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Photosynthesis Some organisms employ even more radical variants of photosynthesis. Some archaea use a simpler method that employs a pigment similar to those used for vision in animals. The bacteriorhodopsin changes its configuration in response to sunlight, acting as a proton pump. This produces a proton gradient more directly, which is then converted to chemical energy. The process does not involve carbon dioxide fixation and does not release oxygen, and seems to have evolved separately from the more common types of photosynthesis. In photosynthetic bacteria, the proteins that gather light for photosynthesis are embedded in cell membranes. In its simplest form, this involves the membrane surrounding the cell itself. However, the membrane may be tightly folded into cylindrical sheets called thylakoids, or bunched up into round vesicles called "intracytoplasmic membranes". These structures can fill most of the interior of a cell, giving the membrane a very large surface area and therefore increasing the amount of light that the bacteria can absorb. In plants and algae, photosynthesis takes place in organelles called chloroplasts. A typical plant cell contains about 10 to 100 chloroplasts. The chloroplast is enclosed by a membrane. This membrane is composed of a phospholipid inner membrane, a phospholipid outer membrane, and an intermembrane space. Enclosed by the membrane is an aqueous fluid called the stroma. Embedded within the stroma are stacks of thylakoids (grana), which are the site of photosynthesis | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24544 | 154,454 |
Maintenance (technical) In international civil aviation maintenance means: This definition covers all activities for which aviation regulations require issuance of a maintenance release document (aircraft certificate of return to service – CRS). The marine and air transportation, offshore structures, industrial plant and facility management industries depend on "maintenance, repair and overhaul" (MRO) including scheduled or preventive paint maintenance programmes to maintain and restore coatings applied to steel in environments subject to attack from erosion, corrosion and environmental pollution. The basic types of maintenance falling under MRO include: Architectural conservation employs MRO to preserve, rehabilitate, restore, or reconstruct historical structures with stone, brick, glass, metal, and wood which match the original constituent materials where possible, or with suitable polymer technologies when not. Preventive maintenance (PM) is "a routine for periodically inspecting" with the goal of "noticing small problems and fixing them before major ones develop." Ideally, "nothing breaks down." The main goal behind PM is for the equipment to make it from one planned service to the next planned service without any failures caused by fatigue, neglect, or normal wear (preventable items), which Planned Maintenance and Condition Based Maintenance help to achieve by replacing worn components before they actually fail | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=91191 | 433,752 |
Client certificate In cryptography, a client certificate is a type of digital certificate that is used by client systems to make authenticated requests to a remote server. Client certificates play a key role in many mutual authentication designs, providing strong assurances of a requester's identity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44222918 | 99,538 |
Restriction fragment length polymorphism In allele "d", there are only two repeats in the VNTR, so the probe detects a shorter fragment between the same two restriction sites. Other genetic processes, such as insertions, deletions, translocations, and inversions, can also lead to polymorphisms. RFLP tests require much larger samples of DNA than do short tandem repeat (STR) tests. Analysis of RFLP variation in genomes was formerly a vital tool in genome mapping and genetic disease analysis. If researchers were trying to initially determine the chromosomal location of a particular disease gene, they would analyze the DNA of members of a family afflicted by the disease, and look for RFLP alleles that show a similar pattern of inheritance as that of the disease (see genetic linkage). Once a disease gene was localized, RFLP analysis of other families could reveal who was at risk for the disease, or who was likely to be a carrier of the mutant genes. RFLP test is used in identification and differentiation of organisms by analyzing unique patterns in genome. It is also used in identification of recombination rate in the loci between restriction sites. RFLP analysis was also the basis for early methods of genetic fingerprinting, useful in the identification of samples retrieved from crime scenes, in the determination of paternity, and in the characterization of genetic diversity or breeding patterns in animal populations. The technique for RFLP analysis is, however, slow and cumbersome | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26285 | 154,673 |
Curt Herzstark (July 26, 1902 – October 27, 1988) was an Austrian engineer. During World War II, he designed plans for a mechanical pocket calculator (the "Curta"). Herzstark was born in Vienna, the son of Marie and Samuel Jakob Herzstark. His father was Jewish and his mother, born a Catholic, converted to Lutheranism and raised Herzstark Lutheran. In 1938, while he was technical manager of his father's company Rechenmaschinenwerk AUSTRIA Herzstark & Co., Herzstark had already completed the design of the Curta, but could not manufacture it due to the Nazi German annexation of Austria. Instead, the company was ordered to make measuring devices for the German Army. In 1943, perhaps influenced by the fact that his father was a liberal Jew, the Nazis arrested him for "helping Jews and subversive elements" and "indecent contacts with Aryan women" and sent him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. However, the reports of the army about the precision-production of the firm AUSTRIA and especially about the technical expertise of Herzstark led the Nazis to treat him as an "intelligence-slave". His imprisonment at Buchenwald seriously threatened his health, but his condition improved when he was called to work in the factory linked to the camp, which was named after Wilhelm Gustloff. There he was ordered to make a drawing of the construction of his calculator, so that the Nazis could ultimately give the machine to the Führer as a gift after the successful end of the war | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1248057 | 294,254 |
South African contract law This is known as the Shifren principle. Such a clause is in favour of both parties and therefore does not offend the constitutional principle of equality. A non-variation clause does sometimes have unacceptable consequences, and its application is limited. It is restrictively interpreted, because it limits the principle of freedom of contract. Cancellation of the contract and certain forms of waiver of rights (e.g. waiver of an accrued right arising from a breach of contract, "datio in solutum", release of the debtor, and a "pactum de non petendo") do not amount to variations. A non-variation clause is not enforced where its enforcement is against public policy or where estoppel can be raised. Neither defence has successfully been raised on the facts in any reported case. A non-cancellation clause is valid and enforceable and restrictively interpreted, and applies only to consensual cancellations. To be effective, therefore, a non-cancellation clause must be coupled with a non-variation clause. A non-waiver clause is also valid and enforceable, but it is restrictively interpreted. An underlying principle of the law of contract ("pacta sunt servanda" or sanctity of contract) is that agreements seriously concluded should be enforced, but agreements that are clearly detrimental to the interests of the community as a whole, whether they are contrary to law or morality ("contra bonos mores"), or if they run counter to social or economic expedience, is not enforced | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33239102 | 466,802 |
Flashtube " His colleague's interest in the new flash apparatus soon provoked Edgerton to improve upon the design. The mercury lamp's efficiency was limited by the coolest part of the lamp, causing them to perform better when very hot but poorly when cold. Edgerton decided to try a noble gas instead, feeling that it would not be as temperature dependent as mercury, and, in 1930, he employed the General Electric company to construct some lamps using argon instead. The argon tubes were much more efficient, were much smaller, and could be mounted near a reflector, concentrating their output. Slowly, camera designers began to take notice of the new technology and began to accept it. Edgerton received his first major order for the strobes from the Kodak company in 1940. Afterward, he discovered that xenon was the most efficient of the noble gases, producing a spectrum very close to that of daylight, and xenon flashtubes became standard in most large photography sets. It was not until the 1970s that strobe units became portable enough to use in common cameras. In 1960, after Theodore Maiman invented the ruby laser, a new demand for flashtubes began for use in lasers, and new interest was taken in the study of the lamps. Flashtubes operate at high voltages, with currents high enough to be deadly. Under certain conditions, shocks as low as 1 joule have been reported to be lethal. The energy stored in a capacitor can remain surprisingly long after power has been disconnected | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=387514 | 59,273 |
Friday night death slot This led to the network moving them back up into mid-week scheduling, eventually back to its original WB slot, Tuesdays. In 2015, midseason, the show was moved to Wednesday evenings where it had also aired. For a majority of the show's run, the program was scheduled on Thursdays, Mondays being the only weekday it was not aired on and it has maintained its audience in all time slots. A general exception to the "Death Slot" is in regards to children's television. Disney Channel and Cartoon Network have long experienced success on Friday nights with their respective children's program blocks. Cartoon Network's original programming success on this night began in 1999 with the launch of "Cartoon Cartoon Fridays" (later known as simply "Fridays"), a two-hour block of original animated series during primetime that included series such as "Dexter's Laboratory", "The Powerpuff Girls", "Cow & Chicken", "Johnny Bravo", "Samurai Jack", "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends", and "Camp Lazlo". After the block was discontinued in 2007, Cartoon Network shifted its programming towards more action-oriented series such as "" and "Ben 10" in the Friday primetime slot. Disney Channel did not begin airing original programming on Friday evenings until 2001; premieres of its made-for-cable films moved to that night from Saturdays that year | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=892094 | 453,751 |
Cell biology is a branch of biology studying the structure and function of the cell, also known as the basic unit of life. encompasses both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and can be divided into many sub-topics which may include the study of cell metabolism, cell communication, cell cycle, and cell composition. The study of cells is performed using several techniques such as cell culture, various types of microscopy, and cell fractionation. These have allowed for and are currently being used for discoveries and research pertaining to how cells function, ultimately giving insight into understanding larger organisms. Knowing the components of cells and how cells work is fundamental to all biological sciences while also being essential for research in biomedical fields such as cancer, and other diseases. Research in cell biology is interconnected to other fields such as genetics, molecular genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, medical microbiology, immunology, and cytochemistry. Cells were first seen in 17th century Europe with the invention of the compound microscope. In 1665, Robert Hooke termed the building block of all living organisms as "cells" after looking at a piece of cork and observing a cell-like structure, however, the cells were dead and gave no indication to the actual overall components of a cell. A few years later, in 1674, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to analyze live cells in his examination of algae | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6339 | 186,075 |
Usability To encourage co-operative problem-solving between the two subjects, and the attendant discussions leading to it, the tests can be designed to make the subjects dependent on each other by assigning them complementary areas of responsibility (e.g. for testing of software, one subject may be put in charge of the mouse and the other of the keyboard.) Component-based usability testing is an approach which aims to test the usability of elementary units of an interaction system, referred to as interaction components. The approach includes component-specific quantitative measures based on user interaction recorded in log files, and component-based usability questionnaires. Cognitive walkthrough is a method of evaluating the user interaction of a working prototype or final product. It is used to evaluate the system's ease of learning. Cognitive walk through is useful to understand the user's thought processes and decision making when interacting with a system, specially for first-time or infrequent users. Benchmarking creates standardized test materials for a specific type of design. Four key characteristics are considered when establishing a benchmark: time to do the core task, time to fix errors, time to learn applications, and the functionality of the system. Once there is a benchmark, other designs can be compared to it to determine the usability of the system. Many of the common objectives of usability studies, such as trying to understand user behavior or exploring alternative designs, must be put aside | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=288276 | 130,891 |
Mobile equipment identifier A mobile equipment identifier (MEID) is a globally unique number identifying a physical piece of CDMA2000 mobile station equipment. The number format is defined by the 3GPP2 report S.R0048 but in practical terms, it can be seen as an IMEI but with hexadecimal digits. An MEID is 56 bits long (14 hexadecimal digits). It consists of three fields, including an 8-bit regional code (RR), a 24-bit manufacturer code, and a 24-bit manufacturer-assigned serial number. The check digit (CD) is not considered part of the MEID. The MEID was created to replace ESNs, whose virgin form was exhausted in November 2008. As of TIA/EIA/IS-41 Revision D and TIA/EIA/IS-2000 Rev C, the ESN is still a required field in many messages—for compatibility, devices with an MEID can use a pseudo-ESN (pESN), which is a manufacturer code of 0x80 (formerly reserved) followed by the least significant 24 bits of the SHA-1 hash of the MEID. MEIDs are used on CDMA mobile phones. GSM phones do not have ESN or MIN, only an International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. Commonly, opening the phone's dialler and typing *#06# will display its MEID. The separation between international mobile equipment identifiers (IMEIs) used by GSM/UMTS and MEIDs is based on the number ranges. There are two administrators: the global decimal administrator (GDA) for IMEIs and the global hexadecimal administrator (GHA) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6726416 | 386,559 |
Tally.ERP 9 is an enterprise resource planning software developed by Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka India. software serves more than 1.6 million users across the globe. is the main product of Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd, co-founded by Shyam Sunder Goenka and his son Bharat Goenka is a windows-based enterprise resource planning software. The software handles accounting, inventory management, order management, tax management, payroll, banking and many such requirements of the business. It supports all day-to-day processes from recording invoices to generating various MIS reports. Tally.ERP 9, enterprise software was launched in the year of 2009. The first release of was called as Series A release 1.0. It was launched with remote access capabilities, advanced synchronization and many more features. From time to time, serval product releases were made available with a range of features and the latest release is Release 6.5. In 2017, Release 6.0 was launched to support the GST compliance in India and VAT support in Tally. ERP 9 release 6.4 for GCC countries such as UAE and Saudi Arabia. In its latest offering in Release 6.5,the VAT requirements for Bahrain are supported. is available in Silver & Gold editions. Silver edition is for a single user, while Gold is for unlimited users on a Local Area Network (LAN). All capabilities and features are available in every edition. Silver can be activated (as in licensed) on one computer and used from that same computer | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60324239 | 489,714 |
