AI Detector Eraser

AI Detector Eraser — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Pixel binning

    Pixel binning

    Pixel binning, also known as binning, is a process image sensors of digital cameras use to combine adjacent pixels throughout an image, by summing or averaging their values, during or after readout. It improves low-light performance while still allowing for highly detailed photographs in good light. Charge from adjacent pixels in CCD or charge-coupled device image sensors and some other image sensors can be combined during readout, increasing the line rate or frame rate. In the context of image processing, binning is the procedure of combining clusters of adjacent pixels, throughout an image, into single pixels. For example, in 2×2 binning, an array of 4 pixels becomes a single larger pixel, reducing the number of pixels to 1/4 and halving the image resolution in each dimension. The result can be the sum, average, median, minimum, or maximum value of the cluster. Some systems use more advanced algorithms such as considering the values of nearby pixels, edge detection, self-claimed "AI", etc. to increase the perceived visual quality of the final downsized image. This aggregation, although associated with loss of information, reduces the amount of data to be processed, facilitating analysis. The binned image has lower resolution, but the relative noise level in each pixel is generally reduced. == History == Normally, an increase in megapixel count on a constant image sensor size would lead to a sacrifice of the surface size of the individual pixels, which would result in each pixel being able to catch less light in the same time, thus leading to a darker and/or noisier image in low light (given the same exposure time). In the past, camera manufacturers had to compromise between low-light performance and the amount of detail in good light, by dropping the megapixel count like HTC did in 2013 with their four-megapixel "UltraPixel" camera. However, this results in less detailed images in daylight where enough light is available. With pixel binning, the camera has "the best of both worlds", meaning both the benefit of high detail in good light and the benefit of high brightness in low light. In low light, the surfaces of four or more pixels can act as one large pixel that catches far more light. For example, some smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy A15 are able to capture photographs with up to fifty megapixels in daylight. However, in low light, the individual pixels would be too small to capture the light needed for a bright image with the short exposure time available for handheld shooting. Therefore, with pixel binning activated, the 50-megapixel image sensor acts as a 12.5-megapixel image sensor, a quarter of its original resolution, with an accordingly larger surface area per pixel.

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  • Trust federation

    Trust federation

    A trust federation is part of the evolving Identity Metasystem that will bring a new layer of persistent identity and trusted data sharing to the Internet. Although the concept of trust federations is technology neutral, several protocols like SAML, OpenID, Information Card, XDI can handle the challenges of technical interoperability. The challenge of business and social interoperability requires a new type of cooperative association similar to a credit card association. Instead of banks, however, a trust federation is an alliance of i-brokers and their customers who agree to abide by a common set of agreements in the care and handling of customer data. A model for trust federations is offered by Open Identity Exchange and Kantara Initiative, which is applied in the U.S. Government ICAM Trust Framework. Some operational trust federations are: InCommon (academic, USA) REFEDs (Research and Education Federations, Europe) IGTF Interoperable Global Trust Federation Portalverbund Government Portal Federation, Austria Trust federations are not limited to the social web use case, but apply to all federations where trust in identity and compliance to other objectives of information security such as confidentiality, integrity and privacy is brokered.

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  • Strong cryptography

    Strong cryptography

    Strong cryptography or cryptographically strong are general terms used to designate the cryptographic algorithms that, when used correctly, provide a very high (usually insurmountable) level of protection against any eavesdropper, including the government agencies. There is no precise definition of the boundary line between the strong cryptography and (breakable) weak cryptography, as this border constantly shifts due to improvements in hardware and cryptanalysis techniques. These improvements eventually place the capabilities once available only to the NSA within the reach of a skilled individual, so in practice there are only two levels of cryptographic security, "cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files" (Bruce Schneier). The strong cryptography algorithms have high security strength, for practical purposes usually defined as a number of bits in the key. For example, the United States government, when dealing with export control of encryption, considered as of 1999 any implementation of the symmetric encryption algorithm with the key length above 56 bits or its public key equivalent to be strong and thus potentially a subject to the export licensing. To be strong, an algorithm needs to have a sufficiently long key and be free of known mathematical weaknesses, as exploitation of these effectively reduces the key size. At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical security strength of the strong symmetrical encryption algorithms is 128 bits (slightly lower values still can be strong, but usually there is little technical gain in using smaller key sizes). Demonstrating the resistance of any cryptographic scheme to attack is a complex matter, requiring extensive testing and reviews, preferably in a public forum. Good algorithms and protocols are required (similarly, good materials are required to construct a strong building), but good system design and implementation is needed as well: "it is possible to build a cryptographically weak system using strong algorithms and protocols" (just like the use of good materials in construction does not guarantee a solid structure). Many real-life systems turn out to be weak when the strong cryptography is not used properly, for example, random nonces are reused A successful attack might not even involve algorithm at all, for example, if the key is generated from a password, guessing a weak password is easy and does not depend on the strength of the cryptographic primitives. A user can become the weakest link in the overall picture, for example, by sharing passwords and hardware tokens with the colleagues. == Background == The level of expense required for strong cryptography originally restricted its use to the government and military agencies, until the middle of the 20th century the process of encryption required a lot of human labor and errors (preventing the decryption) were very common, so only a small share of written information could have been encrypted. US government, in particular, was able to keep a monopoly on the development and use of cryptography in the US into the 1960s. In the 1970, the increased availability of powerful computers and unclassified research breakthroughs (Data Encryption Standard, the Diffie-Hellman and RSA algorithms) made strong cryptography available for civilian use. Mid-1990s saw the worldwide proliferation of knowledge and tools for strong cryptography. By the 21st century the technical limitations were gone, although the majority of the communication were still unencrypted. At the same the cost of building and running systems with strong cryptography became roughly the same as the one for the weak cryptography. The use of computers changed the process of cryptanalysis, famously with Bletchley Park's Colossus. But just as the development of digital computers and electronics helped in cryptanalysis, it also made possible much more complex ciphers. It is typically the case that use of a quality cipher is very efficient, while breaking it requires an effort many orders of magnitude larger - making cryptanalysis so inefficient and impractical as to be effectively impossible. == Cryptographically strong algorithms == This term "cryptographically strong" is often used to describe an encryption algorithm, and implies, in comparison to some other algorithm (which is thus cryptographically weak), greater resistance to attack. But it can also be used to describe hashing and unique identifier and filename creation algorithms. See for example the description of the Microsoft .NET runtime library function Path.GetRandomFileName. In this usage, the term means "difficult to guess". An encryption algorithm is intended to be unbreakable (in which case it is as strong as it can ever be), but might be breakable (in which case it is as weak as it can ever be) so there is not, in principle, a continuum of strength as the idiom would seem to imply: Algorithm A is stronger than Algorithm B which is stronger than Algorithm C, and so on. The situation is made more complex, and less subsumable into a single strength metric, by the fact that there are many types of cryptanalytic attack and that any given algorithm is likely to force the attacker to do more work to break it when using one attack than another. There is only one known unbreakable cryptographic system, the one-time pad, which is not generally possible to use because of the difficulties involved in exchanging one-time pads without them being compromised. So any encryption algorithm can be compared to the perfect algorithm, the one-time pad. The usual sense in which this term is (loosely) used, is in reference to a particular attack, brute force key search — especially in explanations for newcomers to the field. Indeed, with this attack (always assuming keys to have been randomly chosen), there is a continuum of resistance depending on the length of the key used. But even so there are two major problems: many algorithms allow use of different length keys at different times, and any algorithm can forgo use of the full key length possible. Thus, Blowfish and RC5 are block cipher algorithms whose design specifically allowed for several key lengths, and who cannot therefore be said to have any particular strength with respect to brute force key search. Furthermore, US export regulations restrict key length for exportable cryptographic products and in several cases in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., famously in the case of Lotus Notes' export approval) only partial keys were used, decreasing 'strength' against brute force attack for those (export) versions. More or less the same thing happened outside the US as well, as for example in the case of more than one of the cryptographic algorithms in the GSM cellular telephone standard. The term is commonly used to convey that some algorithm is suitable for some task in cryptography or information security, but also resists cryptanalysis and has no, or fewer, security weaknesses. Tasks are varied, and might include: generating randomness encrypting data providing a method to ensure data integrity Cryptographically strong would seem to mean that the described method has some kind of maturity, perhaps even approved for use against different kinds of systematic attacks in theory and/or practice. Indeed, that the method may resist those attacks long enough to protect the information carried (and what stands behind the information) for a useful length of time. But due to the complexity and subtlety of the field, neither is almost ever the case. Since such assurances are not actually available in real practice, sleight of hand in language which implies that they are will generally be misleading. There will always be uncertainty as advances (e.g., in cryptanalytic theory or merely affordable computer capacity) may reduce the effort needed to successfully use some attack method against an algorithm. In addition, actual use of cryptographic algorithms requires their encapsulation in a cryptosystem, and doing so often introduces vulnerabilities which are not due to faults in an algorithm. For example, essentially all algorithms require random choice of keys, and any cryptosystem which does not provide such keys will be subject to attack regardless of any attack resistant qualities of the encryption algorithm(s) used. == Legal issues == Widespread use of encryption increases the costs of surveillance, so the government policies aim to regulate the use of the strong cryptography. In the 2000s, the effect of encryption on the surveillance capabilities was limited by the ever-increasing share of communications going through the global social media platforms, that did not use the strong encryption and provided governments with the requested data. Murphy talks about a legislative balance that needs to be struck between the power of the government that are broad enough to be able to follow the qui

