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Model building code The "Veeck" case has had the effect of placing the text of the adopted model codes into the public domain, although the model codes themselves, until they are adopted into law, are not in the public domain. Some model building codes commonly used in the United States: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1110610 | 313,242 |
Computational and Statistical Genetics Variations in human genome have been long known to make us susceptible to many diseases. We are hurtling towards the era of personal genomics and personalized medicine that require accurate predictions of disease risk posed by predisposing genetic factors. Computational and statistical methods for identifying these genetic variations, and building these into intelligent models for diseaseassociation and interaction analysis studies genome-wide are a dire necessity across many disease areas. The principal challenges are: (1) most complex diseases involve small or weak contributions from multiple genetic factors that explain only a minuscule fraction of the population variation attributed to genetic factors. (2) Biological data is inherently extremely noisy, so the underlying complexities of biological systems (such as linkage disequilibrium and genetic heterogeneity) need to be incorporated into the statistical models for disease association studies. The chances of developing many common diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular diseases involves complex interactions between multiple genes and several endogenous and exogenous environmental agents or covariates. Many previous disease association studies could not produce significant results because of the lack of incorporation of statistical interactions in their mathematical models explaining the disease outcome. Consequently much of the genetic risks underlying several diseases and disorders remain unknown | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40841348 | 156,828 |
Thyristor power controller The actuator can adjust the phase angle of 0 ° el. (maximum power) up to 180 ° el. (no power). In a 50 Hz mains the controller switches every 20 ms and shows very fast behavior. As a result of the voltage flanks during switch-on, disadvantages such as EMC interference potential or control voltage output also result in ohmic loads. This situation must be counteracted by means of line filters or the corresponding plant size with compensating systems. As mentioned, the controllers change their on-off ratio due to the degree of regulation. With a required output of 50%, the controller would switch off a full wave and a full wave in the pulse group mode. Only in the light of this situation, changes in output voltage fluctuate during mains voltage fluctuations. In fact, the operators have a subordinate regulation. In the most complex case, they vary the output power proportionally to the degree of regulation. For mains voltage changes, the controllers react with the variation of the switch-on and switch-off ratio. In addition to the current limitation, thyristor power controllers offer additional functionalities for monitoring and / or protecting the elements: Heating elements are often operated in parallel. The partial breakage monitoring signals the breakage of a heating element. The heating element can be replaced at the next plant shutdown. R-Control limits the temperature of temperature-sensitive heating elements. Most of the heating elements are thermistors, they increase the resistance with the temperature | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52514371 | 390,417 |
Elaine Didier Two months later in October 2007, Didier was filmed in two-hour live broadcast on C-SPAN that featured the 21 million pages of documents and 500,000 audio-visual materials in Gerald Ford's library. In the C-SPAN series, entitled ""Presidential Libraries: History Uncovered"," Didier and supervisory archivist David Horrocks showed off special documents that have been used by researchers like Bob Woodward and artifacts such as Ford's Eagle Scout medal and the Profile in Courage Award he received at the Kennedy Library in 2001. In October 2010, Didier received the University of Michigan Distinguished Alumni Award. The award, given to "alumni who have at least 25 years of professional service in the information professions and have made outstanding contributions," honored Didier for her role in introducing a broad agenda that expanded the programs and feature exhibits of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum as well as increased the visibility of the library and museum both locally and nationally. The University also highlighted her work to advance women in leadership roles by participating in organizations such as International Women's Forum and Michigan's Network for Women Leaders. In October 2012, Didier received the Rotary Club's Distinguished Service Award, the club's highest award. Didier lives in Plymouth, Michigan with her husband Gordon, an attorney at the Detroit-based Butzel Long law firm. Didier serves as Assistant Secretary and her husband Gordon serves as Treasurer at St | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38232184 | 286,661 |
Shijian 13 The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) are the two relevant institutions which designed the rocket and satellite. The project of Shijian-13 communications satellite includes six major systems, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) which is in Beijing has undertaken the related tasks of the operational control and test application systems. The Long March 3B carrier rocket which has responsibility for the launch mission of Shijian-13, was developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) which is the subordinate of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). This launch was the 246th launch of the Long March series of launch vehicles. The Shijian-13 satellite and launch vehicle are respectively developed by China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) and China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). The ion thruster for Shijian-13 is developed by the Lanzhou Institute of Physics, this institution is the relevant institution. The project of Shijian-13 communications satellite was organized and implemented by the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND). The ground monitoring and control system belongs to the Xi'an Satellite Control Center. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60901993 | 386,991 |
Cupiennin These peptides are highly cationic, made up of similar amino acids, but different in the N- and C-terminal ends. The hydrophobic N-terminal is characterised by six repeats of four amino acids, which are in a conserved sequence: position 1 is always lysine; position 2 is variable; position 3 is always a hydrophobic amino acid or glycine, and in position 4 is either alanine or valine. All members have high antibacterial activity against Gram-positive as well as Gram-negative bacteria at a range of 0.16 to 5 mM concentration. They also exhibit a cytolytic activity between 14.5–24.4 mM on human erythrocytes. They also have antiprotozoal activity against "Trypanosoma cruzi" and malarial parasite. They are insecticidal, but not as strong as the CSTX-1, another peptide of the same venom. These properties are modulated by the N-terminus. 2 family is less well understood, but it also comprises at least four peptides. In fact, members of this family were discovered earlier in 1994 as member of the CSTX peptides. Upon the discovery of cupiennin 1 family, CSTX-3, -4, -5, and -6 are reclassified as cupiennins. This is because of their basic chemical similarities, such as the amino acid residues. They are characterised by the presence of at least one proline. 2a is the best studied. It has a molecular mass of 3701.05 Da, and shows weak cytolytic, bactericidal and insecticidal activities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40581623 | 156,684 |
Drum heater A drum heater – also called band heater, barrel heater, container heater or canister heater- is used to reduce viscosity of liquids and gels by heating in order to fill, pump or bottle the respective liquid or to prevent liquids from freezing inside the drum. Typical liquids for the bottling application are tar, varnish, resin, grease, chocolate or galantine. Drum heaters are available for drums between 20 and 220 litres. Drum ovens are designed to store and heat typically from four to 24 drums, usually stored in groups of four on pallets, for ease of insertion and removal by fork-lift. Heated by steam or radiant electric elements, with a single zone thermostat, they are commonly used where long-term storage at a fixed temperature is required to reduce liquid viscosity or keep solids above their melt temperature. Mobile single-drum electric ovens are also available. Industrial heaters of this type have an isolated heating element embedded in a glass fibre mat. Silicone coated drum heaters are suitable for steel drums, whereas polyester coatings at lower temperatures can be used for plastic containers. As these heaters are flexible and wrap around the container they may also be called band heaters. Up to three band heaters can be applied to a standard 200 litre barrel. There is no additional insulation so heat is lost by radiation into the surrounding air and the surface temperatures can be hot enough to burn unprotected hands | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24630641 | 211,000 |
Michael O. Rabin In 1975, Rabin finished his tenure as Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA as a visiting professor. Gary Miller was also there and had his polynomial time test for primality based on the extended Riemann hypothesis. While there, Rabin invented the Miller–Rabin primality test, a randomized algorithm that can determine very quickly (but with a tiny probability of error) whether a number is prime. Rabin's method was based on previous work of Gary Miller that solved the problem deterministically with the assumption that the generalized Riemann hypothesis is true, but Rabin's version of the test made no such assumption. Fast primality testing is key in the successful implementation of most public-key cryptography, and in 2003 Miller, Rabin, Robert M. Solovay, and Volker Strassen were given the Paris Kanellakis Award for their work on primality testing. In 1976 he was invited by Joseph Traub to meet at Carnegie Mellon University and presented the primality test. After he gave that lecture, Traub had said, "No, no, this is revolutionary, and it's going to become very important." In 1979, Rabin invented the Rabin cryptosystem, the first asymmetric cryptosystem whose security was proved equivalent to the intractability of integer factorization | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=298404 | 131,000 |
Construction loan In the case of the individual, where the lender attempts to predict whether the individual can pay each month the loan payment that would occur once the person moves into the house, the lender would be primarily looking at the amount of income the individual receives. In the case of the business, a similar analysis would occur. In the case of an investor building rental property, a special appraisal would be ordered which would attempt to predict what the rents will be and whether they will be enough to pay back the loan, plus all expenses and still give the renter a certain minimum amount of income. The key point here is that no matter how valuable the building might be once completed, almost no lender would extend a loan for more than what the occupier could afford, because even though they will not have to make any payments during construction they would have to make monthly payments once completed and there can be no assurance that the owner would pay down the loan enough to make the monthly payments affordable once the project is completed. Beyond this guideline, the next most common rule is a minimum cash injection requirement. Even if, for example, a business might be able to afford a monthly payment of a loan high enough to pay for the entire construction project, many lenders would require them to instead use a certain minimum portion of their own cash to complete the project | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8408885 | 216,397 |
SREC (file format) Since the Byte Count field can't be higher than 255 (0xFF), then the maximum number of bytes of data is calculated by 255 minus (1 byte for checksum field) minus (number of bytes in the address field). S0/S1 records support up to 252 bytes of data. S2 record supports up to 251 bytes of data. S3 record supports up to 250 bytes of data. "Comments" - The SREC file format does not support comments. Some software ignores all text lines that do not start with "S" and ignores all text after the checksum field; that extra text is sometimes used (incompatibly) for comments. For example, the CCS PIC compiler supports placing a ";" comment line at the top or bottom of an Intel HEX file, and its manuals states "some programmers (MPLAB in particular) do not like comments at the top of the hex file", which is why the compiler has the option of placing the comment at the bottom of the hex file. The following example record: is decoded to show how the checksum value is calculated as follows: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6766701 | 106,837 |
Skywave When high-frequency signals enter the ionosphere at a low angle they are bent back towards the earth by the ionized layer. If the peak ionization is strong enough for the chosen frequency, a wave will exit the bottom of the layer earthwards – as if obliquely reflected from a mirror. Earth's surface (ground or water) then reflects the descending wave back up again towards the ionosphere. When operating at frequencies just below the MUF, losses can be quite small, so the radio signal may effectively "bounce" or "skip" between the earth and ionosphere two or more times (multi-hop propagation), even following the curvature of the earth. Consequently, even signals of only a few Watts can sometimes be received many thousands of miles away. This is what enables shortwave broadcasts to travel all over the world. If the ionization is not great enough, the wave only curves slightly downwards, and subsequently upwards as the ionization peak is passed so that it exits the top of the layer only slightly displaced. The wave then is lost in space. To prevent this a lower frequency must be chosen. With a single "hop", path distances up to 3500 km may be reached. Longer transmissions can occur with two or more hops. Skywaves directed vertically, or almost vertically, are called NVIS for "Near-Vertical Incidence". At some frequencies, generally in the lower shortwave region, the high angle skywaves will be reflected directly back towards the ground | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=276281 | 399,587 |
Museum board is a type of paperboard. Specifically, it is a white, acid free cardboard that bends fairly easily in one direction but is fairly stiff in the other, due to the grain of the paper fibers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19794223 | 257,524 |
Imperfect competition Monopsony power allows the buyer to acquire the good at a lower price than would be the case in a competitive market. Even though this type of market structure can’t be found so easily in real world, some coal companies are considered to be monopsonies. A market with a few buyers and many sellers. Contrasting with the concept of oligopoly, oligopsony has the influencing power on the buyers side, once they are in fewer number, in comparison with the suppliers. The Tobacco industry is an example of this type of market structure. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45445 | 465,847 |
