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SYMAN is an artificial intelligence technology that uses data from social media profiles to identify trends in the job market. SYMAN is designed to organize actionable data for products and services including recruiting, human capital management, CRM, and marketing. SYMAN was developed with a $21 million series B financing round secured by Identified, which was led by VantagePoint Capital Partners and Capricorn Investment Group.
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Link-richness is the quality, possessed by some websites, of having many hyperlinks. Classified advertising sites like Craigslist tend to be very link-rich, sometimes with hundreds of links on their main page. They help users find the links they are looking for by grouping links into clusters. Inadequate link richness has been described as frustrating to readers, as it reduces transparency of site content from the main page. Students new to wiki collaboration were found to need guidance in how to take full advantage of the medium's potential for creating link-rich content. Link-richness in some contexts can be distracting, as when an article is surrounded by extraneous links. Indeed, it is becoming accepted as a best practice for universities to have link-rich home pages that do not rely on user categorisation and exploration of long sequences of links and are not constrained by traditional boundaries between departments. Tools are sometimes needed to make the publishing of link-rich web sites tractable, and many people may lack the technical skills, time, or inclination to engage in hand- crafting new digital document forms. A link-rich site that is low on content is sometimes referred to as a "gateway site." Link-rich portals were popular on the Web in 2000. Yahoo! and other sites featuring categories with many links were heavily used and often required fewer than three clicks to reach the content. Web designers were creating flat sites with content positioned close to the top of pages.
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This is a comparison of web frameworks for front-end web development that are reliant on JavaScript code for their behavior. == General information == == High-level framework comparison == JavaScript-based web application frameworks, such as React and Vue, provide extensive capabilities but come with associated trade-offs. These frameworks often extend or enhance features available through native web technologies, such as routing, component-based development, and state management. While native web standards, including Web Components, modern JavaScript APIs like Fetch and ES Modules, and browser capabilities like Shadow DOM, have advanced significantly, frameworks remain widely used for their ability to enhance developer productivity, offer structured patterns for large-scale applications, simplify handling edge cases, and provide tools for performance optimization. Frameworks can introduce abstraction layers that may contribute to performance overhead, larger bundle sizes, and increased complexity. Modern frameworks, such as React 18 and Vue 3, address these challenges with features like concurrent rendering, tree-shaking, and selective hydration. While these advancements improve rendering efficiency and resource management, their benefits depend on the specific application and implementation context. Lightweight frameworks, such as Svelte and Preact, take different architectural approaches, with Svelte eliminating the virtual DOM entirely in favor of compiling components to efficient JavaScript code, and Preact offering a minimal, compatible alternative to React. Framework choice depends on an application’s requirements, including the team’s expertise, performance goals, and development priorities. A newer category of web frameworks, including enhance.dev, Astro, and Fresh, leverages native web standards while minimizing abstractions and development tooling. These solutions emphasize progressive enhancement, server-side rendering, and optimizing performance. Astro renders static HTML by default while hydrating only interactive parts. Fresh focuses on server-side rendering with zero runtime overhead. Enhance.dev prioritizes progressive enhancement patterns using Web Components. While these tools reduce reliance on client-side JavaScript by shifting logic to build-time or server-side execution, they still use JavaScript where necessary for interactivity. This approach makes them particularly suitable for performance-critical and content-focused applications. == Features == == Browser support ==
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Virtual Print Fee (VPF) is a subsidy paid by a film distributor towards the purchase of digital cinema projection equipment for use by a film exhibitor in the presentation of first release motion pictures. The subsidy is paid in the form of a fee per booking of a movie, intended to match the savings that occurs by not shipping a film print. The model is designed to help redistribute the savings realized by studios when using digital distribution instead of film print distribution and is intended to vanish when the transition phase is over when the vast majority of cinemas screens are equipped. == History == The first public demonstration of digital projection for cinema took place at ShoWest in 1999, and it was readily apparent that the technology was further ahead than the business model. Early technology presentations attempted to claim that the technology would pay for itself through new revenues generated by new forms of content. But exhibitors knew their audience, and could see that digital projection was only a replacement technology, creating new financial liabilities, and not new revenue. It wasn’t until the rollout of digital 3-D years later in 2005 that digital projection demonstrated that it could be used to generate additional revenue. The economics were challenging. Film projectors and platters cost in the neighborhood of US$30,000, while early digital projectors cost up to US$150,000. Further, film projectors had a lifetime of 30 years with relatively small annual expenditures in maintenance and replacement parts. On the other hand, exhibitors felt they would be lucky to get 10 years of service from a digital projector, after which there would have to be a refresh in capital expenditure. Meanwhile, distributors would realize significant savings by eliminating the high cost of film prints with corresponding shipping costs, and instead distributing digital files either by satellite or hard drive. The Virtual Print Fee was designed to better balance savings and expenditures for both exhibitors and distributors. It is intended to primarily assist in the replacement of film projectors, and not assist in the purchase of new projection equipment for new construction. To give confidence to financial institutions that digital cinema technology was stable and worthy of investment, Digital Cinema Initiatives was created in 2002, resulting in the release of the first version of the DCI Digital Cinema System Specification in 2005. The DCI Specification continues to be the core specification for digital cinema, establishing the baseline technology and system requirements for which studios will release digital movies. The first set of VPF agreements executed with four major studios were announced by Christie/AIX in November 2005. Christie/AIX at that time was a subsidiary of Access Integrated Technology, now renamed Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. The agreements were for the rollout of digital cinema technology to 4000 screens. Since that time, numerous other Digital Cinema Deployment Agreements have been executed around the world, allowing exhibitors in nearly every territory to benefit from VPF subsidies in the conversion from film projection to digital projection.