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  • Social commerce

    Social commerce

    Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services. More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s), and user-generated content in the context of e-commerce transactions. The term social commerce was introduced by Yahoo! in November 2005 which describes a set of online collaborative shopping tools such as shared pick lists, user ratings and other user-generated content of online product information and advice. The concept of social commerce was developed by David Beisel to denote user-generated advertorial content on e-commerce sites, and by Steve Rubel to include collaborative e-commerce tools that enable shoppers "to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them". The social networks that spread this advice have been found to increase the customer's trust in one retailer over another. Social commerce may assist companies in achieving the following purposes: Firstly, social commerce helps companies engage customers with their brands according to the customers' social behaviors. Secondly, it provides an incentive for customers to return to their website. Thirdly, it provides customers with a platform to talk about their brand on their website. Fourthly, it provides all the information customers need to research, compare, and ultimately choose you over your competitor, thus purchasing from you and not others. In these days, the range of social commerce has been expanded to include social media tools and content used in the context of e-commerce, especially in the fashion industry. Examples of social commerce include customer ratings and reviews, user recommendations and referrals, social shopping tools (sharing the act of shopping online), forums and communities, social media optimization, social applications and social advertising. Technologies such as augmented reality have also been integrated with social commerce, allowing shoppers to visualize apparel items on themselves and solicit feedback through social media tools. Some academics have sought to distinguish "social commerce" from "social shopping", with the former being referred to as collaborative networks of online vendors; the latter, the collaborative activity of online shoppers. == Timeline == 2005: The term "social commerce" was first introduced on Yahoo! in 2005. 2021: The Global Web Index associated one's use of social media to his/her eagerness to buy. Social media with its entertaining and inspirational content can increase a product's profitability. This explains why Instagram expanded its Checkout feature to similar content like IG Stories, IGTV, and Reels. == Elements == The attraction and effectiveness of Social Commerce can be understood in terms of Robert Cialdini's Principles of InfluenceInfluence: Science and Practice": Reciprocity – When a company gives a person something for free, that person will feel the need to return the favor, whether by buying again or giving good recommendations for the company. Community – When people find an individual or a group that shares the same values, likes, beliefs, etc., they find community. People are more committed to a community that they feel accepted within. When this commitment happens, they tend to follow the same trends as a group and when one member introduces a new idea or product, it is accepted more readily based on the previous trust that has been established. It would be beneficial for companies to develop partnerships with social media sites to engage social communities with their products. Social proof – To receive positive feedback, a company needs to be willing to accept social feedback and to show proof that other people are buying, and like, the same things that I like. This can be seen in a lot of online companies such as eBay and Amazon, that allow public feedback of products and when a purchase is made, they immediately generate a list showing purchases that other people have made in relation to my recent purchase. It is beneficial to encourage open recommendation and feedback. This creates trust for you as a seller. 55% of buyers turn to social media when they're looking for information. Authority – Many people need proof that a product is of good quality. This proof can be based on the recommendations of others who have bought the same product. If there are many user reviews about a product, then a consumer will be more willing to trust their own decision to buy this item. Liking – People trust based on the recommendations of others. If there are a lot of "likes" of a particular product, then the consumer will feel more confident and justified in making this purchase. Scarcity – As part of supply and demand, a greater value is assigned to products that are regarded as either being in high demand or are seen as being in a shortage. Therefore, if a person is convinced that they are purchasing something that is unique, special, or not easy to acquire, they will have more of a willingness to make a purchase. If there is trust established from the seller, they will want to buy these items immediately. This can be seen in the cases of Zara and Apple Inc. who create demand for their products by convincing the public that there is a possibility of missing out on being able to purchase them. == Types == === Onsite === Onsite social commerce refers to retailers including social sharing and other social functionality on their website. Some notable examples include Zazzle which enables users to share their purchases, Macy's which allows users to create a poll to find the right product, and Fab.com which shows a live feed of what other shoppers are buying. Onsite user reviews are also considered a part of social commerce. This approach has been successful in improving customer engagement, conversion and word-of-mouth branding according to several industry sources. === Offsite === Offsite social commerce includes activities that happen outside of the retailers' website. This may include posting products on social networks such as Facebook, X, and TikTok. It may also include advertising on shopping forums such as SlickDeals, Red Flag Deals, and LatestDeals.co.uk. == Measurements == Social commerce can be measured by any of the principle ways to measure social media. Return on Investment: measures the effect or action of social media on sales. Reputation: indices measure the influence of social media investment in terms of changes to online reputation – made up of the volume and valence of social media mentions. Reach: metrics use traditional media advertising metrics to measure the exposure rates and levels of an audience with social media. == Business applications == This category is based on individuals' shopping, selling, recommending behaviors. Social network-driven sales (Soldsie) – Facebook commerce and Twitter commerce belong to this part. Sales take place on established social network sites. Peer-to-peer sales platforms (eBay, Etsy, Amazon) – In these websites, users can directly communicate and sell products to other users. Group buying (Groupon, LivingSocial) – Users can buy products or services at a lower price when enough users agree to make this purchase. Peer recommendations and reviews (Amazon, Yelp, Bazaarvoice) – Users can see recommendations and reviews from other users. User-curated shopping (The Fancy, Lyst) – Users create and share lists of products and services for others to shop from. Participatory commerce (Betabrand, Threadless, Kickstarter) – Users can get involved in the production process. Social shopping (Squadded) – Allowing e-commerce to provide their users live chat sessions and shared shopping lists so they can communicate with their friends or other shoppers for advice. == Business examples == Here are some notable business examples of Social Commerce: Betabrand: an online brand using participatory design to release new, community-created ideas every week. Cafepress: an online retailer of stock and user-customized on demand products. Etsy: an e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items and supplies, as well as unique factory-manufactured items under Etsy's new guidelines. Eventbrite: an online ticketing service that allows event organizers to plan, set up ticket sales and promote events (event management) and publish them across Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking tools directly from the site's interface. Groupon: a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies. Houzz: a web site and online community about architecture, interior design and decorating, landscape design and home improvement. LivingSocial: an online marketplace that allows clients to buy and share things to do in their city. Lockerz: an international social commerce website based in Seattle, Washington. OpenSky: is a r

