Go-box is a name used for a number of electronic devices. The "Go-Box" is often a box, crate, carry-case, modified briefcase or similar construction containing electronic equipment pre-setup and ready to function. The box can then be taken into the field or placed at a remote site with minimal effort. These are often used by radio amateurs (or "Hams") for emergency communications, experimental work, or field communications. This has also led to similar equipment being used in the Emergency Services, utility companies, military, and government agencies. A search of the YouTube website can reveal a number of ideas for these devices mostly built by people at home. Terms created after the use of "go-box" include the "go-bag" which is an 'essentials' bag of items needed for evacuations or quick departures, i.e. medicines, clothes, torch, Broadcast radio receiver, batteries, etc. In Austria it is a radio transmitter used in trucks as part of the Videomaut toll collection system. One use of the term in the United States it is a device which is supposed to change traffic signals from red to green. U.S. Fire trucks have a similar device, called an Opticon, that uses an infrared beam. Two residents of Miami, Florida, were arrested for selling fake go-boxes online. Several hundred were sold, prices ranging from $69 to $150. In reality, the boxes contained nothing more than strobe lights.
Non-native speech database
A non-native speech database is a speech database of non-native pronunciations of English. Such databases are used in the development of: multilingual automatic speech recognition systems, text to speech systems, pronunciation trainers, and second language learning systems. == List == The actual table with information about the different databases is shown in Table 2. === Legend === In the table of non-native databases some abbreviations for language names are used. They are listed in Table 1. Table 2 gives the following information about each corpus: The name of the corpus, the institution where the corpus can be obtained, or at least further information should be available, the language which was actually spoken by the speakers, the number of speakers, the native language of the speakers, the total amount of non-native utterances the corpus contains, the duration in hours of the non-native part, the date of the first public reference to this corpus, some free text highlighting special aspects of this database and a reference to another publication. The reference in the last field is in most cases to the paper which is especially devoted to describe this corpus by the original collectors. In some cases it was not possible to identify such a paper. In these cases a paper is referenced which is using this corpus is. Some entries are left blank and others are marked with unknown. The difference here is that blank entries refer to attributes where the value is just not known. Unknown entries, however, indicate that no information about this attribute is available in the database itself. As an example, in the Jupiter weather database no information about the origin of the speakers is given. Therefore this data would be less useful for verifying accent detection or similar issues. Where possible, the name is a standard name of the corpus, for some of the smaller corpora, however, there was no established name and hence an identifier had to be created. In such cases, a combination of the institution and the collector of the database is used. In the case where the databases contain native and non-native speech, only attributes of the non-native part of the corpus are listed. Most of the corpora are collections of read speech. If the corpus instead consists either partly or completely of spontaneous utterances, this is mentioned in the Specials column.
Ethiopian feminists facing digital gender-based violence
Against a background of traditional views of women, rising internet use, a young population and an unsafe offline life, women and girls in Ethiopia are facing increasing amounts of digital violence. Some women, feeling endangered, have left the country as a result. Researchers, activists and lawyers have called for online content to be taken down and specific digital legislation to be drafted and enforced. == Online violence and its offline effects == Sexual violence against women and girls in Ethiopia is common. In 2023, in the Women, Peace and Security Index by Georgetown University, Ethiopia came 146 out of 177 countries. Over several years online harassment of and violence against women and girls in Ethiopia has increased. It can range from sexist remarks about appearance and women’s role in society, to revenge porn, threats of beating, acid attacks, abduction, rape or death. The real-life effect on women and girls of these attacks can include mental health problems, damaged reputations and a withdrawal from public and economic life. When the online attacks migrate to the real world, for example when online attackers find out where the targeted women and girls live, this can result in physical attacks, street harassment, threats to children and can cause victims to move house or job or even flee the country in fear of femicide. In a country that criminalises homosexuality, it can also lead to physical attacks on LGBTQI+ people in particular and indeed on anybody labelled as homosexual. == Research studies == The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) conducted interviews with Ethiopian women holding public roles or being active online. The centre published a report on this in 2024 entitled ‘Silenced, Shamed and Threatened’. They found that technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) had become “normalised to the point of invisibility.” In 2024, CER also published an analysis of gendered hate speech on social media in Ethiopia called ‘Normalised and invisible.’ It is thought that traditional views of women, the young population, the rise in internet use and the war in Tigray, when sexual violence was used as a weapon of war by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, have all helped to create an online environment in which even femicide is considered unremarkable. AFP Fact Check collaborated with Deutsche Welle Akademie, to investigate the cyber harassment of women in Ethiopia, analysing misogynistic posts published on TikTok and Facebook. They discovered disparaging remarks about women’s physical appearance, threats of acid attacks and other physical violence, and the public sharing of women’s phone numbers. == Individuals affected == Women in particular jeopardy of digital gender-based violence are feminists, activists, politicians and those with a public profile. Some women are known to have fled Ethiopia fearing for their lives after online and offline threats. Yordanos Bezabih, an Ethiopian women’s rights activist, started a campaign with the hashtag #JusticeforHeaven to fight against gender-based cyberspace violence. As a result, she herself become a target. She experienced years of online threats of acid attacks, gang-rape and death. In 2025, subscribers to an online community organised a search for her address. Deepfake nude images of her were shared, she was filmed in real life, her house and online accounts were broken into, her private photos and messages posted on social media. When the attackers finally circulated her address, suggesting that she be executed, she left Ethiopia on a human rights defender scholarship. In 2023, Lella Misikir helped to start a campaign, called ‘My Whistle, My Voice’, that suggested women carry whistles and use them if they were harassed in the street. A TikTok video of the campaign became popular. Shortly after, videos of Misikir were circulated suggesting that she was gay. Her online attackers next searched for her address. In November 2024, Misikir left the country. == Legal issues == Ethiopia has some laws on online harassment and defamation, for example the Computer Crimes Proclamation. However, technology-facilitated, gender-based violence (TFGBV), such as deepfakes, non-consensual image sharing, and coordinated harassment, is not explicitly recognized as crime. In practice too, women are often not believed when reporting such violence and are not taken seriously. Police advice is often that women affected should simply leave the online space. Social media platforms can remove content when it is brought to their attention but the offenders are not banned. Users can only block them.
Grid network
A grid network is a computer network consisting of a number of computer systems connected in a grid topology. In a regular grid topology, each node in the network is connected with two neighbors along one or more dimensions. If the network is one-dimensional, and the chain of nodes is connected to form a circular loop, the resulting topology is known as a ring. Network systems such as FDDI use two counter-rotating token-passing rings to achieve high reliability and performance. In general, when an n-dimensional grid network is connected circularly in more than one dimension, the resulting network topology is a torus, and the network is called "toroidal". When the number of nodes along each dimension of a toroidal network is 2, the resulting network is called a hypercube. A parallel computing cluster or multi-core processor is often connected in regular interconnection network such as a de Bruijn graph, a hypercube graph, a hypertree network, a fat tree network, a torus, or cube-connected cycles. A grid network is not the same as a grid computer or a computational grid, although the nodes in a grid network are usually computers, and grid computing requires some kind of computer network or "universal coding" to interconnect the computers.
Video game
A video game, computer game, or simply game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual feedback from a display device, most commonly shown in a video format on a television set, computer monitor, flat-panel display or touchscreen on handheld devices, or a virtual reality headset. Most modern video games are audiovisual, with audio complement delivered through speakers or headphones, and sometimes also with other types of sensory feedback (e.g., haptic technology that provides tactile sensations). Some video games also allow microphone and webcam inputs for in-game chatting and livestreaming. Video games are typically categorized according to their hardware platform, which traditionally includes arcade video games, console games, and computer games (which includes LAN games, online games, and browser games). More recently, the video game industry has expanded onto mobile gaming through mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablet computers), virtual and augmented reality systems, and remote cloud gaming. Video games are also classified into a wide range of genres based on their style of gameplay and target audience. The first video game prototypes in the 1950s and 1960s were simple extensions of electronic games using video-like output from large, room-sized mainframe computers. The first consumer video game was the arcade video game Computer Space in 1971, which took inspiration from the earlier 1962 computer game Spacewar!. In 1972 came the now-iconic video game Pong and the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. The industry grew quickly during the "golden age" of arcade video games from the late 1970s to early 1980s but suffered from the crash of the North American video game market in 1983 due to loss of publishing control and saturation of the market. Following the crash, the industry matured, was dominated by Japanese companies such as Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and established practices and methods around the development and distribution of video games to prevent a similar crash in the future, many of which continue to be followed. In the 2000s, the core industry centered on "AAA" games, leaving little room for riskier experimental games. Coupled with the availability of the Internet and digital distribution, this gave room for independent video game development (or "indie games") to gain prominence into the 2010s. Since then, the commercial importance of the video game industry has been increasing. The emerging Asian markets and proliferation of smartphone games in particular are altering player demographics towards casual and cozy gaming, and increasing monetization by incorporating games as a service. Today, video game development requires numerous skills, vision, teamwork, and liaisons between different parties, including developers, publishers, distributors, retailers, hardware manufacturers, and other marketers, to successfully bring a game to its consumers. As of 2020, the global video game market had estimated annual revenues of US$159 billion across hardware, software, and services, which is three times the size of the global music industry and four times that of the film industry in 2019, making it a formidable heavyweight across the modern entertainment industry. The video game market is also a major influence behind the electronics industry, where personal computer component, console, and peripheral sales, as well as consumer demands for better game performance, have been powerful driving factors for