Sustainable architecture Solar water heaters, also called solar domestic hot water systems, can be a cost-effective way to generate hot water for a home. They can be used in any climate, and the fuel they use—sunshine—is free. There are two types of solar water systems- active and passive. An active solar collector system can produce about 80 to 100 gallons of hot water per day. A passive system will have a lower capacity. There are also two types of circulation, direct circulation systems and indirect circulation systems. Direct circulation systems loop the domestic water through the panels. They should not be used in climates with temperatures below freezing. Indirect circulation loops glycol or some other fluid through the solar panels and uses a heat exchanger to heat up the domestic water. The two most common types of collector panels are Flat-Plate and Evacuated-tube. The two work similarly except that evacuated tubes do not convectively lose heat, which greatly improves their efficiency (5%-25% more efficient). With these higher efficiencies, Evacuated-tube solar collectors can also produce higher-temperature space heating, and even higher temperatures for absorption cooling systems. Electric-resistance water heaters that are common in homes today have an electrical demand around 4500 kW·h/year. With the use of solar collectors, the energy use is cut in half. The up-front cost of installing solar collectors is high, but with the annual energy savings, payback periods are relatively short | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2704720 | 317,296 |
Hypernetted-chain equation In statistical mechanics the hypernetted-chain equation is a closure relation to solve the Ornstein–Zernike equation which relates the direct correlation function to the total correlation function. It is commonly used in fluid theory to obtain e.g. expressions for the radial distribution function. It is given by: where formula_2 is the number density of molecules, formula_3, formula_4 is the radial distribution function, formula_5 is the direct interaction between pairs. formula_6 with formula_7 being the Thermodynamic temperature and formula_8 the Boltzmann constant. The direct correlation function represents the direct correlation between two particles in a system containing "N" − 2 other particles. It can be represented by where formula_10 (with formula_11 the potential of mean force) and formula_12 is the radial distribution function without the direct interaction between pairs formula_5 included; i.e. we write formula_14. Thus we "approximate" formula_15 by By expanding the indirect part of formula_4 in the above equation and introducing the function formula_18 we can approximate formula_15 by writing: with formula_21. This equation is the essence of the hypernetted chain equation. We can equivalently write If we substitute this result in the Ornstein–Zernike equation one obtains the hypernetted-chain equation: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15398902 | 426,286 |
Direct exchange geothermal heat pump Superheated vapor refrigerant from the heat pump’s compressor is pumped -through the vapor line- into the larger diameter tube of the ground loop. Heat is then transferred from the ground loop to the cooler ground. This leads to the refrigerant condensing to a full liquid as it progresses through the loop, as shown in Figure 12. The refrigerant liquid then exits the ground loop and is returned -through the liquid line- to the indoor coil to be re-expanded to a lower pressure and temperature. This will enable it to absorb heat from the space to condition with the assistance of the indoor circulator. It will also enable it to dehumidify thanks to the indoor coil (evaporator) temperature being lower than the room temperature dew point. As the refrigerant absorbs heat while passing through the indoor coil (evaporator), the refrigerant evaporates and exits as a saturated vapor towards the heat pump’s compressor. Direct exchange systems are rather simple refrigerant-based systems and operate without requiring anti-freezing agents, system flushing, circulating pump, water well drilling or plumbing. Depending on the models, they can provide space heating, space cooling, domestic water heating as well as radiant floor hydronic heating and chilled water cooling. Direct exchange geothermal systems are the least invasive geothermal systems and feature small earth loop size. Because of that, they can be installed in relatively small areas and in relatively shallow soil - typical loop depth does not exceed 100 linear feet | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16930987 | 197,250 |
Phase-change material Phase change materials are also being used in thermal regulation of electronics. Zafer URE M.Sc., C.Eng. MASHRAE HVAC Applications Zafer URE M.Sc., C.Eng. MASHRAE Passive Cooling Application | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1799584 | 196,451 |
Sperm-mediated gene transfer (SMGT) is a transgenic technique that transfers genes based on the ability of sperm cells to spontaneously bind to and internalize exogenous DNA and transport it into an oocyte during fertilization to produce genetically modified animals. Exogenous DNA refers to DNA that originates outside of the organism. Transgenic animals have been obtained using SMGT, but the efficiency of this technique is low. Low efficiency is mainly due to low uptake of exogenous DNA by the spermatozoa, reducing the chances of fertilizing the oocytes with transfected spermatozoa. In order to successfully produce transgenic animals by SMGT, the spermatozoa must attach the exogenous DNA into the head and these transfected spermatozoa must maintain their functionality to fertilize the oocyte. Genetically modified animals produced by SMGT are useful for research in biomedical, agricultural, and veterinary fields of study. SMGT could also be useful in generating animals as models for human diseases or lead to future discoveries relating to human gene therapy. The method for SMGT uses the sperm cell, a natural vector of genetic material, to transport exogenous DNA. The exogenous DNA molecules bind to the cell membrane of the head of the sperm cell. This binding and internalization of the DNA is not a random event. The exogenous DNA interacts with the DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) that are present on the surface of the sperm cell | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13636007 | 190,416 |
Heating oil They also require the use of an automatic overfill prevention if it is not "reasonably practical" to monitor the oil levels within the tank. The Building Regulations Approved Document J covers the legal requirements for the installation of the tanks within the premises of a building. The regulations state that any new tank larger than 2,500 litres must be stored within a bunded tank or secondary containment that is a minimum of 110% of the tank’s capacity. If a tank is single skinned and smaller than 2,500 litres, it must be given an individual site pollution risk assessment. This highlights any pollution or hazard risks such as the possibility of the oil escaping and reaching a river or stream, or the risk of a collision if the storage tank is located near a road. They further state that all tanks must be installed on a surface strong enough to support a full storage tank. The surface must be flat, even and fire-resistance, and should extend at least 300mm beyond the boundaries of the tank. A paving stone surface must be at least 42mm thick, and a concrete surface must be at least 100mm thick. The document also states that the tank should be situated at least 1800mm away from any potential hazards, such as doors, windows, appliance flue terminals, non-fire rated buildings such as garden fences, and at least 760mm from non-fire rated smaller structures such as wooden fences. A safe, secure tank that complies with all regulations will look similar to the diagram above | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1242478 | 49,898 |
NGC 5371 is a face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. (which also seems to be known as NGC 5390) is a symmetrical face-on Sbc barred spiral galaxy at a distance of 100 million light years. This galaxy with Hickson Galaxy Group 68 makes up the Big Lick Galaxy Group. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10498440 | 11,528 |
Soliton when considering the coupling of the Born–Infeld model to general relativity) the corresponding solution is called "EBIon", where "E" stands for Einstein. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51654 | 432,727 |
Transition state theory This surface is a three-dimensional diagram based on quantum-mechanical principles as well as experimental data on vibrational frequencies and energies of dissociation. H + H → H + H A year after the Eyring and Polanyi construction, Hans Pelzer and Eugene Wigner made an important contribution by following the progress of a reaction on a potential energy surface. The importance of this work was that it was the first time that the concept of col or saddle point in the potential energy surface was discussed. They concluded that the rate of a reaction is determined by the motion of the system through that col. It has been typically assumed that the rate-limiting or lowest saddle point is located on the same energy surface as the initial ground state. However, it was recently found that this could be incorrect for processes occurring in semiconductors and insulators, where an initial excited state could go through a saddle point lower than the one on the surface of the initial ground state. One of the most important features introduced by Eyring, Polanyi and Evans was the notion that activated complexes are in quasi-equilibrium with the reactants. The rate is then directly proportional to the concentration of these complexes multiplied by the frequency ("k""T"/"h") with which they are converted into products. Below, a non-rigorous plausibility argument is given for the functional form of the Eyring equation | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9217017 | 47,909 |
Enver Hoxha On 7 November 1961, Hoxha made a speech in which he called Khrushchev a "revisionist, an anti-Marxist and a defeatist". Hoxha portrayed Stalin as the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union and he began to stress Albania's independence. By 11 November, the USSR and every other Warsaw Pact nation broke relations with Albania. Albania was unofficially excluded (by not being invited) from both the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. The Soviet Union also attempted to claim control of the Vlorë port due to a lease agreement; the Albanian Party then passed a law prohibiting any other nation from owning an Albanian port through lease or otherwise. The Soviet–Albanian split was now complete. As Hoxha's leadership continued, he took on an increasingly theoretical stance. He wrote criticisms which were based on theory and current events which occurred at the time; his most notable criticisms were his condemnations of Maoism after 1978. A major achievement under Hoxha was the advancement of women's rights. Albania had been one of the most, if not the most, patriarchal countries in Europe. The "Code of Lekë", which regulated the status of women, states, "A woman is known as a sack, made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's house | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10286 | 190,077 |
C3H7N The molecular formula CHN may refer to: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12194880 | 88,758 |
Growth of photovoltaics Continued overcapacity was further reduced by significantly lowering solar module prices and, as a consequence, many manufacturers could no longer cover costs or remain competitive. As worldwide growth of PV deployment continued, the gap between overcapacity and global demand was expected in 2014 to close in the next few years. IEA-PVPS published in 2014 historical data for the worldwide utilization of solar PV module production capacity that showed a slow return to normalization in manufacture in the years leading up to 2014. The utilization rate is the ratio of production capacities versus actual production output for a given year. A low of 49% was reached in 2007 and reflected the peak of the silicon shortage that idled a significant share of the module production capacity. As of 2013, the utilization rate had recovered somewhat and increased to 63%. After anti-dumping petition were filed and investigations carried out, the United States imposed tariffs of 31 percent to 250 percent on solar products imported from China in 2012. A year later, the EU also imposed definitive anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures on imports of solar panels from China at an average of 47.7 percent for a two-year time span. Shortly thereafter, China, in turn, levied duties on U.S. polysilicon imports, the feedstock for the production of solar cells. In January 2014, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce set its anti-dumping tariff on U.S | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21150165 | 253,572 |
History of mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is a discipline centered around the concept of using force multipliers, moving components, and machines. It utilizes knowledge of mathematics, physics, materials sciences, and engineering technologies. It is one of the oldest and broadest of the engineering disciplines. Engineering arose in early civilization as a general discipline for the creation of large scale structures such as irrigation, architecture, and military projects. Advances in food production through irrigation allowed a portion of the population to become specialists in Ancient Babylon. All six of the classic simple machines were known in the ancient Near East. The wedge and the inclined plane (ramp) were known since prehistoric times. The wheel, along with the wheel and axle mechanism, was invented in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the 5th millennium BC. The lever mechanism first appeared around 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where it was used in a simple balance scale, and to move large objects in ancient Egyptian technology. The lever was also used in the shadoof water-lifting device, the first crane machine, which appeared in Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC, and then in ancient Egyptian technology circa 2000 BC. The earliest evidence of pulleys date back to Mesopotamia in the early 2nd millennium BC, and ancient Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty (1991-1802 BC). The screw, the last of the simple machines to be invented, first appeared in Mesopotamia during the Neo-Assyrian period (911-609) BC | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52562176 | 256,103 |
Morphogenetic field In the developmental biology of the early twentieth century, a morphogenetic field is a group of cells able to respond to discrete, localized biochemical signals leading to the development of specific morphological structures or organs. The spatial and temporal extents of the embryonic field are dynamic, and within the field is a collection of interacting cells out of which a particular organ is formed. As a group, the cells within a given morphogenetic field are constrained: thus, cells in a "limb field" will become a limb tissue, those in a "cardiac field" will become heart tissue. However, specific cellular programming of individual cells in a field is flexible: an individual cell in a cardiac field can be redirected via cell-to-cell signaling to replace specific damaged or missing cells. Imaginal discs in insect larvae are examples of morphogenetic fields. The concept of the morphogenetic field, fundamental in the early twentieth century to the study of embryological development, was first introduced in 1910 by Alexander G. Gurwitsch. Experimental support was provided by Ross Granville Harrison's experiments transplanting fragments of a newt embryo into different locations. Harrison was able to identify "fields" of cells producing organs such as limbs, tail and gills and to show that these fields could be fragmented or have undifferentiated cells added and a complete normal final structure would still result | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12312133 | 184,149 |
Arab Agricultural Revolution Crops from Africa, such as sorghum, from China, such as citrus fruits, and from India, such as mango, rice, cotton and sugar cane, were distributed throughout Islamic lands, which he believed had not previously grown these plants. He listed eighteen such crops. Watson suggested that these introductions, along with an increased mechanization of agriculture and irrigation, led to major changes in economy, population distribution, vegetation cover, agricultural production and income, population, urban growth, distribution of the labour force, industries linked to agriculture, cooking, diet and clothing in the Islamic world. In 1997, the historian of science Howard R. Turner wrote that Islamic study of soil, climate, seasons and ecology "promoted a remarkably advanced horticulture and agriculture. The resulting knowledge, transmitted to Europe after the eleventh century, helped to improve farming techniques, widen the variety of crops, and increase yields on the continent's farmlands. In addition, an enormous variety of crops was introduced to the West from or through Muslim lands". In 2006, James E | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13837507 | 265,467 |