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  • Artificial reproduction

    Artificial reproduction

    Artificial reproduction is the re-creation of life brought about by means other than natural ones. It is new life built by human plans and projects. Examples include artificial selection, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, artificial womb, artificial cloning, and kinematic replication. Artificial reproduction is one aspect of artificial life. Artificial reproduction can be categorized into one of two classes according to its capacity to be self-sufficient: non-assisted reproductive technology and assisted reproductive technology. Cutting plants' stems and placing them in compost is a form of assisted artificial reproduction, xenobots are an example of a more autonomous type of reproduction, while the artificial womb presented in the movie the Matrix illustrates a non assisted hypothetical technology. The idea of artificial reproduction has led to various technologies. == Theology == Humans have aspired to create life since immemorial times. Most theologies and religions have conceived this possibility as exclusive of deities. Christian religions consider the possibility of artificial reproduction, in most cases, as heretical and sinful. == Philosophy == Although ancient Greek philosophy raised the concept that man could imitate the creative capacity of nature, classic Greeks thought that if possible, human beings would reproduce things as nature does, and vice versa, nature would do the things that man does in the same way. Aristotle, for example, wrote that if nature made tables, it would make them just as men do. In other words, Aristotle said that if nature were to create a table, such table will look like a human-made table. Correspondingly, Descartes envisioned the human body, and nature, as a machine. Cartesian philosophy does not stop seeing a perfect mirror between nature and the artificial. However, Kant revolutionized this old idea by criticizing such naturalism. Kant pedagogically wrote: "Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiment thought out in accord with these principles—in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.". Humans are not instructed by nature but rather use nature as raw material to invent. Humans find alternatives to the natural restrictions imposed by natural laws thus, nature is not necessarily mirrored. In accordance with Kant (and contrary to what Aristotle thought) Karl Marx, Alfred Whitehead, Jaques Derrida and Juan David García Bacca noticed that nature is incapable of reproducing tables; or airplanes, or submarines, or computers. If nature tried to create airplanes, it would produce birds. If nature tried to create submarines, it would get fishes. If nature tried to create computers, brains would grow. And if nature tried to create man, modern man, monkeys will be evolved. According to Whitehead, if we look for something natural in artificial life, in the most elaborate cases, if anything, only atoms remain natural. Juan David Garcia Bacca summarized, “It will not come out from wood, it will not be born, a galley; from clay, a vessel; from linen, a dress; from iron, a lever,...From natural, artificial. In the artificial, the natural is reduced to a simple raw material, even though it is perfectly specified with natural specification. The artificial is the real, positive, and original negation of the natural: of species, of genus and of essence. Thus, its ontology is superior to natural ontology. And for this very reason Marx did not attach any importance to Darwin, whose evolutionism is confined to the natural order: to changes, at most, from variety to variety, from species to species... natural. For the same reason, nature has no dialectics, even though continuous evolution and selection can occur. The dialectic cannot emerge from the natural, for deeper reasons than, using today's terms, from a bird, an airplane cannot emerge; from fish, a submarine; from ears, a telephone; from eyes, a television; from a brain, a digital computer; from feet, a car; from hands, an engine; from Euclid, Descartes; from Aristotle, Newton; from Plato, Marx.” According to García Bacca, the major difference between natural causes and artificial causes is that nature does not have plans and projects, while humans design things following plans and projects. In contrast, other influential authors such as Michael Behe have depicted the concept and promoted the idea of intelligent design, a notion that has aroused several doubts and heated controversies, as it reframe natural causes in accordance with a natural plan. Previous ideas that have also provided a positive 'sense' to natural reproduction, are orthogenesis, syntropy, orgone and morphic resonance, among others. Although, these ideas have been historically marginalized and often called pseudoscience, recently Bio-semioticians are reconsidering some of them under symbolic approaches. Current metaphysics of science actually recognizes that the artificial ways of reproduction are diverse from nature, i.e., unnatural, anti-natural or supernatural. Because Biosemiotics does not focus on the function of life but on its meaning, it has a better understanding of the artificial than classic biology. == Science == Biology, being the study of cellular life, addresses reproduction in terms of growth and cellular division (i.e., binary fission, mitosis and meiosis); however, the science of artificial reproduction is not restricted by the mirroring of these natural processes.The science of artificial reproduction is actually transcending the natural forms, and natural rules, of reproduction. For example, xenobots have redefined the classical conception of reproduction. Although xenobots are made of eukariotic cells they do not reproduce by mitosis, but rather by kinematic replication. Such constructive replication does not involve growing but rather building. == Assisted reproductive technologies == Assisted reproductive technology (ART)'s purpose is to assist the development of a human embryo, commonly because of medical concerns due to fertility limitations. == Non-assisted reproductive technologies == Non-assisted reproductive technologies (NART) could have medical motivations but are mostly driven by a wider heterotopic ambition. Although, NARTs are initially designed by humans, they are programed to become independent of humans to a relative or absolute extent. James Lovelock proposed that such novelties could overcome humans. === Artificial cloning === Cloning is the cellular reproductive processes where two or more genetically identical organisms are created, either by natural or artificial means. Artificial cloning normally involves editing the genetic code, somatic cell nuclear transfer and 3D bioprinting. === Non-assisted artificial womb === A non-assisted artificial womb or artificial uterus is a device that allow for ectogenesis or extracorporeal pregnancy by growing an embryonic form outside the body of an organism (that would normally carry the embryo to term) without any human assistance. The aspect of non-assistance is the key distinction between the current artificial womb technology (AWT) in modern medical research, which still relies on human assistance. With this non-assisted hypothetical technology, a zygote or stem cells are used to create an embryo that is then incubated and monitored by artificial intelligence (AI) within a chamber composed of biocompatible material. The AI maintains the necessary conditions for the embryo to develop and thrive, proceeding to mimic organic labor and childbirth in order to best help the embryo adjust to the outside world. Ectogenesis—gestation, depicted in the science fiction movie The Matrix, is a fast approaching reality. This type of innovation presupposes that vertebrate wombs are not the only way for bearing humans or other similar forms of life. === Kinematic replication === Self-replication without binary fission, meiosis, mitosis (or any other form of cellular reproduction that involves division and growing) can be achieved. Xenobots are an example of kinematic replication. They are biobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Xenobots are cellular life forms designed by using artificial intelligence to build more of themselves by combining frog cells in a liquid medium. The term kinematic replication is usually reserved for biomolecules (e.g. DNA, RNA, prions, etc.) and artificially designed cellular forms (e.g. xenobots). === Machine constructive replication === Machine constructive replication mimics human traditional manufacturing but is entirely self-automated. Such constructive replication is a more general form of kinematic replication, which does not necessarily

