Conflict Diamonds

"As a result of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, diamonds are among the most monitored and audited of any natural resource in the world. This system has proven to be an essential and effective tool in combating the scourge of conflict diamonds." by Eli Izhakoff, Chairman World Diamond Council.

The Kimberley Process was launched in 2003 to control and monitor the trade in rough diamonds. In just three years, the international community has made remarkable strides to certify the $30 billion annual international rough diamond trade by creating a documentary record of rough diamonds from mine to polishing. Rough diamonds must be shipped in sealed containers and exported with a Kimberley Process Certificate which certifies that the diamonds are conflict free.

Forest Harvesting

The harvesting operation are carried out based on scientific principles of forestry. The trees, which are to be felled are marked in the coupes which are due for felling. Marking is an act of identifying and numbering suitable trees. It is done in accordance with marking rules prescribed. This work is performed by Territorial Forest Divisions. After marking, the coupes are handed over to the by Production Divisions for felling.

The felling operations are undertaken in the coupes observing all precautions. Felling normally commences in the month of September/October. After the felling of trees, logging, dragging, stacking etc. is done in coupes. Thereafter, the forest produce like timber, poles, fuel, bamboo and khair are brought to the respective depots of the divisions for sale and disposal. Newly harvested material normally starts arriving in the depot during October.

Types of Investment Companies

Legally known as an "open-end company," a mutual fund is one of three basic types of investment companies. While this brochure discusses only mutual funds, you should be aware that other pooled investment vehicles exist and may offer features that you desire. The two other basic types of investment companies are:

Closed-end funds — which, unlike mutual funds, sell a fixed number of shares at one time (in an initial public offering) that later trade on a secondary market; and

Unit Investment Trusts (UITs) — which make a one-time public offering of only a specific, fixed number of redeemable securities called "units" and which will terminate and dissolve on a date specified at the creation of the UIT.

"Exchange-traded funds" (ETFs) are a type of investment company that aims to achieve the same return as a particular market index. They can be either open-end companies or UITs. But ETFs are not considered to be, and are not permitted to call themselves, mutual funds.

FDI

Foreign investment is essential for the long-term health of the UK economy because of its contribution to creating and underpinning British jobs, as well as boosting local and regional economies.

International investors are some of our biggest and most innovative manufacturers, and service providers, bringing enormous benefits to the UK. These include not only job and wealth creation, but also an injection of innovation to process, product and organisational structure, adding to UK capacity in output, R&D and exports.

International investment allows companies to achieve growth and economies of scale that domestic markets alone would not allow. This makes them more productive and profitable with greater capacity for job and wealth creation. The expansion of high productivity businesses helps strengthen competition within the economy as companies are exposed to new ideas and practices.

Lead-Based Paint

Lead has long been recognized as a harmful environmental pollutant. In late 1991, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services called lead the "number one environmental threat to the health of children in the United States." There are many ways in which humans are exposed to lead: through air, drinking water, food, contaminated soil, deteriorating paint, and dust. Airborne lead enters the body when an individual breathes or swallows lead particles or dust once it has settled. Before it was known how harmful lead could be, it was used in paint, gasoline, water pipes, and many other products.

Old lead-based paint is the most significant source of lead exposure in the U.S. today. Most homes built before 1960 contain heavily leaded paint. Some homes built as recently as 1978 may also contain lead paint. This paint could be on window frames, walls, the outside of homes, or other surfaces. Harmful exposures to lead can be created when lead-based paint is improperly removed from surfaces by dry scraping, sanding, or open-flame burning. High concentrations of airborne lead particles in homes can also result from lead dust from outdoor sources, including contaminated soil tracked inside, and use of lead in certain indoor activities such as soldering and stained-glass making.

IBM Plans 'Brain-Like' Computers

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.

Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa. The resulting technology could be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making or even image recognition.

"The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration.

"There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs," he said. "The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain."

The Water Cycle

Earth's water is always in movement, and the water cycle, also known as the hydrologic cycle, describes the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the surface of the Earth. Since the water cycle is truly a "cycle," there is no beginning or end. Water can change states among liquid, vapor, and ice at various places in the water cycle, with these processes happening in the blink of an eye and over millions of years.

