17776 (also known as What Football Will Look Like in the Future) is a serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative by Jon Bois, published online through SB Nation. Set in the distant future in which all humans have become immortal and infertile, the series follows three sapient space probes that watch humanity play an evolved form of American football in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The series debuted on July 5, 2017, and new chapters were published daily until the series concluded with its twenty-fifth chapter on July 15, 2017. Bois began developing 17776 in 2016. Because the story incorporates text, animated GIFs, still images, and videos hosted on YouTube, new tools were developed to allow it to be hosted efficiently on the SB Nation website. The work explores themes of consciousness, hope, despair, and why humans play sports. 17776 was well received by critics, who praised it for its innovative use of its medium and for the depth of emotion it evoked. In 2018, the story won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation and was longlisted for both the Hugo Awards for Best Novella and Best Graphic Story. It is followed by a sequel series: 20020, released from September to October 2020. The sequel series follows a 111-team game of college football on fields spanning 130,000 miles (210,000 km) across the United States. Bois originally intended to follow up with a further series entitled 20021; however, it was postponed indefinitely. In May 2025, Bois announced that the series would be continued with a novel titled 50007: An American Football Odyssey. == Premise == The story takes place on a future Earth where humans stopped dying, aging, and being born on April 7, 2026. All social ills were subsequently eliminated, and technology preventing humans from any injury was developed. In the United States, American football evolved to include new rules, including those that allow fields thousands of miles long, hundreds of in-game players, and games millennia long. Over time, computers gained sentience due to constant exposure to broadcast human data. By the year 17776, the space probe Pioneer 9 (called Nine) has gained sentience and made contact with Pioneer 10 (called Ten) and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (called Juice). As Nine adjusts to a world radically different from that of the 20th century, the three space probes watch multiple football games occurring across the United States: a game using the entirety of Nebraska as a field in which the next point scored wins the game; a game in which players strive to possess every existing football autographed by obscure NFL player Koy Detmer; a game played between the Canadian border and the Mexican border deadlocked for 13,000 years at the bottom of a gorge in Arizona; an NFL regulation game between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers that changed over 15,000 years into 58 playing teams owning and capitalizing upon portions of Sports Authority Field at Mile High while the ball is lost; a 500 game that results in the destruction of the Centennial Light; and a game in which the possessing player is attempting to score an automatic win by hiding in his team's end zone for 10,000 years. == Format == 17776 is read by scrolling through web pages occupied by large GIF images and colored dialogue text, interspersed with occasional YouTube videos. The story is divided into chapters, which were originally published in daily installments between July 5 and 15, 2017. Much of the GIF and video content of the series uses Google Earth satellite imagery, 3D buildings, and other tools within Google Earth to create animations and visual effects. == Development == Bois wrote and illustrated 17776 for Vox Media's sports news website SB Nation, of which he is creative director. Aside from 17776, Bois produces two other recurring, humorous video essay programs for the site: Pretty Good, which focuses on unusual sports topics and stories, and Chart Party, which focuses on statistics and has an emphasis on Bois' use of visual art in his journalism and storytelling. Bois is also known for the Breaking Madden series, in which he attempted unusual scenarios in the Madden NFL series of video games. In early 2016, Bois began developing an "anti-sci fi" project as a possible sequel to The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles, an earlier work for SB Nation, and set the story in a year far enough in the future that "nobody ever thinks about it." Although he liked the concept and the visuals, he believed the project would not connect with readers and shelved it. Later, he realized that the story needed a centering character; he wrote one in the form of a small town, AM radio talk show host before coming up with the characters of the probes. Development renewed in May 2016, and the project solidified after SB Nation published its article "The Future of Football." Bois described it as the biggest project he ever attempted. The series was developed by Graham MacAree, who used a Vox Media tool that creates custom packages from standard article sets to give Bois creative leeway and to accommodate the series' weight on the SB Nation website. MacAree found that there were few resources online for achieving the desired effects. == Themes == Bois has stated that he had "conceived [17776] to give the reader a good time," asserting that this "was literally the whole point." William Hughes writing for The A.V. Club described 17776 as concerned with why humans play sports: "That is, given the massive resources, time, and information at our disposal (not to mention those available to our descendants), why does communal game-playing still hold such an important place in society?" He also listed consciousness, hope, and despair as among the work's themes. Beth Elderkin of io9 described it as "a