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Jipi And The Paranoid Chip
"Jipi and the Paranoid Chip" is a science fiction short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in ''Forbes'' magazine's July 7, 1997 issue. It is part of the Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon universe. Plot The story deals with the concepts of mindshare and evolutionary software. Jipi, a former Pacific-rim airline flight attendant, is staying with her friend in a high-rise luxury apartment building inside Manila's walled district of Intramuros. The fiftieth floor of a neighboring high-rise houses the Asian-Pacific headquarters of Mindshare Management, under regional supervisor Mr. Cardoza. Goto Engineering is conducting a citywide sewer replacement project which produces unpleasant gases that have hurt the city's hospitality industry. Jipi, looking for work, is given employment by Mr. Cardoza at the Manila Hotel in order to monitor guests in the lobby for signs of having noticed the unpleasant sewer gases and having the guests distracted by Cardoza's actors before they become aware o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, has beco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Trade Zone
A free-trade zone (FTZ) is a class of special economic zone. It is a geographic area where goods may be imported, stored, handled, manufactured, or reconfigured and re- exported under specific customs regulation and generally not subject to customs duty. Free trade zones are generally organized around major seaports, international airports, and national frontiers—areas with many geographic advantages for trade. Definition The World Bank defines free trade zones as "small, fenced-in, duty-free areas, offering warehousing, storage, and distribution facilities for trade, transshipment, and re-export operations". Free-trade zones can also be defined as labor-intensive manufacturing centers that involve the import of raw materials or components and the export of factory products, but this is a dated definition as more and more free-trade zones focus on service industries such as software, back-office operations, research, and financial services. Synonyms Free-trade zones are refer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1997 Short Stories
File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of the most observed comets of the 20th century; Golden Bauhinia Square, where sovereignty of Hong Kong is handed over from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China; the 1997 Central European flood kills 114 people in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany; Korean Air Flight 801 crashes during heavy rain on Guam, killing 229; Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner land on Mars; flowers left outside Kensington Palace following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Titanic (1997 film) rect 200 0 400 200 Harry Potter rect 400 0 600 200 Comet Hale-Bopp rect 0 200 300 400 Death of Diana, Princess of Wales rect 300 200 600 400 Handover of Hong Kong rect 0 400 200 600 Mars Pathfind ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Great Simoleon Caper
"The Great Simoleon Caper" is a short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in ''TIME'' on March 1, 1995. It deals with concepts familiar to Stephenson's readers: encryption, digital currency, and distributed republics. It appears to be set in a United States that precedes the events in Stephenson's novel ''Snow Crash'' (1992), using an early version of his Metaverse. Plot summary In the story, the protagonist is an underemployed mathematician who resides in the house of his brother's family in Chicago. The brother, owner of an advertising agency, has won a large contract to create ads for "Simoleons", a form of non-governmental electronic "currency". To launch the product, they plan to give away 27 million Simoleons to the winners of a contest. The contest is based on the long-used format of "guess the number of jelly beans in the container", with Chicago's Soldier Field and 26 other football stadiums as the containers. The brother asks the mathematician ("the hero") to do the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel ''Neuromancer'' helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Other influential cyberpunk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genetic Programming
In artificial intelligence, genetic programming (GP) is a technique of evolving programs, starting from a population of unfit (usually random) programs, fit for a particular task by applying operations analogous to natural genetic processes to the population of programs. The operations are: selection of the fittest programs for reproduction (crossover) and mutation according to a predefined fitness measure, usually proficiency at the desired task. The crossover operation involves swapping random parts of selected pairs (parents) to produce new and different offspring that become part of the new generation of programs. Mutation involves substitution of some random part of a program with some other random part of a program. Some programs not selected for reproduction are copied from the current generation to the new generation. Then the selection and other operations are recursively applied to the new generation of programs. Typically, members of each new generation are on avera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mindshare
Mind share relates to the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion. When people think of examples of a product type or category, they usually think of a limited number of brand names. The aim of mind share is to establish a brand as being one of the best kinds of a given product or service, and to even have the brand name become a synonym for the product or service offered. For example, a prospective buyer of a college education will have several thousand colleges to choose from. However, the evoked set, or set of schools considered, will probably be limited to about ten. Of these ten, the colleges that the buyer is most familiar with will receive the greatest attention. Marketers and promoters of mind share try to maximize the popularity of their product, so that the brand co-exists with deeper, more empirical categories of objects. Kleenex, for example, can distinguish itself as a type of tissue. But, bec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Goto Dengo
''Cryptonomicon'' is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare. Genre and subject matter ''Cryptonomicon'' is closer to the genres of historical fiction and contemporary techno-t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Baroque Cycle
''The Baroque Cycle'' is a series of novels by American writer Neal Stephenson. It was published in three volumes containing eight books in 2003 and 2004. The story follows the adventures of a sizable cast of characters living amidst some of the central events of the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. Despite featuring a literary treatment consistent with historical fiction, Stephenson has characterized the work as science fiction, because of the presence of some anomalous occurrences and the work's particular emphasis on themes relating to science and technology. The sciences of cryptology and numismatics feature heavily in the series, as they do in some of Stephenson's other works. Books The ''Baroque Cycle'' consists of several novels "lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint"; Stephenson felt calling the works a ''trilogy'' would be "bogus". Appearing in print in 2003 and 200 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