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  • Internet

    Internet

    The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing. Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching, and the design of computer networks for data communication. The set of communication protocols to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States, United Kingdom and France. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage. Each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the non-profit Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). == Terminology == The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks. The word Internet may be capitalized as a proper noun, although this is becoming less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services. It is the global collection of web pages, documents and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs. == History == === 1960s === In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources. J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. === 1970s === By the end of 1971, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to Norway (NORSAR and, later, NDRE) and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, the first internetwork for resource sharing. ARPA projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network, or a network of networks. In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". Cerf and his graduate students used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675. The Internet Experiment Notes and later RFCs repeated this use. The work of Louis Pouzin and Robert Metcalfe had important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks. === 1980s === The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. === 1990s === The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet. Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee began writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the

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  • Social media measurement

    Social media measurement

    Social media measurement, also called social media controlling, is the management practice of evaluating successful social media communications of brands, companies, or other organizations. Key performance indicators may be measured by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, or video/photo sharing websites, forums from time to time. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand. Some other social media metrics include share of voice, owned mentions, and earned mentions. The social media measurement process starts with defining a goal that needs to be achieved and defining the expected outcome of the process. The expected outcome varies per the goal and is usually measured by a variety of metrics. This is followed by defining possible social strategies to be used to achieve the goal. Then the next step is designing strategies to be used and setting up configuration tools that ease the process of collecting the data. In the next step, strategies and tools are deployed in real-time. This step involves conducting Quality Assurance tests of the methods deployed to collect the data. And in the final step, data collected from the system is analyzed and if the need arises, it is refined on the run time to enhance the methodologies used. The last step ensures that the result obtained is more aligned with the goal defined in the first step. == Data Acquisition == Acquiring data from social media is in demand of an exploring the user participation and population with the purpose of retrieving and collecting so many kinds of data(ex: comments, downloads etc.). There are several prevalent techniques to acquire data such as Network traffic analysis, Ad-hoc application and Crawling Network Traffic Analysis - Network traffic analysis is the process of capturing network traffic and observing it closely to determine what is happening in the network. It is primarily done to improve the performance, security and other general management of the network. However concerned about the potential tort of privacy on the Internet, network traffic analysis is always restricted by the government. Furthermore, high-speed links are not adaptable to traffic analysis because of the possible overload problem according to the packet sniffing mechanism Ad-hoc Application - Ad-hoc application is a kind of application that provides services and games to social network users by developing the APIs offered by social network companies (Facebook Developer Platform). The infrastructure of Ad-hoc application allows the user to interact with the interface layer instead of the application servers. The API provides a path for application to access information after the user login. Moreover, the size of the data set collected vary with the popularity of the social media platform i.e. social media platforms having high number of users will have more data than platforms having less user base. Scraping is a process in which the APIs collect online data from social media. The data collected from Scraping is in raw format. However, having access to these types of data is a bit difficult because of its commercial value. Crawling - Crawling is a process in which a web crawler creates indexes of all the words in a web-page, stores them, then follows all the hyperlinks and indexes on that page and again stores them. It is the most popular technique for data acquisition and is also well known for its easy operation based on prevalent Object-Orientated Programming Language (Java or Python etc.). And most important, social network companies (YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are friendly to crawling techniques by providing public APIs == Applications == === For branding === Monitoring social media allows researchers to find insights into a brand's overall visibility on social media, to measure the impact of campaigns, to identify opportunities for engagement, to assess competitor activity and share of voice, and to detect impending crises. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products. This is the work of a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, PR staff, marketing teams, social-engagement, and community staff, agencies and sales teams. Several different providers have developed tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels - from blogging to internet video to internet forums. This allows companies to track what consumers say about their brands and actions. Companies can then react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social media platforms. === In government === Apart from commercial applications, social media monitoring has become a pervasive technique applied by public organizations and governments. Monitoring is a tradition within the public sector, and social-media monitoring provides a real-time approach to detecting and responding to social developments. Governments have come to realize the need for strategies to cope with surprises from the rapid expansion of public issues. Sobkowicz introduced a framework with three blocks of social-media opinion tracking, simulating and forecasting. It includes: real-time detection of emotions, topics and opinions information-flow modelling and agent-based simulation modeling of opinion networks Bekkers introduced the application of social media monitoring in the Netherlands. Public organizations in the Netherlands (such as the Tax Agency and the Education Ministry) have started to use social media monitoring to obtain better insights into the sentiments of target groups. On the one hand, the public sector will be enabled to provide timely and efficient answers to the public by using social media monitoring techniques, but on the other hand, they also have to deal with concerns about ethical issues such as transparency and privacy. == Quantifying social media == Social media management software (SMMS) is an application program or software that facilitates an organization's ability to successfully engage in social media across different communication channels. SMMS is used to monitor inbound and outbound conversations, support customer interaction, audit or document social marketing initiatives and evaluate the usefulness of a social media presence. It can be difficult to measure all social media conversations. Due to privacy settings and other issues, not all social media conversations can be found and reported by monitoring tools. However, whilst social media monitoring cannot give absolute figures, it can be extremely useful for identifying trends and for benchmarking, in addition to the uses mentioned above. These findings can, in turn, influence and shape future business decisions. In order to access social media data (posts, Tweets, and meta-data) and to analyze and monitor social media, many companies use software technologies built for business. These range from in-platform analytics dashboards to dedicated third-party platforms, which offer more advanced capabilities including cross-platform audience intelligence, sentiment analysis, and trend detection at scale. == Location-based == Most social media networks allow users to add a location to their posts (reference all of our feeds). The location can be classified as either 'at-the-location' or 'about-the-location'. "'At-the-location' services can be defined as services where location-based content is created at the geographic location. 'About-the-location' services can be defined as services which are referring to a particular location but the content is not necessarily created in this particular physical place." The added information available from geotagged (link to Geotagging article) posts means that they can be displayed on a map. This means that a location can be used as the start of a social media search rather than a keyword or hashtag. This has major implications for disaster relief, event monitoring, safety and security professionals since a large portion of their job is related to tracking and monitoring specific locations. == Technologies used == Various monitoring platforms use different technologies for social media monitoring and measurement. These technology providers may connect to the API provided by social platforms that are created for 3rd party developers to develop their own applications and services that access data. Facebook's Graph API is one such API that social media monitoring solution products would connect to pull data from. Some social media monitoring and analytics companies use calls to data providers each time an end-user d