deep thought experiment into what we consider humanly possible". She also felt that Ten and Juice take on the role of angel and devil, and she suggested the two may be unreliable narrators. Ian Crouch of The New Yorker felt that the work had a "tonal echo" of Don DeLillo's 1972 novel End Zone due to thematic similarities "with the way that the order and logic of football might act as a counterbalance to the chaos of the real world". == Reception == According to the communications director at Vox Media, 17776 garnered over 2.3 million pageviews by July 10. Two days later, it had received more than 2.9 million pageviews. Average engagement time was over nine minutes, and 43 percent of readers finished each installment of the series published by July 7. On July 19, Bois claimed that 17776 received 700,000 unique visitors and 4 million total pageviews, with an average engagement time of 11 minutes. Thu-Huong Ha for Quartz described 17776 as "part Italo Calvino, part Peter Heller [author of The Dog Stars], with humor seemingly from within the depths of Reddit," saying that the story would appeal to fans of both sports and literature. Tor.com described the first chapter as full of tension and felt that receiving answers is a "surprisingly heartbreaking" experience "lessened by a gleeful bouncing immaturity" one would not expect from the characters. Beth Elderkin at io9 said the series is "akin to Homestuck" and described it as "weird, complex, and pretty spectacular". William Hughes writing for The A.V. Club felt that 17776 is a "truly innovative piece of work". After reading the first three chapters, Agatha French of the Los Angeles Times stated that she was "impressed and excited by the innovation" of what she saw, and that she was intrigued despite not knowing what the work is or is saying. She felt the work took full advantage of its online medium and suggested that it "may also be a glimpse into the future of reading on the Internet". Ian Crouch of The New Yorker described the series as, "despite its seemingly meagre parts, a thing of startling beauty". Of the chapters published by July 12, he felt "the most striking chapter" to be one that used audio of Verne Lundquist calling the end of a 2013 game between the University of Alabama and Auburn University over a video panning over Earth. He also noted that the series was compared to Homestuck and relayed additional comparisons to Thomas Pynchon novels and "a Reddit thread hijacked by robot trolls". The series won the inaugural National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation from the American Society of Magazine Editors; this was the first National Magazine Award nomination and win for SB Nation. It was described by the judges as "an extraordinary combination of art, fiction and technology, an online acid trip that had to be experienced to be believed." It was also longlisted for the Hugo Awards for Best Novella and Best Graphic Story in 2018, ultimately finishing in 11th place in both categories. == Sequel series == On September 28, 2020, a sequel titled 20020 was launched on Secret Base, a branch of SB Nation; on October 13, it was revea
GeneRIF
A GeneRIF or Gene Reference Into Function is a short (255 characters or fewer) statement about the function of a gene. GeneRIFs provide a simple mechanism for allowing scientists to add to the functional annotation of genes described in the Entrez Gene database. In practice, function is constructed quite broadly. For example, there are GeneRIFs that discuss the role of a gene in a disease, GeneRIFs that point the viewer towards a review article about the gene, and GeneRIFs that discuss the structure of a gene. However, the stated intent is for GeneRIFs to be about gene function. Currently over half a million geneRIFs have been created for genes from almost 1000 different species. GeneRIFs are always associated with specific entries in the Entrez Gene database. Each GeneRIF has a pointer to the PubMed ID (a type of document identifier) of a scientific publication that provides evidence for the statement made by the GeneRIF. GeneRIFs are often extracted directly from the document that is identified by the PubMed ID, very frequently from its title or from its final sentence. GeneRIFs are usually produced by NCBI indexers, but anyone may submit a GeneRIF. To be processed, a valid Gene ID must exist for the specific gene, or the Gene staff must have assigned an overall Gene ID to the species. The latter case is implemented via records in Gene with the symbol NEWENTRY. Once the Gene ID is identified, only three types of information are required to complete a submission: a concise phrase describing a function or functions (less than 255 characters in length, preferably more than a restatement of the title of the paper); a published paper describing that function, implemented by supplying the PubMed ID of a citation in PubMed; a valid e-mail address (which will remain confidential). == Example == Here are some GeneRIFs taken from Entrez Gene for GeneID 7157, the human gene TP53. The PubMed document identifiers have been omitted from the examples. Note the wide variability with respect to the presence or absence of punctuation and of sentence-initial capital letters. p53 and c-erbB-2 may have independent role in carcinogenesis of gall bladder cancer Degradation of endogenous HIPK2 depends on the presence of a functional p53 protein. p53 codon 72 alleles influence the response to anticancer drugs in cells from aged people by regulating the cell cycle inhibitor p21WAF1 Logistic regression analysis showed p53 and COX-2 as dependent predictors in pancreatic carcinogenesis, and a reciprocal relationship to neoplastic progression between p53 and COX-2. GeneRIFs are an unusual type of textual genre, and they have recently been the subject of a number of articles from the natural language processing community.