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The Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, commonly known as the GGE on LAWS, refers to a group of governmental experts established under the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a United Nations arms control framework. The group examines legal, ethical, societal and moral questions that arise from the increased use of autonomous robots to carry weapons and to be programmed to engage in combat in various situations that might arise, including battles between countries, or in patrolling border areas or sensitive areas, or other similar roles. As of 18 March 2025, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons had 128 High Contracting Parties. In the Geneva Conventions, the term "High Contracting Parties" refers to the states that have joined the conventions and are therefore bound to uphold them. Among the countries that have joined are states with tense relations or ongoing armed conflict with one another, including Russia and Ukraine, Israel and the State of Palestine, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. == Background == In 2013, the Meeting of State Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons agreed on a mandate on lethal autonomous weapon systems and tasked its chairperson with convening an informal Meeting of Experts to discuss issues related to emerging technologies in the area of LAWS. Those informal Meetings of Experts were then held in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and their reports fed into subsequent meetings of the High Contracting Parties. At the Fifth CCW Review Conference in 2016, the High Contracting Parties decided to establish an open-ended Group of Governmental Experts on emerging technologies in the area of LAWS, building on the earlier expert meetings. Since then, the group has been reconvened annually. In 2023, the Meeting of the High Contracting Parties to the CCW decided that the GGE on LAWS would continue its work in 2024 and 2025. The group was tasked with developing, by consensus, elements of a possible instrument, without predetermining its form, as well as other measures addressing lethal autonomous weapon systems, drawing on existing CCW protocols, earlier recommendations, state proposals, and legal, military, and technological expertise. == 2024 == In 2024, the GGE met twice, and the group was chaired by Robert in den Bosch, the Netherlands' disarmament ambassador. The 2024 Meeting of the High Contracting Parties decided that the group would meet for 10 days in 2025, in two five-day sessions, and reaffirmed its mandate to continue work by consensus on possible elements of an instrument and other measures addressing lethal autonomous weapon systems. == 2025 == At its first 2025 session, held in Geneva from 3 to 7 March 2025, the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems discussed revisions to the chair's rolling text. The text was structured into five sections, or "boxes", though delegates held differing views on whether headings were useful or appropriate. Broadly, the discussions covered the characterization of lethal autonomous weapon systems, the application of international humanitarian law, possible prohibitions and regulations, legal review, and questions of accountability and responsibility. At its second session, held from 1 to 5 September 2025, delegations continued work on the chair's rolling text, which set out elements of a possible instrument and was organized into five thematic "boxes". == 2026 == === Developments before the 2026 session === A few weeks before the meeting, autonomous weapons drew renewed attention when the United States pressured Anthropic to revise the terms of use for its AI model Claude. Anthropic prohibited the model's use for mass domestic surveillance and for fully autonomous weapons operating without human oversight, while reports also emerged that OpenAI had reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of War for the use of its AI models, reportedly stipulating that they would not independently direct autonomous weapons where human control was required. The U.S. military nevertheless continued to use Claude during its war on Iran, and there was increasing alarm about the use of AI-assisted semi-autonomous weapons in conflicts including those in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, and Iran. Before the start of the sessions, Robert in den Bosch, as chair, warned that progress was urgent because technological developments were moving quickly. At the same time, although states agreed that international humanitarian law applied to LAWS, specific internationally binding standards governing such systems remained largely absent. A key divide before the session was that Russia and the United States opposed new legally binding instruments, while other states argued that new rules were necessary. According to Robert in den Bosch, the talks could lead to new rules, amendments to an existing convention, or a new treaty. === First session === From 2 to 6 March 2026, the group held its penultimate session under the group's three-year mandate. Delegations discussed the chair's rolling draft text, circulated in December 2025, on elements of a possible instrument or other measures concerning lethal autonomous weapon systems. In revised text circulated by the chair on 5 March 2026, a lethal autonomous weapon system was characterized as "a functionally integrated combination of one or more weapons and technological components, that can identify, select, and engage a target, without intervention by a human operator in the execution of these tasks". The text was divided into five boxes to structure discussion. During the session, delegates conducted a first reading of the draft text, and the chair later circulated revised language for several sections. Informal consultations were also held. According to campaign groups and participating observers, support grew during the week for moving to negotiations on the basis of the rolling text, with more than 70 states said to support that step by the end of the session, though some participants warned that attempts to bridge differences risked blurring the group's core purpose. The International Committee of the Red Cross argued that the text should not only restate existing international humanitarian law, but also clarify how those rules apply to autonomous weapons and set out additional measures tailored to the specific challenges such systems raise. Stop Killer Robots likewise emphasized the need to preserve meaningful human judgment and control over increasingly autonomous systems. During the discussions, the U.S. delegation opposed the term "human control" and reportedly proposed the alternative phrase "good faith human judgment and care". Other delegations rejected that wording as too weak, while many states continued to insist that meaningful human control over weapon systems remained essential.
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Futel is a public arts organization in Portland, Oregon dedicated to preserving and maintaining public telephone hardware and offering free phone and basic information services. Futel was founded by Karl Anderson, a former software engineer, and Elijah St. Clair. == Technology == Karl Anderson stated that one motivation for the project was to explore the idea of urban furniture. Other reasons were to preserve an important part of hacker history, and to salvage and re-use manufactured items at the end of their lifecycle. The original Futel phones were set up in Portland, Oregon. The organization cleans and repurposes old public payphones which are often salvaged from Craigslist or scrappers. Using interface boxes, they are converted into VoIP phones which are made available publicly, with no cost for phone calls. Anderson has said the service runs on "Asterisk and OpenVPN and a lot of scripts." The payphones operate using publicly-available internet connections. The phones have automated phone trees and users can make a call to local social services, to a weather forecast line, or access local transit information. Volunteers act as telephone operators, offering information about the Futel service, or are available for conversation. Users using Futel's phones may also access voicemail boxes. The system has a "wildcard line" where people can listen to samples of audio left on the main voicemail line along with commentary from Anderson and others. == Network == In February 2021, there were 10 Futel phones in Portland and 3 in other cities. Phones were set up in Detroit and Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Long Beach, Washington. The organization has provided free phone service for a Portland-area homeless encampment after receiving funding from the Awesome Foundation. In 2019 the organization reported their phones being used to make 12,000 phone calls. Futel also said their usage went up and not down during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when they outfitted their phone kiosks with handwashing stations and used volunteers to keep the phones clean. The project is funded is primarily through grants and is staffed with volunteers. The project has inspired others such as the PhilTel project in Philadelphia and the RandTel project in Randolph, Vermont. Futel publishes a zine called Party Line.
