Norman Zada

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Norman Zada (born Norman Askar Zadeh) is a former adjunct mathematics professor and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Perfect 10 , an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery, and runs the United States Investing Competition. Zada is the son of Lotfi Zadeh, the creator of fuzzy logic.

Contents

Education and early career

Zada obtained a PhD in Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at IBM. He was an adjunct mathematics Professor at Stanford University, Columbia University, UCLA and University of California, Irvine, writing articles on applied mathematics as well as the 2020 book Hold'em Poker Super Strategy. [1] and the 1974 book Winning Poker Systems.

After teaching, he won both backgammon and sports handicapping championships and later became a money manager. [2] In the 1980s he ran a number of financial competitions, including the United States Investing Championship. Zada made headlines in 1996 when he offered $400,000 for anyone successfully refuting his claim that balancing the United States federal budget over a multi-year period without an accompanying substantial trade surplus would be effectively mathematically impossible. [3]

Perfect 10 magazine

Zada launched Perfect 10 magazine, an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery, after a friend was rejected from Playboy magazine because her proportions did not fit the magazine's tastes. [4] He estimates losing approximately $46 million on Perfect 10 since 1996, when the magazine was first published. [5] [ better source needed ] It has been claimed that these losses have been borne by Zada because of the deductions this allows against gains made in the money market. [5]

His magazine was the plaintiff in Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc. , a lawsuit charging contributory copyright infringement through the search engine displaying thumbnails of Perfect 10 images hosted at unauthorized third-party sites. Other lawsuits Zada filed involved adult verification system supplier Cybernet Ventures, from which he received a confidential settlement, and Visa and MasterCard, where he alleged that these credit card companies benefited from fees charged to access unauthorized material at third-party pay sites. [6] The company also sued Giganews, Inc. [7]

It has been claimed that Zada spends minimal time 40 to 50 hours a year creating content for the site, but "8 hours a day, 365 days a year" on litigation, leading some to call Perfect 10 little more than a copyright troll – by 2015, the company had filed 20 to 30 lawsuits. [5] [8]

Personal life

Zada is the son of Lotfi A. Zadeh, a computer scientist who coined the term fuzzy logic.

Zada at one time owned a large mansion in Beverly Park that he sold in 2010 for $16.5 million. [9]

Zada apparently uses the name "Dr. Norman Zadeh" in connection with the United States Investing Championship. In a press release for the competition issued on December 28, 2018, Zada is referred to by that name. [10]

Related Research Articles

Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lotfi A. Zadeh</span> American electrical engineer and computer scientist (1921–2017)

Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of several fuzzy-related concepts: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy semantics, fuzzy languages, fuzzy control, fuzzy systems, fuzzy probabilities, fuzzy events, and fuzzy information. Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visa Inc.</span> American multinational financial services corporation

Visa Inc. is an American multinational payment card services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. Visa is one of the world's most valuable companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mastercard</span> American multinational financial services corporation

Mastercard Inc. is the second-largest payment-processing corporation worldwide. It offers a range of payment transaction processing and other related-payment services. Its headquarters are in Purchase, New York. Throughout the world, its principal business is to process payments between the banks of merchants and the card-issuing banks or credit unions of the purchasers who use the Mastercard-brand debit, credit and prepaid cards to make purchases. Mastercard has been publicly traded since 2006.

Perfect 10 was a monthly men's magazine, and adult website that featured high resolution topless or nude photographs of women who had not had cosmetic surgery. Perfect 10 also promoted and filmed boxing matches between a number of their models, which were called Perfect 10: Model Boxing on the Showtime and HDNet cable channels. The last print edition of the magazine was published in the summer of 2007, after which it switched to a subscription-based website-only presentation.

A fuzzy concept is a kind of concept of which the boundaries of application can vary considerably according to context or conditions, instead of being fixed once and for all. This means the concept is vague in some way, lacking a fixed, precise meaning, without however being unclear or meaningless altogether. It has a definite meaning, which can be made more precise only through further elaboration and specification - including a closer definition of the context in which the concept is used. The study of the characteristics of fuzzy concepts and fuzzy language is called fuzzy semantics. The inverse of a "fuzzy concept" is a "crisp concept".

In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art, often through hardball legal tactics. Patent trolls often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question. However, some entities, which do not practice their asserted patent, may not be considered "patent trolls", when they license their patented technologies on reasonable terms in advance.

Type-2 fuzzy sets and systems generalize standard Type-1 fuzzy sets and systems so that more uncertainty can be handled. From the beginning of fuzzy sets, criticism was made about the fact that the membership function of a type-1 fuzzy set has no uncertainty associated with it, something that seems to contradict the word fuzzy, since that word has the connotation of much uncertainty. So, what does one do when there is uncertainty about the value of the membership function? The answer to this question was provided in 1975 by the inventor of fuzzy sets, Lotfi A. Zadeh, when he proposed more sophisticated kinds of fuzzy sets, the first of which he called a "type-2 fuzzy set". A type-2 fuzzy set lets us incorporate uncertainty about the membership function into fuzzy set theory, and is a way to address the above criticism of type-1 fuzzy sets head-on. And, if there is no uncertainty, then a type-2 fuzzy set reduces to a type-1 fuzzy set, which is analogous to probability reducing to determinism when unpredictability vanishes.

