinese characters.
Template:Free and open source typography: DejaVu fonts (tries to cover the whole of Unicode. Work in progress. Bad looking zero {0} in Sans Mono for programming, BUT good looking 1, l, I ("one", "lowercase L", "capitalized I")).
Monotype Corporation: type foundry; conglomerate in typography: Linotype, International Typeface Corporation.
X logical font description (XLFD): font standard used by the X Window System. FontName = sequence of fourteen hyphen-prefixed, X-registered fields (FOUNDRY, FAMILY_NAME, WEIGHT_NAME, SLANT, SETWIDTH_NAME, ADD_STYLE_NAME, PIXEL_SIZE, POINT_SIZE, RESOLUTION_X, RESOLUTION_Y, SPACING, AVERAGE_WIDTH, CHARSET_REGISTRY, CHARSET_ENCODING).
Language and brain
Linguistic relativity (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis): structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view. 2 versions:
the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories (1960s disproved (?) strong version)
the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior (from 1980s some support is found for the weak version)
Color term: All languages distinguishing six colors contain terms for black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. These colors roughly correspond to the sensitivities of the retinal ganglion cells, leading Berlin and Kay to argue that color naming is not merely a cultural phenomenon, but is one that is also constrained by biology—that is, language is shaped by perception.
Distinguishing blue from green in language: green+blue=grue, e.g. Vietnamese: tree leaves and the sky are xanh (xanh lá cây "leaf grue" for green and xanh dương "ocean grue" for blue). CJK: Japan: even though most Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe certain vegetables, apples, and vegetation; Ao is also the word used to refer to the color on a traffic light that signals one to "go"; however, most other objects—a green car, a green sweater, and so forth—will generally be called midori.
Language learning and education
English as a foreign or second language: English as a second language (ESL); English for speakers of other languages (ESOL); English as a foreign language (EFL); all refer to the use or study of English by speakers with different native languages. English language teaching (ELT) is a widely used teacher-centred term. Teaching English as a second language (TESL), teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). English as an additional language (EAL), English as an international language (EIL), ELF; English for specific purposes (ESP), English for academic purposes (EAP). Some terms that refer to those who are learning English: English language learner (ELL), limited English proficiency (LEP) and culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD).
TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language): evaluates the ability of an individual to use and understand English in an academic setting.
Duolingo: learning the language and helping translate the web sources from the language one learns into the language one knows.
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries. Put together by the Council of Europe as the main part of the project "Language Learning for European Citizenship" between 1989 and 1996. [A-C]*[1-2]: A1 - beginner, C2 - mastery or proficiency.
Translation: communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. "Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages."
Computer-assisted translation (CAT; computer-aided translation): human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process. Translation memory; Language Search Engine; Terminology management; Alignment; Interactive machine translation; Crowd translation.
Machine translation (MT): investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. Formal (legal) language is easier to translate than informal (speech). Using statistical methods, huge training set (parallel corpus, e.g. legal texts of UN, EU in many different languages).
Sense-for-sense translation: oldest norm for translating; translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as literal translation).
Untranslatability: property of a text, or of any utterance, in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language when translated. Adaptation (free translation), Borrowing (loanword), Calque (loan translation; word-for-word), Compensation, Paraphrase, Translator's note.
Linguee: web service that provides an online dictionary for a number of language pairs. Linguee incorporates a search engine that provides access to large amounts of bilingual, translated sentence pairs, which come from the World Wide Web. As a translation aid, Linguee therefore differs from machine translation services like Babelfish and is more similar in function to a translation memory.
Translation between different writing systems
Alphabets meet logograms:
Chinese word for "crisis": (simplified Chinese: 危机; traditional Chinese: 危機; pinyin: wēijī, wéijī): in Western popular culture, frequently but incorrectly said to be written with two Chinese characters signifying "danger" (wēi, 危) and "opportunity" (jī, 机; 機). The second character is a component of the Chinese word for "opportunity" (jīhuì, 機會; 机会), but has multiple meanings, and in isolation means something more like "change point". The mistaken etymology became a trope after it was used by John F. Kennedy in his presidential campaign speeches and is widely repeated in business, education, politics and the press in USA.
Language and politics, history
Language secessionism (linguistic secessionism or linguistic separatism): attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it normally belongs, in order to make this variety considered as a distinct language (each dialect tries to become a language of its own with a distinct writing system and grammar). E.g. Occitano-Catalan language (Catalan: Valencian, Balearic languages and La Franja area; Occitan: Auvernhat, Provençal, Gascon dialect {note that the Catalan subdialects are called languages, while Occitan subdialects are called dialects}), English (African American Vernacular English), Romanian (Moldova vs Romania), Serbo-Croatian (Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs: 3 religions, 2 writing systems), Portuguese (Portugal (& Galicia) vs Brazil), Tagalog and Filipino.
Minority language: language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory; such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. Lacking recognition in some countries: ru (RU, co-official in Belarus and Kazakhstan; lacking in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia), hu (HU, co-official in Serbia's Vojvodina; lacking in RO, Slovakia, Ukraine), ro (RO, co-official in Vojvodina; lacking in Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine), Macedonian lang (lacking in Bulgaria, Greece), Bulgarian lang (lacking in Greece).
Language shift (language transfer or language replacement or assimilation): process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language; languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status". Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants. Language/Y-chromosome correlation (NOT mtDNA/language correlation): males were the bringers of technology and military prowess, mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women prefer to transmit the "higher-status" spouse's language to their children. Belarus: Belarusian→Russian; Belgium: Dutch/Flemish→French; China/PRC: Mandarin; Finland: Swedish elite→Finnish; Hong Kong: Mandarin→Cantonese; Singapore: Malay→English, among Chinese→Mandarin
T–V distinction: contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee
Relexification: mechanism of language change by which one language replaces much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with that of another language, without drastic change to its grammar. It is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.
Educational perennialism: Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting pertinence to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Particular strategy with modern perennialists is to teach scientific reasoning, not facts. Although perennialism may appear similar to essentialism, perennialism focuses first on personal development, while essentialism focuses first on essential skills. Essentialist curricula thus tend to be much more vocational and fact-based, and far less liberal and principle-based.
Progressive education: pedagogical movement that began in the late 19th c. and has persisted in various forms to the present. Progressive education finds its roots in present experience.
Ideal of education (utopia):
The Republic (Plato) (Plato, ~380 BC): Socratic dialogue, concerning justice (δικαιοσύνη), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically. Discusses meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man. They consider the natures of existing regimes and then propose a series of different, hypothetical cities in comparison, culminating in Kallipolis (Καλλίπολις), a hypothetical city-state ruled by a philosopher king. They also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and of poetry in society. The dialog's setting seems to be during the Peloponnesian War. Utopistic perspective on education of the person as a whole: body, brain, mind and/or soul is educated at the same time; societal impact upon upbringing and education; separation of children from parents.
Noble lie: myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic. In religion, a pious fiction is a narrative that is presented as true by the author, but is considered by others to be fictional albeit produced with an altruistic motivation. The term is sometimes used pejoratively to suggest that the author of the narrative was deliberately misleading readers for selfish or deceitful reasons.
Latin school: grammar school of 14th to 19th-century Europe, though the latter term was much more common in England. Emphasis was placed, as the name indicates, on learning to use Latin. The education given at Latin schools gave great emphasis to the complicated grammar of the Latin language, initially in its Medieval Latin form. Grammar was the most basic part of the trivium and the Liberal arts — in artistic personifications Grammar's attribute was the birch rod. Latin school prepared students for university, as well as enabling those of middle class status to rise above their station. Latin school curriculum: Ars Dictaminis, Studia Humanitatis.
Numerus clausus (Latin: "closed number"): one of many methods used to limit the number of students who may study at a university. In many cases, the goal of the numerus clausus is simply to limit the number of students to the maximum feasible in some particularly sought-after areas of studies. DE.
School counselor: counselor and an educator who works in elementary, middle, and high schools to provide academic, career, college readiness, and personal/social competencies to all K-12 students through a school counseling program; school counseling core curriculum classroom lessons and annual academic, career/college readiness, and personal/social planning for every student; and group and individual counseling for some students.
Practical education, innovators:
European Graduate School: 2 years coursework and summer seminars with famous academicians + 3 years thesis writing and final oral defense; media + communications, art + health + society
Academia:
Nachlass (Nachlaß): collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies. Alfred North Whitehead, in contrast, asked that his Nachlass be destroyed, a wish that his widow carried out. According to Lowe (1982), Whitehead "idealized youth and wanted young thinkers to develop their own ideas, not spend their best years on a Nachlass." Gilbert Ryle likewise disapproved of scholars spending their time editing a Nachlass. According to Anthony Palmer, he "hated the Nachlass industry and thought that he had destroyed everything of his that he had not chosen to publish himself so that there would be no Ryle Nachlass." ("One or two" papers (Palmer) did survive, however, and were published.)
Timeline of the development of MOOCs and open education.
Massive open online course (MOOC): aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. MOOCs are a recent and widely researched development in distance education which were first introduced in 2008 and emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012. Early MOOCs often emphasized open-access features, such as open licensing of content, structure and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources. Some later MOOCs use closed licenses for their course materials while maintaining free access for students. 2012 "The Year of the MOOC" (NYT). 2011 fall: Standford (S. Thrun and P. Norvig) → Udacity; Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera; MIT launched the MITx not-for-profit with the first course in 2012.03, then Harvard joined MITx and renamed to edX, later to be joined by UC Berkeley in 2012 summer. Less than 10% of the students who sign up typically complete the course. Most participants participate peripherally ("lurk"). In 2016.01 Edx offers 820 courses, Coursera offers 1580 courses and Udacity offers more than 120 courses. What happens to the "traditional universities"?
Khan Academy: non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan with a goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of YouTube videos. Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. All resources are available to users of the website. The website and its content are provided mainly in English, but the content is also available in other languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, French, Bengali, Hindi, and German.
Udacity: private institution of higher education founded by Sebastian Thrun and David Evans with the goal of free, online classes available to everyone.
Coursera: founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University; reduces the cost of courses it offers by making students grade their peers' homework and employing statistical methods to validate the assessment
EdX (2012 Fall-): founded by MIT and Harvard; offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge; nonprofit project. Open sourced on 2013.06.01
Edupunk (DIY education): do it yourself attitude to teaching and learning practices; Tom Kuntz: "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom". E.g. University of British Columbia's course "Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem"
Peer to Peer University (P2PU): nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. An example of the "edupunk" approach to education, P2PU charges no tuition and courses are not accredited.
Mozilla Open Badges (Open Badge Infrastructure or OBI): project is a program by Mozilla that issues digital badges to recognize skills and achievements; allows one to display real-world achievements and skills which may help with future career and education opportunities. NASA, Disney-Pixar, 4H, and DigitalMe have developed badges for the Open Badges project.
LibreTexts: 501(c)(3) nonprofit online educational resource project. The project provides open access to its content on its website, and the site is built on the Mindtouch platform. LibreTexts was started in 2008 by Professor Delmar Larsen at the University of California Davis and has since expanded to 400 texts in 154 courses (as of 2018), making it one of the largest and most visited online educational resources.
Research university: university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. Undergraduate courses at many research universities are often academic rather than vocational and may not prepare students for particular careers, but many employers value degrees from research universities because they teach fundamental life skills such as critical thinking. Globally, research universities are predominantly public universities, with notable exceptions being the United States and Japan.
USA: Roger L. Geiger, a historian specializing in the history of higher education in the United States, has argued that "the model for the American research university was established by five colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago)." In turn, research universities were essential to the establishment of USA hegemony by the end of the 20th c.. In particular, Columbia and Harvard were instrumental in the development of the American film industry (Hollywood), MIT and Stanford were leaders in building the American military–industrial complex, and Berkeley and Stanford played a central role in the development of Silicon Valley.
Colleges of the University of Cambridge: Cambridge has 31 colleges, founded between the 13th and 20th centuries. No colleges were founded between 1596 (Sidney Sussex College) and 1800 (Downing College), which allows the colleges to be distinguished into two groups according to foundation date: the 16 'old' colleges, founded between 1284 and 1596, and the 15 'new' colleges, founded between 1800 and 1977.
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University; MIPT, MIPT (SU) or informally Phystech): leading RU university, originally established in the Soviet Union; prepares specialists in theoretical and applied physics, applied mathematics, and related disciplines; sometimes referred to as "the Russian MIT;" famous in the countries of the former Soviet Union, but is less known abroad. Emphasis on practical research in the educational process, MIPT "outsources" education and research beyond the first two or three years to institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Andre Geim: "The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide."
TED (conference) (Technology, Entertainment and Design): global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading."
Digital Life Design (DLD): global conference network, organized by the Munich based DLD Media, a company of Burda Digital.
Map of the legal systems of the world. Civil law: Nopoleonic, Germanic, Nordic, Chilean (inspired by Napoleonic), Mixed. Common law. Customary law. East Asia: mix of civil and customary laws. Phillippines, SAR: mix of civil and common laws. India: mix of common, customary and muslim laws.
Judgment proof: refers to defendants or potential defendants who are financially insolvent.
Rebuttal: form of evidence that is presented to contradict or nullify other evidence that has been presented by an adverse party. By analogy the same term is used in politics and public affairs. In law, rebuttal evidence or rebuttal witnesses must be confined solely to the subject matter of the evidence rebutted.
Multidistrict litigation (MDL): special federal legal procedure designed to speed the process of handling complex cases such as air disaster litigation or complex product liability suits. Usually involves hundreds or more plaintiffs. United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML or the Panel) decide whether to consolidate the cases under MDL. The cases are one of the most complicated, involving many different law systems (e.g. if plaintiffs are from different states and countries).
Do Not Resuscitate (DNR, allow natural death (AND), No Code): law & death.
Due diligence: term used for a number of concepts, involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or an act with a certain standard of care. E.g. underwrites of mortgages must apply due diligence to evaluate the documents and allow or not to take mortgage; due to people failing to apply the due diligence the mortgage financial crisis of 2007 happened.
Standard of care: degree of prudence and caution required of an individual who is under a duty of care. Professional standard of care: medical standard of care; children; persons with disabilities (but NOT mental disabilities); duty to inform self of responsibilities; person below average intelligence; negligence per se
Legal writing: type of technical writing used by lawyers, judges, legislators, and others in law to express legal analysis and legal rights and duties; legalese: legal writing that is very difficult for laymen to read and understand, the implication being that this abstruseness is deliberate for excluding the legally untrained and to justify high fees.
Police officer (cop, constable; Related jobs: gendarmerie, military police, security guard, bodyguard, detective): warranted law employee of a police force. In most countries, "police officer" is a generic term not specifying a particular rank. In some, the use of the rank "officer" is legally reserved for military personnel. Police officers are generally charged with the apprehension of suspects and the prevention, detection, and reporting of crime, protection and assistance of the general public, and the maintenance of public order. Police officers may be sworn to an oath, and have the power to arrest people and detain them for a limited time, along with other duties and powers. Some officers are trained in special duties, such as counter-terrorism, surveillance, child protection, VIP protection, civil law enforcement, and investigation techniques into major crime including fraud, rape, murder, and drug trafficking. Although many police officers wear a corresponding uniform, some police officers are plain-clothed in order to pass themselves off as members of the public. In most countries police officers are given exemptions from certain laws to perform their duties. E.g., an officer may use force if necessary to arrest or detain a person when it would ordinarily be assault. In some countries, officers can also violate traffic code to perform their duties.
Public figure: term applied in the context of defamation actions (libel and slander) as well as invasion of privacy; public figure (such as a politician, celebrity, or business leader) cannot base a sample on incorrect harmful statements unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with actual malice (knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). Burden of proof in defamation actions is higher in the case of a public figure. Limited purpose public figure.
Piercing the corporate veil (lifting the corporate veil): legal decision to treat the rights or duties of a corporation as the rights or liabilities of its shareholders.
Indictment: common law system - formal accusation that a person has committed a crime (for felony or indictable offence). UK and Wales: all indictments are phrased as "R v Smith", where "R" stands for "Regina" or "Rex" (Queen or King) - indictment is issued by the public prosecutor (in most cases this will be the Crown Prosecution Service) on behalf of the Crown, i.e. the Monarch.
Indictable offence: common law - offence which can only be tried on an indictment after a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is a prima facie case to answer or by a grand jury (in contrast to a summary offence). In US this is felony. Offences triable only on indictment: murder, rape.
Sex and the law: Female genital mutilation, Incest, Age of consent, Sex crimes (sexual acts which are prohibited by law in a jurisdiction)
Sexual abuse (molestation): Spousal sexual abuse, Positions of power, Child sexual abuse, Sexual abuse of people with developmental disabilities, Sexual abuse and minorities, Survivor (to honor and empower the strength of an individual to heal, in particular a living victim of sexual abuse or assault).
Intellectual property (IP): refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law. Common types of IP: copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets. Should copyright/patent be for 100+ years or for 5- years for the fast changing technology or for the slow changing technology (usually all current 20th-21st century techs are fast changing)?
Life-Line: short story by Robert A. Heinlein; "There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Patent law
Patent family: "set of patents taken in various countries to protect a single invention (when a first application in a country – the priority – is then extended to other offices)". "The same invention disclosed by a common inventor(s) and patented in more than one country."
Software patent: "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program" (FFII definition). U.S. patent law excludes "abstract ideas", and this has been used to refuse some patents involving software; in Europe, "computer programs as such" are excluded from patentability and European Patent Office policy is consequently that a program for a computer is not patentable if it does not have the potential to cause a "further technical effect" beyond the inherent technical interactions between hardware and software.
List of software patents: notable patents and patent applications involving computer programs, often labelled software patents; lists patents relating to software which have been the subject of litigation or have achieved notoriety in other ways.
Software patent debate: argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. For patentability: Public disclosure, Protection, Economic benefit, International law, Patent challenges, Copyright limitations; against patentability: Software is math, Hinders R&D, Cost and loss of R&D funds, Copyright is sufficient, Software is different (from electromechanical devices), Trivial patents (are easy to file), Open source disadvantage, Software patents usefulness as an information source is limited, Patent examination is too slow.
USA:
Method (patent) ("process"): in US patent law is one of the four principal categories of things that may be patented through "utility patents"; series of steps or acts, for performing a function or accomplishing a result.
Wright brothers patent war: centers on the patent they received for their method of an airplane's flight control. Wright's legal threats suppressed development of the U.S. aviation industry for several years.
Rule of the shorter term (comparison of terms): provision in international copyright treaties. The provision allows that signatory countries can limit the duration of copyright they grant to foreign works under national treatment, to at most the copyright term granted in the work's origin country.
Open Letter to Hobbyists: by Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft), to early personal computer hobbyists; dismay at the rampant copyright infringement with regard to Microsoft's software; 1976
Trade group efforts against file sharing: RIAA (music labels) & MPAA (film studios) vs. people (some of them sharers). P2P file sharing; Impact of illegal downloading on the film industry.
Amie Street: Demand-based pricing for songs!!! Supply-demand, economics; just need the agreement of artist; the idea did not live long due to (giant) Amazon.com.
End-user license agreement (EULA; software license agreement): license agreement: contract between the licensor and purchaser, establishing the purchaser's right to use the software..
Clickwrap ("clickthrough" agreement or clickwrap license)
Browse wrap (Browserwrap, browse-wrap license): term used in Internet law to refer to a contract or license agreement covering access to or use of materials on a web site or downloadable product. In a browse-wrap agreement, the terms and conditions of use for a website or other downloadable product are posted on the website, typically as a hyperlink at the bottom of the screen.
Freedom of panorama (FOP; de: Panoramafreiheit): provision in the copyright laws of various jurisdictions that permits taking photographs or video footage, or creating other images (such as paintings), of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art which are permanently located in a public place, without infringing any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and to publish such images; exception to the normal rule that the copyright owner has the exclusive right to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works. Exceptions: FR, IT, BE. Anti-terrorism laws in UK conflict with the freedom of panorama laws.
Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG): set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian; part of DSC. debian-legal tests for DFSG compliance: "The Desert Island test"; "The Dissident test"; "The Tentacles of Evil test".
Ensuring that the operating system remains open and free.
Giving improvements back to the community which made the operating system possible.
Not hiding problems with the software or organization.
Staying focused on the users and the software that started the phenomena.
Making it possible for the software to be used with non-free software.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC): independent USA company based in Danvers, MA, (although it is incorporated in New York State), that provides collective copyright licensing services for corporate and academic users of copyrighted materials; procures agreements with rightsholders, primarily academic publishers, and then acts as their agent in arranging collective licensing for institutions and one-time licensing for document delivery services, coursepacks, and other access and uses of texts. CCC earns a 15% commission on the fees it collects. RightsLink (or Rightslink) is a product released by the CCC in 2000 "in recognition of the growing prevalence of digital media and the challenges and opportunities it presents"
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF; 2004.05.24-; Cambridge, UK): nonprofit organization that promotes open knowledge, including open content and open data; published the Open Knowledge Definition and runs several projects (e.g. CKAN).
de:Open Data Commons: ein Projekt der OKF, das rechtliche Lösungen für freie Daten bereitstellt; pflegt eine Reihe von Lizenzen für freie Datenbanken
Open Database License (ODbL): "Share Alike" license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others
Open knowledge: knowledge that one is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it without legal, social or technological restriction; set of principles and methodologies related to the production and distribution of knowledge works in an open manner. Open Knowledge Definition is directly derived from the Open Source Definition
Copyfraud: form of copyright misuse; situations where individuals and institutions illegally claim copyright ownership of the public domain and other breaches of copyright law with little or no oversight by authorities or legal consequence for their actions.
"Infringement" or infringement?
Old media living in stone age? Esp. considering the growth of Internet, ebooks, emails, e-everything (digital everything) from 2D to 3D, to 4D (time included), to video, to audio, to audio-video...
Radio music ripping: old analog audio recording on tapes could do it, but digital age brought exact reproduction (aka lossless) of any media. EU: Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC, also refers to DRM) - still not appeared in court hearing [12/04/03]; UK: brainwash campaign "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC"/"AND IT'S ILLEGAL"; USA: why TiVo survived while ReplayTV didn't (ReplayTV's case never was judged)?
Adblock Plus (ABP): for Firefox; also there is a Google Chrome extension
AdBlock (Chrome): copy-cat of ABP; native Google Chrome extension
These ^ two and others push the content providers into making
Paywalls, but again RefSpoof (for Firefox) and co are going around these paywalls.
As one can see, the most intrusive ads made users/consumers to block all ads. This means that only the most creative ads will be watched as a good entertainment on Youtube (e.g. early Apple ads, which are now a famous history). The only non-blocked places are public places, so street ads will only proliferate.
Legal cases
Golan v. Holder: (2001) challenges the constitutionality of restoring copyright of foreign works that were previously in the United States public domain by the United States Congress.
Kahle v. Ashcroft: (2006) challenges the change in the copyright system of the United States from an opt-in system to an opt-out system. Rejected & denied (2008, Jan. 7).
Eldred v. Ashcroft: (2002) challenges the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). Supreme Court held the CTEA constitutional by a 7-2 decision (2003, Jan. 15).
Freedom of the Press Foundation (2012-): fund and support free speech and freedom of the press; organization is headed by both mainstream and alternative journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Xeni Jardin as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers. Supported organizations include WikiLeaks, MuckRock, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and Truthout.
Enemies of the Internet: Bahrain (2012-), Belarus (2006-2008, 2012-), Burma (2006-2013), China (2008-), Cuba (2006-), Egypt (2006-2010), Ethiopia (2014-), India (2014-), Iran (2006-), North Korea (2006-), Pakistan (2014-), RU (2014-), Saudi Arabia (2006-), Sudan (2014-), Syria (2006-), Tunisia (2006-2010), Turkmenistan (2006-), United Arab Emirates (2014-), UK (2014-), USA (2014-), Uzbekistan (2006-), Vietnam (2006-)
Countries Under Surveillance: Australia (2009-), Belarus (2009-2011), Bahrain (2008-2009 and 2011), Egypt (2011-), Eritrea (2008-2009, 2011-), France (2011-), India (2008-2013), Jordan (2008), Kazakhstan (2008-), Libya (2008 and 2011), Malaysia (2008-2009, 2011-), RU (2010-2013), South Korea (2009-), Sri Lanka (2008-2009, 2011-), Thailand (2008-), Tajikistan (2008), Tunisia (2011-), Turkey (2010-), United Arab Emirates (2008-2013), Venezuela (2011), Yemen (2008-2009).
most countries are communistic-like dictatorships; Arab and/or Muslim countries; former USSR countries and the new "freedom bringers", like UK, USA, Australia (NSA-scandal & co); both Koreas; most of Indian subcontinent; Ethiopia; Russia.
Censorship of YouTube: Armenia (shortly), Brazil (very shortly, single trial case), Bangladesh (one incident), Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Morocco (several times), Pakistan, PRC, Sudan, Russia (block of Chechen posts), Thailand (politics and monarchy), Tunisia (politics), Turkey ((!) religion & politics), Turkmenistan, UAE.
Censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany: Federal Republic of Germany guarantees freedom of speech, expression, and opinion to its citizens as per Article 5 of the constitution. Despite this, censorship of various materials has taken place since the Allied occupation after WWII and continues to take place in Germany in various forms due to a limiting provision in Article 5, Paragraph 2 of the constitution.
Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González (2014): decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It held that an internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal information which appears on web pages published by third parties. The outcome of the ruling is that an internet search engine must consider requests from individuals to remove links to freely accessible web pages resulting from a search on their name. Grounds for removal include cases where the search result(s) "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive in the light of the time that had elapsed."
Cyberlaw, Internet law
Legal aspects of computing (information technology law, IT law); Cyberlaw, Internet law): software law, jurisdiction in case of the Internet: 1) nation where user resides, 2) nation where server hosting the transaction is located, 3) nation of the person/business whom/which the user makes a transaction with; Internet: net neutrality, free speech on the Internet, Internet censorship, privacy (publications, yellow press; electronic communication); electronic signatures.
Internet governance: 2011.09 summit between India, Brazil, and South Africa - proposal to seek to move Internet governance into their sphere of dominance, subordination of ICANN and ITU under the auspices of UN.
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, organized by ITU): as of 2011 US Department of Commerce made it clear it intends to retain control of the Internet's root servers indefinitely and ICANN is US-based; digital divide: Vatican & UN.
Digital solidarity fund (DSF).
Working Group on Internet Governance: 'US gov is inflexible on the need for US control to remain for the foreseeable future in order to ensure the "security and stability of the Internet"'.
United States v. Ivanov: Aleksey Vladimirovich Ivanov of Chelyabinsk, Russia was indicted for conspiracy, computer fraud, extortion, and possession of illegal access devices; all crimes committed against the Online Information Bureau (OIB) whose business and infrastructure were based in Vernon, Connecticut. Ivanov committed the crimes while he was outside USA, but FBI lured him to Seattle, asked him to perform a break-in into a honeypot and after recording Ivanov's actions arrested and charged him. Sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Cases
Mark Whitacre: cooperation, embezzlement, punishment, who knows the truth?
McLibel case (McDonald's Corporation v Steel & Morris [1997] EWHC QB 366): English lawsuit for libel filed by McDonald's Corporation against environmental activists Helen Steel and David Morris over a pamphlet critical of the company; each of two hearings in English courts found some of the leaflet's contested claims to be libellous and others to be true. The partial nature of the victory, the David-and-Goliath nature of the case, and the drawn-out litigation embarrassed McDonald's. Following the decision, ECHR ruled in Steel & Morris v United Kingdom that the pair had been denied a fair trial, in breach of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to a fair trial) and that their conduct should have been protected by Article 10 of the Convention (right to freedom of expression). In 1986, they co-authored a six-page leaflet titled "What's wrong with McDonald's: everything they don't want you to know" of which they distributed "a few hundred copies" in Strand, London. The leaflet accused the company of paying low wages, of cruelty to animals used in its products and other malpractices. UK Court of Appeal: ruled against the argument by Steel and Morris that multinational corporations should no longer be able to sue for libel over public interest issues. In response to the verdict, David Pannick QC said in The Times: "The McLibel case has achieved what many lawyers thought impossible: to lower further the reputation of our law of defamation in the minds of all right thinking people." ECHR criticised the way in which UK laws had failed to protect the public right to criticise corporations whose business practices affect people's lives and the environment (which violates Article 10); they also ruled that the trial was biased because of the defendants' comparative lack of resources and what they believed were complex and oppressive UK libel laws.
Natascha Kampusch (1988.02.17-): Austrian woman who was abducted at the age of 10 on 1998.03.02 and held in a secret cellar by her kidnapper Wolfgang Přiklopil for more than eight years, until she escaped in 2006.08.23. She has written a book about her ordeal, 3,096 Days (2010), upon which the 2013 German film 3096 is based.
Fritzl case: emerged in 2008.04, when a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl (1966.04.06-) told police in the town of Amstetten, Austria, that she had been held captive for 24 years by her father, Josef Fritzl (1935.04.09-). Fritzl had assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment inside a concealed area in the basement of the family home. The abuse by Elisabeth's father resulted in the birth of seven children: three of them remained in captivity with their mother, one had died just days after birth at the hands of Josef Fritzl who disposed of his body in an incinerator, and the other three were brought up by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, having been reported as foundlings.
Kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard: occurred in 1991.06.10, in Meyers, California. Dugard was eleven years old when she was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated even though her stepfather, Carl Probyn, witnessed her kidnapping and chased the kidnappers on his mountain bike. Dugard remained missing until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two girls, now known to be his daughters, on August 24 and 25 that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer to order him to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. He was accompanied by a woman who was finally identified as Dugard herself. Phillip and Nancy Garrido were arrested by police after Dugard's reappearance. On April 28, 2011, they pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assaulting Dugard. Law enforcement officers believe Dugard was later kept in concealed tents, sheds, and lean-tos in an area behind the Garridos' house at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California for eighteen years. During her confinement, Dugard gave birth to two daughters, who were 11 and 15 at the time of her reappearance.
Trial by combat (wager of battle, trial by battle, judicial duel): method of Germanic law to settle accusations in the absence of witnesses or a confession in which two parties in dispute fought in single combat; the winner of the fight was proclaimed to be right. In essence, it was a judicially sanctioned duel. It remained in use throughout the European Middle Ages, gradually disappearing in the course of the 16th c. Holy Roman Empire; Great Britain and Ireland; France; Italy; USA.
Societal collapse: collapse (stronger, e.g. extinction of the Polynesian island dwellers) vs. decline (weaker, e.g. the decline of Western Roman empire, decline (called <collapse>) of Soviet Union). Antidote to collapse: social cohesion (more equality, no "huge class of underdogs" who would incite revolution) and adaptability. Features of collapse: either reversion/simplification or incorporation/absorption into some greater society (e.g. old Egyptian society: Greeks, Romans, Christianity, Arabs & Muslims, Turks & Muslims, nowadays); destratification (become more egalitarian), despecialization, decentralization, destructuralization (large civilization produces profound artifacts; after the collapse: the artifacts become much less profound and much fewer in quantity; simpler tools), depopulation (war, plague, natural disasters, famine contribute to this).
Accelerationism: idea that capitalism, or particular processes that historically characterised capitalism, should be accelerated instead of overcome in order to generate radical social change. Accelerationism may also refer more broadly and usually pejoratively to support for the intensification of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately lead to its collapse. Accelerationist theory has been divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants. Left-wing accelerationism attempts to press "the process of technological evolution" beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism by repurposing modern technology for socially beneficial and emancipatory ends. Right-wing accelerationism supports the indefinite intensification of capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technological singularity. Accelerationist writers have additionally distinguished other variants such as "unconditional accelerationism". A far-right and white nationalist adaptation of the term surfacing during the 2010s eschews the focus on capitalism of the prior variants to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict resulting in a white ethnostate. Other forms of accelerationism: Žižekian accelerationism, Far-right accelerationism.
Integrated ticketing: allows a person to make a journey that involves transfers within or between different transport modes with a single ticket that is valid for the complete journey.
Culture-historical archaeology: emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
Marxist archaeology: developed by archaeologists in USSR during the early twentieth century; "generally adopted a materialist base and a processual approach whilst emphasising the historical-developmental context of archaeological data.".
Processual archaeology (formerly the New Archaeology): genesis in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips; pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment that "[m]y own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing. This idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human society. This was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any information which artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life was lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts.
Post-processual archaeology (interpretative archaeologies): movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations; wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology.
Tell (archaeology) (tel; Arabic: تَل, tall, 'hill' or 'mound'): artificial mound formed from the accumulated refuse of people living on the same site for hundreds or thousands of years. A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with a flat top and sloping sides and can be up to 30 metres high. Tells are most commonly associated with the archaeology of the ancient Near East, but they are also found elsewhere, such as Central Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa and Greece. Within the Near East, they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran.
Pseudoarchaeology (alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, cult archaeology, and spooky archaeology): interpretation of the past from outside the archaeological science community, which rejects the accepted data gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to supplement the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacy, and fabrication of evidence. Others instead hold that there were human societies in the ancient period that were significantly technologically advanced, such as Atlantis, and this idea has been propagated by figures like Graham Hancock in his Fingerprints of the Gods (1995).
Graham Hancock (1950.08.02-): British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. His ideas have been the subject of several films, including the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), and Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss them. He has also written two fantasy novels and in 2013 delivered a controversial TEDx talk promoting the use of ayahuasca. As a journalist, Hancock worked for many British papers, such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He co-edited New Internationalist magazine from 1976 to 1979, and was the East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981 to 1983.
Ancient Apocalypse: The series was produced by ITN Productions, and released by Netflix in 2022.11.10. Hancock's son Sean Hancock is "senior manager of unscripted originals" at Netflix. It was the second most-watched series on Netflix in its week of release.
Cultural anthropology (Socio-cultural anthropology): study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists have argued that culture is "human nature", and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically (i.e. in language), and teach such abstractions to others.
Culture: meaning of the word from Cicero ("cultura animi") to 18th and 19th c. to the 20th c. changed ("culture" emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance). Current meaning: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living differently classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively.
Cultural studies: aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives; cultural studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives; focussed upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations, conflicts and defining traits; how a particular communication medium or message relates to ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and/or gender, rather than providing an encyclopedic identification, categorization or definition of a particular culture or area of the world; seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. Opposition to cultural studies was most dramatically demonstrated with the 2002 closing of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Low context culture &
High context culture: Spectrum: Lower < German-Swiss < German < Scandinavian < American < English Canadian < French Canadian < French < Italian < Spanish < Mexican < Greek < Arab < Chinese < Japanese < Higher
Parallel and cross cousins: parallel cousin (or ortho-cousin) is a cousin from a parent's same-sex sibling, while a cross cousin is from a parent's opposite-sex sibling
Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures: in cultural anthropology, the distinction between a guilt society (or guilt culture), shame society (or shame society), and a fear society (or culture of fear) has been used to categorize different cultures. The differences can apply to how behavior is governed with respect to government laws, business rules, or social etiquette.
guilt-innocence world view focuses on law and punishment. A person in this type of culture may ask, "Is my behavior fair or unfair?"[citation needed] This type of culture also emphasizes individual conscience. In a guilt society, the primary method of social control is the inculcation of feelings of guilt for behaviors that the individual believes to be undesirable. A prominent feature of guilt societies is the provision of sanctioned releases from guilt for certain behaviors, whether before or after the fact. There is opportunity in such cases for authority figures to derive power, monetary and/or other advantages, etc. by manipulating the conditions of guilt and the forgiveness of guilt. "True guilt cultures rely on an internalized conviction of sin as the enforcer of good behavior, not, as shame cultures do, on external sanctions. Guilt cultures emphasize punishment and forgiveness as ways of restoring the moral order; shame cultures stress self-denial and humility as ways of restoring the social order. (Hiebert 1985, 213)". Guilt-Innocence: more associated with Catholicism and Judaism
shame-honor worldview seeks an "honor balance" and can lead to revenge dynamics.[citation needed] A person in this type of culture may ask, "Shall I look ashamed if I do X?" or "How people will look at me if I do Y?" Shame cultures are typically based on the concepts of pride and honour, and appearances are what counts. Shame-Honour: more associated with Islam, Protestantism, and Eastern religions
fear-power worldview focuses on physical dominance. A person in this culture may ask, "Will someone hurt me if I do this?" Fear-Power: more associated with animist and tribal societies
East Asia
Huaxia: although still used in conjunction, Hua (simplified Chinese: 华; traditional Chinese: 華) and Xia (Chinese: 夏) are more often used separately to represent things Chinese. Hua, in particular, has become almost synonymous with the Chinese civilization. The official Chinese names of both PRC and ROC refer to Huaxia in using the term Zhonghua (中华 / 中華) to refer the Chinese civilization. The PRC's Chinese name is "中华人民共和国" and the ROC's Chinese name is "中華民國". Zhongguo (中国 / 中國) usually refers to the country.
Sinocentrism: different and changing over history and places views on sinocentrism from Korea(s), Japan (Ryūkyū Kingdom), Vietnam (constant war with big China after 1000s), Myanmar, the West (UK, USA, continental Europe); gǔ yǐ yǒu zhī (古已有之, literally 'this already existed in ancient times') & Lu Xun: "The True Story of Ah Q" (satirizes the ridiculous way in which the protagonist claimed 'spiritual victories' despite being humiliated and defeated). Nowadays, China (PRC) will never seek hegemony (永不称霸). Not to be confused with
Chinese nationalism and
Han chauvinism.
Kowtow: kneel and bow so that the head touches the ground; ancient East Asian give of absolute respect (to supreme ruler and/or out of fear); not used anymore in the modern times.
Zuiikin' English (Eikaiwa taisō Zuiikin' English): series combines English language lessons with gymnastic exercise programs. At the beginning of the show, the host and mastermind, Fernandez Verde, explains his philosophy in learning languages. He proclaims that different cultures use muscles in different proportions due to their customs. For example, in one episode he states Japanese people have stronger lower back muscles (from bowing and keeping a lower posture), and a different leg muscle structure (due to squatting for long periods of time). He feels that using those particular muscles while learning the language of that culture will create strong connotations in your mind and faster learning.
Dunning–Kruger effect: cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. Dunning and Kruger: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
Laziness (indolence): disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to act or to exert oneself. It is often used as a pejorative; terms for a person seen to be lazy include "couch potato", "slacker", and "bludger". Related concepts include sloth, a Christian sin, abulia, a medical term for reduced motivation, and lethargy, a state of lacking energy. Laziness should not be confused with avolition, a negative symptom of certain mental and neurodevelopmental disorders such as depression, ADHD, ASD, sleep disorders, substance use disorders and schizophrenia. Animals: It is common for animals (even those like hummingbirds that have high energy needs) to forage for food until satiated, and then spend most of their time doing nothing, or at least nothing in particular. They seek to "satisfice" their needs rather than obtaining an optimal diet or habitat. Even diurnal animals, which have a limited amount of daylight in which to accomplish their tasks, follow this pattern. Social activity comes in a distant third to eating and resting for foraging animals. When more time must be spent foraging, animals are more likely to sacrifice time spent on aggressive behavior than time spent resting. Extremely efficient predators have more free time and thus often appear more lazy than relatively inept predators that have little free time.
MRS Degree: term used to describe when a young woman attends college or university with the intention of meeting and finding a husband.
Sexual behavior
Human sexuality: capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Nature vs nurture.
Alfred Kinsey (1894.06.23-1956.08.25): USA biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University (now: Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction). Kinsey Reports: two books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
LGBT symbols: two most-recognized international LGBTQ symbols are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag; pink triangle, employed by the Nazis in World War II as a badge of shame, was re-appropriated but retained negative connotations; rainbow flag was created to be a more organic and natural replacement without any negativity attached to it.
Asexuality (nonsexuality): may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the four types thereof; 2004 study: 1%. Some asexual people do engage in sexual activity despite lacking a desire for sex or sexual attraction, due to a variety of reasons, such as a desire to please romantic partners or a desire to have children
Comparison of online dating websites: IAC (Match.com (owns OkCupid), Chemistry.com), Zoosk, Meetic (Eu), PlentyofFish, Ashley Madison ("Life is short. Have an affair"), Mamba (International Dating Platform; former CIS, RU language), SpeedDate.com, Parship (Eu, DE mainly), GayRomeo (PlanetRomeo; GBT men; DE huge, Eu mainly, world wide), Anastasia International (AnastasiaDate; CIS women and the Western men), eHarmony, SpeedDate.com, Gaydar.
Sex worker, prostitution, call girl/boy:
Belle de Jour (writer) (Brooke Magnanti; 1975.11.05-): research scientist, blogger, and writer, whose identity was revealed in November 2009; while completing her doctoral studies, between 2003 and 2004, Magnanti supplemented her income by working as a London call girl; anonymous blog Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl.
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl: memoir which was adopted into
Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute.
Mustang Ranch (originally known as the Mustang Bridge Ranch): brothel in Storey County, Nevada, about 24 km east of Reno. Under owner Joe Conforte, it became Nevada's first licensed brothel in 1971, eventually leading to the legalization of brothel prostitution in 10 of 17 counties in the state. It became Nevada's largest brothel with 67 ha, and the most profitable. After the negotiations (overheard by a hidden intercom system) were over, the prostitute collected the money and deposited it with a cashier. She returned to the room, washed the male genitals in a basin. After the act, she would again wash the male and slip on her skimpy outfit. The women was require to escort the customer from her room to the door. Some men would relax in the bar or on sofas talking to the girls. In time the men would be rested for "round two." Many men had favorites or wanted variety. They could be with as many women as they could afford. The fantasy of two and three women simultaneously was common. Another frequent fantasy was of an older and younger prostitute being intimate with the customer and each other; he pretended they were mother and daughter. Alexa Albert, who conducted interviews with several women in the Mustang Ranch from 1993 to 1996, reported that at one point, the brothel required all women to have pimps, who were thought to make the women work harder. Although this practice had stopped by the 1990s, many women were still pressured into the work by boyfriends, husbands, or other family members. About half of the women reported having been sexually abused as children. Initially, the brothel did not serve black customers. In 1967, a separate trailer for blacks was built, and the prostitutes were allowed to refuse these men. This segregation was later abandoned, but black customers were still announced by a special signal, so that women could choose not to join the lineup, something not allowed for white customers.
Template:Seduction Community &
Seduction community: also known as the pick-up artist or PUA community, is a movement of men whose goal is sexual success with/access to women. Members of the community often call themselves pickup artists.
Wingman (social): role that a person may take when a friend needs support with approaching potential partners. A wingman is someone who is on the "inside" and is used to help someone with intimate relationships.
Relational aggression (covert aggression, covert bullying): type of aggression in which harm is caused through damage to relationships or social status within a group rather than by means of actual or threatened physical violence. Relational aggression is more common and more studied among girls than boys.
Gender; human gender: male (man), female (woman), other
Intersex: people are individuals born with any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies". Though the range of atypical sex characteristics may be obvious from birth through the presence of physically ambiguous genitalia, in other instances, atypical characteristics may go unnoticed, presenting as ambiguous internal reproductive organs or atypical chromosomes that may remain unknown to an individual all of their life. Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child's anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births where the baby is intersex has been reported to be as low as 0.018% or as high as roughly 1.7%, depending on which conditions are counted as intersex. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%. Other intersex conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones. Some intersex persons may be assigned and raised as a girl or boy but then identify with another gender later in life, while most continue to identify with their assigned sex.
Disorders of sex development (DSDs, differences in sex development; variations in sex characteristics (VSC)): medical conditions involving the reproductive system. More specifically, these terms refer to "congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical."
Mixed-sex sports (mixed-gender, coed sports): individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team (for example teams of one man and one woman). Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants. Mixed-sex play is also common in children's sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less. Direct competition: It is uncommon in most organised sports to find individuals of different genders competing head-to-head at elite levels, principally due to physiological differences between the (adult) sexes. In sports where these differences are less linked to performance, it is standard practice for men and women to compete in mixed-sex fields. These open-class sports prove accommodating to intersex athletes, who challenge sex-defined rules of both single-sex events and mixed-sex teams with distinct male and female composition. Mixed doubles or pairs: dancing (ice dancing, pair figure skating, ballroom dancing and synchronised swimming), mixed doubles (tennis, table tennis, badminton, squash and racquetball), sometimes contract bridge; pairs may also compete in turn-based games (mixed doubles curling, mixed golf, mixed bowling, mixed team darts). Mixed relay. Mixed team ball sports.
Hyperandrogenism is when testosterone levels are elevated beyond the typical levels. Some athletes also have testosterone insensitivity which means they are males but their bodies are unable to process testosterone messages so they develop phenotypically as females. Treatments can range from taking drugs to suppress testosterone levels to undergoing surgery to alter their bodies so that they are unable to produce testosterone.
Warren Farrell (1943.06.26): American educator, activist and author of seven books on men's and women's issues. The Myth of Male Power: "cross-culturally, men's experience of powerlessness involved being socialized, even as boys, to become "the disposable sex" (in war, in work)"; "heterosexual men are conditioned to believe that they can obtain love and affection from women only by earning money"; "men constitute 93% of workplace deaths". Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, and Father and Child Reunion: findings include some 26 ways in which children of divorce do better when three conditions prevail: equally-shared parenting (or joint custody); close parental proximity; and no bad-mouthing. Why Men Earn More: trade-offs include working more hours and for more years; taking technical or more-hazardous jobs; relocating overseas or traveling overnight; never-married women without children earn 13% more than their male counterparts; gender pay gap is largely about married men with children who earn more due to their assuming more workplace obligations; since men earn more, and women have more balanced lives, that men have more to learn from women than women do from men.
Eve teasing: euphemism for the sexual harassment in India, Pakistan.
Groping: why Japan has this problem and the Western nations not? Communism/socialism/Karl Marx gave freedom to women + feminism? Density of people (but think about Amsterdam, New York, Ruhr...)
Hate crime (bias-motivated crimes, race hate; bias-motivated violence; hate crime law)
Murder of Sophie Lancaster (UK, 2007): victim, along with her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, was attacked by a number of males in their mid-teens while walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Rossendale, in Lancashire; 2013.04 the Greater Manchester Police announced that they would officially begin to record offences committed against goths and other alternative groups, as hate crimes, as they do with offences aimed at someone's race, disability or sexual orientation
Rape: type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or against a person who is incapable of valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, or below the legal age of consent. According to the American Medical Association (1995), sexual violence, and rape in particular, is considered the most underreported violent crime. USA Bureau of Justice Statistics (1999): 91% of victims are female, 9% male; 99% of offenders are male. Rape by strangers is usually less common than rape by persons the victim knows, several studies argue that male-male and female-female prison rape are quite common and may be the least reported forms of rape. Definitions: Penetrative and non-penetrative, Consent, Marital rape (Bible: "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another (...)"; Islam's teaching: "Allah's Apostle said, 'If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relations] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning'"). Victim blaming, Honor killings, violence by and forced marriages to the rapist. False accusation
White torture: type of psychological torture that includes extreme sensory deprivation and isolation. Iran, Turkey, UK (Northern Ireland), USA - the only countries which are transparent enough for these practices to leak out into the public. What about USSR, Stasi, WWII?
Population ageing: dependency ratio and generational accounting; increase in health care expenses (reduced gov. role in providing health care?); decrease in education expenses; pensions crisis.
Pensions crisis: reform ideas: a) Addressing the worker-retiree ratio, via raising the retirement age, employment policy and immigration policy; b) Reducing obligations via shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution pension types and reducing future payment amounts (by, for example, adjusting the formula that determines the level of benefits); and c) Increasing resources to fund pensions via increasing contribution rates and raising taxes.
Map of Europe showing the percentage of the population over 65 in 2010 for each country. Based on data from the CIA World Factbook.
Aging of Japan: 21% over 65 (2005); 23.1% ≥65 & 11.4% ≥75 (2011.02; world's highest).
Elderly people in Japan: in USA expansion of the 65-and-over age group from 7% to 14% took 75 years; in UK and Germany this expansion took 45 years; in Japan only took 24.5 years passing 7% in late 1970 and 14% in early 1995. In the 1980s, there was a major trend toward the elderly maintaining separate households rather than co-residing with the families of adult children. The proportion living with children decreased from 77% in 1970 to 65% in 1985, although this rate was still much higher than in other industrialized countries. The number of elderly living in Japan's retirement or nursing homes also increased from around 75,000 in 1970 to more than 216,000 in 1987. People over 60 continue to work for varied reasons: to supplement inadequate pension incomes, to give meaning to their lives, or to keep in touch with society.
Living together
Gated community: form of residential community or housing estate containing strictly controlled entrances for pedestrians, bicycles, and automobiles, and often characterized by a closed perimeter of walls and fences. Some gated communities, usually called guard-gated communities, are staffed by private security guards and are often home to high-value properties, and/or are set up as retirement villages; some gated communities are secure enough to resemble fortresses and are intended as such. Gated communities are very rare in Europe and Japan, but popular in Americas, China, Saudo Arabia (oil industry), South Africa. Mexico has both the largest population of gated community dwellers in the world and the largest number of gated community dwellers as a percentage of national population.
Decision making, leadership
Design by committee (design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor leadership) vs.
Systems architect (high-level designer of a system to be implemented)
Delphi technique: structured communication technique, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts
Ant tribe: neologism used to describe a group of low income college graduates who settle for a poverty-level existence in the cities of PRC. Those who belong to the ant tribe class hope that, in time, they will find the jobs for which they are trained in college. In Taiwan, Belarus, Peru, USA the largest share of unemployed were made up of people with college/university degrees.
Vagrancy (people) (vagrant, vagabond; la: vagari: 'wander'): "tramp", "hobo", "drifter"; person, often in poverty, who wanders from place to place without a home or regular employment or income.
Works council (
de:Betriebsrat): strongest in DE, other EU/Eu countries are modeling on DE model. One of the most commonly examined (and arguably most successful) implementations of these institutions is found in Germany. The model is basically as follows: general labour agreements are made at the national level by national unions (e.g. IG Metall) and national employer associations (e.g. Gesamtmetall), and local plants and firms then meet with works councils to adjust these national agreements to local circumstances. Works council members are elected by the company workforce for a four year term. They don't have to be union members; works councils can also be formed in companies where neither the employer nor the employees are organized.
Iron law of oligarchy: found in the book Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911) by Robert Michels; claims that rule by an elite, or "oligarchy", is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization; "Who says organization, says oligarchy"; "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."
Peter Principle: concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was explained in the 1969 book The Peter Principle (William Morrow and Company) by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull. Hull wrote the text, which was based on Peter's research. Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. The Peter principle has since been the subject of much commentary and research.
Dilbert principle: 1990s theory by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory: framework for cross-cultural communication, developed by Geert Hofstede. Describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis. The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In 2010 Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint. A poor country that is short-term oriented usually has little to no economic development, while long-term oriented countries continue to develop to a point. As a country becomes richer, its culture becomes more individualistic. On average, predominantly Catholic countries show very high uncertainty avoidance, relatively high power distance, moderate masculinity and relatively low individualism, whereas predominantly atheist countries have low uncertainty avoidance, very high power distance, moderate masculinity, and very low individualism.
Business (enterprise, firm): organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers.
Company: in USA company="corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, trust, fund, or organized group of persons, whether incorporated or not, and (in an official capacity) any receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, or similar official, or liquidating agent, for any of the foregoing"
Dutch East India Company (see Indonesia, going to Dutch empire; defunct; empire collapsed)
Disney (still running, industry: entertainment)
East India Company (the other company, going to British empire; defunct; empire collapsed)
United Fruit Company (see USA actions in South and Central America in 19th-20th century, going to "American (i.e. US of A) empire"; renamed, still existing, lost all its previous glory)
United Fruit Company: was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Third World plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. Flourished in the early and mid-20th century and came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies
Banana republic: were mainly in Central America where they grew bananas and other fruits.
comparison of these megacorps: they had the headquarters in the civilized world and in the underdeveloped world, they were ruled by laws in the civ-world, and by blood and war in the not-so-civ-world; they extracted resources from underdeveloped world to bring riches to the developed world. Usually literacy uprooted and national movements ousted these practices (11/12/03)...
Recapitalization: sort of a corporate reorganization involving substantial change in a company's capital structure. Leveraged Recapitalization (company issues bonds to raise money to buy back its own shares), Leveraged Buyout (substitute equity with debt), Nationalization.
Board of directors (the board): executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulations (including the jurisdiction's corporate law) and the organization's own constitution and by-laws. These authorities may specify the number of members of the board, how they are to be chosen, and how often they are to meet. The board of directors appoints the chief executive officer of the corporation and sets out the overall strategic direction. Typically, the board chooses one of its members to be the chairman (often now called the "chair" or "chairperson"), who holds whatever title is specified in the by-laws or articles of association. However, in membership organizations, the members elect the president of the organization and the president becomes the board chair, unless the by-laws say otherwise.
Shareholder rights plan ("poison pill"): type of defensive tactic used by a corporation's board of directors against a takeover. Typically, such a plan gives shareholders the right to buy more shares at a discount if one shareholder buys a certain percentage or more of the company's shares. The plan could be triggered, for instance, if any one shareholder buys 20% of the company's shares, at which point every shareholder (except the one who possesses 20%) will have the right to buy a new issue of shares at a discount. If every other shareholder is able to buy more shares at a discount, such purchases would dilute the bidder's interest, and the cost of the bid would rise substantially. In the field of mergers and acquisitions, shareholder rights plans were devised in the early 1980s as a way to prevent takeover bidders from negotiating a price for sale of shares directly with shareholders, and instead forcing the bidder to negotiate with the board.
Market fundamentalism (free-market fundamentalism): term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as pejorative by critics of said beliefs.
Corporate titles (business titles): given to corporate officers to show what duties and responsibilities they have in the organization. Such titles are used by publicly and privately held for-profit corporations, cooperatives, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, partnerships, and sole proprietorships that also confer corporate titles. Variations: Within the corporate office or corporate center of a corporation, some corporations have a chairman and CEO as the top-ranking executive, while the number two is the president and COO; other corporations have a president and CEO but no official deputy. Typically, senior managers are "higher" than vice presidents, although many times a senior officer may also hold a vice president title, such as executive vice president and CFO. The board of directors is technically not part of management itself, although its chairman may be considered part of the corporate office if he or she is an executive chairman.
Mezzanine capital: type of financing that sits between senior debt and equity in a company's capital structure. It is typically used to fund growth, acquisitions, or buyouts. Technically, mezzanine capital can be either a debt or equity instrument with a repayment priority between senior debt and common stock equity. Mezzanine debt is subordinated debt that represents a claim on a company's assets which is senior only to that of the common shares and usually unsecured. Redeemable preferred stock equity, with warrants or conversion rights, is also a type of mezzanine financing. Mezzanine capital is often a more expensive financing source for a company than secured debt or senior debt. Uses: Leveraged buyouts; Real estate finance.
List of industrial processes: procedures involving chemical, physical, electrical or mechanical steps to aid in the manufacturing of an item or items, usually carried out on a very large scale. Industrial processes are the key components of heavy industry.
Slag: glass-like by-product left over after a desired metal has been separated (i.e., smelted) from its raw ore.
Flash smelting: smelting process for sulfur-containing ores including chalcopyrite. The process was developed by Outokumpu in Finland and first applied at the Harjavalta plant in 1949 for smelting copper ore. It has also been adapted for nickel and lead production.
2008 Chinese heparin adulteration: contaminant was identified as an "over-sulphated" derivative of chondroitin sulfate, a closely related substance obtained from mammal or fish cartilage and often used as a treatment for arthritis. Since over-sulphated chondroitin is not a naturally occurring molecule, costs a fraction of true heparin starting material, and mimics the in-vitro properties of heparin, the counterfeit was almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing. The raw heparin batches were found to have been cut from 2-60% with the counterfeit substance, and motivation for the adulteration was attributed to a combination of cost effectiveness and a shortage of suitable pigs in China.
Lean startup (Eric Ries): methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The central hypothesis of the lean startup methodology is that if startup companies invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers, they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches and failures. Definitions: Minimum viable product; Split testing (A/B test); Actionable metrics; pivot is a "structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth", "changing (or even firing) the plan instead of the executive (the sales exec, marketing or even the CEO)"; Build-Measure-Learn.
Kickstarter (2009-): global crowdfunding platform based in USA.
Indiegogo (2008-): international crowdfunding web site.
Stealth mode: company's temporary state of secretiveness, usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pending product launch or other business initiative. A stealth product is a product a company develops in secret, and a stealth company is a new company that avoids initial disclosure as to its existence, purpose, products, personnel, funding, brand name, or other important attributes. The term stealth innovation has been applied to individual projects and ideas that are developed in secret inside a company.
First-mover advantage: advantage gained by the initial ("first-moving") significant occupant of a market segment. First-movers can be rewarded with huge profit margins and a monopoly-like status. The three primary sources of first-mover advantages are technological leadership, preemption of scarce assets, and switching costs / buyer choice under uncertainty. First-mover disadvantages include “free-rider effects, resolution of technological or market uncertainty, shifts in technology or customer needs, and incumbent inertia.” Second-mover advantage occurs when a firm following the lead of the first-mover is actually able to capture greater market share, despite having entered late; Second-mover advantage can be summarized by the adage: "The second mouse gets the cheese."
Y Combinator (company) (2005.03-): USA startup fund. Fast Company has called YC "the world's most powerful start-up incubator". Fortune has called Y Combinator "a spawning ground for emerging tech giants". Y Combinator was started in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris.
The Principles of Scientific Management (1911): monograph published by Frederick Winslow Taylor. This laid out Taylor's views on principles of scientific management, or industrial era organization and decision theory. Taylor was an American manufacturing manager, mechanical engineer, and then a management consultant in his later years. The term scientific management refers to coordinating the enterprise for everyone's benefit including increased wages for laborers although the approach is "directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work." His approach is also often referred to as Taylor's Principles, or Taylorism. The monograph consisted of three sections: Introduction, Chapter 1: Fundamentals of Scientific Management, and Chapter 2: The Principles of Scientific Management.
Subpopulations, minorities
Chinese American: why Chinese Americans (including Taiwanese Americans) are doing so well in the USA (even slightly above Japanese and Korean Americans)? Do only the best of the best come from PRC (Hong Kong & Macau), ROC, of Chinese descent from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia to USA? Or is it a cultural (Chinese culture) thing?
Face (sociological concept): idiomatically means dignity/prestige. "The concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin", yet many languages have "face" terms that metaphorically mean "prestige; honor; reputation." English semantic field for "face" words meaning "prestige; honor" is smaller than the corresponding Chinese field, but historical dictionaries more accurately record its history. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) documents how the English community in China originated lose face and save face in the late 19th century, and how morphological variants like face-saver subsequently developed. "The fact that Chinese lexicalizes losing face (丟臉, 沒面子), but not gaining face is a potent reminder that losing face has far more serious implications for one's sense of self-esteem or decency than gaining face." Huang (1987:71).
Kulturkarte der Welt nach Inglehart-Welzel2
Inglehart Values Map
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world: scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey. It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis.
Tocqueville effect: phenomenon in which as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on". For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia: one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. Its principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms—"involution". The term has drawn significant attention in China since its introduction in China's social sciences research, making it one of the most popular buzzwords in China.
Incarceration
List of countries by incarceration rate: at the top: USA, Rwanda (after genocide?), Georgia (crime?), Russia (all the politicals & co!), ..., Cuba (politicals?). The highest ever was in USSR in 1934-1953 at ~800/100,000 population (1.2-1.5 mln in GULAGs per 168 mln pop.).
Incarceration in the United States: mainly due to the length of the sentences and "war on drugs" the USA has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (in 2009: 743/100,000 population). Ethnicity: black males are incarcerated about 2.5 times as frequently as hispanic males and hispanic males about 2 times over white males per 100,000 of the same gender and ethnicity pop.
United States incarceration rate.
Edge city (suburban activity centers, megacenters, suburban business districts): term that originated in USA for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban residential or rural area. The term was popularized by the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau. Garreau argues that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Most edge cities develop at or near existing or planned freeway intersections, and are especially likely to develop near major airports. They rarely include heavy industry. History: The edge city is fundamentally impossible without the automobile. Edge cities in the 21st century: Densification; Despite the lessons of USA experience, in rapidly developing countries such as China, India, UAE (Dubai), the edge city is quickly emerging as an important new development form as automobile ownership skyrockets and marginal land is bulldozed for development. Impact of edge cities: Relation with metropolitan area; Garreau: "Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism - our jobs - out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City"
Empire: sovereign state consisting of several territories and peoples subject to a single ruling authority, often an emperor. States can be empires either by narrow definition through having an emperor and being named as such, or by broad definition as stated above in being an aggregated realm under the rule of a supreme authority. An empire can be made solely of contiguous territories, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Russian Empire, or include territories which are far remote from the 'home' country of the empire, such as a colonial empire. Aside from the more formal usage, the word empire can also refer colloquially to a large-scale business enterprise (e.g. a transnational corporation), a political organisation controlled by a single individual (a political boss), or a group (political bosses). The concept of empire is associated with other such concepts as imperialism, colonialism, and globalization, with imperialism referring to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between nations and not necessarily the policy of a state headed by an emperor or empress. Empire is often used as a term to describe displeasure to overpowering situations. Territorial empires (Mongol Empire, Median Empire), maritime republics or thalassocracies (the Athenian (Delian League) and British empires), Holy Roman Empire came together by electing the emperor with votes from member realms through the Imperial election. Doyle examplifies the transformation on the case of the Roman Emperor Caracalla whose legislation in AD 212 extended the Roman citizenship to all inhabitants of the Mediterranean world. To the case of Caracalla, Toynbee added the Abbasid cosmopolitan reformation of 750 AD. Historian Maks Ostrovski finds above mentioned cosmopolitan reformations to be the characteristic fate of persistent empires. When such a reformation occurs in our world, he writes, the green card would be abolished since all earth inhabitants would have it by birth. This cosmopolitan World State, as the records of earlier circumscribed civilizations suggest, will last millennia. Carneiro's circumscription theory: The Empires of Egypt, China and Japan are named the most durable political structures in human history. Correspondingly, these are the three most circumscribed civilizations in human history. The Empires of Egypt (established by Narmer c. 3000 BC) and China (established by Cheng in 221 BC) endured for over two millennia. German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck, criticizing the Western idea of progress, emphasized that China and Egypt remained at one particular stage of development for millennia. This stage was universal empire. The development of Egypt and China came to a halt once their empires "reached the limits of their natural habitat". Sinology does not recognize the Eurocentric view of the "inevitable" imperial fall; Egyptology and Japanology pose equal challenges. Since "the contemporary international system is global, we can rule out the possibility that geographic expansion of the system will contribute to the emergence of a new balance of power, as it did so many times in the past." As Quincy Wright had put it, "this process can no longer continue without interplanetary wars."
List of largest empires: Several empires in world history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a fairly precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy. Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera, who published a series of academic articles about the territorial extents of historical empires between 1978 and 1997, defined an empire as "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign" and its size as the area over which the empire has some undisputed military and taxation prerogatives; these are the criteria from which these lists are formed. Empires at their greatest extent:
British Empire (1920) 35.5 M km² / 26.35%
Mongol Empire (1270 or 1309) 24.0 M km² / 17.81%
Russian Empire (1895) 22.8 M km² / 16.92%
Qing dynasty (1790) 14.7 M km² / 10.91%
Spanish Empire (1810) 13.7 M km² / 10.17%
Timeline of largest empires to date.
Timeline of largest empires at the time: USSR 22.5 M km².
Settler colonialism: type of colonialism in which foreign settlers immigrate and permanently reside on land already inhabited by Indigenous residents. Settler colonialism causes the replacement or reduction of existing peoples and cultures; some, but not all, scholars describe the process as inherently genocidal. It may be enacted by a variety of means, ranging from violent depopulation of the previous inhabitants to less deadly means, such as assimilation or recognition of Indigenous identity within a colonial framework. As with all forms of colonialism, it is based on exogenous domination, typically organized or supported by an imperial authority. Settler colonialism contrasts with exploitation colonialism, which entails an economic policy of conquering territory to exploit its population as cheap or free labor and its natural resources as raw material. In this way, settler colonialism lasts indefinitely, except in the rare event of complete evacuation or settler decolonization.
Informal empire: describes the spheres of influence which a polity may develop that translate into a degree of influence over a region or country, which is not a formal colony, protectorate, tributary or vassal state of empire, as a result of its commercial, strategic or military interests. An informal empire may assume a primarily economic guise. Strategic considerations or other concerns may bring about the creation of an imperial influence over a region not formally a component of empire. Origins: The city-state of Athens exerted control over the Delian league through an informal empire in the 5th c. BCE. According to historian Jeremy Black, the role of chartered companies such as the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, who operated beyond official state channels, were a forerunner to the concept of "informal empire". United Kingdom (British Empire). USA. France. Germany. Japan (Japanese diplomacy and military intervention in China from 1895 to the outbreak of WWII has also been described as an informal empire). Russian Empire → USSR (In a more formal interpretation of "Soviet empire", this meant absolutism, resembling Lenin's description of the tsarist empire as a "prison of the peoples" except that this "prison of the peoples" had been actualized during Stalin's regime after Lenin's death.). Ottoman Empire.
The empire on which the sun never sets (Spanish: el imperio donde nunca se pone el sol): used to describe certain global empires that were so extensive that it seemed as though it was always daytime in at least one part of its territory. It was originally used for the Empire of Charles V, who, as Duke of Burgundy, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to build a universal monarchy. The term was then used for the Spanish Empire of Philip II of Spain and successors when the empire reached a global territorial size, particularly in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was used for the British Empire, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period in which it reached a global territorial size. In the 20th c., the phrase has sometimes been adapted to refer to the global reach of American power (USA).
Hegemonic stability theory (HST): theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon. Thus, the fall of an existing hegemon or the state of no hegemon diminishes the stability of the international system. When a hegemon exercises leadership, either through diplomacy, coercion, or persuasion, it is actually deploying its "preponderance of power." This is called hegemony, which refers to a state's ability to "single-handedly dominate the rules and arrangements ...[of] international political and economic relations." HST can help analyze the rise of great powers to the role of world leader or hegemon. Also, it can be used to understand and to calculate the future of international politics through the discussion of the symbiotic relation between the declining hegemon and its rising successor.
Survival skills: techniques that a person may use in order to sustain life in any type of natural environment or built environment. These techniques are meant to provide basic necessities for human life which include water, food, and shelter. The skills also support proper knowledge and interactions with animals and plants to promote the sustaining of life over a period of time. Survival skills are often associated with the need to survive in a disaster situation. Survival skills are often basic ideas and abilities that ancients invented and used themselves for thousands of years. Outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking, horseback riding, fishing, and hunting all require basic wilderness survival skills, especially in handling emergency situations. Bushcraft and primitive living are most often self-implemented but require many of the same skills.
Barbarian: person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage. In idiomatic or figurative usage, a "barbarian" may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person.
"Barbarian" in Greek historical contexts
"Barbarian" in international historical contexts:
Berber and North African cultures
Hindu culture
Chinese culture: Historically, the Chinese used various words for foreign ethnic groups. They include terms like 夷 Yi, which is often translated as "barbarians." Despite this conventional translation, there are also other ways of translating Yi into English. Some of the examples include "foreigners," "ordinary others," "wild tribes," "uncivilized tribes," and so forth.
Japanese culture
American cultures
Ethnogenesis: process in which a group of people acquire an ethnicity, that is, a group identity that identifies them as an ethnic group. This can originate through a process of self-identification as well as come about as the result of outside identification.
Gender pay gap: difference between male and female earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings, according to the OECD. EU: pay gap ranging from less than 10% in Italy, Slovenia, Malta, Romania, Belgium, Portugal and Poland to more than 20% in Slovakia, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Germany, United Kingdom and Greece and more than 25% in Estonia and Austria.
Global Gender Gap Report: ranks countries according to their gender gaps, and their scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the inequality between women and men that has been closed.
Feminism
Torches of Freedom: phrase used to encourage women’s smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the women’s liberation movement in US. 1920s+
Men's rights movement (MRM): Issues: Adoption, Anti-dowry laws (India), Child custody (Fathers' rights movement), Divorce, Domestic violence, Education, False accusation of rape and Marital rape, Female privilege, Governmental structures, Health (men live shorter than women on average), Marriage strike (fewer males marrying), Military conscription, Parental abduction (India), Paternity fraud (called for compulsory paternity testing of all children), Prison (more males in jail than females), Reproductive rights (women decide abortion), Social security and insurance (women are given superior social security and tax benefits than men).
Arts, media
Arts, media (visual, audio, any other {human} perception)
Ilona Hubay: survey of existing copies of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, Die bekannten Exemplare der zweiundvierzigzeiligen Bibel und ihre Besitzer (1985)
Time loop: plot device in fiction whereby characters re-experience a span of time which is repeated, sometimes more than once, with some hope of breaking out of the cycle of repetition. The term "time loop" is sometimes used to refer to a causal loop; however, causal loops are unchanging and self-originating, whereas time loops are constantly resetting: when a certain condition is met, such as a death of a character or a clock reaching a certain time, the loop starts again, possibly with one or more characters retaining the memories from the previous loop. USA film Groundhog Day (1993).
List of films featuring time loops: characters experience the same period of time which is repeatedly resetting: when a certain condition is met, such as a death of a character or a clock reaches a certain time, the loop starts again, with one or more characters retaining the memories from the previous loop. The Time Travelers (1964); ...; Groundhog Day (1993); ...; The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (anime) (2006); ...; Palm Springs (2020); ...
Retroactive continuity (retcon): literary device in which established diegetic facts in the plot of a fictional work (those established through the narrative itself) are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former. Retcons are common in pulp fiction, and especially in comic books published by long-established publishers such as DC and Marvel. The long history of popular titles and the number of writers who contribute stories can often create situations that demand clarification or revision. Retcons also often appear in manga, soap operas, serial dramas, movie sequels, cartoons, professional wrestling angles, video games, radio series, and other forms of serial fiction.
Comic book death: the apparent death and subsequent return of a long-running character, in the comic book fan community. A comic book death is generally not taken seriously by readers and is rarely permanent or meaningful other than for story or thematic purposes. A common expression regarding comic book death was once "No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben", referring to the seminal importance of those characters' deaths to the title character: Captain America's sidekick (retconned dead in 1964), Batman's second Robin (dead in 1988), and Spider-Man's uncle (dead since 1962), respectively. This long-held tenet was broken in 2005, when Jason Todd returned to life as the Red Hood and Bucky was retconned to have survived the accident that seemingly killed him, and brought back as the Winter Soldier who had remained in the shadows for decades.
Piled Higher and Deeper (Piled Higher and Deeper - Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia; PhD Comics): B.S. = "bullshit"; "M.S." = "More of the Same" ("More Shit"); Ph.D. = "Piled Higher and Deeper". The Nameless Hero; Cecilia; Michael Slackenerny; Tajel...
Howl (poem) (Howl for Carl Solomon): poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature. It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation. 1957.10.03, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene. Overview and structure:
Part I: Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he had encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation".
Part II: "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Part II is about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as "Moloch". Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children. Lines: From "Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!" to "Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!" - A reference to several films by Fritz Lang, most notably Metropolis in which the name "Moloch" is directly related to a monstrous factory. Ginsberg also claimed he was inspired by Lang's M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Philosophical fiction: class of works of fiction which devote a significant portion of their content to the sort of questions normally addressed in philosophy. These might explore any facet of the human condition, including the function and role of society, the nature and motivation of human acts, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of art in human lives, the role of experience or reason in the development of knowledge, whether there exists free will, or any other topic of philosophical interest. Philosophical fiction works would include the so-called novel of ideas, including some science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, and the Bildungsroman.
Science fiction (sci-fi, SF): genre of speculative fiction that typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations. Science fiction, whose roots go back to ancient times, is related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction, and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction literature, film, television, and other media have become popular and influential over much of the world. Besides providing entertainment, it can also criticize present-day society, and is often said to inspire a "sense of wonder".
History: In 2007, Liu Cixin's novel, The Three-Body Problem, was published in China. It was translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books in 2014, and won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Liu the first Asian writer to win the award. Emerging themes in late 20th and early 21st century science fiction include environmental issues, the implications of the Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology, nanotechnology, and post-scarcity societies. Recent trends and subgenres include steampunk, biopunk, and mundane science fiction.
Social influence: As protest literature
Science fiction studies: Classification; As serious literature.
History of science fiction: literary genre of science fiction is diverse, and its exact definition remains a contested question among both scholars and devotees. There are two broad camps of thought, one that identifies the genre's roots in early fantastical works such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (earliest Sumerian text versions c. 2150–2000 BCE). A second approach argues that science fiction only became possible sometime between the 17th and early 19th centuries, following the scientific revolution and major discoveries in astronomy, physics, and mathematics. Scholar Robert Scholes calls the history of science fiction "the history of humanity's changing attitudes toward space and time ... the history of our growing understanding of the universe and the position of our species in that universe." In recent decades, the genre has diversified and become firmly established as a major influence on global culture and thought. Early science fiction: Ancient and early modern precursors: Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 AD), the Old English epic heroic poem Beowulf (8th-11th centuries AD), and the Middle German epic poem Nibelungenlied (c. 1230), their relative lack of references to science or technology puts them closer to fantasy rather than science fiction. French science fiction writer Pierre Versins also argued that Gilgamesh was the first science fiction work due to its treatment of human reason and the quest for immortality. In addition, Gilgamesh features a flood scene that in some ways resembles work of apocalyptic science fiction. Hindu epic Ramayana (5th to 4th century BC) includes Vimana flying machines able to travel into space or under water, and destroy entire cities using advanced weapons. Hindu epic Ramayana, Rigveda, Mahabharata. Aristophanes' The Clouds, The Birds. One frequently cited text is the Syrian-Greek writer Lucian's 2nd-century satire True History, which uses a voyage to outer space and conversations with alien life forms to comment on the use of exaggeration within travel literature and debates. One Thousand and One Nights. Other medieval literature. Proto-science fiction in the Enlightenment and Age of Reason: Thomas More's 1516 Utopia. Several works expanded on imaginary voyages to the moon, first in Johannes Kepler's Somnium (The Dream, 1634), which both Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to as the first work of science fiction. Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610–11) contains a prototype for the "mad scientist story". Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627). Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) contains descriptions of alien cultures and "weird science". 19th-century transitions: Shelley and Europe in the early 19th century: groundbreaking publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. Louis Geoffroy's Napoleon et la Conquête du Monde (1836), an alternate history of a world conquered by Napoleon. Verne and Wells: Verne's: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) mixed daring romantic adventure with technology that was either up to the minute or logically extrapolated into the future. Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make didactic points about his society. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, the technical details of the machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the stratification of English society. The story also uses Darwinian evolution (as would be expected in a former student of Darwin's champion, Huxley), and shows an awareness of Marxism. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by a deus ex machina, albeit a scientifically explained one. Late 19th-century expansion. Early 20th century: Birth of the pulps: Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), in which the first cinematic humanoid robot was seen, and the Italian Futurists' love of machines are indicative of both the hopes and fears of the world between the world wars. Modernist writing. Science fiction's impact on the public. The period of the 1940s and 1950s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Astounding Science Fiction Magazine: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. The Golden Age in other media. End of the Golden Age. The New Wave and its aftermath. Science fiction in the 1980s: Cyberpunk. Contemporary science fiction and its future: Postcyberpunk. Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in works such as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix series, in anime such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the emerging medium of video games, with the critically acclaimed Deus Ex and Metal Gear series.
Sense of wonder: intellectual and emotional state frequently invoked in discussions of science fiction and philosophy. His essay 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Professor of English, DePauw University, states: "The so-called sense of wonder has been considered one of the primary attributes of sf at least since the pulp era. The titles of the most popular sf magazines of that period—Astounding, Amazing, Wonder Stories, Thrilling, Startling, etc.—clearly indicate that the putative cognitive value of sf stories is more than counter-balanced by an affective power, to which, in fact, the scientific content is expected to submit." As a concept especially connected with science fiction: David Hartwell sees SF's 'sense of wonder' in more general terms: "Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe—any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader." David Hartwell in his book Age of Wonders as regards the relationship of the 'sense of wonder' in SF to religion or the religious experience: "... in doing so, it [science fiction] can create a rival sense of wonder, which acts almost as a replacement religion: a religion for those deprived of all traditional certainties in the wake of Darwin, Einstein, Plank, Godel, and Heisenberg."
Clarke's three laws: "3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Cyberpunk (the word coined in 1983 or a bit earlier; focuses on "high tech{leading/cutting/bleeding edge or state of the art} and low life") &
Cyberpunk derivatives:
The Diamond Age (1995): continuation of "Snow Crash" (Y.T.); failure of strong AI (only soft sub-par with human versions exist), nanotech, from the frachulates to phyles, comparing East (China, Celestial (Middle) Kingdom) and West (Neo-Victorians, Vickies)
Science fantasy: Science fantasy vs. science fiction ⇒ high (bleeding edge)-tech = supernatural & fantasy, e.g. "teleportation by matter-transmitter-beam is science fiction, teleportation by incantation is fantasy"
Prometheus Award: award for libertarian science fiction novels given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society, which also publishes a quarterly journal Prometheus
The Culture: fictional interstellar anarchic and utopian society. By the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. The Culture series = science fiction novels and works of short fiction. Egalitarian society of beings and AIs (AIs from super-huge capabilities, to drones, the small AIs), i.e. AIs are equal to beings (made of flesh and many improvements). Sublimation as death into the other dimensions. Post-scarcity economics. Non-interference, but war and secret agencies exist.
We (novel): "A repeated mantra in the novel is that there is no final revolution." (Yevgeny Zamyatin; 1921 written in ru, 1924 published in en) →
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley; 1931, 1932) →
Nineteen Eighty-Four (aka 1984; George Orwell; 1949)
Niven's laws: named after science fiction author Larry Niven, who has periodically published them as "how the Universe works" as far as he can tell. These were most recently rewritten on January 29, 2002 (and published in Analog Magazine in the November 2002 issue).
Never fire a laser at a mirror.
F × S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naïve.
It is easier to destroy than to create.
Ethics change with technology.
The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.
Group mind (science fiction) (group ego, mind coalescence, or gestalt intelligence): plot device in which multiple minds, or consciousnesses, are linked into a single, collective consciousness or intelligence. The first alien hive society was depicted in H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) while the use of human hive minds in literature goes back at least as far as David H. Keller's The Human Termites (published in Wonder Stories in 1929) and Olaf Stapledon's science fiction novel Last and First Men (1930), which is the first known use of the term "group mind" in science fiction. This term may be used interchangeably with hive mind. "Hive mind" tends to describe a group mind in which the linked individuals have no identity or free will and are possessed or mind-controlled as extensions of the hive mind.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".
Shirley Jackson -
The Lottery: "People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch."
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
Classical Latin: The ages of Latin - Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel (1870). Authors of the Golden Age (83 BC - 14 AD): Republican (Ciceronian Age) and Augustan; Authors of the Silver Age: Through the death of Trajan (117 AD) and Through the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD)
q.v. (quod videre): "which to see"; used as an imperative. Used after a term or phrase that should be looked up elsewhere in the current document or book. For more than one term or phrase, the plural is quae videre (qq.v.). Similar: v.s. (vide supra) means "see above"; v.i. (vide infra) means "see below".
cf. (confer): literally meaning "bring together", is used to refer to other material or ideas which may provide similar or different information or arguments. It is mainly used in scholarly contexts, such as in academic (mainly humanities, physics, chemistry, and biology) or legal texts. It is translated, and can be read aloud, as "compare".
sic: added immediately after a quoted word or phrase (or a longer piece of text), indicates that the quoted words have been transcribed exactly as spelled or presented in the original source, complete with any erroneous spelling or other presentation. The usual purpose is to inform the reader that any errors or apparent errors in the transcribed material do not arise from transcription errors, and the errors have been repeated intentionally, i.e. that they are reproduced exactly as set down by the original writer or printer. Sic is generally placed inside square brackets, or in parentheses (round brackets), and traditionally in italic, as is customary when printing a foreign word.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations.
Cliché: expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.
Paremiology (παροιμία (paroimía), meaning 'proverb, maxim, saw'): collection and study of proverbs.
Paremiography (παροιμία - paroimía, "proverb, maxim, saw" and γράφω - grafō, "write, inscribe"): study of the collection and writing of proverbs. It is a sub-field of paremiology, the study of proverbs.
World of A Song of Ice and Fire: The Known World. Most of the story takes place on the continent of Westeros and in a large political entity known as the Seven Kingdoms. Those kingdoms are spread across nine regions: the North (House Stark at Winterfell; Wall & Night's Watch), the Iron Islands (House Greyjoy of Pyke, worship the Drowned God), the Riverlands (Harrenhal, Riverrun (House Tully), The Twins (House Frey)), the Vale (House Arryn at Eyrie), the Westerlands (House Lannister at Casterly Rock), the Stormlands (House Baratheon at Storm's End), the Reach (most lush and fertile region of Westeros, House Tyrell at Highgarden; Oldtown - the oldest city in Westeros, home to the Maester's Citadel, and the previous seat of the Faith of the Seven), the Crownlands (King's Landing is the largest city in Westeros and royal capital; Dragonstone - from here Targaryen family conquered the Seven Kingdoms 100 years after the Doom of Valyria), and Dorne (House Martell at Sunspear). A massive wall of ice and old magic separates the Seven Kingdoms from the largely unmapped area to the north. The vast continent of Essos is east of Westeros, across the "Narrow Sea". The closest foreign nations to Westeros are the Free Cities, which is a collection of independent city-states along the western edge of Essos. The lands along the southern coastline of Essos are called the Lands of the Summer Sea and include Slavers Bay and the ruins of Valyria. The latter is the former home of Westeros' Targaryen kings. George R. R. Martin set the Ice and Fire story in an alternative world of Earth, a "secondary world", such as J. R. R. Tolkien pioneered with Middle-Earth. The Ice and Fire narrative is set in a post-magic world where people no longer believe in supernatural things such as the Others. Although the characters understand the natural aspects of their world, they do not know or understand its magical elements.
Westeros: The first inhabitants of the continent were the Children of the Forest, a nature-worshipping anthropoid species who carved the faces of their gods in weirwood trees. Some time later, the First Men's attempts at cultivating the land led to a war with the Children of the Forest that eventually was settled by an agreement known as "The Pact". This was the beginning of the Age of Heroes. During that time, the First Men adopted the gods of the Children of the Forest. Those gods later became known in Westeros as the Old gods. Eight thousand years before the events of the novels, an enigmatic species called the Others emerged from the furthermost north during the decades-long winter known as "The Long Night". The Children of the Forest and the First Men jointly repelled the Others and then built a massive wall barring passage from the far north. Sometime later, the Andals invaded Westeros and established the Faith of the Seven, writing, and steel. Only the North remained unconquered. The Children of the Forest disappeared from Andal lands. Over time, seven kingdoms were forged across Westeros. Three hundred years before the novels begin, Aegon the Conqueror and his two Targaryen sister-wives came from Dragonstone and landed at present-day King's Landing. The three assembled a temporary battalion, known as "Aegon's Fort", which grew into the capital city. Their powerful dragons overwhelmed six of the Seven Kingdoms through conquest or treaty, with Dorne remaining independent for another two hundred years until it was absorbed through a marriage-alliance. The Targaryens built the Iron Throne, which consists of the swords of defeated rulers, fused together by dragonfire. Targaryens remained the ruling power on the continent until deposed by Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon.
Essos: large eastern continent. Free Cities: Braavos (was not a Valyrian colony, but a secret refuge from Valyrian expansion), Pentos, Volantis (oldest and proudest of the Free Cities); Lorath, Lys, Myr, Norvos, Qohor, Tyrosh. Central Essos: Valyria (Doom of Valyria; Valyrians have silver hair and violet eyes; Targaryens are of the blood of old Valyria, who escaped before The Doom); Dothraki Sea - vast, flat grassland, inhabited by the Dothraki people, a copper-skinned race of warlike nomads with their own language and unique culture, Dothraki live in hordes called khalasars, each led by a chief called a khal; Lhazar - Lhazareen, a peaceful people with bronze skin, flat faces, and almond eyes are shepherds. Slaver's Bay: Astapor, Yunkai, Meeren. Eastern Essos: Red Waste is a great desert-like area; Qarth. Asshai and the Shadow Lands. Ibben. Yi Ti, Plains of Jogos Nhai.
Sothoros or Sothoryos: third continent of the known world. Sothoros is large, plague ridden, covered in jungles and largely unexplored.
Themes in A Song of Ice and Fire: Magic and realism: Martin has said he believes in "judicious use of magic" in epic fantasy; Children of the Forest are presented as the original inhabitants of Westeros, but unseen for thousands of years; The Others (White Walkers); Dragons. Politics and society. Moral ambiguity: Laura Miller of The New Yorker summarized that "Characters who initially seem likable commit reprehensible acts, and apparent villains become sympathetic over time", and The Atlantic said that even the TV adaptation "does not present the viewer with an easily identifiable hero, but with an ensemble of characters with sometimes sympathetic, often imperfect motives"; However, according to Martin, Tyrion Lannister is the most morally neutral main character in the book, which, along with his cynicism, is what makes him his favorite character. Violence and death: scene called the "Red Wedding", which occurs about two thirds through A Storm of Swords and leaves several major characters dead, was the hardest scene Martin had ever written; Martin repeatedly skipped writing the chapter and eventually wrote it last for A Storm of Swords. Sexuality: Martin equipped many of the Ice and Fire characters with a sex drive; Martin was also fascinated by medieval contrasts where knights venerated their ladies with poems and wore their favors in tournaments while their armies raped women in wartime. Identity: point of view characters change their names, even to a point where they lose their identity in the chapter title; Arya - Arry, Nymeria, Nan, Salty and Cat of the Canals, among others, 'The Blind Girl' and 'The Ugly Little Girl'; Theon Greyjoy - Reek, The Prince of Winterfell, The Turncloak, A Ghost in Winterfell, and finally, Theon again. Feminism. Religion: different kinds of magic in the Ice and Fire world may be manifestations of the same forces, whereby readers can puzzle out the relation between the religions and the various magics; but the validity, teachings, and power of the competing religions in Ice and Fire, are left ambiguous, and Martin has said the series' gods are unlikely to appear as dei ex machina in Westeros; Faith of the Seven - predominant religion of Westeros, although it has only a few followers on the Iron Islands and in the North; Old Gods - Children of the Forest revered Weirwood trees, when the First Men (human beings) came to Westeros from Essos, they accepted the Old Gods until the Andal Invasion converted the southern population of Westeros to the Faith of the Seven; Drowned God - local religion of the Iron Islands; R'hllor - Red God and the Lord of Light, is a god worshipped primarily across the Narrow Sea, and his priests have only had a small presence in the Seven Kingdoms at the beginning of A Game of Thrones, strong focus on prophecy and on ecstatic visions, antithesis of R'hllor is the "Great Other": a god of ice, darkness, and death; Many-Faced God - deity worshipped by a guild of assassins from the Free City of Braavos known as the Faceless Men. Food
White Walker (the Others): "Tall ... and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk" with eyes "deeper and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice". Accompanied by intense cold, they wear armor that "seemed to change color as it moved", and wield thin crystal swords capable of shattering steel. The Others move silently, and they speak their own language; Martin writes that their voices are "like the cracking of ice on a winter lake". Creatures killed by the Others soon reanimate as wights: undead with pallid skin, black hands and similarly glowing blue eyes. Dragonglass has no effect on them. The humans who live in the north beyond The Wall—called "wildlings" by the inhabitants of Westeros—burn their dead so that they do not become wights.
Le ChevalierC. Auguste Dupin: fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Dupin is not a professional detective and his motivations for solving the mysteries change throughout the three stories. Using what Poe termed "ratiocination", Dupin combines his considerable intellect with creative imagination, even putting himself in the mind of the criminal. His talents are strong enough that he appears able to read the mind of his companion, the unnamed narrator of all three stories. Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined. The character laid the groundwork for fictional detectives to come, including Sherlock Holmes, and established most of the common elements of the detective fiction genre.
Sherlock Holmes: fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard. First appearing in print in 1887's A Study in Scarlet, the character's popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891; additional tales appeared from then until 1927, eventually totalling four novels and 56 short stories. All but one[His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes (WWI)] are set in the Victorian or Edwardian eras, between about 1880 and 1914. Inspiration for the character: Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin is generally acknowledged as the first detective in fiction and served as the prototype for many later characters, including Holmes. Conan Doyle once wrote, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed ... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Similarly, the stories of Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq were extremely popular at the time Conan Doyle began writing Holmes, and Holmes's speech and behaviour sometimes follow those of Lecoq.
Comic books
Dark Horse Comics: USA comic book, graphic novel, and manga publisher founded in Milwaukie, Oregon by Mike Richardson in 1986. Dark Horse Comics has emerged as the fourth largest comic publishing company in the United States of America. Dividing profits with artists and writers, as well as supporting artistic and creative rights in the comic book industry, Dark Horse Comics has become a strong proponent of publishing licensed material that often does not fit into mainstream media. Several titles include: Sin City, Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 300, and Star Wars. In 2021.12, Swedish gaming company Embracer Group launched its acquisition of Dark Horse Media, Dark Horse Comics' parent company, and completed the buyout in 2022.03.
Galactus: fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Formerly a mortal man, Galactus is a cosmic entity who consumes planets to sustain his life force, and serves a functional role in the upkeep of the primary Marvel continuity. Galactus was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appeared in the comic book Fantastic Four #48, published in March 1966. In the character's first appearance, Galactus was depicted as a god-like figure who feeds by draining living planets of their energy, and operates without regard to the morality and judgments of mortal beings.
Ultron: supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, and initially made his debut as an unnamed character in The Avengers #54 (July 1968), with his first full appearance in The Avengers #55 (August 1968). He is a self-aware and highly intelligent robot who develops a god complex and a grudge against his creator Hank Pym. His goal to destroy humanity has brought him into repeated conflict with the Avengers.
List of DC Multiverse worlds: The original Multiverse: Catalogued; Unclassified. The 52 Multiverse. The Multi-Multiverse: The New 52 and DC Rebirth; The Multiverse-2; The Dark Multiverse. Animated properties. Television series: Smallville; Arrowverse: Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis. DC Films. Video games: Injustice, Infinite Crisis. A convergence of Multiverses.
Superman: Red Son: three-issue prestige format comic book mini-series published by DC Comics that was released under their Elseworlds imprint in 2003. Author Mark Millar created the comic with the premise "What if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union?" It received critical acclaim and was nominated for the 2004 Eisner Award for best limited series. Luthor plans to shrink Moscow, but this plan fails when Brainiac, his collaborator, shrinks Stalingrad instead. Superman intervenes and retrieves both Brainiac's central processing unit and the tiny city, putting an end to the Brainiac-Luthor cooperation. He is unable to restore Stalingrad and its inhabitants to their proper size. This becomes his one failure and a source of great guilt. Superman is committed to "winning the argument" with the U.S., and repeatedly refuses Brainiac's suggestions of an invasion. Stalingrad remains his one failure, now contained within a protective glass "bottle". First Lady Lois Luthor visits Paradise Island to forge an alliance with the Amazon empire, now ruled by an embittered and vengeful Wonder Woman. Superman attacks the East Coast, confronting and defeating the Green Lantern Marine Corps, which is led by Colonel Hal Jordan. The Amazon forces, commanded by Wonder Woman, attack Superman but are quickly defeated, along with a collection of "super-menaces" (including the Atomic Skull, the Parasite and Doomsday) that Luthor had put together over the years. Brainiac's spaceship cuts the U.S. Pacific Fleet to pieces, and the two superbeings meet at the White House. They are greeted by Lois Luthor with the last weapon, a small note written by Lex that reads: "Why don't you just put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?" Realizing he has meddled in affairs that he had no place in, Superman orders Brainiac to end the invasion. Brainiac, however, reveals it has never been under Superman's control, and instead attacks Superman with green radiation. Brainiac is shut down from inside by Luthor, who evaded the surgery. As the singularities powering Brainiac's ship threaten to collapse, Superman rockets it into space, where it explodes. The Earth is saved, but Superman is apparently dead. At Luthor's funeral, it is revealed that Superman survived the explosion of Brainiac's ship and is apparently immortal. Superman attends the funeral wearing a business suit and thick glasses essentially identical to the appearance of Clark Kent, an identity he never adopted in this timeline. Billions of years in the future, Earth is being torn apart by tidal stresses from the sun, which has become a red giant. Luthor's distant descendant, Jor-L, sends his infant son, Kal-L, rocketing back into the past. The final panels of the comic book depict the landing of Kal-L's timeship in a Ukrainian collective in 1938, effectively causing a predestination paradox (and, thus, making Superman a descendant of Luthor and Lois).
Vatican Library (Latin: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Italian: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana): library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City. Formally established in 1475, although it is much older, it is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula. The Vatican Library is a research library for history, law, philosophy, science and theology. The Vatican Library is open to anyone who can document their qualifications and research needs.
Bibliotheca Palatina of Heidelberg: the most important library of the German Renaissance, numbering approximately 5,000 printed books and 3,524 manuscripts. The Bibliotheca was a prominent prize captured during the Thirty Years' War, taken as booty by Maximilian of Bavaria, and given to the Pope in a symbolic and political gesture.
Virtual library, searchable, even viewable. BUT only out-of-copyright works (i.e. 100+ years after the authors death). The legal implications & economics (e.g. monopoly...):
Google Book Search Settlement Agreement: do the USA organisations, like AG, have the right to discuss about the copyright of the books written in the last 100 years by (passport of) DE, ES, FR, Japanese, Chinese, etc. authors?
Book Rights Registry: the outcome of the settlement, a legal "watchdog & distributor"?
Open Content Alliance: opt-in (after asking and receiving permission from the copyright holder); opposite in philosophy to Google Books {obviously, having much fewer books than Google Books}
Ibiblio: "collection of collections"; hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source software, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.
Authority control: process that organizes library catalog and bibliographic information by using a single, distinct name for each topic; one-of-a-kind headings are applied consistently throughout the catalog, and work with other organizing data such as linkages and cross references. Each heading is described briefly in terms of its scope and usage, and this organization helps the library staff maintain the catalog and make it user-friendly for researchers; authority comes from authors. Very similar to the unique Wikipedia URL for any article, topic or category.
National:
Integrated Authority File (
de:Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND)): eine Normdatei für Personen, Körperschaften, Kongresse, Geografika, Sachschlagwörter und Werktitel, die vor allem zur Erschließung von Literatur in Bibliotheken dient, zunehmend aber auch von Archiven, Museen, Projekten und in Web-Anwendungen genutzt wird. Sie wird von der DNB, allen deutschsprachigen Bibliotheksverbünden, der Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) und zahlreichen weiteren Institutionen kooperativ geführt.
Name Authority File (
de:Personennamendatei (PND)): eine Normdatei von Personen, die vor allem zur Erschließung von Literatur in Bibliotheken diente. Die DNB sowie alle deutschen und österreichischen Bibliotheksverbünde führten sie bis 2012 kooperativ. Ende 2012.04 ist die PND in der GND aufgegangen.
International:
Wikipedia:Authority control: template links Wikipedia articles (and user pages) to the corresponding entries in catalogs of national libraries and other authority files all over the world; can display identifiers from the following authority files: GND (German National Library), LCCN (Library of Congress), SELIBR (National Library of Sweden), VIAF and ORCID.
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC; 1967-): "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"
Dublin Core: set of 15 metadata elements to provide a small and fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described and catalogued. ISO Standard 15836.
WorldCat: union catalog (combined catalog from many libraries) which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is built and maintained collectively by the participating libraries.
Virtual International Authority File (VIAF): joint project of several national libraries and operated by OCLC; project was initiated by the German National Library and the U.S. Library of Congress.
National Union Catalog: printed catalog of books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries, issued serially beginning in the 1950s for printed works before 1956. It contains photocopies of printed catalog cards from major American and Canadian libraries, arranged alphabetically by author's last name, or by title for books that have no author, such as the Bible. 754 600-page volumes make 3 ton in weight.
International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI): method for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, TV programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 numerical digits divided into four blocks. Developed under the auspices of ISO as Draft International Standard 27729, the valid standard was published 2012.03.15. The ISO technical committee 46, subcommittee 9 (TC 46/SC 9) is responsible for the development of the standard. ISNI will provide a tool for disambiguating names that might otherwise be confused, and will link the data about names that are collected and used in all sectors of the media industries. ORCID identifiers are reserved block of ISNI identifiers, for scholarly researchers; the two organisations coordinate their efforts.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID): nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors. This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature can be hard to electronically recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems; "author DOI"; open and independent registry intended to be the de facto standard for author identification in science and related academic publishing.
ResearcherID: identifying system for scientific authors; introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters.
Musicology: Music history or historical musicology, ethnomusicology (formerly comparative musicology), popular music studies (aka popular musicology), music theory (analysis and composition), music psychology and cognition and therapy, authentic performance (performance practice and research)
Music and mathematics: sound is part of physics, physics is written in math notation → music is written in maths (and through extension - physics, e.g. frequency (Hz), amplitude (Pa RMS [root mean square],
sound pressure: "zero" reference sound pressure in air is 20 µPa RMS → dB), oscillations (change) in atmospheric pressure), force (N), spectrogram (frequency vs amplitude))
Definition of music: philosophy of art, lexicography, composing, music criticism, musicians, semiotics or semiology, linguistics, sociology, and neurology
Psychoacoustics: scientific study of sound perception. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological and physiological responses associated with sound (including speech and music). Peak sensitivity of human ears is in the range of 1000-Hz to 4000+Hz. Psychoacoustic model provides for high quality lossy signal compression by describing which parts of a given digital audio signal can be removed (or aggressively compressed) safely — that is, without significant losses in the (consciously) perceived quality of the sound.
Equal-loudness contour
Dynamic range compression (DRC, compression): reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range (i.e. silent parts appear louder and the louder parts appear more silent - the loudness of the whole music piece is varying very little after compression). TV commercials, loudness war (and loss of music quality)
Limiting: non-linear clipping, in which a signal is passed through normally but "sheared off" when it would normally exceed a certain threshold.
ReplayGain (Replay Gain): proposed standard, to measure the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats
Auto-Tune: audio processor created by Antares Audio Technologies, which uses a proprietary device to measure and alter pitch in vocal and instrumental music recording and performances through use of a phase vocoder; originally intended to disguise or correct off-key inaccuracies, allowing vocal tracks to be perfectly tuned despite originally being slightly off-key.
Trailer music: background music used for film previews, which is not always from the film's soundtrack.
Big-money blockbusters:
Hollywood accounting: opaque accounting methods used by the film, video and television industry to budget and record profits for film projects.
Black List (survey): annual survey of the "most liked" motion picture screenplays not yet produced. It has been published every year since 2005 on the second Friday of December by Franklin Leonard, a development executive who subsequently worked at Universal Pictures and Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment. The website states that these are not necessarily "the best" screenplays, but rather "the most liked", since it is based on a survey of studio and production company executives.
Visual arts
History of graphic design: a great article full of figures/pictures, but, regrettably, the media of the last ~100+ years are removed due to copyright.
Prada Marfa: art for money, money for art; vandalism story
lt:Virtuali realybė: 2018 m. 75-ame Venecijos kino festivalio programoje „Venice Virtual Reality“ režisierė Kristina Buožytė ir prodiuseris Vitalijus Žukas pristatė virtualios realybės animaciją „Angelų takais“. Ši daugiau nei dvejus metus kurta animacija perkelia dailininko M. K. Čiurlionio paveikslus į virtualią erdvę. Dailininko kūryba įgauna kitą formą, trimatėje aplinkoje ji tarsi atgyja – kiekvienas paveikslo elementas yra animuotas, o fone skamba Čiurlionio ir Mindaugo Urbaičio muzika. Ši instaliacija veikė M.K. Čiurlionio dailės muziejuje, Nacionalinės dailės galerijoje.
CIE 1931 color space (CIE 1931 RGB and CIE 1931 XYZ color spaces): the first mathematically defined color spaces. CIE XYZ color space was derived from a series of experiments done in the late 1920s by William David Wright and John Guild, results were combined into the specification of the CIE RGB color space, from which the CIE XYZ color space was derived.
RGB:
YUV:
Other:
HSL and HSV: are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an RGB color model, which rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be more intuitive and perceptually relevant than the cartesian (cube) representation; 1970s; both are also criticized for not adequately separating color-making attributes, or for their lack of perceptual uniformity.
International Commission on Illumination (CIE; fr: Commission internationale de l'éclairage; 1913-; HQ=Vienna, AT): international authority on light, illumination, colour, and colour spaces; successor to Commission Internationale de Photométrie
Absolute color space: calorimetrically defined; ICC profile. Absolute color spaces: all in the "Template:Color space"?
IT8: set of ANSI standards for color communications and control specifications. Backed by USA gov.
Color calibration: measure and/or adjust the color response of a device (input or output) to establish a known relationship to a standard color space. Color calibration is a requirement for all devices taking an active part of a color managed workflow (e.g. printing shop). Needs colorimeter and software. Are LCDs, CCDs (cameras), and printers calibrated by the producer? If so, to which error?
Planckian locus (black body locus): path or locus that the color of an incandescent black body would take in a particular chromaticity space as the blackbody temperature changes. It goes from deep red at low temperatures through orange, yellowish white, white, and finally bluish white at very high temperatures.
Color filter array (CFA), color filter mosaic (CFM): mosaic of tiny color filters placed over the pixel sensors of an image sensor (e.g. CCD) to capture color information.
Discogs (short for discographies): electronic music releases and releases on vinyl media
Internet radio: legal details:
SoundExchange is non-profit performance rights organization that collects royalties on the behalf of sound recording copyright owners (SRCOs — record labels, generally) and featured artists for non-interactive digital transmissions, including satellite and Internet radio.
Internet Radio Equality Act: proposed legislation (have been abandoned in committee, as of July 19, 2008).
Open Music Model (2002 paper “Advanced Peer-Based Technology Business Models”): Open file sharing, Open file formats, Open membership, Open payment (similar to microtransactions), Open competition. Proposed price: 5$/(month * person). Achievements: iTunes Store removed DRM in 2008, Amazon.com offers DRM-free music since 2007.
Spotify: Swedish DRM-based music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Free accounts supported by visual and radio-style advertising or for paid subscriptions without ads and with a range of extra features such as higher bitrate streams and offline access to music. Despotify & Spot: FOSS client by "group of Swedish computer science researchers and security professionals who "believe strongly in the right to tinker with technology"".
Soundcloud: allows collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio recordings
Pandora Radio: uses the properties of a song or artist (a subset of the 400 attributes provided by the Music Genome Project) in order to seed a "station" that plays music with similar properties. User feedback is used to refine the station's results, deemphasizing certain attributes when a user "dislikes" a particular song and emphasizing other attributes when a user "loves" a song. This is an example of a content-based approach.
Last.fm: creates a "station" of recommended songs by observing what bands and individual tracks that the user has listened to on a regular basis and comparing those against the listening behavior of other users. Last.fm will play tracks that do not appear in the user's library, but are often played by other users with similar interests. As this approach leverages the behavior of users, it is an example of a collaborative filtering technique.
Scribd: document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format
Docstoc: electronic document repository and online store, aimed at providing professional, financial and legal documents for the business community; users can upload, share and sell their own documents, or purchase professional documents written in-house by professionals and lawyers.
Video on demand (VOD) or Audio and Video On Demand (AVOD). Best providers:
Blip (website): 2013.11.07 Blip began removing the content of producers that were not generating enough revenue, replacing their content with the following message, "After many years of being an open platform, Blip is now taking its mission to bring the best original web series to our audience more seriously. To accomplish this, it is essential that we fully support producers who are dedicated to their craft and are committed to making their shows successful. This renewed focus means that we have had to make some tough decisions about how and where we direct Blip’s resources. Over the past few months, we have been reviewing the Blip content library and identifying accounts that don’t meet our Terms of Service. These accounts were removed on November 7, 2013. If you have encountered a Blip page or player with the message "Sorry, this show has been removed from Blip", it means the show you are looking for has been removed."
Curiosity Stream: USA media company and subscription video streaming service that offers documentary programming including films, series, and TV shows. It was launched in 2015 by the founder of the Discovery Channel, John S. Hendricks. As of 2021, it was reported to have approximately 20 million subscribers worldwide across its direct and bundled platforms.
Nebula (streaming service): video-on-demand streaming service provider. It was founded by Dave Wiskus and Standard creators as a complement to creators' other distribution channels, mainly YouTube. Nebula is a joint venture between Standard and the creators, with a minority holding by Curiosity Stream. Profits from subscriptions are divided equally between creators and Standard based on watch time.
Netflix: USA over-the-top content platform and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California. 2020.07.10 Netflix became the largest entertainment/media company by market capitalization.
de:Maxdome: only in DE. No flat rate, must pay per each movie; must use some MaxDome TV or whatever HW. Much worse than Netflix, but Netflix is not in DE [14/03/02].
List of streaming media services: over-the-top media service (OTT) is a streaming media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet. OTT bypasses cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms, the companies that traditionally act as controllers or distributors of such content. Most of these services are owned by a major film studio. Some streaming services started as an add-on to Blu-ray offerings, which are supplements to the programs watched. Streaming video on demand: Over 100 mln. subscribers: Netflix; Disney+, Hulu & ESPN+; Amazon Prime Video; iQIYI (Baidu); Tencent Video. 50–100 mln. subscribers: Max & Discovery+ (Warner Bros. Discovery); Youku (Alibaba); YouTube Premium (combined total of YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers); Paramount+ with Showtime; Vidio (Emtek (Indonesia)); Apple TV+.
Home video:
The Criterion Collection (Criterion): USA home video distribution company which focuses on licensing "important classic and contemporary films" and selling them to film aficionados. Criterion has helped to standardize characteristics of home video such as film restoration, using the letterbox format for widescreen films, and adding bonus features and commentary tracks.
Template:Book Publishing Process (called "the editing process" by Eric Flint, "the central "transmission belt" between authors and readers"):
Editing: process of selecting and preparing (any) media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete work
Publisher's reader (first reader; or film reader for films): person paid by a publisher or book club to read manuscripts from the slush pile
Slush pile: set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts sent either directly to the publisher or literary agent by authors, or to the publisher by an agent not known to the publisher.
authonomy @HarperCollins.
Copy (written): written material, in contrast to photographs or other elements of layout. In advertising: output of copywriters; In publishing: the text in books, magazines, and newspapers; In books, it means the text as written by the author, which the copy editor then prepares for typesetting and printing; In newspapers and magazines: "body copy", "display copy".
Copywriting: use of words and ideas to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Term copywriter is generally limited to promotional situations, regardless of the medium. To write an ad (advertisement) copy.
Publishers:
old-school (dead trees):
Template:Bookstore chains: Barnes & Noble is trying to go to new-school with Nook. Let's see if B&N can compete with Amazon's Kindle (11/12/01).
Future of newspapers: "Simply put," wrote Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed." New media vs. dead-tree media to bring information to the masses.
new-school (e-publication): Amazon (combined with dead-tree delivery)
Pottermore: alternative to Amazon, B&N, Sony & Apple iBooks: when author has all the rights and J.K. Rowling decided to make the ebooks available on her own terms and then struck agreements with Amazon, B&N and Sony, while Apple failed to agree. It is a website and an additional experience beyond the books (games? Additional content?). Is this the future of the published book brands when the author knows that the word-of-mouth is the best ad?
eBooks
History of ebooks; economic practice of "selling books": from free to DRM:
Jim Baen: he and Simon & Schuster created one of the first, if not the first, writer-to-fan discussion forums "Baen's Bar" capable of using a mix of technologies to support the overall promotion and interest in reading books for education and entertainment. Jim Baen disliked Adobe pdf format for reading purposes. Baen was a publisher and editor.
Baen Books: American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen; science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy. Since 1999, Baen emphasized epublishing and Internet-focused promotions. DRM free ebooks. Electronic versions by Baen are produced in five common formats from webwrights (HTML, Palm Pilot/Mobipocket/Kindle format, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader versions), all unencrypted. When you purchase a title from Baen, you can read it online, download in any format you want as often as you want.
Baen's Bar: first a BBS, since early 2000s chat client
Webscriptions: web services company that has sold e-books without DRM since 1999.
Baen Free Library (founded in autumn 1999 by science fiction writer Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen): represents an interesting experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright. It appears that sales of both the books made available free and other books by the same author, even from a different publisher, increase when the electronic version is made available free of charge.
Comparison of e-book readers: table is missing: UTF-8 (Unicode) support. New eBooks should have e-ink + LCD + touch screen and switch between reading and browsing modes (LCD turn on/off, e-ink: disappear, appear)
Amazon Kindle: Business model: Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): authors and publishers independently publish their books directly to Kindle and Kindle Apps worldwide. The published ebooks are different from physical books because Amazon sells a license to the ebooks rather than the copy, just like software licenses of Apple or Microsoft → again a legal battle to determine if ebooks are different from physical books, if one can resell them, if patent-like law or physical-commodity law applies in this case (in software licenses and patents the legal battles are ongoing). DRM of Amazon on licensed copies of ebooks on Kindle.
Michael S. Hart: best known as the inventor of the electronic book (or ebook) and the founder of Project Gutenberg. Most of the early postings were typed in by Hart himself.
CGP Grey: American–Irish YouTube content creator, known for creating the edutainment channel CGP Grey; channel features short explanatory videos on varying subjects, including politics, geography, economics, and British culture.
Humans Need Not Apply (2014.08.13): short Internet documentary film, directed, produced, written, and edited by C. G. P. Grey. The film focuses on the future of the integration of automation into economics, as well as the worldwide workforce.
Kurzgesagt: German animation studio founded by Philipp Dettmer. The studio's YouTube channel focuses on minimalist animated educational content, using the flat design style. It discusses scientific, technological, political, philosophical and psychological subjects.
Numberphile: educational YouTube channel featuring videos that explore topics from a variety of fields of mathematics. In the early days of the channel, each video focused on a specific number, but the channel has since expanded its scope, featuring videos on more advanced mathematical concepts such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Riemann hypothesis.
3Blue1Brown: math YouTube channel created by Grant Sanderson. The channel focuses on higher mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Topics covered include linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, the Riemann hypothesis, Fourier transform, quaternions and topology.
Green brothers: John (born 1977) and Hank (born 1980), are two USA entrepreneurs, social activists, authors, and YouTube vloggers. The two extensively work together, having started their collaborative popularity with a daily vlog project in 2007 titled "Brotherhood 2.0", in which they only communicated in vlogs posted to YouTube for a year. The Greens' portfolio of online work now includes their main Vlogbrothers channel, Crash Course, SciShow, their podcast Dear Hank & John, and several other projects spanning several forms of media. Both brothers have become known for their individual projects as well. John has written several books which have received widespread acclaim and popularity, including The Fault in Our Stars. The novel was made into a 2014 film adaptation, which was number one at the box office during its opening weekend and grossed over $307 million worldwide. Hank has founded several companies, starting when he created "EcoGeek", a blog dedicated to environmentally beneficial advancements in technology. The blog was originally a class project of Hank's, while he studied at the University of Montana, but eventually progressed into becoming a major environmental publication, which would grab the attention of Time.
John Green (1977.08.24-; Children: 2, with Sarah Urist Green (m. 2006)): USA author, YouTuber, podcaster, and philanthropist. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time.
Esther Earl (1994.08.03–2010.08.25): USA author, internet vlogger, online personality and Nerdfighter, as well as an activist in the Harry Potter Alliance. Prior to her death from cancer in 2010, Earl befriended author John Green, who credited her for the inspiration to complete his bestselling 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars.
Hank Green (1980.05.05-): USA vlogger, science communicator, entrepreneur, author, internet producer, and musician.
Crash Course (YouTube): educational YouTube channel started by John Green and Hank Green (collectively the Green brothers). Crash Course was one of the hundred initial channels funded by YouTube's $100 million original channel initiative. The channel launched a preview in 2011.12.02, and as of March 2022, it has accumulated over 14 mln subscribers and 1.6 bln video views. The channel launched with John and Hank presenting their respective World History and Biology series; the early history of the channel continued the trend of John and Hank presenting humanities and science courses, respectively.
Vlogbrothers: video blog channel on YouTube. The Internet-based show is created and hosted by the Green brothers. The first incarnation of the brothers' online broadcasting was the "Brotherhood 2.0" project, preceding the establishment of the pair's regular vlogging activity through the Vlogbrothers channel.
Sam Denby: USA YouTuber, best known for creating the edutainment YouTube channels Wendover Productions, Half as Interesting, Extremities, and Jet Lag: The Game. Across all of Denby's channels, he has accumulated more than a billion views.
Brilliant (website) (brilliant.org): USA for-profit company and associated community that features problems and courses in mathematics, physics, quantitative finance, and computer science. It operates via a freemium business model.
Newspaper of record: term used to denote a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent; they are thus "newspapers of record by reputation" and include some of the oldest and most widely respected newspapers in the world. The level and trend in the number of "newspapers of record by reputation" is regarded as being related to the state of press freedom and political freedom in a country. Newspapers of public record: Official newspaper of record: A more extreme example is where such newspapers of public record are owned and operated by a Government that directs their entire editorial content (not just the legal and public notice content). Such newspapers, while pejoratively termed "state mouthpieces", can also be called "official newspapers of record", as their entire editorial copy represents the official view and doctrine of the State. Inclusion of the word "official" can be used to separate them from "newspapers of record by reputation". Notable examples include Russia's Rossiyskaya Gazeta, North Korea's Rodong Sinmun, and China's People's Daily.
2022 Press Freedom Index: Good; Satisfactory; Problematic; Difficult; Very serious; Not classified
Press Freedom Index: annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders since 2002 based upon the organisation's own assessment of the countries' press freedom records in the previous year. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organisations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom.
Concentration of media ownership (media consolidation, media convergence): progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. Large media conglomerates include Viacom, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann AG, Sony, Comcast, Vivendi, Televisa, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst Corporation, Organizações Globo and Lagardère Group. In nations described as authoritarian by most international think-tanks and NGOs like Human Rights Watch (North Korea, China, Iran, Cuba, Russia), media ownership is generally something very close to the complete state control over information in direct or indirect ways.
AT&T: USA multinational conglomerate holding company, Delaware-registered but headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company, the largest provider of mobile telephone services, and the largest provider of fixed telephone services in USA through AT&T Communications. Since 2018.06.14 it is also the parent company of mass media conglomerate WarnerMedia, making it the world's largest media and entertainment company in terms of revenue. As of 2018, AT&T was ranked #9 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, "Ma Bell", "Baby Bells". The current AT&T reconstitutes much of the former Bell System, and includes ten of the original 22 Bell Operating Companies along with the original long-distance division (AT&T Communications, LLC).
WarnerMedia: USA multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate corporation owned by AT&T and headquartered in New York City, United States. It was originally formed in 1990 by Steve Ross and formerly known as Time Warner from 1990 to 2001 and 2003 to 2018, from the merger of Time Inc. and the original Warner Communications. The company has film, television and cable operations, with its assets including WarnerMedia Studios & Networks (consisting of the entertainment and family-friendly assets of Turner Broadcasting, HBO, and Cinemax as well as Warner Bros., which itself consists of the film, animation, and television studios DC Comics, New Line Cinema, and, together with ViacomCBS, a 50% interest in The CW television network); WarnerMedia News & Sports (consisting of the news and sports assets of Turner Broadcasting, as well as AT&T SportsNet); WarnerMedia Commercial (consisting of digital analytics company Xandr, Otter Media, and the company's home entertainment division); and WarnerMedia Direct (consisting of the HBO Max streaming service). 2016.10.22 AT&T announced an offer to acquire Time Warner for $108.7 billion (including assumed Time Warner debt). The proposed merger was confirmed 2018.06.12, after AT&T won an antitrust lawsuit that USA Justice Department filed in 2017 to attempt to block the acquisition. The merger closed two days later, with the company becoming a subsidiary of AT&T.
Home Box Office, Inc.: USA multinational media and entertainment company operating as a unit of WarnerMedia Studios & Networks, and controlled by AT&T through mass media and entertainment subsidiary WarnerMedia. Main properties include its namesake pay television network Home Box Office (HBO), sister service Cinemax, the HBO streaming service (a secondary HBO-branded service, HBO Max, is operated under an eponymous sister subsidiary of WarnerMedia that shares principal management with Home Box Office, Inc.), and HBO Films.
HBO: USA pay television network owned by WarnerMedia Studios & Networks and the flagship property of parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc. Maintaining a general entertainment format, programming featured on the network consists primarily of theatrically released motion pictures and original television programs as well as made-for-cable movies, documentaries and occasional comedy and concert specials. HBO—also the oldest and longest continuously operating subscription television service (basic or a la carte premium) in the United States—pioneered modern pay television upon its launch on 1972.11.08: it was the first television service to be directly transmitted and distributed to individual cable television systems, and was the conceptual blueprint for the "premium channel," pay television services sold to subscribers for an extra monthly fee that do not accept traditional advertising and present their programming without editing for objectionable material. It eventually became the first television channel in the world to begin transmitting via satellite—expanding the growing regional pay service into a national television network—in 1975.09, and, alongside sister channel Cinemax, was among the first two American pay television services to offer complimentary multiplexed channels in August 1991. The network operates seven 24-hour, linear multiplex channels as well as a traditional subscription video on demand platform (HBO On Demand) and an eponymous streaming service (which launched as HBO Now in 2015.04), and its content is the centerpiece of HBO Max, an expanded streaming platform operated separately from but sharing management with Home Box Office, Inc., which also includes original programming produced exclusively for the service and content from other WarnerMedia properties. Overall HBO business unit is one of WarnerMedia's most profitable assets (after Warner Bros. Entertainment).
Cinemax: USA premium cable and satellite television network owned by the Home Box Office, Inc. subsidiary of WarnerMedia's Studios & Networks division. Developed as a companion "maxi-pay" service complementing the offerings shown on parent network Home Box Office (HBO) and initially focusing on recent and classic films upon its launch on August 1, 1980, programming featured on Cinemax currently consists primarily of recent and older theatrically released motion pictures, and original action series, as well as documentaries and special behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB): advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry; represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets globally, but mostly in USA and in Europe
Ad serving: technology and service that places advertisements on web sites
Vice Media, Inc.: American youth media company and digital content creation studio operating in 36 countries. It was started in 1994 by Shane Smith, Gavin McInnes and Suroosh Alvi as a punk magazine titled Voice of Montreal. In 2006, co-founder Gavin McInnes left Vice Media due to creative differences with the company, and co-founded an advertising agency, where he has since been terminated for expressing a pattern of promoting the freedom of speech.
Vice (magazine): Gavin McInnes, VBS.tv. McInnes left the publication in 2008, citing "creative differences" as the primary issue.
Real-time bidding (RTB): means by which advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis, via programmatic instantaneous auction, similar to financial markets. With real-time bidding, advertising buyers bid on an impression and, if the bid is won, the buyer’s ad is instantly displayed on the publisher’s site.
Post-truth politics: political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary" importance.
List of public domain works with multimedia adaptations: includes works for which installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as books, comic books, films, television series, and video games. Multimedia franchises usually develop through a character or fictional world becoming popular in one media, and then expanding to others through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings. With respect to public domain works, however, adaptations or extensions of the original work may be done without the permission of the author.
List of multimedia franchises: installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as books, comics, films, television series, and video games. Multimedia franchises usually develop due to the popularization of an original creative work, and then its expansion to other media through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings, although the trend later developed wherein franchises would be launched in multiple forms of media simultaneously.
SecureDrop: open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources. It was originally designed and developed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen under the name DeadDrop.
The Intercept: online publication launched in February 2014 by First Look Media, the news organization created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Associated Press: USA multinational nonprofit news agency headquartered in New York City that operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. The AP is owned by its contributing newspapers and radio and television stations in USA, all of which contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists.
Harvard Business Review: general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School.
Business Insider: German-owned USA news website that also operates international editions in Australia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, Italy, and the UK; business and technology news website launched in 2009.02 and based in New York City. Founded by DoubleClick Founder and former C.E.O. Kevin P. Ryan; in addition to providing and analyzing business news, the site aggregates top news stories on various subjects from around the web; its original works are sometimes cited by other, larger, publications such as The New York Times and domestic news outlets like National Public Radio.
Advance Publications: USA media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family.
Condé Nast: USA mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast, based at One World Trade Center and owned by Advance Publications.
The New Yorker: USA magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It is published by Condé Nast. Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.
Ars Technica: website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Many of the site's writers are postgraduates and some work for research institutions. Articles on the website are written in a less-formal tone than those in traditional journals.
Wired (magazine): monthly USA magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and has been in publication since March/April 1993. From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from techno-utopian cofounder Stewart Brand and his associate Kevin Kelly. The founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review and brought with him contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first Wired issue (1.1) had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling (who was highlighted on the first cover) and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson, who was featured on Wired's cover in its first year.
GQ (formerly Gentlemen's Quarterly): international monthly men's magazine based in New York City and founded in 1931. The publication focuses on fashion, style, and culture for men, though articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, sports, technology, and books are also featured.
Scott Trust Limited: British company that owns Guardian Media Group and thus The Guardian and The Observer as well as various other media businesses in the UK. In 2008, it replaced the Scott Trust, which had owned The Guardian since 1936. The company is responsible for appointing the editor of The Guardian (and those of the group's other main newspapers) but, apart from enjoining them to continue the paper's editorial policy on "the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore", it has a policy of not interfering in their decisions.
The Guardian: British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.
Technology Review: by MIT; TR35 (list of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35).
Henry Blodget: 1998.10 he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%); this call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. Agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement in 2003. Co-founder of The Business Insider.
Al Jazeera: Qatari broadcaster owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network and headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
Aeon (digital magazine): digital magazine of ideas, philosophy and culture. Publishing new articles every weekday, Aeon describes itself as a publication which "asks the biggest questions and finds the freshest, most original answers, provided by world-leading authorities on science, philosophy and society." Contributors have included Peter Adamson, Alain Badiou, Julian Baggini, Philip Bal, Shahidha Bari, Sven Birkerts, Armand D'Angour, David Deutsch, Vincent T. DeVita, Frans de Waal, Vincenzo Di Nicola, David Dobbs, Tim Footman, Allen Frances, Karl J Friston, Jessa Gamble, Michael Graziano, Toby Green, Pekka Hämäläinen, Sabine Hossenfelder, A.L. Kennedy, Marek Kohn, Olivia Laing, Janna Levin, Tim Lott, Mahmood Mamdani, Francis T. McAndrew, George Musser, Alondra Nelson, Wendy Orent, David Papineau, Ruth Padel, Massimo Pigliucci, Steven Poole, John Quiggin, Emma Rothschild, Claudio Saunt, Anil Seth, Dava Sobel, Roger Scruton, Eric Schwitzgebel, Camilla Townsend, Nigel Warburton, Margaret Wertheim, E.O. Wilson, and Ed Yong.
Slashdot, aka /.: technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc; "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics
Reason (magazine): libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation
ProPublica: non-profit corporation based in New York City. It describes itself as an independent non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In 2010 it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists and published in The New York Times Magazine as well as on ProPublica.org. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters and the resulting stories are given away to news 'partners' for publication or broadcast.
Center for Public Integrity: nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern.
London Review of Books: fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays
The New York Review of Books: fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. "takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity". Esquire called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." In 1970 writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic".
Lituanus: English language quarterly journal dedicated to Lithuanian and Baltic languages, linguistics, political science, arts, history, literature, and related topics.
Germany's media
de:Landesrundfunkanstalt: neun Rundfunkveranstalter des öffentlichen Rechts, die für ein oder für mehrere deutsche Länder Hörfunk und Fernsehen veranstalten: BR, HR, MDR, NDR, Radio Bremen, RBB, SR, SWR und WDR.
de:DW-TV: der offizielle staatliche deutsche Auslandsfernsehsender der Deutschen Welle.
de:Deutschlandradio (DRadio, DLR): produziert die drei bundesweiten Hörfunkprogramme Deutschlandfunk und DRadio Wissen (im Funkhaus Köln) sowie Deutschlandradio Kultur (im Funkhaus Berlin). Das Deutschlandradio hat einen Jahresetat von 180 Millionen Euro (2006); es bezeichnet sich selbst als der nationale Hörfunk.
East Asian media
Anime News Network (ANN): anime industry news website that reports on the status of anime, manga, video games, Japanese popular music and other otaku-related culture within North America, Australia and Japan.
Protoculture Addicts (1987/1988-2008.07/08): was a Canadian-based North American anime and manga magazine.
Dieter Rams: Rams' ten principles to "good design": Good design is: innovative; makes a product useful; is aesthetic; makes the product understandable; is unobtrusive; is honest; is long-lasting; is thorough down to the last detail; is environment friendly; is as little design as possible ("Less is more" & "Less, but better")
Ethics (philosophy) of mainstream are "mistreated" by minorities and the art of minorities. E.g. obscenity: what's indecent/obscene in art vs. everyday life? We live in the freest expression time due to the Internet, but Internet like art is threatened due to these same reasons by copyright, trademark, patent, obscenity (porn...):
Comics:
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (1986 USA): protect the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers covering legal expenses.
Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund (1987 Canada): protect the free speech rights of comics creators, publishers, retailers, and readers, by helping to cover legal expenses in the defense of cases where its directors feel those issues are at stake.
Plot
MacGuffin (macguffin): plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so desirable; "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, a mysterious but highly desired item or object, or simply something that is entirely unexplained.
Media and consumers
Blurb: short summary accompanying a creative work (book, PC game, piece of art in a museum: drawing, ...).
Comics (from comedy?)
The Dilbert Principle: "The successful moron will have a very high bladder-to-brain ratio" from dilbert.com
Popular culture (mass culture, pop culture): generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are the media, mass appeal, marketing and capitalism; and it is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".
Moloch in literature and popular culture: Canaanite god Moloch was the recipient of child sacrifice according to the account of the Hebrew Bible, as well as Greco-Roman historiography on the god of Carthage. Moloch is depicted in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost as one of the greatest warriors of the rebel angels, vengeful and militant. Bertrand Russell in 1903 used Moloch to describe oppressive religion, and Winston Churchill in his 1948 history The Gathering Storm used "Moloch" as a metaphor for Adolf Hitler's cult of personality. Part II of Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl", "Moloch", is about the state of industrial civilization, Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demonic figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II".
User:Wetman#Concerning Atheism: Many Christianists are disbelieving when they first hear that virtually every European or Near Eastern basilica or cathedral founded before 600 CE occupies the consecrated site of a pagan temple of one kind or another. Church crypts from Rome to Monte Gargano to Toulouse are mithraea, swept scrupulously clean of all identifiable details, but still recognizable by their characteristic layouts.
Earliest religions (known through surviving texts; historicity):
Theistic evolution (theistic evolutionism, evolutionary creationism): view that 'religious teachings about God are compatible with modern scientific understanding about biological evolution.
Acceptance of evolution by religious groups: "In one form or another, Theistic Evolutionism is the view of creation taught at the majority of mainline Protestant seminaries, and it is the official position of the Catholic church" (Eugenie Scott). 2007 poll showed that acceptance among American Buddhists, Hindus and Jews was higher than among any Christian groups.
Implicit and explicit atheism: subsets of atheism coined by George H. Smith (1979, p. 13-18). Implicit atheism is defined by Smith as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it". Explicit atheism is defined as "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it".
Negative and positive atheism: Positive atheism (strong atheism, hard atheism) is the form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. Negative atheism (weak atheism, soft atheism) is any other type of atheism, wherein a person does not believe in the existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be none.
Apatheism: " The eighteenth century French philosopher Denis Diderot, when accused of being an atheist, replied that he simply did not care whether God existed or not. In response to Voltaire, he wrote: “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.” "
New Atheism: coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated. Instead, they should be countered, criticized, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert undue influence, such as in government, education, and politics. Major figures include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett—collectively known as the "Four Horsemen", and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, known as the "plus one horse-woman".
Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions (Semitic religions): monotheistic faiths of West Asian origin, emphasizing and tracing their common origin to Abraham or recognizing a spiritual tradition identified with him
Supersessionism (fulfillment theology, replacement theology): terms used in biblical interpretation for the belief that the Christian Church supersedes or replaces the children of Israel in God's plan, and that the New Covenant nullifies the biblical promises made to the children of Israel, including the Abrahamic Covenant, the Land Covenant, and the Davidic Covenant. More recently, supersessionism and replacement theology are also applied to the parallel case of Islam and its attitude towards Christianity and Judaism.
God in Abrahamic religions: centred on monotheism. The three major monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, alongside the Baháʼí Faith, Samaritanism, Druze, and Rastafari, are all regarded as Abrahamic religions due to their shared worship of the God (referred to as Yahweh in Hebrew and as Allah in Arabic) that these traditions say revealed himself to Abraham.
Great Church: used in the historiography of early Christianity to mean the period of about 180 to 313, between that of primitive Christianity and that of the legalization of the Christian religion in the Roman Empire, corresponding closely to what is called the Ante-Nicene Period. "It has rightly been called the period of the Great Church, in view of its numerical growth, its constitutional development and its intense theological activity."
Bible: sources, criticism, historicity
Sources, source criticism, historicity of the sources; interpretation by the scientists (frequently theologian-scientists) of the sources and their historicity:
Dating the Bible. The New Testament: "Earliest preserved fragment" for each text (New Testament books).
Biblical manuscript: any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible.
Cataloging:
von Soden
Gregory–Aland: Gregory assigned the papyri a prefix of P, often written in blackletter script (n), with a superscript numeral.
Names of God in Christianity: Old Testament: El, Elohim, Elyon, Adonai, El Shaddai; Yahweh (YHWH). Based on Lev, 24:16: "He that blasphemes the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death", Jews generally avoided the use of Yahweh and substituted Adonai or Elohim for it when reading Scripture. The pronunciation of YHWH in the Old Testament can never be certain, given that the original Hebrew text only used consonants. The English form Jehovah was formed during the Middle Ages by combining the Latinization of the four consonants YHWH with the vowel points that Masoretes used to indicate that the reader should say Adonai when YHWH was encountered. Thus Jehovah was obtained by adding the vowels of Adonai to the consonants of YHWH. Jehovah appears in Tyndale's Bible, the King James Version, and other translations from that time period and later. For instance, Jehovah's Witnesses make consistent use of Jehovah. New Testament: The essential uses of the name of God the Father in the New Testament are Theos (θεός the Greek term for God), Kyrios (i.e. Lord in Greek) and Patēr (πατήρ i.e. Father in Greek). The Aramaic word "Abba" (אבא), meaning "Father" is used by Jesus in Mark 14:36 and also appears in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. In the New Testament the two names Jesus and Emmanuel that refer to Jesus have salvific attributes. The name Jesus is given in Luke 1:31 and Matthew 1:21 and in both cases the name is not selected by humans but is received by angelic messages with theological significance, e.g. the statement in Matthew 1:21 "you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins" associates salvific attributes to the name Jesus. Emmanuel which appears in Matthew 1:23 may refer to Isaiah 7:14, and does not appear elsewhere in the New Testament, but in the context of Matthew 28:20 ("I am with you always, even unto the end of the world") indicates that Jesus will be with the faithful to the end of the age.
Great uncial codices (four great uncials): the only remaining uncial codices that contain (or originally contained) the entire text of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testament).
Codex Vaticanus (c. 325–350; Uncial 03, B): Codex is named after its place of conservation in the Vatican Library, where it has been kept since at least the 15th century; written on 759 leaves of vellum in uncial letters; uses the most ancient system of text's division in the Gospels; has a more archaic style of writing than the other manuscripts.
Codex Sinaiticus (c. 330–360; Uncial 01, א): codex is an Alexandrian text-type manuscript in uncial letters on parchment. Along with Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus is considered one of the most valuable manuscripts for establishing the original text (textual criticism) of the Greek New Testament, as well as the Septuagint. The only uncial manuscript with the complete text of the New Testament, and the only ancient manuscript of the New Testament written in four columns per page which has survived to the present day. For the Gospels, Sinaiticus is generally considered among scholars as the second most reliable witness of the text (after Vaticanus); in the Acts of the Apostles, its text is equal to that of Vaticanus; in the Epistles, Sinaiticus is the most reliable witness of the text. In the Book of Revelation, however, its text is corrupted and is considered of poor quality, and inferior to the texts of Codex Alexandrinus, Papyrus 47, and even some minuscule manuscripts in this place.
Codex Alexandrinus (400-440; Uncial 02, A): containing the majority of the Septuagint and the New Testament. It derives its name from Alexandria where it resided for a number of years before it was brought by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris from Alexandria to Constantinople. Then it was given to Charles I of England in the 17th century. Until the later purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus, it was the best manuscript of the Greek Bible deposited in Britain.
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (c. 450; Uncial 04, C): manuscript has not survived in a complete condition, although is believed that the original codex contained the whole Bible. Manuscript received its name as a codex in which Greek translations of Ephraem the Syrian's treatises were written over ("rescriptus") a former text that had been washed off its vellum pages, thus forming a palimpsest. The lower text of the palimpsest was deciphered by biblical scholar and palaeographer Tischendorf in 1840–1843, and was edited by him in 1843–1845. Even with modern aids like ultra-violet photography, not all the text is securely legible.
Saint Catherine's Monastery ("Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai" Greek: Ιερά Μονή του Θεοβαδίστου Όρους Σινά): lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the city of Saint Catherine, Egypt. Monastery is controlled by the autonomous Church of Sinai, part of the wider Eastern Orthodox Church, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Built between 548 and 565, the monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world. The site contains the world's oldest continually operating library, possessing many unique books including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus.
Aleppo Codex: medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias, in what is currently northern Israel, in the 10th century C.E., and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides.
New International Version (NIV): OT in 1978, NT in 1973. One of the most popular modern translations in history.
Old Testament (Tanakh)
The inter-relationship between various significant ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament (some identified by their siglum). LXX - the original septuagint (Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, translated in stages between the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC in Alexandria). MT - Masoretic Text
Documentary hypothesis: proposes that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors (editors). The number of these narratives is usually set at four, but the precise number is not an essential part of the hypothesis. Sources: Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), Priestly (P).
Dead Sea Scrolls: text dating 150 BCE - 70 CE; some are "the earliest known surviving copies of Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism". Found 1947-1956. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek on parchment and some on papyrus.
Synoptic Gospels (gr synoptic: syn "together", optic "seen"): gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories, often in a similar sequence and in similar wording. They stand in contrast to John, whose content is comparatively distinct. This strong parallelism among the three gospels in content, arrangement, and specific language is widely attributed to literary interdependence. The synoptic problem: question of the specific literary relationship among the three synoptic gospels–that is, the question as to the source upon which gospel depended when it was written.
Mark 16: final chapter of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament. Begins with the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome; verse 8 ends with the women fleeing from the empty tomb, and saying "nothing to anyone, because they were afraid". Scholars (following Bruce Metzger) take 16:8 as the original ending and believe the longer ending (16:9-20) was written later by someone else as a summary of Jesus' resurrection appearances and several miracles performed by Christians. In this 12-verse passage, the author refers to Jesus' appearances to Mary Magdalene, two disciples, and then the Eleven (the Twelve Apostles minus Judas); text concludes with the Great Commission, declaring that believers that have been baptized will be saved while nonbelievers will be condemned, and pictures Jesus taken to Heaven and sitting at the Right Hand of God. Because of patristic evidence from the late 2nd century for the existence of copies of Mark with the "Longer Ending," it is contended by a majority of scholars that the "Longer Ending" must have been written and attached no later than the early 2nd century. The vast majority of modern scholars remain convinced that neither of the two endings ("short" or "longer") is Marcan.
Gospel of John: it is notable that, in the gospel, the community appears to define itself primarily in contrast to Judaism, rather than as part of a wider Christian community. John presents a "higher" Christology than the synoptic gospels, meaning that it describes Jesus as the incarnation of the divine Logos through whom all things were made, as the object of veneration. Only in John does Jesus talk at length about himself and his divine role, often sharing such information with the disciples only. Against the synoptics, John focuses largely on different miracles (including the resurrection of Lazarus), given as signs meant to engender faith. Synoptic elements such as parables and exorcisms are not found in John.
Authorship of the Johannine works: historical criticism, representing most liberal Christian and secular scholars, rejects the view that John the Apostle authored any of these works. There may have been a single author for the gospel and the three epistles; some scholars conclude the author of the epistles was different from that of the gospel, although all four works probably originated from the same community. Gospel and epistles traditionally and plausibly came from Ephesus, c. 90-110, although some scholars argue for an origin in Syria. In the case of Revelation, many modern scholars agree that it was written by a separate author, John of Patmos, c. 95 with some parts possibly dating to Nero's reign in the early 60s.
John 21: contains an account of the post-Resurrection appearance in Galilee, which the text describes as the third time Jesus had appeared to his disciples. Some New Testament historians assert that it was not part of the original text of the Gospel of John.
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (Pericope Adulterae; John 7:53-8:11): certain critics argue that it was "certainly not part of the original text of St John's Gospel".
Luke–Acts: name usually given by Biblical scholars to the composite work of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament.
Authorship of Luke–Acts: tradition holds that the text was written by Luke the companion of Paul (Colossians 4:14) and this traditional view of Lukan authorship is “widely held as the view which most satisfactorily explains all the data.” Critical views - Anonymous non-eyewitness: the view that both works were written by an anonymous writer who was not an eyewitness of any of the events he described, and who had no eyewitness sources OR Redaction authorship: the view that Acts in particular was written (either by an anonymous writer or the traditional Luke), using existing written sources such as a travelogue by an eyewitness.
Acts of the Apostles (date to 2nd half of 1st c.): two earliest versions of manuscripts are the Western text-type (as represented by the Codex Bezae) and the Alexandrian text-type (as represented by the Codex Sinaiticus); Western manuscripts contain about 10% more content than Alexandrian version. The third class of manuscripts (Byzantine text-type) developed after the Western and Alexandrian types; the extant Byzantine manuscripts date from 5th c. or later; "today" Byzantine text-type is the subject of renewed interest as the possible original form of the text from which the Western and Alexandrian. The content of the Acts - two distinct parts: first (chs. 1-12) deals with the church in Jerusalem, Peter as the central figure, the Seven Men, relates the story of Paul and the great transition of the Gospel from Judaism to the Greek world (Harnack); second part pursues the history of the apostle Paul and the statements in the Acts can be compared with the Epistles - there are two remarkable exceptions: the account given by Paul of his visits to Jerusalem in Galatians as compared with Acts; and the character and mission of the apostle Paul, as they appear in his letters and in Acts.
Categories of New Testament manuscripts: in Greek are categorized into five groups; categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types. Distribution of Greek manuscripts by century and category.
Alexandrian text-type (Neutral, Egyptian): form of the Greek New Testament that predominates in the earliest surviving documents, as well as the text-type used in Egyptian Coptic manuscripts.
Byzantine text-type (Majority Text, Traditional Text, Ecclesiastical Text, Constantinopolitan Text, Antiocheian Text, or Syrian Text; abbr. Byz): Koine Greek New Testament manuscripts; found in the largest number of surviving manuscripts
Novum Testamentum Graece: Latin name of an original Greek-language version of the New Testament. The first printed edition was the Complutensian Polyglot Bible by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, printed in 1514, but not published until 1520. The first published edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by Erasmus in 1516. Today the designation Novum Testamentum Graece normally refers to the Nestle-Aland editions, named after the scholars who led the critical editing work. Accuracy of the New Testament: total number of verses=7947, variant-free verses=4999, 4999/7947=62.9% agreement. Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland concluded, "Thus in nearly two-thirds of the New Testament text, the seven editions of the Greek New Testament which we have reviewed are in complete accord, with no differences other than in orthographical details (e.g., the spelling of names, etc.). Verses in which any one of the seven editions differs by a single word are not counted. This result is quite amazing, demonstrating a far greater agreement among the Greek texts of the New Testament during the past century than textual scholars would have suspected […]. In the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation the agreement is less, while in the letters it is much greater".
Epistle: writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The letters in the New Testament from Apostles to Christians are usually referred to as epistles. Pauline epistles and
General epistles (Catholic Epistles: most part their intended audience seems to be Christians in general rather than individual persons or congregations as is the case with the Pauline epistles)
The fragment in Romans 13:1–7 dealing with obedience to earthly powers is considered by some, for example James Kallas, to be a gloss incorporated later.
Jewish–Christian gospels: gospels of a Jewish Christian character quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome and probably Didymus the Blind. Most modern scholars have concluded that there was one gospel in Aramaic/Hebrew and at least two in Greek. None of these gospels survives today, but attempts have been made to reconstruct them from references in the Church Fathers.
Gospel of the Ebionites
Gospel of the Hebrews: syncretic Jewish–Christian gospel, the text of which is lost; only fragments of it survive as brief quotations by the early Church Fathers.
Gospel of the Nazarenes
Bibles:
The Books of the Bible (TNIV 2007, NIV 2012): first presentation of an unabridged committee translation of the Bible to remove chapter and verse numbers entirely and instead present the biblical books according to their natural literary structures.
Codex Gigas: largest extant medieval manuscript in the world; thought to have been created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia.
New Testament apocrypha
New Testament apocrypha: number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. These writings often have links with the books generally regarded as "canonical" but Christian denominations disagree on which writings should be regarded as "canonical" and which are "apocryphal".
Acts of Thomas: portraying Christ as the "Heavenly Redeemer", independent of and beyond creation, who can free souls from the darkness of the world. References to the work by Epiphanius of Salamis show that it was in circulation in the 4th c..
Jesus (c. 4 BC – c. 30 / 33 AD; Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ): Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the central figure of Christianity. Most Christians believe him to be the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited Messiah (Christ) prophesied in the Old Testament. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically, although the quest for the historical Jesus has produced little agreement on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus. Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was baptized by John the Baptist and subsequently began his own ministry, preaching his message orally and often being referred to as "rabbi". Jesus debated fellow Jews on how to best follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables and gathered followers. He was arrested and tried by the Jewish authorities, and turned over to the Roman government, and was subsequently crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect. After his death, his followers believed he rose from the dead, and the community they formed eventually became the Christian Church.
Historicity of Jesus: Amy-Jill Levine: "Most scholars agree that Jesus was baptized by John, debated with fellow Jews on how best to live according to God's will, engaged in healings and exorcisms, taught in parables, gathered male and female followers in Galilee, went to Jerusalem, and was crucified by Roman soldiers during the governorship of Pontius Pilate."
Historical Jesus: scholarly reconstructions of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, based on historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and cultural context in which he lived.
Historical background of the New Testament: Canonical Gospels and life of Jesus must be viewed as firmly placed within his historical and cultural context, rather than purely in terms of Christian orthodoxy (most scholars believe);
Christ myth theory (Jesus myth theory or Jesus mythicism): The strongest version of the myth theories contends that there was no real historical figure Jesus and that he was invented by early Christians. Another variant holds that there was a person called Jesus, but much of the teachings and miracles attributed to him were either invented or symbolic references. Yet another version suggests that the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is a composite character constructed from multiple people over a period of time. Only a distinct minority of scholars adhere to the myth. Main arguments: 1) New Testament accounts have no historical value; 2) an argument from silence regarding the scarcity of references to Jesus in contemporary non-Christian sources; 3) Christianity had relied on syncretism from the very beginning and combined various myths to build the gospel accounts. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, thought to have been written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus' death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.
Jesus Christ in comparative mythology: examination of the narratives of the life of Jesus in the Christian gospels, traditions and theology, as it relates to Christian mythology and other religions; various authors have drawn a number of parallels between the Christian views of Jesus and other religious or mythical domains. These include Greco-Roman mysteries, ancient Egyptian myths and more general analogies involving cross-cultural patterns of dying and rising gods in the context of Christ myth theory
George Albert Wells (1926.05.22-; G. A. Wells): Emeritus Professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London; best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is essentially a mythical rather than a historical figure, a theory that was pioneered by German biblical scholars such as theologian/historian Bruno Bauer and philosopher Arthur Drews.
Did Jesus Exist? (1975) book by G. A. Wells. Wells argues there was no historical evidence of Jesus existing. Wells has since modified his position (The Jesus Myth, 1999), saying that Paul's Jesus and the Jesus that appeared in the hypothetical Q Gospel were two different people and that the Gospel Jesus, although flesh and blood, is in essence a composite character.
Language of Jesus: generally agreed that Jesus and his disciples primarily spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine in the first century AD, most likely a Galilean dialect distinguishable from that of Jerusalem; towns of Nazareth and Capernaum in Galilee, where Jesus spent most of his time, were primarily Aramaic-speaking communities.
Historical Jesus:
Mara Bar-Serapion on Jesus (after 73 AD, before 3rd c.): letter by Stoic philosopher (Mara Bar-Serapion) from the Roman province of Syria to his son (also Serapion) mentions Socrates, Pythagoras and "king of the Jews" as three wise men who were killed by their people; "What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king?"
Paul the Apostle (c. 5 - c. 67): sources: Acts & Epistles; Historians: Jews, Romans, Greeks
In 2009.06, Pope Benedict announced excavation results concerning the tomb of Paul at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The sarcophagus was not opened but was examined by means of a probe, which revealed pieces of incense, purple and blue linen, and small bone fragments. The bone was radiocarbon dated to the 1st or 2nd century. According to the Vatican, these findings are consistent with the traditional claim that the tomb is Paul's. The sarcophagus was inscribed in Latin saying, "Paul apostle martyr."
Pauline Christianity: Christianity associated with the beliefs and doctrines espoused by Paul the Apostle through his writings
Oriental Orthodox Churches: group of Christian churches adhering to miaphysite Christology and theology, and together have 60 to 70 million members worldwide. As some of the oldest religious institutions in the world, the Oriental Orthodox Churches have played a prominent role in the history and culture of Armenia, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and parts of the Middle East and India. An Eastern Christian body of autocephalous churches, its bishops are equal by virtue of episcopal ordination, and its doctrines can be summarized in that the churches recognize the validity of only the first three ecumenical councils. The Oriental Orthodox Churches are composed of six autocephalous churches: the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch (including its archdiocese in India the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church), the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.
First seven Ecumenical Councils: represented an attempt to reach an orthodox consensus and to establish a unified Christendom as the state church of the Roman Empire. The East–West Schism, formally dated to 1054, was still almost three centuries off from the last of these councils, but already by 787 the major western sees, although still in communion with the state church of the Byzantine Empire, were all outside the empire, and the Pope was to crown Charlemagne as emperor 13 years later.
First Council of Nicaea: main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the nature of the Son of God and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Creed of Nicaea, establishing uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.
Second Council of Nicaea: seventh of the first seven ecumenical councils by both West and East. Orthodox, Catholics, and Old Catholics unanimously recognize it; to restore the use and veneration of icons (or, holy images), which had been suppressed by imperial edict inside the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Leo III (717–741).
Council of Constance (1414–1418): ecumenical council recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. The council ended the Western Schism, by deposing or accepting the resignation of the remaining papal claimants and electing Pope Martin V. The Council also condemned Jan Hus as a heretic and facilitated his execution by the civil authority. It also ruled on issues of national sovereignty, the rights of pagans, and just war in response to a conflict between the Kingdom of Poland and the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The Council is important for its relationship to ecclesial Conciliarism and Papal supremacy.
Doctor of the Church (Latin doctor "teacher"; Doctor of the Universal Church (Latin: Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis)): title given by the Catholic Church to saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing. As of 2020, the Catholic Church has named 36 Doctors of the Church. Of these, the 17 who died before the Great Schism of 1054 are also held in high esteem by the Eastern Orthodox Church, although it does not use the formal title "Doctor of the Church". Among these 36 are 27 from the West and 9 from the East; 4 women; 18 bishops, 12 priests, 1 deacon, 3 nuns, 1 consecrated virgin; 26 from Europe, 3 from Africa, 7 from Asia. More Doctors (12) lived during the 4th century than any other; eminent Christian writers of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries are usually referred to as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, while the 9th and 20th centuries have so far produced no Doctors at all. The shortest period between death and nomination was that of Alphonsus Liguori, who died in 1787 and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1871 – a period of 84 years; the longest was that of Ephrem the Syrian, which took fifteen and a half centuries. Catholic Church: Latin Church: The requisite conditions are enumerated as three: eminens doctrina, insignis vitae sanctitas, Ecclesiae declaratio (i.e. eminent learning, a high degree of sanctity, and proclamation by the church). Benedict XIV explains the third as a declaration by the supreme pontiff or by a general council.
Split of early Christianity and Judaism: took place during the first centuries of the Common Era. Rejection and crucifixion of Jesus (c. 33), the Council of Jerusalem (c. 50), the destruction of the Second Temple and institution of the Jewish tax in 70, the postulated Council of Jamnia c. 90, and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135. Recently, some scholars have argued that there were many competing Jewish sects in the Holy Land during the Second Temple period, and that those that became Rabbinic Judaism and Proto-orthodox Christianity were but two of these. Some of these scholars have proposed a model which envisions a twin birth of Proto-orthodox Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism rather than a separation of the former from the latter.
John the Apostle (~AD 6 - 100): Church Fathers generally identify him as the author of five books in the New Testament: the Gospel of John, three Epistles of John, and the Book of Revelation. Some modern higher critical scholars have raised the possibility that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist, and John of Patmos were three separate individuals.
Celsus (~ 2nd c.): Greek philosopher and opponent of Early Christianity.
The True Word: Celsus’ main argument against Christianity, and why he attacked it with such vigor, was that he considered it a divisive and destructive force that would harm both the Roman Empire and society.
Theological Library of Caesarea Maritima (Library of Caesarea): was the library of the Christians of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine in ancient times. “large library [30,000 vols in A.D. 630 {O’Connor 1980:161}] survived at Caesarea until destroyed by the Arabs in the 7th cent.”
List of early Christian writers: Various Early Christian writers wrote gospels and other books, some of which were canonized as the New Testament canon developed. The Apostolic Fathers were prominent writers who are traditionally understood to have met and learned from Jesus' personal disciples. The Church Fathers are later writers with no direct connection to the disciples (other than the claim to Apostolic Succession). Apologists defended Christianity against its critics, especially Greek and Roman philosophers.
Patristics: period is generally considered to run from the end of New Testament times or end of the Apostolic Age (c. AD 100) to either AD 451 (the date of the Council of Chalcedon), or to the 8th century Second Council of Nicaea.
Missionaries
Alopen (阿罗本 / Āluóběn; ~600 in Syria - ~600): first recorded Christian missionary to have reached China, during the Tang Dynasty. Missionary from the Church of the East (also known as the Nestorian Church), and probably a Syriac-speaker from Persia. After Alopen's time, the Church of the East was prominent in China for the remainder of the Tang Dynasty's power. Different emperors treated it differently, with some showing it the tolerance it received in the early decades, and some openly persecuting it. Nestorianism disappeared with the fall of the Tang Dynasty in the early 10th century.