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The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories include websites, advertising and media, online film and video, mobile sites and apps, and social. Two winners are selected in each category, one by members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and one by the public who cast their votes during Webby People's Voice voting. Each winner presents a five-word acceptance speech, a trademark of the annual awards show. In its early years, the award was hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" and was associated with the phrase "The Oscars of the Internet." == History == In its early years, the organization was one of several vying to be the premiere internet awards show. Both shows would compare themselves to the Oscars, as did media outlets such as The New York Times to Canada's Globe & Mail. The winners of the First Annual Webby Awards in 1995 were presented by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, writers for Columbia Pictures. It was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The televised Webby Awards were sponsored by the Academy of Web Design and Cool Site of the Day. The first Webby Awards were produced by Kay Dangaard at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel as a nod to the first site of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars). That first year, they were called "Webbie" Awards. The first "Site of the Year" winner was the pioneer webisodic serial The Spot. The modern Webby Awards were co-founded by Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker, when she was hired by The Web Magazine to re-establish them, and were first held in San Francisco in 1997. They quickly became known for its requirement that winners give their acceptance speeches in five words. After this, the awards became more successful than the magazine and IDG closed the publication. Shlain and co-founder Maya Draisin Farrah continued to run The Webby Awards until 2004. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which selects the winners of The Webby Awards, was established in 1998 by co-founders Tiffany Shlain, Spencer Ante and Maya Draisin. Members of the Academy include Kevin Spacey, Grimes, Questlove, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, Instagram's Head of Fashion Partnerships Eva Chen, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, Twitter founder Biz Stone, Vice Media co-founder and CEO Shane Smith, Tumblr's David Karp, Director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Susan P. Crawford, Refinery29's Executive Creative Director Piera Gelardi, and CEO and co-founder of Gimlet Media Alex Blumberg. The Webby Awards is owned and operated by the Webby Media Group, a division of Recognition Media, which also owns and produces the Lovie Awards in Europe and Netted by the Webbys, a daily email publication launched in 2009. David-Michel Davies, CEO of Webby Media Group, current Executive Director of the Webby Awards and co-founder of Internet Week New York, was named Executive Director of the Webby Awards in 2005. In 2009, the 13th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 US states and over 60 countries. That same year, more than 500,000 votes were cast in The Webby People's Voice Awards. In 2012, the 16th Annual Webby awards received 1.5 million votes from more than 200 countries for the People's Voice awards. In 2015, the 19th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 13,000 entries from all 50 U.S. states and over 60 countries worldwide. == Nomination process == The 2000 awards began the transition to nominee submissions. Previously, nominees had been selected by an internal committee. As early as 2017, organizations wanting to nominate themselves were charged $395 for a single entry. An "ad campaign entry" would cost $595. By 2024, those fees had risen to $495 and $675, respectively. Executive Academy Members with category-specific expertise evaluate the shortlisted entries based on the appropriate Website, Advertising & Media, Online Film & Video, Mobile Sites & Apps, and Social category criteria, and cast ballots to determine Webby Honorees, Nominees and Webby Winners. Deloitte provides vote tabulation consulting for the Webby Awards. In addition to the award given in each category by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, another winner is selected in each category as determined by the general public during People's Voice voting. Winners of both the Academy-selected and People's Voice-selected awards are invited to the Webbys. == Awards granted == The Webby Awards are presented in over a hundred categories among all four types of entries. A website can be entered in multiple categories and receive multiple awards. In each category, two awards are handed out: a Webby Award selected by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and a People's Voice Award selected by the general public. == Ceremony == Between 2005 and 2019, the Webby Awards were presented in New York City. Many of the ceremony hosts are comedians and comedic actors. Comedian Rob Corddry hosted the ceremony from 2005 to 2007. Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live hosted in 2008 and 2009, B.J. Novak of the sitcom The Office in 2010, and Lisa Kudrow in 2011. Comedian, actor, and writer Patton Oswalt hosted from 2012 to 2014. Comedian Hannibal Buress hosted in 2015. The Webbys are famous for limiting recipients to five-word speeches, which are often humorous, although some exceed the limit. In 2005 when accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award, former Vice President Al Gore's speech was "Please don't recount this vote." He was introduced by Vint Cerf who used the same format to state, "We all invented the Internet." In 2013, the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Steve Wilhite, accepted his Webby and delivered his now famous five-word speech, "It's pronounced 'Jif' not 'Gif'." == Criticism == The Webbys have been criticized for their pay-to-enter and pay-to-attend policy (winners and nominees also have to pay to attend the award ceremony), and thus for not taking most websites into consideration before distributing their awards. Gawker, its Valleywag column, and others, have called the awards a scam, with Valleywag saying, "...somewhere along the way, the organizers figured out that this goofy charade could be milked for profit." In response, Webby Awards executive director David-Michel Davies told the Wall Street Journal that entry fees "provide the best and most sustainable model for ensuring that our judging process remains consistent and rigorous and is not dependent on things like sponsorships that can fluctuate from year to year." == Anthem Awards == In 2021, the Webby organization started a new line of awards, the Anthem Awards, to honor the purpose and mission-driven work of people, companies and organizations worldwide. The finalists and winners are selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