TGV track construction Finally, a dynamic vibrator machine shakes the track to perform the final tamping, effectively simulating the passing of 2,500 axles. Now that the first track is almost complete, work begins on the adjacent track. This time, however, it is not necessary to lay a temporary track. Trains running on the first track bring the sleepers, and then the rail, which is unloaded directly onto the sleepers by dispensing arms that swing out to the proper alignment. The Nabla fasteners are secured, and the ballast is stuffed under the track as before. The two tracks are now essentially complete, but the work on the line is not finished. The catenary masts need to be erected, and the wire strung on them. Once the catenary is complete, the track is given final alignment adjustments down to millimeter tolerances. The ballast is then blown to remove smaller gravel fragments and dust, which might be kicked up by trains. This step is especially important on high-speed tracks, since the blast of a passing train is strong. Finally, TGV trains are tested on the line at gradually increasing speeds. The track is qualified at speeds slightly higher than will be used in everyday operations (typically 350 km/h, or 210 mph), before being opened to commercial service. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3823888 | 427,609 |
Pica (disorder) Practicing pagophagy and amylophagy were more highly associated with anemia. Additionally, being a child or pregnant woman practicing pica was associated with higher chance of being anemic or having low hemoglobin relative to the general population. More recently, cases of pica have been tied to the obsessive–compulsive spectrum, and there is a move to consider OCD in the cause of pica. However, pica is currently recognized as a mental disorder by the widely used "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-IV). Sensory, physiological, cultural and psychosocial perspectives have also been used by some to explain the causation of pica. It has been proposed that mental-health conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia, can sometimes cause pica. However, pica can also be a cultural practice not associated with a deficiency or disorder. Ingestion of kaolin (white clay) among African-American women in the US state of Georgia shows the practice there to be a DSM-IV "culture-bound syndrome" and "not selectively associated with other psychopathology". Similar kaolin ingestion is also widespread in parts of Africa. Such practices may stem from health benefits such as the ability of clay to absorb plant toxins and protect against toxic alkaloids and tannic acids. There is no single test that confirms pica | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=192184 | 151,599 |
Integrated asset modelling An Innovative Integrated Asset Modeling for an Offshore-Onshore Field Development. Tomoporo Field Case. Paper SPE 157556 presented at the International Production and Operations Conference and Exhibition held in Doha Qatar, 14–16 May 2012 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33193914 | 220,227 |
Vacuum Although Descartes agreed with the contemporary position, that a vacuum does not occur in nature, the success of his namesake coordinate system and more implicitly, the spatial–corporeal component of his metaphysics would come to define the philosophically modern notion of empty space as a quantified extension of volume. By the ancient definition however, directional information and magnitude were conceptually distinct. Medieval thought experiments into the idea of a vacuum considered whether a vacuum was present, if only for an instant, between two flat plates when they were rapidly separated. There was much discussion of whether the air moved in quickly enough as the plates were separated, or, as Walter Burley postulated, whether a 'celestial agent' prevented the vacuum arising. The commonly held view that nature abhorred a vacuum was called "horror vacui". There was even speculation that even God could not create a vacuum if he wanted and the 1277 Paris condemnations of Bishop Etienne Tempier, which required there to be no restrictions on the powers of God, which led to the conclusion that God could create a vacuum if he so wished. Jean Buridan reported in the 14th century that teams of ten horses could not pull open bellows when the port was sealed. The 17th century saw the first attempts to quantify measurements of partial vacuum. Evangelista Torricelli's mercury barometer of 1643 and Blaise Pascal's experiments both demonstrated a partial vacuum | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32502 | 465,436 |
Salience (language) Our minds and bodies will activate useful memories, biological responses and feelings that were generated from prior encounters with the object of similar objects. These memory-evaluative-feeling-biology responses will determine if the object is salient. If it is salient, we will devote more cognitive processing resources to the encounter and it will enhance or protect us in that moment. Communication scholars have found that a number of different factors have a direct effect on the salience of attitude objects. William Crano posits that one's direct experience with an issue or attitude object increases the salience and consequently the potency of that attitude, and the level of consistency between attitude and behavior. The concept called "vested interest" by Crano is called "self-interest" by Sears (1997). It seems that "self-interest" is the more widely recognized term. Self-interest involves either perceived or actual personal consequences. That is, Crano (1997) argues that vested interest involves perceived personal consequences (p. 490), while Sears (1997, a critique of Crano) counter-argues that Crano's survey experiments define it objectively. Crano argues that vested interest should have a moderating effect on attitudes. Sears argues that, actually, evidence for this is conflicting: The survey literature has rarely found significant effects of self-interest, while the experimental literature finds significant effects | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2094955 | 482,162 |
Phasor So the phase difference between each wave must also be 120°, as is the case in three-phase power In other words, what this shows is that In the example of three waves, the phase difference between the first and the last wave was 240 degrees, while for two waves destructive interference happens at 180 degrees. In the limit of many waves, the phasors must form a circle for destructive interference, so that the first phasor is nearly parallel with the last. This means that for many sources, destructive interference happens when the first and last wave differ by 360 degrees, a full wavelength formula_35. This is why in single slit diffraction, the minima occur when light from the far edge travels a full wavelength further than the light from the near edge. As the single vector rotates in an anti-clockwise direction, its tip at point A will rotate one complete revolution of 360° or 2 radians representing one complete cycle. If the length of its moving tip is transferred at different angular intervals in time to a graph as shown above, a sinusoidal waveform would be drawn starting at the left with zero time. Each position along the horizontal axis indicates the time that has elapsed since zero time, "t" = 0. When the vector is horizontal the tip of the vector represents the angles at 0°, 180°, and at 360°. Likewise, when the tip of the vector is vertical it represents the positive peak value, ( +"A" ) at 90° or and the negative peak value, ( −"A" ) at 270° or | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1256073 | 407,402 |
Jane Morris ("née" Burden, 19 October 1839 – 26 January 1914) was an English embroiderer in the Arts & Crafts Movement and artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to her husband William Morris and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her sister was the embroiderer and teacher Elizabeth (Bessie) Burden. Jane Burden was born in Oxford, the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his wife Ann Maizey, who was a laundress. At the time of her birth, her parents were living at St Helen's Passage, in the parish of St Peter-in-the-East, off Holywell Street in Oxford which has since been marked with a blue plaque. Her mother Ann was illiterate and probably came to Oxford as a domestic servant. Little is known of Jane Burden's childhood, but it was certainly poor. In October 1857, Burden and her sister Elizabeth, known as Bessie, attended a performance of the Drury Lane Theatre Company in Oxford. Jane Burden was noticed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones who were members of a group of artists painting the Oxford Union murals, based on Arthurian tales. Struck by her beauty, they asked her to model for them. Burden sat mostly for Rossetti as a model for Queen Guinevere and afterwards for William Morris, who was working on an easel painting, "La Belle Iseult", now in the Tate Gallery. During this period, Morris fell in love with Burden and they became engaged, though by her own admission she was not in love with Morris | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1569059 | 260,364 |
EULUMDAT is a data file format used for specification of photometric data especially intensity distributions from light sources such as lamps and luminaries. The file extension is .ldt. The format was proposed by Axel Stockmar (Light Consult Inc., Berlin) in 1990. The format is the European equivalent to the IES file format specified in IESNA LM-63. The data in an file is usually measured using a goniophotometer. The IES file format is more formally specified and many measuring instruments support both formats of file. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41713745 | 283,115 |
Goniometer A difference in angle from that set on the machine may indicate excessive pressure, and a range of angles ("rounding") probably indicates a lack of stiffness, or wear, in the blade holder assembly. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=898572 | 84,690 |
Mount Washington Cog Railway This system allows snow and debris to fall through the rack, rather than lodging in it. A similar design, called the Riggenbach rack system, was invented by engineer Niklaus Riggenbach in Switzerland at about the same time. The Swiss Consul to the United States visited Marsh while constructing the railway up Mount Washington, and his enthusiastic reports persuaded the Swiss government to commission Riggenbach to build the on Mount Rigi, which opened on May 21, 1871. Initially, there was no way for two trains to pass one another on the Mount Washington Cog Railway. In 1941, a nine-motion switch was invented, and two spur sidings were added, each long enough to divert two descending trains so that climbing trains could continue to the summit, enabling more round trips per day. In 2004, work was completed replacing the lower Waumbek Switch and Siding with an passing loop equipped with electric and hydraulically powered automated switches. These switches are powered by batteries and recharged by solar panels. One switch is located at each end of the loop, allowing ascending and descending trains to pass one another. In 2014, work began on another switch and siding at the summit of Mount Washington. When completed, the new switch will allow trains to pass one another at the summit of the mountain. In 2008, work began on the first diesel locomotive to be powered with biodiesel, with the assistance of a retired mechanical engineer from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=379369 | 309,220 |
Magnetometer Because the precession frequency depends only on atomic constants and the strength of the ambient magnetic field, the accuracy of this type of magnetometer can reach 1 ppm. A direct current flowing in a solenoid creates a strong magnetic field around a hydrogen-rich fluid (kerosene and decane are popular, and even water can be used), causing some of the protons to align themselves with that field. The current is then interrupted, and as protons realign themselves with the ambient magnetic field, they precess at a frequency that is directly proportional to the magnetic field. This produces a weak rotating magnetic field that is picked up by a (sometimes separate) inductor, amplified electronically, and fed to a digital frequency counter whose output is typically scaled and displayed directly as field strength or output as digital data. For hand/backpack carried units, PPM sample rates are typically limited to less than one sample per second. Measurements are typically taken with the sensor held at fixed locations at approximately 10 metre increments. Portable instruments are also limited by sensor volume (weight) and power consumption. PPMs work in field gradients up to 3,000 nT/m, which is adequate for most mineral exploration work. For higher gradient tolerance, such as mapping banded iron formations and detecting large ferrous objects, Overhauser magnetometers can handle 10,000 nT/m, and caesium magnetometers can handle 30,000 nT/m | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=83060 | 268,776 |
Dry cleaning Flammability concerns led William Joseph Stoddard, a dry cleaner from Atlanta, to develop Stoddard solvent (white spirit) as a slightly less flammable alternative to gasoline-based solvents. The use of highly flammable petroleum solvents caused many fires and explosions, resulting in government regulation of dry cleaners. After World War I, dry cleaners began using chlorinated solvents. These solvents were much less flammable than petroleum solvents and had improved cleaning power. By the mid-1930s, the dry cleaning industry had adopted tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene), or PCE for short, as the solvent. It has excellent cleaning power and is nonflammable and compatible with most garments. Because it is stable, tetrachloroethylene is readily recycled. businesses, from the perspective of the customer, are either "plants" or "drop shops". A "plant" does on-site cleaning. A drop shop receives garments from customers, sends them to a large plant, and then has the cleaned garment returned to the shop for collection by the customer. The turnaround time is longer for a drop shop than for a local plant. However, running a plant requires more work for the business owner. Since 2010, in some markets, web apps have been used to schedule low-cost home delivery for dry cleaning. This cycle minimized the risk of fire or dangerous fumes created by the cleaning process | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=172118 | 280,406 |
Performance and modelling of AC transmission Hence the solution is of the form, Taking derivative with respect to x we get, Combining these two we have, The following two quantities are defined as, formula_82 , which is called the characteristic impedance formula_83 , which is called the propagation constant Then the previous equations can be written in terms of the characteristic impedance and propagation constant as, Now, at formula_84 we have, formula_85 and formula_86 Therefore, by putting formula_84 at eq.() & eq.() we get, Solving eq.() & eq.() we get the following values for formula_88 : Also, for formula_89, we have formula_90 and formula_91. Therefore, by replacing x by l we get, Where, formula_92 is called incident voltage wave formula_93 is called reflected voltage wave We can rewrite the eq.() & eq.() as, So, by considering the corresponding analogy for long transmission line, the obtained equations i.e. eq.() eq.() can be written into matrix form as follows: The ABCD parameters are given by : A = D =formula_94 B =formula_95 C =formula_96 Like the medium transmission line, the long line can also be approximated into an equivalent Π representation. In the Π-equivalent of a long transmission line, the series impedance is denoted by Z′ while the shunt admittance is denoted by Y′ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61328143 | 199,985 |