hardware design and innovation. == Origins == Early video games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example dates to 1947—a "cathode-ray tube amusement device" was filed for a patent on 25 January 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on 14 December 1948, as U.S. Patent 2455992. Inspired by radar display technology, it consisted of an analog device allowing a user to control the parabolic arc of a dot on the screen to simulate a missile being fired at targets, which were paper drawings fixed to the screen. Other early examples include the Nimrod computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain; Christopher Strachey's Checkers, possibly the first game to display visuals on an electronic screen in 1952; OXO, a tic-tac-toe computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC in 1952; Tennis for Two, an electronic interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham in 1958; and Spacewar!, written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen's on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1962. Each game had different means of display: NIMROD had a panel of lights to play the game of Nim, OXO had a graphical display to play tic-tac-toe, Tennis for Two had an oscilloscope to display a side view of a tennis court, and Spacewar! had the DEC PDP-1's vector display to have two spaceships battle each other. These inventions laid the foundation for modern video games. In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph H. Baer devised a system to play a basic table tennis game on a television screen. With the company's approval, Baer created the prototype known as the "Brown Box". Sanders patented Baer's innovations and licensed them to Magnavox, which commercialized the technology as the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972. Separately, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, inspired by seeing Spacewar! running at Stanford University, devised a similar version running in a smaller coin-operated arcade cabinet using a less expensive computer. This was released as Computer Space, the first arcade video game, in 1971. Bushnell and Dabney went on to form Atari, Inc., and with Allan Alcorn, created their second arcade game in 1972, the hit ping pong-style Pong, which was directly inspired by the table tennis game on the Odyssey. Atari made a home version of Pong, which was released by Christmas 1975. The success of the Odyssey and Pong, both as an arcade game and home machine, launched the video game industry. Both Baer and Bushnell have been titled "Father of Video Games" for their contributions. == Terminology == The term "video game" was developed to describe electronic games played on a video display rather than on a teletype printer, audio speaker, or similar device. This also distinguished from handheld electronic games such as Merlin, which commonly used LED lights for indicators not in combination for imaging purposes. "Computer game" may also be used as a descriptor, as all these types of games essentially require the use of a computer processor; in some cases, it is used interchangeably with "video game". Particularly in the United Kingdom and Western Europe, this is common due to the historic relevance of domestically produced microcomputers. Other terms used include digital game, for example, by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The term "computer game" can also refer to PC games, which are played primarily on personal computers or other flexible hardware systems, to distinguish them from console games, arcade games, or mobile games. Other terms, such as "television game", "telegame", or "TV game", had been used in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly for home gaming consoles that rely on connection to a television set. However, these terms were also used interchangeably with "video game" in the 1970s, primarily due to "video" and "television" being synonymous. In Japan, where consoles like the Odyssey were first imported and then made within the country by the large television manufacturers such as Toshiba and Sharp Corporation, such games are known as "TV games", "TV geemu", or "terebi geemu". The term "TV game" is still commonly used into the 21st century. "Electronic game" may also be used to refer to video games, but this also incorporates devices like early handheld electronic games that lack any video output. The first appearance of the term "video game" emerged around 1973. The Oxford English Dictionary cited a 10 November 1973 BusinessWeek article as the first printed use of the term. Though Bushnell believed the term came from a vending magazine review of Computer Space in 1971, a review of the major vending magazines Vending Times and Cashbox showed that the term may have come even earlier, appearing first in a letter dated July 10, 1972. In the letter, Bushnell uses the term "video game" twice. Per video game historian Keith Smith, the sudden appearance suggested that the term had been proposed and readily adopted by those in the field. Around March 1973, Ed Adlum, who ran Cashbox's coin-operated section until 1972 and then later founded RePlay Magazine, covering the coin-op amusement field, in 1975, used the term in an article in March 1973. In a September 1982 issue of RePlay, Adlum is credited with first naming these games as "video games": "RePlay
Percept (artificial intelligence)
A percept is the input that an intelligent agent is perceiving at any given moment. It is essentially the same concept as a percept in psychology, except that it is being perceived not by the brain but by the agent. A percept is detected by a sensor, often a camera, processed accordingly, and acted upon by an actuator. Each percept is added to a "percept sequence", which is a complete history of each percept ever detected. The agent's action at any instant point may depend on the entire percept sequence up to that particular instant point. An intelligent agent chooses how to act not only based on the current percept, but the percept sequence. The next action is chosen by the agent function, which maps every percept to an action. For example, if a camera were to record a gesture, the agent would process the percepts, calculate the corresponding spatial vectors, examine its percept history, and use the agent program (the application of the agent function) to act accordingly. == Examples == Examples of percepts include inputs from touch sensors, cameras, infrared sensors, sonar, microphones, mice, and keyboards. A percept can also be a higher-level feature of the data, such as lines, depth, objects, faces, or gestures.