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A vinyl cutter is an entry-level machine for making signs. Computer-designed vector files with patterns and letters are directly cut on the roll of vinyl which is mounted and fed into the vinyl cutter through USB or serial cable. Vinyl cutters are mainly used to make signs, banners and advertisements. Advertisements seen on automobiles and vans are often made with vinyl cut letters. While these machines were designed for cutting vinyl, they can also cut through computer and specialty papers, as well as thicker items like thin sheets of magnet. In addition to sign business, vinyl cutters are commonly used for apparel decoration. To decorate apparel, a vector design needs to be cut in mirror image, weeded, and then heat applied using a commercial heat press or a hand iron for home use. Some businesses use their vinyl cutter to produce both signs and custom apparel. Many crafters also have vinyl cutters for home use. These require little maintenance, and the vinyl can be bought in bulk relatively cheaply. Vinyl cutters are also often used by stencil artists to create single use or reusable stencil art and lettering == How it works == A vinyl cutter is a type of computer-controlled machine tool. The computer controls the movement of a sharp blade over the surface of the material as it would the nozzles of an ink-jet printer. This blade is used to cut out shapes and letters from sheets of thin self-adhesive plastic (vinyl). The vinyl can then be stuck to a variety of surfaces depending on the adhesive and type of material. To cut out a design, a vector-based image must be created using vector drawing software. Some vinyl cutters are marketed to small in-home businesses and require download and use of a proprietary editing software. The design is then sent to the cutter where it cuts along the vector paths laid out in the design. The cutter is capable of moving the blade on an X and Y axis over the material, cutting it into the required shapes. The vinyl material comes in long rolls allowing projects with significant length like banners or billboards to be easily cut. A major limitation with vinyl cutters is that they can only cut shapes from solid colours of vinyl, paper, card or thin plastic sheets such as Mylar. The type and thickness of material will vary for each cutter and how much downforce the cutter is capable of. If the material has no backing, a backing sheet, material or cutting mat and a temporary adhesive are needed to allow the cutter to cut through the material. A design with multiple colours must have each colour cut separately and then layered on top of each other as it is applied to the substrate. This is a process that is often applied in stencil art. Also, since the shapes are cut out of solid colours, photographs and gradients cannot be reproduced with a stand-alone cutter. === Design creation === Designs are created using vector-based software like Adobe Illustrator, FlexiSign, EasyCutPro, or other software. Vector artwork is either drawn with lines, shapes and text or images are vectorized thus create vector shapes. Most cutters (also called plotters) require special software to load/edit the artwork and communicate with the cutter. Computer designed images are loaded onto the vinyl cutter via a wired connection or over a wireless protocol. Then the vinyl is loaded into the machine where it is automatically fed through and cut to follow the set design. The vinyl can be placed on an adhesive mat to stabilize the vinyl when cutting smaller designs. === Types of vinyl === Adhesive vinyl is the type of vinyl used for store windows, car decals, signage, and more. Adhesive vinyl is applied with a transfer medium often called "transfer tape" or "carrier sheet". Heat transfer vinyl is the type of vinyl used to apply a design to fabric including t-shirts, tea towels, canvas bags, and more. Heat Transfer vinyl can be applied using a heat press or an iron, though the constant pressure and heat from a heat press is recommended by experts. === Using other materials === In addition to vinyl some cutters are capable of cutting other materials such as paper, card, plastic sheets and even thin wood. The thickness and type of material that can be cut will depend on the model of the cutter and heavily depends on the downforce. Cricut is a popular home cutter used by arts and craft enthusiasts since it allows for a wide use of different materials and is similar in size to a household printer and has strong downforce for its size. === Backing and cutting mat === If you cut material that doesn't have an adhesive backing you will require a cutting mat that you need to attach your material to. Some cutting mats are sticky, others will require you to use a temporary adhesive and/or masking tape to keep the material in place when cutting. === Cutting === The vinyl cutter uses a small knife or blade to precisely cut the outline of figures into a sheet or piece of vinyl, but not the release liner. The process of cutting vinyl material without penetrating it completely is referred to as "kiss cutting". The knife moves side to side and turns, while the vinyl is moved beneath the knife. The results from the cut process is an image cut into the material. === Weeding === The material is then 'weeded' where the excess parts of the figures are removed from the release liner. It is possible to remove the positive parts, which would give a negative decal, or remove the negative parts, giving a positive decal. Removing the figure would be like removing the positive, giving a negative image of the figures. === Transfer tape === A sheet of transfer tape with an adhesive backing is laid on the weeded vinyl when necessary. Heat Transfer vinyl often does not require use of a separate transfer tape. A roller is applied to the tape, causing it to adhere to the vinyl. The transfer tape and the weeded vinyl is pulled off the release liner, and applied to a substrate, such as a sheet of aluminium. This results in an aluminium sign with vinyl figures. == Uses == In addition to the capabilities of the cutter itself, adhesive vinyl comes in a wide variety of colors and materials including gold and silver foil, vinyl that simulates frosted glass, holographic vinyl, reflective vinyl, thermal transfer material, and even clear vinyl embedded with gold leaf. (Often used in the lettering on fire trucks and rescue vehicles.) As the vinyl film is supplied by the manufacturer, it comes attached to a release liner. == Challenges when cutting on a vinyl cutter == Cutting on a vinyl cutter requires careful calibration to achieve clean and accurate results, especially when the goal is to cut through only the top layer of material while leaving the backing intact. One of the most common challenges is setting the correct cutting depth. If the blade is not lowered enough, the vinyl material may not separate properly; if it goes too deep, it can cut through the backing layer and potentially damage the cutting mat. The cutting depth on the vinyl cutter machines typically does not exceed 1 mm. Another frequent issue is the mismatch between the blade and the type of material being processed. Using an inappropriate blade can lead to uneven cuts, premature dulling of the edge, and torn or frayed material. The overall quality of the output also depends on factors such as the cutting speed, blade sharpening and cutting angle, and the material the knife is made of.