Environmental impact of nuclear power After a facility has been completely decommissioned, it is released from regulatory control, and the licensee of the plant will no longer be responsible for its nuclear safety. With some plants the intent is to eventually return to "greenfield" status. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14163295 | 371,835 |
Active recall is a principle of efficient learning, which claims the need to actively stimulate memory during the learning process. It contrasts with passive review, in which the learning material is processed passively (e.g. by reading, watching, etc.). For example, reading a text about George Washington, with no further action, is a passive review. Answering the question "Who was the first US President?", is active recall. There are several variations of active recall as a strategy and these include the 3R (read-recite-review) method by McDaniel et al. and Scott Young's Feynman technique. exploits the psychological testing effect and is very efficient in consolidating long-term memory. Research revealed that it is the quickest, most efficient, and effective way to study written materials, at least for factual and problem-solving tests. Aside from passive review, it is said to be better than mindmapping and note-taking since it is extremely efficient for committing details and ideas into one's memory. It is also suggested that the neocortex has an active recall that can use episodic information to build new semantic memories, which could mean the hippocampus plays a role in the way memories are consolidated in the neocortex. A study done by J.D. Karpicke and H.L. Roediger, III (2008) lent support to the idea that practicing information retrieval is integral to learning. They had college students study 40 pairs of foreign language words on flash cards | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18374763 | 140,009 |
Adobe Acrobat Adobe recommended users update their product installations. Adobe has released security updates for and Reader for Windows and Macintosh. These updates address critical vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=203896 | 235,249 |
Nanocircuitry Until a few years ago, transistors and nanowires were put together to produce the circuit. However, scientists have been able to produce a nanowire with transistors in it. In 2004, Harvard University nanotech pioneer Charles Lieber and his team have made a nanowire—10,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper—that contains a string of transistors. Essentially, transistors and nanowires are already pre-wired so as to eliminate the difficult task of trying to connect transistors together with nanowires. The last part of nanocircuit organization is architecture. This has been explained as the overall way the transistors are interconnected, so that the circuit can plug into a computer or other system and operate independently of the lower-level details. With nanocircuits being so small, they are destined for error and defects. Scientists have devised a way to get around this. Their architecture combines circuits that have redundant logic gates and interconnections with the ability to reconfigure structures at several levels on a chip. The redundancy lets the circuit identify problems and reconfigure itself so the circuit can avoid more problems. It also allows for errors within the logic gate and still have it work properly without giving a wrong result. In 1960, Egyptian engineer Mohamed Atalla and Korean engineer Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs fabricated the first MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) with a gate oxide thickness of 100 nm, along with a gate length of 20µm | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10214429 | 403,014 |
Paleontology The cladistic technique is sometimes fallible, as some features, such as wings or camera eyes, evolved more than once, convergently – this must be taken into account in analyses. Evolutionary developmental biology, commonly abbreviated to "Evo Devo", also helps paleontologists to produce "family trees", and understand fossils. For example, the embryological development of some modern brachiopods suggests that brachiopods may be descendants of the halkieriids, which became extinct in the Cambrian period. seeks to map out how living things have changed through time. A substantial hurdle to this aim is the difficulty of working out how old fossils are. Beds that preserve fossils typically lack the radioactive elements needed for radiometric dating. This technique is our only means of giving rocks greater than about 50 million years old an absolute age, and can be accurate to within 0.5% or better. Although radiometric dating requires very careful laboratory work, its basic principle is simple: the rates at which various radioactive elements decay are known, and so the ratio of the radioactive element to the element into which it decays shows how long ago the radioactive element was incorporated into the rock. Radioactive elements are common only in rocks with a volcanic origin, and so the only fossil-bearing rocks that can be dated radiometrically are a few volcanic ash layers. Consequently, paleontologists must usually rely on stratigraphy to date fossils | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23084 | 154,247 |
Banyan VINES Like AARP, VINES required an inherently "chatty" network, sending updates about the status of clients to other servers on the internetwork. Rounding out its lower-level system, VINES used "RTP" (the "Routing Table Protocol"), a low-overhead message system for passing around information about changes to the routing, and ARP to determine the address of other nodes on the system. These closely resembled the similar systems used in other XNS-based protocols. VINES also included "ICP" (the "Internet Control Protocol"), which it used to pass error-messages and metrics. At the middle layer level, VINES used fairly standard software. The "unreliable datagram service" and "data-stream service" operated essentially identically to UDP and TCP on top of IP. However VINES also added a "reliable message service" as well, a sort of hybrid of the two that offered guaranteed delivery of a single packet. Banyan offered customers TCP/IP as an extra cost option to customers of standard Vines servers. This extra charge for TCP/IP on Vines servers continued long after TCP/IP server availability had become commoditized. At the topmost layer, VINES provided the standard file and print services, as well as the unique "StreetTalk", likely the first truly practical globally consistent name-service for an entire internetwork. Using a globally distributed, partially replicated database, StreetTalk could meld multiple widely separated networks into a single network that allowed seamless resource-sharing | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=378184 | 99,994 |
Myokine Immunomodulation and immunoregulation were a particular focus of early myokine research, as, according to Dr. Bente Klarlund Pedersen and her colleagues, "the interactions between exercise and the immune system provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the role of underlying endocrine and cytokine mechanisms." Both aerobic exercise and strength training (resistance exercise) attenuate myostatin expression, and myostatin inactivation potentiates the beneficial effects of endurance exercise on metabolism. Aerobic exercise provokes a systemic cytokine response, including, for example, IL-6, IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra), and IL-10 (Interleukin 10). IL-6 was serendipitously discovered as a myokine because of the observation that it increased in an exponential fashion proportional to the length of exercise and the amount of muscle mass engaged in the exercise. This increase is followed by the appearance of IL-1ra and the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10. In general, the cytokine response to exercise and sepsis differs with regard to TNF-α. Thus, the cytokine response to exercise is not preceded by an increase in plasma-TNF-α. Following exercise, the basal plasma IL-6 concentration may increase up to 100-fold, but less dramatic increases are more frequent. The exercise-induced increase of plasma IL-6 occurs in an exponential manner and the peak IL-6 level is reached at the end of the exercise or shortly thereafter | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34368888 | 62,068 |
Emilio Azcárraga Milmo or Emilio Azcárraga Jr. (September 6, 1930 in San Antonio, Texas - April 16, 1997 outside Miami, Florida) was a Mexican businessman and the son of Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta and Laura Milmo Hickman. He was educated at Culver Military Academy, he graduated in 1948. He was married four times, to Nadine Jean, Pamela de Surmont (dead in 2001), Adriana Abascal, Miss Mexico in 1989 and most recently to Paula Cussi. He worked in various positions in television such as owner of Univision, a twelve-station Spanish-language network in the U.S., and in the 1960s and 1970s as a controlling shareholder of Televisa, S.A. He was the owner of "The National", an American daily newspaper centered on sports that was published from January 31, 1990 to June 13, 1991. He also owned major Mexican television stations and was the chairman of the U.S.-based Spanish-language TV network "Galavisión". He was also involved in publishing, video rental, and real estate ventures. He died on April 16, 1997 on board his yacht ECO outside Miami. His business passed to his son Emilio Azcárraga Jean, and daughters. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2834552 | 478,335 |
Microthermal analysis is a materials characterization technique which combines the thermal analysis principles of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) with high spatial resolution of scanning probe microscopy. The instrument consists of a thermal probe which is basically a fine platinum/rhodium alloy wire (5 micro meter in diameter) coated by a sheath of silver (Wollaston wire). The wire is bent into V-shape and the silver sheath is etched away to form a fine pointed tip. The probe acts as both the heater as well as temperature sensor. The probe is attached to a conventional scanning probe microscope and can be scanned over the sample surface to spatially resolve the thermal behavior of the sample. This technique has been widely used for localized thermal analysis, where the probe is heated rapidly to avoid thermal diffusion through the sample and the response of the substance in immediate proximity to the tip is measured as a function of temperature. Micro-thermal analysis was launched commercially in March 1998. has been extended to higher spatial resolution to nanothermal analysis which uses microfabricated self-heating silicon cantilevers to probe thermomechanical properties of materials with sub-100 nm spatial resolution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14779081 | 307,523 |
Electrical wiring In a light commercial environment, more frequent wiring changes can be expected, large apparatus may be installed and special conditions of heat or moisture may apply. Heavy industries have more demanding wiring requirements, such as very large currents and higher voltages, frequent changes of equipment layout, corrosive, or wet or explosive atmospheres. In facilities that handle flammable gases or liquids, special rules may govern the installation and wiring of electrical equipment in hazardous areas. Wires and cables are rated by the circuit voltage, temperature rating and environmental conditions (moisture, sunlight, oil, chemicals) in which they can be used. A wire or cable has a voltage (to neutral) rating and a maximum conductor surface temperature rating. The amount of current a cable or wire can safely carry depends on the installation conditions. The international standard wire sizes are given in the IEC 60228 standard of the International Electrotechnical Commission. In North America, the American Wire Gauge standard for wire sizes is used. Modern non-metallic sheathed cables, such as (US and Canadian) Types NMB and NMC, consist of two to four wires covered with thermoplastic insulation, plus a bare wire for grounding (bonding), surrounded by a flexible plastic jacket. Some versions wrap the individual conductors in paper before the plastic jacket is applied | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1105937 | 313,190 |
Fishmongers' Hall However, there was no foundation to this legend, as the weapon was in the armoury long beforehand where it was used to represent the sword of St Paul. The Hall is situated in Bridge Ward on London Bridge. On 29 November 2019, a prisoner attending a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation at the hall, wearing what turned out to be a fake suicide vest, threatened to blow up the hall. He subsequently stabbed a number of people in the hall, and two of them – Jack Merritt, a 25-year-old Cambridge University employee, and Saskia Jones, a 23-year-old volunteer – died of their injuries. The man, Usman Khan, was wrestled to the ground on the bridge by members of the public, before being shot dead by armed policemen; a Polish man used a pole as a weapon to fight off the attacker, while another man used a narwhal tusk which he had taken from the wall inside Fishmongers' Hall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13003630 | 343,856 |
Small cell Small cells are low-powered cellular radio access nodes that operate in licensed and unlicensed spectrum that have a range of 10 meters to a few kilometers. Recent FCC orders have provided size and elevation guidelines to help more clearly define small cell equipment. They are "small" compared to a mobile macrocell, partly because they have a shorter range and partly because they typically handle fewer concurrent calls or sessions. As wireless carriers seek to 'densify' existing wireless networks to provide for the data capacity demands of "5G"; small cells are currently viewed as a solution to allow re-using the same frequencies and as an important method of increasing cellular network capacity, quality and resilience with a growing focus using LTE Advanced. Small cells may encompass femtocells, picocells, and microcells. Small-cell networks can also be realized by means of distributed radio technology using centralized baseband units and remote radio heads. Beamforming technology (focusing a radio signal on a very specific area) can further enhance or focus small cell coverage. These approaches to small cells all feature central management by mobile network operators. Small cells provide a small radio footprint, which can range from 10 meters within urban and in-building locations to 2 km for a rural location | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33593212 | 378,625 |
Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books (named for their binding colors) that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats. The "Red Book" specifies the physical parameters and properties of the CD, the optical parameters, deviations and error rate, modulation system (eight-to-fourteen modulation, EFM) and error correction facility (cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, CIRC), and the eight subcode channels. These parameters are common to all compact discs and used by all logical formats: audio CD, CD-ROM, etc. The standard also specifies the form of digital audio encoding (2-channel signed 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz). Although rarely used, the specification allows for discs to be mastered with a form of emphasis. The first edition of the "Red Book" was released in 1980 by Philips and Sony; it was adopted by the Digital Audio Disc Committee and ratified by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee 100, as an international standard in 1987 with the reference IEC 60908. The second edition of IEC 60908 was published in 1999 and it replaces the first edition, amendment 1 (1992) and the corrigendum to amendment 1. The IEC 60908 however does not contain all the information for extensions that is available in the Red Book, such as the details for CD-Text, CD+G and CD+EG. The standard is not freely available and must be licensed | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41920 | 465,704 |
Social networking service Egyptian activists have credited social networking sites with providing a platform for planning protest and sharing news from Tahrir Square in real time. By presenting a platform for thousands of people to instantaneously share videos of mainly events featuring brutality, social networking can be a vital tool in revolutions. On the flip side, social networks enable government authorities to easily identify, and repress, protestors and dissidents. Another thing that social media helps with in political applications is getting the younger generations involved in politics and ongoing political issues. Perhaps the most significant political application of social media is Barack Obama's election campaign in 2008. It was the first of its kind, as it successfully incorporated social media into its campaign winning strategy, evolving the way of political campaigns forevermore in the ever-changing technological world we find ourselves in today. His campaign won by engaging everyday people and empowering volunteers, donors, and advocates, through social networks, text messaging, email messaging and online videos. Obama's social media campaign was vast, with his campaign boasting 5 million 'friends' on over 15 social networking sites, with over 3 million friends just on Facebook. Another significant success of the campaign was online videos, with nearly 2,000 YouTube videos being put online, receiving over 80 million views. In 2007, when Obama first announced his candidacy, there was no such thing as an iPhone or Twitter | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2041117 | 305,241 |
Cattle Queen Snowshoe Cabin The Cattle Queen Snowshoe Cabin, near West Glacier, Montana is a National Park Service log cabin built in 1923. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. It is significant as "one of the oldest surviving backcountry patrol cabins in Glacier National Park. This is reflected in the structure's unrefined, nonstandard design and relatively primitive construction. The building is both indicative of its wilderness setting and of the earliest efforts of NPS administrators to "protect" the park's backcountry. For many years, in common with some three dozen other backcountry structures, the Cattle Queen Cabin was an important overnight stop for rangers on backcountry patrol, winter and summer." It is a one-room wood-floored cabin with a gable roof having extended purlins creating a large front porch. When listed in 1999, it was painted brown, was very weathered, and had a corrugated metal roof, which had covered original shingles. Its ridgepole and purlins were cracked by a tree fall in the 1970s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58210471 | 305,571 |
Organic acid anhydride An organic acid anhydride is an acid anhydride that is an organic compound. An acid anhydride is a compound that has two acyl groups bonded to the same oxygen atom. A common type of organic acid anhydride is a carboxylic anhydride, where the parent acid is a carboxylic acid, the formula of the anhydride being (RC(O))O. Symmetrical acid anhydrides of this type are named by replacing the word "acid" in the name of the parent carboxylic acid by the word "anhydride". Thus, (CHCO)O is called "acetic anhydride." Mixed (or unsymmetrical) acid anhydrides, such as acetic formic anhydride (see below), are known, whereby reaction occurs between two different carboxylic acids. Nomenclature of unsymmetrical acid anhydrides list the names of both of the reacted carboxylic acids before the word "anhydride" (for example, the dehydration reaction between benzoic acid and propanoic acid would yield "benzoic propanoic anhydride"). One or both acyl groups of an acid anhydride may also be derived from another type of organic acid, such as sulfonic acid or a phosphonic acid. One of the acyl groups of an acid anhydride can be derived from an inorganic acid such as phosphoric acid. The mixed anhydride 1,3-bisphosphoglyceric acid, an intermediate in the formation of ATP via glycolysis, is the mixed anhydride of 3-phosphoglyceric acid and phosphoric acid. Acidic oxides are also classified as acid anhydrides. Organic acid anhydrides are prepared in industry by diverse means | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1696980 | 85,742 |
Parliament Hill The gunman also injured one House of Commons constable, who was shot in the foot. The area, maintained by the National Capital Commission, is named by the Parliament of Canada Act as "Parliament Hill" and defined as resting between the Ottawa River on the north, the Rideau Canal on the east, Wellington Street on the south, and a service road (Kent Street) near the Supreme Court on the west. The south front of the property is demarcated by a Victorian High Gothic wrought iron fence, named the Wellington Wall and in the centre of which, on axis with the Peace Tower to the north, sits the formal entrance to Parliament Hill: the Queen's Gates, forged by Ives & Co. of Montreal. At each southern corner of the quadrangle are also smaller gates for every-day access. The main outdoor area of The Hill is the quadrangle, formed by the arrangement of the parliament and departmental buildings on the site, and laid out in a formal garden fashion. This expanse is the site of major celebrations, demonstrations, and traditional shows, such as the changing of the guard, or the annual Canada Day celebrations. To the sides of the buildings, the grounds are set in the English garden style, dotted with statues, memorials, and, at the northwest corner, a Carpenter Gothic structure called the Summer Gazebo, a 1995 reconstruction of an earlier gazebo, Summer House, built for the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1877 by Thomas Seton Scott and demolished in 1956 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=87696 | 365,133 |
Full virtualization In computer science, virtualization is a modern technique developed in late 1990s and is different from simulation and emulation. Virtualization employs techniques used to create instances of an environment, as opposed to simulation, which models the environment; or emulation, which replicates the target environment such as certain kinds of virtual machine environments. requires that every salient feature of the hardware be reflected into one of several virtual machines – including the full instruction set, input/output operations, interrupts, memory access, and whatever other elements are used by the software that runs on the bare machine, and that is intended to run in a virtual machine. In such an environment, any software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine and, in particular, any operating systems. The obvious test of full virtualization is whether an operating system intended for stand-alone use can successfully run inside a virtual machine. The cornerstone of full virtualization or type-1 virtualization is a hypervisor or Super Operating system that operates at a higher privilege level than the OS. This Hypervisor or Super OS requires two key features to provision and protect virtualized environments. These two features are: See Intel VT-x or AMD-V for a detailed description of privilege levels for Hypervisor, OS and User modes, VMCS, VM-Exit and VM-Entry | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8273596 | 103,668 |
Superintelligence A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems (e.g., superintelligent language translators or engineering assistants) whether or not these high-level intellectual competencies are embodied in agents that act in the world. A superintelligence may or may not be created by an intelligence explosion and associated with a technological singularity. University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom defines "superintelligence" as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest". The program Fritz falls short of superintelligence—even though it is much better than humans at chess—because Fritz cannot outperform humans in other tasks. Following Hutter and Legg, Bostrom treats superintelligence as general dominance at goal-oriented behavior, leaving open whether an artificial or human superintelligence would possess capacities such as intentionality (cf. the Chinese room argument) or first-person consciousness (cf. the hard problem of consciousness). Technological researchers disagree about how likely present-day human intelligence is to be surpassed. Some argue that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will probably result in general reasoning systems that lack human cognitive limitations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=726659 | 244,785 |
Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. Such innovation takes place through the provision of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, or business models that are made available to markets, governments and society. An innovation is something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society. is related to, but not the same as, invention, as innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (ie new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in the market or society, and not all innovations require an invention. often manifests itself via the engineering process, when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation. While a novel device is often described as an innovation, in economics, management science, and other fields of practice and analysis, innovation is generally considered to be the result of a process that brings together various novel ideas in such a way that they affect society. In industrial economics, innovations are created and found empirically from services to meet growing consumer demand. also has an older historical meaning which is quite different | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=118450 | 225,326 |
Tungsten steel is any steel that has tungsten as its alloying element with characteristics derived mostly from the presence of this element (as opposed to any other element in the alloy). Common alloys have between 2% and 18% tungsten by weight along with small amounts of molybdenum and vanadium which together create an alloy with exceptional heat, corrosion, and wear resistance. Tungsten is one of the oldest elements used for alloying steel. It forms a very hard carbide and iron tungstite. High tungsten content in the alloy, however, tends to cause brittleness and makes it subject to fracturing rather than bending. The SAE designation for all tungsten steels consist of four numbers beginning with the number 7, in the format 7XXX. is used for manufacturing micro-drill bits, high-durability self-sharpening rotary cutting blades, and rocket engine nozzles, among many other applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26738223 | 63,092 |
Lego Mindstorms It featured three output ports and manual control, and it was only capable of storing linear sequences of manual input plus timing information. It could store up to two programs at once. The manual controls could be used to independently control the three motors. To record a program; the controller had to be put in programming mode, and then any manual control would be recorded to the program. Pauses could also be included in a program. When the recording was done, the controller could successfully recall and execute any manual action done during the recording. The executing program could be set to loop infinitely. Cybermaster was mainly sold in Europe and Australia/New Zealand and was available for a short time in the United States via the Lego Club magazines. It was aimed at an older audience as an early attempt of merging with robotics and Lego. The brick shares many, especially software, features with the RCX but differs in appearance and technical specifications: one output (plus two built-in) and four sensors. Despite its obvious limitations it has a number of advantages over its 'big brother', the RCX. This makes it very useful for various mobile platforms and performing advanced motion/positioning tasks. It talks the same protocol as the RCX but cannot communicate directly to it (due to IR vs RF) but with a repeater (a computer with 2 serial ports and a simple program) they can communicate indirectly. Sold as part of the Barcode Truck kit. This unit was the first programmable brick (or Pbrick) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=198856 | 394,667 |
Sven Erik Jørgensen It was published in English in 2012 and in Chinese in 2013. He was editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Ecology published in 2008, and of the Encyclopedia of Environmental Management published during December 2012. He was the editorial board member of 18 international journals in the fields of ecology and environmental management. He was the president of ISEM and was elected to the European Academy of Sciences, for which he was chairman of the Section for Environmental Sciences. He married in 1970 and had one son. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13893964 | 80,710 |
Bieberite Uranium mineralization in the Cameron Area of Coconino County, Arizona was found to have beiberite as one of the cobalt mineral species in association with secondary uranium minerals formed through oxidation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56710096 | 9,260 |
Registrar (software) Registrar was being used in Europe but it was not until a distributor was appointed in 1989 that it really took off there. The distributor was John Matchetts Limited based in Banbury in Oxfordshire. Matchetts were very successful and had over 500 clients using the Registrar software, not only in Europe but also in the Middle East. This was a list of people held in the Registrar system. They could be entered manually, imported or templated from existing people. The DOS version was limited to 32,000 people which obviously caused a minor problem for companies with over 32,000 people but later version the size was only limited by the size of the storage. People could be made Inactive when they left the company but the training record was still retained. People could be made Inactive either manually or automatically by a flag. People made inactivate could be made active again at any time. A unique key was used to identify people and this could be any field that the users chose i.e. Social security number, national insurance number, employee number. For people who did not have a unique key the system would generate one for them. In this day and age most companies plan development for their people. Part of this development would possibly be attending training and Registrar had the facility to store the training that a person was planning to attend. It could store the type of training, the date by which the training should be taken and record when that training had taken place automatically | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23322819 | 458,986 |
Emerson Pugh Emerson W. Pugh (born May 1, 1929) is an American research engineer and scientist, whose career at US corporation IBM spanned several decades and resulted in significant technological advances. He was a leader in magnetic and computer memory technologies and author of several books, including college-level physics textbooks and the history of IBM. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was President of IEEE in 1989. Pugh was born in Pasadena, California. His family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was raised. After public-school education, he received BS and PhD degrees at Carnegie Tech. Following his graduation, he taught at Carnegie Tech for one year. He then began working at IBM in 1957. Pugh began working at the IBM research facility in 1957. After several months he was named manager of the Metals Physics Group. The group's research led to the development of the thin magnetic film array used in the IBM System/360. They also developed computer-memory techniques including magnetic bubble memory, and began development of a word processor for the Japanese language. Pugh produced four books on IBM history and development of its products. He retired from IBM in 1993. While still working at IBM, Pugh was active in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His first presentation was in 1964, and in 1965 he became a senior member of IEEE. He was named editor of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics in 1968 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51252014 | 129,265 |
North East of England Process Industry Cluster Leading edge research is done at the region's Universities, for example Newcastle University was the first institution in Europe, second in the world, to receive permission to pursue stem-cell research in human embryos. New industries that have now developed form a significant sector in the Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC). Fujifilm Diosynth Biologics at Billingham now employs over 550 people, the majority of them being graduate-level skills in biotechnology, to develop new products and innovative processes for the pharmaceutical industry. Within a mile of the Fujifilm complex are small companies working on the building blocks of life. Cambridge Research Biochemicals (CRB) supports discovery research activities by providing custom-made research reagents, principally peptides and antibodies. In Sunderland, Immuno Diagnostic Systems (IDS) are producing medical test kits and in Hartlepool Hart Biologicals produce diagnostic products for use in the detection, prevention, and monitoring of a number of medical conditions. In Morpeth, Northumberland Piramal Healthcare invested into bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Across the region, companies such as Leica Biosystems, Orla Proteins, Helena Bioscience, Thermo Fischer Scientific and Millipore are significant contributors to the growing strength of the sector and its supply chain. Industrial, White Biotechnology includes manufacturing, alternative energy (or "bioenergy"), and biomaterials and is also well established in the region | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35184095 | 64,251 |
3D Repo In the second half of 2014, the project was seconded to Balfour Beatty via the Breakthrough Information Technology Exchange programme applying the new technology to the London Olympic Stadium Transformation project. This led to the development and application of Virtual reality for health and safety training on the M5 Smart Motorway in the UK which was nominated for British Construction Industry Awards in 2017. In 2015, was also invited to join the third cohort of Cognicity Challenge by Canary Wharf Group. The challenge consisted of an intensive twelve-week incubation programme designed to identify and solve construction problems faced by Canary Wharf in collaboration with Intel. The resulting Building Information Modeling platform 3drepo.io won the "Virtual Design and Construction" category, a £50,000 cash prize and a paid pilot deploying the solution to the Wood Wharf development. This enabled design coordination and federation of large 3D models via modern WebGL-enabled web browsers. The inner workings of the platform utilizing the X3DOM renderer developed in collaboration with Fraunhofer Institute were presented at the 20th anniversary Web3D conference in Heraklion, Greece. The platform was subsequently expanded with experimental streaming capability using glTF data format developed in collaboration with University College London. Further advanced cloud security provisions were developed in collaboration with British Telecom In 2017, unveiled version 2.0 based on the Unity game engine | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55675206 | 129,456 |
Trinity River Audubon Center The is a nature center and the central structure in the Great Trinity Forest, a large urban open space park in Southeast Dallas, Texas. The center is part of the Trinity River Project, a public works project to redevelop the Trinity River in Downtown Dallas. The center was designed by Design Architect Antoine Predock and BRW Architects. It was completed in 2008 on the site of a former illegal landfill. The center is the first LEED-certified building constructed by the Parks and Recreation Department of Dallas. It includes a green roof (planted), rainwater collection system, energy efficient systems, and recycled materials. The National Audubon Society has a natural history museum and nature center in the building and its surroundings. The Great Trinity Forest urban park is located within the Texas Blackland Prairies ecoregion. Habitats within it include bottomland hardwood forests, riparian zones, wetlands, open water ponds, grasslands, and the Trinity River itself. The Center is part of the City of Dallas-Trinity River Corridor Project and consists of 120 acres. The Center features five miles of nature viewing trails, a butterfly garden, outdoor picnic areas, an indoor event center, and several rentable conference rooms. The Center also hosts community events, such as the annual farm-to-table outdoor dinner, Songbird Supper. The Trinity River Project includes other recreational amenities | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26672450 | 337,827 |
History of business architecture Information was seen as being needed to perform processes. This is changing. It is becoming important to have data available to serve information retrieval needs as well. These ideas around the concept of architectural planning evolved in the early 1990s into frameworks, such as TAFIM, the predecessor of TOGAF. In the 1987 article "A Framework for Information Systems Architecture" John Zachman presented some of the principles of Enterprise architecture, In the 5th NIST workshop on Information Management Directions (1989) a working groups under guidance of W. Bradford Rigdon developed one of the first Enterprise Architecture frameworks, the NIST Enterprise Architecture Model. In this model business architecture was incorporated as one of the layers of Enterprise Architecture. Bradford Rigdon et al. (1989) brought it like this: A discussion of architecture must take into account different levels of architecture. These levels can be illustrated by a pyramid, with the business unit at the top and the delivery system at the base. An enterprise is composed of one or more Business Units that are responsible for a specific business area. The five levels of architecture are The levels are separate yet interrelated... The idea if an enterprise architecture reflects an awareness that the levels are logically connected and that a depiction at one level assumes or dictates that architectures at the higher level | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45102736 | 229,928 |
MOSFET There are also memory devices which contain at least a trillion MOS transistors, such as a 256GB microSD memory card, larger than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As of 2010, the operating principles of modern MOSFETs have remained largely the same as the original first demonstrated by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng in 1960. The US Patent and Trademark Office calls the a "groundbreaking invention that transformed life and culture around the world" and the Computer History Museum credits it with "irrevocably changing the human experience." The was also the basis for Nobel Prize winning breakthroughs such as the quantum Hall effect and the charge-coupled device (CCD), yet there was never any Nobel Prize given for the itself. In 2018, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences which awards the science Nobel Prizes acknowledged that the invention of the by Atalla and Kahng was one of the most important inventions in microelectronics and in information and communications technology (ICT). The is also included on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and its inventors Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2009. Usually the semiconductor of choice is silicon. Recently, some chip manufacturers, most notably IBM and Intel, have started using a chemical compound of silicon and germanium (SiGe) in channels | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40345 | 410,162 |
Self-service International borders have also experimented with traveler-assisted fingerprint verification Another situation is where a company's Human resources department is partially bypassed by departments that "source talent themselves." An early use of the term is a 2005 HRO Today article titled "Insourcing, Outsourcing? How about Self-sourcing?" that mined Wikipedia's history of a pair of banks that merged decades ago as Standard Chartered and, after September 11, rebuilt its personnel department in an innovative way. The concept is similar to self-service, and one USA example is pumping gas: New Jersey banned customers from doing this in 1949; now NJ is the only state "where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline." In 1994 it was considered a radical change to propose permitting self-service at the gas pumps, in Japan, and the New York Times reported that "the push .. (came) from Japanese big business ... trying to cut costs." Automatic Teller Machines are another example, and their expansion beyond banks have led to signs saying Access To Money, which refers to a company with that name; the technology began over half-a-century ago. Selfsourcing is the internal development and support of IT systems by knowledge workers with minimal contribution from IT specialists, and has been described as essentially outsourcing development effort to the end user. At times they use in-house Data warehouse systems, which often run on mainframes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3855083 | 459,834 |
Gender typing Gender dysphoria in children can be a controversial topic as some disapprove in diagnosing GID in children that have yet to reach puberty. However, GID in children is included in the DSM-5 and ICD-10. The ICD-10 is in the process of revision by the WHO, but instead of not addressing GOD in children, it will most likely be changed from "gender identity disorder of children" into "gender incongruence of childhood". Controversies about gender in DSM-5: For the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-5), there has been a tremendous amount of debate around whether the sexual and gender identity, which includes the GID, qualifies as a mental disorder. One of the most notable discussions for this occurred in 2003 during the annual APA meeting, where Darryl B. Hill, Ph.D., argued that the GID should not be considered a mental disorder. He explains that due to the limited amount of reliable and valid evidence, given the role of parents and therapies, for whether GID meets the conditions as a mental disorder among children and adolescents. Furthermore, other researchers have stated that the diagnosis does not give recognition to the individual's discomfort with their biological sex which is completely detached from their gender assignment. This leaves patients susceptible to social changes for what acceptably feminine or masculine | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29880293 | 155,755 |
Areva At the same year, it inaugurated a hydrogen storage system called the MYRTE platform near Ajaccio, Corsica (MYRTE is the French acronym for "Mission Hydrogène Renouvelable pour l’intégration au réseau électrique"). The system aims to establish the feasibility of a storage solution for solar energy using hydrogen technologies, which would serve as a back-up system to stabilize Corsica's power grid. In 2014, Areva's energy storage and management system, the Greenergy Box, was added to the existing installation, in operation since early 2013. In January 2014, and Spain's wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica created on the bases of Wind a joint venture Adwen. In August 2014, exited the solar industry. In October 2013, won a $2.7 billion contract to supply two EPR nuclear reactors and control systems to the Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset, England. In December 2013, and China General Nuclear Power (CGN) agreed to a partnership in renewable energy, with a focus on offshore wind, biomass, concentrated solar power, and energy storage. In October 2014, CEO Luc Oursel took a leave of absence for health reasons. He died in December of the same year. On 20 November 2014 Standard & Poor's downgraded long-term debt to BB+ and short-term-debt to A-3. In May 2014, through its subsidiary CETH2, and the ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency), announced the creation of the AREVA H2-Gen joint venture | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=915549 | 389,541 |
History of the transistor When the plastic was pushed down onto the surface of a crystal and voltage applied to the other side (on the base of the crystal), current started to flow from one contact to the other as the base voltage pushed the electrons away from the base towards the other side near the contacts. The point-contact transistor had been invented. On 15 December 1947, "When the points were, very close together got voltage amp about 2 but not power amp. This voltage amplification was independent of frequency 10 to 10,000 cycles". On 16 December 1947, "Using this double point contact, contact was made to a germanium surface that had been anodized to 90 volts, electrolyte washed off in HO and then had some gold spots evaporated on it. The gold contacts were pressed down on the bare surface. Both gold contacts to the surface rectified nicely... The separation between points was about 4x10 cm. One point was used as a grid and the other point as a plate. The bias (D.C.) on the grid had to be positive to get amplification... power gain 1.3 voltage gain 15 on a plate bias of about 15 volts". Brattain and H. R. Moore made a demonstration to several of their colleagues and managers at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birth date of the transistor. The "PNP point-contact germanium transistor" operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12289129 | 403,453 |
Moquin's Bakery Moquin's Bakery, also known locally as the Biscuit Factory and the National Biscuit Company, is a historic former industrial facility at 78 Rose Street in Burlington, Vermont. Built in 1915 by a local bakery, it was acquired and enlarged by the National Biscuit Company (now better known as Nabisco), which operated here until 1969. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997 for its economic and commercial historic significance, and has since then been converted into residences. The former building stands in a predominantly residential area of Burlington's Old North End, on the east side of Rose Street between Cedar Street and Manhattan Drive. It is a large two-story brick building, with single-story extensions on both sides. The main facade is seven bays wide, with the central section having three bays articulated by brick pilasters. The outermost bays consist of paired sash windows, set in segmented-arch openings, above which is a band of brick corbelling. Although it is basically symmetrical, the building has a complex construction history, beginning as a single-story two-bay structure in the center of the structure. The oldest portion of the building was erected in 1915 by John and Julius Moquin, and by the 1920s had grown to be a major local economic presence, delivering bread and other bakery products across the state. The Moquin's withdrew from the business in the 1930s, and it eventually merged with the National Biscuit Company | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52207022 | 327,054 |
Project Independence was an initiative announced by U.S. President Richard Nixon on November 7, 1973, in reaction to the OAPEC oil embargo and the resulting 1973 oil crisis. Recalling the Manhattan Project, he stated that the goal of was to achieve energy self-sufficiency for the United States by 1980, through a national commitment to energy conservation and development of alternative sources of energy. Nixon declared that American science, technology and industry could free America from its dependence on imported oil, and establish its energy independence. He called for the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000. Some of the important initiatives to emerge from included lowering highway speeds to , converting oil power plants to coal, completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and diverting federal funds from highway construction to mass transit. Despite these initiatives, failed to prevent the increase in American oil consumption after the 1973-74 embargo; its dependence on foreign suppliers rose from 36% to almost 50% in 1979, when questions of nuclear energy safety arose domestically, and the next energy crisis emerged overseas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16767406 | 512,332 |
Women in STEM fields Many scholars and policymakers have noted that the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have remained predominantly male with historically low participation among women since the origins of these fields during the Age of Enlightenment. Scholars are exploring the various reasons for the continued existence of this gender disparity in STEM fields. Those who view this disparity as resulting from discriminatory forces are also seeking ways to redress this disparity within STEM fields (these typically construed as well-compensated, high-status professions with universal career appeal). Studies suggest that many factors contribute to the attitudes towards the achievement of young men in mathematics and science, including encouragement from parents, interactions with mathematics and science teachers, curriculum content, hands-on laboratory experiences, high school achievement in mathematics and science, and resources available at home. In the United States, research findings are mixed concerning when boys' and girls' attitudes about mathematics and science diverge. Analyzing several nationally representative longitudinal studies, one researcher found few differences in girls' and boys' attitudes towards science in the early secondary school years. Students' aspirations to pursue careers in mathematics and science influence both the courses they choose to take in those areas and the level of effort they put forth in these courses | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36487460 | 242,176 |
