George Mason University's Historical Hoaxes
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George Mason University's Historical Hoaxes
Students of George Mason University, as part of T. Mills Kelly's course, "Lying about the past", have created two popular Internet hoaxes: the "Edward Owens hoax," and the "Reddit serial killer hoax." It is a goal of the course to create a sweeping Internet deception. As Kelly stated in the course's syllabus: Edward Owens hoax The Edward Owens hoax was a historical hoax created by students at George Mason University in 2008 as a class project for "Lying About the Past". The students created a website and a fictitious entry on English Wikipedia about Edward Owens, purportedly a Virginia oyster fisherman born in 1853 who became a pirate. The hoax was reported as true in some media outlets. Hoax description Students published a blog and videos about the fictional Owens, created by the fictional student "Jane Browning". The blog asserted that Owens fell on hard times during the Long Depression of the 1870s and took up piracy in Chesapeake Bay to survive. The students wrote that ...
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George Mason University
George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was originally founded in 1949 as a Northern Virginia regional branch of the University of Virginia. Named after Founding Father of the United States George Mason in 1959, it became an independent university in 1972. The school has since grown into the largest public university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mason operates four campuses in Virginia ( Fairfax, Arlington, Front Royal, and Prince William), as well as a campus in Incheon, South Korea. The flagship campus is in Fairfax. The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Two professors were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics during their time at George Mason University: James M. Buchanan in 1986 and Vernon L. Smith in 2002. Ea ...
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Wordpress
WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as "Themes". WordPress was originally created as a blog-publishing system but has evolved to support other web content types including more traditional mailing lists and Internet fora, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS) and online stores. One of the most popular content management system solutions in use, WordPress is used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites . WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little, as a fork of ''b2/cafelog''. The software is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license. To function, WordPress has to be installed on a web server, either part of ...
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Internet Hoaxes
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 consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. The origins of the Internet date back to the development of packet switching and research commissioned by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s to enable time-sharing of computers. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s to enable resource sharing. Th ...
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Hoaxes In The United States
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax. Whereas the promoters of frauds, fakes, and scams devise them so that they will withstand the highest degree of scrutiny customary in the affair, hoaxers are confident, justifiably or not, that their representations will receive no scrutiny at all. They have such confidence because their representations belong to a world of notions fundamental to the victims' views of reality, but whose truth and importance they accept without argument or evidence, and so never question. Some hoaxers intend eventually to unmask their representations as in fact a hoax so as to expose their victims as fools; seeking some form of profit, other hoaxers hope to maintain the hoax indefini ...
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History Of Wikipedia
Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998. Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This characteristic greatly contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', and even Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclop ...
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Fictional Pirates
This is a list of fictional pirates, organized into either air pirates, sea pirates, or space pirates. They may be outlaws, but are not the same as space marines or space cowboys in space westerns. To learn more about pirates and their context in popular culture as a whole, see the Pirates in popular culture and List of pirate films pages. Within in each category, the characters are organized alphabetically ''by surname'' (i.e. last name), or by single name if the character does not have a surname. If more than two characters are in one entry, the last name of the first character is used. Sea pirates Air pirates Space pirates See also * The Five Gold Bands * Roberto Cofresí in popular culture * Lego Pirates * Il pirata * Polly and the Pirates * Red Seas Under Red Skies * The Red Seas * List of pirates Notes References External links Pirates in pop culture CNN, September 18, 2015 Pirates in popular culture page by Mandeville Special Collections Library, 2013 ...
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2008 In The United States
Events from the year 2008 in the United States. Incumbents Federal government * President: George W. Bush ( R-Texas) * Vice President: Dick Cheney ( R-Wyoming) * Chief Justice: John Roberts (New York) * Speaker of the House of Representatives: Nancy Pelosi ( D-California) * Senate Majority Leader: Harry Reid ( D-Nevada) * Congress: 110th Events January * January 3 – Joe Biden drops out of the running for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. * January 5 – A levee bursts in Fernley, Nevada, flooding a large portion of the town and forcing the evacuations of 3,500 residents. * January 7–January 11 – A tornado outbreak passes through eastern North America, producing at least 75 tornadoes across the mid-eastern United States and record-breaking temperatures in eastern Canada. Four fatalities are reported. * January 7 – NBC announces the 2008 Golden Globe Awards Ceremony will be canceled due to the Writers Guild of America strike. The ...
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2008 Hoaxes
8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of the form , being an integer greater than 1. * the first number which is neither prime nor semiprime. * the base of the octal number system, which is mostly used with computers. In octal, one digit represents three bits. In modern computers, a byte is a grouping of eight bits, also called an octet. * a Fibonacci number, being plus . The next Fibonacci number is . 8 is the only positive Fibonacci number, aside from 1, that is a perfect cube. * the only nonzero perfect power that is one less than another perfect power, by Mihăilescu's Theorem. * the order of the smallest non-abelian group all of whose subgroups are normal. * the dimension of the octonions and is the highest possible dimension of a normed division algebra. * th ...
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List Of Hoaxes
The following is a list of hoaxes: Proven hoaxes These are some claims that have been revealed or proven definitively to be deliberate public hoaxes. This list does not include hoax articles published on or around April 1, a long list of which can be found in the "List of April Fools' Day jokes" article. A–F * Cedric Allingham, fictitious author who wrote a book about meeting the pilot of a Martian spacecraft. Allingham was created by British astronomer Patrick Moore and his friend Peter Davies. * Alien autopsy, a hoax film by Ray Santilli * '' The Archko Volume'', a collection of documents related to the life of Jesus * Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a fake Syrian blogger * ''The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk'', a book about purported sexual enslavement of a nun * Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet co-authored the book ''China Under the Empress Dowager'' using a fake diary as a major source; a manuscript of Backhouse's memoirs also was mostly fiction. He falsely represented ...
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Digital History
Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D modeling, and big data analysis. By utilizing these resources, the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories History Rooted in earlier social science history work, particularly aro ...
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Vandalism On Wikipedia
On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, offensive, libelous or degrading in any way. Throughout its history, Wikipedia has struggled to maintain a balance between allowing the freedom of open editing and protecting the accuracy of its information when false information can be potentially damaging to its subjects. Vandalism is easy to commit on Wikipedia because anyone can edit the site, with the exception of protected pages (which, depending on the level of protection, can only be edited by users with certain privileges). Certain Wikipedia bots are capable of detecting and removing vandalism faster than any human editor could. It is not a criminal act to vandalize Wikipedia. However, it is against the site's terms of use to vandalize or otherwise cause disruption. Vandals are blocked from editing, and may a ...
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Situational Ethics
Situational ethics or situation ethics takes into account ''only'' the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it only according to absolute moral standards. With the intent to have a fair basis for judgments or action, one looks to personal ideals of what is appropriate to guide them, rather than an unchanging universal code of conduct, such as Biblical law under divine command theory or the Kantian categorical imperative. Proponents of situational approaches to ethics include existentialist philosophers Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Specifically Christian forms of situational ethics placing love above all particular principles or rules were proposed in the first half of the twentieth century by liberal theologians Rudolf Bultmann, John A. T. Robinson, and Joseph Fletcher. These theologians point specifically to ''agapē'', or unconditional love, as the highest end. Other theologians who advocated situationa ...
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