Portal:Technology

Pioneer Square South and Pioneer Square North are a pair of light rail stations in Portland, Oregon, United States, served by TriMet as part of MAX Light Rail. Located at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, the side-platform stations are integrated into the sidewalks along Southwest Yamhill and Morrison streets between Broadway and 6th Avenue. Eastbound trains stop at Pioneer Square South, while westbound trains stop at Pioneer Square North. Together with the nearby Pioneer Courthouse/SW 6th and Pioneer Place/SW 5th stations one block east, the Pioneer Square stations form the only location in the MAX system where riders can transfer among all five lines.

The Pioneer Square stations are among the 27 original stops of the Banfield Light Rail Project, Portland's first light rail line. They opened with the system’s inaugural service on September 5, 1986. The stations are served by the Blue Line, which operates between Hatfield Government Center station in Hillsboro and Cleveland Avenue station in Gresham, and the Red Line, which operates between Hillsboro Airport/Fairgrounds station and Portland Airport station. The Yellow Line had served the stations from May 2004 until August 2009 when the line was rerouted to the Portland Transit Mall. (Full article...)

The Thousand Islands Parkway (often written as 1000 Islands Parkway) is a scenic parkway in the Canadian province of Ontario. It extends easterly from an interchange with Highway 401 in Gananoque for approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) to rejoin Highway 401 near the community of Butternut Bay, west of Brockville. The parkway follows the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, and was formerly designated Highway 2S (S for Scenic) until 1970. It passes through the communities of Gray's Beach, Halsteads Bay, Ivy Lea, Darlingside, Rockport, Narrows, La Rue Mills and Mallorytown Landing, as well as providing access to the three inland properties of the Thousand Islands National Park. Highway 137, which meets the parkway near its midpoint, provides access to the Interstate 81 in New York via the Thousand Islands Bridge.

The Thousand Islands Parkway was constructed as a divided highway during the late 1930s, alongside the Thousand Islands Bridge, which opened in 1938. Originally known as the St. Lawrence River Road, the parkway became part of Highway 401 when the 400-series highway system was established in 1952. However by that time numerous properties and tourism had been established which made the parkway difficult to upgrade to a full freeway, so in 1968 Highway 401 was rerouted along a new alignment (the Thousand Islands Bypass) north of the existing parkway. The Highway 2S designation returned between 1967 and 1970, after which jurisdiction over the parkway was transferred to the St. Lawrence Parks Commission. The northern carriageway of the parkway was never paved, and was only in use by vehicles between 1938 and 1951. Evidence of its former use can be seen today in the wide right-of-way; the unused westbound lanes now serve as a recreational trail and twin bridges span two locations along the parkway. (Full article...)

"The Epic Split feat. Van Damme (Live Test)" is a 75-second-long commercial released in November 2013 by Swedish company Volvo Trucks, as the sixth commercial in their "Live Tests" advertising campaign. The commercial was made to demonstrate the stability of the Volvo FM trucks while using their implementation of dynamic steering response.

It features Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme (then 52 or 53) performing a split on the wing mirrors between two backwards moving trucks set to the music "Only Time" by Irish singer Enya. The commercial was recorded in a single take at the inactive Ciudad Real International Airport in Spain during a sunrise. It was produced by the agency Forsman & Bodenfors and was directed by Andreas Nilsson. It has won several awards, and multiple parodies were based on the commercial. (Full article...)

The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. The original versions of the game contain no graphics, as they were developed for computers that used teleprinters instead of computer monitors. A later Apple II port added a graphical shooting minigame.

The first version of the game was developed over the course of two weeks for use by Rawitsch in a history unit at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis. Despite its popularity with the students, it was deleted from the school district's mainframe computer at the end of the school semester. Rawitsch recreated the game in 1974 for the MECC, which distributed educational software for free in Minnesota and for sale elsewhere, and recalibrated the probabilities of events based on historical journals and diaries for the game's release the following year. After the rise of microcomputers in the 1970s, the MECC released several versions of the game over the next decade for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, and Commodore 64 computers, before redesigning it as a graphical commercial game for the Apple II under the same name in 1985. (Full article...)

The Connecticut Southern Railroad (reporting mark CSO) is a 90-mile (140 km) short-line railroad operating in Connecticut and Massachusetts, United States. The company was formed in 1996 as a spinoff of Conrail by shortline holding company RailTex and subsequently acquired in 2000 by RailAmerica. Since 2012, it has been a subsidiary of Genesee & Wyoming. CSO is headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, site of its Hartford Yard. The company also operates East Hartford Yard.

Connecticut Southern connects with CSX Transportation at yards in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and North Haven, Connecticut (Cedar Hill Yard). It also connects with the Providence and Worcester Railroad and Central New England Railroad in Hartford, and Pan Am Southern in Berlin. The company's main line is Amtrak's New Haven–Springfield Line, which CSO has trackage rights over; branches are also operated to Suffield, Windsor Locks, Manchester, and South Windsor. Much of the railroad's traffic comes from imports to Connecticut, such as lumber, steel, and carbon dioxide. The railroad also hauls exports of trash and recycling. As of 2022, CSO carries approximately 18,500 carloads annually. (Full article...)