James S. Albus In 1971, he published a new theory of cerebellar function that modified and extended a previous theory published by David Marr in 1969. Based on his cerebellar model, Albus invented a new type of neural net computer, the Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC), for which he received the IR-100 award from Industrial Research Magazine as one of the 100 most important industrial innovations of the year 1976. Albus invented and developed a new generation of robot cranes based on six cables and six winches configured as a Stewart platform. Albus co-invented the Real-Time Control System (RCS), a reference model architecture that has been used over the past 25 years for a number of intelligent systems including the NBS Automated Manufacturing Research Facility (AMRF), the NASA telerobotic servicer, a DARPA Multiple Autonomous Undersea Vehicle project, a nuclear Submarine Operational Automation System, a Post Office General Mail facility, a Bureau of Mines automated mining system, a commercial open architecture machine tool controller, and numerous advanced robotic projects, including the Army Research Lab Demo III Experimental Unmanned Ground vehicle. During the 1980s, the Albus-Barbera reference model architecture (a.k.a. RCS - for Real-time Control System) provided the fundamental integrating principle of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) Automated Manufacturing Research Facility (AMRF.) This was an $80 million experimental automated factory-of-the-future. It was co-funded by the U.S | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=360926 | 376,822 |
Telly (home entertainment server) All models may additionally have tuners and CD/DVD burners for both import and archiving owners content. TellyMinder (Under Development) The TellyMinder is a small desktop computer designed to fit into any entertainment center and display pre-defined messages on a television screen. TellyMinder has a web-based interface that allows the sender (loved ones, medical professionals, etc.) to enter messages (reminders, detailed instructions or video clips) and then schedule these messages to be displayed at a specified time. Messages can include reminders to take a specific medication at a given time, appointment confirmations, or a simple check-in to see how someone is doing. Once the message is displayed, the recipient (such as the elderly or shut-ins) can confirm the receipt of the message. If the message receipt is not triggered within a specified timeframe, the sender would receive an e-mail alert to notify them of possible problems so the recipient can be contacted directly. The TellyMinder will also have a web-cam option so sender can check in on the recipient and get visual feedback on the recipient’s status. Future options include the ability to connect monitoring equipment via TellyMinder’s wireless networking so vital information including heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen levels can be monitored in real time. This would also allow TellyMinder to trigger emergency services if the vital information falls to unsafe levels | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15977395 | 405,107 |
Peter Pauson Returning to Britain, he became a lecturer at Sheffield University and in 1959 became Professor of Organic Chemistry at Strathclyde University. In 1964 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Pauson and his postdoctoral assistant, Ihsan Khand, discovered the reaction now renowned as the Pauson–Khand reaction in 1971, though Pauson always referred to it as the "Khand reaction". In 1994, the University of Strathclyde established the Merck Pauson Chair in Preparative Chemistry, funded by Merck, marking the contribution of Pauson to chemistry and to the university. Pauson retired in 1995 and died peacefully at home on 10 December 2013. He was cremated at Clydebank Crematorium. In his obituary, he is described as ""a gentleman of modesty, humility, and compassion … a fine man and a marvellous scientist"". He married Lai-Ngau Mary (née Wong) (1928 – March 18, 2010), having met her at a party hosted by Enrico Fermi when Pauson was at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. They went on to have two children, Hilary and Alfred. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58297912 | 78,959 |
Telecommuting Federal Government passed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 in order to improve Continuity of Operations and ensure essential Federal functions are maintained during emergencies; to promote management effectiveness when telework is used to achieve reductions in organizational and transit costs and environmental impacts; and to enhance the work-life balance of workers. For example, telework allows employees to better manage their work and family obligations and thus helps retain a more resilient Federal workforce better able to meet agency goals. Study results from the 2013 Regus Global Economic Indicator were published in September 2013 and showed that 48% of business managers worldwide work remotely for at least half their working week. The study engaged over 26,000 business managers across 90 countries, with 55% of respondents stating that the effective management of remote workers is an attainable goal. Following the release of the results, Regus CEO Mark Dixon stated: "The business people we speak with tell us that trust and freedom play a key role in remote management, and once these are in place the benefits are clear for all to see: greater productivity, improved staff retention and lower operating costs." Forrester Research's US Forecast reporting that 34 million Americans work from home and the number is expected to reach a staggering 63 million – or 43% of the U.S. workforce – by 2016 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=158555 | 408,866 |
Flat-panel display The first production flat-panel display was the Aiken tube, developed in the early 1950s and produced in limited numbers in 1958. This saw some use in military systems as a heads up display and as an oscilloscope monitor, but conventional technologies overtook its development. Attempts to commercialize the system for home television use ran into continued problems and the system was never released commercially. The Philco Predicta featured a relatively flat (for its day) cathode ray tube setup and would be the first commercially released "flat panel" upon its launch in 1958; the Predicta was a commercial failure. The plasma display panel was invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois, according to The History of Plasma Display Panels. , 50% of global market share in flat-panel display (FPD) production is by Taiwanese manufacturers such as AU Optronics and Chimei Innolux Corporation. The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) was invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959, and presented in 1960. Building on their work, Paul K. Weimer at RCA developed the thin-film transistor (TFT) in 1962. It was a type of MOSFET distinct from the standard bulk MOSFET. The idea of a TFT-based LCD was conceived by Bernard J. Lechner of RCA Laboratories in 1968. B.J. Lechner, F.J. Marlowe, E.O. Nester and J. Tults demonstrated the concept in 1968 with a dynamic scattering LCD that used standard discrete MOSFETs | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=293396 | 219,182 |
Rafatazmia chitrakootensis the sole member of the genus is a fossil species of filamentous alga described from dolomite obtained from the Vindhya ranges of central India. It is among the oldest known eukaryotic life forms and dates to about 1600 million years. The genus is named after Rafat Azmi, the Indian paleontologist who discovered other fossils in the same area and whose findings were doubted. Some microfossils as well as small shelly fossils were first described by Rafat Azmi in 1998 from Rohtasgarh limestone, and he described them as Cambrian presumably based on conventional ideas on the origin of life. Accusations were made against Azmi and fraud was suspected (at a time when the major fraud of the Indian paleontologist Vishwa Jit Gupta had been unearthed). These findings were investigated as it was in gross contradiction to the known age of the regions in question. A re-examination by others in the region failed to find the fossils claimed by him. However a Swedish team collected in another nearby region and examined microfossils and also noted that they clearly were not Cambrian but proterozoic as expected for the region. The Vindhyan region is made of older rocks and the presence of fossils raised considerable interest and further studies were carried out and in 2017, these were announced as clear and unquestionably traces of living organisms. The cells have been said to be similar to oscillatoriacean cyanobacteria and probably multicellular red algae (Rhodophyta) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53540278 | 187,092 |
History of the transistor Pierce, was the clear winner of an internal ballot (owing in part to the affinity that Bell engineers had developed for the suffix "-istor"). The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memorandum calling for votes: Pierce recalled the naming somewhat differently: The Nobel Foundation states that the term is a combination of the words "transfer" and "resistor". Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, who he felt had built it "behind his back" to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley's own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application. Shockley was incensed, and decided to demonstrate who was the real brains of the operation. Only a few months later he invented an entirely new type of transistor with a layer or "sandwich" structure. This new form was considerably more robust than the fragile point-contact system, and would go on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s. It would evolve into the bipolar junction transistor. The static induction transistor, the first high frequency transistor concept, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950, and was finally able to produce some experimental prototypes in 1975 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12289129 | 257,942 |
Evolutionary anachronism is a concept in evolutionary biology, named by Connie C. Barlow in her book "The Ghosts of Evolution" (2000), to refer to attributes of living species that are best explained as a result of having been favorably selected in the past due to coevolution with other biological species that have since become extinct. When this context is removed, the said attributes appear as unexplained energy investments on the part of the living organism, with no apparent benefit extracted from them, and perhaps are prejudicial to the continued reproduction of the surviving species. The general theory was formulated by Costa Rican-based American botanist Daniel Janzen and University of Arizona-based geologist Paul S. Martin (a prominent defender of the overkill hypothesis to explain the Quaternary extinction event) in a "Science" article published in 1982, titled "Neotropical Anachronisms: The fruit the gomphotheres ate." Previously, in 1977, Stanley Temple had proposed a similar idea to explain the decline of the Mauritius endemic tree tambalacoque following the extinction of the iconic dodo. Janzen, Martin and Barlow mainly discussed evolutionary anachronisms in the context of seed dispersal and passive defense strategies exhibited by plants that had evolved alongside disappeared megaherbivores. However, some examples have also been described in animal species. John Byers used the name relict behavior for animal behavior examples. Evolutionary anachronisms should not be confused with examples of vestigiality | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35350800 | 178,153 |
Fredrik Rosing Bull (25 December 1882 – 7 June 1925) was an information technology pioneer, known for his work on improved punched card machines. Bull was born in Kristiania (Oslo, Norway). In 1907 he finished his studies in civil engineering at the Technical School of Kristiania (Kristiania Tekniske Skole). In 1916 he was hired as a technical inspector for the insurance company Storebrand, where he developed an interest for punched card machines technology and began developing one of his own. In 1919 he obtained a patent for the machine, and in 1921 he prepared a team that took over the implementation of the machine at the company where Bull worked at that time, Storebrand. This team provided several new ideas for improving the Bull machine, rendering it superior to Hollerith's device - the precursor to the IBM punched card machine - in use at that time. Bull continued to develop his ideas, improving the machine, which became a success throughout Europe. He was diagnosed with cancer at an early age and died in 1925 when he was 42 years old. His patents were later sold in 1931 and constituted the basis for the founding of the French company Groupe Bull, a large information technology company operating in over 100 countries. Fredrik Bull was born in Kristiania (the present-day Oslo) to Dr. Ole Bornemann Bull (1842–1916) and his first wife Marie Cathrine Lund (1843–1884). Dr. Ole Bull was a renowned eye doctor | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1702592 | 250,141 |
Biodiversity For example, coral reefs – which are biodiversity hotspots – will be lost within the century if global warming continues at the current rate. Climate change has proven to affect biodiversity and evidence supporting the altering effects is widespread. Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide certainly affects plant morphology and is acidifying oceans, and temperature affects species ranges, phenology, and weather, but, mercifully, the major impacts that have been predicted are still potential futures. We have not documented major extinctions yet, even as climate change drastically alters the biology of many species. In 2004, an international collaborative study on four continents estimated that 10 percent of species would become extinct by 2050 because of global warming. "We need to limit climate change or we wind up with a lot of species in trouble, possibly extinct," said Dr. Lee Hannah, a co-author of the paper and chief climate change biologist at the Center for Applied Science at Conservation International. A recent study predicts that up to 35% of the world terrestrial carnivores and ungulates will be at higher risk of extinction by 2050 because of the joint effects of predicted climate and land-use change under business-as-usual human development scenarios. Climate change has advanced the time of evening when Brazilian free-tailed bats ("Tadarida brasiliensis") emerge to feed. This change is believed to be related to the drying of regions as temperatures rise | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45086 | 160,204 |
Museum of Natural History, Belgrade Natural History Museum () is a museum located in Belgrade, Serbia. It is one of the oldest specialized national institutions in Serbia. In fact, it is the only museum of this type in Serbia. By the richness and diversity of the exhibited species, as well as the results achieved in the domain of museology and science, this museum is one of the most important in the South-Eastern Europe. It was officially founded in 1895, registered as The Natural History Museum of Serbian Land at that time (Јестаственички музеј српске земље). Prior to the foundation of the Museum, in the first half of the 19th century, in the former Principality of Serbia, there was a large number of natural history collections, predominantly kept in the Natural History Cabinet of the Great Lyceum (Great School). The museum was initially located at an Endowment house of Stevče Mihajlovic on the Vracar (central municipality of Belgrade). Josif Pancic is considered to be the founder of the Natural History Museum who, accompanied by the group of his associates and students, systematically collected, studied and extracted specimens from nature to be exhibited. He was the first president of the Serbian Royal Academy and the Great Lyceum professor. Thoroughly investigating the flora of Serbia during his era, he has discovered and described about 50, even nowadays scientifically valid, plant species (Picea omorica, Ramonda sebica, Eryngium serbicum, Centaurea derventana and others) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11999250 | 11,843 |
Reflection coefficient However its "phase" will have shifted according to where formula_27 is the electrical length (expressed as phase) of that length of transmission line at the frequency considered. Note that the phase of the reflection coefficient is changed by "twice" the phase length of the attached transmission line. That is to take into account not only the phase delay of the reflected wave, but the phase shift that had first been applied to the forward wave, with the reflection coefficient being the quotient of these. The reflection coefficient so measured, formula_28, corresponds to an impedance which is generally dissimilar to formula_8 present at the far side of the transmission line. The complex reflection coefficient (in the region formula_30, corresponding to passive loads) may be displayed graphically using a Smith chart. The Smith chart is a polar plot of formula_3, therefore the magnitude of formula_3 is given directly by the distance of a point to the center (with the edge of the Smith chart corresponding to formula_33). Its evolution along a transmission line is likewise described by a rotation of formula_34 around the chart's center. Using the scales on a Smith chart, the resulting impedance (normalized to formula_11) can directly be read. Before the advent of modern electronic computers, the Smith chart was of particular use as a sort of analog computer for this purpose | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41641 | 114,466 |
