Today I Learned #3: There's a wiki for everything!

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I always refer to some friends' pet rabbit as 'the emergency protein source'.
They're not amused. :lol:
Reminds me of a scene from the Michael Moore documentary Roger and Me, about the collapse of the auto industry in Detroit, where a lady tries to supplement her income by selling rabbits "as friends or food".
Don't worry, it isn't the scene where she kills and dresses a rabbit.
 
Not too much of a surprise, but TIL that digital forensics is as prone to bias as the rest of the criminal justice system:

Dror and Nina Sunde at the University of Oslo, Norway, gave 53 digital forensics examiners from eight countries including the UK the same computer hard drive to analyse. Some of the examiners were provided with only basic contextual information about the case, while others were told the suspect had confessed to the crime, had a strong motive for committing it or that the police believed she had been framed.

The study, published in Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, found that the examiners who had been led to believe the suspect might be innocent documented the fewest traces of evidence in the files, while those who knew of a potential motive identified the most traces.

It also found low levels of consistency between examiners who were given the same contextual information, in terms of the observations, interpretations and conclusions they drew from the files.
Grundiad Paper
 
TIL: How to get followers on Instagram. I do not have an Instagram account

You’ve Got Pull

Nine expert ways to attract more followers on Instagram—all shamelessly tested

BY DALE H RABI

WHY WOULD anyone want more Instagram followers?” sighed a friend two summers ago. “Mine just plague me with emojis in the comments.” With 8,000 fans, she could get 300 likes just by aiming her phone down and haphazardly photographing her feet. I’d attracted a mere 950 followers; none was blindly interested in photos of my limbs. This seemed problematic. As the editor of a newspaper’s lifestyle section when Instagram was increasingly defining lifestyle trends, I considered it a professional duty to conquer the platform and acquire enough followers to be plagued at least a little. Besides, I was feeling competitive.

Mastering the science of growing my account became my summer project. To prepare, I watched dozens of YouTube videos in which platform pros talked very fast, outlining “tricks” and “secrets.” Here are the 9 strategies I considered or tested, driving my follower count up 20% in three months—along with updated commentary from two of those loquacious experts:

Strictly define your niche.

The pros loudly concurred: To really grow your fan base, pick a single subject so your posts will reliably satisfy would-be followers with similar interests. Dogs. Saggy old houses. Exhaustingly elaborate desserts. “You need to offer one consistent value proposition,” said Ben Leavitt, a social-media guru in Guelph, Ontario, who’s created 53 YouTube videos drilling such principles into hopeful Instagrammers.

But I just couldn’t do it. I resisted reducing myself to one dimension and didn’t have time to produce a steady stream of wearying tartlets.

So I stuck with what Vancouver based Instagram expert Vanessa Lau pityingly calls a “panoply” of topics.

The only thing my posts have in common, she said after perusing my feed recently, is “really charming captions. Sell that in your Instagram profile bio.” That seems like an embarrassing “niche,” but Ms. Lau stars in 70 odd videos on Instagram success, one with 5.8 million views.

Convert to a professional account.

This I did promptly. (Anyone can do so for free. Make the switch in “Edit Profile.”) “Professional” status lets you access “Insights,” metrics that track how many impressions your hashtags generated, how many shares or follows each post got. You can determine what’s working and try to do more of that. I quickly learned, beyond its paltry 37 likes, why my photo of a forgotten 1970s supermodel was a dud. It got no shares, even if her curly hair had (as I put it) “a matted, Little Orphan Annie intensity.” Said Ms. Lau diplomatically: Insights “let you optimize your strategy based on your findings.”

Post every day at a consistent time.

“If you tell Instagram ‘I’m active on this account,’” said Ms. Lau, “it rewards you.” And potentially exposes your content to non-followers susceptible to your wiles. I obediently posted at 1 p.m., when my followers were most active, according to my Insights. Producing good photos daily nearly killed me, given that I spent my hours in a cubicle, not picturesque Fiji or a photogenic alternative circus. At one low point, I desperately snapped a giant iPhone projected on a giant screen in my slightly sci-fi newsroom. One charitable new follower proved susceptible.

Write long, thoughtful captions ending on call-to-action questions.

I spewed thoughtfulness as suggested. But if you follow my lead, Ms. Lau recommends introducing line breaks to create smaller, digestible chunks of text, “so you don’t hurt people’s brains.” (She personally varies caption length.) As for calls-to-action, I strongly suggested people tell me their “most indelible pizza memory,” demanded to know if they’d sleep in a windowless hotel room “if it saved them $55,” casually inquired whether they had any idea “pigeon eyes were so individualistic.” As painful as it was to add “tell me in the comments,” it worked. “If you’re in a conversation and you never ask for any input, you won’t get any,” explained Mr. Leavitt.

And more engagement equals more exposure to would-be followers.

Respond to every comment.

This took forever, but, as Mr. Leavitt said, “people love to feel acknowledged.” And it spurs more comments, thus more engagement. After I posted about a Bedlington terrier named Pippin—a rare name, I assumed— dog lovers shared their pets’ names: SheShe, Basil, Huckleberry, Texas and three other Pippins. “Enough Pippins to back up Gladys Knight,” I tapped out, reaching a bit. If followers only comment with emojis, respond with a neutral one, said Mr. Leavitt, like the praying hands. “You’d want to avoid the poo emoji, obviously.”

Overcome your distaste for hashtags.

Before I was enlightened, I’d only add one or two long, jokey, intentionally inept hashtags to my posts to telegraph I wasn’t thirsty. (For a candy dish I threw in pottery class: #callingallchocolatecoveredalmonds— a hashtag currently appended to exactly one post, mine.) But, as Mr. Leavitt said, “If you want followers, what’s embarrassing about free exposure to a targeted audience?” Adding, say, 25 strategic hashtags (the maximum is 30) gives you that, unless, said Ms. Lau, you choose ones used by too many Instagrammers (over 2 million) or too few (under 100,000). That summer, I exploited a hashtag generator app to corner every nuance of opportunity from #loveceramics to #ceramicslove.

Post selfies.

This advice came not from the experts but from friends, who reported their self-portraits got the most likes. Since I mostly hate seeing myself, and scorn excessive selfie posting, this commandment stressed me. In one selfie, I posed beside an out-of control hydrangea bush that (strategically) steals the spotlight, nearly pushing me out of the frame.


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DAN PGE


Success: 118 likes. Not so fast, said Ms. Lau. Selfies can get likes but not shares. To up the chances someone will forward your post to friends (potential follower alert), she suggests a carousel of images to broaden the appeal: say, a selfie on the eve of your backyard dinner party; your garden itself; the menu as a text image. Strangers want more than your face.

Seek out marginalized kindred spirits.

This one was time-consuming but easy. Search hashtags aligned with your content. Single out posts that: a) you sincerely like; b) have almost no likes or comments. Like the post. Add an observant, appreciative comment, hinting that your own feed offers similar splendors.

Ignored by others, the grateful Instagrammer might reward you with a follow.

Don’t attempt boosted posts.

Three months of applying these techniques every day wore me out.

I’d acquired 200 more followers, but never had the nerve (or shamelessness) to explore the “Promote” button that appears beside each post of professional accounts. Paying Instagram to share your photo more widely ($30 for 6 days) seemed like cheating. This spring, I overcame my shame and “boosted” a post of Jodie Foster looking shockingly, bravely old in makeup for her film “The Mauritanian.” Curiously, Instagram exposed it only to people in Argentina, 40 of whom followed me. This was nice and a lot easier than all my other techniques combined, but it seemed inevitable that I’d soon disappoint my Argentine fan base. The only passably photogenic South American thing I own is a too-small belt.