Stair tread A stair tread is the horizontal portion of a set of stairs on which a person walks. The tread can be composed of wood, metal, plastic, or other materials. In residential settings, treads can be covered in carpeting. Stair treads can come in non-slip varieties, particularly in commercial or industrial locations. There are a number of different styles of tread: These treads are used to embellish the start of a flight of stairs, they may have either a straight front to them or a commode/curved front to enhance them further. According to the United States Access Board, stair treads in buildings shall have uniform tread depths that are 11 inches, or 280 mm, at minimum. Treads are not permitted to have a slope steeper than 1:48. All stair tread installations must comply with Regulation 302 of the ADA Standards for Accessible Design. The regulation states that the surface of the [tread] must be firm, stable, and slip-resistant. The Dylan's Candy Bar flagship location features a stair case consisting of 53 resin stair treads and three landings that are embedded with real candy and equipped with inserted abrasion strips. China's first children's design museum, Kids Museum of Glass, has alternating black and white stair treads on its central staircase, earning the nickname "The Piano Staircase". As part of the Underground Shopping Center Public Art Project, the Seoul Metropolitan Facilities Management Corporation built a piano staircase in the underground passage at Euljiro 1-ga Station | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49292680 | 332,900 |
GPD Win By March 2016, initial prototypes were finished, debugged, and shipped to select sources. GPD started accepting pre-orders in June 2016 through several online retailers, including the Indiegogo page. Pre-order backers are offered the device for a discounted price of $330, with an estimated final retail price of $499, but settling on a price of $330 after release. The initial stated goal was $100,000. By August 2016, small batch shipment to industry personnel were shipped, and by September, the pre-order promotional pricing ceased. GPD started shipping the final product by October 2016, with pre-order backers receiving their devices first. runs Windows 10 Home. GPD stated that per an April 2014 Microsoft decision, Windows is free on all devices with screens smaller than 9 inches. However, devices shipped to backers have a Windows 10 product key to input on initial boot and setup of the device. Unlike most Windows smartphones, The Win is able to run any x86 Windows application that can also be run on PC laptops and desktops. As of April 2017 several patches are available for the Linux kernel that allow a mostly complete functionality of the Win with a full desktop GNU/Linux like Ubuntu.. There are also ways to get Android to work on the GPD Win. There's a guide of how to install it and make it dual-boot on https://www.black-seraph.com The has a full QWERTY keyboard, which includes 67 standard keys and 10 expanded function keys | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51096462 | 289,153 |
Transparency Directive A shareholder, acquiring or selling shares, has to notify the issuer of such transactions, as soon as the acquisition or disposal of shares results in an amount of voting rights, that exceeds, falls below or reaches the threshold of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 50% and 75% of the total amount of voting rights issued. This notification requirement can also be based on the following cases: This notification has to include the amount of voting rights held after acquisition/disposal, the day on which the event took place, the chain of controlled undertakings or the name of the (directly invested) shareholder from which the notifying party gets attributed the voting rights. Furthermore a notification is required when a natural person or legal entity holds financial instruments, which result in the entitlement to acquire voting rights, whereas the acquisition is based on the holder's initiative. These regulations should not apply for shareholders, holding the shares as market makers, for clearing and settlement purposes and credit institutions, holding the shares in their trading book, and holding less than 10% of the total amount of voting rights issued. Issuers are obliged to treat those shareholders equally, which are in the same position. Furthermore issuers have to make all available all kinds of information that are necessary for the shareholders to ensure the exercise of their rights. person to exercise their voting and/or financial rights, either in paper or electronic form | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32250776 | 486,905 |
History of cancer chemotherapy Richard Lewisohn of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York administered the drug, and over the course of several months, Ruth's condition began to improve. However, Ruth died the following year. In 1951, Jane C. Wright demonstrated the use of methotrexate in solid tumors, showing remission in breast cancer. Wright's group were the first to demonstrate use of the drug in solid tumors, as opposed to leukemias, which are a cancer of the marrow. Several years later at the National Cancer Institute, Roy Hertz and Min Chiu Li then demonstrated complete remission in women with choriocarcinoma and chorioadenoma in 1956, discovering that methotrexate alone could cure choriocarcinoma (1958), a germ-cell malignancy that originates in trophoblastic cells of the placenta. In 1960 Wright et al. produced remissions in mycosis fungoides. Joseph Burchenal, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, with Farber's help, started his own methotrexate study and found the same effects. He then decided to try to develop anti-metabolites in the same way as Farber, by making small changes in a metabolite needed by a cell to divide. With the help of George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, two pharmaceutical chemists who were working at the Burroughs Wellcome Co. in Tuckahoe, many purine analogues were tested, culminating in the discovery of 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), which was subsequently shown to be a highly active antileukemic drug | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1914242 | 70,535 |
Zhongguancun The area and environs, however, remain the same. Hailong Market, Guigu Market, Taipingyang Market, Dinghao Market and Kemao Market are the five prominent IT and electronics markets. They are technology bazaars, famous for their "shops with a shop", where prices are easily but grudgingly bargained. shops mainly deal in PC-compatible hardware, peripherals and software. AppleCentre and Apple Experience Centre are also close by. A very particular sight to visit is the Haidian Christian Church, designed by Hamburg-based architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners. Due to the proximity and participation of China's two most prestigious universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University, along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, many analysts elsewhere are optimistic about Zhongguancun's future prospects. Notable high schools in include Affiliated High School of Peking University and High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China. The State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA) has its headquarters in Zhongguancun. The most famous companies that grew up in are Stone Group, Founder Group, and Lenovo Group. They were all founded in 1984-85. Stone was the first successful technology company to be operated by private individuals outside the government of China. Founder is a technology company that spun off Peking University. Lenovo Group spun off from Chinese Academy of Sciences with Liu Chuanzhi, a hero of and current chairman, eventually taking the helm. Lenovo purchased IBM's PC division with $1 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1717878 | 250,220 |
Clean-in-place This process cleans the borehole interior and equipment without any invasive maintenance being required. CIP is commonly used for cleaning bioreactors, fermenters, mix vessels, and other equipment used in biotech manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and food and beverage manufacturing. CIP is performed to remove or obliterate previous cell culture batch components. It is used to remove in-process residues, control bioburden, and reduce endotoxin levels within processing equipment and systems. Residue removal is accomplished during CIP with a combination of heat, chemical action, and turbulent flow. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a CIP regulation in 1978 applicable to pharmaceutical manufacturing. The regulation states, “Equipment and utensils shall be cleaned, maintained, and sanitized at appropriate intervals to prevent malfunctions or contamination that would alter the safety, identity, strength, quality or purity of the drug product beyond the official or other established requirements.” Repeatable, reliable, and effective cleaning is of the utmost importance in a manufacturing facility. Cleaning procedures are validated to demonstrate that they are effective, reproducible, and under control. In order to adequately clean processing equipment, the equipment must be designed with smooth stainless steel surfaces and interconnecting piping that has cleanable joints | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5645363 | 332,230 |
Phytoremediation However, preliminary studies have shown that these plants can be toxic to small animals (such as snails), and, hence, plants involved in phytotransformation may need to be maintained in a closed enclosure. Hence, the plants reduce toxicity (with exceptions) and sequester the xenobiotics in phytotransformation. Trinitrotoluene phytotransformation has been extensively researched and a transformation pathway has been proposed. Phytostimulation (or rhizodegradation) is the enhancement of soil microbial activity for the degradation of organic contaminants, typically by organisms that associate with roots. This process occurs within the rhizosphere, which is the layer of soil that surrounds the roots. Plants release carbohydrates and acids that stimulate microorganism activity which results in the biodegradation of the organic contaminants. This means that the microorganisms are able to digest and break down the toxic substances into harmless form. Phytostimulation has been shown to be effective in degrading petroleum hydrocarbons, PCBs, and PAHs. Phytostimulation can also involve aquatic plants supporting active populations of microbial degraders, as in the stimulation of atrazine degradation by hornwort. Phytovolatilization is the removal of substances from soil or water with release into the air, sometimes as a result of phytotransformation to more volatile and/or less polluting substances. In this process, contaminants are taken up by the plant and through transpiration, evaporate into the atmosphere | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1068768 | 303,274 |
Service virtualization The proliferation of Composite applications that rely on numerous dependent services, plus the rise of Agile software development following the 2001 publication of the Agile Manifesto, made it increasingly difficult for developers or testers to manually develop the number, scope, and complexity of stubs or mocks required to complete development and testing tasks for modern enterprise application development. The first step in the evolution from stubbing to service virtualization was the technology packaged in SOA testing tools since 2002. The earliest implementations of service virtualization were designed to automate the process of developing simple stub-like emulations so that composite applications could be tested more efficiently. As enterprise systems continued to grow increasingly complex and distributed, software tool vendors shifted focus from stubbing to the more environment-focused service virtualization. While stubbing can still be completed through manual development and management of stubs, what has become known as "service virtualization" is completed by using one of the available commercial off the shelf (COTS) service virtualization technologies as a platform for the development and deployment of their "service virtualization assets". The increasing popularity of Agile software development and DevOps has created demand for a new set of tools to deliver service virtualization to communities that work in this way | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34519332 | 124,033 |
Semantics (computer science) In programming language theory, semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. It does so by evaluating the meaning of syntactically valid strings defined by a specific programming language, showing the computation involved. In such a case that the evaluation would be of syntactically invalid strings, the result would be non-computation. Semantics describes the processes a computer follows when executing a program in that specific language. This can be shown by describing the relationship between the input and output of a program, or an explanation of how the program will be executed on a certain platform, hence creating a model of computation. Formal semantics, for instance, helps to write compilers, better understand what a program is doing, and to "prove", e.g., that the following if statement has the same effect as "S1" alone. The field of formal semantics encompasses all of the following: It has close links with other areas of computer science such as programming language design, type theory, compilers and interpreters, program verification and model checking. There are many approaches to formal semantics; these belong to three major classes: The distinctions between the three broad classes of approaches can sometimes be vague, but all known approaches to formal semantics use the above techniques, or some combination thereof | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=397608 | 100,122 |
Grant v Norway " Although the UK has adopted the Hague-Visby Rules, for the purposes of English Law a bill of lading is now deemed to be conclusive (not merely "prima facie") evidence of receipt as a result of section 4 of the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1992. The reason for the change is that the Law Commission deemed that, if international confidence were to be maintained, it was crucial that a bill of lading should be relied upon as a conclusive statement of fact. It follows that the main rule "Grant v Norway" has been rendered void by the 1992 Act. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56469370 | 468,994 |
SpaceX reusable launch system development program The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable." Also in May 2014, SpaceX publicly announced an extensive test program for a related reusable technology: a propulsively-landed space capsule called "DragonFly". The tests were to be run in Texas at the McGregor Rocket Test Facility in 2014–2015. In June 2014, COO Gwynne Shotwell clarified that all funding for development and testing of the reusable launch system technology development program is private funding from SpaceX, with no contribution by the US government. As of 2017 SpaceX had spent over a billion dollars on the development program. For the first time, SpaceX stated in July 2014 that they are "highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment." By late 2014, SpaceX suspended or abandoned the plan to recover and reuse the Falcon 9 second stage; the additional mass of the required heat shield, landing gear, and low-powered landing engines would incur too great a performance penalty. While the idea was mentioned again later it was ultimately abandoned as Starship development made progress. In December 2015, following the recovery of the first stage from December 22 launch, SpaceX projected that the first reflight of a recovered booster would likely occur in 2016, but that their plan was to not refly the December 22 recovered stage for that purpose | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34666187 | 220,521 |