Informationist
An informationist (or information specialist in context) provides research and knowledge management services in the context of clinical care or biomedical research. Although there is no one educational pathway or formalized set of skills or knowledge for informationists, one way to think of the informationist is as one who possesses the knowledge and skill of a medical librarian with extensive research specialization and some formal clinical or public health education that goes beyond on-the-job osmosis. Medical librarians and other biomedical professional organizations have been exploring the possibilities for evaluating how informationists are being used and whether their activities supplement or replace medical library activity. More generally, an informationist is a professional who works with information within a particular business, analytic or scientific context to drive toward outcomes based on evidence, analysis, prediction and execution. For example, an extension of the term is increasingly emerging in financial services, life sciences and health care industries. Though still nascently in use, its adoption applies to individuals with extensive industry expertise, acute familiarity with organizational structures and processes, deep domain level information mastery and information systems technical savvy. Informationists in this context support transformational initiatives within and across functional areas of an enterprise as architects, governance experts, continuous improvement advocates and strategists. == Background == The term was proposed in 2000 by Davidoff & Florance. Their editorial suggested that physicians should be delegating their information needs to informationists, just as they currently order CT scans from radiologists or cardiac catheterizations from cardiologists. They conceived of an information professional who was embedded in (and indeed, supported by) the clinical departments. Supporters of the concept see it as a means for librarians to reinvigorate connections with the faculty/clinicians, as well as provide superior service by dint of informationists' biomedical training. Critics complained that the idea is nothing new; librarians already provide in-depth, high quality information services and clinical medical librarians have been working alongside physicians, nurses and other clinicians for years. Large informationist programs in the U.S. exist at the National Institutes of Health and at Vanderbilt University. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) is developing an informationist service model in which its 10 clinical and public health librarians are moving from serving as liaison librarians for assigned departments toward becoming embedded informationists within their departments. To prepare for the embedded informationist role, librarians are undertaking education as needed to supplement their backgrounds. For example, librarians bring experience in clinical behavior counseling, public health, nursing, and more. Informationist training can then focus upon filling gaps in research methods knowledge more so than on gaining additional knowledge in the librarian's area of expertise. Courses, seminars and workshops being undertaken include those covering systematic reviews, evidence-based medicine, critical appraisal, medical language, anatomy and physiology, biostatistics, and clinical research. The term informationist is related to that of informatician—also informaticist—and many informationists do possess skills in clinical topics, bioinformatics, and biomedical informatics. Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Washington University in St. Louis are examples of institutional libraries which have hired PhD-level scientists (who may or may not have library degrees) to provide informatics support for biomedical research.
Vinelink.com
Vinelink.com (VINE) is a national website in the United States that allows victims of crime, and the general public, to track the movements of prisoners held by the various states and territories. The first four letters in the websites name, "vine", are an acronym for "Victim Information and Notification Everyday". Vinelink.com displays information, based on the information provided by the various states' departments of correction and other law enforcement agencies, on whether an inmate is in custody, has been released, has been granted parole or probation, or has escaped from custody. In some cases, the website will reveal whether a defendant has been granted parole or probation, but then subsequently violated conditions of their release and become a fugitive. Information provided on Vinelink.com represents metadata, in that the website lists a defendant's custody status; but does not list what the individual is charged with, their criminal history, or the amount of their bail, if applicable. Internet users accessing the Vinelink.com website choose from a map of states and provinces within the United States where they wish to perform a search for an inmate. The user may then search for an individual using the inmate's or parolee's name, or by entering the inmate's specific department of corrections inmate number, if known. When the inmate's custody status changes, users who have registered to be notified of such changes will be notified via email, phone or both. This information is currently released upon request, without the website requesting reasons for the users search or requiring payment, as public records available to the general public. Inmate information is available for most states, and for Puerto Rico, on the website. The states of Arizona, Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire and West Virginia provide very limited information on the site. In March of 2025, The Maine Sheriff's Association entered into a contract to pilot the use of the VINE system in three counties in the state as well as a regional jail, therefore making South Dakota the only state that does not participate in the VINE system to any degree. The website does not provide data on prisoners detained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons which has its own inmate locator web site nor for inmates of the U.S. military prisons.
