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Bonsai Kitten
Bonsai Kitten was a hoax website that claimed to instruct readers how to raise a kitten in a jar, so as to mold the bones of the kitten into the shape of the jar as the cat grows in the same way as a bonsai plant. It was made by an MIT student going by the alias of Dr. Michael Wong Chang. The website generated fury with many people taking it as serious and complaining to animal rights organizations. The Michigan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) stated that "while the site's content may be faked, the issue it is campaigning for may create violence towards animals". Although the website is now shut down, petitions are still circulated to shut down the site or complain to its ISP. The website has been debunked by several organizations including Snopes.com and the Humane Society of the United States. Concerns about the website On October 30, 2000, BonsaiKitten.com was featured as a "Cruel Site of the Day" on the website Cruel.com. When this attracted complai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hoax
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax. Whereas the promoters of frauds, fakes, and scams devise them so that they will withstand the highest degree of scrutiny customary in the affair, hoaxers are confident, justifiably or not, that their representations will receive no scrutiny at all. They have such confidence because their representations belong to a world of notions fundamental to the victims' views of reality, but whose truth and importance they accept without argument or evidence, and so never question. Some hoaxers intend eventually to unmask their representations as in fact a hoax so as to expose their victims as fools; seeking some form of profit, other hoaxers hope to maintain the hoax indefini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992, and as attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, Clinton became known as a New Democrat, as many of his policies reflected a centrist "Third Way" political philosophy. He is the husband of Hillary Clinton, who was a senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2016 presidential election. Clinton was born and raised in Arkansas and attended Georgetown University. He received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at University College, Oxford and later graduated from Yale Law School. He met Hillary Rodham at Yale; they married in 1975. After graduating from law school, Clinton returned to Arkansas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foot Binding
Foot binding, or footbinding, was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls in order to change their shape and size. Feet altered by footbinding were known as lotus feet, and the shoes made for these feet were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, footbinding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities. The prevalence and practice of footbinding varied over time and by region and social class. The practice may have originated among court dancers during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in 10th-century China, and gradually became popular among the elite during the Song dynasty. Footbinding eventually spread to lower social classes by the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). Manchu emperors attempted to ban the practice in the 17th century, but failed. In some areas, footbinding raised marriage prospects. It ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comprachicos
Comprachicos is a compound Spanish neologism meaning "child-buyers", which was coined by Victor Hugo in his novel '' The Man Who Laughs''. The words Comprapequeños and Cheylas are also used. It refers to various groups in folklore who were said to change the physical appearance of human beings by manipulating growing children, in a similar way to the horticultural method of bonsai – that is, deliberate mutilation. The most common methods said to be used in this practice included stunting children's growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and malforming their bones. The resulting dwarfed and deformed adults made their living as mountebanks or were sold to lords and ladies to be used as pages or court fools or court dwarfs. Historical references Victor Hugo's novel '' The Man Who Laughs'' is the story of a young aristocrat kidnapped and disfigured by his captors to display a permanent malicious grin. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chain Letter
A chain letter is a message that attempts to convince the recipient to make a number of copies and pass them on to a certain number of recipients. The "chain" is an exponentially growing pyramid (a tree graph) that cannot be sustained indefinitely. Common methods used in chain letters include emotionally manipulative stories, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and the exploitation of superstition to threaten the recipient. Originally, chain letters were letters sent by mail; today, chain letters are often sent electronically via email, social network sites, and text messages. Types There are two main types of chain letter: # Hoaxes: Hoaxes attempt to trick or defraud users. A hoax could be malicious, instructing users to delete a file necessary to the operating system by claiming it is a virus. It could also be a scam that convinces users to spread the letter to other people for a specific reason, or send money or personal information. Phishing attacks could fall into this. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spam Email
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic. Since the expense of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising. This makes it an excellent example of a negative externality. The legal definition and status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but nowhere have laws and lawsuits been particularly successful in stemming spam. Most email spam messages are commercial in nature. Whether commercial or not, many are not only annoying as a form of attention theft, but also dangerous because they may contain links that lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware or include ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brain Damage
Neurotrauma, brain damage or brain injury (BI) is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors. In general, brain damage refers to significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage. A common category with the greatest number of injuries is traumatic brain injury (TBI) following physical trauma or head injury from an outside source, and the term acquired brain injury (ABI) is used in appropriate circles to differentiate brain injuries occurring after birth from injury, from a genetic disorder (GBI), or from a congenital disorder (CBI). Primary and secondary brain injuries identify the processes involved, while focal and diffuse brain injury describe the severity and localization. Recent research has demonstrated that neuroplasticity, which allows the brain to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, provides for rearrangement of its workings. This allows the brain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cat Litter
A litter box, also known as a sandbox, cat box, litter tray, cat pan, potty, pot or litter pan, is an indoor feces and urine collection box for cats, as well as rabbits, ferrets, miniature pigs, small dogs, and other pets that instinctively or through training will make use of such a repository. They are provided for pets that are permitted free roam of a home but who cannot or do not always go outside to excrete their metabolic waste. In the wild, cats naturally excrete in soft or sandy soil for easy burial. They use their paws in a backward sweeping motion to cover their feces. To stimulate this instinctive desire, a litter box's bottom is typically filled with or less of cat litter. Litter box filler is a loose, granular material that absorbs moisture and odors such as ammonia. Some litter brands contain baking soda to absorb such odors, or owners may sprinkle a thin layer in the bottom of the box, under the cat litter. The litter material also satisfies a cat's instinctiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animal Rights Activist
The animal rights (AR) movement, sometimes called the animal liberation, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement that seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries. Terms and factions All animal liberationists believe that the individual interests of non-human animals deserve recognition and protection, but the movement can be split into two broad camps. Animal rights advocates believe that these basic interests confer moral rights of some kind on the animals, and/or ought to confer legal rights on them;"Animal rights," ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 2007. see, for example, the work of Tom Regan. Utilitarian liberationists, on the other hand, do not believe that animals possess moral rights, but argue, on utilitarian grounds — utilitarianism in its simplest form a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mirror Website
Mirror sites or mirrors are replicas of other websites or any network node. The concept of mirroring applies to network services accessible through any protocol, such as HTTP or FTP. Such sites have different URLs than the original site, but host identical or near-identical content. Mirror sites are often located in a different geographic region than the original, or upstream site. The purpose of mirrors is to reduce network traffic, improve access speed, ensure availability of the original site for technical or political reasons, or provide a real-time backup of the original site. Mirror sites are particularly important in developing countries, where internet access may be slower or less reliable. The maintainers of some mirrors choose not to replicate the entire contents of the upstream server they are mirroring because of technical constraints, or selecting only a subset relevant to their purpose, such as software written in a particular programming language, runnable on a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant only physical mail (hence '' e- + mail''). Email later became a ubiquitous (very widely used) communication medium, to the point that in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries. ''Email'' is the medium, and each message sent therewith is also called an ''email.'' The term is a mass noun. Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet, and also local area networks. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspapers and broadcasters. The AP has earned 56 Pulitzer Prizes, including 34 for photography, since the award was established in 1917. It is also known for publishing the widely used '' AP Stylebook''. By 2016, news collected by the AP was published and republished by more than 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters, English, Spanish, and Arabic. The AP operates 248 news bureaus in 99 countries. It also operates the AP Radio Network, which provides newscasts twice hourly for broadcast and satellite radio and television stations. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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