Nestorian Stele (erected 781): documents 150 years of early Christianity in China. It is a 279 cm tall limestone block with text in both Chinese and Syriac describing the existence of Christian communities in several cities in northern China. It reveals that the initial Nestorian Christian church had met recognition by the Tang Emperor Taizong, due to efforts of the Christian missionary Alopen in 635. Buried in 845, probably during religious suppression, the stele was not rediscovered until 1625.
John of Montecorvino (1246-1328): founder of the earliest Roman Catholic missions in India and China, and archbishop of Peking, and Latin Patriarch of the Orient. Just about the time of Marco Polo being in Yuan China.
Annuario Pontificio: annual directory of the Holy See of the Catholic Church. It lists the popes in chronological order and all officials of the Holy See's departments. It also provides names and contact information for all cardinals and bishops, the dioceses (with statistics about each), the departments of the Roman Curia, the Holy See's diplomatic missions abroad, the embassies accredited to the Holy See, the headquarters of religious institutes (again with statistics on each), certain academic institutions, and other similar information.
Secretariat of State (Holy See): oldest dicastery in the Roman Curia, the central papal governing bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. It is headed by the Cardinal Secretary of State and performs all the political and diplomatic functions of the Holy See. The Secretariat is divided into three sections, the Section for General Affairs, the Section for Relations with States, and, since 2017, the Section for Diplomatic Staff.
Papist: pejorative term referring to the Roman Catholic Church, its teachings, practices, or adherents. The word gained currency during the English Reformation, as it was used to denote a person whose loyalties were to the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, rather than to the Church of England.
Papal selection before 1059: no uniform procedure before AD 1059. The Bishops of Rome and Supreme Pontiffs (Popes) of the Catholic Church were often appointed by their predecessors or by political rulers. While some kind of election often characterized the procedure, an election that included meaningful participation of the laity was rare, especially as the Popes' claims to temporal power solidified into the Papal States. The practice of papal appointment during this period would later result in the jus exclusivae, i. e., a right to veto the selection that Catholic monarchs exercised into the twentieth century. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II succeeded in limiting future Papal electors to the Cardinals in In nomine Domini, instituting standardized Papal elections that eventually developed into the procedure of the Papal conclave.
Papal appointment: medieval method of selecting a pope. Popes have always been selected by a council of Church fathers, however, Papal selection before 1059 was often characterized by confirmation or "nomination" by secular European rulers or by their predecessors. Appointment might have taken several forms, with a variety of roles for the laity and civic leaders, Byzantine and Germanic emperors, and noble Roman families. The role of the election vis-a-vis the general population and the clergy was prone to vary considerably, with a nomination carrying weight that ranged from near total to a mere suggestion or ratification of a prior election. An important precedent from this period is an edict of Emperor Honorius, issued after a synod he convoked to depose Antipope Eulalius. The power passed to (and grew with) the King of the Ostrogoths, then the Byzantine Emperor (or his delegate, the Exarch of Ravenna). After an interregnum, the Kings of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperor (whose selection the pope also sometimes had a hand in), generally assumed the role of confirming the results of papal elections. For a period (today known as the "saeculum obscurum"), the power passed from the Emperor to powerful Roman nobles—the Crescentii and then the Counts of Tusculum.
Ostrogothic Papacy: period from 493 to 537 where the papacy was strongly influenced by the Ostrogothic Kingdom, if the pope was not outright appointed by the Ostrogothic King. The selection and administration of popes during this period was strongly influenced by Theodoric the Great and his successors Athalaric and Theodahad. This period terminated with Justinian I's (re)conquest of Rome during the Gothic War (535–554), inaugurating the Byzantine Papacy (537-752).
Byzantine Papacy: period of Byzantine domination of the Roman papacy from 537 to 752, when popes required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor for episcopal consecration, and many popes were chosen from the apocrisiarii (liaisons from the pope to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Byzantine-ruled Greece, Syria, or Sicily. Justinian I conquered the Italian peninsula in the Gothic War (535–554) and appointed the next three popes, a practice that would be continued by his successors and later be delegated to the Exarchate of Ravenna. Greek-speakers from Greece, Syria, and Sicily replaced members of the powerful Roman nobles in the papal chair during this period. Rome under the Greek popes constituted a "melting pot" of Western and Eastern Christian traditions, reflected in art as well as liturgy.
Counts of Tusculum: most powerful secular noblemen in Latium, near Rome, in the present-day Italy between the 10th and 12th centuries. Several popes and an antipope during the 11th century came from their ranks. They created and perfected the political formula of noble-papacy, wherein the Pope was arranged to be elected only from the ranks of the Roman nobles. The Pornocracy (Saeculum obscurum), the period of influence by powerful female members of the family, also influenced papal history.
Saeculum obscurum (Latin: the Dark Age): name given to a period in the history of the Papacy beginning with the installation of Pope Sergius III in 904 and lasting for sixty years until the death of Pope John XII in 964. During this period, the popes were influenced strongly by a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti (Counts of Tusculum), and their relatives. The saeculum obscurum was first named and identified as a period of papal immorality by the Italian cardinal and historian Caesar Baronius in his Annales Ecclesiastici in the sixteenth century. Baronius's primary source for his history of this period was a contemporaneous writer, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona. Baronius himself was writing during the Counter-Reformation, a period of heightened sensitivity to clerical corruption. Theodora and Marozia held great sway over the popes during this time. In particular, as political rulers of Rome they had effective control over the election of new popes.
Marozia (Maria; aka Mariuccia, Mariozza; c. 890 – 937): Roman noblewoman who was the alleged mistress of Pope Sergius III and was given the unprecedented titles senatrix ("senatoress") and patricia of Rome by Pope John X. Edward Gibbon wrote: "influence of two sister prostitutes, Marozia and Theodora was founded on their wealth and beauty, their political and amorous intrigues: the most strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman tiara, and their reign may have suggested to darker ages the fable of a female pope (Pope Joan). The bastard son, two grandsons, two great grandsons, and one great great grandson of Marozia—a rare genealogy—were seated in the Chair of St. Peter." Pope John XIII was her nephew, the offspring of her younger sister Theodora. Pornocracy.
Pope Adrian VI (Adriaan Florensz Boeyens; 1459.03.02–1523.09.14): head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1522.01.09 until his death. The only Dutchman to become pope, he was the last non-Italian pope until the Polish John Paul II 455 years later. Born in the Episcopal principality of Utrecht, Adrian studied at the University of Leuven in the Low Countries, where he rose to the position of professor of theology, also serving as its rector (the equivalent of president or vice-chancellor). In 1507, he became the tutor of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who later trusted him as both his emissary and his regent. Adrian came to the papacy in the midst of one of its greatest crises, threatened not only by Lutheranism to the north but also by the advance of the Ottoman Turks to the east. He refused to compromise with Lutheranism theologically, demanding Luther's condemnation as a heretic. However, he is noted for having attempted to reform the Catholic Church administration in response to the Protestant Reformation. Adrian's admission that the Roman Curia itself was at fault for the turmoil in the Church was read at the 1522–1523 Diet of Nuremberg.
Church of the East (Persian Church or the Nestorian Church): an Eastern Christian church of the East Syriac Rite, based in Mesopotamia. It was one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity that arose from the Christological controversies of the 5th and 6th centuries, alongside the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Chalcedonian Church. During the early modern period, a series of schisms gave rise to rival patriarchates, sometimes two, sometimes three. Since the latter half of the 20th century, three churches in Iraq claim the heritage of the Church of the East. Meanwhile, the East Syriac churches in India claim the heritage of the Church of the East in India.
Schism of 1552: important event in the history of the Church of the East. It divided the church into two factions, of which one entered into communion with Rome becoming part of the Catholic Church at this time and the other remained independent until the 19th c.
Catholic Church and evolution: 1859-1950: no authoritative pronouncement on the subject; 1950: Humani generis Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces. Humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins; process of evolution is a planned and purpose-driven natural process, guided by God. {The Church does not argue with scientists on matters such as the age of the earth and the authenticity of the fossil record, seeing such matters as outside its area of expertise.}
Pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani; 1912.10.17–1978.09.28; Papacy: 1978.08.26–1978.09.28, 33 days): first pope born in the 20th c. and the last one to die in the 20th c. His reign is among the shortest in papal history, resulting in the most recent year of three popes and the first to occur since 1605. John Paul I remains the most recent Italian-born pope, the last in a succession of such popes that started with Clement VII in 1523. Before the papal conclave that elected him, he expressed his desire not to be elected, telling those close to him that he would decline the papacy if elected, but, upon the cardinals' electing him, he felt an obligation to say yes. He was the first pontiff to have a double name, choosing "John Paul" in honour of his two immediate predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI. He explained that he was indebted to John XXIII and to Paul VI for naming him a bishop and a cardinal, respectively. Furthermore, he was the first pope to add the regnal number "I", designating himself "the First". A dramatic event, soon after the election, occurred when the leader of the delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad, collapsed and died after a ceremony on 5 September 1978. The new pope immediately came over and prayed for him. Moral theology: Contraception, Abortion, Artificial insemination, Divorce, Homosexuality, Ordination of women. Communism. Interfaith dialogue: Islam: As Patriarch of Venice in 1964.11 he explained the declaration of Dignitatis humanae: "There are 4,000 Muslims in Rome: they have the right to build a mosque. There is nothing to say: you have to let them do it".
Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio; 1936.12.17-): while affirming present Catholic doctrine, has stated that Catholics have concentrated excessively on condemning abortion, contraception, and homosexual acts, while neglecting the greater need for tenderness, mercy and compassion; maintains that he is a "Son of the Church" regarding loyalty to Church doctrine, and has spoken against abortion as "horrific", insisted that women be valued, not clericized; against adoption by same-sex couples, maintained that divorced and re-married Catholics may not receive Holy Communion; Christian obligation to assist the poor and the needy in an optimistic tone, as well as promoting peace negotiations and interfaith dialogue.
Cardinals created by Francis: "cardinalship does not imply promotion; it is neither an honour nor a decoration<...>"
Pietro Parolin: Vietnam talks (Catholic Church in Vietnam = ~6 mln ppl)
Institute for the Works of Religion (Vatican Bank; Istituto per le Opere di Religione – IOR): privately held institute located in Vatican City and run by a Board of Superintendence which reports to a Cardinals' Commission and the Pope; because its assets are not the property of the Holy See, it is outside the jurisdiction of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. On 24 June 2013, Pope Francis created a special investigative Pontifical Commission to study IOR reform. In 2014, he fired four of the five cardinals in attempt to fix corruption within the institute.
Lapsed Catholic: Examples in literature and entertainment: "He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic" (Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman (1963), chapter 8); "I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest." (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited).
Countries that have the headquarters of Eastern Catholic particular churches. Deep red: Byzantine rite; Green: Alexandrian rite; Yellow: Others (West Syriac, East Syriac and Armenian).
Eastern Catholic Churches (Oriental Catholic Churches, Eastern-rite Catholic Churches, Eastern Rite Catholicism, Eastern Churches): 23 Eastern Christian sui iuris (autonomous) particular churches of the Catholic Church, in full communion with the Pope in Rome. Although they are distinct theologically, liturgically, and historically from the Latin Church, they are all in full communion with it and with each other. The majority of the Eastern Catholic Churches are groups that, at different points in the past, used to belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, or the historic Church of the East, but are now in communion with the Bishop of Rome. The five liturgical traditions of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, comprising the Alexandrian Rite, the Armenian Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite, and the West Syriac Rite, are shared with other Eastern Christian churches. Consequently, the Catholic Church consists of six liturgical rites, including the aforementioned five liturgical traditions of the Eastern Catholic Churches along with the Latin liturgical rites of the Latin Church.
Eastern Orthodox Church (Orthodox Catholic Church): the second-largest Christian church, with approximately 260 mln. baptised members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops in local synods. Roughly half of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Russia. The church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the Bishop of Rome, but the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by all as primus inter pares ("first among equals") of the bishops. As one of the oldest surviving religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played a prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Near East.
Church of Sinai: Greek Orthodox autonomous church whose territory consists of St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, along with several dependencies. There is a dispute as to whether the church is fully autocephalous or merely autonomous. The church is headed by the Archbishop of Mount Sinai and Raithu, who is traditionally consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem and also serves as abbot for the monastery. The Church of Sinai owes its existence to the Monastery of the Transfiguration (better known as St. Catherine's Monastery). The monastery's origins are traced back to the Chapel of the Burning Bush that Constantine the Great's mother, Helena, had built over the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush. Between 527 and 565, Emperor Justinian I ordered the monastery built to enclose the chapel. The monastery became associated with St. Catherine of Alexandria through the belief that her relics were miraculously transported there. The monastery’s library is renowned for its great antiquity and its manuscripts. In 1859, Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus here.
Talmud: central text of Rabbinic Judaism. The term "Talmud" normally refers to the collection of writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli), although there is also an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem Talmud, or Palestinian Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi). The Talmud has two components: the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), a written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism's Oral Torah, and the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature.
Mishnah: the first major written redaction of the Jewish oral traditions known as the "Oral Torah". It is also the first major work of Rabbinic literature.
Protestantism: second largest form of Christianity with collectively more than 900 million adherents worldwide or nearly 40% of all Christians. It originated with the Reformation, a movement against what its followers considered to be errors in the Roman Catholic Church. Ever since, Protestants reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and sacraments, but disagree among themselves regarding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Lutheranism: major branch of Protestant Christianity which identifies with the theology of Martin Luther (1483–1546), a German friar, ecclesiastical reformer and theologian.
Calvinism (Reformed tradition, Reformed Christianity, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed faith): major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice of John Calvin and other Reformation-era theologians.
Baptists: Christians distinguished by baptizing professing believers only (believer's baptism, as opposed to infant baptism), and doing so by complete immersion (as opposed to affusion or sprinkling). Baptist churches also generally subscribe to the tenets of soul competency/liberty, salvation through faith alone, scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists generally recognize two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's supper. Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant, though some Baptists disavow this identity.
Counter-Reformation (Contrareformatio, Catholic Reformation (Reformatio Catholica), Catholic Revival): period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and largely ended with the conclusion of the European wars of religion in 1648. Initiated to address the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort composed of apologetic and polemical documents and ecclesiastical configuration as decreed by the Council of Trent. The last of these included the efforts of Imperial Diets of the Holy Roman Empire, exiling/forcibly converting Protestant populations, heresy trials and the Inquisition, anti-corruption efforts, spiritual movements, and the founding of new religious orders. Such policies had long-lasting effects in European history with exiles of Protestants continuing until the 1781 Patent of Toleration, although smaller expulsions took place in the 19th century.
Nontrinitarianism: form of Christianity that rejects the mainstream Christian doctrine of the Trinity—the teaching that God is three distinct hypostases or persons who are coeternal, coequal, and indivisibly united in one being, or essence (from the Greek ousia). In terms of number of adherents, nontrinitarian denominations comprise a small minority of modern Christianity: largest - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormons"), Jehovah's Witnesses and the Iglesia ni Cristo, smaller groups - Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, Dawn Bible Students, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Universalist Christians, The Way International, The Church of God International and the United Church of God.
Christian Science: set of beliefs and practices belonging to the metaphysical family of new religious movements. It was developed in 19th-century New England by Mary Baker Eddy, who argued in her 1875 book Science and Health that sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer alone. The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies. Mark Twain was a prominent contemporaneous critic of Eddy's; Twain described Eddy as "[g]rasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish"; "vain, untruthful [and] jealous," but "[i]n several ways ... the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary."
Muhammad (Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim; c. 570-c. 632.06.08): orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib; being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, he later reported that it was there, at age 40, that he received his first revelation from God. Early followers; first hijra (migration to Abyssinia); to Medina with followers in 622 (Hijra); in 630 his followers took control of Mecca in the Conquest of Mecca; he destroyed idols and pagan temples. In 632, a few months after returning to Medina from The Farewell Pilgrimage, Muhammad fell ill and died; by the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam, and he had united Arabia into a single Muslim religious polity.
Muhammad's wives: 11-13 wives; Aisha was 6 when married Muhammad. Only a few kids.
People of the Book: Islamic term which refers to Jews, Christians and Sabians and is sometimes applied to members of other religions such as Zoroastrians. It is also used in Judaism to refer to the Jewish people and by members of some Christian denominations to refer to themselves. Judaism: The Hai Gaon in 998 in Pumbeditah comments, "Three possessions should you prize-a field, a friend, and a book." However the Hai Gaon mentions that a book is more reliable than even friends for sacred books span across time, indeed can express external ideas, that transcend time itself. The love and reverence for Jewish books is seen in Jewish law. It is not permissible for a sacred Jewish text to lie on the ground and if by accident a book is dropped to the floor it should be picked up and given a kiss. A Jewish book is not to be left open unless it is being read, nor is it to be held upside down. It is not permitted to place a book of lesser sanctity on top of a book of higher holiness, so for example one must never place any book on top of the Tanakh.
Islamic revival (الصحوة الإسلامية aṣ-Ṣaḥwah l-ʾIslāmiyyah, "Islamic awakening"): revival of the Islamic religion throughout the Islamic world, that began roughly sometime in 1970s and is manifested in greater religious piety and in a growing adoption of Islamic culture, dress, terminology, separation of the sexes, speech and media censorship, and values by Muslims. From Western perspective two most important events for this are: Arab oil embargo and subsequent quadrupling of the price of oil in the mid 1970s, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution that established an Islamic republic in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. Oil money allowed to fund Islamic books, scholarships, fellowships, and mosques around the world; Iran's Islamic revolution undermined the assumption that Westernization strengthened Muslim countries and was the irreversible trend.
The Satanic Verses controversy (Rushdie Affair): heated and sometimes violent reaction of some Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. In 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwā ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from Muslim anger over the novel.
A Common Word Between Us and You (2007.10.13): open letter from leaders of the Muslim faith to leaders of the Christian faith. It calls for peace between Muslims and Christians and tries to work for common ground and understanding among both faiths.
Islam in Europe: Muslim European countries: Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Albania; ~50%: Bosnia and Herzegovina; 20%-40%: Cyprus (divided), Macedonia; 10%-20%: Georgia, Montenegro, Russia; <1%: new EU members from the former Soviet bloc (except Bulgaria (5%-10%)) [13/06/23].
Biographical evaluation: discipline of Islamic religious studies within hadith terminology in which the narrators of hadith are evaluated. Its goal is to distinguish authentic and reliable hadiths from unreliable hadiths in establishing the credibility of the narrators, using both historic and religious knowledge. History: Beginning of narrator evaluation; Time of the Companions; After the Companions; Early specialists
Ulama ("the learned ones"): "those recognized as scholars or authorities" in the "religious hierarchy" of the Islamic religious studies. Students did not associate themselves with a specific educational institution, but rather sought to join renowned teachers. By tradition, a scholar who had completed his studies was approved by his teacher. At the teacher's individual discretion, the student was given the permission for independent reasoning (ijtihad) and for the issuing of legal opinions (fatwa). Essentially, an unbroken chain of teachers ensured the authenticity of the teaching back to the Prophet Muhammad, a process called Isnād (Arabic: إسناد, "support"). Thus, biographical evaluation (Arabic: عِلْمُ الرِّجال, translit. `Ilm al-Rijāl), a process by which the narrators of hadith are evaluated, using both historic and religious knowledge, is regarded as the key to establishing the credibility of a doctrine.
Places of learning: madrasa (likely came up in Khurasan during the 10th century AD, and spread to other parts of the Islamic world from the late 11th c. onwards).
Branches of learning: Mysticism (sufism); Philosophy and ethics (In general, the Islamic philosophers saw no contradiction between philosophy and the religion of Islam. However, according to Hourani, al-Farabi also wrote that philosophy in its pure form was reserved for an intellectual elite, and that ordinary people should rely for guidance on the sharia.); Law (Sharia); Theology.
Political history of the ulama:
Early Muslim communities (ruler and ulama forming a sort of "separation of powers" in government; Laws were decided based on the Ijma (consensus) of the Ummah (community), which was most often represented by the legal scholars).
Early modern Islamic empires: Ottoman imperial Sunni ulama, Shi'a state religion of Safavid Persia.
19th century: A new Ottoman elite, Orthodox Shi'a ulama in Iran.
19th/20th century: Ulama and Muslim reform: Islah, Wahhabism and the Salafi Movement; Muslim mass organizations.
Ulama in the secular national states of the 20th century: Republic of Turkey (In the kemalist Republic of Turkey, traditional Ottoman religious institutions were abolished like the Ottoman Caliphate, the office of the Shaykh ul-Islam, as well as the dervish brotherhoods); Iran (Shi'a ulama had maintained their religious authority together with considerable sources of income by waqf endowments and the zakat tax. Thus, they maintained their ability to exert political pressure); Syria; Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq; Pakistan.
Islamic revival and the origin of extremism: Islam, unlike Christianity, does not know a centralised process of ordination of its clergy. The traditional way of education and training relied largely on personal relationships between a teacher and his students. Whenever Islamic national governments tried to influence their regional ulama, they did so by controlling their income, or by establishing state-controlled schools and high schools. Traditional madrasas, representing merely decentralised "places of learning" and not institutions comparable to Western universities, often remained beyond state control. Whenever the state failed to control the resources of the madrasas, e.g., by controlling the income from religious endowments, or collecting Muslim taxes on behalf of the clergy, the ulama also retained the independence of their teaching. Saudi Arabian humanitarian organizations use the madrasas they sponsor to spread their wahhabitic doctrine, whilst Shiite madrasas are frequently influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic revival originated largely from institutions which were financially independent from the state, and beyond its control. This led to a resurgence of the social and political influence of the traditional ulama in at least some countries.
Modern challenges: Some opinions from within the Muslim world have criticized the lack of scientific training of the ulama, and argued that those proficient in the sciences should qualify for this title. In Egypt, the Al-Azhar University has begun to introduce scientific and practical subjects in its traditional theological colleges to help the ulama face the challenges of the modern world.
The Satanic Verses controversy (Rushdie Affair): heated and frequently violent reaction of Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from violent Muslims over the novel. The issue was said to have divided "Muslims from Westerners along the fault line of culture," and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression—that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write"—against the view of many Muslims—that no one should be free to "insult and malign Muslims" by disparaging the "honour of the Prophet".
Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (Muhammad cartoons crisis): began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 editorial cartoons 2005.09.30, most of which depicted Muhammad, a principal figure of the religion of Islam. The newspaper announced that this was an attempt to contribute to the debate about criticism of Islam and self-censorship. The cartoons were reprinted in newspapers around the world both in a sense of journalistic solidarity and as an illustration in what became a major news story. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen described the controversy as Denmark's worst international relations incident since WWII.
Akkari-Laban dossier: 43-page document which was created by a group of Danish Muslim clerics from multiple organizations set out to present their case and ask for support in the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.
Sana'a manuscript: one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence. Found, along with many other Quranic and non-Quranic fragments, in Yemen in 1972 during restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a. Written on parchment, and comprises two layers of text.
History of the Quran: compilation of the written Quran (as opposed to the recited Quran) spanned several decades and forms an important part of early Islamic history. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike disagree on whether Muhammad compiled the Quran during his lifetime or if this task began with the first caliph Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (632-634). Once the Quran was compiled, due to the unanimity of the sources, Muslims agree that the Quran we see today was canonized by Uthman ibn Affan (653-656). Upon the canonization of the Quran, Uthman ordered the burning of all personal copies of the Quran. Nevertheless, even according to secular scholars what was done to the Quran in the process seems to have been extremely conservative and the content was formed in a mechanical fashion as to avoid redactional bias. ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd’s codex; Ubayy ibn Kaʿb’s codex. Other secular scholars, such as John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, and Patricia Crone, are less willing to attribute the entire Quran to Muhammad (or Uthman), arguing that there "is no hard evidence for the existence of the Quran in any form before the last decade of the 7th century...[and that]...the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth".
The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (2007; Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (2000)): book by Christoph Luxenberg. The book argues that the Qur'an at its inception was drawn from Christian Syro-Aramaic texts, in order to evangelize the Arabs in the early 8th century.
Christoph Luxenberg: pseudonym of the author of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Qur'an. The real identity of the person behind the pseudonym remains unknown. The most widely circulated version claims that he is a German scholar of Semitic languages. Hans Jansen, professor at Leyden University, has conjectured that Luxenberg is a Lebanese Christian, whereas François de Blois, writing in the Journal of Quranic Studies, has questioned Luxenberg's knowledge of Arabic.
Biblical and Quranic narratives: the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, contains references to more than fifty people and events also found in the Bible. Anything in the Bible that agrees with the Quran is accepted by Muslims, and anything in the Bible that disagrees with the Quran is not accepted by Muslims. Many stories in the Bible are not mentioned at all in the Quran; with regard to such passages, Muslims are instructed to maintain neutral positions, but to read them and pass them on if they wish to do so. From a modern scholarly perspective, similarities between Biblical and Quranic accounts of the same person or event are evidence for the influence of pre-existing traditions on the composition of the Quran. Muslims believe that the Biblical tradition was corrupted over time, whereas the Quranic tradition was uncorrupted.
The Koran Interpreted (1955; by Arthur John Arberry): title acknowledges the orthodox Islamic view that the Quran cannot be translated, merely interpreted.
Creationism
talk.origins (Talk.Origins, t.o.): moderated Usenet discussion forum concerning the origins of life, and evolution. It remains a major venue for debate in the creation-evolution controversy, and its official purpose is to draw such debates out of the science newsgroups, such as sci.bio.evolution.
TalkOrigins Archive: presents mainstream science perspectives on the antievolution claims of young-earth, old-earth, and "intelligent design" creationists
c decay: The concept of c-decay was first proposed by Barry Setterfield in 1981 in an article for the Australian creationist magazine, Ex Nihilo, as an alternative to physical cosmology. Setterfield's proposal was that the speed of light (c), was infinite in the past, but has slowed substantially over time. Setterfield argues that this resolves the so-called "starlight problem", since light may have traveled fast enough in the past to reach Earth in thousands of years, despite being billions of light years away.
Zoroastrianism : one of the world's oldest extant religions, "combining a cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism in a manner unique [...] among the major religions of the world". Ascribed to the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), it exalts a deity of wisdom, Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord), as its Supreme Being. Major features of Zoroastrianism, such as messianism, heaven and hell, and free will have, some believe, influenced other religious systems, including Second Temple Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam. With possible roots dating back to the second millennium BCE, Zoroastrianism enters recorded history in the 5th-century BCE, and along with a Mithraic Median prototype and a Zurvanist Sassanid successor it served as the state religion of the pre-Islamic Iranian empires from around 600 BCE to 650 CE. Zoroastrianism was suppressed from the 7th century onwards following the Muslim conquest of Persia of 633-654. Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. The most important texts of the religion are those of the Avesta, which includes the writings of Zoroaster known as the Gathas, enigmatic poems that define the religion's precepts, and the Yasna, the scripture.
Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae): name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek (but also in Old Coptic, Demotic, etc.), which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward.
Abraxas (Biblical Greek: ἀβραξάς, romanized: abraxas, variant form ἀβρασάξ romanized: abrasax): word of mystic meaning in the system of the Gnostic Basilides, being there applied to the "Great Archon" (megas archōn), the princeps of the 365 spheres (ouranoi). The word is found in Gnostic texts such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and also appears in the Greek Magical Papyri. It was engraved on certain antique gemstones, called on that account Abraxas stones, which were used as amulets or charms. As the initial spelling on stones was Abrasax (Αβρασαξ), the spelling of Abraxas seen today probably originates in the confusion made between the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and xi (Ξ) in the Latin transliteration.
East Asian religions
Budai (布袋 (Bùdài); Hotei in JA): Chinese folkloric deity; means "Cloth Sack"; Budai is usually identified with (or as an incarnation of) Maitreya Buddha, so much so that the Budai image is one of the main forms in which Maitreya Buddha is depicted in East Asia; Laughing Buddha (笑佛 (xiào-fó)); fat bald man wearing a robe. Many people confuse Budai with Gautama Buddha.
Indian religions
Indian religions: religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent; namely Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism
Hinduism
Puruṣārtha (पुरुषार्थ, literally means an "object of human pursuit"): key concept in Hinduism, and refers to the four proper goals or aims of a human life. The four puruṣārthas are Dharma (righteousness, moral values), Artha (prosperity, economic values), Kama (pleasure, love, psychological values) and Moksha (liberation, spiritual values). All four Purusarthas are important, but in cases of conflict, Dharma is considered more important than Artha or Kama in Hindu philosophy. Moksha is considered the ultimate ideal of human life.
History of Buddhism: spans the 6th c. BC to the present, starting with the birth of Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Lumbini, Nepal. Spread from the northeastern region of the Indian subcontinent through Central, East, and Southeast Asia.
Early Buddhist texts (early Buddhist literature, early Buddhist discourses): parallel texts shared by the early Buddhist schools. The most widely studied EBT material are the first four Pali Nikayas, as well as the corresponding Chinese Āgamas. However, some scholars have also pointed out that some Vinaya material, like the Patimokkhas of the different Buddhist schools, as well as some material from the earliest Abhidharma texts could also be quite early. Setting and date: Regarding the setting, the EBTs generally depict the world of the second urbanisation period, which features small scale towns and villages, and small competing states (the mahajanapadas) with a lower level of urbanisation compared to that of the Mauryan era. As such, the EBTs depict the Gangetic Plain before the rise of the Nanda empire, who unified all these small competing states during the 4th c. They also depict Pataliputra as the small village of Pataligama, while it would later become the capital of the Mauryan empire and the largest city in India. They do not mention Ashoka but they mention the Jain leader Mahavira (a.k.a. Nātaputta) as a contemporary of the Buddha.
Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent: gradual process of dwindling and replacement of Buddhism in India, which ended around the 12th century. According to Lars Fogelin, this was "not a singular event, with a singular cause; it was a centuries-long process." The decline of Buddhism has been attributed to various factors, especially the regionalisation of India after the end of the Gupta Empire (320–650 CE), which led to the loss of patronage and donations as Indian dynasties turned to the services of Hindu Brahmins. Another factor was invasions of north India by various groups such as Huns, Turco-mongols and Persians and subsequent destruction of Buddhist institutions such as Nalanda and religious persecutions. Religious competition with Hinduism and later Islam were also important factors. Islamization of Bengal and demolitions of Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a general of the Delhi Sultanate are thought to have severely weakened the practice of Buddhism in East India. Socio-political change and religious competition: Religious competition: The growth of new forms of Hinduism (and to a lesser extent Jainism) was a key element in the decline in Buddhism in India, particularly in terms of diminishing financial support to Buddhist monasteries from laity and royalty. According to Hazra, Buddhism declined in part because of the rise of the Brahmins and their influence in socio-political process. One of the reasons of this conversion was that the brahmins were willing and able to aid in local administration, and they provided councillors, administrators and clerical staff. Moreover, brahmins had clear ideas about society, law and statecraft (and studied texts such as the Arthashastra and the Manusmriti) and could be more pragmatic than the Buddhists, whose religion was based on monastic renunciation and did not recognize that there was a special warrior class that was divinely ordained to use violence. As Johannes Bronkhorst notes, Buddhists could give "very little" practical advice in response to that of the Brahmins and Buddhist texts often speak ill of kings and royalty. Religious convergence and absorption. Patronage. Internal social-economic dynamics. Islamic invasions and conquest (10th to 12th century): Decline under Islamic rule. Revival.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835 02 13 – 1908 05 26): claimed to be the Mujaddid (divine reformer) of the 14th Islamic century, the promised Messiah (Second Coming of Christ), and the Mahdi awaited by the Muslims in the end days.
Sun Myung Moon: South Korean (born in North Korea; was in jail there); Unification Church; Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church
Religion and mythology: differ in but have overlapping aspect. Both terms refer to systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion. Religion is the broader term: besides mythological aspects, it includes aspects of ritual, morality, theology, and mystical experience. A given mythology is almost always associated with a certain religion such as Greek mythology with Ancient Greek religion. Disconnected from its religious system, a myth may lose its immediate relevance to the community and evolve—away from sacred importance—into a legend or folktale.
Demiurge: artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the familiar monotheistic sense, because both the demiurge itself plus the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are considered either uncreated and eternal, or the product of some other being, depending on the system.
Mephistopheles: demon featured in German folklore; originally appeared in literature as the demon in the Faust legend.
Baphomet: deity allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar that subsequently became incorporated into various occult and Western esoteric traditions. The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar starting in 1307. It first came into popular English usage in the 19th century during debate and speculation on the reasons for the suppression of the Templar order. Baphomet is a symbol of balance in various occult and mystical traditions, the origin of which some occultists have attempted to link with the Gnostics and Templars, although occasionally purported to be a deity or a demon. Since 1856 the name Baphomet has been associated with the "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Éliphas Lévi, composed of binary elements representing the "symbolization of the equilibrium of opposites": half-human and half-animal, male and female, good and evil, etc. Lévi's intention was to symbolize his concept of balance, with Baphomet representing the goal of perfect social order.
Game: structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games). Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both.
Chariot racing: one of the most popular Iranian, ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine sports. Chariot racing was dangerous to both drivers and horses as they often suffered serious injury and even death, but these dangers added to the excitement and interest for spectators. Chariot races could be watched by women, who were banned from watching many other sports. In the Roman form of chariot racing, teams represented different groups of financial backers and sometimes competed for the services of particularly skilled drivers. As in modern sports like football, spectators generally chose to support a single team, identifying themselves strongly with its fortunes, and violence sometimes broke out between rival factions. The rivalries were sometimes politicized, when teams became associated with competing social or religious ideas. This helps explain why Roman and later Byzantine emperors took control of the teams and appointed many officials to oversee them. The sport faded in importance in the West after the fall of Rome. It survived much longer in the Byzantine Empire, where the traditional Roman factions continued to play a prominent role for several centuries, gaining influence in political matters. Their rivalry culminated in the Nika riots, which marked the gradual decline of the sport. Early chariot racing. Olympic Games: four-horse (tethrippon, Greek: τέθριππον) and two-horse (synoris, Greek: συνωρὶς) chariot races, which were essentially the same aside from the number of horses.
Roman era: Equirria; The main centre of chariot racing was the Circus Maximus in the valley between Palatine Hill and Aventine Hill, which could seat 250,000 people. It was the earliest circus in the city of Rome. The Circus supposedly dated to the city's earliest times, but Julius Caesar rebuilt it around 50 BC to a length and width of about 650 m and 125 m, respectively. The circus was the only place where the emperor showed himself before a populace assembled in vast numbers, and where the latter could manifest their affection or anger. While the entertainment value of chariot races tended to overshadow any sacred purpose, in late antiquity the Church Fathers still saw them as a traditional "pagan" practice, and advised Christians not to participate.
Byzantine era: Constantine I (r. 306–337) preferred chariot racing to gladiatorial combat, which he considered a vestige of paganism. However, the end of gladiatorial games in the Empire may have been more the result of the difficulty and expense that came with procuring gladiators to fight in the games, than the influence of Christianity in Byzantium. The Olympic Games were eventually ended by Emperor Theodosius I (r. 379–395) in 393, perhaps in a move to suppress paganism and promote Christianity, but chariot racing remained popular. The fact that chariot racing became linked to the imperial majesty meant that the Church did not prevent it, although gradually prominent Christian writers, such as Tertullian, began attacking the sport.
Cinderella (sports) ("Cinderella story", Cinderella team): refer to situations in which competitors achieve far greater success than would reasonably have been best expected. Cinderella stories tend to gain much media and fan attention as they move closer to the championship game at the end of the tournament. Esports: Dota 2: OG at The International 2018: needing three new members just a few weeks before the qualifiers began, OG quickly signed Topias "Topson" Taavitsainen, a newcomer to the scene who had never performed at a major LAN event prior to the event, Sébastien "Ceb" Debs, who had previously served as the team's coach and has not played on professional level for nearly 3 years, and Anathan "ana" Pham, returning to the team from a year-long break after their previous elimination at The International 2017. Finishing outside of the top eight in the Dota Pro Circuit final standings, which granted a direct invite to The International 2018, OG earned theirs by playing through and winning the European-region open qualifiers. Following their win at the European qualifiers, OG were then placed into group A, finishing fourth with a record of 9–7, which seeded them into the upper bracket. There, OG won every series to advance to the grand finals. Facing the lower bracket winner PSG.LGD in it, whom OG had just defeated in the upper bracket finals, OG won the game one, but lost the next two games. Needing another win to avoid losing the series, OG forced a late-game comeback in game four, and subsequently won game five, making them International champions and winning them over US$11 million in prize money. OG would then go on to win The International 2019 with the same roster, becoming the first team to win two The Internationals and first team to win back to back The Internationals.
Play (activity): range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment; most commonly associated with children and their juvenile-level activities, but play can also be a useful adult activity, and occurs among other higher-functioning animals as well. Play is often interpreted as frivolous; yet the player can be intently focused on their objective, particularly when play is structured and goal-oriented, as in a game. Accordingly, play can range from relaxed, free-spirited and spontaneous through frivolous to planned or even compulsive.
Tickling: act of touching a part of the body so as to cause involuntary twitching movements and/or laughter. Tickling as physical abuse: An article in the British Medical Journal describes a European method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet after they had been dipped in salt water; In his book Sibling Abuse, Vernon Wiehe published his research findings regarding 150 adults who were abused by their siblings during childhood; Several reported tickling as a type of physical abuse they experienced, and based on these reports it was revealed that abusive tickling is capable of provoking extreme physiological reactions in the victim, such as vomiting, fainting or brief loss of consciousness, incontinence and unconsciousness.
Chess, checkers, board games, eSports etc. are excluded from this category.
Swimming:
Swimsuits:
Bodyskin:
LZR Racer allowed in 2008 Summer Olympics for the 23 out of 25 world records broken. In 2010.01 these bodyskin swimsuits were banned by FINA.
Masters athletics (masters are sometimes known as veterans): class of the sport of athletics for veteran athletes in the events of track and field, road running and cross country running; competitions feature five-year age groups beginning at age 35.
John Whittemore (1899.11.20-2005.04.13) "world's oldest athlete"; quote: "If I don't drop it on my foot, I set a world record".
Freediving (free diving): form of underwater diving that relies on divers' ability to hold their breath until resurfacing rather than on the use of a breathing apparatus such as scuba gear. The term 'freediving' is often associated with competitive breath-hold diving or competitive apnea. However, while some regard freediving as a specific group of underwater activities, for others it is merely a synonym for breath-hold diving. The activity that attracts the most public attention is the extreme sport of competitive apnea in which competitors attempt to attain great depths, times, or distances on a single breath.
Tennis pros:
Male:
Roger Federer (1981.08.08): Swiss professional tennis player, turned professional in 1998 and was continuously ranked in the top ten from October 2002 to November 2016. He has won 19 Grand Slam singles titles, the most in history for a male tennis player, and held the world No. 1 spot in the ATP rankings for a record total of 302 weeks.
Female:
Venus Williams (1980.06.17): USA professional tennis player who is generally regarded as one of the all-time greats of women's tennis and who, along with younger sister Serena Williams, is credited with ushering in a new era of power and athleticism on the women's professional tennis tour.
Serena Williams (1981.09.26): USA professional tennis player. The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) has ranked her world no. 1 in singles on eight occasions, from 2002 to 2017. She became the world no. 1 for the first time in 2002.07.08. On the sixth occasion, she held the ranking for 186 consecutive weeks, tying the record set by Steffi Graf for the most consecutive weeks as world no. 1 by a female tennis player. In total, she has been world no. 1 for 319 weeks, which ranks her third in the Open Era among female tennis players. Some commentators, players and sports writers regard her as the greatest female tennis player of all time. In 2017.04.19 she announced a hiatus from tennis until 2018 because of her pregnancy.
Rabbit punch: blow to the neck or to the base of the skull. It is considered especially dangerous because it can damage the cervical vertebrae and subsequently the spinal cord, which may lead to serious and irreparable spinal cord injury. A rabbit punch can also detach the victim's brain from the brain stem, which can kill instantly.
Hybrid martial arts (hybrid fighting systems): martial arts or fighting systems that incorporate techniques and theories from several particular martial arts (eclecticism). While numerous martial arts borrow or adapt from other arts and to some extent could be considered hybrids, a hybrid martial art emphasizes its disparate origins.
Mixed martial arts (MMA): full-contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, from a variety of other combat sports and martial arts.
Pankration (Greek : Παγκράτιο): was a sporting event introduced into the Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC and founded as a blend of boxing and wrestling but with scarcely any rules. The only things not acceptable were biting and gouging of the opponent's eyes. In extreme cases a pankration competition could even result in the death of one of the opponents, which was considered a win. However, pankration was more than just an event in the athletic competitions of the ancient Greek world; it was also part of the arsenal of Greek soldiers – including the famous Spartan hoplites and Alexander the Great's Macedonian phalanx. At the time of the revival of the Olympic Games (1896), pankration was not reinstated as an Olympic event.
Dioxippus: was an ancient Greek pankratiast, renowned for his Olympic victories in the sport of pankration. His fame and skill were such that he was crowned Olympic champion by default in 336 BC when no other pankratiast dared meet him on the field. This kind of victory was called "akoniti" (literally: without getting dusted) and remains the only one ever recorded in the Olympics in this discipline.
Arrhichion of Phigalia (died 564 BC): was a champion pankratiast in the ancient Olympic Games. He died while successfully defending his championship in the pankration at the 54th Olympiad (564 BC).
Krav maga: noncompetitive eclectic self-defense system developed in Israel that involves striking techniques, wrestling and grappling. Relative to other systems, Krav Maga is known for its focus on real-world situations, efficient and versatile counter-attacks, and ease of learning. Developed by Imi Lichtenfeld in Bratislava in the mid-to late-1930s for the Jews to defend on the streets.
Systema: Russian martial art; hand to hand combat, grappling, knife fighting and fire arms training as well. Training involves drills and sparring without set kata. It focuses mainly on controlling the six body levers (elbows, neck, knees, waist, ankles, and shoulders) through pressure point application, striking and weapon applications.
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC): UFC 12 saw the introduction of weight classes and the banning of fish-hooking. For UFC 14 gloves became mandatory, while kicks to the head of a downed opponent were banned. UFC 15 saw limitations on hair pulling, and the banning of strikes to the back of the neck and head, headbutting, small-joint manipulations, and groin strikes. With five-minute rounds introduced at UFC 21, the UFC gradually re-branded itself as a sport rather than a spectacle. In fact, the UFC had already broken the pay-per-view industry's all-time records for a single year of business, generating over $222,766,000 in revenue in 2006, surpassing both WWE and boxing.
Boxing: Professional boxing is forbidden in Iceland, Iran and North Korea. It was banned in Sweden until 2007 when the ban was lifted but strict restrictions, including four three-minute rounds for fights, were imposed. It was banned in Albania from 1965 till the fall of Communism in 1991; it is now legal there. Norway legalized professional boxing in December 2014.
Death:
Manuel Velazquez: "Death Under the Spotlight: The Manuel Velazquez Boxing Fatality Collection," which documents "Western" boxing deaths since 1741.
Brazil v Germany (2014 FIFA World Cup): 2014.07.08 at the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was the first semi-final match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The game ended in a shocking loss for Brazil; Germany led 5–0 at half time with 4 goals scored in a span of just 6 minutes (between the 23rd and 29th minute). Germany subsequently brought the score up to 7–0 in the second half before Brazil scored a goal at the last minute, ending the match 7–1.
Athletes, sportspeople
Sportsman/sportswoman:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr.; 1947.04.16) professional USA basketball player.
Doping
Cycling - the most doped sport (?):
Festina affair: events that surrounded several doping scandals, doping investigations and confessions by riders to doping that occurred during and after the 1998 Tour de France. How come this event did NOT clean up the doping in cycling?
Christophe Bassons: spoke out about doping; in 1999 Tour de France fellow cyclists neglected him, L.A. even "warned" him. Bassons retired in 1999.
Lance Armstrong (Lance Edward Armstrong; né Gunderson; L.A.): in Oprah Winfrey interview aired 2013.01.17 L.A. admitted that he doped for all 7 Tour de France winnings and that without doping one could not have achieved that.
L.A. Confidentiel (2004, French): book by sports journalist Pierre Ballester and The Sunday Times sports correspondent David Walsh; book contains circumstantial evidence of cyclist Lance Armstrong having used performance enhancing drugs. L.A. sued them all and got quite some "defamation" money. Will money be going back?
Outdoors
Outdoors (+Virtual,+electronics (HW,SW))
What's the relationship between ARG, metapuzzles/puzzlehunts/puzzles, The Game, Location-based game (Encounter, Orienteering/Geocaching/Letterboxing)?
Location-based game (location-enabled game): game play somehow evolves and progresses via a player's location. Thus, location-based games almost always support some kind of localization technology, for example by using satellite positioning like GPS. "Urban gaming" or "Street Games" are typically multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.
Template:Geocaching: Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use GPS receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world.:
Travel Bug (a tag that moves from cache to cache)
Letterboxing: Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and distribute clues to finding the box in printed catalogs, on one of several web sites, or by word of mouth. Stamps are in the letterboxes and carried by letterboxers, so that a stamp is left by a letterboxer in the letterbox "logbook" and a stamp is left in the letterboxer's own "logbook".
Template:Mixed reality (Virtual reality · Augmented reality · Mixed reality): like gargoyles in Snow Crash
Alternate reality game (ARG): interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers.
Metapuzzle: puzzle that unites several puzzles that feed into it.
Puzzlehunt: puzzle game where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles at a particular site, in multiple sites and/or via the internet. Groups of puzzles in a puzzle hunt are often connected by a metapuzzle, leading to answers which combine into a final set of solutions.
ru:Шаблон:Ночные поисковые игры (RU equivalent; Template):
Dozor: RU codebreaking/geolocation game played at night
The Game (treasure hunt): since 1973; non-stop 24–48 hour treasure hunt, puzzlehunt or road rally that has run in the San Francisco Bay and Seattle areas
Live-action game: participants act out their characters' actions (e.g. Humans vs. Zombies)
Metaverse: network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets. The term "metaverse" has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of "meta" and "universe". Various metaverses have been developed for popular use such as virtual world platforms like Second Life. Some metaverse iterations involve integration between virtual and physical spaces and virtual economies. Demand for increased immersion means metaverse development is often linked to advancing virtual reality technology. Implementations: In 2019, the social network company Facebook launched a social VR world called Facebook Horizon. In 2021, Facebook was renamed "Meta Platforms" and its chairman Mark Zuckerberg declared a company commitment to developing a metaverse.
Game design
What's the relationship between gameplay and game mechanics?
Gameplay: a very broad, somewhat abstract concept in game design; specific way in which players interact with a game, and in particular with video games. Gameplay is the pattern defined through the game rules, connection between player and the game, challenges and overcoming them, plot and player's connection with it. Video game gameplay is distinct from graphics, and audio elements. Playability: unplayable, static, non-playable character (NPC); satisfaction, learning, efficiency, immersion, motivation, emotion, socialization.
Game mechanics: constructs of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game or gameplay. Game mechanics is more of an engineering concept while gameplay is more of a design concept. Turns (time in games); action points; (playing) cards: randomizers, game resource; auction or bidding; capture/eliminate; catch-up (in the game); dice: randomizers; movement; resource management; risk and reward; role-playing; tile-laying; game modes (e.g. single vs multi player; capture the flag vs deathmatch). Victory condition mechanics: many.
real-time: game time in video games is in fact subdivided into discrete units due to the sequential nature of computing, these intervals or units are typically so small as to be imperceptible to the player.
turn-based: simultaneously-executed games (phase-based, "We-Go"), player-alternated games ("I-Go-You-Go" ("IGOUGO")). IGOUGO order under which players start within a turn: ranked (same player being the first every time), round-robin (first player is selected), random.
sub types: timed turns (chess), time compression (flight simulators: to shorten the subjective duration of relatively uneventful periods of gameplay); ticks and rounds; active time battle (Final Fantasy); pausable real-time (pause the game and issue orders such that once a game is un-paused, orders are automatically put into effect; SimCity, Homeworld)
Game balance: gimp, nerf (opposite: buff), overpowered (OP)
Kingmaker scenario: in a game of three or more players, is an endgame situation where a player unable to win has the capacity to determine which player among others is the winner
Ben Brode: USA video game designer. He was the game director and public face of Hearthstone until 2018 when he left to found his own game studio, Second Dinner, where he is now Chief Creative Officer. After 15 years working at Blizzard, Brode left the company in 2018 to start his own game development studio called Second Dinner along with several other ex-Blizzard employees. In 2019 the company announced that it had received a US$30 million investment from NetEase, along with the license to create a mobile game for Marvel. The game, Marvel Snap, was first revealed in May 2022, for mobile devices and personal computers.
Brian Kibler (1980.09.07): USA collectible card game player, game designer, and streamer. Kibler is also a professional card player, and has had great success at Magic: The Gathering with five Pro Tour Top 8s, winning Pro Tour Austin in 2009 and Pro Tour Honolulu in 2012. Hearthstone: winning the ChallengeStone tournaments in May 2015 and November 2016, the latter taking place at BlizzCon 2016. In October 2019, Kibler announced that he would no longer be working with Blizzard as a commentator on their events, as a result of their controversial decision to ban esport competitor Ng Wai Chung for saying "liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times" in a post-game interview. Kibler stated that although he agreed that Blizzard should issue a penalty, the actual penalty was too harsh. As such, he could "realistically never work with Hearthstone again". He still frequently streams Hearthstone.
Tabletop Simulator (2015.06.05): independent video game that allows players to play and create tabletop games in a multiplayer physics sandbox. Developed by Berserk Games as their first title after a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014.02. Gameplay: Tabletop Simulator is a player-driven physics sandbox, without set victory or failure conditions. After selecting a table to play on, players interact with the game by spawning and moving virtual pieces, which are subject to a physics simulation. Online multiplayer is supported with a maximum of ten players. Aside from spawning and moving pieces, the game includes mechanics to assist with common styles of board game play, such as automatic dice rolling and hiding players' pieces from one another; other mechanics aid in administrating a game, for example saving the state of the board or undoing moves. In an interview with Gamasutra, the pair described the game Desperate Gods as being an inspiration, though they wanted to expand the "free-form shared board game" concept to cover all tabletop games.