Long story short: Turns out I’d adjusted a setting years ago that predisposed Instagram to send my Jodie post down Buenos Aires way. With that fixed, I boosted another post, this time targeting New Yorkers like me. It yielded not a single follow. “I would definitely not advise ‘Promote,’” said Mr. Leavitt, “unless you’re building a business and can write off the expense.” Ms. Lau added that boosting often yields followers who drop you quickly and it can get addictive: “$50 becomes $500 becomes $1,000.” It might be cheaper to move to picturesque Fiji.
 
Ghah. Somehow I acquired some followers on CBC.ca who apparently like my variety of anti-UCP/Reformacon snark, plus my continual advocacy for disabled voters' rights. I didn't have to go through all the steps listed above. I just had to say what I would have said anyway. It's a little bemusing that one of these people is a left-wing supporter who lives in Edmonton and his avatar is a picture of Joe Clark (who was a Progressive Conservative Prime Minister for a few months in 1979-80).
 
TIL: Smaller wireless technology on horizon

At Sandia Labs, tiniest amplifier emerges from 50-year-old hypothesis

BY TROY RUMMLER
SANDIA NEWS SERVICE

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have built the world’s smallest and best acoustic amplifier. And they did it using a concept that was all but abandoned for almost 50 years. According to a paper published May 13 in Nature Communications, the device is more than 10 times more effective than the earlier versions. The design and future research directions hold promise for smaller wireless technology.

Modern cell phones are packed with radios to send and receive phone calls, text messages and high-speed data. The more radios in a device, the more it can do. While most radio components, including amplifiers, are electronic, they can potentially be made smaller and better as acoustic devices. This means they would use sound waves instead of electrons to process radio signals. “Acoustic wave devices are inherently compact because the wavelengths of sound at these frequencies are so small — smaller than the diameter of human hair,” Sandia scientist Lisa Hackett said. But until now, using sound waves has been impossible for many of these components.

Sandia’s acoustic, 276-megahertz amplifier, measuring a mere 0.0008 square inch (0.5 square millimeter), demonstrates the vast, largely untapped potential for making radios smaller through acoustics. To amplify 2 gigahertz frequencies, which carry much of modern cell phone traffic, the device would be even smaller, 0.00003 square inch (0.02 square millimeter), a footprint that would comfortably fit inside a grain of table salt and is more than 10 times smaller than current state-of-the-art technologies.

The team also created the first acoustic circulator, another crucial radio component that separates transmitted and received signals. Together, the petite parts represent an essentially uncharted path toward making all technologies that send and receive information with radio waves smaller and more sophisticated, said Sandia scientist Matt Eichenfield.


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Scientists Matt Eichenfield, left, and Lisa Hackett led the team at Sandia National Laboratories that created the world’s smallest and best acoustic amplifier. BRET LATTER/SANDIA NEWS SERVICE

“We are the first to show that it’s practical to make the functions that are normally being done in the electronic domain in the acoustic domain,” Eichenfield said.

Resurrecting a decades-old design

Scientists tried making acoustic radio-frequency amplifiers decades ago, but the last major academic papers from these efforts were published in the 1970s. Without modern nanofabrication technologies, their devices performed too poorly to be useful. Boosting a signal by a factor of 100 with the old devices required 0.4 inch (1 centimeter) of space and 2,000 volts of electricity. They also generated lots of heat, requiring more than 500 milliwatts of power.

The new and improved amplifier is more than 10 times as effective as the versions built in the ‘70s in a few ways. It can boost signal strength by a factor of 100 in 0.008 inch (0.2 millimeter) with only 36 volts of electricity and 20 milliwatts of power.

Previous researchers hit a dead end trying to enhance acoustic devices, which are not capable of amplification or circulation on their own, by using layers of semiconductor materials. For their concept to work well, the added material must be very thin and very high quality, but scientists only had techniques to make one or the other.

Decades later, Sandia developed techniques to do both in order to improve photovoltaic cells by adding a series of thin layers of semiconducting materials. The Sandia scientist leading that effort happened to share an office with Eichenfield.