Pour point The pour point of a liquid is the temperature below which the liquid loses its flow characteristics. It is defined as the minimum temperature in which the oil has the ability to pour down from a beaker. In crude oil a high pour point is generally associated with a high paraffin content, typically found in crude deriving from a larger proportion of plant material. That type of crude oil is mainly derived from a kerogen Type III. ASTM D97, Standard Test Method for Pour Point of Crude Oils. The specimen is cooled inside a cooling bath to allow the formation of paraffin wax crystals. At about 9 °C above the expected pour point, and for every subsequent 3 °C, the test jar is removed and tilted to check for surface movement. When the specimen does not flow when tilted, the jar is held horizontally for 5 sec. If it does not flow, 3 °C is added to the corresponding temperature and the result is the pour point temperature. It is also useful to note that failure to flow at the pour point may also be due to the effect of viscosity or the previous thermal history of the specimen. Therefore, the pour point may give a misleading view of the handling properties of the oil. Additional fluidity tests may also be undertaken. An approximate range of pour point can be observed from the specimen's upper and lower pour point. ASTM D5949, Standard Test Method for Pour Point of Petroleum Products (Automatic Pressure Pulsing Method) is an alternative to the manual test procedure | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4771910 | 91,679 |
Energy Manufacturing Co. Inc Energy Manufacturing Co., Inc. is an American manufacturing company based in Monticello, Iowa. Established in 1944, the company produces a variety of hydraulic cylinders, hydraulic pumps, valves, and power systems. In the early 1940s B.J. Pasker ran a blacksmith shop in New Vienna, Iowa. In this shop his son, Jerry, produced farm wagons made from discarded automobile spindles and rims. During this period, Pasker also developed a hydraulically powered front loader which mounted to farm tractors. In 1944 Jerry Pasker outgrew the blacksmith shop and sought a larger facility for his operations. Jerry Pasker moved to South Cedar Street in Monticello, Iowa and was introduced to Harold Sovereign, who sold John Deere tractors and equipment. Pasker and Sovereign formed a partnership known as Industrious Farmer Equipment Company, and moved the business to the vacant second floor of Sovereign's dealership on South Cedar Street. In 1946 the business again outgrew its facility. To accommodate the expansion, Pasker purchased the property of an auto dealership on Main Street. During that time the company manufactured hydraulic components, wagon hoists, truck hoists, valves and hydraulic cylinders. In 1948 the company's name was changed to Energy Farm Equipment Company. In 1962 the business incorporated to become Energy Manufacturing Company, Inc., by which it is still known. Jerry Pasker was killed in a 22 July 1964 airplane crash in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; the company presidency then passed to LaVon Pasker | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23984989 | 350,840 |
Norman Selfe His death certificate states the cause of death as "heart failure brought on by exertion". His daughter Norma offered some context to a journalist in 1957. She said: "On the day of his death he climbed trees in the church grounds to lop branches, as the gardener was too nervous to climb so high. That night he died in his sleep." Norma reported that her father had been sanguine to the end, playful with his nephews and learning to play the oboe. However, other reports suggest that Selfe was concealing a bitter sense of disappointment at the end of his life, most particularly over the Harbour Bridge affair. His obituary in the journal "Building" concluded: ... [T]here is none today who can replace the noble personality, that keen energetic brain ever ready to give of its wonderful store of knowledge, and that happy spirit ever bright, ever optimistic, even though crushed beneath the cruel and unjust blow of the non-acceptance of his prize design for the North Shore bridge. "It will crown my life" he said. We will always remember the bright gleam in his eyes as they peered beyond the anxiety of today, looked afar to the future glory of his beloved Sydney where in his dreams he saw his mighty bridge spanning what he called "God's noblest waterway". Selfe's funeral was held at St Paul's Church, Wahroonga, where he had been a churchwarden. He was buried in Gore Hill cemetery in the presence of a large gathering of businessmen and representatives of the organisations he had been involved with | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38470727 | 329,145 |
Abraham–Minkowski controversy This explanation is completely consistent with Alexander Feigel's finding that "Abraham's expression is indeed the momentum of the field, the measured momentum also includes the matter contribution, and its value coincides with Minkowski's result"; thus "the Abraham definition accounts for the momentum of the electric and magnetic fields alone, while the Minkowski definition also takes into account the momentum of the material". According to this theory, Abraham momentum formula_6 is the quantized field momentum (= field part of total momentumformula_7photon number), while the Minkowski momentum formula_3 is the quantized wave momentum (= total momentum including both field part and material partformula_7photon number). In his Featured-in-Physics PRL Letter, Feigel uses relativistic Lagrange formulism to analyze momentum transfer between matter and EM field in a moving dielectric medium, which is isotropic, nondispersive, and uniform, observed in the medium-rest frame. In Feigel's formulism, Minkowski approximate constitutive relation is taken into account in invariant Lagrangian density formula_10. However, Lagrange formulism "gives no new clue on the interpretation of the "macroscopic" Maxwell equations", as criticized by Tiggelen and Rikken, because the validity of Lagrange formulism is identified with whether the Euler-Lagrange equations generated by the Lagrangian density formula_10 under the principle of least action are the same as Maxwell equations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1190648 | 50,929 |
Surface diffusion Reaction thermodynamics aside because of the interplay between increased rates of diffusion and decreased lifetime of adsorption, increased temperature may in some cases decrease the overall rate of the reaction. may be studied by a variety of techniques, including both direct and indirect observations. Two experimental techniques that have proved very useful in this area of study are field ion microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy. By visualizing the displacement of atoms or clusters over time, it is possible to extract useful information regarding the manner in which the relevant species diffuse-both mechanistic and rate-related information. In order to study surface diffusion on the atomistic scale it is unfortunately necessary to perform studies on rigorously clean surfaces and in ultra high vacuum (UHV) conditions or in the presence of small amounts of inert gas, as is the case when using He or Ne as imaging gas in field-ion microscopy experiments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14501355 | 81,360 |
Trapdoor mechanism This caused the Model 1865 to be called the "First Allin", and the following revised model, the Springfield Model 1866, to be called the "Second Allin". The Springfield model 1865 fired a rimfire .58-60-500 cartridge (.58 inch bullet, of black powder), the caliber matching that of the Civil War Minié ball, which was originally used in these rifles. The Model 1865 quickly became obsolete, and most of them were sold in the 1870s to several American arms dealers. At the time, there was a large demand in the US for shorter cadet-style rifles. To satisfy this need, these dealers cut the barrels and stocks to make short rifles with 33-inch and 36-inch barrel lengths. Likewise, the stock wrists were often thinned for cadet use. In 1872–1873 a military board, headed by Brigadier-General Alfred H. Terry, conducted an examination and trial of 99 rifles from several domestic and foreign manufacturers, including those from Springfield, Sharps, Peabody, Whitney, Spencer, Remington, and Winchester pursuant to the selection of a breech-loading system for rifles and carbines for the U.S. Military. The trials included tests for: accuracy, dependability, rate of fire, and ability to withstand adverse conditions. Both single-shot and magazine-equipped systems were considered, but, at the time, the single-shot was deemed to be more reliable | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54015036 | 450,307 |
Craig Gotsman Gotsman co-founded three startup companies: Virtue3D was founded in 1997 and developed advanced technologies for Web-based 3D computer graphics based on Technion intellectual property. The principal investors were Zohar and Yehuda Zisapel and Eurofund. The technology was eventually acquired by German Mental Images, itself later acquired by NVIDIA. Estimotion – a precursor to Waze – was founded in 2000 and developed technologies for real-time traffic-based applications for cellular phones. The principal investors were Partner/Orange Communications and Shlomo Group. Estimotion was acquired by British ITIS Holdings, itself later acquired by INRIX. CatchEye Gotsman also co-founded in 2006 an active consulting company – Geometrika – which develops graphics and geometric software technologies. While at Technion, Gotsman served as Associate Dean for Computing during 2001–2003. He also founded its Industrial Affiliates Program and Alumni Program and served as Associate Dean for External Relations during 2005–2008. Gotsman served as consultant for HP Labs in Haifa and spent summers during 1993–1996 at HP Labs in Palo Alto. He has also consulted for companies in Israel, Europe and the US, including Nokia, Shell Oil, Disney, Intel, Rafael, Autodesk and Samsung. In 2014, Gotsman served as a technology expert on the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority Reinvention Commission, appointed by the governor of NY State | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45270199 | 99,894 |
Singularity (software) Singularity is a free, cross-platform and open-source computer program that performs operating-system-level virtualization also known as containerization. One of the main uses of Singularity is to bring containers and reproducibility to scientific computing and the high-performance computing (HPC) world. The need for reproducibility requires the ability to use containers to move applications from system to system. Using Singularity containers, developers can work in reproducible environments of their choosing and design, and these complete environments can easily be copied and executed on other platforms. Singularity began as an open-source project in 2015, when a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by Gregory Kurtzer, developed the initial version and released it under the BSD license. By the end of 2016, many developers from different research facilities joined forces with the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to further the development of Singularity Singularity quickly attracted the attention of computing-heavy scientific institutions worldwide: For two years in a row, in 2016 and 2017, Singularity was recognized by HPCwire editors as "One of five new technologies to watch". In 2017 Singularity also won the first place for the category ″Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology″ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57055637 | 264,521 |
Great chain of being The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought in medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals. The Great Chain of Being (, "Ladder of Being") is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his "Historia Animalium"), Plotinus and Proclus. Further developed during the Middle Ages, it reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism. The Chain of Being is a hierarchy, with God at the top, above angels, which like him are entirely in spirit form, without material bodies, and hence unchangeable. Beneath them are humans, consisting both of spirit and matter; they can change and die, and are thus essentially impermanent. Lower still are animals and plants. At the bottom are the mineral materials of the earth itself; they consist only of matter. Thus, the higher the being is in the chain, the more attributes it has, including all the attributes of the beings below it. The minerals are, in the medieval mind, a possible exception to the unchangeability of the material beings in the chain, as alchemy promised to turn lower elements like lead into those higher up the chain, like silver or gold. Each link in the chain might be divided further into its component parts. In medieval secular society, for example, the king is at the top, succeeded by the aristocratic lords and the clergy, and then the peasants below them | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=177793 | 181,984 |
Money and Trade Considered Money and Trade Considered: With a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money is an early economics text written by John Law of Lauriston, published in 1705. In it, he attempts to compare the prosperity of other countries with that of Scotland, and advocates a "land bank" system of paper money backed by real estate as a commodity instead of gold or silver. John Law examines what he finds to be problems with monetary theory in Scotland. This topic had been growing in attractiveness for the previous 150 years, as Europe had suffered an increasing crisis known as the price revolution, where the value of gold had been fluctuating wildly, and falling overall, in large part because of the influx of additional gold plundered from the New World. Law describes the scarcity of money as being essential for its value, a lesson learned by that crisis of the previous two centuries. He describes the evolution of money this way: Because silver, the common money in Scotland at the time, is falling in value, he proposes land, whose value is more stable, as a replacement backing for currency. Regarding the Price Revolution, Law says: The Spainiards bring as great Quantities into Europe as they can get wrought out of the Mines Thus, he says, the value of metal currency has been diluted. Remarkable in his work is the assertion that money is not something invented by government authority, which was the popular view of government authorities at the time | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53330015 | 505,097 |
Solar transit In the Northern Hemisphere, solar transit is usually in early March and October. In the Southern Hemisphere, solar transit is usually in early September and April. The time of day varies mainly with the longitude of the satellite and receiving station, while the exact days vary mainly with the station's latitude. Stations along the equator will experience solar transit right at the equinoxes, as that is where geostationary satellites are located directly over. Note that with large dishes, it would be possible for the feedhorn to be damaged, which is prevented by the parabolic dishes being done in a flat (non-glossy) finish that does not focus light or heat effectively. Non-parabolic dishes cannot focus in this manner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5953552 | 401,531 |
Union process Oil vapors are cooled by the raw oil, thus minimizing polymer formation among the hydrocarbon fractions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24561471 | 31,225 |
Pluvial In geology and climatology, a pluvial is either a modern climate characterized by relatively high precipitation, or an interval of time of variable length – decades to thousands of years – during which a climate is characterized by either relatively high precipitation or "humidity". Subdivisions of a pluvial, which are characterized by relatively high precipitation, are known as a subpluvials. Formally, pluvials were equated with glacial stages of the Quaternary. However, pluvials, as in equatorial regions, can also occur during interglacial stages. Lower latitudes have even experienced major pluvials in early to mid-Holocene times. In geomorphology, pluvial refers to a geologic episode, change, process, deposit, or feature that is the result of the action or effects of rain. Sometimes it also refers to the fluvial action of rainwater flowing in a stream channel, including a flood, known as a pluvial flood, that is the direct result of excessive precipitation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2395100 | 3,478 |