Keynesian economics Through the 1950s, moderate degrees of government demand leading industrial development, and use of fiscal and monetary counter-cyclical policies continued, and reached a peak in the "go go" 1960s, where it seemed to many Keynesians that prosperity was now permanent. In 1971, Republican US President Richard Nixon even proclaimed "I am now a Keynesian in economics." Beginning in the late 1960s, a new classical macroeconomics movement arose, critical of Keynesian assumptions (see sticky prices), and seemed, especially in the 1970s, to explain certain phenomena better. It was characterized by explicit and rigorous adherence to microfoundations, as well as use of increasingly sophisticated mathematical modelling. With the oil shock of 1973, and the economic problems of the 1970s, began to fall out of favour. During this time, many economies experienced high and rising unemployment, coupled with high and rising inflation, contradicting the Phillips curve's prediction. This stagflation meant that the simultaneous application of expansionary (anti-recession) and contractionary (anti-inflation) policies appeared necessary. This dilemma led to the end of the Keynesian near-consensus of the 1960s, and the rise throughout the 1970s of ideas based upon more classical analysis, including monetarism, supply-side economics, and new classical economics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17326 | 516,004 |
Hermann A. Grunder Hermann August Grunder (born December 4, 1931) is a Swiss-American nuclear and accelerator physicist. Dr. was the founding director of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and a Director Emeritus of Argonne National Laboratory. Born 4 December 1931 in Basel, Switzerland, Hermann August Grunder has been a very vocal advocate for the sciences especially within the U.S. Department of Energy, having worked for multiple labs during his estimated forty years within the National Laboratory system. Dr. Grunder obtained his Master's Degree in Engineering from the Kalrsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) in 1958 and in 1967 earned his doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Basel. He entered the National Laboratory system in 1959 beginning at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 1968 he was in the accelerator department. In 1979, he became the associate director and head of the departments for accelerators and nuclear fusion. Dr. Grunder spent a cumulative 17 years (approximately) with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, moving on to the Directorship of the up-and-coming Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility from 1985 - 2000. Dr. was the first Director of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and had a literal hand in its formation and construction. In 2000, he accepted the directorship of the National Lab system's oldest lab: Argonne. It was from this lab that he retired in 2005. In 1979, Dr. received the U.S | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59284203 | 9,694 |
Interstate Highway System As American suburbs have expanded, the costs incurred in maintaining freeway infrastructure have also grown, leaving little in the way of funds for new Interstate construction. This has led to the proliferation of toll roads (turnpikes) as the new method of building limited-access highways in suburban areas. Some Interstates are privately maintained (for example, the VMS company maintains I‑35 in Texas) to meet rising costs of maintenance and allow state departments of transportation to focus on serving the fastest-growing regions in their states. Parts of the Interstate System might have to be tolled in the future to meet maintenance and expansion demands, as has been done with adding toll HOV/HOT lanes in cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Although part of the tolling is an effect of the SAFETEA‑LU act, which has put an emphasis on toll roads as a means to reduce congestion, present federal law does not allow for a state to change a freeway section to a tolled section for all traffic. About of toll roads are included in the Interstate Highway System. While federal legislation initially banned the collection of tolls on Interstates, many of the toll roads on the system were either completed or under construction when the was established. Since these highways provided logical connections to other parts of the system, they were designated as Interstate highways | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43950 | 323,589 |
File transfer is the transmission of a computer file through a communication channel from one computer system to another. Typically, file transfer is mediated by a communications protocol. In the history of computing, numerous file transfer protocols have been designed for different contexts. A file transfer protocol is a convention that describes how to transfer files between two computing endpoints. As well as the stream of bits from a file stored as a single unit in a file system, some may also send relevant metadata such as the filename, file size and timestamp - and even file system permissions and file attributes. Some examples: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7018709 | 107,040 |
Freedom Monument The earth from the demolition of the fortifications was gathered in the park and now forms an artificial hill with a cascade of waterfalls to the north of the monument. The Boulevard district east of the park is the location of several embassies and institutions, of which the closest to the are the German and French embassies, the University of Latvia and Riga State Gymnasium No.1. Situated in the park near the monument to the south is the National Opera House with a flower garden and a fountain in front of it. Opposite the opera house on the western part of plaza near the old town, is a small café and the Laima clock. The clock was set up in 1924, and in 1936 it was decorated with an advertisement for the Latvian confectionery brand "Laima", from which it took its name; it is a popular meeting spot. Originally it was planned that an elliptical plaza would be built around the foot of the monument, enclosed by a granite wall high, with benches placed inside it, while a hedge of thujas was to be planted around the outside. This project was however not carried out in the 1930s. The idea was reconsidered in the 1980s but shelved again. The idea of building a memorial to honor soldiers killed in action during the Latvian War of Independence first emerged in the early 1920s. On July 27, 1922, the Prime Minister of Latvia, Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics, ordered rules to be drawn up for a contest for designs of a "memorial column" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9290073 | 367,969 |
Piazza Cotton Gin The is located on the Frogmore Plantation at 11656 U.S. Highway 84, about west of Ferriday, Louisiana in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. The building containing the cotton gin press was built c.1880, while the machinery was added c.1900. The gin itself is a system cotton gin, which was invented by Robert S. Munger. This invention was the second major revolution in cotton processing (after the original gin was invented by Eli Whitney). This example is one of the few (and perhaps the only one) left in existence. It is a two-story building with ginning/pressing equipment. It was moved to its current location from across the Mississippi River in Rodney, Mississippi in 1997. The building is estimated to have been started c.1880 based on square nails used in its construction; some of the equipment bears 1883 and 1884 patent dates. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54722185 | 342,496 |
Distributed Management Task Force DMTF standards include: CADF - Cloud Auditing Data Federation CIMI - Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface CIM - Common Information Model DASH - Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware MCTP - Management Component Transport Protocol Including NVMe-MI™, I2C/SMBus and PCIe® Bindings NCSI - Network Controller Sideband Interface OVF - Open Virtualization Format PLDM - Platform Level Data Model Including Firmware Update, Redfish Device Enablement (RDE) Redfish – Including Protocols, Schema, Host Interface, Profiles SMASH - Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware]] SMBIOS - System Management BIOS | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=216967 | 246,703 |
American Folk Art Museum Five years later, a new branch of the museum, the Eva and Morris Feld Gallery, opened at 2 Lincoln Square, New York, opposite Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2001, a new building on the 45 and 47 West 53rd Street was inaugurated. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the building. From 2001 to 2011, the midtown space served as the museum's main branch. However, facing increasingly high bond payments, the museum sold the midtown branch to the Museum of Modern Art. When MoMA announced that it was going to demolish the building in connection with its expansion, there was outcry and considerable discussion about the issue, but the museum ultimately proceeded with its original plans. Following the sale, the used its facility at 2 Lincoln Square as its main exhibition and shop space. In 2014, the museum's archives, library, and administrative staff moved to Long Island City, Queens. In September 2017, the museum opened the Self-Taught Genius Gallery at its facility in Long Island City. The STG gallery shows art from the museum's collection in thematic exhibitions that change every few months. The STG Gallery is funded in large part by the Henry Luce Foundation. Standing as "one of New York City’s great treasures", the museum's 7,000 plus collection has been formed almost entirely through gifts | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1441278 | 311,718 |
Purchasing power parity 00 in Hong Kong and US$5.58 in the United States. The implied PPP exchange rate is 3.58 HK$ per US$. The difference between this and the actual exchange rate of 7.83 suggests that the Hong Kong dollar is 54.2% undervalued. That is, it is cheaper to convert US Dollars into HK$ and buy a Big Mac in Hong Kong than it is to buy a Big Mac directly in US Dollars. Similar to the Big Mac Index, the KFC Index measures PPP with a basket that contains a single item: a KFC Original 12/15 pc. bucket. The Big Mac Index cannot be used for most countries in Africa because most do not have a McDonald's restaurant. Thus, the KFC Index was created by Sagaci Research (a market research firm focusing solely on Africa) to identify over- and under-valued currencies in Africa. For example, the average price of KFC's Original 12 pc. Bucket in the United States in January 2016 was $20.50; while in Namibia it was only $13.40 at market exchange rates. Therefore, the index states the Namibian dollar was undervalued by 33% at that time. Like the Big Mac Index, the iPad index (elaborated by CommSec) compares an item's price in various locations. Unlike the Big Mac, however, each iPad is produced in the same place (except for the model sold in Brazil) and all iPads (within the same model) have identical performance characteristics. Price differences are therefore a function of transportation costs, taxes, and the prices that may be realized in individual markets. In 2013, an iPad cost about twice as much in Argentina as in the United States. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64489 | 507,063 |
Secretariat of Intelligence An interesting and sometimes confusing fact about the Secretariat's internal organization is the use of a specially structured sequence of numbers to refer to different internal divisions. For example, the Undersecretariat of Interior Intelligence is numbered '8', and its dependencies, such as the Directorates of Counterintelligence and Judicial Surveillance are numbered '84' and '85' respectively. The same case applies for the Undersecretariat of Exterior Intelligence, or '3', its divisions go from '32' for the Directorate of Foreign Intelligence to '34' for the Division of Transnational Crime and International Terrorism. Even though it is still hard to discern how exactly SIDE's number sequence is structured because of the lack of an official explanation, it is known that single numbers used to refer to a certain director, '3', '5', '8', '9'. Sometimes the numbers represent their location in the 25 de Mayo buildings. As with most intelligence agencies, the Secretariat only makes public statements when dealing with national issues or scandals. For the Secretariat, the AMIA investigation, the Sofía Fijman incident, and the participation in the Senate Bribes scandal were the most notorious episodes of media attention. During the AMIA investigation, Claudio Lifschitz, a judicial employee involved in the investigation wrote a book about his experiences and theories that the Secretariat knew beforehand about the bombing and could not stop it | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2552713 | 346,012 |
Graphene production techniques Ethylene decomposes on the surface due to pyrolysis, and the formed carbon adsorbs to the surface forming a graphene monolayer. Thus, only a monolayer growth is possible. The formed graphene layer is weakly bounded to the iridium substrate and is located about 3.3 Å above the surface. The graphene layer and the Ir(111) substrate also forms a moiré pattern with period around 25 Å, depending on the orientation of the graphene on Ir(111). There are many different possibilities for the graphene layer orientation, the most common ones being R0 and R30. The graphene layer has also corrugation due to the moiré pattern, with height varying from 0.04 Å to 0.3 Å. Due to the long-range order of these ripples, minigaps in the electronic band-structure (Dirac cone) become visible. Graphene sheets have been reported to be grown by dosing ethylene onto the clean, single platinum(111) substrate at temperatures above 1000 °C in ultra-high vacuum (UHV). Graphene monolayer interacts weakly with the Pt(111) surface below it confirmed by the local density of states which is a ‘V’ shape. Kim et al., reported the electronic properties of the graphene nanoislands whose geometry is affected by varying the annealing temperatures and providing a fundamental understanding on graphene growth. The effect of annealing on the average size and density of graphene islands grown on Pt(111) has been widely studied. Sutter et al | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48233141 | 232,262 |
Stephen P. Boyd In 2005 he and Michael Grant developed the MATLAB open source software package CVX, which makes it easy to specify and solve convex optimization problems. This work earned them the 2012 Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming. In 2012 he and Jacob Mattingley developed CVXGEN, which generates fast custom code for small, quadratic-programming-representable convex optimization problems, using an online interface. With minimal effort, it turns a mathematical problem description into a high-speed solver. Boyd co-founded and served as chief scientist of analog synthesis and intellectual property provider Barcelona Design, from its 1999 founding until it folded in 2005. He serves in an advisory capacity for BlackRock, an investment management corporation; Petuum, a machine learning platform for artificial intelligence; and H2O.ai, open source machine learning platform. He is also a co-inventor on 11 patents. On his personal website, which is visited more than 1.6 million times per year, he makes available papers, books, software, lecture notes and lecture videos. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41903803 | 400,284 |
Severe plastic deformation Compared to other SPD processes, ARB has the benefit that it does not require specialized equipment or tooling, only a conventional rolling mill. However, the surfaces to be joined must be well-cleaned before rolling to ensure good bonding. Repetitive corrugation and straightening (RCS) is a severe plastic deformation technique used to process sheet metals. In RCS, a sheet is pressed between two corrugated dies followed by pressing between two flat dies. RCS has gained wide popularity to produce fine grained sheet metals. Endeavors to improve this technique lead to introduce Repetitive Corrugation and Straightening by Rolling (RCSR), a novel SPD method. Applicability of this new method approved in the various materials. In asymmetric rolling (ASR), a rolling mill is modified such that one roll has a higher velocity than the other. This is typically done with either independent speed control or by using rolls of different size. This creates a region in which the frictional forces on the top and bottom of the sheet being rolled are opposite, creating shear stresses throughout the material in addition to the normal compressive stress from rolling. Unlike other SPD processes, ASR does not maintain the same net shape, but the effect on the microstructure of the material is similar. Mechanical alloying/milling (MA/MM) performed in a high-energy ball mill such as a shaker mill or planetary mill will also induce severe plastic deformation in metals | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23756855 | 350,631 |
