AI Headshot Apk

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  • Hierarchical RBF

    Hierarchical RBF

    In computer graphics, hierarchical RBF is an interpolation method based on radial basis functions (RBFs). Hierarchical RBF interpolation has applications in treatment of results from a 3D scanner, terrain reconstruction, and the construction of shape models in 3D computer graphics (such as the Stanford bunny, a popular 3D model). This problem is informally named as "large scattered data point set interpolation." == Method == The steps of the interpolation method (in three dimensions) are as follows: Let the scattered points be presented as set P = { c i = ( x i , y i , z i ) | i = 1 N ⊂ R 3 } {\displaystyle \mathbf {P} =\{\mathbf {c} _{i}=(\mathbf {x} _{i},\mathbf {y} _{i},\mathbf {z} _{i})\vert _{i=1}^{N}\subset \mathbb {R} ^{3}\}} Let there exist a set of values of some function in scattered points H = { h i | i = 1 N ⊂ R } {\displaystyle \mathbf {H} =\{\mathbf {h} _{i}\vert _{i=1}^{N}\subset \mathbb {R} \}} Find a function f ( x ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {f} (\mathbf {x} )} that will meet the condition f ( x ) = 1 {\displaystyle \mathbf {f} (\mathbf {x} )=1} for points lying on the shape and f ( x ) ≠ 1 {\displaystyle \mathbf {f} (\mathbf {x} )\neq 1} for points not lying on the shape As J. C. Carr et al. showed, this function takes the form f ( x ) = ∑ i = 1 N λ i φ ( x , c i ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {f} (\mathbf {x} )=\sum _{i=1}^{N}\lambda _{i}\varphi (\mathbf {x} ,\mathbf {c} _{i})} where φ {\displaystyle \varphi } is a radial basis function and λ {\displaystyle \lambda } are the coefficients that are the solution of the following linear system of equations: [ φ ( c 1 , c 1 ) φ ( c 1 , c 2 ) . . . φ ( c 1 , c N ) φ ( c 2 , c 1 ) φ ( c 2 , c 2 ) . . . φ ( c 2 , c N ) . . . . . . . . . . . . φ ( c N , c 1 ) φ ( c N , c 2 ) . . . φ ( c N , c N ) ] ∗ [ λ 1 λ 2 . . . λ N ] = [ h 1 h 2 . . . h N ] {\displaystyle {\begin{bmatrix}\varphi (c_{1},c_{1})&\varphi (c_{1},c_{2})&...&\varphi (c_{1},c_{N})\\\varphi (c_{2},c_{1})&\varphi (c_{2},c_{2})&...&\varphi (c_{2},c_{N})\\...&...&...&...\\\varphi (c_{N},c_{1})&\varphi (c_{N},c_{2})&...&\varphi (c_{N},c_{N})\end{bmatrix}}{\begin{bmatrix}\lambda _{1}\\\lambda _{2}\\...\\\lambda _{N}\end{bmatrix}}={\begin{bmatrix}h_{1}\\h_{2}\\...\\h_{N}\end{bmatrix}}} For determination of surface, it is necessary to estimate the value of function f ( x ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {f} (\mathbf {x} )} in specific points x. A lack of such method is a considerable complication on the order of O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} ^{2})} to calculate RBF, solve system, and determine surface. == Other methods == Reduce interpolation centers ( O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} ^{2})} to calculate RBF and solve system, O ( m n ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {m} \mathbf {n} )} to determine surface) Compactly support RBF ( O ( n log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} \log {\mathbf {n} })} to calculate RBF, O ( n 1.2..1.5 ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} ^{1.2..1.5})} to solve system, O ( m log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {m} \log {\mathbf {n} })} to determine surface) FMM ( O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} ^{2})} to calculate RBF, O ( n log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {n} \log {\mathbf {n} })} to solve system, O ( m + n log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {O} (\mathbf {m} +\mathbf {n} \log {\mathbf {n} })} to determine surface) == Hierarchical algorithm == A hierarchical algorithm allows for an acceleration of calculations due to decomposition of intricate problems on the great number of simple (see picture). In this case, hierarchical division of space contains points on elementary parts, and the system of small dimension solves for each. The calculation of surface in this case is taken to the hierarchical (on the basis of tree-structure) calculation of interpolant. A method for a 2D case is offered by Pouderoux J. et al. For a 3D case, a method is used in the tasks of 3D graphics by W. Qiang et al. and modified by Babkov V.

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  • RadioVIS

    RadioVIS

    RadioVIS is a protocol for sideband signalling of images and text messages for a broadcast audio service to provide a richer visual experience. It is an application and sub-project of RadioDNS, which allows radio consumption devices to look up an IP-based service based on the parameters of the currently tuned broadcast station. In January 2015, the functionality of RadioVIS was integrated to Visual Slideshow (ETSI TS 101 499 v3.1.1). The original RVIS01 document is now deprecated. == Details == The protocol enables either Streaming Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP) or Comet to deliver text and image URLs to a client, with the images being acquired over a HTTP connection. The technology is currently implemented by a number of broadcasters across the world, including Global Radio, Bauer Radio in the UK, RTÉ in the Republic Of Ireland, Südwestrundfunk in Germany and a number of Australian media groups amongst others. A number of software clients exist to show the protocol, as well as hardware devices such as the Pure Sensia from Pure Digital, and the Colourstream from Roberts Radio.

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  • User-generated content

    User-generated content

    User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is content generated by users of the Internet such as images, videos, audio, text, testimonials, software, and user interactions. Online content aggregation platforms such as social media, discussion forums and wikis by their interactive and social nature, no longer produce multimedia content but provide tools to produce, collaborate, and share a variety of content, which can affect the attitudes and behaviors of the audience in various aspects. This transforms the role of consumers from passive spectators to active participants. User-generated content is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, entertainment, customer engagement, advertising, gossip, research and more. It is an example of the democratization of content production and the flattening of traditional media hierarchies. The BBC adopted a user-generated content platform for its websites in 2005, and Time magazine named "You" as the Person of the Year in 2006, referring to the rise in the production of UGC on Web 2.0 platforms. CNN also developed a similar user-generated content platform, known as iReport. There are other examples of news channels implementing similar protocols, especially in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe or terrorist attack. Social media users can provide key eyewitness content and information that may otherwise have been inaccessible. Since 2020, there has been an increasing number of businesses who are utilizing User Generated Content (UGC) to promote their products and services. Several factors significantly influence how UGC is received, including the quality of the content, the credibility of the creator, and viewer engagement. These elements can impact users' perceptions and trust towards the brand, as well as influence the buying intentions of potential customers. UGC has proven to be an effective method for brands to connect with consumers, drawing their attention through the sharing of experiences and information on social media platforms. Due to new media and technology affordances, such as low cost and low barriers to entry, the Internet is an easy platform to create and dispense user-generated content, allowing the dissemination of information at a rapid pace in the wake of an event. == Definition == The advent of user-generated content marked a shift among media organizations from creating online content to providing facilities for amateurs to publish their own content. User-generated content has also been characterized as citizen media as opposed to the "packaged goods media" of the past century. Citizen Media is audience-generated feedback and news coverage. People give their reviews and share stories in the form of user-generated and user-uploaded audio and user-generated video. The former is a two-way process in contrast to the one-way distribution of the latter. Conversational or two-way media is a key characteristic of so-called Web 2.0, which encourages the publishing of one's own content and commenting on other people's content. The role of the passive audience, therefore, has shifted since the birth of new media, and an ever-growing number of participatory users are taking advantage of these interactive opportunities, especially on the Internet, to create independent content. Grassroots experimentation then generated an innovation in sounds, artists, techniques, and associations with audiences, which then are being used in mainstream media. The active, participatory, and creative audience is prevailing today with relatively accessible media, tools, and applications, and its culture is in turn affecting mass media corporations and global audiences. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined three core variables for UGC: Accessible Content: User-generated content (UGC) is publicly produced through platforms located on the Internet and is available to any individual browsing such a publicly accessible website or a public social media account. There are other contexts where users must remain in a community or closed group to access and publish on such platforms (for example, wikis). This is a way of differentiating that although the content is accessible to the audience, there are certain restrictions for the users who generates the content. Creative effort: Creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites that users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered UGC. However, uploading photographs, expressing one's thoughts in a blog post or creating a new music video could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context. Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User-generated content is generally created outside of professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself. == Media pluralism == According to Cisco, in 2016 an average of 96,000 petabytes was transferred monthly over the Internet, more than twice as many as in 2012. In 2016, the number of active websites surpassed 1 billion, up from approximately 700 million in 2012. Reaching 1.66 billion daily active users in Q4 2019, Facebook has emerged as the most popular social media platform globally. Other social media platforms are also dominant at the regional level such as: Twitter in Japan, Naver in the Republic of Korea, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) in Africa, VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki (eng. Classmates) in Russia and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, WeChat and QQ in China. However, a concentration phenomenon is occurring globally giving dominance to a few online platforms that become popular for some unique features they provide, most commonly for the added privacy they offer users through disappearing messages or end-to-end encryption (e.g. Jami, Signal, Snapchat, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp), but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences. Production of freely accessible information has been increasing since 2012. In January 2017, Wikipedia had more than 43 million articles, almost twice as many as in January 2012. This corresponded to a progressive diversification of content and an increase in contributions in languages other than English. In 2017, less than 12 percent of Wikipedia content was in English, down from 18 percent in 2012. Graham, Straumann, and Hogan say that the increase in the availability and diversity of content has not radically changed the structures and processes for the production of knowledge. For example, while content on Africa has dramatically increased, a significant portion of this content has continued to be produced by contributors operating from North America and Europe, rather than from Africa itself. == History == The massive, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary was exclusively composed of user-generated content. In 1857, Richard Chenevix Trench of the London Philological Society sought public contributions throughout the English-speaking world for the creation of the first edition of the OED. As Simon Winchester recounts: So what we're going to do, if I have your agreement that we're going to produce such a dictionary, is that we're going to send out invitations, were going to send these invitations to every library, every school, every university, every book shop that we can identify throughout the English-speaking world... everywhere where English is spoken or read with any degree of enthusiasm, people will be invited to contribute words. And the point is, the way they do it, the way they will be asked and instructed to do it, is to read voraciously and whenever they see a word, whether it's a preposition or a sesquipedalian monster, they are to... if it interests them and if where they read it, they see it in a sentence that illustrates the way that that word is used, offers the meaning of the day to that word, then they are to write it on a slip of paper... the top left-hand side you write the word, the chosen word, the catchword, which in this case is 'twilight'. Then the quotation, the quotation illustrates the meaning of the word. And underneath it, the citation, where it came from, whether it was printed or whether it was in manuscri

