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🔗 Human rights 🔗 Computing 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Law 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 United Kingdom

The British Post Office scandal is a widespread and long-lasting series of individual miscarriages of justice which, between 1999 and 2015, involved over 700 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud when shortfalls at their branches were in fact due to errors of the Post Office's Horizon accounting software. In 2019, the High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty and in 2020 the government established a public inquiry. Courts began to quash convictions from 2010. As of January 2024, some victims are still fighting to have their convictions overturned and receive compensation, the public inquiry is ongoing, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the Post Office for potential fraud offences.

The Horizon accounting system was developed by ICL Pathway, owned by the Japanese company Fujitsu. In 1999, the Post Office started to roll out the new software to its branch and sub-offices, the latter managed by subpostmasters on a self-employed basis under contracts with the Post Office. Almost immediately, some subpostmasters noticed the new system reporting false shortfalls, sometimes for thousands of pounds. The Post Office insisted that the system was robust and, when shortfalls occurred, prosecuted the subpostmasters or forced them to make up the amount. The impact of court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonment, loss of livelihood and homes, debt and bankruptcy took a heavy toll on victims and their families, leading to stress, illness, divorce and, in at least four cases, suicide. In May 2009, Computer Weekly broke the story about problems with Horizon software and in September 2009 subpostmaster Alan Bates set up the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA). In 2012, as a result of pressure from campaigners and Members of Parliament, the Post Office appointed forensic accountants Second Sight to conduct an investigation into Horizon. The investigators concluded that Horizon contained faults that could result in accounting discrepancies, but the Post Office insisted that there were no system-wide problems with the software.

In 2019 a group of 555 subpostmasters led by Bates won a group action brought in court against the Post Office, with the judge ruling that Horizon contained bugs, errors and defects. The Post Office agreed to settle out of court for £58 million. The subpostmasters' legal costs amounted to £47 million of, leaving them with only about £20,000 each. The government later agreed to supplement the settlement, as they were excluded from the compensation scheme set up by the Post Office for other victims of the scandal. The first convictions to be quashed were those of six subpostmasters who had been convicted in magistrates' courts and whose appeals were heard at Southwark Crown Court in December 2020. In allowing the appeal by 39 subpostmasters in April 2021, the Court of Appeal judges ruled that in cases that relied on Horizon data a fair trial was not possible. Further appeal cases followed.

In September 2020, the government established the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, to look into the implementation and failings of the Horizon system that led to the prosecution of subpostmasters and termination of their contracts. Evidence was due to be heard from subpostmasters, the Post Office, UK Government Investment, the Department for Business and Trade, and others.

A four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, was broadcast on ITV in January 2024, after which the scandal became a major news story and political issue.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Effective Altruism

Effective accelerationism, often abbreviated as "e/acc", is a 21st-century philosophical movement advocating an explicit pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that artificial intelligence-driven progress is a great social equalizer which should be pushed forward. They see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable and needs to be regulated, often giving their opponents the derogatory labels of "doomers" or "decels" (short for deceleration).

Central to effective accelerationism is the belief that propelling technological progress at any cost is the only ethically justifiable course of action. The movement carries utopian undertones and argues that humans need to develop and build faster to ensure their survival and propagate consciousness throughout the universe.

Although effective accelerationism has been described as a fringe movement, it has gained mainstream visibility. A number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, explicitly endorsed the movement by adding "e/acc" to their public social media profiles. Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng are seen as further supporters, as they have argued for less restrictive AI regulation.

🔗 Death 🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Business 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF), implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF), and value of a statistical life (VSL). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. It is an important issue in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, globalization, and process safety.

The motivation for placing a monetary value on life is to enable policy and regulatory analysts to allocate the limited supply of resources, infrastructure, labor, and tax revenue. Estimates for the value of a life are used to compare the life-saving and risk-reduction benefits of new policies, regulations, and projects against a variety of other factors, often using a cost-benefit analysis.

Estimates for the statistical value of life are published and used in practice by various government agencies. In Western countries and other liberal democracies, estimates for the value of a statistical life typically range from US$1 million—US$10 million; for example, the United States FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at US$7.5 million in 2020.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Media 🔗 Music theory

Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients. While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shutdown. Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and BitTorrent.

Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store commonly known as Napster 2.0. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody streaming service on December 1, 2011. In 2016, the original branding was restored when Rhapsody was renamed Napster.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology

Olestra (also known by its brand name Olean) is a fat substitute that adds no calories to products. It has been used in the preparation of otherwise high-fat foods, thereby lowering or eliminating their fat content. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) originally approved olestra for use in the US as a replacement for fats and oils in prepackaged ready-to-eat snacks in 1996, concluding that such use "meets the safety standard for food additives, reasonable certainty of no harm".^: 46399 In the late 2000s, olestra lost its popularity due to supposed side effects and has been largely phased out, but products containing the ingredient can still be purchased at grocery stores in some countries. As of 2023, no products are sold in the United States using Olestra.

🔗 Technology 🔗 France

The Rue de l'Avenir (transl. Street of the future) was an electric moving walkway installed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It ran along the edge of the Exposition site, from the Esplanade of Les Invalides to the Champ de Mars, passing through nine stations along the way, where passengers could board. It was designed by architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee and engineer Max E. Schmidt, designers of The Great Wharf Moving Sidewalk installed at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, the first-ever moving walkway.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Cycling 🔗 Aviation/rotorcraft

A human-powered helicopter (HPH) is a helicopter powered solely by one or more humans carried on board. As in other human-powered aircraft, the power is usually generated by pedalling. It remains a considerable engineering challenge to obtain both the power-to-weight ratio and rotor efficiency required to sustain a helicopter in flight.

On 13 June 2013, the AeroVelo Atlas was the first to complete a flight that lasted 64 seconds and reached an altitude of 3.3 metres, thus winning the American Helicopter Society (AHS) International's Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Соломон Вениаминович Шерешевский; 1886 – 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Ш' ('Sh'), 'S.', or Luria's S, was a Soviet journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s. He was the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968).

🔗 Video games

The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It takes its name from the video game Tetris.

People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street. They may see coloured images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.. They may see such coloured, moving images when they are falling asleep, a form of hypnagogic imagery.

The Tetris effect is a form of habit. Those experiencing the effect may feel they are unable to prevent the thoughts, images, or dreams from happening.

A broadening of the Tetris effect may be the Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP).