(B7) Research Brief: Further Research

Today's Tasks:

From research I found the topic of Sudokus could be interesting to look into further, thinking about the competitions and terminology.
- What am I wanting to demonstrate?
- What am I wanting to learn?

Found the other topics to be more boring when I looked into them, they didn't grab my attention as much. 
Went back to look at blog from the start of 505 when I was thinking about research topics. Found the idea of 'invisible women' to be an interesting topic I'd thought about exploring before. 

INVISIBLE WOMEN:

Research from 505:

Invisible Women Research:

• 'Invisible Women - Exposing the Data Bias in a World Designed for Men'
  - Discussing the gender data gap, how data is mainly based off of men, so data about males is being projected onto women when it doesn't apply.
  - Talks about simple things like shelves being set at male height, rooms being set to male temperatures, and how these impact women but are not life threatening. But, also discusses the more serious side of the gender data gap, how car safety features are designed around male body types, how when women show symptoms of a heart attack they're deemed atypical.
  - Very interesting opening paragraph to the book, the information is something I hadn't thought about or realised before.

• Women becoming invisible once they're over the age of 40.
  - Lots of accounts on articles about women feeling invisible once they get to a certain age (around 50/60), personal accounts.
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/21st-century-aging/200908/the-invisible-years
  https://sixtyandme.com/why-women-our-age-are-saying-i-feel-invisible/

• (Current Research) Reading up on a lot of articles written by women saying how they feel invisible and the inner conflict that comes along with this.
  Article 1, Article 2, Article 3
  - There seem to be a lot of relation to feminism here, feeling of wanting someone to notice you as being attractive but then the struggle that this is then objectification. Was interesting to hear about.
  - Feel as though it's an issue that is too far away from me personally, don't have a strong connection to the topic or yearning to work on it further
  
  
• Since 505 I have purchased 'Invisible Women: Exposing the Data Bias in a World Designed for Men' there are lots of points of interest in the book, could potentially highlight one of these and research it further.
  - I remember from L5 when looking at this topic the amount of data was difficult to navigate, struggled doing it on my own. Should approach with a different mindset. 

SUDOKU:

• Modern Sudoku only began to gain widespread popularity in 1986 when it was published by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli under the name Sudoku, meaning "single number".
• The name "Nikoli" comes from the racehorse who won the Irish 2,000 Guineas in 1980; the president of Nikoli, Maki Kaji, is fond of horse racing and betting.
• Nikoli Website:

• https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/may/15/pressandpublishing.usnews
  - National newspapers scrambled to advertise the puzzle on their front pages, while websites devoted to it sprang up and TV and radio stations caught the new global bug.
  - Scientists have identified Sudoku as a classic meme - a mental virus which spreads from person to person and sweeps across national boundaries. Dr Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, said: 'This puzzle is a fantastic study in memetics. It is using our brains to propagate itself across the world like an infectious virus.'
  - Sudoku - pronounced soo-doe-koo - does not require general knowledge, linguistic ability or even mathematical skill.
  - Dubbed the Rubik's Cube of the 21st century.
  - No one knows exactly when it started or who devised it, but the oldest copy I can find in our archive is 1979. We called the puzzle Number Place and still do today.'
  - 'I like the puzzle a lot. It's accessible to most people and that's part of the charm. Although some are more difficult than others, the concept is easy to grasp and it doesn't take for ever to solve. There is a universality to it and it becomes addictive.'
  - As Dell continued to quietly churn out Number Place through the Eighties, it was spotted, imitated and embraced in puzzle-obsessed Japan. Publisher Nikoli made two small improvements to the concept and renamed it Sudoku - in Japanese Su means a number and doku roughly translates as singular or unique.
  - On Friday the Guardian front page declared 'G2 - The only newspaper section with Sudoku on every page!'
  