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  • Deluxe Media

    Deluxe Media

    Deluxe Media Inc., also known simply as Deluxe and formerly Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Inc., is an American multinational multimedia and entertainment service provisions company owned by Platinum Equity, founded in 1915 by Hungarian-born American film producer William Fox and headquartered in Burbank, California. The company services multiple clients in the film, television, digital content and advertising industries across the globe, and has been recognized with 10 Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements, including developments in CinemaScope pictures (as part of 20th Century Fox) and more recently for a process of creating archival separations from digital image data. == History == Deluxe began as a film processing laboratory established in 1915 by William Fox under the name De Luxe as part of his eponymous film conglomerate corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1916, Fox Film Corporation opened its studio in Hollywood on 13 acres at Sunset and Western. The first Deluxe film laboratory on the west coast was built on the south side of the lot (Fernwood and Serrano), and the laboratory was moved to the new Fox studios building on Manhattan's west side in 1919, where it remained for over 40 years. The "business manager" (later president) of the laboratory was Alan E. Freedman, who guided the company into the 1960s. In 1927, Fox (Deluxe) received a patent for sound-on-film, the Fox Movietone system. In 1927, "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans," an early Movietone film, opened. Fox Movietone News, ran weekly in theaters until 1963. During the Great Depression, Fox Film Corporation encountered financial difficulties. Among the actions taken to maintain liquidity, Fox sold the laboratories in 1932 to Freedman, who renamed the operation Deluxe. Under Freedman's leadership, Deluxe added two more plants in Chicago and Toronto. In January 1934, Fox was granted an option to rebuy DeLuxe before December 31, 1938. On 31 May 1935, under Sidney Kent, Fox merged his film company with Twentieth Century Pictures to form The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation following a bank-infused reorganisation. The merged company then exercised this option in July 1936, with Freedman remaining as president. In 1953, Deluxe developed the widescreen format CinemaScope. Titles included "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954) and "The Seven Year Itch" (1955). Other innovations included the processing and sound striping of CinemaScope, and were patented and/or received Academy awards. In 1962 Freedman retired. In the 1960s, Deluxe closed its New York plant, followed by its plants in Chicago and Toronto, as motion picture production declined on the East Coast. In 1972, Deluxe began large volume videocassette production, with a billion by 1996. In 1990, The Rank Organisation acquired Deluxe from Fox. In 2000, Deluxe began large volume DVD production. In 2006, The Rank Organisation sold Deluxe Film Group to MacAndrews & Forbes, renamed Deluxe Entertainment Services Group. On 9 February 2012, Deluxe acquired Hong Kong–based visual effects and post-production company, Centro Digital Pictures, with its founder John Chu remaining as president while reporting to Alaric McAusland, managing director for Deluxe in Australia. In May 2014, Deluxe shut down its Los Angeles plant at Sunset & Western Studios complex, where other studios themselves were demolished way back in 1971. Also that same year, Deluxe closed the Hollywood film labs, and they gave thousands of orphaned film elements to the Academy Film Archive. The Deluxe Laboratories Collection at the Academy Film Archive consists of over 7,500 35mm and 16mm film elements of various motion pictures dating back to the early 1960s. On 22 April 2015, Deluxe and its longtime competitor, Technicolor S.A., announced that they had entered into a binding agreement to create a new joint venture known as Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema which will specialize in cinema mastering, distribution and management services. Deluxe got acquired on 4 September 2019 by creditors in a debt-for-equity swap to avoid bankruptcy. On 3 October 2019, Deluxe filed for bankruptcy, pending in the Southern District of New York. The same month on the 24th, the company received court approval to emerge from bankruptcy with a comprehensive restructuring plan. On July 1, 2020, Platinum Equity agreed to acquire the distribution division of Deluxe and re-unite with former CEO Cyril Drabinsky who would merge CineVizion, a film distribution company he founded after leaving Deluxe in 2016, into it. The companies Company 3 and Method Studios which formed the creative divisions of Deluxe were sold to Framestore in November 2020.