Although the balance of water on Earth remains fairly constant over time, individual water molecules can come and go in a hurry. The water in the apple you ate yesterday may have fallen as rain half-way around the world last year or could have been used 100 million years ago by Mama Dinosaur to give her baby a bath.

Skin cancer

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States. The two most common types are basal cell cancer and squamous cell cancer. They usually form on the head, face, neck, hands and arms. Another type of skin cancer, melanoma, is more dangerous but less common.

Anyone can get skin cancer, but it is more common in people who
* Spend a lot of time in the sun or have been sunburned

* Have light-colored skin, hair and eyes

* Have a family member with skin cancer

* Are over age 50

You should have your doctor check any suspicious skin markings and any changes in the way your skin looks. Treatment is more likely to work well when cancer is found early. If not treated, some types of skin cancer cells can spread to other tissues and organs.

Botanic fruit and culinary fruit

Many true fruits, in a botanical sense, are treated as vegetables in cooking and food preparation because they are not sweet. These botanical fruits include cucurbits (e.g., squash, pumpkin, and cucumber), tomato, peas, beans, corn, eggplant, and sweet pepper, spices, such as allspice and chillies.Occasionally, though rarely, a culinary "fruit" is branded as a true fruit in the botanical sense. For example, rhubarb is often referred to as a fruit, because it is used to make sweet desserts such as pies, though only the petiole of the rhubarb plant is edible.In the culinary sense, a fruit is usually any sweet tasting plant product associated with seed(s), a vegetable is any savoury or less sweet plant product, and a nut any hard, oily, and shelled plant product.

Although a nut is a type of fruit, it is also a popular term for edible seeds, such as peanuts (which are actually a legume) and pistachios. Technically, a cereal grain is a fruit termed a caryopsis. However, the fruit wall is very thin and fused to the seed coat so almost all of the edible grain is actually a seed. Therefore, cereal grains, such as corn, wheat and rice are better considered edible seeds, although some references list them as fruits.Edible gymnosperm seeds are often misleadingly given fruit names, e.g. pine nuts, ginkgo nuts, and juniper berries. A Folk taxonomy is a vernacular naming system which describes how non-scientists categorize items.

Google Abandons Deal With Yahoo

Google has decided to abandon its advertising partnership with Yahoo to avoid having a "protracted legal battle" with regulators.

The deal involved Google providing some of the advertising around Yahoo's search results and would have been worth $800m (£494m) a year to Yahoo.

It was originally announced in June but has faced anti-trust objections.

Yahoo said in a statement it was disappointed that Google had decided not to fight for the deal in court.

Yahoo was relying on the deal with Google to help to placate shareholders angry about Yahoo rejecting Microsoft's takeover offer.

Google said it would not allow the prospect of a legal battle to distract it from its core mission.

"That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on," Google said in a blog.

Martial arts

Martial arts are systems of codified practices and traditions of training for combat. While they may be studied for various reasons, martial arts share a single objective: to defeat one or more people physically and to defend oneself or others from physical threat. In addition, some martial arts are linked to spiritual or religious beliefs/philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism or Shinto while others have their own spiritual or non-spiritual code of honour. Many arts are also practised competitively most commonly as combat sports, but may also be in the form of dance.

The word 'martial' derives from the name of Mars, the Roman god of war. The term 'martial arts' literally means arts of war. This term comes from 15th century Europeans who were referring to their own fighting arts that are today known as Historical European martial arts. A practitioner of martial arts is referred to as a martial artist.

Study in India

For all those who have dreams and aspirations for quality education, India is the perfect destination. With 343 universities and 17000 colleges, India offers a wide spectrum of courses that are recognised globally. Apart from undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral courses, there are many training and diploma-level institutes and polytechnics that cater to the growing demand for skill-based and vocational education.

Studying in India, the second largest higher education network in the World, is an enriching experience in itself. A welcoming atmosphere, non-discriminative approach and an assured educational and career growth is what attracts students from all over the world to India. There are universities focusing on the study of medicine, arts & language, journalism, social work, business, commerce, planning, architecture, engineering, and other specialised studies. Most Indian universities teach in English Medium and conduct special language classes for those weak in English.

The Quality education that India offers is within the reach of every income-group considering the reasonable fee structure. With 66 distance education institutions functioning in 60 universities besides 11 open universities, India has an enlarged outreach of distance education as well. So, visit India and be a part of an educational system that lives on the values of quality, growth and truthfulness

In The Hunt For Extrasolar Planets, A New Find Is Shattering Records Left And Right.

A planet called WASP-12b is the hottest planet ever discovered (about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,200 degrees Celsius), and orbits its star faster and closer in than any other known world

This sizzling monster whips its way around its parent star about once a day (for comparison, the fastest-circling planet in the solar system, Mercury, orbits the sun once every 88 days).

To make such swift progress, the planet circles extremely close-in to its star — about 2 percent of the distance from the Earth to the sun, in fact, or 2 million miles (3.4 million kilometers).

Helsinki Floods

Petteri Sulonen, Helsinki, Finland:

"The ongoing winter in Finland has been extremely freaky: very mild, with record storms, culminating in a rise in the sea level of nearly two metres in Helsinki.

"The city erected flood barriers of cardboard bales, but they didn't do much to help; the water reached the streets."

The Controlled Addition And Removal Of An Electron Represents a Milestone In Atom-Scale Science

As reported in the July 23 issue of Science magazine, IBM scientists Jascha Repp and Gerhard Meyer placed and removed a single electron on an individual gold (Au) atom by positioning the tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) above the atom and applying a voltage pulse. This pulse does not affect the lateral position of the gold atom adsorbed on an ultrathin (only two atomic layers thick) insulating sodium chloride (NaCl) film on a metal substrate.

Most importantly, both charge states of the atom are stable, that is, an additional electron remains on it until it is removed by a voltage pulse of reversed sign. The stabilization of the different charge states is achieved by tiny changes in the positions of the atoms in the ionic film. Owing to the film's large ionic polarization, the Cl- ion underneath the gold moves downward, while the surrounding Na+ ions move upward. In the STM image, the new charge state of the gold atom appears as a circular trough around the atom.

Jascha Repp, who designed and carried out the experiment, explains: "A simple electron transfer with no lasting changes of ion-core positions would not be stable because the electron residing in an excited state on the manipulated Au atom would rapidly tunnel beneath the insulating layer into the metal of the substrate."

"Our discovery is an important step towards using a single atom or molecule as a basic building block for possible future atomic-scale technology," says Gerhard Meyer, who leads the STM-related research efforts at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. "In the nanoworld, creating complex functionalized structures will require that we control not only the position of atoms, but also the electronic and chemical parameters as well." In 1990, Don Eigler of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, showed that an STM can place atoms on top of a surface with atomic precision. Now, a new capability has been achieved by manipulating the electrons of an atom. Jascha Repp points out: "The chemical and physical properties of ions in general are qualitatively different from those of the corresponding neutral atoms. Therefore our findings will have an impact not only on physics but also on chemistry. This research is likely to aid the atom-scale study of such diverse phenomenon as chemical catalysis to quantum information technology."

To interpret the experimental findings, Fredrik Olsson and Mats Persson from Chalmers University used first-principles density functional theory calculations. In agreement with the experiments, the theoretical investigation also finds two different stable states for Au atoms: One is nearly neutral, the other is negatively charged by one electron. The simple physical mechanism responsible for the existence of different charge states suggests that this finding is a common phenomenon for adsorbates on polar insulating films supported by a metal substrate.

The collaboration between IBM and Chalmers University was conducted within the framework of the European Union (EU) network on "Atomic and Molecular Manipulation as a new Tool for Science and Technology".

Obama Statement on Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw

Chicago, IL - Senator Barack Obama today released the following statement of condolence on the passing of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw.

"I offer my deep condolences to the people of India, on the passing of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. He was a legendary soldier, a patriot, and an inspiration to his fellow citizens. Field Marshal Manekshaw provided an example of personal bravery, self-sacrifice, and steadfast devotion to duty that began before India's independence, and will deservedly be remembered far into the future."