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Granular computing is an emerging computing paradigm of information processing that concerns the processing of complex information entities called "information granules", which arise in the process of data abstraction and derivation of knowledge from information or data. Generally speaking, information granules are collections of entities that usually originate at the numeric level and are arranged together due to their similarity, functional or physical adjacency, indistinguishability, coherency, or the like. At present, granular computing is more a theoretical perspective than a coherent set of methods or principles. As a theoretical perspective, it encourages an approach to data that recognizes and exploits the knowledge present in data at various levels of resolution or scales. In this sense, it encompasses all methods which provide flexibility and adaptability in the resolution at which knowledge or information is extracted and represented. == Types of granulation == As mentioned above, granular computing is not an algorithm or process; there is no particular method that is called "granular computing". It is rather an approach to looking at data that recognizes how different and interesting regularities in the data can appear at different levels of granularity, much as different features become salient in satellite images of greater or lesser resolution. On a low-resolution satellite image, for example, one might notice interesting cloud patterns representing cyclones or other large-scale weather phenomena, while in a higher-resolution image, one misses these large-scale atmospheric phenomena but instead notices smaller-scale phenomena, such as the interesting pattern that is the streets of Manhattan. The same is generally true of all data: At different resolutions or granularities, different features and relationships emerge. The aim of granular computing is to try to take advantage of this fact in designing more effective machine-learning and reasoning systems. There are several types of granularity that are often encountered in data mining and machine learning, and we review them below: === Value granulation (discretization/quantization) === One type of granulation is the quantization of variables. It is very common that in data mining or machine-learning applications the resolution of variables needs to be decreased in order to extract meaningful regularities. An example of this would be a variable such as "outside temperature" (temp), which in a given application might be recorded to several decimal places of precision (depending on the sensing apparatus). However, for purposes of extracting relationships between "outside temperature" and, say, "number of health-club applications" (club), it will generally be advantageous to quantize "outside temperature" into a smaller number of intervals. ==== Motivations ==== There are several interrelated reasons for granulating variables in this fashion: Based on prior domain knowledge, there is no expectation that minute variations in temperature (e.g., the difference between 80–80.7 °F (26.7–27.1 °C)) could have an influence on behaviors driving the number of health-club applications. For this reason, any "regularity" which our learning algorithms might detect at this level of resolution would have to be spurious, as an artifact of overfitting. By coarsening the temperature variable into intervals the difference between which we do anticipate (based on prior domain knowledge) might influence number of health-club applications, we eliminate the possibility of detecting these spurious patterns. Thus, in this case, reducing resolution is a method of controlling overfitting. By reducing the number of intervals in the temperature variable (i.e., increasing its grain size), we increase the amount of sample data indexed by each interval designation. Thus, by coarsening the variable, we increase sample sizes and achieve better statistical estimation. In this sense, increasing granularity provides an antidote to the so-called curse of dimensionality, which relates to the exponential decrease in statistical power with increase in number of dimensions or variable cardinality. Independent of prior domain knowledge, it is often the case that meaningful regularities (i.e., which can be detected by a given learning methodology, representational language, etc.) may exist at one level of resolution and not at another. For example, a simple learner or pattern recognition system may seek to extract regularities satisfying a conditional probability threshold such as p ( Y = y j | X = x i ) ≥ α . {\displaystyle p(Y=y_{j}|X=x_{i})\geq \alpha .} In the special case where α = 1 , {\displaystyle \alpha =1,} this recognition system is essentially detecting logical implication of the form X = x i → Y = y j {\displaystyle X=x_{i}\rightarrow Y=y_{j}} or, in words, "if X = x i , {\displaystyle X=x_{i},} then Y = y j {\displaystyle Y=y_{j}} ". The system's ability to recognize such implications (or, in general, conditional probabilities exceeding threshold) is partially contingent on the resolution with which the system analyzes the variables. As an example of this last point, consider the feature space shown to the right. The variables may each be regarded at two different resolutions. Variable X {\displaystyle X} may be regarded at a high (quaternary) resolution wherein it takes on the four values { x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , x 4 } {\displaystyle \{x_{1},x_{2},x_{3},x_{4}\}} or at a lower (binary) resolution wherein it takes on the two values { X 1 , X 2 } . {\displaystyle \{X_{1},X_{2}\}.} Similarly, variable Y {\displaystyle Y} may be regarded at a high (quaternary) resolution or at a lower (binary) resolution, where it takes on the values { y 1 , y 2 , y 3 , y 4 } {\displaystyle \{y_{1},y_{2},y_{3},y_{4}\}} or { Y 1 , Y 2 } , {\displaystyle \{Y_{1},Y_{2}\},} respectively. At the high resolution, there are no detectable implications of the form X = x i → Y = y j , {\displaystyle X=x_{i}\rightarrow Y=y_{j},} since every x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is associated with more than one y j , {\displaystyle y_{j},} and thus, for all x i , {\displaystyle x_{i},} p ( Y = y j | X = x i ) < 1. {\displaystyle p(Y=y_{j}|X=x_{i})<1.} However, at the low (binary) variable resolution, two bilateral implications become detectable: X = X 1 ↔ Y = Y 1 {\displaystyle X=X_{1}\leftrightarrow Y=Y_{1}} and X = X 2 ↔ Y = Y 2 {\displaystyle X=X_{2}\leftrightarrow Y=Y_{2}} , since every X 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}} occurs iff Y 1 {\displaystyle Y_{1}} and X 2 {\displaystyle X_{2}} occurs iff Y 2 . {\displaystyle Y_{2}.