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  • Information retrieval

    Information retrieval

    Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images, or sounds. Cross-modal retrieval implies retrieval across modalities. Automated information retrieval systems are used to reduce what has been called information overload. An IR system is a software system that provides access to books, journals, and other documents, as well as storing and managing those documents. Web search engines are the most visible IR applications. == Overview == An information retrieval process begins when a user enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval, a query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevance. An object is an entity that is represented by information in a content collection or database. User queries are matched against the database information. However, as opposed to classical SQL queries of a database, in information retrieval the results returned may or may not match the query, so results are typically ranked. This ranking of results is a key difference of information retrieval searching compared to database searching. Depending on the application the data objects may be, for example, text documents, images, audio, mind maps or videos. Often the documents themselves are not kept or stored directly in the IR system, but are instead represented in the system by document surrogates or metadata. Most IR systems compute a numeric score on how well each object in the database matches the query, and rank the objects according to this value. The top ranking objects are then shown to the user. The process may then be iterated if the user wishes to refine the query. == History == there is ... a machine called the Univac ... whereby letters and figures are coded as a pattern of magnetic spots on a long steel tape. By this means the text of a document, preceded by its subject code symbol, can be recorded ... the machine ... automatically selects and types out those references which have been coded in any desired way at a rate of 120 words a minute The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information was popularized in the article As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It would appear that Bush was inspired by patents for a 'statistical machine' – filed by Emanuel Goldberg in the 1920s and 1930s – that searched for documents stored on film. The first description of a computer searching for information was described by Holmstrom in 1948, detailing an early mention of the Univac computer. Automated information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s: one even featured in the 1957 romantic comedy Desk Set. In the 1960s, the first large information retrieval research group was formed by Gerard Salton at Cornell. By the 1970s several different retrieval techniques had been shown to perform well on small text corpora such as the Cranfield collection (several thousand documents). Large-scale retrieval systems, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, came into use early in the 1970s. In 1992, the US Department of Defense along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cosponsored the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) as part of the TIPSTER text program. The aim of this was to look into the information retrieval community by supplying the infrastructure that was needed for evaluation of text retrieval methodologies on a very large text collection. This catalyzed research on methods that scale to huge corpora. The introduction of web search engines has boosted the need for very large scale retrieval systems even further. By the late 1990s, the rise of the World Wide Web fundamentally transformed information retrieval. While early search engines such as AltaVista (1995) and Yahoo! (1994) offered keyword-based retrieval, they were limited in scale and ranking refinement. The breakthrough came in 1998 with the founding of Google, which introduced the PageRank algorithm, using the web's hyperlink structure to assess page importance and improve relevance ranking. During the 2000s, web search systems evolved rapidly with the integration of machine learning techniques. These systems began to incorporate user behavior data (e.g., click-through logs), query reformulation, and content-based signals to improve search accuracy and personalization. In 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, introducing features that would later incorporate semantic web technologies through the development of its Satori knowledge base. Academic analysis have highlighted Bing's semantic capabilities, including structured data use and entity recognition, as part of a broader industry shift toward improving search relevance and understanding user intent through natural language processing. A major leap occurred in 2018, when Google deployed BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to better understand the contextual meaning of queries and documents. This marked one of the first times deep neural language models were used at scale in real-world retrieval systems. BERT's bidirectional training enabled a more refined comprehension of word relationships in context, improving the handling of natural language queries. Because of its success, transformer-based models gained traction in academic research and commercial search applications. Simultaneously, the research community began exploring neural ranking models that outperformed traditional lexical-based methods. Long-standing benchmarks such as the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), initiated in 1992, and more recent evaluation frameworks Microsoft MARCO(MAchine Reading COmprehension) (2019) became central to training and evaluating retrieval systems across multiple tasks and domains. MS MARCO has also been adopted in the TREC Deep Learning Tracks, where it serves as a core dataset for evaluating advances in neural ranking models within a standardized benchmarking environment. As deep learning became integral to information retrieval systems, researchers began to categorize neural approaches into three broad classes: sparse, dense, and hybrid models. Sparse models, including traditional term-based methods and learned variants like SPLADE, rely on interpretable representations and inverted indexes to enable efficient exact term matching with added semantic signals. Dense models, such as dual-encoder architectures like ColBERT, use continuous vector embeddings to support semantic similarity beyond keyword overlap. Hybrid models aim to combine the advantages of both, balancing the lexical (token) precision of sparse methods with the semantic depth of dense models. This way of categorizing models balances scalability, relevance, and efficiency in retrieval systems. As IR systems increasingly rely on deep learning, concerns around bias, fairness, and explainability have also come to the picture. Research is now focused not just on relevance and efficiency, but on transparency, accountability, and user trust in retrieval algorithms. == Applications == Areas where information retrieval techniques are employed include (the entries are in alphabetical order within each category): === General applications === Digital libraries Information filtering Recommender systems Media search Blog search Image retrieval 3D retrieval Music retrieval News search Speech retrieval Video retrieval Search engines Site search Desktop search Enterprise search Federated search Mobile search Social search Web search === Domain-specific applications === Expert search finding Genomic information retrieval Geographic information retrieval Information retrieval for chemical structures Information retrieval in software engineering Legal information retrieval Vertical search === Other retrieval methods === Methods/Techniques in which information retrieval techniques are employed include: Cross-modal retrieval Adversarial information retrieval Automatic summarization Multi-document summarization Compound term processing Cross-lingual retrieval Document classification Spam filtering Question answering == Model types == In order to effectively retrieve relevant documents by IR strategies, the documents are typically transformed into a suitable representation. Each retrieval strategy incorporates a specific model for its document representation purposes. The picture on the right illustrates the relationship of som