Spiel (Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, often called Essen)
Deutscher Spiele Preis (DSP): collects votes from the industry's stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs; contrast to Spiel des Jahres, DSP is awarded for "gamers' games" with particularly good or innovative gameplay
BoardGameGeek (BGG): online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 101,000 different tabletop games, including European-style board games, wargames, and card games. In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games.
BrettspielWelt: large, popular, and entirely free German online gaming site
International Mind Sports Association: association of the world governing bodies for contract bridge, chess, draughts (checkers), and go, namely the World Bridge Federation (WBF), World Chess Federation (FIDE), World Draughts Federation (FMJD), and International Go Federation (IGF). Poker and xiangqi (Chinese chess) are affiliated sports; as of summer 2011, the International Federation of Poker (IFP) and World Xiangqi Federation (WXF) have observer status in the association. Xiangqi competition was included in the first Games and duplicate poker under the auspices of the IFP will be included in the second.
World Mind Sports Games: quadrennial multi-sport event created by the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA) as a "stepping stone on the path of introducing a third kind of Olympic Games (after the Summer and the Winter Olympics)". The Games are considered to be very prestigious and are the equivalent of the Olympics for Bridge, Chess, Go, and Draughts.
Hearthstone (video game): free-to-play online collectible card video game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.
Gameplay of Hearthstone: one-versus-one battle between two opponents. Cards and minions. Decks: constructed deck of 30 cards selected from the player's collection, using a mix of neutral cards available to all classes and specific class-based cards available to the chosen Hero. Each deck can only feature two of each card and only one of each legendary card. Card library and crafting: Each card is classified as neutral or specific to one of the nine classes; with the introduction of Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, tri-class cards were added, meaning the card can be used by three different classes. Game modes: Play, Solo Adventures, Arena, Tavern Brawl, Duels. Game regions: Americas, Europe, Asia and China.
Magic: The Gathering (MTG; Magic): trading card game created by Richard Garfield. First published in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first trading card game produced and it continues to thrive, with approximately 20 mln. players as of 2015. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay of Magic bears little similarity to pencil-and-paper adventure games, while having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games. Luck vs. skill
Roguelike deck-building game: hybrid genre of video games that combine the nature of deck-building card games with procedural-generated randomness from roguelike games.
Gameplay aspects: Most roguelike deck-building games present the player with one or more playable characters, each character having a pre-established deck of cards that are used within the game, typically in turn-based combat. As the player progresses through the game, they gain the ability to add cards to this deck, most often through either a choice of one or more random reward cards, or sometimes through an in-game shop. There also may be mechanism to remove cards from the deck, or to update a card already in the deck. Because the player cannot predict which cards will be presented as rewards, they must build their deck "on the fly", trying to develop potential combinations and synergies between cards and other gameplay elements, while at the same time avoid diluting their deck with cards that do not work as well. Many games in this genre use turn-based combat, similar to console role-playing games. On the player's turn, they are drawn a hand of cards, and may play one or more cards, frequently based on limited amount of "mana" or "action cost" used in other collectible cards games. Card effects can range from simple damage, defense or healing to complicated effects that may linger for several turns, similar to other collectible card games. Enemies typically follow more straight-forward combat, attacking, defending, or applying buffs and debuffs to themselves or the player. Many games in this genre utilize permadeath, another roguelike feature; should the player's character lose all their health, the character is dead and the player must start anew with the original starting deck for the character. Often, these games include metagame aspects, with players unlocking the potential for new cards to be obtained with each runthrough, or gaining a small bonus perk on starting a new runthrough.
History: Dominion was introduced in 2008 as the first tabletop deck-building game, inspiring several tabletop card games that followed. While other roguelike deck-building games emerged following Dream Quest such as Hand of Fate, the genre gained more attention with Slay the Spire, which was developed by Megacrit. Slay the Spire was released into early access for Microsoft Windows computers in November 2017, and had its full release in January 2019, eventually expanding to release on several consoles as well. The developers of the game had wanted to make a game like Dominion, while using some of the concepts of the tabletop card game Netrunner, and had used the Netrunner community to test the game's balance before release.
Netrunner (1996): out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published by Wizards of the Coast and introduced in April 1996. The game took place in the setting for the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game (RPG), but it also drew from the broader cyberpunk genre.
Android: Netrunner (2012-2018): Living Card Game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. It is a two-player game set in the dystopian future of the Android universe. Each game is played as a battle between a megacorporation and a hacker ("runner") in a duel to take control of data. It is based on Richard Garfield's Netrunner collectible card game, produced by Wizards of the Coast in 1996.
Dominion (card game) (2008.10 (1st ed) / 2016.10 (2nd ed)): deck-building game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. It was the first game of its kind, and inspired a genre of games building on its central mechanic. Each player begins with a small deck of cards, which they improve by purchasing cards from a common supply that varies from game to game. Cards can help the player's deck function, impede their opponents, or provide victory points. The game has a medieval theme with card names referencing pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures. Comparisons about the game's feel are often drawn with collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering. Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration.
Slay the Spire (early access late 2017; official release 2019.01): roguelike deck-building video game developed by American studio MegaCrit and published by Humble Bundle. In Slay the Spire, the player, through one of four characters, attempts to ascend a spire of multiple floors, created through procedural generation, battling through enemies and bosses. Combat takes place through a collectible card game-based system, with the player gaining new cards as rewards from combat and other means, requiring the player to use strategies of deck-building games to construct an effective deck to complete the climb. Slay the Spire has been well-received. It was nominated for several accolades in 2019, and is considered the game that launched a number of roguelike deck-building games.
Viktor Blom (1990.09.26-) is a Swedish high-stakes online poker player, best known by the online poker name Isildur1.
Digitized board/card games (computer games)
PokerTH (MS, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Maemo): open source Texas hold 'em simulator; allows for up to ten human players; online.
Internet Diplomacy: any of a number of online implementations of Diplomacy, a board game in which seven players, each controlling one of the major European powers of the early 20th century, fight for control over Europe.
Gaming as an entertainment or an art form? Aesthetics in real-life games: e.g. Olympics, chess? Beauty in maths, games (chess; math-based), art? Why mathematicians play instruments, draw, make visual arts? Is there a region in the brain responsible for gaming, maths & artistic expression in the same place? Programming: art or science? ...
Art Game: work of interactive new media digital software art as well as a member of the "art game" subgenre of the serious video game. The term "art game" was first used academically in 2002 and it has come to be understood as describing a video game designed to emphasize art or whose structure is intended to produce some kind of reaction in its audience.
Video games as an art form: controversial topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical proposition that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of expressive elements such as graphics, storytelling and music. Roger Ebert: "games are not art"; games are for entertainment, art is to "make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic". Blending between game and art, e.g. Second Life. Two-way art (aka "interactive art") vs. PC/video games. Money making in games, non-money in art. "Games are a waste of time".
Real-time strategy: micro- vs. macro- management; tactics vs. strategy; turn-based vs. real-time; real-time strategy games on the consoles - only Halo Wars on Xbox 360; graphics: Total Annihilation, Homeworld (3D space) & Warzone 2100 (3D on "2D" surface)
Template:Real-time strategy gameplay: actions per minute, build order, fog of war, metagaming, technology tree, rush (Swarming, Cheese, Mobbing, Goblin Tactics or Zerging), turtling
Real-time tactics: Total War, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Sid Meier's Gettysburg!
Battle royale game: blends the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game with last-man-standing gameplay. Battle royale games challenge a large number of players, starting with minimal equipment, to search for weapons and armor and eliminate all other opponents while avoiding being trapped outside of a shrinking "safe area", with the winner being the last competitor in the game. The name for the genre is taken from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, which presents a similar theme of a last-man-standing competition in a shrinking play zone; arose from mods for large-scale online survival games like Minecraft and ARMA 2; 2017: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG); 2018: free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale, "Blackout" mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4; 2019.02: Electronic Arts released free-to-play Apex Legends.
The Sims (series): the game series which brought the female gender to computer games en masse. Are females about social interactions much more than males, while males are into competition much more than females?
Playfish: now at EA;
The Sims Social (on Facebook; spiritual successor of The Sims Online): the ultimate in the "The Sims" universe. cf. FarmVille/Mafia Wars to The Sims Social.
RPG, MUD, MMORPG: Player versus player (PvP), Player versus environment (PvE) ; Realm versus Realm
Progress Quest: parody of RPGs, ARPGs, MUDs and MMORPGs. 1) slay monsters; 2) returning to town to sell plunder looted from the monsters' corpses; and 3) using the resultant lucre to upgrade one's equipment, so as to more effectively facilitate the efficient slaughter of further monsters.
Theorycraft (from "StarCraft" & "game theory"): reverse engineering the game mechanics; "theorycraft breaks the barrier between game players and developers, since players try to discover the mechanics that usually are accessible only to developers."
Let's Play (video gaming): series of screenshots or a recorded video documenting a playthrough of a video game, usually including commentary by the gamer.
Template:Blizzard Entertainment &
Blizzard Entertainment: Starcraft, Warcraft (and WOW), Diablo (Blizz acquired Condor which contained at its heart: Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik; Condor renamed as Blizzard North to finish Diablo); Battle.net 2.0. Privacy controversy and Real ID; Warden Client.
Template:Valve games &
Template:Valve technology &
Valve Corporation: (Valve Software; Valve; VALVE): USA video game development and digital distribution company; founded in 1966 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Valve became famous for its critically acclaimed Half-Life (released in November 1998) and Portal series (released in October 2007).
Don't Starve (initial release: Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux 2013.04.23): survival video game developed by the Canadian indie video game developer Klei Entertainment. The game follows a scientist named Wilson who finds himself in a dark, dreary world and must survive as long as possible. To this end, the player must keep Wilson healthy, fed, and mentally stable as he avoids a variety of surreal and supernatural enemies that will try to kill and devour him. The game's Adventure mode adds depth to the sparse plot and pits Wilson against the game's antagonist, Maxwell. Releases and updates: Don't Starve: Reign of Giants; Don't Starve Together; Don't Starve: Shipwrecked; Don't Starve: Hamlet.
Experience point: unit of measurement used in many role-playing games (RPGs) and role-playing video games to quantify a player character's progression through the game. Power-Leveling
Grinding (video gaming): term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games.
Min-maxing: practice of playing RPG, wargame or video game with the intent of creating the "best" character by means of minimizing undesired or unimportant traits and maximizing desired ones.
Powergaming: style of interacting with games or game-like systems with the aim of maximising progress towards a specific goal, to the exclusion of other considerations such as (in video games, boardgames, and roleplaying games) storytelling, atmosphere and camaraderie.
Gold farming: playing MMOG to acquire in-game currency that other players purchase in exchange for real-world money.
Video game bot: type of weak AI expert system software which for each instance of the program controls a player in deathmatch, team deathmatch and/or cooperative human player, most prominently in FPSs.
PCGamingWiki (2012.02.9-): collaboratively edited, free Internet encyclopedia focused on collecting game behavior data (such as save locations and startup parameters) to optimizing gameplay and fixing issues found in PC video games. Intended fixes and optimizations range from simple cutscene removals to modifications that allow for wide-screen resolutions and more. The wiki runs on MediaWiki software and was created by Andrew Tsai.
The Ancient Art of War (1984, USA): generally recognized as one of the first real-time strategy or real-time tactics games.
Modem Wars (1988, USA): real-time tactics. Features such as fog of war, varied unit types, terrain, and formations, all now standards in the genre, were implemented despite the daunting technical limitations of late 1980s computers.
Herzog Zwei (1989, Japan): early real-time strategy game, predating the genre-popularizing Dune II.
Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA ("We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA"): song by Swedish dance DJ Basshunter which samples a remixed version of the French song "Daddy DJ" by Daddy DJ. The lyrics, in Swedish, are about using the voice chat program Ventrilo while playing DotA.
Dota 2 (beta: since 2011.07; released: 2013.07.09; esport; by Valve Corporation; platforms: Windows (Linux and OS X TBA)): stand-alone sequel to the Defense of the Ancients mod (of Warcraft III). Notoriously long development cycle: Valve's investment in Dota was sparked from the collective interest of several veteran employees, including Team Fortress designer Robin Walker, programmer Adrian Finol and project manager Erik Johnson, all of whom had attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level; they began corresponding with DotA's developer, IceFrog; invitation from Erik Johnson, offering IceFrog a tour of the company's facilities and as a result, hired him to develop a sequel; first public notification regarding the development of Dota 2 was a blog post made by IceFrog on 2009.10.05, stating that he would be leading a team at Valve; Dota 2 debut at Gamescom 2011 (Cologne). 2013.05: 330k concurrent players; 2014.06.21: ~800k concurrent players; 2015.02.15: ~ 1 mln. Professional competition.
Dawngate: MOBA video game developed by Waystone Games and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows. Testing period began on 2013.05.24, and the community beta was released on 2014.04.09. The open beta was released on 2014.05.19; on 2014.11.04, it was announced that because the beta was not shaping up as they had hoped, all development would stop and the game would be fully shut down in 90 days.
Role-playing video game (RPG): video game genre where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immersed in some well-defined world, usually involving some form of character development by way of recording statistics. Many role-playing video games have origins in tabletop role-playing games[1] and use much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. Other major similarities with pen-and-paper games include developed story-telling and narrative elements, player character development, complexity, as well as replay value and immersion. The electronic medium removes the necessity for a gamemaster and increases combat resolution speed. RPGs have evolved from simple text-based console-window games into visually rich 3D experiences.
Characteristics: Story and setting; Exploration and quests; Items and inventory; Character actions and abilities; Experience and levels; Combat; Interface and graphics.
MMORPGs (MUDs)
Sandbox RPGs
Tactical RPGs
Relationship to other genres: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, a real-time strategy game, features heroes that can complete quests, obtain new equipment, and "learn" new abilities as they advance in level. A community-created mod based on 'Warcraft III, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), served as significant inspiration for the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre. Due to its Warcraft III origins, MOBA is a fusion of role-playing games, real-time strategy games, and action games, with RPG elements built in its core gameplay. A key features, such as control over one character in a party, growth in power over the course of match, learning new thematic abilities, using of mana, leveling and accumulation of experience points, equipment and inventory management, completing quests, and fighting with the stationary boss monsters, have resemblance with role-playing games.
Roguelike: subgenre of role-playing computer games traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Though Beneath Apple Manor predates it, the 1980 game Rogue, which is an ASCII based game that runs in terminal or terminal emulator, is considered the forerunner and the namesake of the genre, with derivative games mirroring Rogue's character- or sprite-based graphics. These games were popularized among college students and computer programmers of the 1980s and 1990s, leading to hundreds of variants.
Universe: Anor Londo (Ornstein and Smough), Sif, Solaire of Astora
Soulslike: subgenre of action role-playing and action-adventure games known for high levels of difficulty and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. It had its origin in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series by FromSoftware, the themes and mechanics of which directly inspired several other games.
Addiction
Gaming is addictive. One can make money from games as from selling guns or drugs on the street
Neopets (1999.11.15-): mostly female users; Nielsen/NetRatings of Neopets was the highest in 2001.
eSports
Electronic sports (e-sports, eSports, competitive gaming, professional gaming, cybersports, v-sports): real-time strategy (RTS) [notable: StarCraft: Brood War & StarCraft II; Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne], Multiplayer online battle arena [Defense of the Ancients & Dota 2; League of Legends], fighting [Street Fighter series], first-person shooter (FPS) [Counter Strike (mainly 1.6, but also Source & Condition Zero), Quake (series), Halo (series), Painkiller, Unreal (series)], massively-multiplayer online (MMOG) [WoW], sports games [FIFA, TrackMania Nations].
Total earnings for each game by game group
BarCraft: portmanteau for watching StarCraft at bars; started in 2011.spring in USA with NASL. Spread to Street Fighter's "Barfights" and Dota 2's "Pubstomps".
ESL
Intel Extreme Masters: organizer of ESL Major Series & ESL Pro Series. RTS: WIII (2007-2008), SC2 (2011-), LoL (2011-), DotA (2011, Shanghai). FPS: CS (2007-2012-?), Quake Live (2010-2011), WoW (2009-2010)
Major League Gaming (MLG): 1v1 SC2 from 2010. No SC:BW previously. In January 2016, video game publisher Activision Blizzard announced its acquisition of Major League Gaming. MLG, which lost large profits during the COVID-19 pandemic, was announced to be acquired by Microsoft in 2022.01, through its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Dendi (gamer) (Danil Ishutin, Данило Ішутін; 1989.12.30): Ukrainian professional Dota 2 player. He is best known for his time with Natus Vincere (Na'Vi) for whom he played between 2010 and 2018. He left Na'Vi in 2018 and formed his own Dota 2 organization in 2020, known as B8. Was born in Lviv. As a child, at the insistence of his mother-musician, he played the piano, as well as acrobatics and dancing. As Danil told, the first computer in their house was his brother's, who did not allow him to play for a long time . Gaming world was opened to him by Quake and Doom. Dendi later began playing Warcraft III at local computer clubs. The total fascination with computer games was influenced by the death of Danil's father from cancer. According to the recollections of Danil Ishutin, games became an attempt to distract himself .
KuroKy (کورو صالحی تخاصمی): German-Iranian professional Dota 2 player for Nigma Galaxy. He was a member of Team Liquid that won The International 2017. 2008-2011: in team mousesports where he met initial stand-in player Clement "Puppey" Ivanov, and started what was to become a long-standing relationship. 2011–2014: Early career, Natus Vincere: introduction of Dota 2 and its annual tournament The International, KuroKy's team struggled to find success and the signing of Puppey by Natus Vincere almost prompted KuroKy to quit professionally. Moving between teams Virtus.pro, Uebelst gamynG and mousesports, KuroKy's breakthrough came in 2013 when he joined Natus Vincere as a support player, finishing as runners-up in The International 2013. 2014-2015: Team Secret: KuroKy left Natus Vincere after a lackluster 2014 campaign, and formed Team Secret with his Natus Vincere teammate Puppey, Fnatic players Fly and N0tail and from The Alliance, s4. A roster shuffle later saw them win 4 consecutive LAN finals, but disappointed in The International 2015 having gone in as the heavy favorites. 2015–2019: Team Liquid: Following The International 2015, KuroKy left Team Secret to form a new team, 5Jungz composed of himself, FATA-, MATUMBAMAN, JerAx and MinD_ContRoL. 5Jungz was signed by the esports organisation Team Liquid and found immediate success, coming 2nd in The Shanghai Major 2016, The Manila Major 2016 and 1st at EPICENTER 2016. With further roster adjustments including the additions of then unknown pubstars Miracle- and GH, Team Liquid became the strongest team in the competition, winning several LANs in succession culminating in winning The International 2017. Their success had continued to The International 2019, as they had made a miraculous run to the finals through the lower bracket of the Main Event after failing to obtain an upper bracket seed in the Group Stage. This involved beating Fnatic, TNC Predator, RNG, Evil Geniuses, Team Secret and PSG.LGD but ultimately falling to defending champions OG in the best-of-five series 3–1, therefore taking a grand total of $4,462,909. 2019–present: Nigma.
Puppey (Clement Ivanov; 1990.03.06-): Estonian professional Dota 2 player for Team Secret. He is the founding member of Team Secret. Together with Natus Vincere, Puppey won The International 2011 in August 2011 for a one million dollar first place prize. They also took runner-up for the next two Internationals. Controversies: On 16 February 2016, former team manager Evany Chang accused Team Secret of not paying prize winnings to her and former players. He also backed EternaLEnVy's claim that Puppey was the only player aware of the organization taking a 10% cut.
S4 (gamer) (Gustav Magnusson; 1992.04.01-): Swedish professional Dota 2 player for Alliance. As a member of Alliance, s4 won The International 2013.
N0tail (Johan Sundstein): Danish professional Dota 2 player and captain for OG. With them, he has played in four iterations of The International, winning in 2018 and 2019, and has also won four Major championships. Notail became one of the youngest professional Heroes of Newerth player at the early age of 15, playing the role of solo middle back then. He started by playing random pub games on HoN servers and later on decided to match up with Jascha "NoVa" Markuse and Tal "Fly" Aizik. They were recognized by the manager of Fnatic, who took them under his wing as an unofficial side project.
Fly (gamer) (Hebrew: טל אייזיק): Israeli professional Dota 2 player for Evil Geniuses. He was former co-founder of esports team OG. Aizik won four Dota Major Championships with team OG. He is the son of Krav Maga instructor Moni Aizik. Tal has done instructor courses and has an active interest in Krav Maga himself. He says that if he weren't a professional Dota 2 player, he would be a Krav Maga teacher. In 2018.05, he left OG to join Evil Geniuses, along with s4.
Ppd (gamer) (Peter Dager; 1991/1992-): USA former professional Dota 2 player and current coach for Alliance. He was the former CEO of the esports organization Evil Geniuses, where he also won The International 2015 as a player-captain, later playing for OpTic Gaming and Ninjas in Pyjamas.
Ceb (gamer) (Sébastien Debs; 1992/1993-): French professional Dota 2 player for OG. He was a member of the team that won the multi-million dollar International 2018 and 2019 tournaments, as well as the team's coach when they won four Dota Major Championships.
Arteezy (Artour Babaev; 1996.07.01-): Canadian-Uzbekistani professional Dota 2 player for Evil Geniuses. He is also one of the most popular streamers among the community. In 2013.11, he made his professional debut in MLG Columbus as a stand-in for Speed Gaming. In January 2014, Babaev, along with North American Dota players Universe and Fear, as well as former Heroes of Newerth players ppd and zai created "S A D B O Y S", who were later signed by Evil Geniuses.
Topson (Topias Miikka Taavitsainen; 1998.04.14-): Finnish professional Dota 2 player for OG. As a member of OG, he won The International 2018 and The International 2019.
Sumail (Syed Sumail Hassan, سمیل حسن; 1999.02.13): Pakistani professional Dota 2 player for OG. Sumail was a member of the Evil Geniuses team that won The International 2015. He was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and lives in Rosemont, Illinois as a resident of USA. In 2019, Hassan left EG to briefly play alongside his brother on the Quincy Crew before signing with OG in 2020. Upon his arrival to USA, Sumail began playing in the North American Elite League. Hassan quickly became the highest rated player in the in-house league, establishing himself as one of the best unsigned talents in North America. Evil Geniuses (EG) signed him in 2015.01, joining Fear, Aui 2000, Universe, and ppd. TI5 (2015): EG experienced a setback of their own after losing the upper bracket finals 0–2 to CDEC Gaming. EG defeated LGD Gaming in the lower bracket finals and prevailed 3–1 in a rematch with CDEC in the grand finals to win the tournament and a US$6.6 million grand prize, which made Sumail the youngest player ever to surpass a million in esports winnings. In 2016, Sumail was named by Time as among 'the 30 Most Influential Teens' that year.
Ana (gamer) (Anathan Pham; 1999.10.26-): Australian former professional Dota 2 player. He was a member of the team (OG) that won the multi-million dollar International 2018 and 2019 tournaments, and has also won two Major championships. In his early career, Pham played in the position solo mid, with comparatively little success. He received significant criticism for his solo mid performance and comparatively low creep score. Prior to the International 2018, Pham transitioned to playing as a carry, leaving the solo mid position to Topson. Pham has been described as an integral piece to OG's success. He developed a novel carry Io strategy which kept his opponents off balance throughout The International 2019. He was noted for his so-called "game sense". Commentators have called him as one of the best carry players, and one of the best Dota 2 players overall. Pham is noted for his long breaks from professional play, something that is generally recommended against
de:Riot League of Legends World Championship: alljährlich stattfindendes E-Sport-Turnier, das von Riot Games veranstaltet wird. Season 1 (2011): 1. Fnatic, 2. against All authority, 3. Team SoloMid; Season 2 (2012): 1. Taipei Assassins, 2. Azubu Frost, 3./4. Moscow Five & Counter Logic Gaming EU
Evil Geniuses: USA esports organization based in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1999, the organization has fielded players in various fighting games, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Fortnite Battle Royale, Halo, League of Legends, StarCraft II, Rocket League, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, and World of Warcraft.
SK Gaming: CS; SC2 (MC); LoL; shortly lived Dota (with Loda) / Dota 2 team
Team Secret: esports team based in Europe formed in 2014, best known for their Dota 2 team. N0tail and Fly were confirmed to leave Fnatic in 2014.07.27. 2014.08.03 s4 left Alliance. Some rumors of a new all-star team began to rise on Reddit. Na`Vi posted on their website they released Puppey and KuroKy. 2014.08.27 Team Secret debuted and showed their roster in a match against Alliance.
Korean teams (see Korean Wikipedia): FXOpen, Incredible Miracle, MvP (Most Valuable Player), New Star Hoseo, oGs (Old Generations; 2010.05.01-2012.05.15), SlayerS, TSL (Team SCV Life), ZeNEX, STARTALE, Prime
Sean Plott (Day[9]; 1986.06.27): USA esports commentator, player, event host, and game designer. Plott is best known for his contributions in the professional StarCraft scene, where he regularly appeared first as a player and later as a commentator and host at various tournaments for the game for many years. More recently, Plott has branched out to other competitive games, such as Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, and Dota 2.
Nick Plott (Tasteless; 1984.08.11): USA esports commentator. He moved to Seoul, Korea in 2007 to give commentary to e-sports competitions. He has provided commentary for multiple Starcraft and Starcraft 2 tournaments. Together with Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski, he currently provides commentary for Global StarCraft II League and AfreecaTV StarLeague games.
Characters of StarCraft: The story of the StarCraft series revolves around interstellar affairs in a distant sector of the galaxy, where three species are vying for supremacy: the Terrans, a highly factionalised future version of humanity, the Protoss, a theocratic race of vast psionic ability; and the Zerg, an insectoid species commanded by a hive mind persona. The latter two of these species were genetically engineered by the Xel'Naga, a fourth species believed extinct. The series was begun with Blizzard Entertainment's 1998 video game StarCraft, and has been expanded with sequels Insurrection, Retribution, Brood War, Ghost, Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void. Terrans: Raynor's Raiders; Terran Dominion; United Earth Directorate (UED); Umojan Protectorate. Protosses: Khalai; Nerazim; Tal'Darim; Purifiers. Zergs: Overmind's Zerg Swarm; Feral and Renegade Broods; Queen of Blade's Zerg Swarm (Kerrigan); Xel'Naga characters.
Team Liquid: SC:BW, SC2, Dota 2 info and team, Wiki (Liquipedia), and statistics (Player Database, TLPD). Team Liquid Starleague (TSL) for SC:BW and SC2.
Guillaume Patry (Grrrr...; 1982.06.19-): French-Canadian former pro of SC:BW (the only non-Korean Starleague (OSL) winner); learned Korean language; played poker.
Lee Jae-dong (Jaedong): South Korean professional StarCraft: Brood War and StarCraft 2 player; earned over $500,000 in tournament prize money alone through his career - the most of any professional gamer
Entropia Universe: MMORPG by Swedish software company MindArk, based in Gothenburg. Uses a micropayment business model, in which players may buy in-game currency (PED - Project Entropia Dollars) with real money that can be redeemed back into U.S. dollar at a fixed exchange rate of 10:1. Some virtual tycoons managed to make money in Entropia Universe by developing the content and selling the use of it ("taxing" the players for the use). Has virtual planets, virtual banks.
OpenSimulator: server platform for hosting virtual worlds. Compatible with Second Life client.
Virtual world (massively multiplayer online world (MMOW)): computer-based simulated environment. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others. These avatars can be textual, two or three-dimensional graphical representations, or live video avatars with auditory and touch sensations. In general, virtual worlds allow for multiple users.
Second Life (2003.06.23-): online virtual world, developed by Linden Lab (a company based in San Francisco). 1 mln regular users in 2014. In many ways, Second Life is similar to MMORPGs; however, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective". Intended for people aged 16 and over. Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based on simple geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects. There is also a procedural scripting language, Linden Scripting Language, which can be used to add interactivity to objects. Sculpted prims (sculpties), mesh, textures for clothing or other objects, animations, and gestures can be created using external software and imported. Fraud and intellectual property protection.
Mathematical Kangaroo (International Mathematical Kangaroo): international mathematical competition with more than 50 countries that take an active part in it. There are twelve levels of participation: from grade 1 to grade 12. The competition is held annually on the third Thursday of March. According to the organizers, the key competence tested by the Kangaroo is logical combination, not just pure knowledge of formulas. Because of the rising popularity of the Mathematical Kangaroo in many participating countries, it is currently the most participated scholar math competition: over 5,000,000 students from 47 countries took part in 2009.
International Science Olympiad: a group of worldwide annual competitions in various areas of science. The competitions are designed for the 4-6 best high school students from each participating country selected through internal National Science Olympiads, with the exception of the IOL, which allows two teams per country, the IOI, which allows two teams from the hosting country, and the IJSO, which is designed for junior secondary students. Early editions of the Olympiads were limited to the Eastern Bloc, but later they gradually spread to other countries. 12 are:
International Mathematical Olympiad: annual six-problem, 42-point mathematical olympiad for pre-collegiate students and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except in 1980. About 100 countries send teams of up to six students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and observers.
International Physics Olympiad: annual physics competition for high school students. The first IPhO was held in Warsaw, Poland in 1967.
Asian Physics Olympiad: annual physics competition for high school students from Asia and Oceania regions. It is one of the International Science Olympiads and is also the only regional competition in physics to date.
International Olympiad in Informatics: annual competitive programming competition for secondary school students. It is the second largest olympiad, after International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries (IOI 2014 saw participation of 84 countries). The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria.
Veteran (vetus 'old'): person who has significant experience (and is usually adept and esteemed) and expertise in an occupation or field. A military veteran is a person who is no longer in a military. A military veteran that has served directly in combat in a war is further defined as a war veteran (although not all military conflicts, or areas in which armed combat took place, are necessarily referred to as wars). Military veterans are unique as a group as their lived experience is so strongly connected to the conduct of war in general and application of professional violence in particular. Therefore, there are a large body of knowledge developed through centuries of scholarly studies that seek to describe, understand and explain their lived experience in and out of service.
Force multiplication: attribute or a combination of attributes which make a given force more effective than that same force would be without it. Common force multipliers: morale, technology, geographical features, weather, recruitment through diplomacy, training and experience, fearsome reputation, deception, military strategy, military tactics (e.g. force concentration)
Armored spearhead: formation of armored fighting vehicles, mostly tanks, that form the front of an offensive thrust during a battle. The idea is to concentrate as much firepower into a small front as possible, so any defenders in front of them will be overwhelmed.
List of aircraft carriers by country: in service: USA (11), UK (2 (a shadow of British Empire!)), IT (2 (WHY more than FR?)), FR (1), RU (1), India (2), ES (1 (!)), Brazil (1 (!!)), PRC (2), Japan (2), Thailand (1 (Helicopter carrier)) [2023/09/30]. Under construction: USA (3), PRC (1), India (1), FR (1), IT (1).
Just war theory (Latin: jus bellum iustum): doctrine, also referred to as a tradition, of military ethics studied by military leaders, theologians, ethicists and policy makers. The purpose of the doctrine is to ensure war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. The criteria are split into two groups: "right to go to war" (jus ad bellum) and "right conduct in war" (jus in bello). The first concerns the morality of going to war, and the second the moral conduct within war. Recently there have been calls for the inclusion of a third category of Just War theory—jus post bellum—dealing with the morality of post-war settlement and reconstruction.
Rules of engagement (ROE): internal rules or directives among military forces (including individuals) that define the circumstances, conditions, degree, and manner in which the use of force, or actions which might be construed as provocative, may be applied. They provide authorization for and/or limits on, among other things, the use of force and the employment of certain specific capabilities. In some nations, ROE has the status of guidance to military forces, while in other nations, ROE is lawful commands.
Urban warfare: combat conducted in urban areas such as towns and cities. Urban combat is very different from combat in the open at both the operational and tactical level. Complicating factors in urban warfare include the presence of civilians and the complexity of the urban terrain. Fighting in urban areas negates the advantages that one side may have over the other in armour, heavy artillery, or air support. Ambushes laid down by small groups of soldiers with handheld anti-tank weapons can effectively destroy entire columns of modern armour (as in the First Battle of Grozny), while artillery and air support can be severely reduced if the 'superior' party wants to limit civilian casualties as much as possible, but the defending party does not (or even uses civilians as human shields). Urban warfare tactics: Battle of Monterrey, Mexico; Battle of Berlin; First Chechen War (Grozny); Operation Defensive Shield (Nablus, Jenin).
Electronic warfare (EW): any action involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EM spectrum) or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy assaults. The purpose of electronic warfare is to deny the opponent the advantage of—and ensure friendly unimpeded access to—the EM spectrum. EW can be applied from air, sea, land, and/or space by crewed and uncrewed systems, and can target communication, radar, or other military and civilian assets.
Full-spectrum dominance (full-spectrum superiority): military entity's achievement of control over all dimensions of the battlespace, effectively possessing an overwhelming diversity of resources in such areas as terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, extraterrestrial, psychological, and bio- or cyber-technological warfare. Full spectrum dominance includes the physical battlespace; air, surface and sub-surface as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space.
List of defense contractors: defense contractor is a business organization or individual that provides products or services to a military or intelligence department of a government. Products typically include military or civilian aircraft, ships, vehicles, weaponry, and electronic systems, while services can include logistics, technical support and training, communications support, and engineering support in cooperation with the government. Security contractors do not generally provide direct support of military operations. Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, military contractors engaged in direct support of military operations may be legitimate targets of military interrogation. USA: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics Corp., L3Harris Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Honeywell, Booz Allen Hamilton. China (PRC): NORINCO, AVIC, CETC, CASIC, CSGC. UK: BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce. EU: Airbus. Italy: Leonardo. France: Thales Group. Russia: Almaz-Antey, United Aircraft.
Lanchester's laws: mathematical formulae for calculating the relative strengths of military forces. The Lanchester equations are differential equations describing the time dependence of two armies' strengths A and B as a function of time, with the function depending only on A and B. In 1915 and 1916, during WWI, M. Osipov and Frederick Lanchester independently devised a series of differential equations to demonstrate the power relationships between opposing forces. Lanchester's linear law. Lanchester's square law.
The Green Book (IRA): training and induction manual issued by the Irish Republican Army to new volunteers. It was used by the post-Irish Civil War Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Cumann na mBan, ("League of Women"), along with later incarnations such as the Provisional IRA (PIRA). It includes a statement of military objectives, tactics and conditions for military victory against the British government. This military victory was to be achieved as part of "the ongoing liberation of Ireland from foreign occupiers". The Green Book has acted as a manual of conduct and induction to the organisation since at least the 1950s.
Decapitation (military strategy): aimed at removing the leadership or command and control of a hostile government or group. The strategy of shattering or defeating an enemy by eliminating its military and political leadership has long been utilized in warfare. Genocide. In nuclear warfare: decapitation strike is a pre-emptive first strike attack that aims to destabilize an opponent's military and civil leadership structure in the hope that it will severely degrade or destroy its capacity for nuclear retaliation. Conventional warfare, assassination and terrorist acts
Separation of military and police roles: principle by which the military and law enforcement perform clearly differentiated duties and do not interfere with each other's areas of discipline. Whereas the military's purpose is to fight wars, law enforcement is meant to enforce domestic law. Neither is trained specifically to do the other's job. Military and law enforcement differ, sometimes fundamentally, in areas such as source of authority, training in use of force, training in investigation and prosecution, and training in enforcing laws and ensuring civil liberties. The presence of a heavily-armed military standing in for the law enforcement personnel may reassure anxious civilians or not, but it should at best be partial and short-term.
Military police: law enforcement agencies connected with, or part of, the military of a state. In wartime operations, the military police may support the main fighting force with force protection, convoy security, screening, rear reconnaissance, logistic traffic management, counterinsurgency, and detainee handling. In different countries it may refer to:
A section of military forces assigned to police, or garrison, occupied territories, usually during a war.
A section of military forces assigned to policing Prisoners of war (POW) detentions.
A section of the military responsible for policing the areas of responsibility of the armed forces (referred to as provosts) against all criminal activity by military or civilian personnel
A section of the military responsible for policing in both the armed forces and in the civilian population (most gendarmeries, such as the French Gendarmerie or the Spanish Guardia Civil)
A section of the military solely responsible for policing the civilian population (such as the Romanian Gendarmerie or the Chilean Carabineros)
The status of military police is usually prominently displayed on the helmet or peaked cap, with an armband, brassard, or arm or shoulder flash. Military police personnel may also wear a more traditional police badge, usually on the front of their uniform; They may also wear other accoutrements exclusive to military police personnel.
Naval police personnel are sometimes called "coast guard", "naval security forces", "masters-at-arms" and/or "shore patrol". Law enforcement personnel of an air force are sometimes called "air police", "security police" or "security forces".
Gendarmerie: military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population. The term gendarme (English: /ˈʒɒndɑːrm/) is derived from the medieval French expression gens d'armes, which translates to "men-at-arms" (lit. 'armed people'), or "rural police". In France and some Francophone nations, the gendarmerie is a branch of the armed forces that is responsible for internal security in parts of the territory (primarily in rural areas and small towns in the case of France), with additional duties as military police for the armed forces. It was introduced to several other Western European countries during the Napoleonic conquests. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of former French mandates and colonial possessions (such as Lebanon, Syria, the Ivory Coast and the Republic of the Congo) adopted a gendarmerie after independence. A similar concept exists in Eastern Europe in the form of Internal Troops, which are present in many countries of the former Soviet Union and its former allied countries.
Bomb damage assessment (BDA; battle damage assessment): the practice of assessing damage inflicted on a target from a stand-off weapon, most typically a bomb or air launched missile. It is part of the larger discipline of combat assessment. Assessment is performed using many techniques including footage from in-weapon cameras, gun cameras, forces on the ground near the target, satellite imagery and follow-up visits to the target. Preventing information on battle damage reaching the enemy is a key objective of military censorship. For nuclear weapons special techniques may be required due to the extensive damage caused and difficulty in approaching the site.
Military deception (MILDEC): attempt by a military unit to gain an advantage during warfare by misleading adversary decision makers into taking actions detrimental to the adversary. This is usually achieved by creating or amplifying an artificial fog of war via psychological operations, information warfare, visual deception, or other methods. As a form of disinformation, it overlaps with psychological warfare. Military deception is also closely connected to operations security (OPSEC) in that OPSEC attempts to conceal from the adversary critical information about an organization's capabilities, activities, limitations, and intentions, or provide a plausible alternate explanation for the details the adversary can observe, while deception reveals false information in an effort to mislead the adversary. The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise, emphasizes the importance of deception as a way for outnumbered forces to defeat larger adversaries.
Pole weapon: close combat weapon in which the main fighting part of the weapon is fitted to the end of a long shaft, typically of wood, thereby extending the user's effective range and striking power. Because many pole weapons were adapted from agricultural implements or other tools in fairly large amount of abundance, and contain relatively little metal, they were cheap to make and readily available. When warfare breaks out and the belligerents have a poorer class who cannot pay for dedicated weapons made for war, military leaders often resort to the appropriation of tools as cheap weapons. The cost of training was minimal, since these conscripted farmers had spent most of their lives in the familiar use of these "weapons" in the fields. This made polearms the favored weapon of peasant levies and peasant rebellions the world over.
Multiple rocket launcher (MRL; multiple launch rocket system (MLRS)): type of rocket artillery system that contains multiple launchers which are fixed to a single platform, and shoots its rocket ordnance in a fashion similar to a volley gun. Rockets are self-propelled in flight and have different capabilities than conventional artillery shells, such as longer effective range, lower recoil, typically considerably higher payload than a similarly sized gun artillery platform, or even carrying multiple warheads. Unguided rocket artillery is notoriously inaccurate and slow to reload compared to gun artillery. A multiple rocket launcher helps compensate for this with its ability to launch multiple rockets in rapid succession, which, coupled with the large kill zone of each warhead, can easily deliver saturation fire over a target area. However, modern rockets can use GPS or inertial guidance to combine the advantages of rockets with the higher accuracy of precision-guided munitions.
Man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS): portable surface-to-air missiles. They are guided weapons and are a threat to low-flying aircraft, especially helicopters. MANPADS were developed in the 1950s to provide military ground forces with protection from jet aircraft. They have received a great deal of attention, partly because armed groups have used them against commercial airliners.
Bombs:
Unguided bomb (free-fall bomb, gravity bomb, dumb bomb, iron bomb): conventional or nuclear aircraft-delivered bomb that does not contain a guidance system and hence, simply follows a ballistic trajectory. This described all aircraft bombs in general service until the latter half of WWII, and the vast majority until the late 1980s.
Carpet bombing: large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. The phrase evokes the image of explosions completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor. Carpet bombing is usually achieved by dropping many unguided bombs.
Precision-guided munition (PGM, smart weapon, smart munition, smart bomb): guided munition intended to precisely hit a specific target, to minimize collateral damage and increase lethality against intended targets. During the First Gulf War guided munitions accounted for only 9% of weapons fired, but accounted for 75% of all successful hits. Despite guided weapons generally being used on more difficult targets, they were still 35 times more likely to destroy their targets per weapon dropped.
Ballistic missile: follows a ballistic trajectory to deliver one or more warheads on a predetermined target. These weapons are guided only during relatively brief periods—most of the flight is unpowered. Short-range ballistic missiles stay within the Earth's atmosphere, while ICBMs are launched on a sub-orbital trajectory. These weapons are in a distinct category from cruise missiles, which are aerodynamically guided in powered flight.
9K720 Iskander (Искандер): mobile short range ballistic missile system produced and deployed by the Russian military. The missile systems (Искандер-М) are to replace the obsolete OTR-21 Tochka systems, still in use by the Russian armed forces, by 2020. Iskander-M: published range 415 km, rumoured 500 km, speed Mach 6–7, flight altitude up to 6–50 km, nuclear capable stealth missile, controlled at all stages, not ballistic flight path. Iskander-K (Krylataya): intended to carry various types of cruise missiles; 9M728 (R-500): flight altitude up to 6 km, published range up to 500 km; 9M729: new long-range missile that is reportedly land-based version of the 3M14 Caliber-NK missile complex with a range 480–5,470 km and may be based even on the air-launched Kh-101 cruise missile with a range over 5,500 km; Iskander-E (Eksport): director of the state corporation Rostec Sergey Chemezov commented that the Iskander missile complex is a serious offensive weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV): exoatmospheric ballistic missile payload containing several warheads, each capable of being aimed to hit a different target. The concept is almost invariably associated with ICBMs carrying thermonuclear warheads, even if not strictly being limited to them. By contrast, a unitary warhead is a single warhead on a single missile. Only USA, UK, France, Russia and China are currently confirmed to possess functional MIRV missile systems. Pakistan and India are developing MIRV missile systems. Israel is suspected to possess or be in the process of developing MIRVs.
Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM): missile with a minimum range of 5,500 km primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads). Similarly, conventional, chemical, and biological weapons can also be delivered with varying effectiveness, but have never been deployed on ICBMs. Most modern designs support MIRVs, allowing a single missile to carry several warheads, each of which can strike a different target. Russia, the United States, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, and North Korea are the only countries that have operational ICBMs.
LGM-30 Minuteman: USA land-based ICBM in service with the Air Force Global Strike Command. As of 2021, the LGM-30G Minuteman III (1970-) version is the only land-based ICBM in service in the United States and represents the land leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. 1962-1969 Minuteman-I; 1965-1994 Minuteman-II. In 1970, the Minuteman-III became the first deployed ICBM with MIRV: three smaller warheads that improved the missile's ability to strike targets defended by ABMs.
LGM-35 Sentinel: future USA land-based ICBM currently in the early stages of development.
Submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM): capable of being launched from submarines. Modern variants usually deliver MIRVs each of which carries a nuclear warhead and allows a single launched missile to strike several targets. SLBMs operate in a different way from Submarine-Launched Cruise Missiles. Modern submarine-launched ballistic missiles are closely related to ICBMs.
Cruise missile: guided missile used against terrestrial or naval targets that remains in the atmosphere and flies the major portion of its flight path at approximately constant speed. Cruise missiles are designed to deliver a large warhead over long distances with high precision. Modern cruise missiles are capable of travelling at high subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic speeds, are self-navigating, and are able to fly on a non-ballistic, extremely low-altitude trajectory.
Missile defense: system, weapon, or technology involved in the detection, tracking, interception, and destruction of attacking missiles. Conceived as a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs, its application has broadened to include shorter-ranged non-nuclear tactical and theater missiles. China/PRC, France, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Russia, Taiwan/ROC, UK and USA have all developed such air defense systems.
M142 HIMARS (M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System): light multiple rocket launcher developed in the late 1990s for the United States Army and mounted on a standard United States Army M1140 truck frame. The M142 carries one pod with either six GMLRS rockets (M30, M31) or one ATACMS missile on the United States Army's new Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) five-ton truck, and can launch the entire Multiple Launch Rocket System Family of Munitions (MFOM). M142 ammunition pods are interchangeable with the M270 MLRS; however, it is able to carry only one pod rather than the standard two for the M270 and its variants.
M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System: USA armored, self-propelled, multiple rocket launcher. The first M270s were delivered to the U.S. Army in 1983. The MLRS has since been adopted by several NATO countries. Rockets and missiles: MLRS: M26, M26A1 ER, M26A2 ER, M28, M28A1, M28A2, AT2; GMLRS: M30, M30A1, M30A2, M31, M31A1, M31A2, M32 SMArt, ER GMLRS (extended range of up to 150 km); ATACMS: M39, M39A1, M48, M57, M57E1; PrSM.
MGM-140 ATACMS (MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System): surface-to-surface missile (SSM) manufactured by USA defense company Lockheed Martin. It has a range of up to 300 km, with solid propellant, and is 4.0 m high and 610 mm in diameter.
Nuclear triad: three-pronged military force structure that consists of land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-missile-armed submarines, and strategic aircraft with nuclear bombs and missiles. Specifically, these components are land-based ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers. The purpose of having this three-branched nuclear capability is to significantly reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all of a nation's nuclear forces in a first-strike attack. This, in turn, ensures a credible threat of a second strike, and thus increases a nation's nuclear deterrence. Triad powers: India, China (PRC), Russia (Soviet nuclear triad during the Cold War; ICBMs; SLBMs), USA (Nuclear triad during the Cold War (1960–1990); Nuclear triad after the Cold War (1990–2010); Modern nuclear triad (2010–present)). Former triad powers: France. Suspected triad powers: Israel.
Neutron bomb (enhanced radiation weapon (ERW)): low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself. The neutron release generated by a nuclear fusion reaction is intentionally allowed to escape the weapon, rather than being absorbed by its other components. The neutron burst, which is used as the primary destructive action of the warhead, is able to penetrate enemy armor more effectively than a conventional warhead, thus making it more lethal as a tactical weapon.
Category:Tactical nuclear weapons (TNW, non-strategic nuclear weapon (NSNW)): designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war. Tactical nuclear weapons include gravity bombs, short-range missiles, artillery shells, land mines, depth charges, and torpedoes which are equipped with nuclear warheads. Also in this category are nuclear armed ground-based or shipborne SAMs and air-to-air missiles.
Autocannon: automatic cannon or machine cannon is a fully automatic gun that is capable of rapid-firing large-caliber (20 mm or more) armour-piercing, explosive or incendiary shells, as opposed to the smaller-caliber kinetic projectiles (bullets) fired by a machine gun. Autocannons have a longer effective range and greater terminal performance than machine guns, due to the use of larger/heavier munitions (most often in the range of 20–57 mm), but bigger calibers also exist), but are usually smaller than tank guns, howitzers, field guns or other artillery. When used on its own, the word "autocannon" typically indicates a non-rotary weapon with a single barrel. When multiple rotating barrels are involved, such a weapon is referred to as a "rotary autocannon" or occasionally "rotary cannon", for short (particularly on aircraft).
Rotary cannon (rotary autocannon, rotary gun, Gatling cannon): any large-caliber multiple-barreled automatic firearm that uses a Gatling-type rotating barrel assembly to deliver a sustained saturational direct fire at much greater rates of fire than single-barreled autocannons of the same caliber. The loading, firing and ejection functions are performed simultaneously in different barrels as the whole assembly rotates, and the rotation also permits the barrels some time to cool. The rotating barrels on nearly all modern Gatling-type guns are powered by an external force such as an electric motor, although internally powered gas-operated versions have also been developed. Each barrel fires a single cartridge when it reaches a certain position in the rotation, after which the spent casing is ejected at a different position and then a new round loaded at another position. During the cycle, the barrel has more time to dissipate some heat away to the surrounding air. Due to the usually cumbersome size and weight of rotary cannon, they are typically mounted on weapons platforms such as vehicles, aircraft, or ships, where they are often used in close-in weapon systems.
Command of the sea (control of the sea, sea control): naval military concept regarding the strength of a particular navy to a specific naval area it controlled. A navy has command of the sea when it is so strong that its rivals cannot attack it directly. This dominance may apply to its surrounding waters (i.e., the littoral) or may extend far into the oceans, meaning the country has a blue-water navy. With command of the sea, a country (or alliance) can ensure that its own military and merchant ships can move around at will, while its rivals are forced either to stay in port or to try to evade it. It also enables free use of amphibious operations that can expand ground-based strategic options. The British Royal Navy held command of the sea for most of the period between the 18th to the early 20th c., allowing Britain and its allies to trade and to move troops and supplies easily in wartime, while its enemies could not. In the post-WWII period, USA Navy has had command of the sea. Historic command of the sea during the age of sail: National capabilities; Asymmetric countermeasures: An annex to the Treaty of Paris (1856) banned privateering. That treaty was an oddity in that it was ratified by relatively few countries, but quickly became the de facto law of the sea. Historic command of the sea in the era of steam. Historic command of the sea in the era of naval aviation. Modern command of the sea: Requirements for modern sea control; Countermeasures to imposed command.