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  • OARnet

    OARnet

    The Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet) is a state-funded IT organization that provides member organizations with intrastate networking, virtualization and cloud computing applications, advanced videoconferencing, connections to regional and international research networks and the commodity Internet, colocation services, and emergency web-hosting. The OARnet network (known for a time as Third Frontier Network and later, OSCnet) is a dedicated, statewide, high-speed fiber-optic network that serves Ohio K-12 schools, college and university campuses, academic medical centers, public broadcasting stations and state and local/state government. OARnet is connected in Cleveland and Cincinnati to Internet2, the United States' most advanced nationwide research and education network. OARnet also maintains direct connections to Michigan's Merit network and OmniPoP in Chicago. OARnet offices are located on the West Campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, United States. OARnet additionally serves as the delegated registrar for many third-level domains (both generic and locality-based) under .oh.us and some under .in.us and .ky.us. == History == A member-organization of the Ohio Technology Consortium, the technology and information division of the Ohio Board of Regents (now the Ohio Department of Higher Education), OARnet was created by the Ohio General Assembly in 1987 to provide Ohio researchers with network connectivity to the resources of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). It was recognized at the time that the network would serve a much broader audience, so when a network name was selected in early 1988, OARnet was chosen to emphasize the many uses of the network. The initial plan (1987) was to make use of a number of existing BITNET and CCnet (regional DECnet network) connections to get started. Three network (compatible) protocols were used, NJE, DECnet, and TCP/IP. The first OARnet-funded line was installed between Case Western Reserve University and John Carroll University in June 1987. Many subsequent lines at 9.6 kbit/s, 56 kbit/s, and T1 (1.544 Mbit/s) were installed with the aid of an Ohio Department of Administrative Services contract with Litel Corp. Internet (then NSFNET) connections were obtained in the spring of 1988. The non-TCP/IP protocols were soon phased out, and a process of upgrading connections took place regularly. In 1991, it was decided that OARnet would accept commercial business, at appropriate rates, for Internet connection services. Thus OARnet became one of the first Internet service providers (ISPs) in Ohio. After commercial ISPs entered the business extensively, OARnet stopped seeking new commercial accounts. A very large increase in backbone capacity occurred (planning 2000–02, installation 2003–04) when it became possible to lease optical fiber lines themselves ("dark fiber"). A new network backbone of 1,850 miles was installed at much higher capacity, and the eTech Ohio Commission and the Ohio Department of Education joined in funding and using OARnet. The fiber-optic backbone was launched in November 2004. In 2006, OARnet provided one of the first networks for delivery of live TV via Internet Protocol, known today as IPTV. OARnet served as the backbone for Ohio News Network to transmit Miami Redhawks hockey. The team finished the 2008-2009 season at the Frozen Four with a 4-3 OT loss to Boston University in the championship. It was one of the first live sports transmission deliveries over IPTV in the US. Another sharp jump in capacity occurred in 2012, when the State of Ohio funded an upgrade of the OARnet backbone to 100 Gigabits per second. Today, more than 1,500 miles of Ohio’s network backbone runs at an ultra-fast 100 Gbit/s, which was recognized by ComputerWorld in the Emerging Technology category of their 2013 Computerworld Honors Laureates program. In November 2012, Case Western Reserve University became the first member institution to connect at 100 Gbit/s to the OARnet backbone. The OARnet leaders have been: Russell M. Pitzer, director, 1987–88 Alison Brown, director, 1988–94 John Ritter, acting director, 1995 Larry Buell, acting director, 1996–97 Douglas Gale, director, 1998–2002 Alvin Stutz, director, 2002–05 Pankaj Shah, executive director, 2005–15 Paul Schopis, interim executive director, 2015–2018, executive director 2018–19 Denis Walsh, interim executive director, 2019–20 Pankaj Shah, executive director, 2020–

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  • Terminology model

    Terminology model

    A terminology model is a refinement of a concept system. Within a terminology model the concepts (object types) of a specific problem or subject area are defined by subject-matter experts in terms of concept (object type) definitions and definitions of subordinated concepts or characteristics (properties). Besides object types, the terminology model allows defining hierarchical classifications, definitions for object type and property behavior and definition of casual relations. The terminology model is a means for subject-matter experts to express their knowledge about the subject in subject-specific terms. Since the terminology model is structured rather similar to an object-oriented database schema, is can be transformed without loss of information into an object-oriented database schema. Thus, the terminology model is a method for problem analysis on the one side and a mean of defining database schema on the other side. Several terminology models have been developed and published in the field of statistics: Terminology model for classifications Terminology model for statistical variables Reference model for statistical metadata

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  • Vans challenge

    Vans challenge

    The Vans challenge is a viral internet challenge that began in March 2019 where people show their Vans shoes landing right-side up after tossing them in the air. The viral sensation reportedly started after a Twitter user shared a video of the occurrence, which was captioned: “Did you know it doesn’t matter how you throw your Vans they will land facing up.” Since then, multiple people on social media posted similar videos of them throwing their Vans in the air and landing right-side up, along with Crocs, UGG boots, and other popular shoes. This theory proved false, as these shoes have not always landed facing up after tossing them.