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  • Elonis v. United States

    Elonis v. United States

    Elonis v. United States, 575 U.S. 723 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case concerning whether conviction of threatening another person over interstate lines (under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c)) requires proof of subjective intent to threaten or whether it is enough to show that a "reasonable person" would regard the statement as threatening. In controversy were the purported threats of violent rap lyrics written by Anthony Douglas Elonis and posted to Facebook under a pseudonym. The ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner. It was the first time the Court has heard a case considering true threats and the limits of speech on social media. == Background == In May 2010, Elonis was in the process of divorce and made a number of public Facebook posts. Prior to his postings, he had lost his job at an amusement park. He "posted the script of a sketch" by The Whitest Kids U' Know, which originally referenced saying "I want to kill the President of the United States" and replaced the president with his wife: Elonis ended the post with this statement: "Art is about pushing limits. I'm willing to go to jail for my constitutional rights. Are you?" A week later, Elonis posted about local law enforcement and a kindergarten class, which caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then, he wrote a post on Facebook about one of the agents who visited him: He concluded: == Arrest and Conviction == These actions led to Elonis's arrest on December 8, 2010. He was indicted by a grand jury on five counts of threats to his estranged ex-wife, park employees and visitors, local law enforcement, an FBI agent, and a kindergarten class that had been relayed through interstate communication. At the district court, Elonis moved to dismiss the indictment for failing to allege that he had intended to threaten anyone, claiming his Facebook post was not were not intended as a threat. He argued that, as an aspiring rap artist, his posts were intended to be a form of artistic expression to help him cope with his recent loses. According to him, he did not mean anything said in his posts in a literal sense. His motion was denied. He requested a jury instruction that "the government must prove that he intended to communicate a true threat", which was also denied. He was convicted on the last four of the five counts, and was sentenced to 44 months in prison and three years on supervised release. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Third Circuit, renewing his challenge to the jury instructions. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court based on lack of any attempt to show intent to threaten and on First Amendment rights. == Decision == On June 1, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Elonis's conviction in an 8–1 decision. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a seven-justice majority, Samuel Alito authored an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, and Clarence Thomas authored a dissenting opinion. The finding of the circuit court was reversed and the matter remanded. === Majority opinion === The majority opinion, written by Roberts, did not rule on First Amendment matters or on the question of whether recklessness was sufficient mens rea to show intent. It ruled that mens rea was required to prove the commission of a crime under §875(c). Importantly, the mens rea issue had been preserved for review, since Elonis had raised that objection at every stage of the previous proceedings. The government contended that the presence of the words "intent to extort" in §875(b) and §875(d) implied that the absence in §875(c) was constructive. The court disagreed, holding that the absence of the language in §875(c) was because the section was intended to have a broader scope than threats relating to extortion. The opinion drew on many Supreme Court cases holding that in criminal law, mens rea was required though it had not been mentioned explicitly in statute. Consequently, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Elonis. === Alito's concurrence === Justice Samuel Alito, concurring in part and dissenting in part, opined that while agreeing that mens rea was required and specifically that showing negligence was not sufficient, the court should have ruled on the question of recklessness. He further opined that recklessness was sufficient to show a crime under that provision on the basis that going further would amount to amending the statute, rather than interpreting it. Since Elonis explicitly argued that recklessness was not sufficient, Alito said: I would therefore remand for the Third Circuit to determine if Elonis’s failure (indeed, refusal) to argue for recklessness prevents reversal of his conviction. The Third Circuit should also have the opportunity to consider whether the conviction could be upheld on harmless error grounds. Alito also addressed the First Amendment question, elided by the majority opinion. He held that "lyrics in songs that are performed for an audience or sold in recorded form are unlikely to be interpreted as a real threat to a real person. ... Statements on social media that are pointedly directed at their victims, by contrast, are much more likely to be taken seriously." === Thomas's dissent === Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting, wrote against discarding the "general intent" standard without replacing it with a clearer standard. Thomas argued that "there is no historical practice requiring more than general intent when a statute regulates speech." Thomas cited Rosen v. United States, arguing that general intent was sufficient in this case. However, the majority opinion offers refutation in that Rosen turned on ignorance of the law: knowledge as to whether material was legally obscene, not on whether it was intended to be obscene. Thomas also supported the government's claim that the presence of "intent to extort" language in the adjacent §875(b) and did not address the majority's reasoning on that language. Thomas used precedent, notably from the states and 18th-century England based on other but similar and, arguably, influencing legislation to support his "general intent" claim. Thomas also drew a parallel with general intent in tort. While he sought to address the First Amendment issues, he never strayed far from "general intent". == Aftermath == On remand, the Third Circuit reaffirmed the conviction "concluding beyond a reasonable doubt that Elonis would have been convicted if the jury had been properly instructed" and therefore was harmless error. In 2022, Elonis was once again arrested and indicted on three counts of cyberstalking involving three people. It was discovered that between 2018 and 2021, Elonis had sent numerous threatening messages over email, text, voice mail, and social media platforms like Twitter to a former prosecutor of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, his ex-girlfriend, and ex-wife. On August 5, after a five-day trial, Elonis was found guilty on all three counts, and on March 23, 2023, he was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Edward G. Smith of Easton, Pennsylvania to twelve years and seven months in prison.

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  • Daylight Computer Co.

    Daylight Computer Co.

    Daylight Computer Co. is a Public Benefit Company that designs and manufactures devices that do not emit blue light or flicker. Anjan Katta, the company's founder and CEO, stated that he started the company to reduce his personal eyestrain and the distraction that came with conventional devices. The first device that the company released is the Daylight DC-1, a tablet using a monochrome transflective liquid-crystal display designed for outdoor use, while also being usable indoors with an amber backlight. The company's goal is to create a "healthy computer." == History == In June 2018, Anjan Katta began the process of designing a device that did not emit blue light or flicker. He was inspired by the Kindle stating that he wanted to create a device that was, "an analog object that happens to have digital magical capabilities.” By 2020, he created his first scientific prototype and created the first proof-of-concept prototype in 2021. In the early research and development stages of the device, Katta had spent $300,000 of his own money. Eventually, Katta obtained a $12 million investment from current and former executives of companies such as Oculus, Pinterest, and Dropbox. In 2024, the company held a launch party at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park for the Daylight DC1, the company's first device. The event had roughly 200 attendees. Later that year, Daylight sold out its first run of 5,000 devices. The Daylight DC1 is a 1.2 pound tablet that runs its own operating system, SolOS, based on Android 13. It has a refresh rate of 60 Hz, fast enough to process video. In 2025, the product was demonstrated by Danny Jones on the Joe Rogan Experience. The company has been described by outlets such as Wired and VentureBeat as a "returning computing to hippie ideals" and being a product for "techno-hippies." The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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  • AMiner (database)

    AMiner (database)