Carrier battle group (CVBG): naval fleet consisting of an aircraft carrier (designated CV) capital ship and its large number of escorts, together defining the group. The first naval task forces built around carriers appeared just prior to and during Second World War. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the first to assemble many carriers into a single task force, known as Kido Butai. This task force was used with devastating effect in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Kido Butai operated as the IJN's main carrier battle group until four of its carriers were sunk at the Battle of Midway. In contrast, USA Navy deployed its large carriers in separate formations, with each carrier assigned its own cruiser and destroyer escorts. These single-carrier formations would often be paired or grouped together for certain assignments, most notably the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway. With the construction of the large "supercarriers" of the Cold War era, the practice of operating each carrier in a single formation was revived. During the Cold War, the main role of the CVBG in case of conflict with USSR would have been to protect Atlantic supply routes between USA and its allies in NATO Europe, while the role of the Soviet Navy would have been to interrupt these sea lanes, a fundamentally easier task. Because the Soviet Union had no large carriers of its own, a situation of dueling aircraft carriers would have been unlikely. However, a primary mission of the Soviet Navy's attack submarines was to track every allied battle group and, on the outbreak of hostilities, sink the carriers. Understanding this threat, the CVBG expended enormous resources in its own anti-submarine warfare mission.
Naval warfare: combat in and on the sea, the ocean, or any other battlespace involving major body of water such as a large lake or wide river. Mankind has fought battles on the sea for more than 3,000 years. Even in the interior of large landmasses, transportation before the advent of extensive railroads was largely dependent upon rivers, canals, and other navigable waterways. Athenian fleet and Greek city-states vs Persian Empire; Phoenicia's and Egypt's power, Carthage's and even Rome's largely depended upon control of the seas. Vikings; Venetian Republic vs Ottoman Empire. Mediterranean Sea. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/History#New Kingdom (1550 - 1069 BC) Battle of the Delta}. The Islamic Caliphate, or Arab Empire, became the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean Sea from the 7th to 13th centuries, during what is known as the Islamic Golden Age. As Arab power in the Mediterranean began to wane, the Italian trading towns of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice stepped in to seize the opportunity, setting up commercial networks and building navies to protect them.
Tonnage war: military strategy aimed at merchant shipping. The premise is that the enemy has only a finite number of ships, and a finite capacity to build replacements for them. Most anti-shipping strategies primarily aim at a relatively narrow set of goals. For example, a traditional practice of the Royal Navy during wars between Britain and France was blockade. By concentrating available naval units forces near the major French ports, the Royal Navy was usually able to strangle French trade and create significant economic difficulties. Similarly, the enemy may focus on ships carrying strategically vital cargos such as hemp and timber or, in modern times, oil and iron.
During WWII, three tonnage wars were fought:
The largest and best known of them was Dönitz's U-boat campaign, aimed mainly against UK. Although the primary venue for the campaign was the North Atlantic, Dönitz sent U-boats and surface raiders to all corners of the globe in search of the most efficient way to sink the maximum number of ships at minimum cost. The U-boats campaign was very successful especially in the two happy periods (in 1940 and in 1942), and was able to reduce the total shipping available to the Allies up to a breaking point until 1943, when the tide of war was turning against Germany.
Allied campaign against Axis shipping (mostly Italian) from Europe to North Africa, in the Battle of the Mediterranean. British submarines based in Malta and the aircraft of several Allied air forces, in conjunction with British and Commonwealth surface ships, reduced shipments of essential military supplies to Axis forces under Rommel to the point where the German commander was unable to fight effectively. By the close of the campaign, Italy had very few merchant ships left.
Early years of the Pacific War, the submarines of the US Navy were allocated a great variety of tasks and were unable to achieve any of them effectively, particularly given major technical problems with the Mark 14 torpedoes early in the war. From about the middle of 1943, however, substantial numbers of American submarines were tasked with disrupting Japanese trade, in particular, with cutting off the flow of oil and other vital materials from the occupied territories of South-east Asia. This, too, became a tonnage war, with rapidly building results, and by mid to late 1944 Allied submarines and aircraft were experiencing difficulty in finding targets large enough to be worth a torpedo. The Japanese merchant navy was all but wiped out, and despite desperate measures to make do without strategic materials, the war economy ground to a virtual standstill.
Air supremacy: degree of air superiority where a side holds complete control of air power over opposing forces. They are levels of control of the air in warfare. Air power has increasingly become a powerful element of military campaigns; military planners view having an environment of at least air superiority as a necessity. Air supremacy allows increased bombing efforts, tactical air support for ground forces, paratroop assaults, airdrops and simple cargo plane transfers, which can move ground forces and supplies. Air power is a function of the degree of air superiority and numbers or types of aircraft, but it represents a situation that defies black-and-white characterization. The achievement of aerial supremacy does not guarantee a low loss rate of friendly aircraft, as hostile forces are often able to adopt unconventional tactics or identify weaknesses irrespectively. For example, NATO forces which held air superiority over Kosovo still lost a stealth strike aircraft to a Serbian ground-based air defense system, despite it being considered to be "obsolete". During both the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, insurgents found a greater degree of success in attacking coalition aircraft on the ground than when they were operating above them in the skies.
Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD): military actions to suppress enemy surface-based air defenses, including not only surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) but also interrelated systems such as early-warning radar and command, control and communication (C³) functions, while also marking other targets to be destroyed by an air strike. Suppression can be accomplished both by physically destroying the systems or by disrupting and deceiving them through electronic warfare. In modern warfare SEAD missions can constitute as much as 30% of all sorties launched in the first week of combat and continue at a reduced rate through the rest of a campaign. One quarter of American combat sorties in recent conflicts have been SEAD missions. Despite generally being associated with aircraft, SEAD missions may be performed using any means, including through actions by ground forces.
Airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system: airborne radar system designed to detect aircraft, ships, vehicles, missiles, and other incoming projectiles at long ranges and perform command and control of the battlespace in an air engagement by directing fighter and attack aircraft strikes. AEW&C units are also used to carry out surveillance, including over ground targets and frequently perform BMC2 (battle management command and control). When used at altitude, the radar on the aircraft allows the operators to detect and track targets and distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft much farther away than a similar ground-based radar. Like a ground-based radar, it can be detected by opposing forces, but because of its mobility and extended sensor range, it is much less vulnerable to counter-attacks. So useful is the advantage of command and control aircraft operating at a high altitude, that some navies operate such aircraft from their warships at sea. In the case of US Navy, the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye AEW&C aircraft is assigned to its supercarriers to protect them and augment their onboard command information centers (CICs). The designation airborne early warning (AEW) was used for earlier similar aircraft used in the less-demanding radar picket role, such as the Fairey Gannet AEW.3 and Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star, and continues to be used by the RAF for its Sentry AEW1, while AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) emphasizes the command and control capabilities that may not be present on smaller or simpler radar picket aircraft.
Anti-aircraft warfare (counter-air, air defence): battlespace response to aerial warfare, defined by NATO as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action". It includes surface based, subsurface (submarine launched), and air-based weapon systems, associated sensor systems, command and control arrangements, and passive measures (e.g. barrage balloons). It may be used to protect naval, ground, and air forces in any location. However, for most countries the main effort has tended to be homeland defence. In some countries, such as Britain and Germany during WWII, USSR, and modern NATO and USA, ground-based air defence and air defence aircraft have been under integrated command and control. However, while overall air defence may be for homeland defence (including military facilities), forces in the field, wherever they are, provide their own defences against air threats. Until the 1950s, guns firing ballistic munitions ranging from 7.62 mm (.30 in) to 152.4 mm (6 in) were the standard weapons; guided missiles then became dominant, except at the very shortest ranges (as with close-in weapon systems, which typically use rotary autocannons or, in very modern systems, surface-to-air adaptations of short range air-to-air missiles, often combined in one system with rotary cannons).
List of Ilyushin aircraft: list of aircraft produced by Ilyushin, a Soviet/Russian aircraft manufacturer.
Ilyushin Il-76 (Илью́шин Ил-76; Introduction: 1974.06; Number built: 960+): multi-purpose, fixed-wing, four-engine turbofan strategic airlifter designed by the Soviet Union's Ilyushin design bureau. It was first planned as a commercial freighter in 1967, as a replacement for the Antonov An-12. It was designed to deliver heavy machinery to remote, poorly served areas. Military versions of the Il-76 have been widely used in Europe, Asia and Africa, including use as an aerial refueling tanker or command center. The Il-76 has seen extensive service as a commercial freighter for ramp-delivered cargo, especially for outsized or heavy items unable to be otherwise carried. It has also been used as an emergency response transport for civilian evacuations as well as for humanitarian aid and disaster relief around the world. Due to its ability to operate from unpaved runways, it has been useful in undeveloped areas. Specialized models have also been produced for aerial firefighting and zero-G training.
Space warfare: combat that takes place in outer space. The scope of space warfare therefore includes ground-to-space warfare, such as attacking satellites from the Earth; space-to-space warfare, such as satellites attacking satellites; and space-to-ground warfare, such as satellites attacking Earth-based targets. As of 2021, no actual warfare is known to have taken place in space, though a number of tests and demonstrations have been performed. International treaties are in place that attempt to regulate conflicts in space and limit the installation of space weapon systems, especially nuclear weapons.
Stay-behind: country places secret operatives or organisations in its own territory, for use in the event that an enemy occupies that territory. Many hidden weapons caches were found, in Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries, at the disposition of these "secret armies". In some cases, stay-behind operations have deviated from their stated purpose, and have become active against elements in their own countries which they deem to be subversive — rather than fighting an outright invasion, they claimed to be fighting a quieter subversion of their country.
Genetics and war
War rapes: rapes committed by soldiers, other combatants or civilians during armed conflict or war, or during military occupation. It is distinguished from sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service. Almost every war, rebellion, occupation or any other event where a huge group of men/army wielding guns entered "new territory" resulted in war rapes, usually against the local women (?).
Hoover Institution (Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace): conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. Located in Stanford, California, on the campus of Stanford University, it began as a library founded in 1919 by Stanford alumnus Herbert Hoover, before he became President of the United States. The library, known as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, houses multiple archives related to Hoover, WWI, WWII, and other world-historical events. Hoover was ranked as the tenth most influential think tank in the world in 2020 by Academic Influence, and the 22nd of the "Top Think Tanks in the United States" by the Global Go To Think Tank Index Report in 2019.
Identification friend or foe (IFF): identification system designed for command and control. It uses a transponder that listens for an interrogation signal and then sends a response that identifies the broadcaster. IFF systems usually use radar frequencies, but other electromagnetic frequencies, radio or infrared, may be used. It enables military and civilian air traffic control interrogation systems to identify aircraft, vehicles or forces as friendly, as opposed to neutral or hostile, and to determine their bearing and range from the interrogator. IFF is used by both military and civilian aircraft. IFF was first developed during WWII, with the arrival of radar, and several friendly fire incidents.
World Economic Forum (WEF; 1971-): international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by Klaus Schwab. The foundation, which is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with more than five billion US dollars in turnover – as well as public subsidies, views its own mission as "improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas". The WEF is mostly known for its annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, a mountain resort in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 3,000 paying members and selected participants – among which are investors, business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists – for up to five days to discuss global issues across 500 sessions. The Forum suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations (CSOs), which it expresses through initiatives like the "Great Reset" and the "Global Redesign". It sees periods of global instability – such as the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – as windows of opportunity to intensify its programmatic efforts. The World Economic Forum and its annual meeting in Davos are criticised regarding the public cost of security while having amassed several hundred million Swiss francs in reserves and not paying federal taxes, the formation of a wealthy global elite without attachment to the broader societies, undemocratic decision processes, gender issues, a lack of financial transparency, unclear selection criteria, the environmental footprint of its annual meetings, the corporate capture of global and democratic institutions, the non-accreditation of critical media outlets and institutional whitewashing initiatives. As a reaction of criticism within Swiss society, the Swiss federal government decided in February 2021 to reduce its annual contributions to the WEF.
Klaus Schwab (1938.03.30-): German engineer and economist best known as the founder and executive chairman of WEF. WEF and other foundations: Schwab had originally appointed José María Figueres as CEO and his potential successor at the World Economic Forum. In October 2004, the WEF however gained attention through the resignation of Figueres over the undeclared receipt of more than US$900,000 in consultancy fees from the French telecommunications firm Alcatel. Transparency International had highlighted this incident in their Global Corruption Report in 2006. Criticism: Salary level and lack of financial transparency; Capture of democratic structures and institutions; Controversy with Davos municipality.
Transnational Institute (TNI): international non-profit research and advocacy think tank that was founded in 1974, Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to their website, the organization promotes a "... just, democratic and sustainable world." Work: Drugs and democracy: The program analyses worldwide trends on drugs-policies and promotes a pragmatic approach to drugs based on damage-control. It has written on countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia; Public alternatives; Trade and investment.
World Social Forum (2001-): annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization.
Occupy Wall Street (2011.09.17): inspired by anti-austerity protests in Spain coming from the 15-M movement. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the perceived undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector.
Alter-globalization (alternative globalization): name of a social movement whose proponents support global cooperation and interaction, but oppose what they describe as the negative effects of economic globalization, feeling that it often works to the detriment of, or does not adequately promote, human values such as environmental and climate protection, economic justice, labor protection, protection of indigenous cultures, peace and civil liberties.
The graph shows two periods of deglobalization (1930s and 2010s) alongs side the trend increase inglobalization since 1880.
Deglobalization: process of diminishing interdependence and integration between certain units around the world, typically nation-states. It is widely used to describe the periods of history when economic trade and investment between countries decline. It stands in contrast to globalization, in which units become increasingly integrated over time, and generally spans the time between periods of globalization. While globalization and deglobalisation are antitheses, they are no mirror images.
Ian Bremmer (1969.11.12): USA political scientist and author with a focus on global political risk. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm with principal offices in New York City. He is also a founder of the digital media firm GZERO Media. Key concepts:
The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall: outlines the link between a country's openness and its stability. While many countries are stable because they are open (the United States, France, Japan), others are stable because they are closed (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq under Saddam Hussein). States can travel both forward (right) and backward (left) along this J curve, so stability and openness are never secure. The J is steeper on the left-hand side, as it is easier for a leader in a failed state to create stability by closing the country than to build a civil society and establish accountable institutions; the curve is higher on the far right because states that prevail in opening their societies (Eastern Europe, for example) ultimately become more stable than authoritarian regimes.
State capitalism: system in which the state dominates markets primarily for political gain. In his 2010 book The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations, Bremmer describes China (PRC) as the primary driver for the rise of state capitalism as a challenge to the free market economies of the developed world, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
G-Zero: breakdown in global leadership brought about by a decline of Western influence and the inability of other nations to fill the void. It is a reference to a perceived shift away from the pre-eminence of the ["G7"] ("Group of Seven") industrialized countries and the expanded Group of Twenty, which includes major emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and others.
Weaponization of finance: describe the ways in which the United States is using its influence to affect global outcomes
Pivot state: nation that is able to build profitable relationships with multiple other major powers without becoming overly reliant on any one of them. This ability to hedge allows a pivot state to avoid capture—in terms of security or economy—at the hands of a single country. At the opposite end of the spectrum are shadow states, frozen within the influence of a single power. Canada is an example of a pivot state: with significant trade ties with both the United States and Asia, and formal security ties with NATO, it is hedged against conflict with any single major power. Mexico, on the other hand, is a shadow state due to its overwhelming reliance on the US economy.
Geopolitical recession: unwinding of the former US-led global order. Unlike economic recessions, linked to frequent boom and bust cycles, Bremmer sees geopolitical recessions as much longer cycles that are less likely to be recognized. He sees the present geopolitical recession as defined by deteriorating relations between the US and its traditional allies—particularly the Europeans—as China is rising and creating an alternative international political and economic architecture.
World Data Organization: to forestall a division in technology ecosystems due to conflict between the United States and China. He described it as a digital version of the World Trade Organization, arguing that the United States, Europe, Japan, and other “governments that believe in online openness and transparency” should collaborate to set standards for artificial intelligence, data, privacy, citizens’ rights, and intellectual property.
Special economic zone (SEZ): geographical region that is designed to export goods and provide employment; exempt from federal laws regarding taxes, quotas, FDI-bans, labour laws and other restrictive laws in order to make the goods manufactured in the SEZ at a globally competitive price.
Free trade zone (FTZ; export processing zone (EPZ); foreign-trade zone; formerly: free port): area within which goods may be landed, handled, manufactured or reconfigured, and reexported without the intervention of the customs authorities. Only when the goods are moved to consumers within the country in which the zone is located do they become subject to the prevailing customs duties.
Free economic zone (sometimes: free port): designated areas in which companies are taxed very lightly or not at all in order to encourage economic activity.
List of free ports: port, port area or other area with relaxed jurisdiction with respect to the country of location; special customs area or small customs territory with generally less strict customs regulations (or no customs duties and/or controls for transshipment); many international airports have free ports. LT:
Port of Klaipėda.
Klaipėda Free Economic Zone (Klaipėda FEZ; lt: Klaipėdos laisvoji ekonominė zona; 1996-): offers tax incentives to qualified investors that invest at least 1 mln €. 2008: due to overcrowding the zone was expanded from 205 hectares to 412 hectares of developed land. Investors:
Lazard, Al Ibrahim family of Saudi Arabia
Kaunas Free Economic Zone (1996.10.22-; next to A6 and A1): 534 hectare industrial development area which offers favorable and smaller taxes for the investors that invest at least 1 mln €.
European Union Association Agreement: main huge economies: Balkan countries; Israel; Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia; Mexico; EFTA & EEA (Norway, Switzerland (not EEA member), Iceland, Liechtenstein); South Africa; Turkey
Marie von Brühl (1779.06.03–1836.01.28): member of the noble German von Brühl family originating in Thuringia. Despite her own career as a patron of the arts in Berlin, she is known for editing and publishing the work of her husband Carl von Clausewitz, especially his military treatise On War. The two frequently discussed politics, literature, current events together. They considered each other equals, which was rare for a man to think of regarding his own wife. Carl and Marie were unable to conceive children. Present day theories point to Carl's chronic illness as the culprit. From 1832 to 1834, following Clausewitz's unexpected death from cholera in 1831, she edited and published several of his books, including his most famous one, On War. Throughout their correspondence, Marie insisted that Carl send her his drafts and notes for safekeeping. He was known to have an unorganized writing process that would often lead to lost papers and unfinished ideas. In fact, when Carl was writing On War, Marie acted as the researcher and copywriter for the book. Marie's handwriting can be found on some of the pages of the On War manuscript, listing notes and references. Additionally, von Brühl wrote a preface to On War. In the summer of 1832, less than a year after Carl's death, a publishing house in Berlin had put out announcements advertising the upcoming publication of On War. With the help of her brother, Marie transcribed drafts and inserted changes for On War in a manner of months.
August Landmesser (1910.05.24; KIA 1944.10.17; confirmed in 1949): worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, best known for his appearance in a photograph refusing to perform the Nazi salute at the launch of the naval training vessel Horst Wessel on 1936.06.13.
Polymaths (esp. the ancient ones)
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero; 106 BC.01.3 - 43 BC.12.07): Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, who served as consul in the year 63 BC. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. Following Julius Caesar's death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches; Cicero was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed by soldiers in 43 BC. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture.
Cicero was elected consul for the year 63 BC. His co-consul for the year, Gaius Antonius Hybrida, played a minor role. During his year in office, he thwarted a conspiracy centered on assassinating him and overthrowing the Roman Republic with the help of foreign armed forces, led by Lucius Sergius Catilina. The Orations listed Catiline and his followers' debaucheries, and denounced Catiline's senatorial sympathizers as roguish and dissolute debtors clinging to Catiline as a final and desperate hope. Cicero demanded that Catiline and his followers leave the city. At the conclusion of his first speech, Catiline hurriedly left the Senate
Governorship of Cilicia
Opposition to Mark Antony and death
Works: Cicero was declared a righteous pagan by the Early Church, and therefore many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation.
Legacy: Cicero was greatly admired by influential Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, who credited Cicero's lost Hortensius for his eventual conversion to Christianity, and St. Jerome, who had a feverish vision in which he was accused of being "follower of Cicero and not of Christ" before the judgment seat. This influence further increased after the Early Middle Ages in Europe, which more of his writings survived than any other Latin author.
Writings of Cicero: Roman senator and consul (chief-magistrate) who played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. A contemporary of Julius Caesar, Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists; one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome. He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary, distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. His voluminous correspondence, much of it addressed to his friend Atticus, has been especially influential, introducing the art of refined letter writing to European culture.
Philippicae: series of 14 speeches Cicero gave condemning Mark Antony in 44 and 43 BC. When Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and heir, arrived in Italy in April, Cicero formed a plan to play him against Antony. In September Cicero began attacking Antony in a series of speeches he called the Philippics, in honour of his inspiration, Demosthenes. In praise of Octavian, he labelled him a "god-sent child" and said that the young man desired only honour and would not make the same mistake as did Caesar. Meanwhile, his attacks on Antony, whom he called a "sheep", rallied the Senate in firm opposition to Antony. During this time, Cicero's popularity as a public figure was unrivalled and, according to the historian Appian, he "had the [most] power any popular leader could possibly have". Cicero’s plan to drive out Antony failed, however. After the successive battles of Forum Gallorum and Mutina, Antony and Octavian reconciled and allied with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate. Immediately after legislating their alliance into official existence for a five-year term with consular imperium, the Triumvirate began proscribing their enemies and potential rivals. Cicero and his younger brother Quintus Tullius Cicero, formerly one of Caesar's legati, and all of their contacts and supporters were numbered among the enemies of the state though, reportedly, Octavian argued for two days against Cicero being added to the list. Among the proscribed, Cicero was one of the most viciously and doggedly hunted. Other victims included the tribune Salvius, who, after siding with Antony, moved his support directly and fully to Cicero. Cicero was viewed with sympathy by a large segment of the public and many people refused to report that they had seen him. Antony requested that the hands that wrote the Philippics also be removed. His head and hands were publicly displayed in the Roman Forum to discourage any who would oppose the new Triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Marci filius Cato; 234–149 BC): Roman soldier, senator and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write history in Latin.
Cato the Younger (Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis; 95 BC – April 46 BC): statesman in the late Roman Republic, and a follower of the Stoic philosophy. A noted orator, he is remembered for his stubbornness and tenacity (especially in his lengthy conflict with Julius Caesar), as well as his immunity to bribes, his moral integrity, and his famous distaste for the ubiquitous corruption of the period.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1150.01.26 - 1210.03.29; Sultan of the theologians): Persian polymath, Islamic scholar and a pioneer of inductive logic. He wrote various works in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, literature, theology, ontology, philosophy, history and jurisprudence. He was one of the earliest proponents and skeptics that came up with the concept of Multiverse, and compared it with the astronomical teachings of Quran. A rejector of the geocentric model and the Aristotelian notions of a single universe revolving around a single world, Al-Razi argued about the existence of the outer space beyond the known world.
Niccolò Machiavelli (Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli; 1469.05.03–1527.06.21): Florentianhistorian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer during the Renaissance; was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs; was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics; wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry; wrote his masterpiece, The Prince, after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence. Medici subjected him to torture "with the rope", but he denied involvement and was released after three weeks in 1513.
Paracelsus (c. 1493 – 1541.09.24; born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim)): Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works. "The dose makes the poison"
Henri Poincaré (1854.04.29–1912.07.17): French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. Poincaré made clear the importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Hendrik Lorentz in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity. In 1905, Poincaré first proposed gravitational waves (ondes gravifiques) emanating from a body and propagating at the speed of light as being required by the Lorentz transformations.
Albert Schweitzer (1875.01.14–1965.09.04): Alsatian-German polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", becoming the eighth Frenchman to be awarded that prize. His philosophy was expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, which up to 1958 was situated in French Equatorial Africa, and after this in Gabon.
Walter J. Ong (1912.11.30–2003.08.12): USA Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. Summary of Ong's works and interests: A major concern of Ong's works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation. Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.
Herbert A. Simon (1916.06.15–2001.02.09): Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978), USA political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making.
Douglas Hofstadter (1945.02.15-): USA professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Charles Lindbergh (1902.02.04–1974.08.26): USA aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist. As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from the Roosevelt Field in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. "America First" involvement; Thoughts on race and racism.
Phil Radford (1976.02.02-): leader of Greenpeace USA since 2009.
Laura Poitras (1962.01.16-): USA documentary film director and producer; 2012 MacArthur Fellow; one of the initial supporters of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. According to Glenn Greenwald, Poitras and Greenwald are the only two people with full archives of the global surveillance disclosure initiated by the former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.
PZ Myers (1957.03.09-): USA scientist and associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. Atheist; widely regarded as a confrontationalist; outspoken critic of intelligent design and the creationist movement. Received American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award in 2009 and International Humanist Award in 2011. Eucharist controversy.
Pharyngula (blog): blog founded by PZ Myers and written by Myers and formerly Chris Clarke, hosted on ScienceBlogs (2005-2011, in full, and 2011-present, in part) and FreeThoughtBlogs (2011–present). In 2006, the science journal Nature listed it as the top-ranked blog written by a scientist. "The virtues are critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural." Myers is strongly feminist and has written about discrimination against women in the skeptical movement.
Garry Kasparov (13 April 1963): Russian chess grandmaster, former world chess champion, writer, and political activist, whom many consider to be the greatest chess player of all time. From 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for 225 out of 228 months. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. After Kasparov retired, he devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin. In 2008, he announced an intention to run as a candidate in that year's Russian presidential race, but failure to find a sufficiently large rental space to assemble the number of supporters that is legally required to endorse such a candidacy led him to withdraw. Kasparov blamed "official obstruction" for the lack of available space. In the wake of the Russian mass protests that began in 2011, he announced in 2013 that he had left Russia for the immediate future out of fear of persecution. Since 2014, he holds Croatian citizenship and has a summer residence in Podstrana near Split. He lives in New York City with his family. Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein (Russian: Гарик Ки́мович Вайнштейн, Garik Kimovich Vainshtein) in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR (now Azerbaijan), Soviet Union. His father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, was Jewish, and his mother, Klara Shagenovna Gasparian, was Armenian. Kasparov has described himself as a "self-appointed Christian", although "very indifferent" and identifies as Russian: "although I'm half-Armenian, half-Jewish, I consider myself Russian because Russian is my native tongue, and I grew up with Russian culture." Kasparov responded with several sardonic Twitter postings to 2013.09 The New York Times op-ed by Putin. "I hope Putin has taken adequate protections," he tweeted. "Now that he is a Russian journalist his life may be in grave danger!" Also: "Now we can expect NY Times op-eds by Mugabe on fair elections, Castro on free speech, & Kim Jong-un on prison reform. The Axis of Hypocrisy." Putin, argued Kasparov, "did not have to outplay or outthink anyone. He and Bashar Assad won by forfeit when President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and the rest of the so-called leaders of the free world walked away from the table." There is, he lamented, "a new game at the negotiating table where Putin and Assad set the rules and will run the show under the protection of the U.N." Kasparov said in September 2013 that Russia was now a dictatorship. In the same month he told an interviewer that "Obama going to Russia now is dead wrong, morally and politically," because Putin's regime "is behind Assad." Sochi Olympics: Coca-Cola, for example, could put "a rainbow flag on each Coca-Cola can" and NBC could "do interviews with Russian gay activists or with Russian political activists." Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped: Kasparov likens Putin to Adolf Hitler, and explains the need for the west to oppose Putin sooner, rather than appeasing him and postponing the eventual confrontation. In 2018.10, he wrote that Erdoğan's regime in Turkey "has jailed more journalists than any country in the world and scores of them remain in prison in Turkey. Since 2016, Turkey's intelligence agency has abducted at least 80 people in operations in 18 countries." In 2021, Kasparov stated that "the only language that Putin understands is power, and his power is his money," arguing that the United States should target the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs to force Russia to rein in its criminals' cyberattacks against American agencies and companies.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky (1963.06.26-): exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist and former oligarch, now resident in Switzerland; worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares"); described by The Economist as "the Kremlin’s leading critic-in-exile". Khodorkovsky's father was Jewish, and his mother was Russian Orthodox Christian. They were both opponents of Communism, though they kept this from their son, who was born in 1963. Masha Gessen wrote that they faced a dilemma raising Mikhail: “Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or try to raise a contented conformist. They chose the second path, with results that far exceeded their expectations. Mikhail became a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct.” My Fellow Prisoners
Noah Smith (writer): USA blogger, journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was an assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University. He has written articles or columns that demonstrate a left leaning perspective, expressing support for affordable healthcare reform, mass expansion of public transit, green energy, immigration reform, labor unions, and YIMBY positions. Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism as well as the degrowth movement, or a post growth world. He has views on the education of economics, particularly microeconomics, stating that more of the focus of economics education should be data driven, and less of a theory emphasis. In a similar vein, he has criticized macroeconomics for being too theory focused, despite it being the most popular field.
Maria Popova (1984-): Bulgarian writer, blogger, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her blog BrainPickings.org, which features her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects off and on the Internet.
Mark Manson (1984.03.09-): USA self-help author, blogger and entrepreneur; author of the website MarkManson.net and two books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living the Good Life, and Models: Attract Women through Honesty.
CGP Grey: YouTube channel name of an American-Irish educational YouTuber and podcaster who has been posting on YouTube under the channel name since 2010.08.12; channel's most popular video is an explanation of the terminology of the British Isles, which went viral in 2011.
Wait But Why: site founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Tim Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. In 2015.06 Elon Musk asked Urban if he would be willing to write about his companies and their surrounding industries, leading to a five-part series of Wait But Why posts on Elon Musk and his companies. Urban interviewed Musk multiple times, and the two discussed the importance of sustainable transport, solar energy, and the future of space exploration. 2017.04.20 Tim Urban posted the first deep insight into Elon Musk's transhumanist brain-machine interface company, Neuralink.
LessWrong: community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Posts often focus on avoiding biases related to decision-making and the evaluation of evidence. One suggestion is the use of Bayes' theorem as a decision-making tool. There is also a focus on psychological barriers that prevent good decision-making, including fear conditioning and cognitive biases that have been studied by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. LessWrong is also concerned with transhumanism, existential threats and the singularity. History: Roko's basilisk. LessWrong played a significant role in the development of the effective altruism (EA) movement, and the two communities are closely intertwined.
Science and art people
Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace; born: Augusta Ada Byron; 1815.12.10-1852.11.27): referred to herself as a "poetical scientist" and "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)"; English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine; her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine → she is often considered the world's first computer programmer.
Geographers, cartographers
Marinus of Tyre (active 100-150; Marinos of Tyre): Greek geographer, cartographer and mathematician, who founded mathematical geography. Marinus and his work were a precursor to Ptolemy and Ptolemy's work Geographia.
Geography (Ptolemy): treatise on cartography and a compilation of what was known about the world's geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century; Ptolemy relied mainly on the work of Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empire. Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe (from Canary Islands to China ~180°; from Arctic to the East Indies and deep into Africa ~80°).
Chris Anderson (entrepreneur) (1957-): curator of TED; formerly: editor of early computer magazines (Personal Computer Games, then on Zzap!64); launched Future Publishing, Business 2.0
Artists
Hokusai (1760.10.31 (exact date questionable) – 1849.05.10): Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period.
M. C. Escher: (1898.06.17–1972.03.27): Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for long somewhat neglected in the art world; even in his native Netherlands; he was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the twenty-first century, he became more widely appreciated, with exhibitions across the world.
Naji al-Ali (1938-1987.08.29): Palestinian cartoonist, noted for the political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel in his works; creator of the character Handala, pictured in his cartoons as a young witness of the satirized policy or event depicted. Was shot outside the London office of Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas on 1987.07.22 - fallout between Mossad and Margaret Thatcher due to Mossad employing double agents inside the PLO and not notifying UK of the assassination attempt on al-Ali.
Gottfried Helnwein (1948.10.08-): AT fine artist, painter, photographer, installation and performance artist. Epiphany I – Adoration of the Magi; Marilyn Manson
H. R. Giger (1940.02.05-): CH surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer; was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for their design work on the film Alien.
Giger Bar: 1st - the H.R. Giger Bar in Chur, Switzerland (1992), and 2nd - The Museum HR Giger Bar, located in Château St. Germain, Gruyères, Switzerland (2003.04.12).
Li Tobler (1948-1975.05.19): CH stage actress; model to several of H. R. Giger's works (including his famous Li paintings), as well as for being his life partner up until her suicide in 1975.
Greta Garbo (1905.09.18–1990.04.15) was a Swedish film actress and an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Although she was offered many opportunities to return to the screen, she declined all of them. Instead, she lived a private life, shunning publicity. Garbo never married, had no children and lived alone as an adult. She was something of an art collector and her art collection was worth millions at the time of her death.
Ridley Scott (1937.11.30-): English film director and producer. Following his commercial breakthrough with the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), his best known works include the neo-noir dystopian science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), historical drama and Best Picture Oscar winner Gladiator (2000), and science fiction film The Martian (2015). His films frequently showcase memorable imagery of urban environments, whether 2nd century Rome (Gladiator), 12th century Jerusalem (Kingdom of Heaven), Medieval England (Robin Hood), contemporary Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down), or the future cityscapes of Blade Runner; strong female characters.
Blade Runner: loose adaptation of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
Replicant: fictional bioengineered or biorobotic android; replicant can only be detected by means of the fictional Voight-Kampff test, in which emotional responses are provoked; replicants’ nonverbal responses differ from humans'.
Themes in Blade Runner: Genetic engineering and cloning: Eyes. Religious and philosophical symbolism. Environment and globalization. Deckard: human or replicant?
Michael Crichton (1942.10.23–2008.11.04): USA author and filmmaker. His literary works heavily feature technology and are usually within the science fiction, techno-thriller, and medical fiction genres. His novels often explore technology and failures of human interaction with it, especially resulting in catastrophes with biotechnology. The Andromeda Strain (1969). "Why Speculate?": In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.
Stellan Skarsgård (1951.06.13-): Swedish actor. Skarsgård was brought up by humanist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.
Ben Affleck (1972.08.15-): USA actor, film director, screenwriter, producer and activist. Outspoken member of the Democratic Party. Believes paparazzi attention is "part of the deal" of stardom, he has spoken out against paparazzi interest in his children, attributes the media interest to "housewives who hold up their child rearing to the child rearing of these [famous] parents". An avid poker player, Affleck has regularly entered local events. Argued in favor of universal health care; pro-choice; supports legalizing gay marriage; does not support the death penalty:"As long we have a flawed system of determining guilt and innocence, I think capital punishment is a bad idea" (2008); supporter of the Second Amendment; believes "more in people than political parties ... I know some pretty exceptional people who are Republicans" (2004).
Yale student abortion art controversy: was a Yale University art student who caused major controversy in 2008 for her proposed senior performance art project. 2008.04.17: the Yale Daily News printed an article detailing the process by which Shvarts reportedly inseminated herself artificially as many times as possible over the course of nine months, during which she also induced abortions using abortifacient drugs; The proposed exhibition of the project was to feature video recordings of the forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process; Shvarts declared that the goal of the project was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.
Madonna (entertainer) (1958.08.16-): singer, songwriter, actress, and businesswoman. She achieved popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a fixture on MTV. Madonna is known for reinventing both her music and image, and for maintaining her autonomy within the recording industry. Music critics have acclaimed her musical productions, which have generated some controversy. Often referred to as the "Queen of Pop", she is cited as an influence by numerous other artists around the world. Madonna's use of sexual imagery has benefited her career and catalyzed public discourse on sexuality and feminism. She noted that her favorite style was baroque, and loved Mozart and Chopin because she liked their "feminine quality". Madonna's major influences include Karen Carpenter, The Supremes and Led Zeppelin, as well as dancers Martha Graham and Rudolf Nureyev. She also grew up listening to David Bowie, whose show was the first rock concert she ever attended.
Musicians, composers
Carl Orff (1895.07.10–1982.03.29): German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). Born in Munich. His paternal grandfather was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. By the time he was a teenager, having studied neither harmony nor composition, Orff was writing songs; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Served in the German Army during WWI, when he was severely injured and nearly killed when a trench caved in.
ABBA (ᗅᗺᗷᗅ): were a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972. With members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, ABBA became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1975 to 1982. They won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974 at the Dome in Brighton, UK, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest, and were the most successful group ever to take part in the competition.
David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/; 1947.01.08–2016.01.10; born: David Robert Jones): English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, and was considered by critics and other musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Major Tom: persona of David Bowie's, mentioned in songs "Space Oddity", "Ashes to Ashes", "Hallo Spaceboy", and "Blackstar". Bowie's own interpretation of the character evolved throughout his career. "Space Oddity" (1969) depicts an astronaut who casually slips the bonds of the world to journey beyond the stars. In the song "Ashes to Ashes" (1980), Bowie reinterprets Major Tom as an oblique autobiographical symbol for himself. Major Tom is described as a "junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low". This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of Bowie's album Low (1977), which was inspired by the withdrawal symptoms he suffered while undergoing treatment for drug addiction. Additionally, the choked and self-recriminating tone used in the lyrics "Time and again I tell myself I'll stay clean tonight" reinforces an autobiographical and retrospective interpretation. A short time later, there is another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal, turning 'outwards' or towards space.
Space Oddity: song that was written and recorded by English singer-songwriter David Bowie. It was first released in 1969.07.11 by Philips Records as a 7-inch single then as the opening track of his second studio album David Bowie. After the commercial failure of his self-titled debut album in 1967, Bowie's manager Kenneth Pitt commissioned Love You till Tuesday, a promotional film that was intended to introduce Bowie to a larger audience. For the film, Bowie wrote "Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut named Major Tom; its title and subject matter were partly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Bowie's feelings of alienation at that point in his career. Musically, "Space Oddity" was one of the most complex songs Bowie had written up to that point, and marked a change from the music hall-influenced sound of his debut to a sound that is akin to psychedelic folk and inspired by the music of the Bee Gees. The single was rush-released ahead of the moon landing; it received praise from music critics and the BBC used it as background music during its coverage of the landing. The single, however, initially sold poorly in the United Kingdom and was banned by radio stations in the United States. After it reached number 48 in the UK by September, Bowie performed the song on the British television programme Top of the Pops in early October. The broadcast helped "Space Oddity" climb to number five, becoming Bowie's first and only chart hit for another three years. "Space Oddity" was a mainstay during Bowie's concerts throughout his career. A range of artists have covered "Space Oddity" and others have released songs that reference the character Major Tom. A 2013 cover by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gained widespread media attention; its accompanying music video, which was filmed aboard the International Space Station, was the first video to be recorded in space. Initially viewed as a novelty track, "Space Oddity" is now considered one of Bowie's finest recordings and remains one of his most popular songs.
Writers
William Shakespeare (bapt. 1564.04.26 – 1616.04.23): English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hailed Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".
Spelling of Shakespeare's name: varied over time. It was not consistently spelled any single way during his lifetime, in manuscript or in printed form. The standard spelling of the surname as "Shakespeare" was the most common published form in Shakespeare's lifetime, but it was not one used in his own handwritten signatures. It was, however, the spelling used as a printed signature to the dedications of the first editions of his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. It is also the spelling used in the First Folio, the definitive collection of his plays published in 1623, after his death.
Portraits of Shakespeare: only two portraits that definitively portray William Shakespeare, both of which are posthumous.
First Folio (Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies): considered one of the most influential books ever published.
Edgar Allan Poe (né Edgar Poe; 1809.01.19–1849.10.07): USA writer, poet, editor, and literary critic best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in USA, and of USA literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at age 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.
Charles Dickens (1812.02.07-1870.06.09): English writer and social critic. Generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.
Samuel Butler (novelist) (1835.12.04–1902.06.18): English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 in an altered version titled The Way of All Flesh, and published in 1964 as he wrote it. Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted.
Mark Twain (1835.11.30–1910.04.21; Samuel Langhorne Clemens): USA writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain was born shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well; he died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. His father was an attorney and judge, who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11. The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, joining the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers trade union. He educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
Olivia Langdon Clemens (1845.11.27–1904.06.05): wife of the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Clemens courted her throughout 1868, mainly by letter. She rejected his first proposal of marriage, but they became engaged two months later, in November 1868. Clemens was quoted later as saying, "I do believe that young filly has broken my heart. That only leaves me with one option, for her to mend it." The engagement was announced in February 1869, and in February 1870, they were married. The wedding was in Elmira, and the ceremony was performed by the Congregational ministers Joseph Twichell and Thomas K. Beecher.
Ambrose Bierce (1842.06.24 – circa 1914): American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer. Prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and he was considered an influential and feared literary critic. His parents were a poor but literary couple who instilled in him a deep love for books and writing.
The Devil's Dictionary: satirical dictionary written by Ambrose Bierce consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce’s witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
Edith Wharton (1862.01.24-1937.08.11): Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. Style: characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony
Jack London (1876.01.12-1916.11.22): American author, journalist, and social activist.
Stefan Zweig (1881.11.28–1942.02.22): Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters), and decisive historical events in Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; published in English in 1940 as The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941). In 1934, as a result of the Nazi Party's rise in Germany, Zweig emigrated to England and then, in 1940, moved briefly to New York and then to Brazil, where he settled. In his final years, he would declare himself in love with the country, writing about it in the book Brazil, Land of the Future. Nonetheless, as the years passed Zweig became increasingly disillusioned and despairing at the future of Europe, and he and his wife Lotte were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in Petrópolis on 23 February 1942; they had died the previous day.
de:Franz Kafka (1883.07.03-1924.06.03): deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller. Kafkas Werke wurden zum größeren Teil erst nach seinem Tod und gegen seine letztwillige Verfügung von Max Brod veröffentlicht, einem engen Freund und Vertrauten, den Kafka als Nachlassverwalter bestimmt hatte. Kafkas Werke zählen zum unbestrittenen Kanon der Weltliteratur. Kafka hatte ein zwiespältiges Verhältnis zu Frauen („Junggeselle der Weltliteratur“); „Das Urteil“; Judentum und Palästina-Frage („Palästina blieb ein Traum, den sein Körper schließlich zunichte machte“); Krankheit und Tod (1917: Lungentuberkulose; 1918: Spanischen Grippe); Zur Frage der Nationalität („Deutsch ist meine Muttersprache, aber das Tschechische geht mir zu Herzen“; „Ich habe niemals unter deutschem Volk gelebt“; jüdische Minderheit). Die Romanfragmente: Der Process, Das Schloss, Der Verschollene.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892.01.03–1973.09.02): English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Erich Maria Remarque (Erich Paul Remark; 1898.06.22–1970.09.25): German-born novelist. His landmark novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during WWI, was an international bestseller which created a new literary genre, and was adapted into multiple films. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic". He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and USA, where he became a naturalized citizen. During WWI, Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army at the age of 18. 1917.06.12, he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division at Hem-Lenglet. 1917.06.26 he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 2nd Company, Engineer Platoon Bethe, and fought in the trenches between Torhout and Houthulst. 1917.07.31 he was wounded by shell shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck. In 1943, the Nazis arrested his youngest sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a trial at the notorious Volksgerichtshof (Hitler's extra-constitutional "People's Court"), she was found guilty of "undermining morale" for stating that she considered the war lost. Court President Roland Freisler declared, "Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt—Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen". Scholz was beheaded in 1943.12.16. Remarque later said that his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899.08.24–1986.06.14; Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo): Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion; contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre. He became completely blind by the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture. Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party."
George Orwell (1903.06.25-1950.01.21; Eric Arthur Blair): English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.
Charles Addams (1912.01.07–1988.09.29): USA cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of his recurring characters became known as the Addams Family, and were subsequently popularized through various adaptations.
The Addams Family: fictional family created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. They originally appeared in a series of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker over a 50-year period from their inception in 1938. They have since been adapted to other media, such as television, film, video games, comic books, a musical, and merchandise. The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening.
Romain Gary (1914.05.21–1980.12.02; born רומן קצב Roman Katsev, Russian: Рома́н Ле́йбович Ка́цев): French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names. Gary later claimed that his actual father was the celebrated actor and film star Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mosjoukine appears in his memoir Promise at Dawn. Deported to central Russia in 1915, they stayed in Moscow until 1920. They later returned to Vilnius, then moved on to Warsaw. When Gary was fourteen, he and his mother emigrated illegally to Nice, France. Converted to Catholicism by his mother, Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges. In December 1980, Seberg's former husband Romain Gary committed suicide. His suicide note, addressed to his publisher, indicated that he had not killed himself over the loss of Seberg, but because he could no longer produce literary works.
Frank Herbert (1920.10.08–1986.02.11): USA science fiction writer best known for the novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer. Dune saga, set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, deals with complex themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. Dune itself is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time and the series is widely considered to be among the classics of the genre. Dune was the first major ecological science fiction novel, embracing a multitude of sweeping, inter-related themes and multiple character viewpoints, a method that ran through all Herbert's mature work. Criticism of government. Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology, which have caused many of his readers to take an interest in these areas; The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Herbert never again equalled the critical acclaim he received for Dune; Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula Award, although almost all of them were New York Times Best Sellers.
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist; Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster. It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.
Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.
Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.
Italo Calvino (1923.10.15–1985.09.19): Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Other legacies include the parents' beliefs in Freemasonry, Republicanism with elements of Anarchism and Marxism. Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred of the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and Mario also refused to give their sons any education in the Catholic Faith or any other religion. World War II. Turin and communism. After communism: In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party. In his letter of resignation published in L'Unità on 7 August, he explained the reason of his dissent (the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes) while confirming his "confidence in the democratic perspectives" of world Communism. He withdrew from taking an active role in politics and never joined another party.
Georgi Markov (Георги Иванов Марков; 1929.03.01–1978.09.11): Bulgarian dissident writer. He originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright in his native country, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, until his defection in 1978. After relocating to London, he worked as a broadcaster and journalist for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany's Deutsche Welle. Assassination: 1978.09.07, Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames and waited to take a bus to his job at the BBC. While at the bus stop, he felt a slight sharp pain, as a bug bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He looked behind him and saw a man picking up an umbrella off the ground. The man hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street and got in a taxi which then drove away. Bernard Riley, the attending physician treating Markov, considered many possible causes of his illness, including that he had been bitten by a venomous tropical snake. Riley had the inflamed area at the back of his leg x-rayed, but no foreign object was detected at this time. Due to the circumstances and statements Markov made to doctors expressing the suspicion that he had been poisoned, the Metropolitan Police ordered a thorough autopsy of his body. Rufus Crompton performed the autopsy, noting a red mark on the back of Markov's leg. He cut a tissue sample from the area, with a matching sample from the other leg. These samples were sent for further analysis at the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons laboratory. There, David Gall, the Research Medical Officer, found a tiny pellet in the tissue sample. Annabel Markov recalled her husband's view about the umbrella, telling the BBC's Panorama programme, in 1979.04, "He felt a jab in his thigh. He looked around and there was a man behind him who'd apologized and dropped an umbrella. I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn't been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face." It was reported after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Soviet KGB had assisted the Bulgarian Secret Service.
Michael Crichton (1942.10.23–2008.11.04): USA best-selling author, physician, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction and thriller genres. In 1994, Crichton became the only creative artist ever to have works simultaneously charting at No. 1 in US television (ER), film (Jurassic Park), and book sales (Disclosure). Crichton's works were frequently cautionary; his plots often portrayed scientific advancements going awry, commonly resulting in worst-case scenarios. A notable recurring theme in Crichton's plots is the pathological failure of complex systems and their safeguards, whether biological (Jurassic Park), military/organizational (The Andromeda Strain), technical (Airframe), or cybernetic (Westworld). His 1973 movie Westworld contains one of the earliest references to a computer virus, and the first mention of the concept of a computer virus in a movie. The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Westworld
Ian McEwan (1948.06.21-): English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Vladimir Sorokin (1955.08.07-): contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist. He has been described as one of the most popular writers in modern Russian literature. His 2006 novel, Day of the Oprichnik, describes a dystopian Russia in 2027, with a Tsar in the Kremlin, a Russian language with numerous Chinese expressions, and a "Great Russian Wall" separating the country from its neighbors. He was awarded in 2015 the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for this novel. 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: Three days later Sorokin published a piece highly critical of Vladimir Putin. In it he compared Putin to Ivan the Terrible and power in Russia to a medieval pyramid. He writes, "the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin," and faults the destruction of the TV channel NTV for this opening. "Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption.". For Sorokin, Putin's goal is not Ukraine. It is the dismemberment of NATO and the destruction of western civilization.
Nicholas Kristof (1959.04.27-): USA journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict.
Liu Cixin (刘慈欣 1963.06.23-): Chinese science fiction writer and electrical engineer. He is a nine-time winner of China's Galaxy Award and has also received the 2015 Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem as well as the 2017 Locus Award for Death's End. He is also a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award.
Ken Liu (1976-): USA author of science fiction and fantasy. His epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty, which he describes as silkpunk, is published by Simon & Schuster; born in Lanzhou, China. His mother, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, is a pharmaceutical chemist, while his father is a computer engineer. The family immigrated to the United States when Liu was 11 years old. At Harvard College, he studied English Literature and Computer Science, receiving his A. B. in 1998. After graduation, Liu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft, and then joined a start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004 and after working as a corporate lawyer, eventually became a high-tech litigation consultant. His translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin helped the book become a best seller to English readers.
Andy Weir (1972.06.16-): USA novelist and former computer programmer. His 2011 novel The Martian was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name directed by Ridley Scott. He received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016 and his 2021 novel Project Hail Mary was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He worked as a programmer for several software companies, including AOL, Palm, MobileIron, and Blizzard, where he worked on the video game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Weir has said that he is agnostic, and has described his political views as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
The Egg (Weir short story) (2009): Weir's most popular short story, and has been translated into over 30 languages by readers. Summary: The story is about the main character, who is referred to as "you" (in the second person), and God, who is "me" (in the first person). You, a 48-year-old man who dies in a car crash, meet God, the narrator, who says that you have been reincarnated many times before, and that you are next to be reincarnated as a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD. God then explains that you are, in fact, constantly reincarnated across time, and that all human beings who have ever lived and will ever live are incarnations of you. The reason God created the universe was for the main character, you, to understand this point: "Every time you victimized someone...you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
Maddox (writer) (1978.01.01-; George Ouzounian): USA humorist, satirist, Internet personality, and author. He gained fame on the Internet in the early 2000s for his opinion-oriented website, The Best Page in the Universe, which he still maintains.
The Best Page in the Universe: personal satirical humor website created by Maddox. Launched in 1997 without any high expectations, the website became known by word of mouth.
John Green (author) (1977.08.24-): USA author of young adult fiction. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and his sixth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012, and its 2014 film adaptation opened at number one on the box office.