Oligonucleotides

The use of synthetic oligonucleotides in gene therapy is to inactivate the genes involved in the disease process. There are several methods by which this is achieved. One strategy uses antisense specific to the target gene to disrupt the transcription of the faulty gene. Another uses small molecules of RNA called siRNA to signal the cell to cleave specific unique sequences in the mRNA transcript of the faulty gene, disrupting translation of the faulty mRNA, and therefore expression of the gene. A further strategy uses double stranded oligodeoxynucleotides as a decoy for the transcription factors that are required to activate the transcription of the target gene. The transcription factors bind to the decoys instead of the promoter of the faulty gene, which reduces the transcription of the target gene, lowering expression. Additionally, single stranded DNA oligonucleotides have been used to direct a single base change within a mutant gene.The oligonucleotide is designed to anneal with complementarity to the target gene with the exception of a central base, the target base, which serves as the template base for repair. This technique is referred to as oligonucleotide mediated gene repair, targeted gene repair, or targeted nucleotide alteration.

Microbial biodegradation

Interest in the microbial biodegradation of pollutants has intensified in recent years as mankind strives to find sustainable ways to cleanup contaminated environments. These bioremediation and biotransformation methods endeavour to harness the astonishing, naturally occurring, ability of microbial xenobiotic metabolism to degrade, transform or accumulate a huge range of compounds including hydrocarbons (e.g. oil), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pharmaceutical substances, radionuclides and metals. Major methodological breakthroughs in recent years have enabled detailed genomic, metagenomic, proteomic, bioinformatic and other high-throughput analyses of environmentally relevant microorganisms providing unprecedented insights into key biodegradative pathways and the ability of organisms to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
The elimination of a wide range of pollutants and wastes from the environment is an absolute requirement to promote a sustainable development of our society with low environmental impact. Biological processes play a major role in the removal of contaminants and they take advantage of the astonishing catabolic versatility of microorganisms to degrade/convert such compounds. New methodological breakthroughs in sequencing, genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and imaging are producing vast amounts of information.

Cell biology

Cell biology (also called cellular biology or formerly cytology, from the Greek kytos, "container") is an academic discipline that studies cells – their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level. Cell biology research extends to both the great diversity of single-celled organisms like bacteria and the many specialized cells in multicellular organisms like humans.

Knowing the composition of cells and how cells work is fundamental to all of the biological sciences. Appreciating the similarities and also differences between cell types is particularly important to the fields of cell and molecular biology. These fundamental similarities and differences provide a unifying theme, allowing the principles learned from studying one cell type to be extrapolated and generalized to other cell types. Research in cell biology is closely related to genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology and developmental biology.

Google Earth Plus

Google Earth can be upgraded to a Plus edition for a $20 annual subscription fee. Google Earth Plus is an individual-oriented paid subscription upgrade to Google Earth and adds the following features:

* GPS integration: read tracks and waypoints from a GPS device. A variety of third party applications have been created which provide this functionality using the basic version of Google Earth by generating KML or KMZ files based on user-specified or user-recorded waypoints. However, Google Earth Plus provides direct support for the Magellan and Garmin product lines, which together hold a large share of the GPS market. The Linux version of the Google Earth Plus application does not include any GPS functionality.
* Higher resolution printing.
* Customer support via email.
* Data importer: read address points from CSV files; limited to 100 points/addresses. A feature allowing path and polygon annotations, which can be exported to KML, was formerly only available to Plus users, but was made free in version 4.0.2416.
* Higher data download speeds

Benefits of Remote Service Software

Remote service software helps to:

* Increase uptime, improve performance and extend the life of a device
* Control service costs by deploying patches and upgrades remotely, and ensure a first-time fix when an onsite visit is required
* Streamline administration of pay-per-use models, with automated usage monitoring
* Focus highly trained service teams on preventative maintenance, by diagnosing and repairing issues before they cause system failure
* Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

Manufacturers are using aftermarket service a competitive differentiator. Remote service software provides a platform for manufacturers to offer and meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs) without increasing the size of their service team.

Custom software development

Custom software development, also known as custom software engineering, defines omitting of predeveloped (template or boxed) solutions and views. If a customer wants to believe that their favour is unique and putting their ideas into practice, custom software development technologies are custom approaches to solving their problems. Finding new creative decisions in order to meet the specific requirements and preferences of the customer as quickly as possible may be achieved with custom software development.