    AMiner (formerly ArnetMiner) is a free online service used to index, search, and mine big scientific data. == Overview == AMiner (ArnetMiner) is designed to search and perform data mining operations against academic publications on the Internet, using social network analysis to identify connections between researchers, conferences, and publications. This allows it to provide services such as expert finding, geographic search, trend analysis, reviewer recommendation, association search, course search, academic performance evaluation, and topic modeling. AMiner was created as a research project in social influence analysis, social network ranking, and social network extraction. A number of peer-reviewed papers have been published arising from the development of the system. It has been in operation for more than three years, and has indexed 130,000,000 researchers and more than 265 million publications. The research was funded by the Chinese National High-tech R&D Program and the National Science Foundation of China. AMiner is commonly used in academia to identify relationships between and draw statistical correlations about research and researchers. It has attracted more than 10 million independent IP accesses from 220 countries and regions. The product has been used in Elsevier's SciVerse platform, and academic conferences such as SIGKDD, ICDM, PKDD, WSDM. == Operation == AMiner automatically extracts the researcher profile from the web. It collects and identifies the relevant pages, then uses a unified approach to extract data from the identified documents. It also extracts publications from online digital libraries using heuristic rules. It integrates the extracted researchers’ profiles and the extracted publications. It employs the researcher name as the identifier. A probabilistic framework has been proposed to deal with the name ambiguity problem in the integration. The integrated data is stored into a researcher network knowledge base (RNKB). The principal other product in the area are Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scirus, and the open source project CiteSeer. == History == It was initiated and created by professor Jie Tang from Tsinghua University, China. It was first launched in March 2006. The following provide a list of updates in the past years: March 2006, Version 0.1, Functions include researcher profiling, expert search, conference search, and publication search. The system was developed in Perl; August 2006, Version 1.0, The system was re-implemented in Java; July 2007, Version 2.0, New functions include researcher interest mining, association search, survey paper finding (unavailable now); April 2008, Version 3.0, New functions include query understanding, new GUI, and search log analysis; November 2008, Version 4.0, New functions include graph search, topic modeling, NSF/NSFC funding information extraction; April 2009, Version 5.0, New functions include Profile edition, open API service, Bole search, course search (unavailable now); December 2009, Version 6.0, New functions include academic performance evaluation, user feedback, conference analysis; May 2010, Version 7.0, New functions include name disambiguation, paper-reviewer recommendation, ArnetPage creation; March 2012, Version II, renamed as AMiner, rewrote all the codes and redesign the GUI. New functions include: geographic search, ArnetAPP platform. June 2014, Version II, renamed as AMiner, rewrote all the codes and redesign the GUI. New functions include: geographic search, ArnetAPP platform. December 2015, a completely new version got online. May 2017, professional version got online. April 2018, New functions include Trend Analysis, a deep learning based Name Disambiguation == Resources == AMiner published several datasets for academic research purpose, including Open Academic Graph, DBLP+citation (a data set augmenting citations into the DBLP data from Digital Bibliography & Library Project), Name Disambiguation, Social Tie Analysis. For more available datasets and source codes for research, please refer to.

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  • ZipBooks

    ZipBooks

    ZipBooks is a free online accounting software company based in American Fork, Utah. The cloud-based software is an accounting and bookkeeping tool that helps business owners process credit cards, track finances, and send invoices, among other features. == History == ZipBooks was founded by Tim Chaves in June 2015, backed by venture capital firm Peak Ventures. The company secured an additional $2 million of funding in July 2016, and in 2017 it was awarded a $100,000 economic grant by the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development Technology Commercialization and Innovation Program. == Products == ZipBooks' core modules are invoicing, transactions, bills, reporting, time tracking, contacts, and payroll. Accrual accounting was added in 2017. The application is available on G Suite, iOS, Slack, and as a web application. == Reception == Computerworld compared ZipBooks favorably with other accounting software. PC Magazine praised its user experience, but stated it lacked "a lot of features that competing sites offer".

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  • MIDI Show Control

    MIDI Show Control

    MIDI Show Control (MSC), is a real-time System Exclusive extension of the international Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard. MSC enables all types of entertainment equipment to communicate with each other through the process of show control. The MIDI Show Control protocol is a technical standard ratified by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in 1991, which allows entertainment control devices to talk with each other and with computers to perform show control functions in live and prerecorded entertainment applications. Just like musical MIDI, MSC does not transmit the actual show media - it simply transmits digital information about a multimedia performance. == How MSC works == When any cue is called by a user (typically a stage manager) and/or preprogrammed timeline in a show control software application, the show controller transmits one or more MSC messages from its 'MIDI Out' port. A typical MSC message sequence is: the user has just called a cue the cue is for lighting device 3 the cue is number 45.8 the cue is in cue list 7 MSC messages are serially transmitted in the same way as musical messages and are fully compatible with all conventional MIDI hardware; however, many modern MSC devices now use Ethernet communications for higher bandwidth and the flexibility afforded by networks. Other performance parameters are also transmitted, such as lighting desk submaster settings using MSC SET messages. All cues that a media control device is capable of playing are assigned MSC messages within the Show Controller's cue list and they are transmitted from its MIDI Out port at the appropriate show time, depending on the actions of the user and the show controller's internally timed sequences. All MSC-compatible instruments follow the MSC specification and thus transmit identical MSC messages for identical MSC events, such as the playing of a certain cue on the media controller. Since they follow a published standard, all MSC devices can communicate with and understand each other, as well as with computers that have been programmed to understand MSC messages using the MSC Command Set. All MSC compatible instruments have a built-in MIDI interface and many now follow one of the various MIDI-over-Ethernet protocols. == History == To create the MSC spec, Charlie Richmond headed the USITT MIDI Forum on their Callboard Network in 1990, which included developers and designers from the theatre sound and lighting industry from around the world. It is believed that this was the first international standard to be developed without a single physical meeting of the participants. This Forum created the MSC standard between January and September 1990. This was ratified by the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) in January 1991, and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee (JMSC) later that year, becoming a part of the standard MIDI specification in August 1991. The first show to fully use the MSC specification was the Magic Kingdom Parade at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in September 1991. == MIDI Show Control software ==