Journalists
Joseph Roth (1894.09.02–1939.05.27): Austrian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English in The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of WWI and the Russian Revolution. Emigration: 1933.01.30, dem Tag von Hitlers Ernennung zum Reichskanzler, verließ Roth Deutschland. In einem Brief an Stefan Zweig urteilte er: „Inzwischen wird es Ihnen klar sein, daß wir großen Katastrophen zutreiben. Abgesehen von den privaten – unsere literarische und materielle Existenz ist ja vernichtet – führt das Ganze zum neuen Krieg. Ich gebe keinen Heller mehr für unser Leben. Es ist gelungen, die Barbarei regieren zu lassen. Machen Sie sich keine Illusionen. Die Hölle regiert.“
Seymour Hersh (1937.04.08-): USA investigative journalist, and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War.
Nord Stream 2: 2023.02, in a post to Substack, Hersh claimed that the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was carried out by the US Navy, the CIA, and the Norwegian Navy, under the direct order of President Biden. Hersh's report relied on an anonymous source who stated that, in June 2022, US Navy divers placed explosive C4 charges on the pipelines at strategic locations selected by the Norwegians. The source said that charges were placed under the cover of a multi-nation wargame simulation, and remotely detonated three months later by a signal from a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian Navy P-8 surveillance plane. In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh's credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh's allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings. Hersh's article was criticized by some journalists. Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative journalism group Bellingcat, said that Hersh was unable to get his article published in a reputed newspaper and that his reporting would only impress the likes of people who support Putin and al-Assad. Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev described Hersh's report as "total fiction" and stated that his reporting is seriously damaging to journalism. In Russia, Hersh's publication was picked up by RT and the news agency TASS.
Thomas Friedman (1953.07.20-): USA journalist, columnist and author. Writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues, and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.
Eliot Higgins (1979.01-): British citizen journalist and former blogger, known for using open sources and social media for investigations. He is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. He has investigated incidents including the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. He first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict.
Directors, screenwriters, producers
Fritz Lang (Friedrich Christian Anton Lang; 1890.12.05–1976.08.02): Austrian film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later USA. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor. His 1929 film Woman in the Moon showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket, and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad (a rocket standing upright against a tall building before launch having been slowly rolled into place) and the rocket-launch countdown clock. His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and after moving to Hollywood in 1934, Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). He became a naturalized citizen of USA in 1939. In 1920, Lang met his future wife, the writer Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933. During the climactic final scene in M, Lang allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. Lang, who was known for being hard to work with, epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical Germanic film director, a type embodied also by Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; Lang wore a monocle adding to the stereotype.
Actors
Kirk Douglas (1916.12.09-): USA retired actor, producer, director, and author.
Stellan Skarsgård: (1951.06.13-): Swedish actor. Skarsgård has had a vasectomy, stating that he felt eight children was enough. Skarsgård was brought up by humanist, atheist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.
Comedians
George Carlin (1937.05.12–2008.06.22): USA stand-up comedian, social critic, actor, and author. Carlin was noted for his black comedy and his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. Carlin and his "Seven dirty words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5–4 decision affirmed the government's power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians: One newspaper called Carlin "the dean of counterculture comedians."
Seven dirty words: seven English-language words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in 1972 in his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". The words are: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation: In 1997, Pacifica Radio "Living Room" host Larry Bensky prefaced an interview with Carlin by saying: "George Carlin, you're a very unusual guest for Pacifica Radio. You're probably the only person in the United States that we don't have to give The Carlin Warning to about which words you can't say on this program, because it's named after you."
Dave Chappelle (1973.08.24-): USA stand-up comedian and actor. He is best known for his satirical comedy sketch series Chappelle's Show (2003–2006), which he starred in until quitting in the middle of production during the third season. After a hiatus, Chappelle returned to performing stand-up comedy across USA.
Motivational speakers
Simon Sinek (1973.10.09-): an author, speaker, and consultant who writes on leadership and management. He joined the RAND Corporation in 2010 as an adjunct staff member, where he advises on matters of military innovation and planning. He is known for popularizing the concepts of "the golden circle" and to "Start With Why".
Businesspeople, entrepreneurs, company founders
Timothy Dexter (1748.01.22–1806.10.23): USA businessman noted for his writing and eccentricity. Known for: business sense, eccentricity.
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. (1895.05.24–1979.08.29): USA broadcasting businessman, magazine and newspaper publisher. He was the founder of Advance Publications; born Solomon Isadore Neuhaus in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of eight children born to Jewish immigrants. His father, Meier Neuhaus, was an immigrant from Vitebsk, Belarus; and his mother, Rose (née Arenfeldt), was from Austria-Hungary. Business strategy: Newhouse focused on purchasing bargain-priced papers in growing communities; he had no interest in starting papers or in unrelated ventures (he even declined an offer to purchase the New York Yankees). He typically acquired a city's oldest newspaper and then purchase the city's second newspaper thereby allowing him to set advertising rates. Although he generally promised to keep both papers in business and in competition, he typically merged the two, generally closing the afternoon paper and keeping the morning, effectively establishing a monopoly and then using the profits to purchase additional newspapers. Newhouse largely ran his various interests out of a brown leather briefcase and kept its figures in his head, even as they grew into an empire of 20 newspapers, as well as numerous magazines, radio stations and television stations. He never had what could be called a formal headquarters; to this day Advance Publications' corporate address is the same as that of the Staten Island Advance. Timeline of acquisitions: 1959: Condé Nast Publications purchased for $5 million at the suggestion of his wife; according to Newhouse, "She asked for a fashion magazine and I went out and got her Vogue"; Condé Nast also published Glamour, House & Garden, and Young Bride. He soon purchased another magazine publisher, Street & Smith and merged it with Condé Nast, becoming a major magazine publisher. Upon his death, he passed his voting common stock in the principal family company, Advance Publications, in trust to his six grandchildren and made his two sons the sole trustees.
Howard Hughes (1905.12.24–1976.04.05): USA business tycoon, entrepreneur, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. During his lifetime, he was known as the wealthiest self-made man in the world. He is remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Charlie Munger (1924.01.01-): USA billionaire investor, businessman, and former real estate attorney. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; Buffett has described Munger as his closest partner and right-hand man.
Warren Buffett (1930.08.30-): USA business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is one of the most successful investors in the world and has a net worth of over $95 billion as of October 2022, making him the world's sixth-wealthiest person.
Steve Jobs (1955.02.24–2011.10.05; 4 children: Lisa Brennan-Jobs with Laurene Powell, 3 with Laurene Powell): USA business magnate and investor; chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Bill Gates (1955.10.28-; 3 children with Melinda French): USA business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, humanitarian, and principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.
Jack Sim (沈锐华/沈銳華; 1957-): founder of the Restroom Association of Singapore and World Toilet Organization; broke the global taboo of toilet and sanitation by bringing it to global media centre-stage with his unique mix of humour and serious facts since 2001. After attaining financial independence at age of 40 as a businessman, he decided to devote the rest of his life to social work.
Yuri Milner (Юрий Борисович (Бенционович) Мильнер; born 11 November 1961): Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He is a cofounder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (now VK) and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Byju’s, Facebook, Wish, and many others. Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Yuri Milner was the second child of Russian intellectuals. Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University, graduating in 1985.
Jeff Bezos (1964.01.12-; 4 children with MacKenzie Tuttle): USA technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the founder, chairman, and CEO of Amazon.
Paul Graham (computer programmer) (1964.11.13-): English computer scientist, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is known for his work on Lisp, for co-founding Viaweb (which eventually became Yahoo! Store), and for co-founding the Y Combinator seed capital firm. He is the author of some programming books, such as: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 2008, Paul Graham married Jessica Livingston.
Jessica Livingston: author and a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator. She also organizes Startup School. Previously, she was the VP of marketing at Adams Harkness Financial Group. In 2008, she married fellow Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. In 2015.12 it was announced that Livingston is one of the financial backers of OpenAI.
Robert Tappan Morris (1965.11.08-) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur; best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988; co-found the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, and later the funding firm Y Combinator—both with Paul Graham.
Trevor Blackwell (1969.11.04): computer programmer, engineer and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley; co-founder of Y Combinator in 2005.
Reid Hoffman (1967.08.05-) USA internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn.
Sheryl Sandberg (1969.08.28-): USA technology executive, activist, and author; COO of Facebook (2008.03-).
Rony Abovitz (1971-): USA entrepreneur. Abovitz founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, in 2004. MAKO was acquired by Stryker Corporation in 2013 for $1.65B. Abovitz is the founder of the Mixed reality/Augmented Reality (MR/AR) company Magic Leap and served as its CEO from its founding in 2010. In May 2020, amid financial strife for the company, Abovitz stepped down from his position. Abovitz attended the University of Miami, where he eventually obtained a master's degree in biomedical engineering. While attending the University of Miami, he also was a cartoonist.
Elon Musk (1971.06.28-; 6 children (1 deceased from SIDS at 10 weeks) with Justine Wilson; 1 child with Grimes): career: Zip2, X.com and PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAI.
The Boring Company: infrastructure and tunneling company founded by Elon Musk in late 2016 after he mentioned the idea of making tunnels on his Twitter account. Musk cited difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the current 2-D transportation network as inspiration for the tunneling project.
Neuralink: USA neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others, reported to be developing implantable brain–computer interfaces.
Jack Dorsey (1976.11.19-): creator of Twitter, founder of Square.
Naval Ravikant (1974.11.05-): Indian-USA entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
Sergey Brin (1973.08.21-; 2 children with Anne Wojcicki): USA computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin is the President of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. 2018.10: 13th-richest, US$50.6 billion. Brin immigrated to USA with his family from USSR at the age of 6. Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, encouraged him to learn mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin's data mining system to build a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park.
Larry Page (1973.03.26-; 2 children with Lucinda Southworth): USA computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin. After stepping aside as Google CEO in 2001.08, in favor of Eric Schmidt, he re-assumed the role in 2011.04. He announced his intention to step aside a second time in 2015.07, to become CEO of Alphabet, under which Google's assets would be reorganized. Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google's best-known search ranking algorithm. Page's house "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place", an environment in which he immersed himself. Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines". Page also played Flute and studied music composition while growing up. Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me". In an interview Page said that "In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing" and that "If you think about it from a music point of view, if you're a percussionist, you hit something, it's got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second". Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to "play with the stuff lying around"—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his parents. He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor". His older brother also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked". He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually." Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan, from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991.
Sam Altman (1985.04.22-): entrepreneur, programmer, venture capitalist and blogger. He is the President of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI; received his first computer aged 8, and studied computer science at Stanford University until dropping out in 2005. At age 19, Altman was a co-founder and CEO of Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. Loopt was acquired in 2012 by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.
Historical figures
John II Casimir Vasa (1609.03.22–1672.12.16): King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania during the era of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Duke of Opole in Upper Silesia, and titular King of Sweden 1648–1660. He was the last ruler of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth bearing a blood connection to the Jagiellon dynasty. His father Sigismund, grandson of Gustav I of Sweden, had in 1592 succeeded his own father to the Swedish throne, only to be deposed in 1599 by his uncle, Charles IX of Sweden. This led to a long-standing feud wherein the Polish kings of the House of Vasa claimed the Swedish throne, resulting in the Polish–Swedish War of 1600–1629. John Casimir for most of his life remained in the shadow of his brother, Władysław IV Vasa. He had few friends among the Polish nobility (szlachta), as he openly sympathised with Austria and showed disregard and contempt for Polish culture. Unfriendly, secretive, dividing his time between lavish partying and religious contemplation, and disliking politics, he did not have a strong power base nor influence at the Polish court. He did, however, display talent as a military commander, showing his abilities in the Smolensk War against Muscovy (1633).
Maria Theresa (Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina; 1717.05.13–1780.11.29): the only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions and the last of the House of Habsburg; sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma. She started her 40-year reign when her father, Emperor Charles VI, died in October 1740. Charles VI paved the way for her accession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 and spent his entire reign securing it. Upon the death of her father, Saxony, Prussia (invasion of Silesia by Frederick the Great was the start of a lifelong enmity; she referred to him as "that evil man"), Bavaria, and France all repudiated the sanction they had recognised during his lifetime. Neither Maria Theresa's parents nor her grandparents were closely related to each other, making Maria Theresa one of few members of the House of Habsburg who was not inbred. Maria Theresa was a serious and reserved child who enjoyed singing and archery. She was barred from horse riding by her father, but she would later learn the basics for the sake of her Hungarian coronation ceremony. Even though he had spent the last decades of his life securing Maria Theresa's inheritance, Charles always expected a son and never prepared his daughter for her future role as sovereign. France drew up a plan to partition Austria between Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Spain. Vienna was in a panic, as none of Maria Theresa's advisors expected France to betray them. Contrary to all expectations, a significant amount of support for the young Queen came from Hungary. To appease those who considered her sex to be the most serious obstacle, Maria Theresa assumed masculine titles. Thus, in nomenclature, Maria Theresa was archduke and king; normally, however, she was styled as queen. No 18th-century commentary saw this crossing of gendered titles as inappropriate or impossible. In 1750, Maria Theresa recalled in her Political Testament the circumstances under which she had ascended: "I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own and finally, also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop."
Samuel Pepys (1633.02.23-1703.05.26): English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. The detailed private diary Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London.
Nadezhda Durova (Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova (RU: Наде́жда Андре́евна Ду́рова), aka Alexander Durov, Alexander Sokolov and Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov; 1783.09.17-1866.03.21): woman who, while disguised as a man, became a decorated soldier in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic wars; the first known female officer in the Russian military; memoir The Cavalry Maiden - one of the earliest autobiographies in RU lang.
Chiune Sugihara (1900.01.01-1986.07.31): Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania. During WWII, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan.
Historical Alexander the Great: none of the surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources on Alexander are contemporary. All contemporary works are lost.
Wars of Alexander the Great (336–323 BC): fought by King Alexander III of Macedon ("The Great"), first against the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Darius III, and then against local chieftains and warlords as far east as Punjab, India. Alexander the Great was one of the most successful military commanders of all time. He was undefeated in battle. By the time of his death, he had conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks.
Alexander romance: any of several collections of legends concerning the mythical exploits of Alexander the Great. The earliest version is in the Greek language, dating to the 3rd c. Several late manuscripts attribute the work to Alexander's court historian Callisthenes, but the historical person died before Alexander and could not have written a full account of his life. The unknown author is still sometimes known as Pseudo-Callisthenes.
Tadeusz Kościuszko: Tadeusz was baptized by the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox Church, thereby receiving the names Andrzej, Tadeusz and Bonawentura. His paternal family was ethnically Lithuanian-Ruthenian and traced their ancestry to Konstanty Fiodorowicz Kostiuszko, a courtier of Polish King and Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund I the Old. Kościuszko's maternal family, the Ratomskis, were also Ruthenian. Modern Belarusian writers interpret his Ruthenian or Lithuanian heritage as Belarusian; he once described himself as a Litvin, which at the time meant a Polish-speaking inhabitant, whatever their ethnicity may have been, of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, however now would be interpreted by modern Belarusian sources as a term used for Belarusians before the word "Belarusian" appeared.
Hindustani, Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit philosophers
Shastra: Sanskrit word that means "precept, rules, manual, compendium, book or treatise" in a general sense. The word is generally used as a suffix in the Indian literature context, for technical or specialized knowledge in a defined area of practice. Shastra has a similar meaning to English -logy.
Sutra: in Indian literary traditions refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text. Sutras are a genre of ancient and medieval Indian texts found in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The oldest manuscripts that have survived into the modern era, that contain extensive sutras, are part of the Vedas dated to be from the late 2nd millennium BCE through mid 1st-millennium BCE.
Arthashastra: ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Arthashastra includes books on the nature of government, law, civil and criminal court systems, ethics, economics, markets and trade, the methods for screening ministers, diplomacy, theories on war, nature of peace, and the duties and obligations of a king. The text incorporates Hindu philosophy, includes ancient economic and cultural details on agriculture, mineralogy, mining and metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests and wildlife. Authorship: Likely to be the work of several authors over centuries: Kauṭilya or Kauṭalya, Vishnugupta, Chanakya. In Machiavelli's The Prince, the king and his coterie are single-mindedly aimed at preserving the monarch's power for its own sake, states Paul Brians for example, but in the Arthashastra, the king is required "to benefit and protect his citizens, including the peasants". Kautilya asserts in Arthashastra that, "the ultimate source of the prosperity of the kingdom is its security and prosperity of its people", a view never mentioned in Machiavelli's text. The text advocates "land reform", states Brians, where land is taken from landowners and farmers who own land but do not grow anything for a long time, and given to poorer farmers who want to grow crops but do not own any land.
Vātsyāyana: name of an ancient Indian philosopher, known for writing the Kama Sutra, the most famous book in the world on human sexuality. He lived in India during the second or third century CE, probably in Pataliputra (modern day Patna). His name is sometimes erroneously confused with Mallanaga, the prophet of the Asuras, to whom the origin of erotic science is attributed. Hardly anything is known about Vātsyāyana, although it is believed that his disciples went on his instructions, on the request of the Hindu Kings in the Himalayan range to influence the hill tribals to give up the pagan cult of sacrifices. He is said to have created the legend of Tara among the hill tribes as a tantric goddess. Later as the worship spread to the east Garo hills, the goddess manifest of a 'yoni' goddess Kamakhya was created. His interest in human sexual behavior as a medium of attaining spirituality was recorded in his treatise Kama Sutra.
Kama Sutra: ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but written as a guide to the "art-of-living" well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. Kamasutra is the oldest surviving Hindu text on erotic love. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhasya (exposition and commentaries). The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad. According to Doniger, this paradigm of celebrating pleasures, enjoyment and sexuality as a dharmic act began in the "earthy, vibrant text known as the Rigveda" of the Hindus. The Kamasutra and celebration of sex, eroticism and pleasure is an integral part of the religious milieu in Hinduism and quite prevalent in its temples. Johann Meyer: Though she is reserved and selective, "a woman stands in very great need of surata (amorous or sexual pleasure)", and "the woman has a far stronger erotic disposition, her delight in the sexual act is greater than a man's". Burton used the terms lingam and yoni instead throughout the translation. This conscious and incorrect word substitution, states Doniger, thus served as an Orientalist means to "anthropologize sex, distance it, make it safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of weird, dark people far away." Though Burton used the terms lingam and yoni for human sexual organs, terms that actually mean a lot more in Sanskrit texts and its meaning depends on the context. However, Burton's Kamasutra gave a unique, specific meaning to these words in the western imagination.
Muslim, Arabic, Persian, Turkic philosophers
Brethren of Purity (Arabic: اخوانالصفا ikhwãn al-safã): secret society of Muslim philosophers in Basra, Iraq, in the 8th century CE. The structure of this mysterious organization and the identities of its members have never been clear. A good deal of Muslim and Western scholarship has been spent on just pinning down the identities of the Brethren and the century in which they were active. "In this Brotherhood, self is forgotten; all act by the help of each, all rely upon each for succour and advice, and if a Brother sees it will be good for another that he should sacrifice his life for him, he willingly gives it". They define a perfect man in their Rasa'il as "of East Persian derivation, of Arabic faith, of Iraqi, that is Babylonian, in education, Hebrew in astuteness, a disciple of Christ in conduct, as pious as a Syrian monk, a Greek in natural sciences, an Indian in the interpretation of mysteries and, above all a Sufi or a mystic in his whole spiritual outlook".
Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity: large encyclopedia in 52 treatises (rasā'il) written by the mysterious Brethren of Purity of Basra, Iraq sometime in the second half of the 10th c. CE (or possibly later, in the 11th c.). It had a great influence on later intellectual leading lights of the Muslim world, such as Ibn Arabi, and was transmitted as far abroad within the Muslim world as Al-Andalus. The Encyclopedia contributed to the popularization and legitimization of Platonism in the Arabic world. The subject of the work is vast and ranges from mathematics, music, astronomy, and natural sciences, to ethics, politics, religion, and magic—all compiled for one, basic purpose, that learning is training for the soul and a preparation for its eventual life once freed from the body.
European philosophers, modern philosophers
Epictetus (Ἐπίκτητος; c. 50 – c. 135 AD): Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece for the rest of his life. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses and Enchiridion. Epictetus taught that philosophy is a way of life and not simply a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. However, individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.
Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius; c. 477–524 AD): Roman senator, consul, magister officiorum, and philosopher. Boethius entered public service under Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great, who later imprisoned and executed him in 524 on charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy. As the author of numerous handbooks and translator of Aristotle, he became the main intermediary between Classical antiquity and following centuries. De topicis differentiis: it is largely due to Boethius that the Topics of Aristotle and Cicero were revived, and the Boethian tradition of topical argumentation spans its influence throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance. De arithmetica. De institutione musica: Like his Greek predecessors, Boethius believed that arithmetic and music were intertwined, and helped to mutually reinforce the understanding of each, and together exemplified the fundamental principles of order and harmony in the understanding of the universe as it was known during his time. Opuscula sacra: supported Catholicism and condemned Arianism and other heterodox forms of Christianity; De fide catholica.
The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae): philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues, which became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. Written in AD 523 during a one-year imprisonment Boethius served while awaiting trial – and eventual execution – for the alleged crime of treason under the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. Boethius was at the very heights of power in Rome, holding the prestigious office of magister officiorum, and was brought down by treachery. This experience inspired the text, which reflects on how evil can exist in a world governed by God (the problem of theodicy), and how happiness is still attainable amidst fickle fortune, while also considering the nature of happiness and God. It has been described as "by far the most interesting example of prison literature the world has ever seen." Boethius writes the book as a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy. Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius by discussing the transitory nature of fame and wealth ("no man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune"), and the ultimate superiority of things of the mind, which she calls the "one true good". On human nature, Boethius says that humans are essentially good and only when they give in to “wickedness” do they “sink to the level of being an animal.” On justice, he says criminals are not to be abused, rather treated with sympathy and respect, using the analogy of doctor and patient to illustrate the ideal relationship between prosecutor and criminal. It has often been said Boethius was the “last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics”.
Baltasar Gracián (Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J.; 1601.01.08–1658.12.06): Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud (Aragon). His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. El Criticón, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia → Manual Oracle and Art of Discretion)
El Criticón: Spanish novel by Baltasar Gracián. It was published in three parts in the years 1651, 1653 and 1657. It is considered his greatest work and one of the most influential works in Spanish literature, along with Don Quixote and La Celestina. El Criticón collects and expands his previous works. The work takes the form of an allegory covering the life of Andrenio, representing two facets of his life: his impulsiveness and lack of experience. It outlines the philosophical vision of Gracián's world in the form of an epic tale.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709.11.23 – 1751.11.11) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L'homme machine "Machine man" (aka "The Human Mechanism"). Philosophy: considered one of the most influential determinists of 18th c. Along with aiding the furthering of determinism he considered himself a mechanistic materialist. Believed that mental processes were caused by the body. He expressed these thoughts in his most important work L'homme machine. There he also expressed his belief that humans worked like a machine.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895.05.11–1986.02.17): philosopher, speaker and writer. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the Theosophy organization behind it. His subject matter included psychological revolution, the nature of mind, meditation, inquiry, human relationships, and bringing about radical change in society. He constantly stressed the need for a revolution in the psyche of every human being and emphasised that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social.
Theosophical Society: organization formed in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky to advance Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments, currently has several successors. The "World Teacher": Jiddu Krishnamurti
Karl Popper (1902.07.28–1994.09.17): Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th c.'s most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraced ideas from major democratic political ideologies, including socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism, and attempted to reconcile them.
3 Philosophy
3.1 Background to Popper's ideas
3.2 Philosophy of science
3.2.1 Falsifiability and the problem of demarcation
3.2.2 Falsification and the problem of induction
3.3 Rationality
3.4 Philosophy of arithmetic
3.5 Political philosophy
3.5.1 The paradox of tolerance
3.5.2 The "conspiracy theory of society"
3.6 Metaphysics
3.6.1 Truth
3.6.2 Popper's three worlds
3.6.3 Origin and evolution of life
3.6.4 Free will
3.7 Religion and God
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959): about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): work on political philosophy by the philosopher Karl Popper, in which the author presents a "defence of the open society against its enemies", and offers a critique of theories of teleological historicism, according to which history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws. Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.
Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis): association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922.
Frank Ramsey (mathematician) (1903.02.22–1930.01.19): British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908.01.09–1986.04.14): French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905.06.21–1980.04.15): French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.
Albert Camus (1913.11.07–1960.01.04): French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked...".
John Rawls (1921.02.21–2002.11.24): American moral and political philosopher; held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford; magnum opus: A Theory of Justice - "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of WWII" and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy". Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's childhood". Military Service, 1943-46: infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New Guinea and was awarded a Bronze Star; and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed horrific scenes; there, he lost his Christian faith. A Theory of Justice focused on distributive justice and attempted to reconcile the competing claims of the values of freedom and equality; Political Liberalism addressed the question of how citizens divided by intractable religious and philosophical disagreements could come to endorse a constitutional democratic regime; The Law of Peoples focused on the issue of global justice, "well-ordered" peoples could be either "liberal" or "decent".
Gilles Deleuze (1925.01.18–1995.11.04): French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.
Epistemology: Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift." Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."[47] In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine). In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"
Susan Schneider (philosopher): USA philosopher. Work: The Language of Thought; The Metaphysics of Mind; Astrobiology and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.); Uploading, Cognitive Enhancement and the Singularity.
Medical doctors
Archie Cochrane (1909-1988): Scottish doctor noted for his book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. He spent his career urging the medical community to adopt the scientific method; pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials.
Lawyers
Brad Smith (American lawyer) (1959.01.17-): USA attorney and technology executive currently serving as President of Microsoft, concurrently serving as chief legal officer. Smith joined Microsoft in 1993. Smith's application for the job of general counsel in late 2001 included a PowerPoint presentation of a single slide that said: "time to make peace." Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer agreed. By 2014, Smith was the longest serving member of Microsoft's top leadership, and considered "a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large". Smith was promoted to president and chief legal officer of Microsoft in 2015 by CEO Satya Nadella, becoming the first President of Microsoft since Richard Belluzzo in 2002. In these roles, Smith is responsible for Microsoft's corporate, external, and legal affairs, and is also the firm's chief compliance officer.
Tim Wu: professor at Columbia Law School, the former chair of media reform group Free Press, and a writer for Slate Magazine. Specialties: Law & Technology ("net neutrality" was coined by him).
Who Controls the Internet? with Jack Goldsmith.
Public figures
ru:Городские проекты («Городские проекты Ильи Варламова и Максима Каца»): российский некоммерческий фонд, созданный политиком Максимом Кацем и журналистом Ильёй Варламовым, призванный улучшить городскую среду с помощью данных современной урбанистики. Фонду принадлежит ряд инициатив в Москве, встретивших смешанные реакции властей.
Maxim Katz (1984.12.23-): Russian political and public figure, co-founder of the Urban Projects Foundation, author of the YouTube channel of the same name, Russian champion in sports poker, wikipedian, former deputy of the municipal assembly of the Moscow region Schukino (III convocation 2012–2016) from Party "Yabloko".
ru:Кац, Максим Евгеньевич (1984.12.23-): российский политический и общественный деятель, директор фонда «Городские проекты». Автор одноимённого канала на YouTube, первый чемпион России по спортивному покеру, бывший депутат муниципального собрания московского района Щукино (III созыв 2012—2016 годов) от партии «Яблоко»
ru:Варламов, Илья Александрович (1984.01.07-): российский общественный деятель, журналист, предприниматель и видеоблогер. Создатель авторского СМИ на базе блог-платформы «Живой Журнал» (позднее — на Teletype). Основатель рекламно-девелоперского агентства «iCube», сооснователь фонда «Городские проекты», основатель и руководитель фонда сохранения культурного наследия «Внимание». Известен своими фоторепортажами с акций политической оппозиции в России и в мире, а также материалами о городской среде в российских городах. С 2017 года — активно ведёт канал на YouTube под названием «varlamov», в котором Илья большинство материалов посвящает теме урбанистики.
Economists, politicians, political scientists, social scientists, revolutionaries
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767.06.22-1835.04.8): German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949.
Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796.02.17–1866.10.18): German physician, botanist, and traveler. He taught some pupils Western medicine in Japan. He achieved prominence for his study of Japanese flora and fauna, and was the father of female Japanese doctor, Kusumoto Ine.
Henry George (1839.09.02–1897.10.29): USA political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in the 19th century, and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. His writings also inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value derived from land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value tax and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems.
Winston Churchill (1874.11.30 – 1965.01.24): British politician who was the Prime Minister of UK 1940-1945 and 1951-1955. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer (under the pen name Winston S. Churchill), and an artist. Churchill is the only British Prime Minister to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since its inception in 1901, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.
The Second World War (book series): largely responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Churchill wrote the book, with a team of assistants, using both his own notes and privileged access to official documents while still working as a politician; the text was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions throughout the world; overing the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914).
Ludwig von Mises (1881.09.29–1973.10.10): "The captain is the consumer…the consumers determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities…They are merciless egoistic bosses, full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction…In their capacity as buyers and consumers they are hard-hearted and callous, without consideration for other people…Capitalists…can only preserve and increase their wealth by filling best the orders of the consumers… In the conduct of their business affairs they must be unfeeling and stony-hearted because the consumers, their bosses, are themselves unfeeling and stony-hearted." from Human action.
Max Eastman (1883.01.04–1969.03.25): "In 1922, Eastman embarked on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union to learn about the Soviet enactment of Marxism. Upon returning to the United States in 1927, Eastman published several works that were highly critical of the Stalinist system, beginning with Since Lenin Died, which was written in 1925 (description of Lenin's Testament, a copy of which Eastman had smuggled out of Russia). Although Eastman's view of the Soviet Union was sharply altered by his experiences there and by subsequent study, his commitment to left-wing political ideas continued unabated." [...] He published several works in which he criticized James Joyce and other modernist writers who, he claimed, fostered "the Cult of Unintelligibility". These were controversial at a time when the modernists were highly admired. When Eastman had asked Joyce why his book was written in a very difficult style, Joyce famously replied: "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years". Changing political beliefs: In 1941, he was hired as a roving editor for Reader's Digest magazine, a position he held for the remainder of his life. About this time, he also became a friend and admirer of the noted free market economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke. He allied with the American writers James Burnham, John Chamberlain and John Dos Passos. Nobel laureate economist Hayek referred to Eastman's life and to his repudiation of socialism in his widely read The Road to Serfdom.
Friedrich Hayek (1899.05.8 - 1992.03.23)
Milton Friedman (1912.07.31 - 2006.11.16)
Murray Rothbard (1926.03.2 - 1995.01.7)
Hal Varian (Hal Ronald Varian; 1947.03.18-): economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics; Chief Economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information.
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung, Chairman Mao; 1893.12.26–1976.09.09): Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of PRC, which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. Son of a prosperous peasant in Shaoshan, Hunan. He supported Chinese nationalism and had an anti-imperialist outlook early in his life, and was particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. He later adopted Marxism–Leninism while working at Peking University and became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP, Mao helped to found the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land policies, and ultimately became head of the CCP during the Long March. Although the CCP temporarily allied with the KMT under the Second United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), China's civil war resumed after Japan's surrender, and Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan in 1949. In 1955, Mao launched the Sufan movement, and in 1957 he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals and dissidents, were persecuted. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial, which led to the deadliest famine in history and the deaths of 15–55 million people between 1958 and 1962. In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement, and in 1966 he initiated the Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements in Chinese society which lasted 10 years and was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts, and an unprecedented elevation of Mao's cult of personality. Tens of millions of people were persecuted during the Revolution, while the estimated number of deaths ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Liu Shaoqi (1898.11.24–1969.11.12): Chinese (PRC) revolutionary, politician, and theorist. He was Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1954 to 1959, First Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1956 to 1966 and Chairman of the People's Republic of China, the de jure head of state, from 1959 to 1968, during which he implemented policies of economic reconstruction in China. Originally considered as a successor to Mao, Liu antagonized him in the early 1960s before the Cultural Revolution. From 1966 onward, he was purged, imprisoned, and tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution
Vyacheslav Molotov (Вячеслав Михайлович Молотов; né Skryabin (Скрябин); 1890.03.09 [O.S. 25 February] – 1986.11.08): Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the USSR government from the 1920s onward. He served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1941 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. During the 1930s, he ranked second in the Soviet leadership, after Joseph Stalin, whom he supported loyally for over 30 years, and whose reputation he continued to defend after Stalin's death, having himself been deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the Stalin years – the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s, and the Great Purge, during which he signed 373 lists of people condemned to execution.
Polina Zhemchuzhina (Полина Семёновна Жемчужина, born Perl Solomonovna Karpovskaya (Перл Соломоновна Карповская); 1897.02.27–1970.04.01): Soviet politician and the wife of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Zhemchuzhina was the director of the Soviet national cosmetics trust from 1932 to 1936, Minister of Fisheries in 1939, and head of textiles production in the Ministry of Light Industry from 1939 to 1948. In 1948, Zhemchuzhina was arrested by the Soviet secret police, charged with treason, and sent into internal exile, where she remained until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, she was released from captivity by Lavrentiy Beria and reunited with her husband. Her first question upon her release was "How's Stalin?" Upon being told he had died only days before, she fainted.
Samuel P. Huntington (1927.04.18-2008.12.24): influential political scientist from USA whose works covered multiple sub-fields of political science. :
The Clash of Civilizations (and the Remaking of World Order; 1996): theory that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington proposed in 1992 lecture. Divided the world into the "major civilizations" in his thesis as such: Western civilization (USA, EU, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Oceania); Latin American (Mexico and further South); Orthodox world of the former Soviet Union (excluding Baltics & most of Central Asia), Armenia, Georgia, the former Yugoslavia (excluding Slovenia and Croatia), Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Romania; Eastern world (Buddhist (Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand), Chinese/Sinic (PRC/China, ROC/Taiwan, Singapore; Koreas, Vietnam; Chinese diaspora in SEA), Hindu (India, Bhutan, Nepal; Indian diaspora), and Japonic); Muslim world (Greater Middle East (excluding Armenia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Georgia, Israel, Malta and South Sudan), northern West Africa, Albania, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Maldives); civilization of Sub-Saharan Africa (possible 8th civilization by Huntington). Distinct entities: Ethiopia and Haiti ("lone" countries), Israel (very similar to the West), Anglophone Caribbean. "Cleft countries" (kinda "melting pot of USA"?): India (Hindu majority + Muslim minority); Ukraine (Eastern Rite Catholic-dominated western section + Orthodox-dominated east) [2014; 2022 - Huntington was in a way correct]; France (French Guiana + the West); Benin, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Togo (Islam + Sub-Saharan Africa); Guyana and Suriname (Hindu + Sub-Saharan African); China (Sinic + Buddhist (Tibet) + the West (Hong Kong and Macau)); Philippines (Islam (Mindanao) + Sinic + the West); Sudan was "cleft" (Islam and Sub-Saharan Africa) - independence by South Sudan in 2011.01. "The West versus the Rest". "Torn countries": Russia (Orthodox vs West), Mexico (Latin vs West), Turkey (Muslim vs West: if Turkey were to become part of EU, Turkey would be the first to redefine its civilizational identity). Critics: Edward Said: "The Clash of Ignorance" ("the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims"); Noam Chomsky: new justification for the United States (military-industrial complex?) "for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out" (as USSR collapsed);
Dialogue Among Civilizations (Mohammad Khatami);
Alliance of Civilizations was proposed at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005 by the President of the Spanish Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and co-sponsored by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In the
Intermediate Region one cannot speak of a civiliational clash or external conflict, but rather an internal conflict, not for cultural domination, but for political succession (hellenized Roman Empire → Christianity; Byzantine Empire (Christian) → Islamic caliphates; Byzantine + Islamic caliphates → Ottoman rule { Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul}).
Huntington 1996.
Geert Hofstede (1928.10.02-): Dutch social psychologist, former IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations; developing cultural dimensions theory. He describes national cultures as describable along six dimensions: Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation , and Indulgence vs restraint.
Madeleine Albright (1937.05.15): Czechoslovak Jew who became a naturalized USA citizen; the first woman to become the USA Secretary of State.
Jeremy Rifkin (1945.01.26-): economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist; bestselling author of nineteen books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), The European Dream (2004), The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The Age of Access (2000), The Biotech Century (1998), and The End of Work (1995).
Francis Fukuyama (1952.10.27): USA political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.
Religion personalities
Richard Sipe (1932.12.11-): former Benedictine monk-priest of 18 years, a sociologist and author of 6 books about Catholicism American Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor trained specifically to deal with the mental health problems of Roman Catholic Priests
Founders
Aleister Crowley (1875.10.12-1947.12.01; Edward Alexander Crowley, Frater Perdurabo & The Great Beast 666 (To Mega Therion)): English occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, poet and mountaineer, who was responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema; became a member of the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a young man; grounded A∴A∴; rose to become a leader of Ordo Templi Orientis; founded a religious commune in Cefalù known as the Abbey of Thelema (1920-1923).
Rajneesh (1931.12.11–1990.01.19; Chandra Mohan Jain, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Osho): Indian godman and founder of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader and mystic. In the 1960s he traveled throughout India as a public speaker and was a vocal critic of socialism, arguing that India was not ready for socialism and that socialism, communism, and anarchism could evolve only when capitalism had reached its maturity. Rajneesh also criticised Mahatma Gandhi, and the orthodoxy of mainstream religions. Rajneesh emphasized the importance of meditation, mindfulness, love, celebration, courage, creativity, and humour—qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition, and socialisation. In advocating a more open attitude to human sexuality he caused controversy in India during the late 1960s and became known as "the sex guru". In 1974, Rajneesh relocated to Pune, where an ashram was established and a variety of therapies, incorporating methods first developed by the Human Potential Movement, were offered to a growing Western following. Rajneesh's teachings have had a notable impact on Western New Age thought, and their popularity has increased markedly since his death.
Theologians
Paolo Sarpi: had contact with Galileo; was a true Venetian; did a lot for Venice and against Rome, Roman Catholic Church and popes at that time; started on the side of Rome and ended in Venice and with Venice against Rome; maybe helped Galileo to go against Rome as well
Religious study scholars, writers
Paul de Lagarde (1827.11.02–1891.12.22): German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist. He has been cited as one of the greatest orientalists of 19th c. Parallel to his academic work, he attempted to establish a German national religion whose most striking manifestations were an aggressive anti-Semitism and expansionism. The historian Ulrich Sieg classifies his position as follows: "He despised the Christianity that he considered bland and lukewarm and hoped for a folkish religion of the future."
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam: "the notion that historical context should play no role in the interpretation of the Quran – that what applied to Muhammad's community applies to all Muslim communities for all time – is simply an untenable position in every sense"
Albert Schweitzer (1875.01.14–1965.09.04): Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, literally "From Reimarus to Wrede: a History of Life-of-Jesus Research"): 1906 work of Biblical historical criticism written by Albert Schweitzer during the previous year, before he began to study for a medical degree.
Sam Harris (author) (1967.04.09-): father: Quaker background, mother: Jewish. Leaving Stanford in his second year of B.A., he went to India, where he studied meditation with Hindu and Buddhist religious teachers, including Dilgo Khyentse. Eleven years later, in 1997, he returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000. Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at UCLA fMRI research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. Views: religion is especially rife with bad ideas, calling it "one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised"; "We don't have a word for not believing in Zeus, which is to say we are all atheists in respect to Zeus. And we don't have a word for not being an astrologer"; idea of free will is incoherent, humans are not free and no sense can be given to the concept that they might be; postulates that religion is essentially a failed science. Morality and ethics: points out that even the Golden Rule is not unique to any one religion and was taught by such figures as Confucius and the Buddha centuries before the New Testament was written.
Bill Maher (1956.01.20-): USA stand-up comedian, television host, political commentator, satirist, author, and actor; known for his sarcastic attitude, political satire and sociopolitical commentary, which targets a wide swath of topics including religion, politics, bureaucracies of many kinds, political correctness, the mass media, greed among people and persons in positions of high political and social power, and the lack of intellectual curiosity in the electorate. Politics: eschews political labels, referring to himself as "practical"; in the past, he has described himself as a libertarian, and has also referred to himself "as a progressive, as a sane person"; referred to himself as a "9/11 liberal", noting that his formerly liberal view of Muslims changed as a result of the attacks in 2001.09.11, and he differentiates himself from liberals of the opinion that all religions are equal; favors legalization of gambling, prostitution, and marijuana; environmentalist, and he has spoken in favor of the Kyoto treaty on global warming; noted the paradox of people claiming they distrusted "elite" politicians while at the same time wanting elite doctors to treat them and elite lawyers to represent them in court; supports the death penalty; since the 9/11 attacks, he has endorsed the use of racial profiling at airports; gun owner. Religion: Religulous, been described variously as an agnostic, atheist, and apatheist; "I don't know what happens when you die, and I don't care"; "idiots must stop claiming that atheism is a religion. [...] believe it or not, I don't really enjoy talking about religion all the time. In fact, not only is atheism not a religion, it's not even my hobby. And that's the best thing about being an atheist. It requires so little of your time." Health care: "if Jesus was in charge of the country we’d probably have health care for everybody"; expressed the view that most illness is generally the result of poor diet and lack of exercise, and that medicine is often not the best way of addressing illness; "If you believe you need to take all the pills the pharmaceutical industry says you do, then you're already on drugs!".
Rulers, dynasties
Jagiellonian dynasty: royal dynasty, founded by Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, who in 1386 was baptized as Władysław, married Queen regnant (also styled "King") Jadwiga of Poland, and was crowned King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło. The dynasty reigned in several Central European countries between the 14th and 16th centuries. Members of the dynasty were Kings of Poland (1386–1572), Grand Dukes of Lithuania (1377–1392 and 1440–1572), Kings of Hungary (1440–1444 and 1490–1526), and Kings of Bohemia (1471–1526). The personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and GDL (converted in 1569 with the Treaty of Lublin into PLC) is the reason for the common appellation "Poland–Lithuania" in discussions about the area from the Late Middle Ages onward.
The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars...likely to have planets circling around them.... The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge.... Yearning for fresh worlds...they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. – "And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?" – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: "They are among us," he said, "but they call themselves Hungarians."
"
The Martians (scientists)": term used to refer to a group of prominent Jewish Hungarian scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated to the United States in the early half of the 20th c. Leó Szilárd, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians." This account is featured in György Marx's book The Voice of the Martians. Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner are included in this group. Dennis Gabor, Ervin Bauer, Róbert Bárány, George de Hevesy, Nicholas Kurti, George Klein, Eva Klein, Michael Polanyi and Marcel Riesz are also sometimes named, though they did not emigrate to the United States. Loránd Eötvös, Kálmán Tihanyi, Zoltán Lajos Bay, Victor Szebehely, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Georg von Békésy and Maria Telkes are often mentioned in connection.
Multidisciplinary, founders of new (sub)branches of sciences, polymaths, science-politics
Ptolemy (c. 100 - c. 170; Koinē Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Klaúdios Ptolemaîos; Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus): Greek mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt under the rule of the Roman Empire, had a Latin name (which several historians have taken to imply he was also a Roman citizen), cited Greek philosophers, and used Babylonian observations and Babylonian lunar theory. Ptolemy wrote several scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic and Western European science: Almagest (Mathematical Treatise; Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις, Mathēmatikē Syntaxis), Geography (thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world), Apotelesmatika (Tetrabiblos).
Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600 – 1662.03.10): polymath of German origin who settled, married and died in England. He was an active promoter and expert writer in many fields, interested in science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle, whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard, London, in the early 1660s. 'Hartlib circle' {similar to
Salomon's House (Francis Bacon)} →
Invisible College (Robert Boyle) →
Royal Society of London (aka the Royal Society) (
John Wilkins was the founding Secretary of the Royal Society). Wrote in German and English. Civil war in England (Oliver Cromwell paid Hartlib a pension). The glue of intellectuals of Europe.
Hermeticism (Western Hermetic Tradition)
Isaac Newton (1643.01.04-1727.03.31): English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, laid the foundations of classical mechanics; made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing the infinitesimal calculus; built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum, book Opticks. Fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian, who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and who, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, refused to take holy orders in the Church of England. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death.
Religious views of Isaac Newton: considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his contemporaries. He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies and religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646.07.01 [O.S. 21 June] – 1716.11.14): German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, and philology. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He also contributed to the field of library science: while serving as overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany, he devised a cataloging system that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German, but also in English, Italian and Dutch.
Charles Darwin (1809.02.12–1882.04.19): English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839.02.11–1903.04.28): USA scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous deductive science. Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created statistical mechanics (a term that he coined), explaining the laws of thermodynamics as consequences of the statistical properties of ensembles of the possible states of a physical system composed of many particles. Working in relative isolation, he became the earliest theoretical scientist in the United States to earn an international reputation and was praised by Albert Einstein as "the greatest mind in American history". In 1901, Gibbs received what was then considered the highest honor awarded by the international scientific community, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, "for his contributions to mathematical physics". Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband Addison Van Name, who was the Yale librarian. It was Gibbs who first combined the first and second
laws of thermodynamics by expressing the infinitesimal change in the internal energy, dU, of a
closed system in the form: . That Gibbs succeeded in interesting his European correspondents in his work is demonstrated by the fact that his monograph "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" was translated into German (then the leading language for chemistry) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892 and into French by Henri Louis Le Châtelier in 1899. According to Robert A. Millikan, in pure science, Gibbs "did for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (300 pages; 1875-1878): "the Principia of thermodynamics" and as a work of "practically unlimited scope"; solidly laid the foundation for physical Chemistry.
Nikola Tesla (1856.07.10–1943.01.07): Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures.
Ronald Fisher (1890.02.17–1962.07.29): British statistician and geneticist. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors". Developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Fisher held strong views on race. Throughout his life, he was a prominent supporter of eugenics, an interest which led to his work on statistics and genetics. Notably, he was a dissenting voice in the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question, insisting on racial differences.
John von Neumann (1903.12.28-1957.02.08): Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to have been "the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both pure and applied mathematics". He integrated pure and applied sciences. During WWII, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project with theoretical physicist Edward Teller, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and others, problem-solving key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon and coined the term "kiloton" (of TNT) as a measure of the explosive force generated. As a Hungarian émigré, concerned that the Soviets would achieve nuclear superiority, he designed and promoted the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) to limit the arms race, additionally, he played a key role, alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner, in contributing to the development of America's first ICBM programs. Von Neumann was born to a wealthy, acculturated and non-observant Jewish family. His Hungarian birth name was Neumann János Lajos.
Child prodigy: when he was six years old, he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and could converse in Ancient Greek. When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, "What are you calculating?"
Career and private life: Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did. He knew by heart much of the material in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and after dinner liked to engage in various historial discussions. Von Neumann liked to eat and drink. His wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly. Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he enjoyed driving—frequently while reading a book—occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. A later friend of Ulam's, Gian-Carlo Rota, wrote, "They would spend hours on end gossiping and giggling, swapping Jewish jokes, and drifting in and out of mathematical talk." When von Neumann was dying in the hospital, every time Ulam visited, he came prepared with a new collection of jokes to cheer him up. Von Neumann believed that much of his mathematical thought occurred intuitively; he would often go to sleep with a problem unsolved and know the answer upon waking up. Ulam noted that von Neumann's way of thinking might not be visual, but more aural.
Illness and death: In 1955, von Neumann was diagnosed with what was either bone, pancreatic or prostate cancer after he was examined by physicians for a fall, whereupon they inspected a mass growing near his collarbone. The cancer was possibly caused by his radiation exposure during his time in Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was not able to accept the proximity of his own demise, and the shadow of impending death instilled great fear in him.
Mathematics: Set theory (Von Neumann paradox); Proof theory; Ergodic theory; Measure theory; Topological groups; Functional analysis; Operator algebras; Geometry; Lattice theory; Mathematical statistics; Other work in pure mathematics.
Physics: Quantum mechanics (Von Neumann entropy, Quantum mutual information, Density matrix, Von Neumann measurement scheme, Quantum logic); Fluid dynamics; Other work in physics.
Economics: Game theory; Mathematical economics; Linear programming.
Computer science: Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing; Cellular automata, DNA and the universal constructor; Scientific computing and numerical analysis; Weather systems and global warming; Technological singularity hypothesis.
Defense work:
Manhattan Project
Atomic Energy Commission
Mutual assured destruction: Von Neumann's assessment that the Soviets had a lead in missile technology, considered pessimistic at the time, was soon proven correct in the Sputnik crisis. Von Neumann entered government service primarily because he felt that, if freedom and civilization were to survive, it would have to be because the United States would triumph over totalitarianism from Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism. During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
Consultancies.
Personality: He knew Hungarian, French, German and English fluently, and maintained at least conversational level Italian, Yiddish, Ancient Latin and Greek. His Spanish was less perfect, but once on a trip to Mexico he tried to create his own "neo-Castilian" mix of English and Spanish; Mathematical style.
Recognition: Cognitive abilities: Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man", and later Bethe wrote that "[von Neumann's] brain indicated a new species, an evolution beyond man". Seeing von Neumann's mind at work, Eugene Wigner wrote, "one had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch." Accolades and anecdotes were not limited to those from the physical or mathematical sciences either, neurophysiologist Leon Harmon, described him in a similar manner, "Von Neumann was a true genius, the only one I’ve ever known. I’ve met Einstein and Oppenheimer and Teller and—who’s the mad genius from MIT? I don’t mean McCulloch, but a mathematician. Anyway, a whole bunch of those other guys. Von Neumann was the only genius I ever met. The others were supersmart .... And great prima donnas. But von Neumann’s mind was all-encompassing. He could solve problems in any domain. ... And his mind was always working, always restless."
Legacy: "It seems fair to say that if the influence of a scientist is interpreted broadly enough to include impact on fields beyond science proper, then John von Neumann was probably the most influential mathematician who ever lived," wrote Miklós Rédei in John von Neumann: Selected Letters. James Glimm wrote: "he is regarded as one of the giants of modern mathematics". Mastery of mathematics.
Qian Xuesen (钱学森; 1911.12.11–2009.10.31): Chinese mathematician, cyberneticist, aerospace engineer, and physicist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. Recruited from MIT, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at Caltech. During the Second Red Scare, in the 1950s, the US federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues, he was stripped of his security clearance. He decided to return to mainland China, but he was detained at Terminal Island, near Los Angeles. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. Upon his return, he helped lead the Chinese nuclear weapons program. This effort ultimately led to China's first successful atomic bomb test and hydrogen bomb test, making China the fifth nuclear weapons state, and achieving the fastest fission-to-fusion development in history. Additionally, Qian's work led to the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry".
