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🔗 Biography 🔗 New York City 🔗 Law Enforcement

Adrian Schoolcraft (born 1976) is a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who secretly recorded police conversations from 2008 to 2009. He brought these tapes to NYPD investigators in October 2009 as evidence of corruption and wrongdoing within the department. The tapes were used as evidence of arrest quotas leading to police abuses such as wrongful arrests, and that emphasis on fighting crime sometimes resulted in under-reporting of crimes to artificially deflate CompStat numbers.

After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was repeatedly harassed by members of the NYPD and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, an ESU unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days. In 2010, he released the audio recordings to The Village Voice, leading to the reporting of a multi-part series titled The NYPD Tapes. The same year, Schoolcraft filed a lawsuit against Jamaica Hospital and the NYPD. In 2012 The Village Voice reported that a 2010 unpublished report of an internal NYPD investigation found the 81st precinct had evidence of quotas and underreporting. Both of Schoolcraft's claims were settled in 2015, with him receiving $600,000 for the NYPD portion of the lawsuit.

🔗 Cognitive science

Digital infinity is a technical term in theoretical linguistics. Alternative formulations are "discrete infinity" and "the infinite use of finite means". The idea is that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions.

'Language is, at its core, a system that is both digital and infinite. To my knowledge, there is no other biological system with these properties....'

It remains for us to examine the spiritual element of speech ... this marvelous invention of composing from twenty-five or thirty sounds an infinite variety of words, which, although not having any resemblance in themselves to that which passes through our minds, nevertheless do not fail to reveal to others all of the secrets of the mind, and to make intelligible to others who cannot penetrate into the mind all that we conceive and all of the diverse movements of our souls.

Noam Chomsky cites Galileo as perhaps the first to recognise the significance of digital infinity. This principle, notes Chomsky, is "the core property of human language, and one of its most distinctive properties: the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts". In his Dialogo, Galileo describes with wonder the discovery of a means to communicate one's "most secret thoughts to any other person ... with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper." "This is the greatest of all human inventions," Galileo continues, noting it to be "comparable to the creations of a Michelangelo".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (aka RBIL, x86 Interrupt List, MS-DOS Interrupt List or INTER) is a comprehensive list of interrupts, calls, hooks, interfaces, data structures, CMOS settings, memory and port addresses, as well as processor opcodes and special function registers for x86 machines from the 1981 IBM PC up to 2000, most of it still applying to IBM PC compatibles today.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Futures studies

Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development. It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare.

While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many LessWrong users, LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the basilisk on the site to be banned for five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Yudkowsky himself. Even after the post's discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a modern version of Pascal's wager. In the field of artificial intelligence, Roko's basilisk has become notable as an example that raises the question of how to create an AI which is simultaneously moral and intelligent.

🔗 Psychology

The need for cognition (NFC), in psychology, is a personality variable reflecting the extent to which individuals are inclined towards effortful cognitive activities.

Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world". Higher NFC is associated with increased appreciation of debate, idea evaluation, and problem solving. Those with a high need for cognition may be inclined towards high elaboration. Those with a lower need for cognition may display opposite tendencies, and may process information more heuristically, often through low elaboration.

Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity (see below).

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 United States/U.S. history

A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution, and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting American society and the federal government. The name refers to the red flag as a common symbol of communism.

🔗 Law

Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 23 Media L. Rep. 1794 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995), is a 1995 U.S. New York Supreme Court decision holding that online service providers could be held liable for the speech of their users. The ruling caused controversy among early supporters of the Internet, including some lawmakers, leading to the passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

🔗 Physics

In physics, the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are defined as derivatives of the position vector with respect to time – with the first, second, and third derivatives being velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively. Unlike the first three derivatives, the higher-order derivatives are less common, thus their names are not as standardized, though the concept of a minimum snap trajectory has been used in robotics and is implemented in MATLAB.

The fourth derivative is often referred to as snap or jounce. The name "snap" for the fourth derivative led to crackle and pop for the fifth and sixth derivatives respectively, inspired by the Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop. These terms are occasionally used, though "sometimes somewhat facetiously".

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Health and fitness

The ketchup as a vegetable controversy stemmed from proposed regulations of school lunches by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 1981, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The regulations were intended to provide meal planning flexibility to local school lunch administrators coping with cuts to the National School Lunch Program enacted by the Omnibus Reconciliation Acts of 1980 and 1981. The proposed changes allowed administrators to meet nutritional requirements by crediting food items not explicitly listed. While ketchup was not mentioned in the original regulations, pickle relish was used as an example of an item that could count as a vegetable.

A similar controversy arose in 2011, when Congress passed a bill prohibiting the USDA from increasing the amount of tomato paste required to constitute a vegetable; the bill allowed pizza with two tablespoons (30 mL) of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Poultry

The salmonella-in-eggs controversy was a political controversy in the United Kingdom caused by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, Edwina Currie's claims that "most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella" in 1988. These claims led to a 60 percent decline in egg sales over the next few weeks, and angered both politicians and those in the egg production industry. Currie's statement also resulted in the destruction of around 400 million eggs and the slaughter of around 4 million hens. The controversy dominated Currie's tenure as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and resulted in her resignation two weeks later.