Obscura

CLF Dox

Here is something amazing. Maybe

posted by Cobb @ 12:45 PM

AMU

The programs taught in the School of Security and Global Studies truly embody our motto, "Educating Those Who Serve.” Students with majors in this school have an understanding of the world—appreciating differences in political, economic, and social cultures. Our faculty members are highly-credentialed and respected leaders in their fields, and many of them currently work in the U.S. government and in the U.S. intelligence community. Our graduates are employed in leadership positions at agencies ranging from the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security to the intelligence services, as well as private businesses throughout the world.

posted by Cobb @ 8:41 AM

Three Phase

Three-phase electric power is a common method of alternating-current electric power transmission.^[1] It is a type of polyphase system, and is the most common method used by electric power distribution grids worldwide to distribute power. It is also used to power large motors and other large loads. A three-phase system is generally more economical than others because it uses less conductor material to transmit electric power than equivalent single-phase or two-phase systems at the same voltage.^[2]

In a three-phase system, three circuit conductors carry three alternating currents (of the same frequency) which reach their instantaneous peak values at different times. Taking one conductor as the reference, the other two currents are delayed in time by one-third and two-thirds of one cycle of the electrical current. This delay between "phases" has the effect of giving constant power transfer over each cycle of the current, and also makes it possible to produce a rotating magnetic field in an electric motor.

posted by Cobb @ 3:10 PM

NFPA 704

NFPA 704 is a standard maintained by the U.S.-based National Fire Protection Association. It defines the colloquial "fire diamond" used by emergency personnel to quickly and easily identify the risks posed by nearby hazardous materials. This is necessary to help determine what, if any, specialty equipment should be used, procedures followed, or precautions taken during the first moments of an emergency response.

posted by Cobb @ 8:03 PM

Vela6911

The Vela Incident (sometimes referred to as the South Atlantic Flash) was an as-yet unidentified double flash of light detected by a United States Vela satellite on September 22, 1979. It has been speculated that the double flash, characteristic of a nuclear explosion, was the result of a nuclear weapons test. A US presidential panel concluded that it "was probably not from a nuclear explosion, although [it cannot be ruled] out that this signal was of nuclear origin"^[1], but others examining the data "including DIA, the national laboratories, and contractors reached a very different conclusion - that the data supported the conclusion that on September 22, 1979 Vela 6911 had detected a nuclear detonation."^[2]

posted by Cobb @ 12:17 PM

Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche"). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation, such as with the film The Polar Express.^[1]

posted by Cobb @ 1:41 PM

Indifference Curves

In microeconomic theory, an indifference curve is a graph showing different bundles of goods, each measured as to quantity, between which a consumer is indifferent. That is, at each point on the curve, the consumer has no preference for one bundle over another. In other words, they are all equally preferred. One can equivalently refer to each point on the indifference curve as rendering the same level of utility (satisfaction) for the consumer. Utility is then a device to represent preferences rather than something from which preferences come (Geanakoplis, 1987, p. 117). The main use of indifference curves is in the representation of potentially observable demand patterns for individual consumers over commodity bundles (Böhm and Haller, 1987, p. 785).

posted by Cobb @ 10:54 AM