Solid phase sequencing The principle of solid phase DNA sequencing was described in 1989 based on binding of biotinylated DNA to streptavidin coated magnetic beads and elution of one DNA strands selectively using alkali. The method allowed robotic applications suitable for clinical sequencing, but the magnetic handling has also found frequent use in many molecular applications, including sample handling for DNA diagnostics. The use of solid phase methods for DNA handling is now frequently used as an integrated part of many of the next generation DNA sequencing methods, as well as numerous molecular diagnostics applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55123599 | 9,055 |
D'Arcy Concession The output of oil was small, as the well only produced about 200 gallons per day. With or without this well being turned into a producer, D'Arcy still needed money to continue his venture. D'Arcy became busy looking around for investors and he even began to search in France for foreign investors, without much success. To make matters worse, shortly after they struck oil, the well at Chiah Surkh began to run out and turn into a trickle. Back in London, the British Admiralty began to reconsider and feared that if they did not intervene, then D'Arcy would sell out his concession to other foreign investors or lose the concession altogether. They feared that the French or the Russians would take over the concession and then have a major influence in Persia. The British Admiralty decided to intervene and try to play matchmaker and find an investor to help out D'Arcy and keep the concession under British control. One way they did this was using a British spy named Sidney Reilly, who allegedly disguised himself as a priest, and convinced D'Arcy to sell the majority of his concession to a "good 'Christian' enterprise. They were successful and with the help of Redwood they were able to strike a deal with the firm called Burmah Oil. D'Arcy and Burmah Oil made the deal in London in 1905 that made an agreement establishing the Concession Syndicate, renamed as the Anglo Persian Oil Co. With new capital being provided by the agreement with Burmah Oil, the exploration was able to continue | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25481409 | 243,701 |
Flight instruments The vertical speed indicator, or VSI, is more of "a good help" than absolutely essential. On jet aircraft it displays the vertical speed in thousands of feet per minute, usually in the range −6 to +6. The gyrocompass can be used for navigation, but it is indeed a flight instrument as well. It is needed to control the adjustment of the heading, to be the same as the heading of the landing runway. Indicated airspeed, or IAS, is the second most important instrument and indicates the airspeed very accurately in the range of . At higher altitude a MACH-meter is used instead, to prevent the aircraft from overspeed. An instrument called true airspeed, or TAS, exists on some aircraft. TAS shows airspeed in knots in the range from and higher (It is like the Mach-meter: not really a flight instrument). The altimeter displays the altitude in feet, but must be corrected to local air pressure at the landing airport. The altimeter may be adjusted to show an altitude of zero feet on the runway, but far more common is to adjust the altimeter to show the actual altitude when the aircraft has landed. In the latter case pilots must keep the runway elevation in mind. However a radio altimeter (displaying the height above the ground if lower than around has been standard for decades. This instrument is however not among the "big five", but must still be considered as a flight instrument. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=79537 | 381,126 |
Laterite Many high-level bauxites are formed in coastal plains which were subsequently uplifted to their present altitude. The basaltic laterites of Northern Ireland were formed by extensive chemical weathering of basalts during a period of volcanic activity. They reach a maximum thickness of and once provided a major source of iron and aluminium ore. Percolating waters caused degradation of the parent basalt and preferential precipitation by acidic water through the lattice left the iron and aluminium ores. Primary olivine, plagioclase feldspar and augite were successively broken down and replaced by a mineral assemblage consisting of hematite, gibbsite, goethite, anatase, halloysite and kaolinite. ores were the major source of early nickel. Rich laterite deposits in New Caledonia were mined starting the end of the 19th century to produce white metal. The discovery of sulfide deposits of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, during the early part of the 20th century shifted the focus to sulfides for nickel extraction. About 70% of the Earth's land-based nickel resources are contained in laterites; they currently account for about 40% of the world nickel production. In 1950 laterite-source nickel was less than 10% of total production, in 2003 it accounted for 42%, and by 2012 the share of laterite-source nickel was expected to be 51%. The four main areas in the world with the largest nickel laterite resources are New Caledonia, with 21%; Australia, with 20%; the Philippines, with 17%; and Indonesia, with 12%. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26855026 | 337,931 |
Monolithic HPLC column The technology was originally developed by Tatiana Tennikova and Frantisek Svec during a collaboration between their respective institutes. The patent for these columns was acquired by BIA Separations and Ales Podgornik and Milos Barut developed the first commercially available monolith column in the form of a short disc encapsulated in a plastic housing. Trademarked CIM, BIA Separations has since introduced full lines of reversed-phase, normal-phase, ion-exchange, and affinity polymeric monoliths. Ales Podgornik and Janez Jancar then went on to develop large scale tube monolithic columns for industrial use. The largest column currently available is 8L. In May 2008, LC instrumentation powerhouse Agilent technologies agreed to market BIA Separations’ analytical columns based on monolith technology. Agilent's commercialized the columns with strong and weak ion exchange phases and Protein A in September 2008 when they unveiled their new Bio-Monolith product line at the BioProcess International conference. While BIA Separations was the first to commercially market polymeric monoliths, Merck KGaA was the first company to market silica monoliths. In 1996, Tanaka and coworkers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology published extensive work on silica monolith technologies. Merck was later issued a license from Kyoto Institute of Technology to develop and produce the silica monoliths | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22131699 | 16,833 |
Haystack (MIT project) Haystack was a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to research and develop several applications around personal information management and the Semantic Web. The most notable of those applications is the Haystack client, a research personal information manager (PIM) and one of the first to be based on semantic desktop technologies. The Haystack client is published as open source software under the BSD license. Similar to the Chandler PIM, the Haystack system unifies handling different types of unstructured information. This information has a common representation in RDF that is presented to users in a configurable human-readable way. Haystack was developed in the RDF-aware dynamic language Adenine which was created for the project. The language was named after the nucleobase adenine and is a scripting language that is cross-platform. It is the perhaps the earliest example of a homoiconic general graph (rather than list/tree) programming language. A substantial characteristic of Adenine is that this language possesses native support for the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The language constructs of Adenine are derived from Python and Lisp. Adenine is written in RDF and thus also can be represented and written with RDF based syntaxes such as Notation3 (N3). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5033679 | 120,672 |
Kenneth Stewart Cole In 1954 he became chief of the laboratory of biophysics of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. He achieved advances that led to the "sodium theory" of nerve transmission that later won Nobel Prizes for Alan L. Hodgkin and Andrew F. Huxley in 1963. Cole was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1956, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1967, the award citation, read: "As a result, we know far more about how the nervous system functions." In 1972 he was made a member of the Royal Society of London. The Biophysical Society awards the Kenneth S. Cole medal to a scientist studying cell membranes. In 1980 he became an adjunct professor of the Department of Neurosciences at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. He had a son, Roger Braley Cole, and a daughter, Sarah Roberts Cole. He died on April 18, 1984 in La Jolla, California. Tissue can be modeled as an electrical circuit with resistive and capacitive properties: Its dispersion and absorption are represented by the empirical formula: formula_1 In this equation formula_2 is the complex dielectric constant, formula_3 and formula_4 are the "static" and "infinite frequency" dielectric constants, formula_5 times the frequency, and formula_6 is a generalized relaxation time. The parameter formula_7 can assume values between 0 and 1, the former value giving the result of Debye for polar dielectrics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8814960 | 300,126 |
Gas lighting "Several hundred theatres are said to have burned down in America and Europe between 1800 and the introduction of electricity in the late 1800s. The increased heat was objectionable, and the border lights and wing lights had to be lighted by a long stick with a flaming wad of cotton at the end. For many years, an attendant or gas boy moved along the long row of jets, lighting them individually while gas was escaping from the whole row. Both actors and audiences complained of the escaping gas, and explosions sometimes resulted from its accumulation." These problems with gas lighting led to the rapid adoption of electric lighting. By 1881, the Savoy Theatre in London was using incandescent lighting. While electric lighting was introduced to theatre stages, the gas mantle was developed in 1885 for gas-lit theatres. "This was a beehive-shaped mesh of knitted thread impregnated with lime that, in miniature, converted the naked gas flame into in effect, a lime-light." Electric lighting slowly took over in theatres. In the 20th century, it enabled better and safer theater productions, with no smell, relatively very little heat, and more freedom for designers. In the early 20th century, most cities in North America and Europe had gaslit streets. However, around 1880 gas lighting for streets began giving way to high voltage (3000–6000 volt) direct current and alternating current arc lighting systems. This time period also saw the development of the first electric power utility designed for indoor use | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=850048 | 96,596 |
Behavior tree (artificial intelligence, robotics and control) Graphically, the children of a control flow node are placed below it, ordered from left to right. The execution of a behavior tree starts from the root which sends ticks with a certain frequency to its child. A tick is an enabling signal that allows the execution of a child. When the execution of a node in the behavior tree is allowed, it returns to the parent a status running if its execution has not finished yet, success if it has achieved its goal, or failure otherwise. A control flow node is used to control the subtasks of which it is composed. A control flow node may be either a selector (fallback) node or a sequence node. They run each of their subtasks in turn. When a subtask is completed and returns its status (success or failure), the control flow node decides whether to execute the next subtask or not. Fallback nodes are used to find and execute the first child that does not fail. A fallback node will return immediately with a status code of success or running when one of its children returns success or running (see Figure I and the pseudocode below). The children are ticked in order of importance, from left to right. In pseudocode, the algorithm for a fallback composition is: Sequence nodes are used to find and execute the first child that has not yet succeeded. A sequence node will return immediately with a status code of failure or running when one of its children returns failure or running (see Figure II and the pseudocode below). The children are ticked in order, from left to right | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43097038 | 243,045 |
Enigma machine If the wiring is secret, the total number of possible configurations has been calculated to be around (approximately 380 bits); with known wiring and other operational constraints, this is reduced to around (76 bits). Users of Enigma were confident of its security, because of the large number of possibilities; it was not then feasible for an adversary to even begin to try a brute-force attack. Most of the key was kept constant for a set time period, typically a day. A different initial rotor position was used for each message, a concept similar to an initialisation vector in modern cryptography. The reason is that encrypting many messages with identical or near-identical settings (termed in cryptanalysis as being "in depth"), would enable an attack using a statistical procedure such as Friedman's Index of coincidence. The starting position for the rotors was transmitted just before the ciphertext, usually after having been enciphered. The exact method used was termed the "indicator procedure". Design weakness and operator sloppiness in these indicator procedures were two of the main weaknesses that made cracking Enigma possible. One of the earliest "indicator procedures" for the Enigma was cryptographically flawed and allowed Polish cryptanalysts to make the initial breaks into the plugboard Enigma. The procedure had the operator set his machine in accordance with the secret settings that all operators on the net shared. The settings included an initial position for the rotors (the "Grundstellung"), say, "AOH" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9256 | 447,163 |
Thermal simulations for integrated circuits Although analytical solutions can only be found for specific and simple cases, they give a good insight to deal with more complex situations. Analytical solutions for regular subsystems can also be combined to provide detailed descriptions of complex structures. In Prof. Batty's work, a Fourier series expansion to the temperature in the Laplace domain is introduced to find the solution to the linearized heat equation. This procedure can be applied to a simple but nontrivial case: an homogeneous cube die made out of GaAs, L=300 um. The goal is to find the temperature distribution on the top surface. The top surface is discretized into smaller squares with index i=1...N. One of them is considered to be the source. Taking the Laplace transform to the heat equation: where formula_23 Function formula_24 is expanded in terms of cosine functions for the formula_25 and formula_26 variables and in terms of hyperbolic cosines and sines for formula_27 variable. Next, by applying adiabatic boundary conditions at the lateral walls and fix temperature at the bottom (heat sink temperature), thermal impedance matrix equation is derived: Where the index formula_29 accounts for the power sources, while the index formula_30 refers to each small area. For more details about the derivation, please see Prof. Batty's paper. The below figure shows the steady state temperature distribution of this analytical method for a cubic die, with dimensions 300 um. A constant power source of 0.3W is applied over a central surface of dimension 0 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21884508 | 112,998 |