A goal of custom software solutions may be to develop not for the mass auditorium (users), but rather developed to be unique, for a single customer (user) or a group. Custom developed software is encouraged to take under one hat the most progressive technologies alone with preferences and expectations of the customer. Custom developed software may be designed in stage by stage processes, allowing all nuances and possible hidden dangers to be taken into account, including issues which were not mentioned in the specifications.

Pre-developed software packages, in most cases, may not be modifiable or customized to ones needs; and are usually available to all unrelated users or groups of users. For example, software designed for a cell phone manufacturer would be 'custom,' even though there could be thousands of individual users. Software written for use by many other manufacturers would be packaged, even if there were only a single user in each factory.

VersionTracker

VersionTracker.com is a website that tracks software releases. It started out originally as a Mac OS software tracker, eventually expanding into Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Palm OS.

VersionTracker does not host the majority of the software listed (it merely links to them), only in special agreements with the developers.

VersionTracker also offers a software called VersionTracker Pro that checks software versions on a user's computer and then queries its database to see if any updates are available. This feature is available only to paid subscribers. Browsing and searching the database is free.

Data extraction

Data extraction is the act or process of retrieving (binary) data out of (usually unstructured or badly structured) data sources for further data processing or data storage (data migration). The import into the intermediate extracting system is thus usually followed by data transformation and possibly the addition of metadata prior to export to another stage in the data workflow.

Usually, the term data extraction is applied when (experimental) data is first imported into a computer from primary sources, like measuring or recording devices. Today's electronic devices will usually present a electrical connector (e.g. USB) through which 'raw data' can be streamed into a personal computer.

Hierarchical model

In a hierarchical data model, data is organized into a tree-like structure. The structure allows repeating information using parent/child relationships: each parent can have many children but each child only has one parent. All attributes of a specific record are listed under an entity type. In a database, an entity type is the equivalent of a table; each individual record is represented as a row and an attribute as a column. Entity types are related to each other using 1: N mapping, also known as one-to-many relationships. The most recognized example of hierarchical model database is an IMS designed by IBM.

Data quality

1. Data Quality refers to the degree of excellence exhibited by the data in relation to the portrayal of the actual phenomena. GIS Glossary

2. The state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness and accuracy that makes data appropriate for a specific use. Government of British Columbia

3. The totality of features and characteristics of data that bears on their ability to satisfy a given purpose; the sum of the degrees of excellence for factors related to data

Image spam

Image spam is a kind of E-mail spam where the message text of the spam is presented as a picture in an image file. Since most modern graphical E-mail client software will render the image file by default, presenting the message image directly to the user, it is highly effective at circumventing normal E-mail filtering software.

The basic rationale behind image spam is that it is difficult to detect using spam filtering software designed to detect patterns in text in the plain-text E-mail body. Attempts to filter text in image spam are easily defeated because optical character recognition of text in image spam can be prevented using a variety of obfuscation techniques which will not prevent the spam image from being read by human beings. This is the same phenomenon exploited by CAPTCHAs, but put to the ends of spammers, rather than to deter their activity.

Gathering of addresses

In order to send spam, spammers need to obtain the e-mail addresses of the intended recipients. To this end, both spammers themselves and list merchants gather huge lists of potential e-mail addresses. Since spam is, by definition, unsolicited, this address harvesting is done without the consent (and sometimes against the expressed will) of the address owners. As a consequence, spammers' address lists are inaccurate. A single spam run may target tens of millions of possible addresses — many of which are invalid, malformed, or undeliverable.

Sometimes, if the sent spam is "bounced" or sent back to the sender by various programs that eliminate spam, or if the recipient clicks on an unsubscribe link, that may cause that email address to be marked as "valid", which is interpreted by the spammer as "send me more".

Blacklisting

Attempts to stop spam by blacklisting sender's IP addresses still allows a small percentage through. Most IP addresses are dynamic, i.e. they are frequently changing. An ISP, or any organization directly connected to the Internet, gets a block of real Internet addresses when they register in the DNS. Within that block, they assign individual addresses to customers as needed. A dial-up customer may get a new IP address each time they connect. By the time that address appears on blacklists all over the world, the spammer will have new addresses for the next run. There are 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses on the Internet. The game of keeping up with these rapidly changing IP addresses has been facetiously called "whack-a-mole".