NSB Class 73 (Norwegian: NSB-type 73) is a class of 22 electric multiple units built by Adtranz for the Norwegian State Railways. The four-car trains were modifications of Class 71, which was again based on the Swedish X2. The A-series consists of 16 intercity trains; they were delivered in 1999 and 2000 and are used on the Bergen, Dovre and Sørland Lines. The intercity service was branded as Signatur until 2003. The B-series consists of six regional trains delivered in 2002 and used on the Østfold Line. The regional trains were originally part of the Agenda concept. The trains have a power output of 2,646 kilowatts (3,548 hp) and a maximum speed of 210 km/h (130 mph). They have an overall length of 108 meters (354 ft) and have a capacity for 208 seated passengers in the A-series and 250 in the B-series. The trains have a tilting mechanism allowing for faster travel through curves.

The trains were delivered late, and were put into service after the Norwegian Railway Inspectorate had given dispensation from parts of the safety regulation. On 17 June 2000, a train derailed at Nelaug Station after an axle broke. The class was grounded for a month, and the investigation showed both design errors, and lack of proper inspection and testing. After they were put back into service, they were not allowed to use the tilting mechanism—thus not being allowed to run faster than their predecessors. The construction was reinforced, and in 2004, the tilting mechanism was re-enabled along with higher speeds. In 2007, a train derailed on the Bergen Line, and questions were raised about the trains' ability to operate in snow, however the accident report showed that the trains' front axle load was just as able to cope with heavy snow conditions as the locomotives running on the line, and that the derailment would have been more severe if the same conditions would hit a normal train with less secure connections between carriages. On 16 June 2011, two units were destroyed when the train ran into a fire in a snow tunnel at Hallingskeid Station. (Full article...)

On 15 August 2019, Ural Airlines Flight 178, a scheduled passenger flight from Moscow to Simferopol, suffered engine damage and made a forced landing in a cornfield after takeoff from Zhukovsky International Airport. The aircraft, an Airbus A321-211 with 226 passengers and 7 crew members, was taking off from Runway 12 when it struck several birds during rotation, causing damage to the engines. Due to the resulting loss of thrust and improper actions by the flight crew, the A321 failed to gain sufficient airspeed and altitude to climb safely. The aircraft belly landed and slid across a cornfield before stopping with substantial damage. All 233 occupants survived the accident, although 28 suffered injuries, 3 of them serious.

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, citizens and the media praised the crew for managing to land and evacuate the aircraft without any fatalities. Comparisons were made to the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 accident, which ditched in the Hudson River following bird strikes and dual engine failure with no fatalities. The event was referred to as the Miracle in the Cornfield by Russian citizens and media. The Kremlin awarded the flight crew with Hero of the Russian Federation, the country's highest civilian honor, and the cabin crew with the Order of Courage. (Full article...)

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. Originally released in November 2022, the product uses large language models—specifically generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs)—to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. ChatGPT accelerated the AI boom, an ongoing period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI operates the service on a freemium model. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts. (Full article...)

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen who were all former employees at PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had reached more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of video every day. As of May 2019^[update], videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of video per minute, and as of mid-2024^[update], there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total. (Full article...)

Facebook is an American social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The name Facebook derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. (Full article...)

Google LLC (/ˈɡuː.ɡəl/ ^ⓘ, GOO-gəl) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big Tech company. (Full article...)

Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and former public official known for his leadership of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2025; as of June 2026,^[update] Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$834 billion. (Full article...)

Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It has developed a series of large language models (LLMs) named Claude and has a focus on AI safety. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively. The company is privately held and as of May 2026^[update] had an estimated value of $965 billion. (Full article...)

A QR code, short for quick-response code, is a type of two-dimensional matrix barcode invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara of the Japanese company Denso Wave for labelling automobile parts. It features white and black squares within a square grid featuring fiducial markers on the corners, readable by imaging devices like cameras, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data is then extracted from patterns that are present in both the horizontal and the vertical components of the QR image. (Full article...)

WhatsApp Messenger, commonly known simply as WhatsApp, is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and Voice over IP (VoIP) service accessible via desktop and mobile app. Owned by Meta Platforms, the service allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to register. WhatsApp was launched in May 2009. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. As of May 2025, the service had 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most used messenger app. The name of the app is meant to sound like "what's up". (Full article...)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of 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 engineering, mathematics and computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. (Full article...)

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley, and known for consumer electronics, software and online services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Company by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the company was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. the following year. Its name was changed to its current one in 2007 as the company expanded its focus from computers to consumer electronics. Apple is one of the Big Tech companies. (Full article...)