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  • Svelte

    Svelte

    Svelte is a free and open-source component-based front-end software framework and language created by Rich Harris and maintained by the Svelte core team. Svelte is not a monolithic JavaScript library imported by applications: instead, Svelte compiles HTML templates to specialized code that manipulates the DOM directly, which may reduce the size of transferred files and give better client performance. Application code is also processed by the compiler, inserting calls to automatically recompute data and re-render UI elements when the data they depend on is modified. This also avoids the overhead associated with runtime intermediate representations, such as virtual DOM, unlike traditional frameworks (such as React and Vue) which carry out the bulk of their work at runtime, i.e. in the browser. The compiler itself is written in JavaScript. Its source code is licensed under MIT License and hosted on GitHub. Among comparable frontend libraries, Svelte has one of the smallest bundle footprints at merely 2KB. == History == The predecessor of Svelte is Ractive.js, which Rich Harris created in 2013. Version 1 of Svelte was written in JavaScript and was released on 29 November 2016. The name Svelte was chosen by Rich Harris and his coworkers at The Guardian. Version 2 of Svelte was released on 19 April 2018. It set out to correct what the maintainers viewed as mistakes in the earlier version such as replacing double curly braces with single curly braces. Version 3 of Svelte was written in TypeScript and was released on 21 April 2019. It rethought reactivity by using the compiler to instrument assignments behind the scenes. The SvelteKit web framework was announced in October 2020 and entered beta in March 2021. SvelteKit 1.0 was released in December 2022 after two years in development. Version 4 of Svelte was released on 22 June 2023. It was a maintenance release, smaller and faster than version 3. A part of this release was an internal rewrite from TypeScript back to JavaScript, with JSDoc type annotations. This was met with confusion from the developer community, which was addressed by the creator of Svelte, Rich Harris. Version 5 of Svelte was released on October 19, 2024 at Svelte Summit Fall 2024 with Rich Harris cutting the release live while joined by other Svelte maintainers. Svelte 5 was a ground-up rewrite of Svelte, changing core concepts such as reactivity and reusability. Its primary feature, runes, reworked how reactive state is declared and used. Runes are function-like macros that are used to declare a reactive state, or code that uses reactive states. These runes are used by the compiler to indicate values that may change and are depended on by other states or the DOM. Svelte 5 also introduces Snippets, which are reusable "snippets" of code that are defined once and can be reused anywhere else in the component. Svelte 5 was initially met with controversy due to its many changes, and thus deprecations caused primarily by runes. However, most of this has subsided since the initial announcement of runes, and the further refining of Svelte 5. Also at Svelte Summit Fall 2024, Ben McCann announced the Svelte CLI under the sv package name on npm. In early 2025, the Svelte team announced Asynchronous Svelte, an experimental feature set centered around asynchronous reactivity in Svelte using await expressions. As of August 2025, the feature is available via an experimental compiler option. This coincided with the experimental release of remote functions, an RPC feature in SvelteKit, Svelte's metaframework. Key early contributors to Svelte became involved with Conduitry joining with the release of Svelte 1, Tan Li Hau joining in 2019, and Ben McCann joining in 2020. Rich Harris and Simon Holthausen joined Vercel to work on Svelte fulltime in 2022. Dominic Gannaway joined Vercel from the React core team to work on Svelte fulltime in 2023. == Syntax == Svelte applications and components are defined in .svelte files, which are HTML files extended with templating syntax that is based on JavaScript and is similar to JSX. Svelte's core features are accessed through runes, which syntactically look like functions, but are used as macros by the compiler. These runes include: The $state rune, used for declaring a reactive state value The $derived rune, used for declaring reactive state derived from one or more states The $effect rune, used for declaring code that reruns whenever its dependencies change Starting with Svelte 5, the framework introduced a significant reactivity overhaul that replaces the previous `$:` reactive declarations with new runes such as $state, $derived, and $effect. The $effect rune is now used for post-render operations without modifying state, while $derived is used for computations that depend on other reactive values. This change aims to simplify the mental model of reactivity and make component logic more explicit. Additionally, the { JavaScript code } syntax can be used for templating in HTML elements and components, similar to template literals in JavaScript. This syntax can also be used in element attributes for uses such as two-way data binding, event listeners, and CSS styling. A Todo List example made in Svelte is below: == Associated projects == The Svelte maintainers created SvelteKit as the official way to build projects with Svelte. It is a Next.js/Nuxt-style full-stack framework that dramatically reduces the amount of code that gets sent to the browser. The maintainers had previously created Sapper, which was the predecessor of SvelteKit. The Svelte maintainers also maintain a number of integrations for popular software projects under the Svelte organization including integrations for Vite, Rollup, Webpack, TypeScript, VS Code, Chrome Developer Tools, ESLint, and Prettier. A number of external projects such as Storybook have also created integrations with Svelte and SvelteKit. == Influence == Vue.js modeled its API and single-file components after Ractive.js, the predecessor of Svelte. == Adoption == Svelte is widely praised by developers. Taking the top ranking in multiple large scale developer surveys, it was chosen as the Stack Overflow 2021 most loved web framework and 2020 State of JS frontend framework with the most satisfied developers. Recent surveys continue to show Svelte's strong developer satisfaction, with the 2024 State of JS survey maintaining its position among the most praised frontend frameworks. The 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reported that 73% of developers who used Svelte want to continue working with it, and noted that Stack Overflow's own team used Svelte for building their 2024 Developer Survey results site. Svelte has been adopted by a number of high-profile web companies including The New York Times, Google, Apple, Spotify, Radio France, Square, Yahoo, ByteDance, Rakuten, Bloomberg, Reuters, Ikea, Facebook, Logitech, and Brave. A community group of primarily non-maintainers, known as the Svelte Society, run the Svelte Summit conference, write a Svelte newsletter, host a Svelte podcast, and host a directory of Svelte tooling, components, and templates.