WebCL
WebCL (Web Computing Language) is a JavaScript binding to OpenCL for heterogeneous parallel computing within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins, first announced in March 2011. It is developed on similar grounds as OpenCL and is considered as a browser version of the latter. Primarily, WebCL allows web applications to actualize speed with multi-core CPUs and GPUs. With the growing popularity of applications that need parallel processing like image editing, augmented reality applications and sophisticated gaming, it has become more important to improve the computational speed. With these background reasons, a non-profit Khronos Group designed and developed WebCL, which is a Javascript binding to OpenCL with a portable kernel programming, enabling parallel computing on web browsers, across a wide range of devices. In short, WebCL consists of two parts, one being Kernel programming, which runs on the processors (devices) and the other being JavaScript, which binds the web application to OpenCL. The completed and ratified specification for WebCL 1.0 was released on March 19, 2014. == Implementation == Currently, no browsers natively support WebCL. However, non-native add-ons are used to implement WebCL. For example, Nokia developed a WebCL extension. Mozilla does not plan to implement WebCL in favor of WebGL Compute Shaders, which were in turn scrapped in favor of WebGPU. Mozilla (Firefox) - hg.mozilla.org/projects/webcl/ === WebCL working draft === Samsung (WebKit) - github.com/SRA-SiliconValley/webkit-webcl (unavailable) Nokia (Firefox) - github.com/toaarnio/webcl-firefox (down since Nov 2014, Last Version for FF 34) Intel (Crosswalk) - www.crosswalk-project.org === Example C code === The basic unit of a parallel program is kernel. A kernel is any parallelizable task used to perform a specific job. More often functions can be realized as kernels. A program can be composed of one or more kernels. In order to realize a kernel, it is essential that a task is parallelizable. Data dependencies and order of execution play a vital role in producing efficient parallelized algorithms. A simple example can be thought of the case of loop unrolling performed by C compilers, where a statement like:can be unrolled into:Above statements can be parallelized and can be made to run simultaneously. A kernel follows a similar approach where only the snapshot of the ith iteration is captured inside kernel. Rewriting the above code using a kernel:Running a WebCL application involves the following steps: Allow access to devices and provide context Hand over the kernel to a device Cause the device to execute the kernel Retrieve results from the device Use the data inside JavaScript Further details about the same can be found at == Exceptions List == WebCL, being a JavaScript based implementation, doesn't return an error code when errors occur. Instead, it throws an exception such as OUT_OF_RESOURCES, OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY, or the WebCL-specific WEBCL_IMPLEMENTATION_FAILURE. The exception object describes the machine-readable name and human-readable message describing the error. The syntax is as follows: From the code above, it can be observed that the message field can be a NULL value. Other exceptions include: INVALID_OPERATION – if the blocking form of this function is called from a WebCLCallback INVALID_VALUE – if eventWaitList is empty INVALID_CONTEXT – if events specified in eventWaitList do not belong to the same context INVALID_DEVICE_TYPE – if deviceType is given, but is not one of the valid enumerated values DEVICE_NOT_FOUND – if there is no WebCLDevice available that matches the given deviceType More information on exceptions can be found in the specs document. There is another exception that is raised upon trying to call an object that is ‘released’. On using the release method, the object doesn't get deleted permanently but it frees the resources associated with that object. In order to avoid this exception, releaseAll method can be used, which not only frees the resources but also deletes all the associated objects created. == Security == WebCL, being an open-ended software developed for web applications, has lots of scope for vulnerabilities in the design and development fields too. This forced the developers working on WebCL to give security the utmost importance. Few concerns that were addressed are: Out-of-bounds Memory Access: This occurs by accessing the memory locations, outside the allocated space. An attacker can rewrite or erase all the important data stored in those memory locations. Whenever there arises such a case, an error must be generated at the compile time, and zero must be returned at run-time, not letting the program override the memory. A project WebCL Validator, was initiated by the Khronos Group (developers) on handling this vulnerability. Memory Initialization: This is done to prevent the applications to access the memory locations of previous applications. WebCL ensures that this doesn't happen by initializing all the buffers, variables used to zero before it runs the current application. OpenCL 1.2 has an extension ‘cl_khr_initialize_memory’, which enables this. Denial of Service: The most common attack on web applications cannot be eliminated by WebCL or the browser. OpenCL can be provided with watchdog timers and pre-emptive multitasking, which can be used by WebCL in order to detect and terminate the contexts that are taking too long or consume lot of resources. There is an extension of OpenCL 1.2 ‘cl_khr_terminate_context’ like for the previous one, which enables to terminate the process that might cause a denial of service attack. == Related browser bugs == Bug 664147 - [WebCL] add openCL in gecko, Mozilla Bug 115457: [Meta] WebCL support for WebKit, WebKit Bugzilla