“I had some pretty heavy peripheral exposure. I heard about it all the time in my office,” Eichenfield said. “So fast forward probably three years later, I was reading these papers out of curiosity about this acousto-electric amplifier work and reading about what they tried to do, and I realized that this work that Sandia had done to develop these techniques for essentially taking very, very thin semiconductors and transferring them onto other materials was exactly what we would need to make these devices realize all their promise.”

Sandia made its amplifier with semiconductor materials that are 83 layers of atoms thick — 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Fusing an ultrathin semiconducting layer onto a dissimilar acoustic device took an intricate process of growing crystals on top of other crystals, bonding them to yet other crystals and then chemically removing 99.99% of the materials to produce a perfectly smooth contact surface. Nanofabrication methods like this are collectively called heterogeneous integration and are a research area of growing interest at Sandia’s Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications complex and throughout the semiconductor industry.

SMALLEST from page Z2 to Z4

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An acousto-electric chip, top, produced at Sandia National Laboratories includes a radio-frequency amplifier, circulator and filter. An image taken by scanning electron microscopy shows details of the amplifier. BRET LATTER/SANDIA NEWS SERVICE


Amplifiers, circulators and filters are normally produced separately because they are dissimilar technologies, but Sandia produced them all on the same acousto-electric chip. The more technologies that can be made on the same chip, the simpler and more efficient manufacturing becomes. The team’s research shows that the remaining radio signal processing components could conceivably be made as extensions of the devices already demonstrated.

Work was funded by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a user facility jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

So how long until these petite radio parts are inside your phone? Probably not for a while, Eichenfield said. Converting mass-produced, commercial products like cell phones to all acousto-electric technology would require a massive overhaul of the manufacturing infrastructure, he said. But for small productions of specialized devices, the technology holds more immediate promise.

The Sandia team is now exploring whether they can adapt their technology to improve all-optical signal processing, too. They are also interested in finding out if the technology can help isolate and manipulate single quanta of sound, called phonons, which would potentially make it useful for controlling and making measurements in some quantum computers.
 

An alaskan town with only one residential building.

It seems quite interesting, although I doubt it would be for me.

I do like the single triangular gate, going through a tunnel.
 
from yahoo

A microscopic multi-celled organism has returned to life after being frozen for 24,000 years in Siberia, according to new research.

Scientists dug up the animal known as a bdelloid rotifer from the Alayeza River in the Russian Arctic.

Once thawed, it was able to reproduce asexually, after spending millennia in a state of frozen animation known as crytobiosis.

Previous research said they could survive frozen for up to 10 years.
 
Oh man, I'd love to get my hands on such old samples.
In my last lab the associate professor had planned to try to cultivate some spore-forming bacteria from some mummies, in collaboration with the national history museum, but couldn't get money for this :/.
 

An alaskan town with only one residential building.

It seems quite interesting, although I doubt it would be for me.

I do like the single triangular gate, going through a tunnel.
The video is geoblocked in Canada. What's the name of the town?
 
Whitter Alaska
 
Spoiler Whittier :

Whittier, Alaska: One Building Houses A Whole Town



If you’re the ultimate homebody—Whittier, Alaska may be your dream destination. Whittier started out in the mid-1950’s as a military outpost. In recent decades, civilians have begun to trickle into a former army barracks at the heart of the town called Begich Towers. Begich Towers is currently home to 75% of Whittier’s 300 permanent residents. Begich Towers serves as a cozy condominium which features a post office, general store, police station, laundromat, hospital, mayor’s office, and a heated indoor pool. Whittier’s school is connected to Begich Towers by an underground tunnel, so young residents never have to brave harsh wind and snow on their way to the classroom. Begich Towers also features a small bed and breakfast so that visitors can experience Whitter’s warm sense of community.