} Thus, a pattern recognition system scanning for implications of this kind would find them at the binary variable resolution, but would fail to find them at the higher quaternary variable resolution. ==== Issues and methods ==== It is not feasible to exhaustively test all possible discretization resolutions on all variables in order to see which combination of resolutions yields interesting or significant results. Instead, the feature space must be preprocessed (often by an entropy analysis of some kind) so that some guidance can be given as to how the discretization process should proceed. Moreover, one cannot generally achieve good results by naively analyzing and discretizing each variable independently, since this may obliterate the very interactions that we had hoped to discover. A sample of papers that address the problem of variable discretization in general, and multiple-variable discretization in particular, is as follows: Chiu, Wong & Cheung (1991), Bay (2001), Liu et al. (2002), Wang & Liu (1998), Zighed, Rabaséda & Rakotomalala (1998), Catlett (1991), Dougherty, Kohavi & Sahami (1995), Monti & Cooper (1999), Fayyad & Irani (1993), Chiu, Cheung & Wong (1990), Nguyen & Nguyen (1998), Grzymala-Busse & Stefanowski (2001), Ting (1994), Ludl & Widmer (2000), Pfahringer (1995), An & Cercone (1999), Chiu & Cheung (1989), Chmielewski & Grzymala-Busse (1996), Lee & Shin (1994), Liu & Wellman (2002), Liu & Wellman (2004). === Variable granulation (clustering/aggregation/transformation) === Variable granulation is a term that could describe a variety of techniques, most of which are aimed at reducing dimensionality, redundancy, and storage requirements. We briefly describe some of the ideas here, and present pointers to the literature. ==== Variable transformation ==== A number of classical methods, such as principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling, and their relatives, fall under the genus of "variable transformation." Also in this category are more modern areas of study such as dimensionality reduction, projection pursuit, and independent component analysis. The common goal of these methods in general is to find a representation of the data in terms of new variables, which are a linear or nonlinear transformation of the original variables, and in which important stati
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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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InteLex Past Masters is a collection of full-text web-based scholarly editions of classic works in the humanities. InteLex Corporation was founded in 1989 by its current chief executive officer, Mark Rooks, to produce electronic versions of the works of the great philosophers, based on existing scholarly editions. The company is located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Its databases are marketed to academic institutions, with pricing based on the individual collections purchased. Content is provided in XML and searchable image format and is accessed through the InteLex Corporation website. In addition to philosophy, subject coverage includes religious studies, English literature, women's writing, social science, and history of science. InteLex databases are found in institutions in over 65 countries around the world.
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Attention inequality is the inequality of distribution of attention across users on social networks, people in general, and for scientific papers. Yun Family Foundation introduced "Attention Inequality Coefficient" as a measure of inequality in attention and arguments it by the close interconnection with wealth inequality. == Relationship to economic inequality == Attention inequality is related to economic inequality since attention is an economically scarce good. The same measures and concepts as in classical economy can be applied for attention economy. The relationship develops also beyond the conceptual level—considering the AIDA process, attention is the prerequisite for real monetary income on the Internet. On data of 2018, a significant relationship between likes and comments on Facebook to donations is proven for non-profit organizations. == Attention economy == The attention economy refers to the practice of maximizing the attention users give to a product for advertising-related reasons. Attention economy remains one of the most common forms of advertising, and has been steadily increasing thanks to new technologies such as television, internet and social media. It is one of the most widely-used approaches to economy for its effectiveness for maximising the noticeability of a certain product. == Attention inequality in social media == In social media, attention inequality refers to the unequal distribution of users' attention on social media platforms. This means that instead of an equal distribution of attention, fewer sources receive a disproportionate share of attention, leaving many unnoticed. This phenomenon is possibly the result of social media algorithms, which are commonly designed to drive maximum engagement. This phenomenon is a large factor in the polarization and creation of echo-chambers. Social media algorithms tend to note content that is already performing well and display it to more users, while content that is equally engaging or well-made is not recommended to users. Posts that trigger strong emotions usually out-perform more "uncontroversial" content. When many users interact with the post, it signals the algorithm that the specific post drives engagement. The algorithm then tends to recommend that type of content to an exponential number of people, potentially outperforming "un-emotional" content. These factors, when combined, tend to create an unequal social media environment. == Attention inequality in science == According to a recent 2025 study about research inequality among scientists published in Information Processing and Management, scientific discourse is restricted to a small group of connected scientists, and is frequently not an accurate representation of the whole scientific community. Using citation-network analysis in the fields of nanoscience and chemical physics, the study claims that a group of connected scientists has a significant notability in the scientific community. The calculated connection strength between these scientists is estimated to be about 4.5, the study also says that these authors cite each other four times more often than would be predicted in a random network, whereas ordinary scientists that exist outside of this group only reach an estimated connection strength of 0.9. The study findings suggest that that scientific attention is not distributed by merit, but rather by the connectedness of the scientists involved in the research. == Extent == As data of 2008 shows, 50% of the attention is concentrated on approximately 0.2% of all hostnames, and 80% on 5% of hostnames. The Gini coefficient of attention distribution lay in 2008 at over 0.921 for such commercial domains names as ac.jp and at 0.985 for .org-domains. The Gini coefficient was measured on Twitter in 2016 for the number of followers as 0.9412, for the number of mentions as 0.9133, and for the number of retweets as 0.9034. For comparison, the world's income Gini coefficient was 0.68 in 2005 and 0.904 in 2018. More than 96% of all followers, 93% of the retweets, and 93% of all mentions are owned by 20% of Twitter. == Causes == At least for scientific papers, today's consensus states that inequality is unexplainable by variations of quality and individual talent. The Matthew effect plays a significant role in the emergence of attention inequality—those who already enjoy large amounts of attention get even more attention, and those who do not lose even more. Ranking algorithms based on relevance to the user have been found to alleviate the inequality of the number of posts across topics.