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  • Viber

    Viber

    Rakuten Viber, commonly known as Viber, is a cross-platform voice over IP (VoIP) and instant messaging (IM) software application owned by the Japanese technology company Rakuten Group. The service is available as freeware for Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux. Users are registered and identified through a mobile phone number, although the service can also be accessed on desktop platforms without mobile connectivity. In addition to instant messaging, the platform allows users to exchange media such as images, videos and files, and provides a paid international calling service called Viber Out. The software was launched in 2010 by the company Viber Media, founded by Talmon Marco and Igor Magazinnik. Rakuten acquired Viber Media in 2014 and later renamed the company Rakuten Viber. The company is headquartered in Cyprus and maintains offices in London, Manila, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Tokyo and Beijing. == History == === Founding (2010) === Viber Media was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010 by Talmon Marco and Igor Magazinnik. Marco and Magazinnik are also co-founders of the peer-to-peer media and file-sharing client iMesh. The company was run from Israel and was registered in Cyprus. Sani Maroli and Ofer Smocha soon joined the company as well. Marco said Viber allows instant calling and synchronization with contacts because the ID is the user's cell number. In its early days, Viber relied on a patchwork of outsourcing partners from different countries, commissioning specific solutions from external vendors — including teams based in Cyprus and Belarus. According to the company's statements, development of Viber's core functionality historically originated from its Tel Aviv office — a testament to its roots — even though the legal entity was registered elsewhere. === Early monetisation (2011) === In its first two years of availability, Viber did not generate revenues. It began doing so in 2013, via user payments for Viber Out voice calling and the Viber graphical messaging "sticker market". The company was originally funded by individual investors, described by Marco as "friends and family". They invested $20 million in the company, which had 120 employees as of May 2013. On 24 July 2013, Viber's support system was defaced by the Syrian Electronic Army. According to Viber, no sensitive user information was accessed. By the time Rakuten came forward with its acquisition deal in 2014, Viber had already stopped working with external vendors, choosing instead to consolidate development under its own offices. === Rakuten acquires Viber (2014) === On 13 February 2014, Rakuten announced they had acquired Viber Media for $900 million, and since then Viber has been owned by Rakuten, Inc., an e-commerce conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo. The sale of Viber earned the Shabtai family (Benny, his brother Gilad, and Gilad's son Ofer) some $500 million from their 55.2% stake in the company. At that sale price, the founders each realized over 30 times return on their investments. Later that year, the company established a UK presence with the incorporation of Viber UK Limited in London. Djamel Agaoua became Viber Media CEO in February 2017, replacing co-founder Marco who left in 2015. In July 2017 the corporate name of Viber Media was changed to Rakuten Viber and a new wordmark logo was introduced. Its legal name remains Viber Media, S.à r.l. based in Luxembourg. === Post-acquisition === In August 2015 Viber opened a regional office for Central and Eastern Europe in Sofia to support growth in the region. In 2017, Rakuten Viber and the World Wildlife Fund engaged in a commercial transaction aimed at raising awareness and protecting wildlife. After first using Viber to spread its message in June 2020, the International Federation of the Red Cross launched an official chatbot and community on the messaging app to combat the spread of false information, which they termed an infodemic, about COVID-19. The chatbot is still active as of June 2022, with over 1.4 million subscribers. In 2020, Rakuten Viber and the World Health Organization (the WHO) engaged in a commercial transaction for a chatbot to inform users of issues such as women's health. and an anti-smoking campaign. In the wake of the July–August 2020 Belarusian election protests, to avoid sanctions and harassment from monopolies the company closed its office in Minsk. In 2022, Ofir Eyal became Viber CEO, replacing Djamel Agaoua. Eyal is a Viber veteran; he worked as Vice President of Product in 2014 before his promotion to Chief Operating Officer in 2019. Shortly after the appointment of a new CEO, Viber continued its international expansion. In March 2022, Rakuten announced the opening of a development center in Tbilisi, Georgia, intended to support work on mobile applications and technology projects in the region. In July 2022, Rakuten Viber partnered with Rapyd to launch instant cross-border P2P payments. The company launched payments on the Viber app first in Greece and Germany, and then in other countries. In August, Mineski teamed up with Viber to develop a social minigame platform that can play off Viber's application. In May 2022, Rakuten Viber launched the premium chat service Viber Plus that offers exclusive features, including sticker market privileges, ad-free use, priority Viber support, exclusive badge, unique Viber icon, large file sharing, and more. In 2022, Viber joined the European Union’s Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online. As part of this framework, the company undertook to review reported content and remove material identified as hate speech in accordance with the Code and its platform rules. In January 2024 Rakuten (the company behind Viber) established an office in Kyiv to bring together engineering and marketing departments. Alongside launching its Kyiv office the company joined Diia.City as a resident. Subsequently in October 2024 Rakuten Viber inaugurated an office in Manila to broaden its operations, in the Philippines. The company’s legal entity remains Viber Media S.à r.l., registered in Luxembourg. Viber’s engineering work has been carried out across multiple countries and through external partners, including outsourcing and near-shore vendors. As a result, its development operations are distributed internationally rather than concentrated in a single location. In December 2024, Viber was blocked in Russia. Roskomnadzor announced the nationwide blocking of the messaging app due to non-compliance with local legal requirements. == Security audit == On 4 November 2014, Viber scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Secure Messaging Scorecard". Viber received a point for encryption during transit but lost points because communications were not encrypted with keys that the provider did not have access to (i.e. the communications were not end-to-end encrypted), users could not verify contacts' identities, past messages were not secure if the encryption keys were stolen (i.e. the service did not provide forward secrecy), the code was not open to independent review (i.e. the code was not open-source), the security design was not properly documented, and there had not been a recent independent security audit. On 14 November 2014, the EFF changed Viber's score to 2 out of 7 after it had received an external security audit from Ernst & Young's Advanced Security Centre. On 19 April 2016, with the announcement of Viber version 6.0, Rakuten added end-to-end encryption to their service. The company said that the encryption protocol had only been audited internally, and promised to commission external audits "in the coming weeks". In May 2016, Viber published an overview of their encryption protocol, saying that it is a custom implementation that "uses the same concepts" as the Signal Protocol. In 2022, Rakuten Viber won a Security Award, by test.de, a tech firm based in Germany where there are over 3 million Viber users. In 2024, Rakuten Viber received SOC certification following an audit conducted by Ernst & Young. The certification relates to the company’s controls for data protection and information security. == Market share == As of December 2016, Viber had 800 million registered users. According to Statista, there are 260 million monthly active users as of January 2019. The Viber messenger is very popular in the Philippines, Greece, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and some Asian markets. India was the largest market for Viber as of December 2014 with 33 million registered users, the fifth most popular instant messenger in the country. At the same time there were 30 million users in the United States, 28 million in Russia and 18 million in Brazil. Viber is particularly popular in Eastern Europe, being the most downloaded messaging app on Android in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine as of 2016. It is also popular in Iraq, Libya and Nepal. Viber is translated in 44 languages and used in more than 190 co