Late capitalism The term "late capitalism" was first used by Werner Sombart in his magnum opus "Der Moderne Kapitalismus", which was published from 1902 through 1927, and subsequent writings; Sombart divided capitalism into different stages: (1) proto-capitalist society from the early middle ages up to 1500 AD, (2) early capitalism in 1500–1800, (3) the heyday of capitalism ("Hochkapitalismus") from 1800 to the first World War, and (4) late capitalism since then. Sombart's work was never translated into English, but historians sometimes do refer to "late bourgeois society" in contrast to "early bourgeois society" in the 17th and 18th century, or "classical bourgeois society" in the 19th and early 20th century. Vladimir Lenin famously declared that there are no "absolutely hopeless situations" for capitalism. The Communist International stated that with the first World War, a new world epoch of wars and revolutions had opened, and it defined state monopoly capitalism as the highest and final stage of capitalism. The term "late capitalism" began to be used by socialists in continental Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many economists believed capitalism was doomed. At the end of World War II, many economists, including Joseph Schumpeter and Paul Samuelson, believed the end of capitalism could be near, in that the economic problems might be insurmountable. The term was used in the 1960s in Germany and Austria, by Western Marxists writing in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Austromarxism | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=160355 | 507,506 |
Genome sequencing of endangered species A recent study used whole-genome sequencing data to demonstrate the sister lineage between the Dryas monkey and vervet monkey and their divergence with additional bidirectional gene flow approximately 750,000 to approximately 500,000 years ago. With <250 remaining adult individuals, the study showed high genetic diversity and low levels of inbreeding and genetic load in the studied Dryas monkey individuals. Another study used several techniques such as single-molecule real time sequencing, paired-end sequencing, optical maps, and high-throughput chromosome conformation capture to obtain a high quality chromosome assembly from already constructed incomplete and fragmented genome assembly for the golden snub-nosed monkey. The modern techniques used in this study represented 100-fold improvement in the genome with 22,497 protein-coding genes, of which majority were functionally annotated. The reconstructed genome showed a close relationship between the species and the Rhesus macaque, indicating a divergence approximately 13.4 million years ago. Plants species identified as PSESP ("plant species with extremely small population") have been the focus of genomic studies, with the aim of determining the most endangered populations. The DNA genome can be sequenced starting from the fresh leaves by doing a DNA extraction. The combination of different sequencing techniques together can be used to obtain a high quality data that can be used to assembly the genome | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62084317 | 5,978 |
Takeda Oncology In addition to Cambridge, MA, oncology resources include facilities in San Diego, San Francisco, Tsukuba and Osaka with Millennium as the global hub for this critical and rapidly expanding therapeutic area. In summer 2013 the decision was made by Takeda to drop the "Millennium" brand effectively renaming the subsidiary into Takeda Oncology. However, Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc is still a legal holding of Takeda and its name is still used for on-going legal processes. Velcade is the first oncology drug marketed and promoted by Millennium. Velcade was granted FDA approval little more than four and a half years after initiation of the first clinical trial. To discover and develop such treatments, the Company focuses on key molecular pathways that play crucial roles in underlying disease processes, and on identifying therapeutically significant differences that may exist among people. applies this approach broadly throughout its R&D program to develop novel treatments not just for cancer but also for a number of other important diseases. Velcade was co-developed by Millennium Pharmaceuticals. and Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development. Takeda is responsible for commercialization of Velcade in the U.S. and Janssen-Cilag is responsible for commercialization in Europe and the rest of the world. Janssen Pharmaceutical K.K. is responsible for commercialization in Japan. For a limited period of time, Takeda and Ortho Biotech. are co- promoting Velcade in the U.S | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2797422 | 173,889 |
Mullard 5-10 The was a circuit for a valve amplifier designed by the British valve company, Mullard in 1954 at the Mullard Applications Research Laboratory (ARL) in Mitcham Surrey UK, part of the New Road factory complex, to take advantage of their particular products. The circuit was first published in Practical Wireless magazine. The amplifier featured five valves and an output of 10 watts - hence '5-10'. Of those valves, one was a full-wave rectifier (an EZ80 or EZ81), one was a pre-amplifier pentode EF86 and one a double-triode ECC83 as phase splitter. The power amplification was handled by a pair of EL84 working in push-pull configuration. The frequency response of the circuit was from 40Hz to 20,000Hz with less than 0.2% THD. In 1959 Mullard published its famous booklet "Mullard Circuits for Audio Amplifiers" covering a range of amplifier and pre-amplifier circuits using valves developed within the Receiving Valve Development Department at the New Road factory. The circuit design of the Mullard 5-10, together with the recommended Partridge output transformers, was famous for its unique sound reproduction and many variations of this amplifier (including Mullard's own 20-watt version, the Mullard 5-20 using the EL34) were in widespread use until the end of the valve era; similar designs are still manufactured as expensive equipment for valve audiophiles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3938286 | 374,695 |
Stargate: The Ark of Truth According to the DVD commentary, a tease leading into that film was planned to be included at the end of "Stargate: The Ark of Truth", but was ultimately dropped as it was felt that this film had "too many endings." The movie went into production in April 2007. A pre-release (workprint) version of the film with unfinished special effects, no credits and recorded in cropped 16:9 was leaked onto the Internet in mid-December 2007. "The Ark of Truth" was released as a Region 1 DVD release on March 11, 2008. Sky One broadcast the film on March 24, 2008, to be followed by the Region 2 DVD release on April 14, 2008. The DVD was released in Australia on April 9, 2008. The DVD includes an audio commentary with Robert C. Cooper, Peter Woeste and Christopher Judge, a 30-minute behind-the-scenes program, highlights from the 2007 Comic-Con Stargate panel and a nine-minute summary of the Ori storyline from seasons nine and 10. The DVD release of "Stargate:The Ark of Truth" in the U.S. earned MGM/Fox US $1.59 million in rentals in the first week after the release, and another US $1.38 million in rentals in the second week. In its third week it earned US $1.19 million in rentals totaling US $4.16 million. The DVD has also earned US $9.0 million in sales. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8929212 | 300,291 |
Holstentor Each tile bears one of three different ornaments: either an arrangement of four heraldic lilies, a symmetrical lattice, or a representation of four thistle leaves. There is no apparent order to these recurring symbols, but each group of eight tiles is always followed by a tile with a different design. It has the form of a heraldic shield and bears either the Lübeck heraldic eagle or a stylized tree. These shields are flanked by two male figures who function as bearers of a coat of arms. The terracotta stripes were repaired during restoration work between 1865 and 1870. Only three of the original tiles are preserved as museum specimens. The new tiles approximate the former design, although liberties were taken during the restoration. For example, the design of the heraldic eagle motif is by no means a reflection of the original. The pediment was also not faithfully restored, but this is not the fault of the restorers, since in the 19th century it had long been gone and its original appearance was unknown. An old view on an altarpiece in the Lübeck fortress monastery shows a Holsten Gate with five pediment towers. But since this picture shows the Gate in the middle of a fantasy landscape of mountains and forests the credibility of the representation is disputed. Today, three towers crown the pediment, but they are visible only from the city side. It was constructed with red bricks. Both tower interiors have the same design | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=169442 | 359,049 |
Wireless lock A wireless communication distance metrics sets the protected object to "locked", as soon as the set distance level between paired transmitter and receiver of a wireless signal transmission is exceeded. The protected object returns to status "unlocked" as soon as the distance gets lesser and the received signal strength level higher than set limit. Transmitters may be worn by the owner of an object, whereas the other receiver item gets attached to the protected object for logically protecting it to usage by the owner only. Basic electronic gadget is a wireless token that communicates with a counterpart attached to the object to be controlled wirelessly. User guides for mode of operation recommend to bear a very light designed alarm token with a necklace, a wristband or similarly directly bound to the body. Very low transmission power levels secure low electromagnetic interference as well as entirely biologically harmless operation After setting the object to protect to work and initially pairing the two wireless token devices with each other, the protected object refuses operation when exceeding the set distance between token and protected object. Advanced solutions offer communications on the basis of standardized communication protocols and based on standardized air interface links. Simple solutions make use of passive RFID tokens, thus requiring a higher transmission level from a reader attached to the protected object and illuminating the token for response | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32260893 | 281,290 |
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a package delivery system is scalable because more packages can be delivered by adding more delivery vehicles. However, if all packages had to first pass through a single warehouse for sorting, the system would not be scalable, because one warehouse can handle only a limited number of packages. In computing, scalability is a characteristic of computers, networks, algorithms, networking protocols, programs and applications. An example is a search engine, which must support increasing numbers of users, and the number of topics it indexes. Webscale is an computer architectural approach that brings the capabilities of large scale cloud computing companies into enterprise data centers. In mathematics, scalability mostly refers to closure under scalar multiplication. The Incident Command System (ICS) is the emergency management system used across emergency response agencies in the United States. ICS can scale resource coordination from a single-engine roadside brushfire to an interstate wildfire. The first resource on scene establishes command, with authority to order resources and delegate responsibility (managing five to seven officers, who will again delegate to up to seven, and on as the incident grows). As an incident expands, more senior officers assume command | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=185529 | 222,373 |
Chubb detector lock In response, Jeremiah Chubb, who was working with his brother, Charles, as a ship's outfitter and ironmonger in Portsmouth, invented and patented his detector lock in 1818. Building on earlier work by Robert Barron and Joseph Bramah, Jeremiah developed a four-lever lock that when picked or opened with the wrong key would stop working until a special key was used to reset it. This security feature was known as a "regulator", and was tripped when an individual lever was pushed past the position required to bring the lever in line to open the lock. As a result of this innovation, Jeremiah was able to claim the £100 reward offered by the government (). A convict aboard one of the prison hulks in Portsmouth Docks was given the Chubb lock with a promise of a free pardon from the Government and £100 from Jeremiah if he could pick the lock. The convict, who was a locksmith by trade and had successfully picked every lock he had been presented with, was confident he could do the same with the detector lock. After two or three months of trying he was forced to admit defeat. In 1820, Jeremiah joined his brother Charles in starting their own lock company, Chubb. They moved from Portsmouth to Willenhall, which was the lockmaking capital of Great Britain, and opened a factory in Temple Street. In 1836 they moved to St James' Square in the same town. A further move to the site of the old Workhouse in Railway Street followed in 1838 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=821869 | 437,956 |
Census of Marine Zooplankton The is a field project of the Census of Marine Life that has aimed to produce a global assessment of the species diversity, biomass, biogeographic distribution, and genetic diversity of more than 7,000 described species of zooplankton that drift the ocean currents throughout their lives. CMarZ focuses on the deep sea, under-sampled regions, and biodiversity hotspots. Technology plays a great role in CMarZ's research, including the use of integrated morphological and molecular sampling through DNA Barcoding. CMarZ makes its datasets available via the CMarZ Database. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22034606 | 141,193 |
Maucha diagram A Maucha diagram, or Maucha symbol, is a graphical representation of the major cations and anions in a chemical sample. R. Maucha published the symbol in 1932. It is mainly used by biologists and chemists for quickly recognising samples by their chemical composition. The symbol is similar in concept to the Stiff diagram. It conveys similar ionic information to the Piper diagram, though in a more compact format that is suitable as a map symbol or for showing changes with time. The is a special case of the Radar chart and overcomes some of the limitations of the Pie chart by having equal angles for all variables and consistently showing each variable in the same position. The star shape comprises eight kite-shaped polygons, the area of each of which is proportional to the concentration of an ion in milliequivalents per litre. The anions carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride and sulphate are on the left, while the cations potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium are on the right. The total ionic concentration adds up to the area of the background circle, the total anion concentration adds up to the left semicircle and the total cation concentration adds up to the right semicircle. A method for drawing the diagram in R is available on GitHub . Broch and Yake modified Maucha's original fixed-size diagram by scaling for concentration. Further scaling using the logarithm of the ionic concentration enables the plotting of a wide range of concentrations on a single map. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47620343 | 45,991 |
Megalethoscope The megalethoscope is an optical apparatus designed by Carlo Ponti of Venice before 1862. The megalethoscope is the evolution of the alethoscope, patented by Ponti in 1861. In it, photographs are viewed through a large lens, which creates the optical illusion of depth and perspective. The albumen photographs are either backlit by an internal light source—usually an oil or kerosene lantern—or lit by daylight admitted via a system of opening doors. Ponti and others produced specially prepared photographs for use in the Megalethoscope. The photographs themselves were translucent and were coloured and pierced to create dramatic visual effects, such as using backlighting to create the impression of nighttime. The megalethoscope was and is often confused with the stereoscope which was of a different design and effect. However, the megalethoscope and the alethoscope are capable of a certain illusion of relief, that uses chromostereopsis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2416099 | 302,077 |
