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🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/South Asian military history 🔗 Afghanistan

The Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a US Air Force B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai (sometimes spelled Garani or Gerani) in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.

The United States admitted significant errors were made in carrying out the airstrike, stating "the inability to discern the presence of civilians and avoid and/or minimize accompanying collateral damage resulted in the unintended consequence of civilian casualties".

The Afghan government has said that around 140 civilians were killed, of whom 22 were adult males and 93 were children. Afghanistan's top rights body has said 97 civilians were killed, most of them children. Other estimates range from 86 to 147 civilians killed. An earlier probe by the US military had said that 20–30 civilians were killed along with 60–65 insurgents. A partially released American inquiry stated "no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred". The Australian has said that the airstrike resulted in "one of the highest civilian death tolls from Western military action since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001".

🔗 France 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Continental philosophy

The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Lists 🔗 Computing/Networking

This is a list of interface bit rates, is a measure of information transfer rates, or digital bandwidth capacity, at which digital interfaces in a computer or network can communicate over various kinds of buses and channels. The distinction can be arbitrary between a computer bus, often closer in space, and larger telecommunications networks. Many device interfaces or protocols (e.g., SATA, USB, SAS, PCIe) are used both inside many-device boxes, such as a PC, and one-device-boxes, such as a hard drive enclosure. Accordingly, this page lists both the internal ribbon and external communications cable standards together in one sortable table.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

🔗 Fire Service 🔗 Forestry 🔗 Wildfire

Smokejumpers are specially trained wildland firefighters who provide an initial attack response on remote wildland fires. They are inserted at the site of the fire by parachute.

Smokejumpers are trained and experienced wildland firefighters. In addition to performing the initial attack on wildfires, they may also provide leadership for extended attacks on wildland fires. Shortly after smokejumpers touch ground, they are supplied by parachute with food, water, and firefighting tools, making them self-sufficient for 48 hours. Smokejumpers are usually on duty from early spring through late fall.

🔗 International relations 🔗 History 🔗 Military history 🔗 Africa 🔗 Europe 🔗 Military history/African military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Colonialism 🔗 Countering systemic bias

The Scramble for Africa, also called the Partition of Africa or the Conquest of Africa, was the invasion, occupation, division, and colonisation of African territory by European powers during a short period known to historians as the New Imperialism (between 1881 and 1914). In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914 this had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Dervish state (a portion of present-day Somalia) and Liberia still being independent. There were multiple motivations for European colonizers, including desire for valuable resources available throughout the continent, the quest for national prestige, tensions between pairs of European powers, religious missionary zeal and internal African native politics.

The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonisation and trade in Africa, is usually referred to as the ultimate point of the Scramble for Africa. Consequent to the political and economic rivalries among the European empires in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning, or splitting up of Africa was how the Europeans avoided warring amongst themselves over Africa. The later years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" by military influence and economic dominance, to direct rule, bringing about colonial imperialism.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

The AI effect is a phenomenon in which advances in artificial intelligence lead to a redefinition of what is considered intelligence, such that capabilities achieved by AI systems are no longer regarded as examples of "real" intelligence.

The concept has been used to describe both a cognitive tendency and a sociotechnical pattern, in which successful AI techniques are reclassified as routine computation or absorbed into other domains.

Historian Pamela McCorduck described this as a recurring feature of AI research, noting that once a problem is solved, it is no longer considered evidence of intelligence. Researcher Rodney Brooks similarly observed that once systems are understood, they are often regarded as "just computation".

🔗 Maps

In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as nonexistent towns, or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.

Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

Trap streets are rarely acknowledged by publishers. One known case is a popular driver's atlas for the city of Athens, Greece, which has a warning inside its front cover that potential copyright violators should beware of trap streets.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Books

Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors is a book written under the pseudonym Rex Feral (real name Nancy Crampton-Brophy) and published by Paladin Press in 1983. Paladin Press owner Peder Lund claimed, in an interview with 60 Minutes, that the book started life as a detailed crime novel written by a Florida housewife, and that the format was later changed to appeal to Paladin's reader base accustomed to the publisher's non-fiction books on military, survivalist, weapons and similar topics. The book portrays itself as a how-to manual on starting a career as a hit man, fulfilling contracts. However, after a number of lawsuits claiming that the book was used as a handbook in several murders, the publication of the book was stopped. It marked "the first time in American publishing history that a publisher has been held liable for a crime committed by a reader."

🔗 Psychology

The uncertainty reduction theory, also known as initial interaction theory, developed in 1975 by Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese, is a communication theory from the post-positivist tradition. It is one of the few communication theories that specifically looks into the initial interaction between people prior to the actual communication process. The theory asserts the notion that, when interacting, people need information about the other party in order to reduce their uncertainty. In gaining this information people are able to predict the other's behavior and resulting actions, all of which according to the theory is crucial in the development of any relationship.

Berger and Calabrese explain the connection between their central concept of uncertainty and seven key variables of relationship development with a series of axioms, and deduce a series of theorems accordingly. Within the theory two types of uncertainty are identified; cognitive uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty. There are three types of strategies which people may use to seek information about someone: passive, active, and interactive. Furthermore, the initial interaction of strangers can be broken down into individual stages—the entry stage, the personal stage, and the exit stage. According to the theory, people find uncertainty in interpersonal relationships unpleasant and are motivated to reduce it through interpersonal communication.