  
• Sudoku fever grips UK newspaper readers (10 May, 2005): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/may/10/pressandpublishing.uknews
  - Found this interesting as I felt like sudoku's are an ancient puzzle that's existed for a long time but it's shown here that it's a recently popular game.
  
  
•  Le Siècle, a Paris daily, published a partially completed 9×9 magic square with 3×3 subsquares on November 19, 1892.

• On July 6, 1895, Le Siècle's rival, La France, refined the puzzle so that it was almost a modern Sudoku and named it carré magique diabolique ('evil magic square'). From Le France's newspaper:

Patterns on Sudoku's:

Stamps:

History:

On 1 May 1840, the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp, was issued in the United Kingdom. Within three years postage stamps were introduced in Switzerland and Brazil, a little later in the United States, and by 1860, they were in 90 countries around the world. 

The first postage stamps did not need to show the issuing country, so no country name was included on them. Thus the United Kingdom remains the only country in the world to omit its name on postage stamps; the monarch's image signifies the United Kingdom as the country of origin. Postage stamps have facilitated the delivery of mail since the 1840s. Before then, ink and hand-stamps (hence the word 'stamp'), usually made from wood or cork, were often used to frank the mail and confirm the payment of postage.

Always featuring the name of the issuing nation (with the exception of the United Kingdom), a denomination of its value, and often an illustration of persons, events, institutions, or natural realities that symbolize the nation's traditions and values, every stamp is printed on a piece of usually rectangular, but sometimes triangular or otherwise shaped special custom-made paper whose back is either glazed with an adhesive gum or self-adhesive.

As postage stamps with their engraved imagery began to appear on a widespread basis, historians and collectors began to take notice.The study of postage stamps and their use is referred to as philately.

in 1869, the United States Post Office broke tradition of depicting presidents or other famous historical figures, instead using other subjects including a train, and horse.(See: 1869 Pictorial Issue, a series of definitive United States postage stamps released during the first weeks of the Grant administration.) The change was greeted with general disapproval, and sometimes harsh criticism from the American public.

Design Features:

Perforations are small holes made between individual postage stamps on a sheet of stamps, facilitating separation of a desired number of stamps. The resulting frame-like, rippled edge surrounding the separated stamp defines a characteristic meme for the appearance of a postage stamp.

In addition to the most common rectangular shape, stamps have been issued in geometric (circular, triangular and pentagonal) and irregular shapes. The United States issued its first circular stamp in 2000 as a hologram of the Earth. Sierra Leone and Tonga have issued stamps in the shapes of fruit.

Types of Stamps:

• Airmail stamp

• ATM stamp

• Booklet stamp

• Carrier’s stamp

• Certified mail stamp

• Cinderella stamp - virtually anything resembling a postage stamp, but not issued for postal purposes by a government postal administration

• Coil stamps - tear-off stamps issued individually in a vending machine, or purchased in a roll.

• Commemorative Stamps

• Computer vended postage

• Customised stamp

• Definitive stamps

• Express mail

• Late fee

• Local post stamps

• Make up stamp - a stamp with a very small value, used to make up the difference when postage rates are increased.

• Official mail

• Non-denominated postage

• Overprint

• Perforated stamps - allow the user to add his or her own image.

• Pneumatic post - for mail sent using pressurized air tubes, only produced in Italy.

• Postage currency

• Postage due

• Poster stamp

• Specimen stamp

• War tax stamp -  A variation on the postal tax stamp to defray the cost of war.

• Water activated stamp - (usually by licking, thus the stamps are also known as "lick and stick").

Contemporary Stamps

Jay Cover

Cover has worked with the Isle of Man Post Office to create a set of four stamps celebrating the Chinese Year of the Ox, a landmark project in that it’s the first triangular set of stamps to be issued by any of the British postal administrations. 

NB Studio and Jonny Hannah

Royal Mail competition to capture the unique spirit of some of the UK’s more weird and wonderful folk customs for an octet of stamps.

Stamp Collections