Conceptualization (information science)
In information science, a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected parts of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them. An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an ontology, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ontological commitment in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others. "An ontology is language-dependent", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it". The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right. Not all workers in knowledge engineering use the term "conceptualization", but instead refer to the conceptualization itself, or to the ontological commitment of all its realizations, as an overarching ontology. == Purpose and implementation == As a higher level abstraction, a conceptualization facilitates the discussion and comparison of its various ontologies, facilitating knowledge sharing and reuse. Each ontology based upon the same overarching conceptualization maps the conceptualization into specific elements and their relationships. The question then arises as to how to describe the "conceptualization" in terms that can encompass multiple ontologies. This issue has been called the Tower of Babel problem, that is, how can persons used to one ontology talk with others using a different ontology? This problem is easily grasped, but a general resolution is not at hand. It can be a "bottom-up" or a "top-down" approach, or something in between. However, in more artificial situations, such as information systems, the idea of a "conceptualization" and the "ontological commitment" of various ontologies that realize the "conceptualization" is possible. The formation of a conceptualization and its ontologies involves these steps: specification of the conceptualization ontology concepts: every definition involves the definitions of other terms relationships between the concepts: this step maps conceptual relationships onto the ontology structure groups of concepts: this step may lead to the creation of sub-ontologies formal description of ontology commitments, for example, to make them computer readable An example of moving conception into a language leading to a variety of ontologies is the expression of a process in pseudocode (a strictly structured form of ordinary language) leading to implementation in several different formal computer languages like Lisp or Fortran. The pseudocode makes it easier to understand the instructions and compare implementations, but the formal languages make possible the compilation of the ideas as computer instructions. Another example is mathematics, where a very general formulation (the analog of a conceptualization) is illustrated with "applications" that are more specialized examples. For instance, aspects of a function space can be illustrated using a vector space or a topological space that introduce interpretations of the "elements" of the conceptualization and additional relationships between them but preserve the connections required in the function space.
EasyChair
EasyChair is a web-based conference management software system. It has been used since 2002 in the scientific community for tasks such as organising research paper submission and review. In 2012, EasyChair added an open access online publication service for conference proceedings. == Description == EasyChair is a paid web-based conference management software system used, among other tasks, to organize paper submission and review, similar to other event management system software such as OpenConf. EasyChair used to be run by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester but now it is a commercial service, owned by EasyChair Ltd. in Stockport (established 2016). EasyChair used to be free, for standard service, but as of 2022, only minimal services are free. The EasyChair website also provides an open access online publication service for conference proceedings. When launched in 2012, the service was for computer science only, but in 2016 it was expanded to all sciences. == History == The EasyChair software has been in continuous development since 2002. As of 2015, the code base consists of nearly 300,000 lines of code, and it has been used by more than 41,000 conferences. More than two and a half million users in the scientific community reported using it in 2019.