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Genigraphics is a large-format printing service bureau specializing in providing poster session services to medical and scientific conferences throughout the US and Canada. The company began in 1973 as a division of General Electric. == History == Genigraphics began as a computer graphics system, developed by General Electric in the late 1960s, for NASA to use in space flight simulation. The technologies thus developed provided a foundation for the company's expansion into the commercial market. The Computed Images System & Services division (CISS, to become Genigraphics Corporation) of GE delivered the first presentation graphics system to Amoco Oil's corporate headquarters in 1973. It was named the 100 Series, and was based on DEC's PDP 11 series of mini computer systems. The first Genigraphics systems (100 Series and 100A Series) used an array of buttons, dials, knobs and joysticks, along with a built in keyboard, as the means of user interface. The PDP-11/40 computer was housed in a tall cabinet and used random access magnetic tape drives (DECtape) for storing completed presentations. The graphics generator (Forox recorder) was capable of outputting 2,000 line resolution, suitable for 35mm and 72mm film and large sheet film positive using larger cassettes for recording. 4000 and 8000 line resolution was later achieved with duplex scanning and 4x scanning by modifying to the Forox recorder's settings menu. Subsequent models (100B,C,D,D+ and D+/GVP) replaced the knobs and dials with an on screen, text based menu system, a graphics tablet and a pen. The pen/tablet combination gave way to a mouse like device in later models, and served to provide the interface with the graphics tools. User interaction with the computer for functions such as media initialization or modem to modem data transfer required a DECwriter serial terminal. In 1982, GE divested the Genigraphics division along with a host of other "non essential" business units (Genitext, Geniponics) and Genigraphics Corporation was born. Shortly after the divestiture, the headquarters of Genigraphics was moved from Liverpool, New York to Saddle Brook, New Jersey. Major success followed as the company grew exponentially over the next few years selling both systems and slide creation services. Genigraphics film recorders produced high-resolution digital images on 35mm film. The computer-generated scenes for The Last Starfighter were calculated on a Cray X-MP supercomputer and mastered with a Genigraphics film recorder. At its peak, Genigraphics Corporation employed roughly 300 people in 24 offices worldwide, with revenues upwards of $70 million annually. By the late 1980s Genigraphics saw demand for its proprietary systems dwindle and began selling the MASTERPIECE 8770 film recorder and GRAFTIME software as a peripheral for DEC Vaxes, IBM PC AT’s, and Mac NuBus machines. But the MASTERPIECE film recorder proved too expensive to sell in volume. In 1988, the company began a partnership with Microsoft to help develop the PowerPoint software. In exchange, every copy of PowerPoint included a “Send to Genigraphics” link to have files sent to a Genigraphics service bureau to be produced as 35mm slides. This partnership continued until 2001. In 1989, after three years of flat revenue, Genigraphics sold its hardware business in order to focus on its service bureau business and partnership with Microsoft via PowerPoint. In 1994, all assets of Genigraphics, including equipment, software development, in-house artwork, trademarks, and rights to the Microsoft partnership, were sold to InFocus Corporation of Wilsonville, Oregon who continued to operate under the Genigraphics brand name. The twenty-four service bureaus were consolidated to a 20,000 square foot facility next to the FedEx hub in Memphis, Tennessee. This allowed PowerPoint slide orders to be received until 10pm and delivered across the United States by the following morning. In 1995, InFocus registered www.genigraphics.com and was among the first to offer a form of ecommerce allowing 35mm slides, color prints and transparencies, printed booklets, and digital projectors to be purchased online. In 1998, then current management bought Genigraphics from InFocus and have operated it continuously ever since as Genigraphics LLC. That same year, InFocus projector rentals were added to the “Send to Genigraphics” link in PowerPoint and Genigraphics became the rental and repair center for all InFocus national accounts. It also marked Genigraphics entry into the new industry of large format printing; leveraging their knowledge of, and access to, PowerPoint programming code to develop a proprietary printer driver to output directly to an Epson 9500 wide format printer. At the time, Genigraphics was the exclusive 35mm slide vendor for all Kinko’s stores in the United States and poster printing was added to the arrangement. In 2003, Genigraphics closed their 35mm slide E6 photo lab – one of the last high-volume commercial E6 labs in the US – and expanded their large format printing capabilities. Since 2003, Genigraphics has become a major player in the poster session market, providing printing and on-site services to medical and scientific conferences throughout the US and Canada. As of February 2019, over 150,000 medical or scientific ‘ePosters’ are made available through their ResearchPosters.com archive service. === Partnership with Microsoft and development of PowerPoint === As presentations began to be created on personal computers in the late 80’s, Genigraphics sought presentation software partners in Silicon Valley who would be interested in sending files to Genigraphics via dial-up modem to be produced on 35mm slides. In 1987, Michael Beetner, Director of Marketing Planning for Genigraphics, met with Robert Gaskins, head of Microsoft's Graphics Business Unit, who was leading the development of the newly released PowerPoint software. A joint development agreement between Microsoft and Genigraphics was agreed upon and announced at Mac World 1988. According to Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, "It would be hard to overestimate Genigraphics’ influence on PowerPoint. PowerPoint 2.0 was designed for Genigraphics film recorders. It shipped with Genigraphics color palettes, schemes, and the distinctively Genigraphics color-gradient backgrounds. The application contained a ‘Send to Genigraphics’ menu item that wrote the presentation to floppy disk or transmitted the order directly via modem. Within three and a half months PowerPoint orders accounted for ten percent of revenue at Genigraphics service centers. PowerPoint 3.0 was even more intimately dependent upon Genigraphics. The software incorporated a collection of clip art images and symbols that had been produced by hundreds of artists at dozens of service centers across tens of thousands of presentations. Genigraphics artists designed PowerPoint 3.0 colors, templates, and sample presentations. The software even used Genigraphics (rather than Excel) chart style. Bar charts were rendered two-dimensionally with apparent thickness added to make them seemingly recede from the axes. The technique made it easier for viewers to compare bar heights and estimate values from axis ticks and labels. Pie charts were handled analogously. Microsoft paid Genigraphics to produce more than 500 clip art drawings and symbols used in Microsoft programs.” In exchange for Genigraphics development efforts, Microsoft included a “Send to Genigraphics” link in every copy of PowerPoint through the 10.0 version (2000/2001). The arrangement came to an end when Microsoft restructured as a result of anti-trust lawsuits.