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  • Sentiment analysis

    Sentiment analysis

    Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to voice of the customer materials such as reviews and survey responses, online and social media, and healthcare materials for applications that range from marketing to customer service to clinical medicine. With the rise of deep language models, such as RoBERTa, more difficult data domains can be analyzed, e.g., news texts where authors typically express their opinion/sentiment less explicitly. == Types == A basic task in sentiment analysis is classifying the polarity of a given text at the document, sentence, or feature/aspect level—whether the expressed opinion in a document, a sentence or an entity feature/aspect is positive, negative, or neutral. Advanced, "beyond polarity" sentiment classification looks, for instance, at emotional states such as enjoyment, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise. Precursors to sentimental analysis include the General Inquirer, which provided hints toward quantifying patterns in text and, separately, psychological research that examined a person's psychological state based on analysis of their verbal behavior. Subsequently, the method described in a patent by Volcani and Fogel, looked specifically at sentiment and identified individual words and phrases in text with respect to different emotional scales. A current system based on their work, called EffectCheck, presents synonyms that can be used to increase or decrease the level of evoked emotion in each scale. Many other subsequent efforts were less sophisticated, using a mere polar view of sentiment, from positive to negative, such as work by Turney, and Pang who applied different methods for detecting the polarity of product reviews and movie reviews respectively. This work is at the document level. One can also classify a document's polarity on a multi-way scale, which was attempted by Pang and Snyder among others: Pang and Lee expanded the basic task of classifying a movie review as either positive or negative to predict star ratings on either a 3- or a 4-star scale, while Snyder performed an in-depth analysis of restaurant reviews, predicting ratings for various aspects of the given restaurant, such as the food and atmosphere (on a five-star scale). First steps to bringing together various approaches—learning, lexical, knowledge-based, etc.—were taken in the 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium where linguists, computer scientists, and other interested researchers first aligned interests and proposed shared tasks and benchmark data sets for the systematic computational research on affect, appeal, subjectivity, and sentiment in text. Even though in most statistical classification methods, the neutral class is ignored under the assumption that neutral texts lie near the boundary of the binary classifier, several researchers suggest that, as in every polarity problem, three categories must be identified. Moreover, it can be proven that specific classifiers such as the Max Entropy and SVMs can benefit from the introduction of a neutral class and improve the overall accuracy of the classification. There are in principle two ways for operating with a neutral class. Either, the algorithm proceeds by first identifying the neutral language, filtering it out and then assessing the rest in terms of positive and negative sentiments, or it builds a three-way classification in one step. This second approach often involves estimating a probability distribution over all categories (e.g. naive Bayes classifiers as implemented by the NLTK). Whether and how to use a neutral class depends on the nature of the data: if the data is clearly clustered into neutral, negative and positive language, it makes sense to filter the neutral language out and focus on the polarity between positive and negative sentiments. If, in contrast, the data are mostly neutral with small deviations towards positive and negative affect, this strategy would make it harder to clearly distinguish between the two poles. A different method for determining sentiment is the use of a scaling system whereby words commonly associated with having a negative, neutral, or positive sentiment are given an associated number on a −10 to +10 scale (most negative up to most positive) or simply from 0 to a positive upper limit such as +4. This makes it possible to adjust the sentiment of a given term relative to its environment (usually on the level of the sentence). When a piece of unstructured text is analyzed using natural language processing, each concept in the specified environment is given a score based on the way sentiment words relate to the concept and its associated score. This allows movement to a more sophisticated understanding of sentiment, because it is now possible to adjust the sentiment value of a concept relative to modifications that may surround it. Words, for example, that intensify, relax or negate the sentiment expressed by the concept can affect its score. Alternatively, texts can be given a positive and negative sentiment strength score if the goal is to determine the sentiment in a text rather than the overall polarity and strength of the text. There are various other types of sentiment analysis, such as aspect-based sentiment analysis, grading sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral), multilingual sentiment analysis and detection of emotions. === Subjectivity/objectivity identification === This task is commonly defined as classifying a given text (usually a sentence) into one of two classes: objective or subjective. This problem can sometimes be more difficult than polarity classification. The subjectivity of words and phrases may depend on their context and an objective document may contain subjective sentences (e.g., a news article quoting people's opinions). Moreover, as mentioned by Su, results are largely dependent on the definition of subjectivity used when annotating texts. However, Pang showed that removing objective sentences from a document before classifying its polarity helped improve performance. Subjective and objective identification, emerging subtasks of sentiment analysis to use syntactic, semantic features, and machine learning knowledge to identify if a sentence or document contains facts or opinions. Awareness of recognizing factual and opinions is not recent, having possibly first presented by Carbonell at Yale University in 1979. The term objective refers to the incident carrying factual information. Example of an objective sentence: 'To be elected president of the United States, a candidate must be at least thirty-five years of age.' The term subjective describes the incident contains non-factual information in various forms, such as personal opinions, judgment, and predictions, also known as 'private states'. In the example down below, it reflects a private states 'We Americans'. Moreover, the target entity commented by the opinions can take several forms from tangible product to intangible topic matters stated in Liu (2010). Furthermore, three types of attitudes were observed by Liu (2010), 1) positive opinions, 2) neutral opinions, and 3) negative opinions. Example of a subjective sentence: 'We Americans need to elect a president who is mature and who is able to make wise decisions.' This analysis is a classification problem. Each class's collections of words or phrase indicators are defined for to locate desirable patterns on unannotated text. For subjective expression, a different word list has been created. Lists of subjective indicators in words or phrases have been developed by multiple researchers in the linguist and natural language processing field states in Riloff et al. (2003). A dictionary of extraction rules has to be created for measuring given expressions. Over the years, in subjective detection, the features extraction progression from curating features by hand to automated features learning. At the moment, automated learning methods can further separate into supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Patterns extraction with machine learning process annotated and unannotated text have been explored extensively by academic researchers. However, researchers recognized several challenges in developing fixed sets of rules for expressions respectably. Much of the challenges in rule development stems from the nature of textual information. Six challenges have been recognized by several researchers: 1) metaphorical expressions, 2) discrepancies in writings, 3) context-sensitive, 4) represented words with fewer usages, 5) time-sensitive, and 6) ever-growing volume. Metaphorical expressions. The text contains metaphoric expression may impact on the performance on the extraction. Besides, metaphors take in different forms, which may have been contribu

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  • 1 Second Everyday

    1 Second Everyday

    1 Second Everyday (1SE) is an application developed by Cesar Kuriyama. The application allows the user to record one second of video every day and then chronologically edits (mashes) them together into a single film. It is compatible with iOS and Android. The idea of the application was developed by Kuriyama's 1 Second Everyday — Age 30 video. The application was launched in January 2013. 1 Second Everyday played a part in the plot of Chef and also became the inspiration for the 2014 short animated clip Feast. == Background == === Kuriyama's video === In February 2011, when Cesar Kuriyama turned 30, after saving money, he quit his job in an advertising firm and took a year off to travel. During this time, he started working on a project he called 1 Second Everyday. As part of the project, every day he recorded one second of video – something that was supposed to help him remember that day. He started the project because he was frustrated with his memory. He planned to stockpile the 365 one-second clips into one film to serve as a memento of his year. While working on the project Kuriyama realized that recording one second every day impacted the decisions he made in a positive way. After a year he made a 365-second clip out of his recordings. The video called 1 Second Everyday – Age 30, went viral. According to Kuriyama, he was initially inspired to take a year off from work by a TED talk given by Stefan Sagmeister called "The Power of Time Off." Kuriyama also delivered a TED talk about 1 Second Everyday in 2012 at TED 2012 in Long Beach California. === Kickstarter campaign === After completing his own video, Kuriyama decided to develop an application that would allow the users to record one second every day and compile their own videos. He developed a prototype of the application and then in 2012, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for completing the application. The campaign became one of the most backed app campaigns in the history of Kickstarter. It was backed by 11,281 backers who pledged a total of $56,959 on an initial goal of $20,000. Following the completion of the Kickstarter campaign, he partnered with an application design studio in Brooklyn to develop the application. 1 Second Everyday was released two weeks after the completion of its Kickstarter campaign. == Application == The application was released for iOS on 10 January 2013. An Android-compatible version of the application was developed later. Using it, the user can record the videos in the application or they can select one second portions from their libraries. 1 Second Everyday dates every snippet. The user can also set alarms to remember to record their daily video. In order to compile a video, the user selects the seconds they want and the application creates a compilation video. The user can keep multiple timelines. It also allows users to post directly on social networks. The main interface in 1 Second Everyday is a calendar, which shows the user which days have snippets and which they can still fill in. In the beginning, 1 Second Everyday restricted the recording to one second. However, the developers later released Super Seconds, which allowed users to record an additional half a second video. In 2014, 1 Second Everyday Crowds was launched, which is an area in the application featuring compilations of second clips from different users. == In the media == The Kickstarter campaign of 1 Second Everyday was featured in Entrepreneur's 3 Innovative Tech Startups on Kickstarter Right Now in 2012. The application was featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gawker and other media outlets. By the end of the launch day, it was in Top 10 Free Apps on App Store. It was also selected as the App of the Week on GeekWire in 2013. Several other one-second compilation videos were also posted on the Internet after Kuriyama's video gained media attention. Sam Cornwell, an English photographer documented his son Indigo's growth using a montage of one-second iPhone clips. He shot these clips every single day from the moment of birth right up to the baby's first birthday. According to Cornwell, he was inspired by Kuriyama's project. The video of Cornwell's son gained considerable media attention after it was posted on YouTube. Save the Children also made a video commercial based on a similar format that showed a British girl oblivious of the Syrian war end up being a refugee. 1SE was a finalist for the Fast Company Innovation by Design Award in 2015, but lost to Google Maps. In 2015, Google Android created a gallery, Leap Second 2015, with the help of Droga5 and Kuriyama. The gallery showcased how people around the world enjoyed the one extra second of their lives. Through the 1 Second Everyday app available at Google Play, people were able to submit their extra second, which were then vetted and added to the gallery. The viewers were able to view other celebratory seconds from around the world as well as searching for them using different hashtags.