Lester Charles King (1907–1989) was an English geologist and geomorphologist known for his theories on scarp retreat. He offered a very different view of the origin of continental landscaping than that of William Morris Davis. Studying at university in New Zealand King was a disciple of Charles Cotton who was heavily influenced by Davis. While King's ideas were an attempt at refuting Davis' cycle of erosion they were themselves of cyclical nature and contributed to what Cliff Ollier has called "Davis bashing" — the ridicule of cyclical theories in geomorphology, in particular Davis' ones. Critics did however not propose alternative models. For him, the weathering of physical factors in arid areas causes the erosion of the hills, the deposition of the weathered material (pediments) and the deposition of these material in lower altitudes, contributing to the formation of the pediplain. He was also an early proponent of continental drift, having lectured on this matter at a number of U.S. universities during a tour in 1958. King was a supporter of the Expanding Earth hypothesis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43719119 | 6,807 |
Public administration For a basic understanding of sociopolitical structure of a society or culture is a key component of comparative public administration. Despite all of its set backs there are examples of the application of well-formed Comparative Public Administration working in the world today. One of which is the comparison on the national level David Clark an author in this field states "In spite of similarities in public management reform rhetoric, it is argued that there is increasing divergence in the philosophy & practice of public service in the two nations, & and these differences reflect regimes that incorporate different ideals of citizenship." This highlights the benefit of proper comparison of public administration. By examining patterns that emerge in international public sectors one can identify similarities and differences in many things including ideals of citizenship on the local level. Although the United States failed use of Comparative Public Administration in the Middle East is noted, they did properly incorporate it domestically. "During the Clinton administration, the focus on residential energy consumption in the United States was elevated to a high level with the inauguration of the Million Solar Roofs initiative, in which the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored workshops, developed a pool of existing federal lending and financing options, and worked with partners in the solar and building industries to remove market barriers to strengthen grassroots demand for solar technologies" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=587618 | 484,349 |
Blue Ocean Strategy Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it. This, in turn, requires a shift of attention from supply to demand, from a focus on competing to a focus on "value innovation" – that is, the creation of innovative value to unlock new demand. This is achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost. As market structure is changed by breaking the value/cost tradeoff, so are the rules of the game. Competition in the old game is therefore rendered irrelevant. By expanding the demand side of the economy, new wealth is created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities. Some examples of companies that may have created new market spaces in the opinion of Kim and Mauborgne include: Reports of businesses using blue ocean strategy concepts include: Since "Blue Ocean Strategy" was published in 2005 it has been translated into 43 languages and has sold over 3.5 million copies. The book was named a bestseller by the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Amazon.com. It was selected as one of the “Best Books of 2005” by Fast Company magazine, won “The Best Business Book of 2005” Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and achieved bestselling book of the decade status by 800-CEO-READ (2000-2010) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4231933 | 456,450 |
South-pointing chariot There are several methods that could have been used, for example: Unlike mechanisms that rely on the rotation of road wheels, most of these methods can be used at sea. This may account for the mention (see "Earliest sources" above) that a marine version of the south-pointing chariot existed. These methods can work accurately over long distances, unlike the mechanical designs for the chariot. Some non-mechanical method of finding the south must have been used when a mechanical south-pointing chariot was initialized, aiming its pointer to the south at the start of a journey. Any of the methods mentioned above in "Non-mechanical possibilities" could have been used. If any south-pointing chariot was really used for long-distance navigation, it must have relied (after initialization) on a non-mechanical direction-finding method. It might have been operated non-mechanically by someone riding in it, as outlined above. Alternatively, if it had a mechanical mechanism, it must have been frequently re-initialized non-mechanically to eliminate accumulated errors and uncertainties. The only chariots that might not have needed non-mechanical methods of finding the south would have been those that were never used for long-distance navigation. If some chariots were used only for amusement or fraud, they could have worked purely mechanically. Even initialization could have been avoided by simply declaring some arbitrary direction to be "south" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1437746 | 211,766 |
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons government, despite the convention insisting the OPCW "shall not seek or receive instructions from any government"; the US had tried to persuade Brazil to recall Bustani. Monbiot wrote that the U.S. had tried other measures, although the convention also indicates that states should "not seek to influence" staff. In line with his mandate, Bustani wanted Iraq to sign the convention thus allowing international chemical weapons monitors into Iraq and thus potentially impeding the U.S. push for war against Iraq. The U.S. gave three main arguments for the removal of Bustani's from his position: "polarising and confrontational conduct", "mismanagement issues" and "advocacy of inappropriate roles for the OPCW". The removal was subsequently determined to be improper by an Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization and consequently Bustani was awarded €50,000 in moral damages, his pay for the remainder of his second term, and his legal costs. On 11 October, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the OPCW had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons". The committee further indicated how "Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons.” In the year ending September 2014, the OPCW had overseen the destruction of some 97 percent of Syria's declared chemical weapons | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36832 | 37,853 |
Electric energy consumption In Middle East, growth rate was softened but remained high, just below 4%. The table lists the top 37 electricity consuming countries, which use 19,000 TWh/a. i.e. 90% of the consumption of all more than 190 countries. The total consumption (including the amount consumed by the power plants) and the energy sources to generate this electricity is given per country. The data is from 2012. Total consumption (2nd column) divided by number of inhabitants (last column) gives a country's consumption per head. In W-Europe this is between 5 and 8 MWh/a. (1 MWh equals 1000 kWh.) In Scandinavia, USA, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea it is much more, in developing countries much less. The worlds average is 3 MWh/a. A very low consumption per head, as in Indonesia, means that many inhabitants are not connected to the electricity grid, and this is the reason that the world's 7th and 8th most populous countries—Nigeria (177M) and Bangladesh (156M)—do not appear in the table. From 2012 to 2014 worldwide electricity consumption increased 5%. Nuclear and fossil generated electricity rose 3%, renewable electricity 12%. A small part of the renewables, solar and wind electricity, increased much more, 46% in line with the strong growth since 1990. In Brazil, wind power increased 140%, in China not only solar and wind increased fast, 81%, but also nuclear, 36%. Listed countries are top 20 populous countries and/or top 20 GDP (PPP) countries and Saudi Arabia as of CIA World Factbook 2009 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6168349 | 386,361 |
List of ancient woods in England 2 Ha (40 acres) Devichoys Wood -16 Ha (40 acres) 9.5% of the land area of Cumbria is woodland. 16.7% of the land area of East Sussex is woodland. 11.2% of the land area of Gloucestershire is woodland. 17.7% of the Land Area of Hampshire is woodland. 9.5% of Hertfordshire's land area is woodland. In 2012 the Isle of Wight Biodiversity Partnership commissioned a revised Ancient Woodland Inventory for the island, and this was completed in 2014. This has a list of all identified ancient woodland sites on the Isle of Wight. 10.6% of Kent's land area is wooded, and it has more ancient woodland than any other county. It is estimated that 2% of Leicestershire's land area is ancient woodland, of which half has been replaced by new plantings in recent times. There are over 100 woods in Leicestershire believed to be ancient. The sites listed below are those over in size, and with one exception, all have SSSI status. With one group of woods near Hinckley, in the south-west, the remainder fall into three broad areas. In East Leicestershire, close to the border with Rutland, are the woods near Leighfield Forest, an extensive Royal Forest which straddled the two counties. North west of Leicester are the woods of Charnwood Forest. Further west are the woods of the coal measures toward the border with Derbyshire. The ancient woods of Northants are concentrated towards the south and west of the county, to that region bordering Bucks, Oxford and Beds | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29062023 | 178,014 |
Paddington Substation The Paddington Zone substation is constructed using tuck pointed face brick work and features a bold rendered cornice below the parapet. External materials include face brick, cement render, and steel roller shutter. As at 10 November 2000, the condition was good. The Paddington Zone substation is a fine rare rare and representative example of an externally intact Interwar Functionalist building located within Paddingtom Urban Conservation Area as listed by the National Trust. It makes a substantial contribution to the character of the streetscape in the paddington area. It has considerable architectural significance on a state level, as the only known example of its kind in the Sydney area. was listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58177286 | 305,548 |
Raptor (programming language) RAPTOR, the Rapid Algorithmic Prototyping Tool for Ordered Reasoning, is a graphical authoring tool created by Martin C. Carlisle, Terry Wilson, Jeff Humphries and Jason Moore. The software is hosted and maintained by former US Air Force Academy and current Carnegie Mellon University professor Martin Carlisle. RAPTOR is very common within the learning environment. This is because the software allows students to write and execute programs using flowcharts. The easy-to-use language and graphical components of RAPTOR are designed to teach the major ideas of computer programming to students. It is typically used in academics to teach introductory programming concepts as well. Other educational programming languages include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43882791 | 99,409 |
Earth structure They are believed to have played a central role in the mound-building peoples' religious life and documented uses include semi-public chief's house platforms, public temple platforms, mortuary platforms, charnel house platforms, earth lodge/town house platforms, residence platforms, square ground and rotunda platforms, and dance platforms. The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, was started in 100 AD. The stone-faced structure contains two million tons of rammed earth. Earthworks are engineering works created through moving or processing quantities of soil or unformed rock. The material may be moved to another location and formed into a desired shape for a purpose. Levees, embankments and dams are types of earthwork. A levee, floodbank or stopbank is an elongated natural ridge or artificially constructed dirt fill wall that regulates water levels. It is usually earthen and often runs parallel to the course of a river in its floodplain or along low-lying coastlines. Mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) retaining walls may be used for embankments. MSE walls combine a concrete leveling pad, wall facing panels, coping, soil reinforcement and select backfill. A variety of designs of wall facing panels may be used. After the leveling pad has been laid and the first row of panels has been placed and braced, the first layer of earth backfill is brought in behind the wall and compacted. The first set of reinforcements is then laid over the earth | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5593595 | 285,048 |
Windows Metafile vulnerability The Windows Metafile vulnerability—also called the Metafile Image Code Execution and abbreviated MICE—is a security vulnerability in the way some versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system handled images in the Windows Metafile format. It permits arbitrary code to be executed on affected computers without the permission of their users. It was discovered on December 27, 2005, and the first reports of affected computers were announced within 24 hours. Microsoft released a high-priority update to eliminate this vulnerability via Windows Update on January 5, 2006. Attacks using this vulnerability are known as WMF exploits. The vulnerability was located in gdi32.dll and existed in all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.0 to Windows Server 2003 R2. However, attack vectors only exist in NT-based versions of Windows (Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003). Exploits taking advantage of the vulnerability on Windows NT-based systems facilitated the propagation of various types of malware, typically through drive-by downloads. Due to extreme impact, this bug won the 2007 Pwnie Award for "Mass 0wnage" and "Breaking the Internet". All versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system support the Windows Metafile graphics standard. All versions from Windows 3.0 to Windows Server 2003 R2 contain this security flaw. However, Windows NT 4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3589914 | 310,445 |
Wireless power transfer When the harvested power is used to supply the power of wireless information transmitters, the network is known as Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT); whereas when it is used to supply the power of wireless information receivers, it is known as a Wireless Powered Communication Network (WPCN). These are the different wireless power technologies: Electric and magnetic fields are created by charged particles in matter such as electrons. A stationary charge creates an electrostatic field in the space around it. A steady current of charges (direct current, DC) creates a static magnetic field around it. The above fields contain energy, but cannot carry power because they are static. However time-varying fields can carry power. Accelerating electric charges, such as are found in an alternating current (AC) of electrons in a wire, create time-varying electric and magnetic fields in the space around them. These fields can exert oscillating forces on the electrons in a receiving "antenna", causing them to move back and forth. These represent alternating current which can be used to power a load. The oscillating electric and magnetic fields surrounding moving electric charges in an antenna device can be divided into two regions, depending on distance "D" from the antenna. At large relative distance, the near-field components of electric and magnetic fields are approximately quasi-static oscillating dipole fields | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=570662 | 270,062 |
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