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MetaFilter
MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-and-answer subsite Ask MetaFilter. The site has eight paid staff members as of December 2021, including the owner. MetaFilter has about 12,000 active members as of early 2011. Community MetaFilter was founded by Matthew Haughey in 1999. Haughey wrote the software for the site himself, using Macromedia ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server. The earliest Front Page Post (FPP), concerning cats in scanners and the resulting pictures, debuted on July 14, 1999. From its early beginnings as a small community of webloggers who traded links, the weblog now enjoys international popularity. Members are permitted to make one post to the front page per day, which must feature at least one link. Members may then comment on these posts. Although membersh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kaycee Nicole
Kaycee Nicole, aka Kaycee Nicole Swenson, was a fictitious persona played by an American woman named Debbie Swenson (born Deborah Marie Dickman 1960), in an early case of Münchausen by Internet. Between 1999 and when the hoax was discovered in 2001, Swenson, playing the role of Kaycee, represented herself on numerous websites as a teenager suffering from terminal leukemia. Kaycee was reported to have died on May 14, 2001, and her death was publicized on May 16; shortly thereafter, members of the online communities that had supported her unraveled the story and discovered that Kaycee had never actually existed. Debbie Swenson confessed on her blog to the hoax on May 20, 2001. Creation In 1998, Debbie Swenson's real daughter, Kelli Burke (born Kelli Jo Swenson in 1985), who was in middle school at the time in Gracemont, Oklahoma, created the online persona of "Kaycee Nicole" with a group of her friends. The group created a webpage for the nonexistent girl and used photos of a hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matthew Haughey
Matthew Haughey (born October 10, 1972) is an American programmer, web designer, and blogger best known as the founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, where he is known as ''mathowie''. Life and career Haughey grew up in Placentia, California. He graduated from the University of California, Riverside with a B.S. and M.S. in environmental science. Haughey designed his first website in 1995. From 1997 to 2000, Haughey was a webmaster and programmer for Social Sciences Computing at UCLA. In 2000, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area where, as an employee of Pyra Labs, he participated in the development of early versions of Blogger. In 2001, he worked briefly for KnowNow and Bitzi. Haughey then relocated to Portland, Oregon, and from 2002 to 2005 served as creative director at Creative Commons. In 1999, Haughey launched MetaFilter, a community weblog and internet forum, which he programmed himself using Macromedia ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server. This paper was completed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jessamyn West (librarian)
Jessamyn Charity West (born September 5, 1968) is an American library technologist and writer known for her activism and work on the digital divide. She is the creator of librarian.net. She is the Vermont Chapter Councilor of the American Library Association, and was Director of Operations at the massive group blog MetaFilter from 2005 to 2014. She is now the owner of MetaFilter. Early life and education West grew up in Massachusetts, where her father, computer engineer Tom West, worked for RCA and Data General. He was the key figure in the 1981 Tracy Kidder book '' The Soul of a New Machine''. Her mother, Elizabeth (née Cohon), was the younger sister of actor Peter Coyote. She may be named after the author Jessamyn West (according to her parents, a "coincidence"), and as a child corresponded with her. She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst. She completed graduate work at the University of Washington for a Master of Librarianship degree, and moved back to Vermont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Holden Karnofsky
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. He is a co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the research and grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 and is vice chair of its board of directors. Biography Education and early career Karnofsky graduated from Harvard University with a degree in social studies in 2003. At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon. After graduating, he worked at Bridgewater Associates, an investment management fund based in Westport, Connecticut.' GiveWell At Bridgewater, Karnofsky met his future GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld. In 2006, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld started a charity club where they and other Bridgewater employees pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to. In mid-2007, with donations from their colleagues, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed a fund called "The Clear Fund", and quit their jobs to w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sockpuppet (Internet)
A sock puppet is defined as a person whose actions are controlled by another. It is a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, and is often used to refer to alternative online identities or user accounts used for purposes of deception. Online, it came to be used to refer to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person. The use of the term has expanded to now include other misleading uses of online identities, such as those created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions, such as viewing a social media account that they are blocked from, suspension, or an outright ban from a website. A significant difference between a pseudonym and a sock puppet is that the latter poses as a third party independent of the main account operator. Sock puppets are unwelcome in many online communities a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GiveWell
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead. History In 2006 Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who worked at a hedge fund A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as sho ... in Connecticut, formed an informal group with colleagues to evaluate charities based on data and performance metrics similar to those they used at the fund, and were surprised to find the data often didn't exist. The next year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed GiveWell as a nonprofit to provide financial analyst services to donors. They eventually d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Astroturfing
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection. The term ''astroturfing'' is derived from AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass, as a play on the word "grassroots". The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. Definition In political science, it is defined as the process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public, and is designed to create the image of public consensus where there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2001 Nisqually Earthquake
The 2001 Nisqually earthquake occurred at on February 28, 2001 and lasted nearly a minute. The intraslab earthquake had a moment magnitude of 6.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (''Severe''). The epicenter was in the southern Puget Sound, northeast of Olympia, but the shock was felt in Oregon, British Columbia, eastern Washington, and Idaho. This was the most recent of several large earthquakes that occurred in the Puget Sound region over a 52-year period and caused property damage valued at $1–4 billion. One person died of a heart attack and several hundred were injured. Tectonic setting The Puget Sound area is prone to deep earthquakes due to the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate's subduction under the North American Plate at 3.5 to 4.5 cm a year as part of the Cascadia subduction zone. Three types of earthquake are observed in the area: rare megathrust events, such as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, shallow events within the North American Plate and deeper intra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina was a destructive Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused over 1,800 fatalities and $125 billion in damage in late August 2005, especially in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. It was at the time the costliest tropical cyclone on record and is now tied with 2017's Hurricane Harvey. The storm was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record to make landfall in the contiguous United States. Katrina originated on August 23, 2005, as a tropical depression from the merger of a tropical wave and the remnants of Tropical Depression Ten. Early the following day, the depression intensified into a tropical storm as it headed generally westward toward Florida, strengthening into a hurricane two hours before making landfall at Hallandale Beach on August 25. After briefly weakening to tropical storm strength o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
July 2005 London Bombings
The following is a timeline of the 7 July 2005 London bombings and 21 July 2005 London bombings. All times are in British Summer Time ( BST or UTC+01:00). First explosions 7 July 2005 * 08:50: Initial reports of an incident between Liverpool Street and Aldgate tube stations, either an explosion or a collision between trains. The reports from the two stations were initially thought to relate to two separate incidents * 08:50: Explosion on a train between King's Cross and Russell Square tube stations. Eyewitnesses report explosion appeared to come from outside the train ''(this explosion was initially reported to have happened at 08:56)''. * 08:50: Explosion on train at Edgware Road tube station ''(this explosion was initially reported to have happened at 09:17)''. * 09:28: Metronet, the private consortium responsible for maintaining Tube infrastructure says the incident was caused by some sort of power surge. * 09:33: Reports of an incident at Edgware Road tube station. Repo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
9/11
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the Northeastern United States to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and the third plane into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States military) in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane was intended to hit a federal government building in Washington, D.C., but crashed in a field following a passenger revolt. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and instigated the war on terror. The first impact was that of American Airlines Flight 11. It was crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan at 8:46 a.m. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03, the World Trade Center’s Sout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blogger
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. ''Blog'' can also be used as a verb, meaning ''to maintain or add content to a blog''. The emergence and growth of blogs in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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