The 14-story building is a former Army barracks built in 1956, yet it houses all the amenities you’d expect from a small town: a laundromat, health clinic, corner store, police station, church, video store, city offices and the homes of nearly 200 residents.
Photo via California Sunday Magazine

Whittier is relatively close to Anchorage, Alaska—but it is still difficult to access. Whittier is only accessible by boat, and a single drive through tunnel which periodically alternates directions. The drive through tunnel closes every night at 10:30 pm. Whittier residents who ventured to Anchorage for an evening of fun, and missed the 10:30 tunnel cut off time have been known to spend the night in their car. Most Whittier residents love the tiny town’s remote status. Whittier is surrounded by breathtaking mountains and home to majestic animals such as reindeer who live in a small enclosure just outside of Begich Towers, and humpback whales who frolic in the pristine waters of Prince William Sound.


June Miller runs June’s Whittier Condo Suites, a B&B on the Towers’ top two floors.

One Begich Towers resident who works as a teacher at the local school stated that life in Begich Towers is actually more akin to life in a big city than a remote small town. Begich Towers is essentially a fully functional condo that is equipped to take care of most of the residents needs in-house. Begich Towers residents rarely have to brave Alaska’s icy winds and blinding snow at the height of winter if they don’t want to because virtually anything they may need is conveniently located a few short minutes from their doorstep. Begich Towers residents can even set up a meeting with the Whittier mayor, police chief, or head physician without reaching for their coat and scarf. Wealthy residents of New York who pay big bucks for condos with in-house amenities could only dream of such lavish luxury.


Until he moved away, Pastor Kevin Jones, a Southern Baptist, presided over a mostly Catholic congregation.


Gary Carr works at the Kozy Korner Store, one of Whittier’s two grocery stores.


A pot bust on the tenth floor led to the police donating hydroponic equipment to Whittier’s school for a vegetable garden, which Joey Lipscomb oversaw through eighth grade.


Because the winters are so ferocious, the town’s only playground is indoors.

During the summer months, when the sun shines 22 hours a day—visitors from around the world who are curious about life in Begich Towers flock to Whittier. A museum about the Japanese occupation of Alaska during World War II, an abandoned army barracks called the Buckner Building which once housed Whittier residents as Begich Towers does today, and a handful of delectable restaurants that serve fresh seafood are some other points of interest. Paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Buckner Building is haunted by restless spirits. The state of Alaska is rugged and beautiful beyond compare. Charming small towns like Whittier are one of many reasons that Alaska is a place that every seasoned traveler must visit at least once.

 
"A pot bust on the tenth floor"
How could one run a drug business when the police station is in the same building :D

Those living in the ground or first floor apparently do have problems with wildlife attacks (bears, iirc).

It must be terrible to live on the ground/first floor if there is only one building in "town". And rather unfair too.
 
"A pot bust on the tenth floor"
How could one run a drug business when the police station is in the same building :D

Those living in the ground or first floor apparently do have problems with wildlife attacks (bears, iirc).

It must be terrible to live on the ground/first floor if there is only one building in "town". And rather unfair too.

Depends how often the lifts break down.
 
That's so Judge Dredd.
 
Depends how often the lifts break down.
Yep. The one advantage of my former apartment was that I never needed to worry about the elevator shut down during fire alarms. I'd just put on my shoes, don my earmuffs, and go.

Now is different. I'm on the 4th floor and can't really manage the stairs well anymore - especially if I was also toting the cat with me. There's a shoulder strap on her carrier, but it's still really awkward.
 
YIL that the law of cosines can be inferred relatively quickly from two propositions of Euclid about acute and obtuse angles (they feature height from the other side, so require some calculation to bring to the same form). I always hated memorizing entire formulas :)
While wiki mentions this as a generalization of the pythagorean theorem, imo it is more intuitive (if you want the full generalization) to just use Ptolemy's theorem*

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Should be noted that the pythagorean theorem, while commonly used without proof and almost as an axiom, itself wasn't needed to prove a more fundamental theorem (usually regarded as the first theorem in geometry as well as the first instance of use of the notion of a theorem), that of Thales about intersecting lines creating analogies. Ultimately you can go from that to prove everything else (eg you can visualize a descending or ascending cosine as decreasing or increasing the two sides with the same proportions: the distance between those two sides, at their end, has the same ratio of change to the distance between them closer to the angle, that the diminishing/enlargement of each side to another has; this idea usually gets reduced to the rather monotone concept of "similar triangles").