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  • Hardware security

    Hardware security

    Hardware security is a discipline originated from the cryptographic engineering and involves hardware design, access control, secure multi-party computation, secure key storage, ensuring code authenticity, measures to ensure that the supply chain that built the product is secure among other things. A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides cryptoprocessing. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server. Some providers in this discipline consider that the key difference between hardware security and software security is that hardware security is implemented using "non-Turing-machine" logic (raw combinatorial logic or simple state machines). One approach, referred to as "hardsec", uses FPGAs to implement non-Turing-machine security controls as a way of combining the security of hardware with the flexibility of software. Hardware backdoors are backdoors in hardware. Conceptionally related, a hardware Trojan (HT) is a malicious modification of electronic system, particularly in the context of integrated circuit. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a physical entity that is embodied in a physical structure and is easy to evaluate but hard to predict. Further, an individual PUF device must be easy to make but practically impossible to duplicate, even given the exact manufacturing process that produced it. In this respect it is the hardware analog of a one-way function. The name "physical unclonable function" might be a little misleading as some PUFs are clonable, and most PUFs are noisy and therefore do not achieve the requirements for a function. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in integrated circuits and are typically used in applications with high security requirements. Many attacks on sensitive data and resources reported by organizations occur from within the organization itself.

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  • Wavelet noise

    Wavelet noise

    Wavelet noise is an alternative to Perlin noise which reduces the problems of aliasing and detail loss that are encountered when Perlin noise is summed into a fractal. == Algorithm detail == The basic algorithm for 2-dimensional wavelet noise is as follows: Create an image, R {\displaystyle R} , filled with uniform white noise. Downsample R {\displaystyle R} to half-size to create R ↓ {\displaystyle R^{\downarrow }} , then upsample it back up to full size to create R ↓↑ {\displaystyle R^{\downarrow \uparrow }} . Subtract R ↓↑ {\displaystyle R^{\downarrow \uparrow }} from R {\displaystyle R} to create the end result, N {\displaystyle N} . This results in an image that contains all the information that cannot be represented at half-scale. From here, N {\displaystyle N} can be used similarly to Perlin noise to create fractal patterns.

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  • Asynchronous module definition

    Asynchronous module definition

    Asynchronous module definition (AMD) is a specification for the programming language JavaScript. It defines an application programming interface (API) that defines code modules and their dependencies, and loads them asynchronously if desired. Implementations of AMD provide the following benefits: Website performance improvements. AMD implementations load smaller JavaScript files, and then only when they are needed. Fewer page errors. AMD implementations allow developers to define dependencies that must load before a module is executed, so the module does not try to use outside code that is not available yet.... In addition to loading multiple JavaScript files at runtime, AMD implementations allow developers to encapsulate code in smaller, more logically-organized files, in a way similar to other programming languages such as Java. For production and deployment, developers can concatenate and minify JavaScript modules based on an AMD API into one file, the same as traditional JavaScript. AMD provides some CommonJS interoperability. It allows for using a similar exports and require() interface in the code, although its own define() interface is more basal and preferred. The AMD specification is implemented by Dojo Toolkit, RequireJS, and other libraries.

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  • Browser sniffing

    Browser sniffing

    Browser sniffing (also known as User agent sniffing and browser detection) is a set of techniques used in websites and web applications in order to determine the web browser a visitor is using, and to serve browser-appropriate content to the visitor. It is also used to detect mobile browsers and send them mobile-optimized websites. This practice is sometimes used to circumvent incompatibilities between browsers due to misinterpretation of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), or the Document Object Model (DOM). While the World Wide Web Consortium maintains up-to-date central versions of some of the most important Web standards in the form of recommendations, in practice no software developer has designed a browser which adheres exactly to these standards; implementation of other standards and protocols, such as SVG and XMLHttpRequest, varies as well. As a result, different browsers display the same page differently, and so browser sniffing was developed to detect the web browser in order to help ensure consistent display of content. == Sniffer methods == === Client-side sniffing === Web pages can use programming languages such as JavaScript which are interpreted by the user agent, with results sent to the web server. For example: This code is run by the client computer, and the results are used by other code to make necessary adjustments on client-side. In this example, the client computer is asked to determine whether the browser can use a feature called ActiveX. Since this feature was proprietary to Microsoft, a positive result will indicate that the client may be running Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is no longer a reliable indicator since Microsoft's open-source release of the ActiveX code, however, meaning that it can be used by any browser. === Standard Browser detection method === The web server communicates with the client using a communication protocol known as HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which specifies that the client send the server information about the browser being used to view the website in a User-Agent header. === Server-side sniffing === Extensive browser techniques enable persistent user tracking even if users try to stay anonymous. See device fingerprint for more details on browser fingerprinting. == Issues and standards == Many websites use browser sniffing to determine whether a visitor's browser is unable to use certain features (such as JavaScript, DHTML, ActiveX, or cascading style sheets), and display an error page if a certain browser is not used. However, it is virtually impossible to account for the tremendous variety of browsers available to users. Generally, a web designer using browser sniffing to determine what kind of page to present will test for the three or four most popular browsers, and provide content tailored to each of these. If a user is employing a user agent not tested for, there is no guarantee that a usable page will be served; thus, the user may be forced either to change browsers or to avoid the page. The World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards for the construction of web pages, recommends that web sites be designed in accordance with its standards, and be arranged to "fail gracefully" when presented to a browser which cannot deal with a particular standard. Browser sniffing increases maintenance needed. Websites treating some browsers differently should provide an alternative version for other browsers. Use of user agent strings are error-prone because the developer must check for the appropriate part, such as "Gecko" instead of "Firefox". They must also ensure that future versions are supported. Furthermore, some browsers allow changing the user agent string, making the technique useless.

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