Perfect 10, Inc. v. Visa Int'l Serv. Ass'n is a court case in which the pornography magazine Perfect 10 filed a complaint against Visa and MasterCard for copyright infringement and trademark infringement.

Denise Louise Cote is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Adult Check, Inc. was an American company that created and hosted one of the first and largest online age verification services. The network of web sites using the Adult Check verification system reached as many as 400,000 and the Adultcheck.com domain was ranked in the top 100 most visited internet web sites as late as 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fuzzy Zoeller</span> American professional golfer

Frank Urban "Fuzzy" Zoeller Jr. is an American professional golfer who has won ten PGA Tour events including two major championships. He is one of three golfers to have won the Masters Tournament in his first appearance in the event. He also won the 1984 U.S. Open, which earned him the 1985 Bob Jones Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright troll</span> Party that enforces copyrights for purposes of making money through litigation

A copyright troll is a party that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works.

Righthaven LLC was a copyright enforcement company founded in early 2010. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, it entered agreements from its partner newspapers after finding that their content had been copied to online sites without permission, in order to engage in litigation against the site owners for copyright infringement. The lawsuits were much criticized by commentators, who describe the activity as copyright trolling and the company as a "lawsuit factory". Righthaven LLC's CEO, Steven Gibson, who is currently a partner at Las Vegas law firm Gibson & True LLP, regularly spoke to the media about Righthaven.

<i>Ho v. Taflove</i> U.S. Seventh Circuit case about the copyrightability of scientific data

Ho v. Taflove is a Seventh Circuit case about the copyrightability of scientific data. In 2011, the Seventh Circuit affirmed a 2009 decision of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois holding that the expression of ideas can be copyrighted but not the ideas themselves.

Prenda Law, also known as Steele | Hansmeier PLLP and Anti-Piracy Law Group, was a Chicago-based law firm that ostensibly operated by undertaking litigation against copyright infringement. However, it was later characterized by the United States District Court for Central California in a May 2013 ruling as a "porno-trolling collective" whose business model "relie[d] on deception", and which resembled most closely a conspiracy and racketeering enterprise, referring in the judgment to RICO, the U.S. Federal anti-racketeering law. The firm ostensibly dissolved itself in July 2013 shortly after the adverse ruling although onlookers described Alpha Law Firm LLC as its apparent replacement. In 2014, the ABA Journal described the "Prenda Law saga" as having entered "legal folklore".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Payment card interchange fee and merchant discount antitrust litigation</span> United States class-action lawsuit filed in 2005

The payment card interchange fee and merchant discount antitrust litigation is a United States class-action lawsuit filed in 2005 by merchants and trade associations against Visa, Mastercard, and numerous financial institutions that issue payment cards. The suit was filed because of price fixing and other allegedly anti-competitive trade practices in the credit card industry. A proposed settlement received preliminary approval from the judge overseeing the case in November 2012 but the majority of named class plaintiffs have objected and many have vowed to opt out of the settlement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simplii Financial</span> Banks of Canada

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In late September 2019, Stones Gambling Hall, located in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento, California, came to prominence due to a cheating scandal that became known as Postlegate. Mike Postle was publicly accused of cheating in poker games he participated in during livestream events hosted at Stones Gambling Hall. "Stones Live" livestream poker games utilized playing cards with embedded RFID sensors that scanned the playing cards and transmitted identifying information into the livestream's technical control room and to play-by-play announcers and color commentators; casino management and livestream supervisors also had access to real-time identifying information of otherwise unknown, facedown, cards. The initial public accusation of Postle's alleged cheating was made by poker color commentator, interviewer, and recreational player Veronica Brill, whose day job of analytic analysis for the medical industry was instrumental in her being emboldened to accuse Postle of cheating. Brill's allegations were reported by Scott Van Pelt on ESPN's SportsCenter during its October 3, 2019, broadcast. Initially, industry, local, and national media closely followed the evolving story, but interest waned after criminal charges were not brought by law enforcement, and as civil lawsuits were adjudicated, settled, or dismissed.

References

  1. Amazon.com
  2. "Defending against a Google assault - ZDNet UK". Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2007-05-17.
  3. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_19960204/ai_n10230333%5B%5D
  4. FoRK Archive: Perfect 10
  5. 1 2 3 “Copyright troll” Perfect 10 hit with $5.6M in fees after failed Usenet assault | Ars Technica
  6. "Perfect 10 Sues Visa/MasterCard - XBIZ.com". Archived from the original on 2006-05-14. Retrieved 2007-05-17.
  7. Perfect 10, Inc. "Perfect 10 Announces: Ninth Circuit Upends Copyright Law By Immunizing Automated Piracy" (press release) Global Newswire
  8. (IN CHAMBERS) ORDER GRANTING DEFENDANTS’ MOTION OR ATTORNEYS’ FEES AND COSTS IN PART AND AWARDING DEFENDANTS $5,213,117.06 IN ATTORNEYS’ FEES AND $424,235.47 IN NONTAXABLE COSTS (DKT. NO. 644.)
  9. Lauren Beale, Norm Zada sells his Beverly Park compound, Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2010, accessed May 8, 2011.
  10. Staff (December 28, 2018) "United States Investing Championship Update" Financial Post