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Jipi And The Paranoid Chip
"Jipi and the Paranoid Chip" is a science fiction short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in ''Forbes'' magazine's July 7, 1997 issue. It is part of the Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon universe. Plot The story deals with the concepts of mindshare and evolutionary software. Jipi, a former Pacific-rim airline flight attendant, is staying with her friend in a high-rise luxury apartment building inside Manila's walled district of Intramuros. The fiftieth floor of a neighboring high-rise houses the Asian-Pacific headquarters of Mindshare Management, under regional supervisor Mr. Cardoza. Goto Engineering is conducting a citywide sewer replacement project which produces unpleasant gases that have hurt the city's hospitality industry. Jipi, looking for work, is given employment by Mr. Cardoza at the Manila Hotel in order to monitor guests in the lobby for signs of having noticed the unpleasant sewer gases and having the guests distracted by Cardoza's actors before they become aware o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction
Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space exploration, time travel, Parallel universes in fiction, parallel universes, and extraterrestrials in fiction, extraterrestrial life. The genre often explores human responses to the consequences of projected or imagined scientific advances. Science fiction is related to fantasy (together abbreviated wikt:SF&F, SF&F), Horror fiction, horror, and superhero fiction, and it contains many #Subgenres, subgenres. The genre's precise Definitions of science fiction, definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Major subgenres include hard science fiction, ''hard'' science fiction, which emphasizes scientific accuracy, and soft science fiction, ''soft'' science fiction, which focuses on social sciences. Other no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Trade Zone
A free-trade zone (FTZ) is a class of special economic zone. It is a geographic area where goods may be imported, stored, handled, manufactured, or reconfigured and re- exported under specific customs regulation and generally not subject to customs duty. Free trade zones are generally organized around major seaports, international airports, and national frontiers—areas with many geographic advantages for trade. Definition The World Bank defines free trade zones as "small, fenced-in, duty-free areas, offering warehousing, storage, and distribution facilities for trade, transshipment, and re-export operations". Free-trade zones can also be defined as labor-intensive manufacturing centers that involve the import of raw materials or components and the export of factory products, but this is a dated definition as more and more free-trade zones focus on service industries such as software, back-office operations, research, and financial services. Synonyms Free-trade zones ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world, and the social sciences, which study individuals and societies. While referred to as the formal sciences, the study of logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science are typically regarded as separate because they rely on deductive reasoning instead of the scientific method as their main methodology. Meanwhile, applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine. The history of science spans the majority of the historical record, with the earliest identifiable predecessors to modern science dating to the Bronze Age in Egypt and Mesopotamia (). Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Greek natural philo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1997 Short Stories
Events January * January 1 – The Emergency Alert System is introduced in the United States. * January 11 – Turkey threatens Cyprus on account of a deal to buy Russian S-300 missiles, prompting the Cypriot Missile Crisis. * January 16 – Murder of Ennis Cosby: Near Interstate 405 (California) on a Los Angeles freeway, Bill Cosby's son Ennis is shot in the head in a failed robbery attempt. * January 17 – A Delta II rocket carrying a military GPS payload explodes, shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral. * January 18 – In northwest Rwanda, Hutu militia members kill 6 Spanish aid workers and three soldiers, and seriously wound another. * January 19 – Yasser Arafat returns to Hebron after more than 30 years, and joins celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli-controlled West Bank city. (→ Hebron Agreement) * January 23 – Madeleine Albright becomes the first female Secretary of State of the United States, after confirmation by the United States Senate. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Great Simoleon Caper
"The Great Simoleon Caper" is a short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in ''TIME'' on March 1, 1995. It deals with concepts familiar to Stephenson's readers: encryption, digital currency, and distributed republics. It appears to be set in a United States that precedes the events in Stephenson's novel ''Snow Crash'' (1992), using an early version of his Metaverse. Plot summary In the story, the protagonist is an underemployed mathematician who resides in the house of his brother's family in Chicago. The brother, owner of an advertising agency, has won a large contract to create ads for "Simoleons", a form of non-governmental electronic "currency". To launch the product, they plan to give away 27 million Simoleons to the winners of a contest. The contest is based on the long-used format of "guess the number of jelly beans in the container", with Chicago's Soldier Field and 26 other football stadiums as the containers. The brother asks the mathematician ("the hero") to do th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner (novelist), John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel ''Neuromancer'' helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Frank Miller's ''Ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genetic Programming
Genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary algorithm, an artificial intelligence technique mimicking natural evolution, which operates on a population of programs. It applies the genetic operators selection (evolutionary algorithm), selection according to a predefined fitness function, fitness measure, mutation (evolutionary algorithm), mutation and crossover (evolutionary algorithm), crossover. The crossover operation involves swapping specified parts of selected pairs (parents) to produce new and different offspring that become part of the new generation of programs. Some programs not selected for reproduction are copied from the current generation to the new generation. Mutation involves substitution of some random part of a program with some other random part of a program. Then the selection and other operations are recursively applied to the new generation of programs. Typically, members of each new generation are on average more fit than the members of the previous gene ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to machine perception, perceive their environment and use machine learning, learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon (company), Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon Alexa, Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); Generative artificial intelligence, generative and Computational creativity, creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and Superintelligence, superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mindshare
Mind share relates to the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion. When people think of examples of a product type or category, they usually think of a limited number of brand names. The aim of mind share is to establish a brand as being one of the best kinds of a given product or service, and to even have the brand name become a synonym for the product or service offered. For example, a prospective buyer of a college education will have several thousand colleges to choose from. However, the evoked set, or set of schools considered, will probably be limited to about ten. Of these ten, the colleges that the buyer is most familiar with will receive the greatest attention. Marketers and promoters of mind share try to maximize the popularity of their product, so that the brand co-exists with deeper, more empirical categories of objects. Kleenex, for example, can distinguish itself as a type of tissue. But, beca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Goto Dengo
''Cryptonomicon'' is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II–era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare. Genre and subject matter ''Cryptonomicon'' is closer to the genres of historical fiction and contemporary tech ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Baroque Cycle
''The Baroque Cycle'' is a series of novels by American writer Neal Stephenson. It was published in three volumes containing eight books in 2003 and 2004. The story follows the adventures of a sizable cast of characters living amidst some of the central events of the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. Despite featuring a literary treatment consistent with historical fiction, Stephenson has characterized the work as science fiction, because of the presence of some anomalous occurrences and the work's particular emphasis on themes relating to science and technology. The sciences of cryptology and numismatics feature heavily in the series, as they do in some of Stephenson's other works. Books The ''Baroque Cycle'' consists of several novels "lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint"; Stephenson felt calling the works a ''trilogy'' would be "bogus". Appearing in print in 2003 and 20 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