History of chemistry To date, the earliest copper smelting is found at the Belovode site; these examples include a copper axe from 5500 BC belonging to the Vinča culture. Other signs of early metals are found from the third millennium BC in places like Palmela (Portugal), Los Millares (Spain), and Stonehenge (United Kingdom). However, as often happens in the study of prehistoric times, the ultimate beginnings cannot be clearly defined and new discoveries are ongoing. These first metals were single elements, or else combinations as naturally occurred. By combining copper and tin, a superior metal could be made, an alloy called bronze. This was a major technological shift which began the Bronze Age about 3500 BC. The Bronze Age was a period in human cultural development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) included techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of copper ores, and then smelting those ores to cast bronze. These naturally occurring ores typically included arsenic as a common impurity. Copper/tin ores are rare, as reflected in the absence of tin bronzes in western Asia before 3000 BC. After the Bronze Age, the history of metallurgy was marked by armies seeking better weaponry. States in Eurasia prospered when they made the superior alloys, which, in turn, made better armor and better weapons. Significant progress in metallurgy and alchemy was made in ancient India | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1416046 | 260,885 |
Frequency mixer Mixers may be built of discrete components, may be part of integrated circuits, or can be delivered as hybrid modules. Mixers may also be classified by their topology: Selection of a mixer type is a trade off for a particular application. Mixer circuits are characterized by their properties such as conversion gain (or loss), and noise figure. Nonlinear electronic components that are used as mixers include diodes, transistors biased near cutoff, and at lower frequencies, analog multipliers. Ferromagnetic-core inductors driven into saturation have also been used. In nonlinear optics, crystals with nonlinear characteristics are used to mix two frequencies of laser light to create optical heterodynes. A diode can be used to create a simple unbalanced mixer. This type of mixer produces the original frequencies as well as their sum and their difference. The significant property of the diode here is its non-linearity (or non-Ohmic behavior), which means its response (current) is not proportional to its input (voltage). The diode does not reproduce the frequencies of its driving voltage in the current through it, which allows the desired frequency manipulation. The current "I" through an ideal diode as a function of the voltage "V" across it is given by where what is important is that "V" appears in "e"'s exponent | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=482952 | 418,131 |
Lotus effect The measured contact angle on this leaf in this study is around 148 degrees. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2174453 | 21,207 |
Stream function By observing the flow into an elemental square in an x-y Cartesian coordinate system, we have: where u is the flow velocity parallel to and in the direction of the x-axis, and v is the flow velocity parallel to and in the direction of the y-axis. Thus, as δn → 0 and by rearranging, we have: Consider two-dimensional plane flow within a Cartesian coordinate system. Continuity states that if we consider incompressible flow into an elemental square, the flow into that small element must equal the flow out of that element. The total flow into the element is given by: The total flow out of the element is given by: Thus we have: and simplifying to: Substituting the expressions of the stream function into this equation, we have: The stream function can be found from vorticity using the following Poisson's equation: or where the vorticity vector formula_54 – defined as the curl of the flow velocity vector formula_55 – for this two-dimensional flow has formula_56 i.e. only the formula_57-component formula_58 can be non-zero. Consider two-dimensional plane flow within a Cartesian coordinate system. Consider two infinitesimally close points formula_59 and formula_60. From calculus we have that Say formula_6 takes the same value, say formula_64, at the two points formula_2 and formula_66, then formula_67 is tangent to the curve formula_68 at formula_2 and implying that the vector formula_71 is normal to the curve formula_68 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=218091 | 448,522 |
Nuclear magnetic resonance crystallography intermolecular hydrogen bonds. The above-mentioned dipolar interaction can be measured directly, e.g. between pairs of heteronuclear spins like C/N in many organic compounds. Furthermore, the strength of the dipolar interaction modulates parameters like the longitudinal relaxation time or the spin diffusion rate which therefore can be examined to obtain structural information. E.g. H spin diffusion has been measured providing rich structural information. The chemical shift interaction can be used in conjunction with the dipolar interaction to determine the orientation of the dipolar interaction frame (principal axes system) with respect to the molecular frame (dipolar chemical shift spectroscopy). For some cases there are rules for the chemical shift interaction tensor orientation as for the C spin in ketones due to symmetry arguments (sp hybridisation). If the orientation of a dipolar interaction (between the spin of interest and e.g. another heteronucleus) is measured with respect to the chemical shift interaction coordinate system, these two pieces of information (chemical shift tensor/molecular orientation and the dipole tensor/chemical shift tensor orientation) combined give the orientation of the dipole tensor in the molecular frame. However, this method is only suitable for small molecules (or polymers with a small repetition unit like polyglycine) and it provides only selective (and usually intramolecular) structural information | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31279073 | 31,563 |
N-body problem The restricted problem (both circular and elliptical) was worked on extensively by many famous mathematicians and physicists, most notably by Poincaré at the end of the 19th century. Poincaré's work on the restricted three-body problem was the foundation of deterministic chaos theory. In the restricted problem, there exist five equilibrium points. Three are collinear with the masses (in the rotating frame) and are unstable. The remaining two are located on the third vertex of both equilateral triangles of which the two bodies are the first and second vertices. Inspired in the circular restricted three-body problem, the four-body problem can be greatly simplified by considering a smaller body to have a small mass compared to the other three massive bodies, which in turn are approximated to describe circular orbits. This is known as the bicircular restricted four-body problem (also known as bicircular model) and it can be traced back to 1960 in a NASA report written by Su-Shu Huang . This formulation has been highly relevant in the astrodynamics, mainly to model spacecraft trajectories in the Earth-Moon system with the addition of the gravitational attraction of the Sun. The former formulation of the bicircular restricted four-body problem can be problematic when modelling other systems that not the Earth-Moon-Sun, so the formulation was generalized by Negri and Prado to expand the application range and improve the accuracy without loss of simplicity | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23859945 | 423,122 |
PlayStation models The debug units were designed to be as close as possible to retail consoles, so they only had 2MB of ram (the developer boards had 8MB) and had standard retail boot ROMs. The only real difference is that the CD controller was reprogrammed so that it would identify any disc that had a data track as being "licensed", rather than requiring the region code in the lead-in that was present on pressed PlayStation CDs. This was done to allow developers to burn games to CD-R for testing. A side-effect of this was that most debug consoles would also boot discs from other regions (one notable exception being the later NTSC:J debugs, which only boot Japanese titles), although this was not officially supported. Sony made specific debug consoles for each region, and the technical required checklist provided by Sony for each region required testing the title on the correct debug stations. The reason for the two different case colors was a hardware change that Sony had made fairly early in the PlayStation production cycle - the original machines were built using Rev. A (early Japan market units) or Rev. B (later Japan units, US and Europe) hardware, both using the same GPU with VRAM to store the video data. Later models used Rev. C silicon and SGRAM - although the two chipsets had very similar performance, and Rev. C was explicitly designed with compatibility in mind, they were not identical - the Rev | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40105963 | 272,533 |
Legal Services Complaints Commissioner In England and Wales, the is a statutory office that regulates solicitors, but not barristers. A Commissioner can be appointed by, and is answerable to, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. When the Access to Justice Act 1999 came into force, government minister Keith Vaz stated to the House of Commons: In September 2003, Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, criticised the Law Society, the governing body of solicitors, saying: As a result, the Lord Chancellor exercised his powers under the Act to appoint Zahida Manzoor as Commissioner in February 2004. The Commissioner's powers as to the Law Society were to: If the Law Society failed to submit a plan or adequately handle complaints, the Commissioner could impose a penalty of up to £1 million, or 1% of the Society's annual income if that is less. In 2005, the Law Society divided its functions among the Society, the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Legal Complaints Service but by May 2006, the Society's efforts to remedy its own deficiencies were still giving concern to the Commissioner. As a result, a penalty of £220,000 was levied. The Commissioner subsequently recognised that progress was being made and in April 2007, advised the Society that their Complaints Handling Plan adequately addressed the concerns. However, in April 2008, the Commissioner reported that "Results show that despite some improvements in all target areas set, there are still failures ... to consistently apply their policies, processes and customer standards | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16166600 | 492,799 |
Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) is an open standard API specification for managing cloud infrastructure. CIMI's goal is to enable users to manage cloud infrastructure in a simple way by standardizing interactions between cloud environments to achieve interoperable cloud infrastructure management between service providers and their consumers and developers. CIMI 1.1 was registered as an International Standard in August 2014 by the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The CIMI standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). It includes the (CIMI) Model and RESTful HTTP-based Protocol specification, the CIMI XML Schema, the CIMI Primer and the CIMI Uses Cases whitepaper: CIMI aims to provide a single set of interfaces that a cloud consumer can use to provision and manage their cloud infrastructure in multiple clouds, so client code does not need to be adapted to each of the proprietary interfaces from these multiple vendors. CIMI has been described as a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body, contrasting it to a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it. It is expecting vendors to embrace a dual strategy of delivering two offerings – one a CIMI compliant offering and the second a more proprietary offering that allows for more proprietary functionality | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42077350 | 283,468 |
CccDNA cccDNA (covalently closed circular DNA) is a special DNA structure that arises during the propagation of some viruses in the cell nucleus and may remain permanently there. It is a double-stranded DNA that originates in a linear form that is ligated by means of DNA ligase to a covalently closed ring. In most cases, transcription of viral DNA can occur from the circular form only. The cccDNA of viruses is also known as episomal DNA or occasionally as a minichromosome. The existence of a cccDNA during the propagation does not differentiate taxonomic group of "real" retroviruses ("Orthoretrovirinae") from the pararetrovirus. cccDNA was first described in bacteriophages, but it was also found in some cell cultures where an infection of DNA viruses ("Polyomaviridae") was detected. cccDNA is typical of "Caulimoviridae" and "Hepadnaviridae", including the hepatitis B virus (HBV). cccDNA in HBV is formed by conversion of capsid-associated relaxed circular DNA (rcDNA). Following hepatitis B infections, cccDNA can remain following clinical treatment in liver cells and can rarely reactivate. The relative quantity of cccDNA present is an indicator for HBV treatment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22603052 | 170,921 |
Starch or amylum is a polymeric carbohydrate consisting of numerous glucose units joined by glycosidic bonds. This polysaccharide is produced by most green plants as energy storage. It is the most common carbohydrate in human diets and is contained in large amounts in staple foods like potatoes, maize (corn), rice, and cassava, as well as in the grain Emmer wheat (Triticum amyleum), from which is produced a cultivated white starch. Pure starch is a white, tasteless and odorless powder that is insoluble in cold water or alcohol. It consists of two types of molecules: the linear and helical amylose and the branched amylopectin. Depending on the plant, starch generally contains 20 to 25% amylose and 75 to 80% amylopectin by weight. Glycogen, the glucose store of animals, is a more highly branched version of amylopectin. In industry, starch is converted into sugars, for example by malting, and fermented to produce ethanol in the manufacture of beer, whisky and biofuel. It is processed to produce many of the sugars used in processed foods. Mixing most starches in warm water produces a paste, such as wheatpaste, which can be used as a thickening, stiffening or gluing agent. The biggest industrial non-food use of starch is as an adhesive in the papermaking process. can be applied to parts of some garments before ironing, to stiffen them. The word "starch" is from its Germanic root with the meanings "strong, stiff, strengthen, stiffen" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27711 | 154,714 |
Carbon literacy Carbon Literacy is the awareness of climate change and the climate impacts of mankind's everyday actions. The term has been used in a range of contexts in scientific literature and in casual usage (see Research), but is most associated with The Carbon Literacy Project (CLP). Carbon Literacy is the knowledge and capacity required to create a positive shift in how mankind lives, works and behaves in response to climate change. The Carbon Literacy Project defines Carbon Literacy as "an awareness of the carbon costs and impacts of everyday activities and the ability and motivation to reduce emissions, on an individual, community and organisational basis." To distinguish between the use of the phrase in its abstract sense ('carbon literacy') (e.g.), and its use under the established definition (Carbon Literacy), the phrase is capitalised (e.g.). See Research. The term Carbon Literacy had been used informally on a number of earlier occasions, but began to gain prominence in 2009 when it emerged in the development of the climate change action plan for Manchester, Manchester: A Certain Future | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47757903 | 46,086 |
Trakai Island Castle () is an island castle located in Trakai, Lithuania, on an island in Lake Galvė. The construction of the stone castle was begun in the 14th century by Kęstutis, and around 1409 major works were completed by his son Vytautas the Great, who died in this castle in 1430. Trakai was one of the main centers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the castle held great strategic importance. Soviet Communists restored the castle and established the Trakai History Museum there. was built in several phases. During the first phase, in the second half of the 14th century, the castle was constructed on the largest of three lake islands by the order of Grand Duke Kęstutis. The construction of was related to the expansion and strengthening of the Trakai Peninsula Castle. Kęstutis moved his main residence and his treasury to the Island Castle. The castle suffered major devastation during an attack by the Teutonic Knights in 1377. After the assassination of Kęstutis, a power struggle between Jogaila and Vytautas the Great for the title of Grand Duke of Lithuania began. The castle was besieged by both sides. Soon after the reconciliation between Jogaila and Vytautas, the second phase of construction started and continued until 1409. This phase is regarded as the major development in the history of the castle. Apparently, during the truce with the Teutonic Order, the construction works were supervised by the Order's stonemason Radike, four years before the Battle of Grunwald | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6278604 | 331,332 |
Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. CAD software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, and to create a database for manufacturing. CAD output is often in the form of electronic files for print, machining, or other manufacturing operations. The term CADD (for "Computer Aided Design and Drafting") is also used. Its use in designing electronic systems is known as electronic design automation (EDA). In mechanical design it is known as mechanical design automation (MDA) or computer-aided drafting (CAD), which includes the process of creating a technical drawing with the use of computer software. CAD software for mechanical design uses either vector-based graphics to depict the objects of traditional drafting, or may also produce raster graphics showing the overall appearance of designed objects. However, it involves more than just shapes. As in the manual drafting of technical and engineering drawings, the output of CAD must convey information, such as materials, processes, dimensions, and tolerances, according to application-specific conventions. CAD may be used to design curves and figures in two-dimensional (2D) space; or curves, surfaces, and solids in three-dimensional (3D) space | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37315 | 206,685 |
Tektronix 4010 The 4081 was a version with an Interdata 7/16 minicomputer built into an office desk, which saw limited use. Tektronix continued selling the storage tubes to OEMs, the 19" version as the GMA101 and 102 (the former offering roughly twice the drawing speed) and the 25" as the GMA 125. Tektronix also sold a set of graphics routines in FORTRAN known as PLOT10 that converted simple inputs like lists of numbers into a graphic display like a chart. Another common solution was the DISSPLA system, which was adapted to run on the 4010. The command format for sending graphics to the terminals was very simple, and was soon copied by a number of other terminal vendors. These later moved to traditional video terminals using raster scan displays, although these generally offered lower resolution, perhaps half that of the 4010. A number of these also understood the color codes from the Tektronix 4105 raster scan terminal, which added color to the original 4010 command set. This emulation continued to be used and copied by newer terminals to this day; NCSA Telnet and xterm emulates the 4014 (xterm -t). Conventional video displays consist of a series of images, or "frames", representing single snapshots in time. When the frames are updated rapidly enough, changes in those images provide the illusion of continuous motion. This makes normal television tubes unsuitable for computer displays, where the image is generally static for extended periods of time (as it is while you read this) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=912984 | 417,286 |
NCBioImpact is a partnership of North Carolina organizations created to enhance the trained workforce for biotechnology and other life science employers by educating students and retraining incumbent workers. The partnership works to promote economic development in North Carolina while offering comprehensive biomanufacturing training and education programs located at two universities in the University of North Carolina System and the North Carolina Community College System. In 2002, biomanufacturing executives in the Research Triangle region in North Carolina, working with NCBIO, asked the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to conduct a study of the workforce and training needs of the industry. "Window on the Workplace 2003" was published the following year. As a result of that study, a partnership among industry, government, academic leaders and nonprofits, such as the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and NCBIO, submitted a proposal to provide unique training to increase the number of workers to the Golden LEAF Foundation. Equipment and construction funds were provided for three initiatives, which now receive part of their operating funds from the North Carolina General Assembly, along with contracts, grants and training fees | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38999618 | 165,555 |
Samarium Heating to 300 °C combined with compression to 40 kbar results in a double-hexagonally close-packed structure ("dhcp"). Applying higher pressure of the order of hundreds or thousands of kilobars induces a series of phase transformations, in particular with a tetragonal phase appearing at about 900 kbar. In one study, the "dhcp" phase could be produced without compression, using a nonequilibrium annealing regime with a rapid temperature change between about 400 and 700 °C, confirming the transient character of this samarium phase. Also, thin films of samarium obtained by vapor deposition may contain the "hcp" or "dhcp" phases at ambient conditions. (and its sesquioxide) are paramagnetic at room temperature. Their corresponding effective magnetic moments, below 2μ, are the 3rd lowest among the lanthanides (and their oxides) after lanthanum and lutetium. The metal transforms to an antiferromagnetic state upon cooling to 14.8 K. Individual samarium atoms can be isolated by encapsulating them into fullerene molecules. They can also be doped between the C molecules in the fullerene solid, rendering it superconductive at temperatures below 8 K. doping of iron-based superconductors – the most recent class of high-temperature superconductors – allows enhancing their transition temperature to 56 K, which is the highest value achieved so far in this series. Freshly prepared samarium has a silvery luster. In air, it slowly oxidizes at room temperature and spontaneously ignites at 150 °C | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27121 | 97,299 |
Residual-current device A residual-current device (RCD), or residual-current circuit breaker (RCCB), is a device that quickly breaks an electrical circuit to prevent serious harm from an ongoing electric shock. Injury may still occur in some cases, for example if a human falls after receiving a shock, or if the person touches both conductors at the same time. RCD is the name used in the United Kingdom. In the United States and Canada, the terms ground fault circuit interrupter (GFCI), ground fault interrupter (GFI) or appliance leakage current interrupter (ALCI) (also known as a Leakage Current Detection Interrupter (LCDI)) are used. If the RCD device has additionally overcurrent protection integrated in the same device, it is referred to as "RCBO" (see below). An earth leakage circuit breaker (ELCB) may be a residual-current device, although an older type of voltage-operated earth leakage circuit breaker also exists. These electrical wiring devices are designed to quickly and automatically disconnect a circuit when it detects that the electric current is not balanced between the supply and return conductors of a circuit. Any difference between the currents in these conductors indicates leakage current, which presents a shock hazard. Current of around 30 mA (0.030 amperes) through the human body is potentially sufficient to cause cardiac arrest or serious harm if it persists for more than a small fraction of a second. RCDs are designed to disconnect the conducting wires ("trip") quickly enough to prevent serious injury | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=530715 | 368,561 |
J. F. Eesley Milling Co. Flour Mill–Elevator The mill section has a gable roof, the elevator part a gambrel roof. An addition that has a slightly sloping roofline connects the two portions of the structure. The exterior is covered with clapboard siding, and has double-hung, square-head, sash windows. A cinder block loading platform sheltered with an overhang runs the length of the building on one side. There is a single-story extension at the back of the elevator building. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54395381 | 342,274 |
Ecological fitting This is important in the light of climate change for two reasons: species ranges may be shifting dramatically, and ecological fitting is an important mechanism for the construction of communities over ecological time, and it shows that human-made systems could be integral in the mitigation of climate change. can influence species diversity either by promoting diversification through genetic drift, or by maintaining evolutionary stasis through gene flow. Research has shown that ecological fitting can result in parasite assemblages that are just as diverse as those created over evolutionary time, indicating the importance of ecological factors for biodiversity. can contribute to 3 types of evolutionary transition. The first is simple ecological fitting, in which organisms track resources to form novel species interactions and increase individual fitness. The second is a shift from an organism's ancestral ecology to a derived ecology, or a more true form of ecological fitting: traits are exapted from their original purpose to increase fitness. Finally, a more dramatic form involves the creation of new evolutionary arenas, requiring morphological or ecological changes to gain fitness under new conditions. Any of these processes can promote speciation or diversification under the right circumstances. Each form of ecological fitting can encourage speciation only if the population is sufficiently isolated from other populations to prevent gene flow from swamping local adaptation to newly formed species associations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30509934 | 156,008 |
Eli Lilly and Company In 1972 Richard D. Wood became Lilly's president and CEO after the retirement of Burton E. Beck. In 1991 Vaughn Bryson became president and Wood became board chairman. During Bryson's 20-month tenure as Lilly's president and CEO, the company reported its first quarterly loss as a publicly traded company. Randall L. Tobias, a vice chairman of AT&T Corporation, was named chairman, president, and CEO in June 1993. Tobias, a Lilly board member since 1986, was recruited from outside the company's executive ranks to replace Lilly's president, Vaughn Bryson, and board chairman, Richard Wood. Tobias later became the U.S. director of Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the rank of ambassador. Sidney Taurel, former chief operating officer of Lilly, was named CEO in July 1998 to replace Tobias, who retired. Taurel became chairman of the board in January 1999. Taurel retired as CEO on March 31, 2008, but remained as chairman of the board until December 31, 2008. John C. Lechleiter was elected as Lilly's CEO and president, effective April 1, 2008. Lechleiter had served as Lilly's president and chief operating officer since October 2005. In July 2016 Dave Ricks, who also had a long career at Lilly, was appointed CEO. In 2006, "Fortune" magazine named one of the top 100 companies in the United States for which to work. Also in 2006, "Barron's Magazine" named the company among the top 500 best managed companies in the U.S | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=758905 | 476,669 |
Differential (mechanical device) The rotation of the ring gear is always the average of the rotations of the side sun gears. This is why if the driven roadwheels are lifted clear of the ground with the engine off, and the drive shaft is held (say, leaving the transmission in gear preventing the ring gear from turning inside the differential), manually rotating one driven roadwheel causes the opposite roadwheel to rotate in the opposite direction by the same amount. When the vehicle is traveling in a straight line there will be no differential movement of the planetary system of gears other than the minute movements necessary to compensate for slight differences in wheel diameter, undulations in the road which make for a longer or shorter wheel path, etc. One undesirable side effect of an open differential is that it can limit traction under less than ideal conditions. The amount of traction required to propel the vehicle at any given moment depends on the load at that instant—how heavy the vehicle is, how much drag and friction there is, the gradient of the road, the vehicle's momentum, and so on. The torque applied to each driving wheel is the result of the engine, transmission and drive axle applying a twisting force against the resistance of the traction at that roadwheel. In lower gears, and thus at lower speeds, and unless the load is exceptionally high, the drivetrain can supply as much torque as necessary, so the limiting factor becomes the traction under each wheel | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=206242 | 448,451 |
Air handler To avoid this, vibration isolators (flexible sections) are normally inserted into the duct immediately before and after the air handler and often also between the fan compartment and the rest of the AHU. The rubberized canvas-like material of these sections allows the air handler components to vibrate without transmitting this motion to the attached ducts. The fan compartment can be further isolated by placing it on spring suspension, neoprene pads, or hung on spring hangers, which will mitigate the transfer of vibration through the structure. The blower in the air handler also generates noise, which should be attenuated before ductwork enters a noise-sensitive room. To achieve meaningful noise reducion in a relatively short length, a sound attenuator is used. The attenuator is a specialty duct accessory that typically consists of an inner perforated baffle with sound-absorptive insulation. Sound attenuators may take the place of ductwork; conversely, inline attenuators are located close to the blower and have a bellmouth profile to minimize system effects. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2369672 | 199,108 |
British Computer Society The Fellow of BCS (FBCS) title is conferred to individuals to recognize their outstanding achievements and contributions to Information Technology. Fellows are expected to give something back to the profession, by promoting and evangelizing the profession to the public and society, and contributing to debates in conferences, panels, meetings, etc. Fellows are nominated to the society each year and have to be supported by one or more existing fellows. Criteria for election to fellow include: include distinguished individuals from industries and universities. Some of the prominent fellows include: The BCS is the only professional body in the United Kingdom with the ability to grant chartered status to IT professionals under its Royal Charter, granted to them by the Privy Council. Thus having the ability to grant Chartered (Professional) status to both its Fellows and Professional members. Known as Chartered IT Professional, they are entitled to use the suffix CITP. The BCS keeps a register of current Chartered Members and Fellows. Other Professional membership bodies apply to the BCS for a licence that enables them to award CITP to their eligible members. BCS has different grades of membership: Members are encouraged to display the designatory letters to which they are entitled whenever appropriate. The order of designatory (post-nominal) letters is complex and open to a certain amount of interpretation. The accepted authority on this subject is "Debrett’s Correct Form" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=552656 | 119,889 |
Catlateral Damage is a first-person video game in which the player plays as a cat. The goal of the game is to knock as many of the player character's owner's belongings onto the floor as possible. There are game modes in which the player can either race against the clock and get a certain number of items onto the floor as fast as they can, score as many points in a 2-minute time-frame, or a free play mode where there is no clock and there are no points. The original version of "Catlateral Damage" was created for the August 2013 "7DFPS" game jam. Development for a full release began in September 2013. On 13 January 2014, "Catlateral Damage" was released on Steam's "Steam Greenlight" service. There was a Kickstarter campaign for the game that ran between 16 June 2014 and 11 July 2014. The full version of the game was released on Steam on 27 May 2015. "BuzzFeed"'s Joseph Bernstein reviewed the original "Catlateral Damage" favorably citing "If you have ever wanted to know what it is like to be a little feline menace, this is your chance." "Kotaku"'s Luke Plunkett reviewed the original "Catlateral Damage" as "as accurate a cat simulator as you'll ever play." "Rock, Paper, Shotgun"'s Nathan Grayson reviewed the original "Catlateral Damage" as "basic and inconsequential as can be, and that's exactly what I wanted from it. Be a cat. Do total jerkstore asshole cat things. The end." "CNET"'s Michelle Starr reviewed the alpha release of "Catlateral Damage" as "kind of really fun | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41673116 | 163,742 |
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