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Web3D, also called 3D Web, is a group of technologies to display and navigate websites using 3D computer graphics. These technologies enable applications such as online games, virtual reality experiences, interactive product demonstrations, and 3D data visualization directly within web browsers. The emergence of Web3D dates back to 1994, with the advent of VRML, a file format designed to store and display 3D graphical data on the World Wide Web. Modern Web3D is primarily powered by WebGL, a JavaScript API that enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics rendering in web browsers without requiring plug-ins. == Pre-WebGL era == The emergence of Web3D dates back to 1994, with the advent of VRML, a file format designed to store and display 3D graphical data on the World Wide Web. In October 1995, at Internet World, Template Graphics Software demonstrated a 3D/VRML plug-in for the beta release of Netscape 2.0 by Netscape Communications. The Web3D Consortium was formed to further the collective development of the format. VRML and its successor, X3D, have been accepted as international standards by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. The main drawback of the technology was the requirement to use third-party browser plug-ins to perform 3D rendering, which slowed the adoption of the standard. Between 2000 and 2010, one of these plug-ins, Adobe Flash Player, was widely installed on desktop computers and was used to display interactive web pages and online games and to play video and audio content. Several Flash-based frameworks appeared that used software rendering and ActionScript 3 to perform 3D computations such as transformations, lighting, and texturing. Most notable among them were Papervision3D and Away3D. Eventually, Adobe developed Stage3D, an API for rendering interactive 3D graphics with GPU-acceleration for its Flash player and AIR products, which was adopted by software vendors. In 2009, an open-source 3D web technology called O3D was introduced by Google. It also required a browser plug-in, but contrary to Flash/Stage3D, was based on JavaScript API. O3D was geared not only for games but also for advertisements, 3D model viewers, product demos, simulations, engineering applications, control and monitoring systems. == WebGL and glTF == WebGL (short for "Web Graphics Library") evolved out of the Canvas 3D experiments started by Vladimir Vukićević at Mozilla Foundation. Vukićević first demonstrated a Canvas 3D prototype in 2006. By the end of 2007, both Mozilla and Opera had made their own separate implementations. In early 2009, the nonprofit technology consortium Khronos Group started the WebGL Working Group, with initial participation from Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, and others. Version 1.0 of the WebGL specification was released in March 2011. Major advantages of the new technology include conformity with web standards and near-native 3D performance without the use of any browser plug-ins. Since WebGL is based on OpenGL ES, it works on mobile devices without any additional abstraction layers. For other platforms, WebGL implementations leverage ANGLE to translate OpenGL ES calls to DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan API calls. Among notable WebGL frameworks are A-Frame, which uses HTML-based markup for building virtual reality experiences; PlayCanvas, an open-source engine alongside a proprietary cloud-hosted creation platform for building browser games; Three.js, an MIT-licensed framework used to create demoscene from the early 2000s; Unity, which obtained a WebGL back-end in version 5; and Verge3D, which integrates with Blender, 3ds Max, and Maya to create 3D web content. With the rapid adoption of WebGL, a new problem arose—the lack of a 3D file format optimized for the Web. This issue was addressed by glTF, a format that was conceived in 2012 by members of the COLLADA working group. At SIGGRAPH 2012, Khronos presented a demo of glTF, which was then called WebGL Transmissions Format (WebGL TF). On 19 October 2015, the glTF 1.0 specification was released. Version 2.0 glTF uses a physically based rendering material model, proposed by Fraunhofer. Other upgrades include sparse accessors and morph targets for techniques such as facial animation, and schema tweaks and breaking changes for corner cases or performance, such as replacing top-level glTF object properties with arrays for faster index-based access. == Future == "WebGPU" is the working name for a potential web standard and JavaScript API for accelerated graphics and computing, aiming to provide "modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities". It is developed by the W3C "GPU for the Web" Community Group, with engineers from Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google, among others. WebGPU will not be based on any existing 3D API and will use Rust-like syntax for shaders.
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Digital classics is the application of the tools of digital humanities to the field of classics, or more broadly to the study of the ancient world. == History == Classics was one of the first of the humanities disciplines to adopt computing approaches; the first references to the use of computing in the classical humanities date to the early 1960s, which might be surprising considering the reputation of the discipline as old-fashioned and stuffily traditionalist. Major projects such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, founded in 1972, and the text collections of the Packard Humanities Institute set the trend, and there are still a significantly large number of ancient world projects among Humanities Computing projects today. Also, the success of traditional scholarly publications in digital guises, such as seen in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and the early adoption of hypertext in high profile projects like the Perseus Digital Library helped to legitimize computing in the study of classics in ways that has not always been the case in other areas of the humanities. This apparent paradox may be as a result of the many methodologies and different sources of evidence that classicists have always had to embrace, from literary sources and linguistics, to art history and archaeology, history, philosophy, religious theory, ancient documents such as inscriptions and papyri, and so forth. The fragmentary nature of many of the texts and languages of the ancient world, the scattered evidence from the material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and the necessity to evaluate all these varieties of evidence in context are particularly likely to benefit from digital approaches such as databases, text markup, image manipulation and machine learning. == Digital classics projects == There are currently several major projects that aim to encourage and develop digital approaches to classical scholarship. The Stoa Consortium at the University of Kentucky distributes news of the discipline, and serves as a peer-reviewed electronic publication venue, and encourages open source approaches to digital classics. The Perseus Project is a digital library that also provides a collection of digital texts and analysis tools to the public; principally (but not exclusively) classical. Digital Classicist is another project and community which shares information and advice about the digital humanities applied to the field of classics. Epigraphy.info is an international open community pursuing a collaborative environment for digital epigraphy. The Liverpool Classics Mailing List is a project which can be subscribed to in which one receives email regarding Classics events around the world, as well as call for papers, studentships and public lectures.
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