Algorithmic game theory
Algorithmic game theory (AGT) is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of game theory and computer science, focused on understanding and designing algorithms for environments where multiple strategic agents interact. This research area combines computational thinking with economic principles to address challenges that emerge when algorithmic inputs come from self-interested participants. In traditional algorithm design, inputs are assumed to be fixed and reliable. However, in many real-world applications—such as online auctions, internet routing, digital advertising, and resource allocation systems—inputs are provided by multiple independent agents who may strategically misreport information to manipulate outcomes in their favor. AGT provides frameworks to analyze and design systems that remain effective despite such strategic behavior. The field can be approached from two complementary perspectives: Analysis: Evaluating existing algorithms and systems through game-theoretic tools to understand their strategic properties. This includes calculating and proving properties of Nash equilibria (stable states where no participant can benefit by changing only their own strategy), measuring price of anarchy (efficiency loss due to selfish behavior), and analyzing best-response dynamics (how systems evolve when players sequentially optimize their strategies). Design: Creating mechanisms and algorithms with both desirable computational properties and game-theoretic robustness. This sub-field, known as algorithmic mechanism design, develops systems that incentivize truthful behavior while maintaining computational efficiency. Algorithm designers in this domain must satisfy traditional algorithmic requirements (such as polynomial-time running time and good approximation ratio) while simultaneously addressing incentive constraints that ensure participants act according to the system's intended design. == History == === Nisan-Ronen: a new framework for studying algorithms === In 1999, the seminal paper of Noam Nisan and Amir Ronen drew the attention of the Theoretical Computer Science community to designing algorithms for selfish (strategic) users. As they claim in the abstract: We consider algorithmic problems in a distributed setting where the participants cannot be assumed to follow the algorithm but rather their own self-interest. As such participants, termed agents, are capable of manipulating the algorithm, the algorithm designer should ensure in advance that the agents’ interests are best served by behaving correctly. Following notions from the field of mechanism design, we suggest a framework for studying such algorithms. In this model the algorithmic solution is adorned with payments to the participants and is termed a mechanism. The payments should be carefully chosen as to motivate all participants to act as the algorithm designer wishes. We apply the standard tools of mechanism design to algorithmic problems and in particular to the shortest path problem. This paper coined the term algorithmic mechanism design and was recognized by the 2012 Gödel Prize committee as one of "three papers laying foundation of growth in Algorithmic Game Theory". === Price of Anarchy === The other two papers cited in the 2012 Gödel Prize for fundamental contributions to Algorithmic Game Theory introduced and developed the concept of "Price of Anarchy". In their 1999 paper "Worst-case Equilibria", Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou proposed a new measure of the degradation of system efficiency due to the selfish behavior of its agents: the ratio of between system efficiency at an optimal configuration, and its efficiency at the worst Nash equilibrium. (The term "Price of Anarchy" only appeared a couple of years later.) === The Internet as a catalyst === The Internet created a new economy—both as a foundation for exchange and commerce, and in its own right. The computational nature of the Internet allowed for the use of computational tools in this new emerging economy. On the other hand, the Internet itself is the outcome of actions of many. This was new to the classic, ‘top-down’ approach to computation that held till then. Thus, game theory is a natural way to view the Internet and interactions within it, both human and mechanical. Game theory studies equilibria (such as the Nash equilibrium). An equilibrium is generally defined as a state in which no player has an incentive to change their strategy. Equilibria are found in several fields related to the Internet, for instance financial interactions and communication load-balancing. Game theory provides tools to analyze equilibria, and a common approach is then to ‘find the game’—that is, to formalize specific Internet interactions as a game, and to derive the associated equilibria. Rephrasing problems in terms of games allows the analysis of Internet-based interactions and the construction of mechanisms to meet specified demands. If equilibria can be shown to exist, a further question must be answered: can an equilibrium be found, and in reasonable time? This leads to the analysis of algorithms for finding equilibria. Of special importance is the complexity class PPAD, which includes many problems in algorithmic game theory. == Areas of research == === Algorithmic mechanism design === Mechanism design is the subarea of economics that deals with optimization under incentive constraints. Algorithmic mechanism design considers the optimization of economic systems under computational efficiency requirements. Typical objectives studied include revenue maximization and social welfare maximization. === Inefficiency of equilibria === The concepts of price of anarchy and price of stability were introduced to capture the loss in performance of a system due to the selfish behavior of its participants. The price of anarchy captures the worst-case performance of the system at equilibrium relative to the optimal performance possible. The price of stability, on the other hand, captures the relative performance of the best equilibrium of the system. These concepts are counterparts to the notion of approximation ratio in algorithm design. === Complexity of finding equilibria === The existence of an equilibrium in a game is typically established using non-constructive fixed point theorems. There are no efficient algorithms known for computing Nash equilibria. The problem is complete for the complexity class PPAD even in 2-player games. In contrast, correlated equilibria can be computed efficiently using linear programming, as well as learned via no-regret strategies. === Computational social choice === Computational social choice studies computational aspects of social choice, the aggregation of individual agents' preferences. Examples include algorithms and computational complexity of voting rules and coalition formation. Other topics include: Algorithms for computing Market equilibria Fair division Multi-agent systems And the area counts with diverse practical applications: Sponsored search auctions Spectrum auctions Cryptocurrencies Prediction markets Reputation systems Sharing economy Matching markets such as kidney exchange and school choice Crowdsourcing and peer grading Economics of the cloud == Journals and newsletters == ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC) SIGEcom Exchanges Algorithmic Game Theory papers are often also published in Game Theory journals such as GEB, Economics journals such as Econometrica, and Computer Science journals such as SICOMP.