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  • Key Transparency

    Key Transparency

    Key Transparency allows communicating parties to verify public keys used in end-to-end encryption. In many end-to-end encryption services, to initiate communication a user will reach out to a central server and request the public keys of the user with which they wish to communicate. If the central server is malicious or becomes compromised, a man-in-the-middle attack can be launched through the issuance of incorrect public keys. The communications can then be intercepted and manipulated. Additionally, legal pressure could be applied by surveillance agencies to manipulate public keys and read messages. With Key Transparency, public keys are posted to a public log that can be universally audited. Communicating parties can verify public keys used are accurate.

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  • Sharenting

    Sharenting

    "Sharenting" is a portmanteau of "sharing" and "parenting", describing the practice of parents publicizing a large amount of potentially sensitive content about their children on internet platforms, most notably on social media. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. Proponents of sharenting frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting-related posts out of context. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent–child relationship. Academic research has been conducted over the potential social motivations for sharenting and legal frameworks to balance child privacy with this parental practice. Researchers have conducted several psychological surveys, outlining social media accessibility, parental self-identification with children, and social pressure as potential causes for sharenting. Legal scholars have identified international human rights laws, labor protections, and recent online child privacy statutes as potential legal standards to check sharenting abuses. == History == The origins of the term "sharenting" have been attributed to the Wall Street Journal, where they called it "oversharenting," a portmanteau of "oversharing" and "parenting." Priya Kumar suggests that recording life moments of children rearing is not a new practice: people have been using diaries, scrapbooks and baby log books as the media of documentation for centuries. Scholars assert that sharenting has become popular as a result of social media, which has made many people more comfortable with sharing their lives and those of their children online. The trend of oversharing on social media has raised public attention in the 2010s and become the focus of a number of editorials and academic research projects. It was also added to Times Word of the Day in February 2013 and Collins English Dictionary in 2016 given its influence. == Popularity == Several studies describe sharenting as an international phenomenon with widespread prevalence across households. In the United States, researchers at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital found that almost 75% of American parents were familiar with someone who over-shared information about their child on social media, and an AVG survey determined that 92% of all American two-year-olds had some presence on the internet. In Australia, Fisher-Price conducted a survey which revealed that 90% of Australian parents admitted to over-sharing. In Spain and Czech Republic, a survey of approximately 1,500 parents found that 70-80% participated in sharenting. In the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy, a Research Now report revealed that almost three-quarters of surveyed parents said that they were "willing to share images of their infants". Some claim that sharenting presents a violation of child privacy, and this backlash includes anti-sharenting sites and apps that block baby pictures. One particular outlet of protest was the blog STFU Parents, founded in 2009 to criticize parental oversharing on social media. Some parents felt that these criticisms of sharenting often took posts out of context and neglected some positive aspects of the practice, including advancing a stronger sense of online community. Others, while acknowledging the potential privacy violations of sharenting, suggested a more tailored approach that would only permit posting under certain conditions, notwithstanding audience and identification restrictions for social media posts. == Motivations == Research has suggested that sharenting is associated with a mix of parent self-identification with children, mothering pressures, and the accessibility of social media. Conducting 17 interviews with mothers in the United Kingdom, a London School of Economics study found that parent bloggers often re-explained their sharing practices in terms of expressing their own personal identity, representing their own child as part of themselves. In particular, the report surveyed the use of blogs as a networking vehicle to connect parents with similar family situations and found that sharenting parents, by filtering self-presentation through their parent-child relationship, adopted a more relational identity on social media websites. This included identifying oneself in terms of parental circumstances, whether it be raising a child with a disability or being a single mother. Alternatively, some have suggested that these online expressions indicate the infiltration of individual pride into the sphere of parenting, as family photography becomes a means to "show off" one's children to the others and strengthens a parent's sense of individuated self. Addressing the prevalence of mothers engaging in sharenting, those who purport this view argue that the rise of digital communication has pressured mothers into performing the role of a "good" parent on social media platforms. They claim that these developments may reinforce a dominant vision of a "normal" family, as sharenting posts could be motivated by the need to converge to a normative interpretation of family. == Controversy == While some people assert that online platforms enable parents to establish a community and seek parenting support, others are concerned about the children's data privacy and their lack of informed consent. Sharing content may not only embarrass children but also creates an initial digital footprint, a history of online activity, that the children themselves have no control over. This might bring some negative consequences, such as being ridiculed at school or leaving a negative impression on future employers. === Parental benefits === Many parents use social media to seek parenting advice and share information about their children. With the convenience of online platforms, parent bloggers can easily connect with other people in similar situations as well as those who are willing to contribute meaningful advice. By forming a community, parents can receive encouragement from empathetic peers and assistance from experts in children rearing. Parents whose children need special educational accommodations or have disabilities often found themselves detached from the mainstream parenting style. Therefore, they regard online blogs as a means to gain support from others and support back. Online blogging enables parents of children with disabilities and special needs to connect with other parents. The advice from similarly situated families can open up new possibilities that help the parents "negotiate the complexities of social services, health care, and schools". However, in some cases, posting online about a parent's struggles can cause a backlash, as advocates may accuse the parent of presenting people with that condition in a bad light, or wonder how the child will feel, if they later read these posts and see how much their parents struggled to care for them. Such advantages of social media are not limited to particular groups of parents. In general, most parents benefit from exchanging parenting experience. Statistically speaking, 72% of parents rate social media useful for emotional connection and affirmations, and 74% of them receive support about parenting from friends on social media. Sharenting also plays a role in fostering interpersonal relationships. As the images and words about children's lives initiate conversations, parents use sharenting to stay connected with distant friends and relatives. In particular, mothers, as a research study reveals, are willing to engage in sharenting since they believe that the positive contents can help avoid digital conflicts and maintain close relations with those in their social circles. Researchers also found that female participants in this study carefully chose photos and phrases to express love and present laudable behaviors of children in their updates, which indicates their intention to convey positive messages. These messages also promote a close social network for a child as the parents invites supportive family members and friends into daily life. === Children's privacy === Given the potential misuse of digital data, people are critical about sharenting, and the majority of parents are cautious about the wrongdoing with online posts. The disclosure of minors' personal information, such as geographic location, name, date of birth, pictures, and the schools they attend, might expose them to illegal practices by recipients with malicious intentions. Sharented information is often abused for "identity theft", when imposters manage to track, stalk, commit fraud against children, or even blackmail the family. According to Barclays, online fraud targeting the young generation will contribute to a loss of £670 million (approximately $790 million) by 2030, and two-thirds of identity fraud will be related to s

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