Graph with the benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself and causes to others. According to Carlo M. Cipolla. Intelligent people contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits. Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (and especially by the "bandit" sector of it); note, however, that extreme altruists and pacifists may willingly and consciously (rather than helplessly) accept a place in this category for moral or ethical reasons. Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare. Stupid people's efforts are counterproductive to both their and others' interests. Ineffectual people.
Carlo M. Cipolla (1922.08.15–2000.09.05): The Fundamental Laws of Human Stupidity. Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.
Stephen Wolfram (1959.08.29-): GB scientist known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics; book A New Kind of Science. Founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he worked as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. As a young child, Wolfram initially struggled in school and had difficulties learning arithmetic; at the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics; by 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics. PhD in particle physics on 1979.11.19 at age 20; Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field. Complex systems and cellular automata. Symbolic Manipulation Program → Mathematica.
John Ioannidis (1965.08.21-): Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. Best known for his research and published papers on scientific studies, particularly the 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". Ioannidis is one of the most-cited scientists across the scientific literature, especially in the fields of clinical medicine and social sciences, according to Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researchers 2015.
Daniel J. Bernstein (djb; 1971.10.29-): USA German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer programmer. He is a professor ("persoonlijk hoogleraar") in the department of mathematics and computer science at the TU Eindhoven, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fibonacci (Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Bigollo Pisano; c. 1170 – c. 1240–50): Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be "the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages". Fibonacci popularized the Indo–Arabic numeral system in the Western world primarily through his composition in 1202 of Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). Fibonacci sequence
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887.12.22–1920.04.26): Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research. Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. In 1919, ill health—now believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously)—compelled Ramanujan's return to India, where he died in 1920 at the age of 32. A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. Mathematicians' views of Ramanujan: Hardy: "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"
Frank P. Ramsey (1903.02.22-1930.01.19): British Mathematician; close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus from de to en). Economical contributions: "how much of its income should a nation save?" (1928; mathematical theory of saving). Died young due to chronic liver problems.
Jaron Lanier (1960.05.03-): USA computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of virtual reality (a term he is credited with popularizing), Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. From 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 forward he works at Microsoft Research as Interdisciplinary Scientist. Wikipedia and the omniscience of collective wisdom: Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. You Are Not a Gadget (2010). Who Owns the Future (2013).
Geoffrey Hinton (1947.12.06-): a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. Since 2013 he divides his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto. In 2017, he cofounded and became the Chief Scientific Advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto. With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularized the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks, although they were not the first to propose the approach. Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community. The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision. Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning". Hinton has petitioned against lethal autonomous weapons. Regarding existential risk from artificial intelligence, Hinton typically declines to make predictions more than five years into the future, noting that exponential progress makes the uncertainty too great. However, in an informal conversation with the AI risk researcher Nick Bostrom in November 2015, overheard by journalist Raffi Khatchadourian, he is reported to have stated that he did not expect general A.I. to be achieved for decades (“No sooner than 2070”), and that, in the context of a dichotomy earlier introduced by Bostrom between people who think managing existential risk from artificial intelligence is probably hopeless versus easy enough that it will be solved automatically, Hinton "[is] in the camp that is hopeless." He has stated, "I think political systems will use it to terrorize people" and has expressed his belief that agencies like NSA are already attempting to abuse similar technology. Hinton does not categorically rule out human beings controlling an artificial superintelligence, but warns that "there is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence".
Alan Kay (1940.05.17-): USA computer scientist; best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:
I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me.
Ole Rømer (1644.09.25–1710.09.19; also "Roemer", "Römer", or "Romer"): Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light; also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points, namely the points at which water respectively boils and freezes.
Rømer's determination of the speed of light: demonstration in 1676 that light has a finite speed, and so does not travel instantaneously. The discovery is usually attributed to Danish astronomer Ole Rømer, who was working at the Royal Observatory in Paris at the time. By timing the eclipses of the Jupiter moon Io, Rømer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. This would give light a velocity of about 220,000 km/s, about 26% lower than the true value.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742.07.01–1799.02.24): German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile; the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany; remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. Lichtenberg became a hunchback owing to a malformation of his spine. This left him unusually short, even by 18th-century standards. Over time, this malformation grew worse, ultimately affecting his breathing. Proposed the standardized paper size system used globally today (except in Canada and the US) defined by ISO 216, which has A4 as the most commonly used size. Since the initial publications, however, notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to have contained sensitive materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are now preserved in Göttingen University.
Nikola Tesla (1856.07.10–1943.01.07): Serbian-USA inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Marie Curie (Marie Skłodowska Curie; born Maria Salomea Skłodowska; 1867.11.07–1934.07.04): the woman who won 2 Nobel prizes: 1903 Physics ("in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel", Pierre Curie, Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel), 1911 Chemistry ("in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium {in honor of her native Poland}, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element", Marie Curie alone; she did not patent the radium-isolation process, so that the scientific community could do research unhindered).
Lise Meitner (Elise Meitner, 1878.11.07–1968.10.27): Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of Nature in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during WWII, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
Otto Robert Frisch (1904.10.01–1979.09.22): Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner (his aunt) he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940. During the Christmas holiday in 1938, he visited his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv. While there she received the news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced the element barium as one of its byproducts. Hahn, in a letter to Meitner, called this new reaction a "bursting" of the uranium nucleus. Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that the uranium nucleus had split in two, explained the process, and estimated the energy released, and Frisch coined the term fission, adopted from a process in biology, to describe it. Political restraints of the Nazi era forced the teams of Hahn and Strassmann and that of Frisch and Meitner (both of whom were Jewish) to publish separately. Hahn's paper described the experiment and the finding of the barium byproduct. Meitner's and Frisch's paper explained the physics behind the phenomenon.
Albert Einstein (1879.03.14–1955.04.18): German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. Specializing in physics and mathematics, he received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (eidgenössische polytechnische Schule, later ETH) in Zürich in 1900. The following year, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for his entire life. After initially struggling to find work, from 1902 to 1909 he was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, called his annus mirabilis, he published four groundbreaking papers, which attracted the attention of the academic world; the first outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, the second paper explained Brownian motion, the third paper introduced special relativity, and the fourth mass-energy equivalence. That year, at the age of 26, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. In 1914, he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he remained for 19 years. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting USA, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany. He settled in USA and became an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of WWII, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting FDR to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan Project. He was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein stated that he believed in the pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified however that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever." Einstein also stated he did not believe in life after death, adding "one life is enough for me." He was closely involved in his lifetime with several humanist groups. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein was more inclined to denigrate atheists than religious people. Einstein said in correspondence, "[T]he fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot hear the music of the spheres." Although he did not believe in a personal God, he indicated that he would never seek to combat such belief because "such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook." Einstein, in a one-and-a-half-page hand-written German-language letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, dated Princeton, New Jersey, 1954.01.03, a year and three and a half months before his death, wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this. [...] For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. [...] I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them [the Jewish people]." "As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indoctrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws."
Leo Szilard (born Leó Spitz; 1898.02.11–1964.05.30): Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. Szilard was the first scientist of note to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory. In addition to the nuclear reactor, Szilard coined and submitted the earliest known patent applications and the first publications for the concepts of electron microscope (1928), the linear accelerator (1928), and the cyclotron (1929) in Germany, proving him as the originator of the idea of these devices. Between 1926 and 1930, he worked with Einstein on the development of the Einstein refrigerator. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Szilard urged his family and friends to flee Europe while they still could. Foreseeing another war in Europe, Szilard moved to the United States in 1938, where he worked with Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn on means of creating a nuclear chain reaction. He was present when this was achieved within the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942.12.02. He worked for the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on aspects of nuclear reactor design. He drafted the Szilard petition advocating a demonstration of the atomic bomb, but the Interim Committee chose to use them against cities without warning. He publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, a new kind of nuclear weapon that might annihilate mankind. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, he underwent a cobalt-60 treatment that he had designed. He helped found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he became a resident fellow.
Ernest Lawrence (1901.08.08–1958.08.27): pioneering USA nuclear scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
de:Werner Heisenberg (1901.12.05-1976.02.01,
Werner Heisenberg): German theoretical physicist and one of the key creators of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg war musisch begabt, und er spielte recht gut Klavier.
Paul Dirac (1902.08.08–1984.10.20): English theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." In another letter concerning the Compton effect he wrote, "I don't understand the details of Dirac at all."
Early years: Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who died by suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much ... I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew." Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919. Dirac's father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a strained relationship with his father, so much so that after his father's death, Dirac wrote, "I feel much freer now, and I am my own man." Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French so that they might learn the language. When Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent. University of Bristol. University of Cambridge: He completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere. He then continued his research in Copenhagen and Göttingen. In the spring of 1929, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Family: In 1937, Dirac married Margit Wigner, a sister of physicist Eugene Wigner and a divorcee. Dirac raised Margit's two children, Judith and Gabriel, as if they were his own. Paul and Margit Dirac also had two daughters together, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica. Margit, known as Manci, had visited her brother in 1934 in Princeton, New Jersey, from their native Hungary and, while at dinner at the Annex Restaurant, met the "lonely-looking man at the next table". This account from a Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else".
Personality: Dirac criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?"
Career: Dirac established the most general theory of quantum mechanics and discovered the relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name. The remarkable notion of an antiparticle to each fermion particle – e.g. the positron as antiparticle to the electron – stems from his equation. He was the first to develop quantum field theory, which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or "elementary" particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of the forces of nature.
Quantum theory: Dirac was famously not bothered by issues of interpretation in quantum theory. In fact, in a paper published in a book in his honour, he wrote: "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things."
The Dirac equation; Magnetic monopoles; Gravity; University of Cambridge - Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969; Florida State University and University of Miami - After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research. His last paper (1984), entitled "The inadequacies of quantum field theory," contains his final judgment on quantum field theory: "These rules of renormalisation give surprisingly, excessively good agreement with experiments. Most physicists say that these working rules are, therefore, correct. I feel that is not an adequate reason. Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observation does not prove that one's theory is correct." The paper ends with the words: "I have spent many years searching for a Hamiltonian to bring into the theory and have not yet found it. I shall continue to work on it as long as I can and other people, I hope, will follow along such lines."
Students: Polkinghorne recalls that Dirac "was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations."
Honours: Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".
Dirac large numbers hypothesis: observation made by Paul Dirac in 1937 relating ratios of size scales in the Universe to that of force scales. The ratios constitute very large, dimensionless numbers: some 40 orders of magnitude in the present cosmological epoch. According to Dirac's hypothesis, the apparent similarity of these ratios might not be a mere coincidence but instead could imply a cosmology with these unusual features:
The strength of gravity, as represented by the gravitational constant, is inversely proportional to the age of the universe:
The mass of the universe is proportional to the square of the universe's age: .
Physical constants are actually not constant. Their values depend on the age of the Universe.
Edward Teller (1908.01.15–2003.09.09): a Hungarian-USA theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he claimed he did not care for the title; numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular, the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects) and surface physics. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality, and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." Like Einstein and Feynman, Teller was a late talker. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller. When he was a young student, his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident in Munich, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot, and leaving him with a lifelong limp. Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. In 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community, but was still quite welcome in the government and military science circles. Teller was one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. For some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular. In 1991 he was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". He was also rumored to be one of the inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film of the same name (others speculated to be RAND theorist Herman Kahn, mathematician John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara).
Frank Oppenheimer (1912.08.14–1985.02.03): USA particle physicist, cattle rancher, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment. After the war, Oppenheimer's earlier involvement with the American Communist Party placed him under scrutiny, and he resigned from his physics position at the University of Minnesota. Oppenheimer was a target of McCarthyism and was blacklisted from finding any physics teaching position in USA until 1957, when he was allowed to teach science at a high school in Colorado. This rehabilitation allowed him to gain a position at the University of Colorado teaching physics.
David Bohm (1917.12.20–1992.10.27): USA scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was targeted during the McCarthy era, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. His main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but rather an unending process of movement and unfoldment. "So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction". "...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything – that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us."
Richard Feynman (1918.05.11-1988.02.15) American theoretical physicist. Quantum electrodynamics: path integral formulation & Feynman diagrams; superfluidity; model of weak decay. Teacher/professor and books based on his lectures at CalTech. Born in Queens, NY, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, his father from Minsk in Russian Empire. Like Einstein and Edward Teller, Feynman was a late talker, and by his third birthday had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new; from his mother he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life; as a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they didn't look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the d's. In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree, and was named a Putnam Fellow; he attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal, and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and blackmailed him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. That this sort of behavior was illegal was not overlooked; Feynman had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but eventually decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in 1959.06. She made a point of dating other men but Feynman proposed in the spring of 1960. They were married on 1960.09.24 at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Feynman tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech; also tried marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness; gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911.07.09–2008.04.13): USA theoretical physicist; largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in USA after WWII. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission.
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912.05.31–1997.02.16): Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".
Lev Landau (1908.01.22-1968.04.01): prominent USSR physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C). Born to Jewish parents in Baku; learned to differentiate at age 12 and to integrate at age 13. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at the Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, and the Department of Chemistry. Subsequently he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.
Wang Ganchang (1907.05.28–1998.12.10): nuclear physicist from China.
Julian Schwinger (1918.02.12-1994.07.16) American theoretical physicist. Theory of QED; for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
Paul Peter Ewald (1888.01.23-1985.08.22): German-born American crystallographer and physicist; pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods.
Hans Bethe (1906.07.02-2005.03.06): German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis (CNO cycle). Professor at Cornell University. Married Ewald's daughter.
Steven Weinberg (1933.05.03–2021.07.23): USA theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Stephen Hawking (1942.01.08-): English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. Theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set forth a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Suffers from a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of ALS. He now communicates using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device.
Edward Witten (1951.08.26-): USA mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.
Chemists
Fritz Haber (1868.12.09–1934.01.29): German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilisers and explosives. It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponising chlorine and other poisonous gases during WWI. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement, to develop Zyklon B, used for the extermination of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Haber was forced to resign from his positions because he was Jewish. Already in poor health, he spent time in various countries, before Chaim Weizmann invited him to become the director of the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, Mandatory Palestine. He accepted the offer, but died of heart failure mid-journey in a Basel hotel aged 65. Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.
Otto Hahn (1879.03.08–1968.07.28): German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. A graduate of the University of Marburg, which awarded him a doctorate in 1901, Hahn studied under Sir William Ramsay at University College London and at McGill University in Montreal under Ernest Rutherford, where he discovered several new radioactive isotopes. He returned to Germany in 1906; Emil Fischer placed a former woodworking shop in the basement of the Chemical Institute at the University of Berlin at his disposal to use as a laboratory. Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907 and became a Privatdozent. In 1912, he became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Working with the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner in the building that now bears their names, he made a series of groundbreaking discoveries, culminating with her isolation of the longest-lived isotope of protactinium in 1918. He was an opponent of national socialism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazi Party that caused the removal of many of his colleagues, including Meitner, who was forced to flee Germany in 1938. During WWII, he worked on the German nuclear weapons program, cataloguing the fission products of uranium. Hahn served as the last president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in 1946 and as the founding president of its successor, the Max Planck Society from 1948 to 1960. In 1959 he co-founded in Berlin the Federation of German Scientists, a non-governmental organization, which has been committed to the ideal of responsible science. As he worked to rebuild German science, he became one of the most influential and respected citizens of the post-war West Germany. History: Discovery of radiothorium and other "new elements"; Discovery of mesothorium I; Discovery of radioactive recoil; Marriage to Edith Junghans; WWI; Discovery of protactinium; Discovery of nuclear isomerism; Applied Radiochemistry - In 1966, Glenn T. Seaborg: "In fact, I read the entire volume repeatedly and I recall that my chief disappointment with it was its length. It was too short."; National socialism; Rubidium–strontium dating; Discovery of nuclear fission; WWII; Incarceration (Operation Epsilon);
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944: 1945.11.16 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei." Hahn was still at Farm Hall when the announcement was made; thus, his whereabouts were a secret, and it was impossible for the Nobel committee to send him a congratulatory telegram. Instead, he learned about his award on 18 November through the Daily Telegraph. His fellow interned scientists celebrated his award by giving speeches, making jokes, and composing songs. Hahn gave 10,000 krona of his prize to Strassmann, who refused to use it.
Founder and President of the Max Planck Society: The suicide of Albert Vögler in 1945.04.14 left the KWS without a president. The British chemist Bertie Blount was placed in charge of its affairs while the Allies decided what to do with it, and he decided to install Max Planck as an interim president. Now aged 87, Planck was in the small town of Rogätz, in an area that the Americans were preparing to hand over to the Soviet Union. The Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper from the Alsos Mission fetched Planck in a jeep and brought him to Göttingen on 16 May. Planck wrote to Hahn, who was still in captivity in England, 1945.07.25, and informed Hahn that the directors of the KWS had voted to make him the next president, and asked if he would accept the position. Hahn did not receive the letter until September, and did not think he was a good choice, as he regarded himself as a poor negotiator, but his colleagues persuaded him to accept. After his return to Germany, he assumed the office on 1 April 1946. However, the British, who had voted against the dissolution, were more sympathetic, and offered to let the Kaiser Wilhelm Society continue in the British Zone, on one condition: that the name be changed. Hahn and Heisenberg were distraught at this prospect. To them it was an international brand that represented political independence and scientific research of the highest order. Hahn noted that it had been suggested that the name be changed during the Weimar Republic, but the Social Democratic Party of Germany had been persuaded not to. To Hahn, the name represented the good old days of the German Empire, however authoritarian and undemocratic it was, before the hated Weimar Republic. Heisenberg asked Niels Bohr for support, but Bohr recommended that the name be changed. Lise Meitner wrote to Hahn.
Spokesman for social responsibility;
Irving Langmuir (1881.01.31–1957.08.16): USA American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis. While at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, Langmuir advanced several fields of physics and chemistry, inventing the gas-filled incandescent lamp and the hydrogen welding technique. In fiction: According to author Kurt Vonnegut, Langmuir was the inspiration for his fictional scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker in the novel Cat's Cradle. The character's invention of ice-nine eventually destroyed the world by seeding a new phase of ice water.
George M. Sheldrick (1942.11.17-): British chemist who specialises in molecular structure determination. He is one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011. Sheldrick was awarded a Major Scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. He specialised in chemistry in his final year. He graduated in 1963 with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. PhD 1966: investigation of inorganic hydrides using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and was title "N.M.R. Studies of Inorganic Hydrides".
Biologists, medicine doctors, physicians, medical researchers
Medical researchers, biochemists
Erasistratus (Ἐρασίστρατος; c. 304 – c. 250 BC): Greek anatomist and royal physician under Seleucus I Nicator of Syria. Along with fellow physician Herophilus, he founded a school of anatomy in Alexandria, where they carried out anatomical research. He is credited for his description of the valves of the heart, and he also concluded that the heart was not the center of sensations, but instead it functioned as a pump. Erasistratus was among the first to distinguish between veins and arteries. He is credited with one of the first in-depth descriptions of the cerebrum and cerebellum.
Galen (Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus; September 129 AD – c. 200/c. 216): Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Arguably the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic. Born in Pergamon, Galen travelled extensively, exposing himself to a wide variety of medical theories and discoveries before settling in Rome, where he served prominent members of Roman society and eventually was given the position of personal physician to several emperors. His theories dominated and influenced Western medical science for more than 1,300 years. His anatomical reports, based mainly on dissection of monkeys, especially the Barbary macaque, and pigs, remained uncontested until 1543, when printed descriptions and illustrations of human dissections were published in the seminal work De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius where Galen's physiological theory was accommodated to these new observations. Galen saw himself as both a physician and a philosopher, as he wrote in his treatise entitled That the Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868.05.14-1935.05.14): German physician and sexologist; outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which Dustin Goltz called "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights."
Félix d'Hérelle (1873.04.25–1949.02.22): French-Canadian microbiologist. He was co-discoverer of bacteriophages and experimented with the possibility of phage therapy. D'Herelle has also been credited for his contributions to the larger concept of applied microbiology. Guatemala and Mexico; Return to France; France and phages; Egypt; India; United States and commercial failures; Soviet Union: Tbilisi, Georgia, he was welcomed to the Soviet Union as a hero, bringing knowledge of salvation from diseases ravaging the eastern states, D'Hérelle worked at the Tbilisi Institute off and on for about a year; Final return to France.
Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883.10.08–1970.08.01): Warburg investigated the metabolism of tumors and the respiration of cells, particularly cancer cells, and in 1931 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his "discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme". In 1935, Hitler had a polyp removed from his vocal cords. It is believed that afterwards, he feared that could develop cancer, which may have allowed Warburg to survive. In 1941, Warburg lost his post briefly, when he made critical remarks about the regime but a few weeks later a personal order from Hitler's Chancellery ordered him to resume work on his cancer research. Göring also arranged for him to be classified as one-quarter Jewish. Warburg’s combined work in plant physiology, cell metabolism and oncology made him an integral figure in the later development of systems biology. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Work#Cancer}
Jonas Salk (1914.10.28 - 1995.06.23): USA medical researcher and virologist, best known for discovery of the first polio vaccine. When asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"; founded Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
James Collins (Boston University): USA bioengineer, professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, HHMI investigator; fundamental discoveries regarding the actions of antibiotics and the emergence of resistance.
Drew Berry: biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. Collaborated with Björk on Biophilia.
Giulio Superti-Furga (1962.05.17-): Italian molecular and systems biologist; most significant scientific achievements to date are the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers and the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome of higher organisms. His work has directly contributed to a systems-level understanding of pathogen infections in host cells and of the mechanism of action of specific drugs. He is an advocate for the adoption of systems biology approaches for medicine and in particular for drug discovery and aims to bridge basic research and the clinical world.
Shinya Yamanaka (山中 伸弥, Yamanaka Shin'ya; 1962.09.04-): Japanese stem cell researcher, winner of the Nobel Prize. He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Yamanaka is also a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).
Abraham Ortelius (1527.04.14-1598.06.28): Flemish cartographer and geographer, generally recognized as the creator of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World); also believed to be the first person to imagine that the continents were joined together before drifting to their present positions.
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (printed: 1570.05.20, Antwerp): considered to be the first true modern atlas; consisted of a collection of uniform map sheets and sustaining text bound to form a book for which copper printing plates were specifically engraved. The Ortelius atlas is sometimes referred to as the summary of sixteenth-century cartography.
Ortelius World Map "Typvs Orbis Terrarvm" 1570.
Science writers, encyclopedists
Louis de Jaucourt (1704.09.16-1799.02.03): French scholar and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote about 18,000 articles on subjects including physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history, or about 25% of the entire encyclopedia, all done voluntarily.
Historians
Tacitus (Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus; AD 56 - after 117): senator and a historian of the Roman Empire; surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors. Other writings by him discuss oratory (in dialogue format, Dialogus de oratoribus), Germania (in De origine et situ Germanorum), and the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, the Roman general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain, mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia (De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae). Known for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.
Alexis de Tocqueville: (1805.07.29–1859.04.16) was a French diplomat, political scientist and historian. Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856): analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. Argued the importance of the French Revolution was to continue the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state which had begun under King Louis XIV. The failure of the Revolution came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals. Tocqueville was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government, but he was skeptical of the extremes of democracy.
Bernard Lewis (1916-): British-American historian, scholar in Oriental studies, and political commentator. Armenian genocide; Views on Islam.
Norman Davies (Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies; 1939.06.08-) &
Template:Davies (Books by Norman Davies): English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and UK.
God's Playground (: a history of Poland; 1979): vol I - origins to 1795; vol II - 1795 to the present.
Managers, management theorists
Peter Drucker (esp.
Peter Drucker#Key ideas): concepts: knowledge worker, worker is the best company's asset, serve customers and derive profit from that, decentralization & simplification, outsourcing; NGO and non-profits will become more important (these "organizations" and "philosophical societies" are replacing religion very fast; people donate money to these non-profits/NGOs because they have "faith" in them)
Management by objectives (MBO): process of defining objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they need to do in the organization in order to achieve them.
W. Edwards Deming (1900.10.14-1993.12.20): American statistician, professor, author, lecturer and consultant. In Japan, from 1950 onwards, he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.
PDCA (plan–do–check–act, plan–do–check–adjust; Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control circle/cycle, plan–do–study–act (PDSA)): iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products.
Intellectual property
Benjamin Mako Hill: Debian/Ubuntu/Linux; One Laptop per Child; serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Ubuntu Community Council, the Free Software Foundation.
Donald Knuth (1938.01.10-): creator of TeX (it was before HTML/internet/MP3s were even in the dreams!). Fun:
Knuth reward check.
WEB: computer programming system created by Donald E. Knuth as the first implementation of what he called "literate programming": the idea that one could create software as works of literature, by embedding source code inside descriptive text, rather than the reverse (as is common practice in most programming languages), in an order that is convenient for exposition to human readers, rather than in the order demanded by the compiler. WEB consists of two secondary programs: TANGLE, which produces compilable Pascal code from the source texts, and WEAVE, which produces nicely-formatted, printable documentation using TeX.
Larry Tesler (1945.04.24–2020.02.16): computer scientist working on human-computer interaction; worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazano, Yahoo. Made
Gypsy (software) (the first document preparation system based on mouse and GUI to eliminate modes; 2nd WYSIWYG doc preparation system). Has strong preference for modeless software, in which a user action has a consistent effect; license plate "NO MODES"; been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years as a rally cry to eliminate or reduce modes.
Mitch Kapor (1950.11.01): founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Joel Spolsky (1965-): worked at Microsoft on Excel 4.0 and 5.0 and VBA (1991); Fog Creek Software (2000); Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow & co)
Jeff Atwood (1970-):
Coding Horror programming blog; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange Network (2012.02.06 left Stack Exchange to have time with family); "Atwood's Law" (corollary to the Rule of least power design principle): any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript. His new company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.: open source next-generation discussion platform called Discourse (2013.02.05-).
Tom Preston-Werner (1979.10.28-): CEO of GitHub, one of the 3 founders. "The efficiency of large groups working together is very low in large enterprises. We want to change that…Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow." (same like Valve)
Jamie Zawinski (jwz; 1968.11.03-): USA impresario, computer programmer, and blogger. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco. Notable Quotes: Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can"; Now you have two problems: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems"; "Linux is only free if your time has no value". Principles: Zawinski first attained prominence as a Lisp programmer, but most of his larger projects are written in C. Despite that, he has long been critical of languages lacking memory safety and automatic storage management. He has particularly proselytized against C++. Though he has written and published many utilities in Perl, he is not without his criticisms, characterizing Perl as "combining all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript."
Ben Horowitz (1966.06.13-): USA businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Andreessen. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups, and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.
Marc Andreessen (1971.07.09-): USA businessman and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Luis von Ahn (1978.08.19-): helped on CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, Duolingo.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-): professor of Anthropology and director of the program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. Organ trade: she investigated an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel.
Victor H. Mair (1943.03.25-): USA sinologist. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers. Mair specializes in early written vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the Dao De Jing (the Mawangdui Silk Texts version), the Zhuangzi and The Art of War; long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script (viz., pinyin), which he considers advantageous for Chinese education, computerization, and lexicography.
Engineers and inventors
{q.v.
Ada Lovelace
Nikola Tesla
Howard Hughes
Rony Abovitz
Trevor Blackwell
James Collins
}
Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – 1468.02.03): German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.
Vannevar Bush (1890.03.11-1974.06.28): USA engineer, inventor, science administrator. Work on analog computers; WWII: initiation and administration of Manhattan project, proximity fuze; founder of Raytheon; memex: analogous to the structure of WWW or Wikipedia or PC-human interface; from his science administration starts the huge military-industrial complex in the USA.
"
As We May Think" (1945.07): essay by Vannevar Bush; memex: collective memory machine, cross-referencing (hyperlinking) system. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified" - Wikipedia; "The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk"
Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890.12.18–1954.02.01): fought till his death against regulations and corporations
Walter Dornberger (1895.09.06–1980.06.26): German Army artillery officer whose career spanned World War I and World War II. He was a leader of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket programme and other projects at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre. Postwar: Along with some other German rocket scientists, Dornberger was released and brought to the United States under the auspices of Operation Paperclip and worked for the United States Air Force for three years, developing guided missiles. From 1950 to 1965, he worked for the Bell Aircraft Corporation, where he worked on several projects, rising to the post of Vice-President. He played a major role in the creation of the North American X-15 aircraft and was a key consultant for the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar project. He also had a role on the creation of ideas and projects, which, in the end, led to the creation of the Space Shuttle. Dornberger also developed Bell's ASM-A-2, the world's first guided nuclear air-to-surface missile developed for the Strategic Air Command. Dornberger advised West Germany on a European space program. During the 1950s he had some differences with von Braun and was instrumental in recruiting several engineers out of the Huntsville's team for Air Force projects. The most remarkable of them was Krafft Ehricke, who later created the Centaur rocket stage and actively participated in several more Defense projects. Following retirement, Dornberger went to Mexico and later returned to West Germany, where he died in 1980 in Baden-Württemberg.
Wernher von Braun (1912.03.23–1977.06.16): German and USA aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. As a young man, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during WWII. The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space in 1944.06.20. Following the war, he was secretly moved to USA, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip. He worked for USA Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the USA's first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in USA and beyond from 1955 to 1957. In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science.
Dean Kamen (1951.04.05-) is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT, as well as founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. Kamen holds over 1,000 patents.
Fravia (Francesco Vianello; 1952.08.30–2009.05.03): software reverse engineer, and hacker, who maintained a web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. He also worked on steganography. He taught on subjects such as data mining, anonymity and stalking.
Jim Keller (engineer): (1958/1959-): microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture (including the original Athlon 64) and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015, he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures. Jim Keller's wife, Bonnie, is the sister of Canadian author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Architects
Albert Kahn (architect) (1869.03.21–1942.12.08): USA industrial architect. He was accredited the architect of Detroit and designed industrial plant complexes such as the Ford River Rouge automobile complex. He designed the construction of Detroit skyscrapers and office buildings as well as mansions in the city suburbs. He led an organization of hundreds of architect associates and in 1937, designed 19% of all architect-designed industrial factories in the United States. Under a unique contract in 1929, Kahn established a design and training office in Moscow, sending twenty-five staff there to train Soviet architects and engineers, and to design hundreds of industrial buildings under their first five-year plan. They trained more than 4,000 architects and engineers using Kahn's concepts. In Soviet Union: 1929.05.08, through an agreement signed with Kahn by Saul G. Bron, President of Amtorg, the Soviet government contracted Albert Kahn Associates to help design the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the first tractor plant in the USSR. 1930.01.09, a second contract with Kahn was signed for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in USSR.
Artists
Jaron Lanier: famous for virtual reality; computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism": the works made by many are not as good as the work made by several or one very interested into the topic person, e.g. online encyclopedia - Wikipedia vs. what? Capitalism vs. Maoism in creating anything new and innovative: financial incentive is very strong, "open source and free and open content" is giving little incentive; BUT: art in the end is for its own end, nobody had to pay to van Gogh while he still lived for his drawings - only after his death people started to see value in these drawings.
Painters/drawers
Albrecht Dürer, self-portrait.
Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze (active 1343 – 1377): Italian painter active in Florence. Andrea di Bonaiuto is known for his stained glass window of the Coronation of Mary in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and his fresco decorations in the Spanish chapel (then called Cappellone degli Spagnoli) of the chapter house there. The central theme of the fresco's in the Spanish chapel is the glorification of the Dominican Order. From mid 1366 to mid 1367 Andrea di Bonaiuto was one of the artists advising on the construction of the Florence Cathedral.
Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528): German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I. Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are more Gothic than the rest of his work. Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance.
Aubrey Beardsley (1872.08.21–1898.03.16): English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style) figures.
Theater/Cartoons/Animation/Cinema/movies
Stanley Kubrick (1928.07.26–1999.03.07): USA film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and photographer. Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century", and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinematic history. His films, which are typically adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres, and are noted for their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music. A demanding perfectionist, he assumed control over most aspects of the filmmaking process, from direction and writing to editing, and took painstaking care with researching his films and staging scenes, working in close coordination with his actors and other collaborators. He often asked for several dozen retakes of the same scene in a movie, which resulted in many conflicts with his casts. Despite the resulting notoriety among actors, many of Kubrick's films broke new ground in cinematography. Kirk Douglas: "You don't have to be a nice person to be extremely talented. You can be a shit and be talented and, conversely, you can be the nicest guy in the world and not have any talent. Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit". Peter Sellers: "Kubrick is a god as far as I'm concerned". William Friedkin: "Speaking personally, I think Stanley Kubrick is the best American film-maker of the year. In fact, not just this year, but the best, period". Kubrick explained: "Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try" ... "When you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself".
Stanley Kubrick's personal life and beliefs: Michael Herr: "Stanley had views on everything, but I would not exactly call them political... He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist." Kubrick: "Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure." Kubrick: "2001 would give a little insight into my metaphysical interests... I'd be very surprised if the universe wasn't full of an intelligence of an order that to us would seem God-like. I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside the Earth."; "When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans."; "The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, 2001 shows that what some people call "god" is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call "god"..." Jack Nicholson recalls that Kubrick said The Shining is an overall optimistic story because "anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story."
Normal lens: lens that reproduces a field of view that generally looks "natural" to a human observer under normal viewing conditions, as compared with lenses with longer or shorter focal lengths which produce an expanded or contracted field of view that distorts the perspective when viewed from a normal viewing distance. For still photography, a lens with a focal length about equal to the diagonal size of the film or sensor format is considered to be a normal lens; its angle of view is similar to the angle subtended by a large-enough print viewed at a typical viewing distance equal to the print diagonal; this angle of view is about 53° diagonally. For cinematography, where the image is normally viewed at a greater distance, a lens with a focal length of roughly double the film or sensor diagonal is considered 'normal'.
Long-focus lens: camera lens which has a focal length that is longer than the diagonal measure of the film or sensor that receives its image
Wide-angle lens: lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a normal lens for a given film plane
Linear magnification vs axial magnification:
Magnification (Linear or transverse magnification; Angular magnification)
Perspective distortion (photography) (axial magnification (related concept) - the perceived depth of objects at a given magnification): warping or transformation of an object and its surrounding area that differs significantly from what the object would look like with a normal focal length, due to the relative scale of nearby and distant features. Perspective distortion takes two forms: extension distortion and compression distortion, also called wide-angle distortion and long-lens or telephoto distortion.
Carl von Ossietzky (3 October 1889 – 4 May 1938): German pacifist and the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize; convicted of high treason and espionagein 1931 after publishing details of Germany's alleged violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force, the predecessor of the Luftwaffe, and training pilots in the Soviet Union.
CryptoParty: grassroots global endeavor to introduce the basics of practical cryptography such as the Tor anonymity network, key signing parties, TrueCrypt, and virtual private networks to the general public.
Whistleblowers
Thomas Andrews Drake: persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. 2011.06.09 all 10 original charges against him were dropped.
William Binney (U.S. intelligence official): former highly placed intelligence official with NSA turned whistleblower who resigned on 2001.10.31, after more than 30 years with the agency. He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and was the subject of FBI investigations, including a raid on his home in 2007.
Thomas Tamm: former attorney in the United States Department of Justice Office of Intelligence Policy and Review during the period in 2004 when senior Justice officials fought against the widening scope of warrantless NSA surveillance that consisted of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. He was an anonymous whistleblower to The New York Times, making the initial disclosure regarding the issue.
Russ Tice: former intelligence analyst; in 2005.12 Tice helped spark a national controversy over claims that the NSA and the DIA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens.
Edward Snowden: disclosure of PRISM and FISA orders related to NSA data capture efforts was an effort to blow the whistle on what he believes is excessive government surveillance of the American people. Technology: three big impacts (on IT industry, industrial espionage): increased interest in encryption, business leaving US companies, reconsideration of the safety of cloud technology. [2013/12]
Edward Snowden asylum in Russia: part of the aftermath from the global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. 2013.06.23 Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport. Observing that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, Russian authorities restricted him to the airport terminal. On August 1, after 39 days in the transit section, Snowden left the airport. He was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year. 2014.08.07, six days after Snowden's one-year temporary asylum expired, his Russian lawyer announced that Snowden had received a three-year residency permit. It allowed him to travel freely within Russia and to go abroad for up to three months. In 2020.10, after Snowden applied to renew his temporary permit, Russia granted him unlimited permanent residency. In 2020.11, Snowden announced that he and his wife were applying for Russian citizenship, but that they "remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love". [21/08/29]
Adrian Lamo (1981.02.20-): American threat analyst and former hacker. Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest. In 2010, Lamo reported U.S. soldier PFC Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning) to federal authorities, claiming that Manning had leaked hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. Manning was arrested and incarcerated in the U.S. military justice system and later sentenced to 35 years in confinement.
People with disabilities
Helen Keller (1880.06.27-1968.06.01): USA author, political activist, and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at the age of nineteen months. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan, who taught her language, including reading and writing; Sullivan's first lessons involved spelling words on Keller's hand to show her the names of objects around her. She also learned how to speak and to understand other people's speech using the Tadoma method. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, she attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter; met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain.
Virtual real people
Anshe Chung (Ailin Graef): first online millionaire; made fortune from/in Second Life.
Jon Jacobs (actor) (Neverdie, NEVERDIE; 1966.09.10): English actor, entrepreneur, director, producer, writer and creator of the avatar Neverdie; made money in Entropia Universe.
Infamous people
Ted Bundy (Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell); 1946.11.24-1989.01.24): USA serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier.
Typhoid Mary (1869.09.23-1938.11.11; better known as Typhoid Mary): was the first person in USA identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was presumed to have infected 53 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook. She was twice forcibly isolated by public health authorities and died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation.
Stu Ungar (1953.09.08-1998.11.22): professional poker, blackjack, and gin rummy player, widely regarded to have been the greatest Texas hold 'em and gin rummy player of all time. Betting, drugs (cocaine) and divorce. Gameplay: ultra-aggressive playing style and well-timed bluffs.
Jason Somerville (1987.04.15) is an American professional poker player and Team PokerStars Pro specializing in Texas Hold'em.
Chris Moneymaker (1975.11.21-): USA poker player who won the main event at the 2003 WSOP. His 2003 win is said to have "revolutionized poker" because he was the "first person to become a world champion by qualifying" at an online poker site.
Demis Hassabis (1976.07.27-) is AI researcher, neuroscientist, computer game designer, and world-class gamer; child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335, and is 4 days older than Hassabis) and captained many of the England junior chess teams. In 2011, he co-founded and was CEO of DeepMind Technologies, a London-based machine learning startup, specializing in building general-purpose learning algorithms. Hassabis won the world games championship (called the 'Pentamind') at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times, prior to his retirement from competitive play in 2003, and at the time was regarded as the best all-round games player in the world. He is an expert player of many games including chess, Diplomacy, shogi and poker. He has cashed at the World Series of Poker six times including in the Main Event. {q.v.
User:Kazkaskazkasako/Books/EECS#Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning}
Judit Polgár (1976.07.23-) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player in history. In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She is the youngest ever player, to date, to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, being ranked No. 55 in the January 1989 rating list, at the age of 12. Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family. Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a "socialist" approach. They also received criticism at the time from some western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.
Warriors, soldiers, generals
Ernest J. King (1878.11.23–1956.06.25): fleet admiral in USA Navy who served as Commander in Chief, USA Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) during WWII. As COMINCH-CNO, he directed the USA Navy's operations, planning, and administration and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was USA Navy's second most senior officer in WWII after Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, King was appointed as Commander in Chief of USA Fleet. Surface ships; Submarines; Aviation: Among King's accomplishments was to corroborate Admiral Harry E. Yarnell's 1932 war game findings in 1938 by staging his own successful simulated naval air raid on Pearl Harbor, showing that the base was dangerously vulnerable to aerial attack, although he was taken no more seriously than his contemporary until 1941.12.07, when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the base by air for real.; WWII: King's career was resurrected by his friend, Admiral Harold "Betty" Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) who realized King's talent for command was being wasted on the General Board. Stark appointed him Commander, Atlantic Squadron, in 1940. In December 1940 King said the US was already at war with Germany. After turning 64 in 1942.11.23, he wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt to say he had reached mandatory retirement age. Roosevelt replied with a note reading, "So what, old top?". In January 1941 King issued Atlantic Fleet directive Cinclant Serial 053, encouraging officers to delegate and avoid micromanagement, which is still cited widely in today's armed forces. King was advocate of the “Japan First” approach, as opposed to the Europe First position that was eventually agreed upon. He has been heavily criticized for ignoring British advice regarding convoys and up-to-date British intelligence on U-boat operations in the Atlantic, leading to high losses among the US Merchant Marine.
Lauri Törni (28 May 1919 – 18 October 1965; later known as Larry Alan Thorne): Finnish born USA soldier who fought under three flags: as a Finnish Army officer in the Winter War and the Continuation War ultimately gaining a rank of captain; as a Waffen-SS captain (under the alias Larry Lane) of the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen-SS when he fought the Red Army on the Eastern Front in WWII; and as US Army Major (under the alias "Larry Thorne") when he served in the US Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War. Törni died in a helicopter crash during the Vietnam War and he was promoted to the rank of major posthumously. His remains were located three decades later and then buried in Arlington National Cemetery; he is the only former member of the Waffen-SS known to be interred there.
Europeans
Male line of Landsberg, Landsbergis, Landsbergis-Žemkalnis families:
lt:Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis (1852.11.02-1916.11.28): dramaturgas, publicistas, teatro veikėjas, draudžiamosios lietuviškos spaudos platintojas.
Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis: Lithuanian playwright and activists of the early Lithuanian amateur theater. Born to an old noble family, Landsbergis attended Šiauliai Gymnasium where his friend Petras Vileišis encouraged him to speak Lithuanian and support the Lithuanian National Revival. After finishing a telegraph school in Riga in 1871, he worked at the telegraph offices in Moscow and Crimea. He returned to Lithuania in 1884 and joined the Lithuanian cultural life. He contributed articles to the illegal Lithuanian periodicals Varpas and Ūkininkas and his house was a gathering place of many Lithuanian intellectuals. Due to these activities, he was forced to leave Lithuania in 1894 but continued to maintain contacts with Lithuanian activists. He was arrested and imprisoned for ten weeks in 1900 and sentenced to two years of exile in Smolensk in 1902. He returned in 1904 and became administrator of Vilniaus žinios, the first legal Lithuanian daily established by Petras Vileišis. At the same time, Landsbergis devoted his energy to the Lithuanian amateur theater.
lt:Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis (1893.03.10–1993.05.21 [100 y.o.!]): inžinierius architektas.
Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis: Lithuanian modernist architect most active in interwar Lithuania (1926–1939). Landsbergis studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. During WWI, he was drafted to the Imperial Russian Army and completed a school for junior officers. Upon return to Lithuania, he joined the newly established Lithuanian Army and fought in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence. He was taken prisoner by Poland, but managed to escape. He then continued his studies of architecture at the Higher School of Architecture in Rome (now a department of the Sapienza University). Landsbergis returned to Lithuania in 1926 and became one of the most popular and sought-after architects in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania. He was one of the leaders of a group of about 40 modernist architects working in Kaunas. Eight of his buildings were included in a group 44 buildings awarded the European Heritage Label in 2015. Overall, the modernist architecture of interwar Kaunas has been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2017. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Lithuanians started the anti-Soviet June Uprising, Landsbergis became the minister of infrastructure in the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania. When his son Gabrielius was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944, Landsbergis followed his son from one prison to another until Gabrielius was freed by the Americans in April 1945. Landsbergis became a displaced person (DP) and taught at a Lithuanian DP camp and later at the University of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Munich. In 1949, he emigrated to Australia and worked there as an architect at the Housing and Construction Department in Melbourne. In 1959, he returned to Kaunas in Soviet Lithuania and worked as architect and restorer of monuments until retirement in 1984.
lt:Vytautas Landsbergis (1932.10.18): lietuvių politikas, visuomenės veikėjas, meno, muzikos ir kultūros istorikas.
Vytautas Landsbergis: Lithuanian politician and former Member of the European Parliament. He was the first Head of Parliament of Lithuania after its independence declaration from USSR. He has written 20 books on a variety of topics, including a biography of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, as well as works on politics and music. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Landsbergis entered politics, in 1988, as one of the founders of Sąjūdis. After Sąjūdis' victory in the 1990 elections, he became the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Lithuania. Landsbergis was somewhat critical of certain Western powers (such as USA and UK/GB) for not showing enough support in Lithuania's bid to restore its independence after more than 40 years of Soviet occupation, although he did accept the recommendation from his government that the newly independent Lithuania immediately seek to establish full diplomatic relations with the UK and USA. In 1993, Landsbergis led much of Sąjūdis into a new political party, the Homeland Union (Tėvynes Sąjunga). It gained a landslide victory in the 1996 parliamentary elections.
Creation science (scientific creationism): pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
Rejection of evolution by religious groups (creation–evolution controversy, the creation vs. evolution debate, the origins debate): in accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact. Any such debate is universally considered religious, not scientific, by professional scientific organizations worldwide: in the scientific community, evolution is accepted as fact, and efforts to sustain the traditional view are universally regarded as pseudoscience. While the controversy has a long history, today it has retreated to be mainly over what constitutes good science education, with the politics of creationism primarily focusing on the teaching of creationism in public education. Among majority-Christian countries, the debate is most prominent in USA, where it may be portrayed as part of a culture war. Parallel controversies also exist in some other religious communities, such as the more fundamentalist branches of Judaism and Islam. In Europe and elsewhere, creationism is less widespread (notably, the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion both accept evolution), and there is much less pressure to teach it as fact.
Young Earth creationism: form of creationism which holds as a central tenet that the Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by supernatural acts of the God of Abraham between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. In its most widespread version, YEC is based on the religious belief in the inerrancy of certain literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis. Its primary adherents are Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six literal days, in contrast with old Earth creationism.
Omphalos (book) (Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot; 1857 (two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species)): book by Philip Gosse, in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is. The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why Adam (who would have had no mother) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry. Thus, the name of the book, Omphalos, which means 'navel' in Greek. Darwin is mentioned several times within the book, but always with considerable respect. Gosse had attended meetings at the Royal Society where evolutionary theory was tested by Darwin before the publication of Origin—and had even made similar observations himself about variation of species in his own studies into marine biology—and considered Darwin's reasoning scientifically sound.
Quantum mysticism: set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered by most scientists and philosophers to be pseudoscience or quackery. In 1961 Eugene Wigner wrote a paper, titled Remarks on the mind–body question, suggesting that a conscious observer played a fundamental role in quantum mechanics, a part of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. Appropriation by New Age thought
Moon landing conspiracy theories: claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969–1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples. Conspiracists have managed to sustain public interest in their theories for more than 40 years, despite the rebuttals and third-party evidence. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked.
Big Pharma conspiracy theory: which claim that the medical establishment in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular operate for sinister purposes and against the public good. Manifestations: Alternative treatments, HIV/AIDS, Hidden cancer cure. In 2016 David Robert Grimes published a research paper elaborating about the mathematical non-viability of conspiracy theories in general. He specifically showed that if there was an actual big pharma conspiracy to conceal a cure for cancer that it would take about 3.2 years for it get exposed due to the sheer number of people required to keep it secret.
Rupert Sheldrake (1942.06.28-): English author, and researcher in the field of parapsychology, who proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture which lacks mainstream acceptance and has been characterised as pseudoscience. Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development, inheritance, and memory.
European Committee for Standardization (fr: Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN); founded 1961): national members work together to develop European Standards (ENs) in various sectors to build a European internal market for goods and services and to position Europe in the global economy; officially recognised as a European standards body by EU
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abcdeDanilovic, Vesna. "When the Stakes Are High—Deterrence and Conflict among Major Powers", University of Michigan Press (2002), pp 27, 225–228
(PDF chapter downloads)(PDF copy).
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abcdefgT. V. Paul; James J. Wirtz; Michel Fortmann (2005).
Balance of Power. United States of America: State University of New York Press, 2005. pp. 59, 282.
ISBN0791464016. Accordingly, the great powers after the Cold War are Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States p.59
^
abcdefgSterio, Milena (2013).
The right to self-determination under international law : "selfistans", secession and the rule of the great powers. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. p. xii (preface).
ISBN978-0415668187. Retrieved 13 June 2016. ("The great powers are super-sovereign states: an exclusive club of the most powerful states economically, militarily, politically and strategically. These states include veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia), as well as economic powerhouses such as Germany, Italy and Japan.")
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abcdefgBaron, Joshua (22 January 2014). Great Power Peace and American Primacy: The Origins and Future of a New International Order. United States: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN978-1137299482.
^Chalmers, Malcolm (May 2015).
"A Force for Order: Strategic Underpinnings of the Next NSS and SDSR"(PDF). Royal United Services Institute. Briefing Paper (SDSR 2015: Hard Choices Ahead): 2. While no longer a superpower (a position it lost in the 1940s), the UK remains much more than a 'middle power'.
^Walker, William (22 September 2015).
"Trident's Replacement and the Survival of the United Kingdom". International Institute for Strategic Studies, Global Politics and Strategy. 57 (5): 7–28. Retrieved 31 December 2015. Trident as a pillar of the transatlantic relationship and symbol of the UK's desire to remain a great power with global reach.
^Best, Antony; Hanhimäki, Jussi; Maiolo, Joseph; Schulze, Kirsten (2008). International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. United States of America:
Routledge. p. 9.
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^Carter, Keith Lambert (2019).
Great Power, Arms, And Alliances. Retrieved 25 January 2021. U.S., Russia, China, France, Germany, U.K. and Italy - Table on page 56,72 (Major powers-great power criteria)
^Kuper, Stephen.
"Clarifying the nation's role strengthens the impact of a National Security Strategy 2019". Retrieved 22 January 2020. Traditionally, great powers have been defined by their global reach and ability to direct the flow of international affairs. There are a number of recognised great powers within the context of contemporary international relations – with Great Britain, France, India and Russia recognised as nuclear capable great powers, while Germany, Italy and Japan are identified as conventional great powers
^"The
Prime Minister of Canada (during the
Treaty of Versailles) said that there were 'only three major powers left in the world the United States, Britain and Japan' ... (but) The Great Powers could not be consistent. At the instance of Britain, Japan's ally, they gave Japan five delegates to the Peace Conference, just like themselves, but in the Supreme Council the Japanese were generally ignored or treated as something of a joke." from
MacMillan, Margaret (2003). Paris 1919. United States of America: Random House Trade. p. 306.
ISBN0-375-76052-0.
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