*the four vertices have to be on the periphery of a circle, but that doesn't matter if you want to go from there to a right-angled triangle, since the latter's vertices are always on the periphery of a circle with the hypotenuse being the diameter- also shown by Thales.
 
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Color meaning is closely tied to culture and geography.
 
TIL about the Graduated electronic decelerator:

The graduated electronic decelerator (GED) is an aversive conditioning device that delivers a powerful electric skin shock to punish behaviors considered undesirable. It was developed and used for decades at Judge Rotenberg Center, an institution and school in Massachusetts.
The creator Matthew Israel reports that the GED has been used on children as young as seven or eight.

The GED-1 produces a shock of 30 mA, lasting two seconds. The GED-4 produces a shock of 90 mA, lasting two seconds. For comparison, a cattle prod produces a shock of not more than 10 mA lasting a fraction of a second. According to James Eason, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington and Lee University, the GED's lowest shock setting is about twice the threshold that pain researchers consider tolerable to most adult humans.

It was used to "control" behaviours such as:
  • Failing to be neat
  • Wrapping one's foot around the leg of a chair
  • Stopping work for more than ten seconds
  • Closing one's eyes for more than five seconds
  • Minor acts of noncompliance
  • Using the bathroom without permission
  • Urinating on oneself after being refused the right to use the bathroom
  • Screaming while being shocked
  • Attempting to remove the GED
And we are not talking about ancient history here:

In 2020, the device was banned by the United States Food and Drug Administration.
GED_shock_on_a_four-point_board.jpg


Spoiler Examples of use :
In 2002, Andre McCollins, an autistic student from New York City, was restrained on a four-point board and shocked 31 times with the GED over the course of seven hours. The first shock was given after he did not take off his coat when asked; subsequent shocks were given as punishments for screaming and tensing up while being shocked. The day after the incident, McCollins’ mother had to drive him to the hospital, as he was unable to speak and had third-degree burns on many parts of his body. The doctor diagnosed him with acute stress disorder, a short-term disorder defined by the existence of posttraumatic stress symptoms. A video of event was released to the public, with clips airing on national news.

After the center received a phone call alleging that two of its residents had misbehaved earlier that evening, staff woke them from their beds, restrained them, and repeatedly gave them electric shocks. One of the residents received 77 shocks and the other received 29. After the incident, one of the residents had to be treated for burns. The phone call was later found to be a hoax perpetrated by a former resident who was pretending to be a supervisor.

Greg Miller, a teacher's assistant at the JRC, reported that on one occasion, he saw a girl with cerebral palsy shocked for moaning and reaching out to hold a staff member's hand. On another occasion, he reached into his pocket without first announcing his intention to the class. Four children screamed out in fear, and he was forced to shock them. Miller said that this kind of scenario occurred "all the time" at the school. Staff were continually observed by cameras to ensure that they administered the prescribed shocks, and feared losing their jobs if they did not.

Some students were made to sit on GED seats that would automatically administer skin shocks for the target behavior of standing up, while others wore waist holsters that would administer skin shocks if the student pulled a hand out of the holster. Shocks were administered continuously until the target behavior stopped occurring.

Residents were made to wear the GED devices at all hours, even during showers and sleep. Residents report that they were sometimes awoken by shocks at night, which were administered for reasons including nighttime incontinence, tensing up while asleep, and having broken a rule earlier in the day. Resident would also be shocked if they failed to stay awake at daytime. One resident reported that after being shocked while asleep, staff would not explain to her why she was shocked. Fear of these shocks produced extreme insomnia, which persisted even after she went off the GED.

It was not explained to me why I got this shock. I was terrified and angry. I was crying. I kept asking why? And they kept telling me ‘No talking out’…After this incident I really stopped sleeping. Every time I closed my eyes they would jump open, anticipating that jolt somewhere in my body”
— anonymous former resident​
 
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