So called policy lists are black lists that contain IP addresses on a preventive basis. An IP address can be listed therein even if no spam has ever been sent from it, because it has been variously classified as a dial-up address, end-user address, or residential address, with no formal definition of such classification schemes. Not requiring evidence of spam for each enlisted address, these lists can collect a greater number of addresses and thus block more spam. However, the policies devised are not authoritative, since they have not been issued by the legitimate user of an IP address, and the resulting lists are therefore not universally accepted.

Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL)

This Microsoft license allows for distribution of derived code so long as the modified source files are included and retain the Ms-RL. The Ms-RL allows those files in the distribution that do not contain code originally licensed under Ms-RL to be licensed according to the copyright holder's choosing. This is equivalent to the CDDL or LGPL (GPL with a typical "linking exception"). Initially known as the Microsoft Community License, it was renamed during the OSI approval process.

On December 9, 2005, the Ms-RL license was submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval by John Cowan. OSI then contacted Microsoft and asked if they wanted OSI to proceed. Microsoft replied that they did not wish to be reactive and that they needed time to review such a decision.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July 2007, Bill Hilf, director of Microsoft's work with open source projects, announced that Microsoft had formally submitted Ms-PL and Ms-RL to OSI for approval. It was approved on October 12, 2007 along with the Ms-PL. According to the Free Software Foundation, it is a free software license. However, unlike the Microsoft Public License, it is not compatible with the GNU GPL.

Concurrent Versions System

In the field of software development, the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, provides a version control system based on open-source code. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers (potentially widely separated in space and/or time) to collaborate. Dick Grune developed CVS in the 1980s. CVS has become popular in the open source software world and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Types of systems psychology

In the scientific literature different kind of systems psychology have been mentioned in the scientific literature:

Applied systems psychology
De Greene in 1970 described applied systems psychology as being connected with engineering psychology and human factor.

Cognitive systems theory
Cognitive systems psychology is a part of cognitive psychology and like existential psychology, attempts to dissolve the barrier between conscious and the unconscious mind.

Contract-systems psychology
Contract-systems psychology is about the human systems actualization through praticipative organizations.

Family systems psychology
Family systems psychology is a more general name for the subfield of family thearpists and like Murray Bowen, Michael E. Kerr, and Baard. and researchers have begun to theoretize a psychology of the family as a system.

Organismic-systems psychology
Through the application of organismic-systems biology to human behavior Ludwig von Bertalanffy conceived and developed the organismic-systems psychology, as the theoretical prospect needed for the gradual comprehension of the various ways human personalities may evolve and how could they evolve properly, being supported by a holistic interpretation of human behavior.

Developmental robotics

Developmental Robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a methodology that uses metaphors from developmental psychology to develop controllers for autonomous robots. The focus is on a single robot going through stages of autonomous mental development. Researchers in this field study artificial emotions, self-motivation, and other methods of self-organization.

DevRob is related to, but differs from, evolutionary robotics (ER). ER uses populations of robots that evolve over time, whereas DevRob is interested in how the organization of a single robot's control system develops through experience, over time.

DevRob is also related to work done in the domains of Robotics, Artificial Life.

Similar to developmental robotics, Epigenetic robotics is an interdisciplinary research area with the goal of understanding biological systems by the integration between neuroscience, developmental psychology and engineering sciences. Epigenetic systems are characterized by a prolonged developmental process through which varied and complex cognitive and perceptual structures emerge as a result of the interaction of an embodied system with a physical and social environment. An additional goal is to enable robots to autonomously develop skills for any particular environment instead of programming them for a specific environment.

Open source software

Open source software is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user generated content.

Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange has been one of the most significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that occurred after 1492. Many new and different goods were exchanged between the two hemispheres of the Earth, and it began a new revolution in the Americas and in Europe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus' first voyage launched an era of large-scale contact between the Old and the New World that resulted in this ecological revolution: hence the name "Columbian" Exchange.

Pre-Columbian Islamic contact theories

Pre-Columbian Islamic contact theories are theories which contend that medieval Muslim explorers from the Islamic world (specifically Al-Andalus, Africa or China) may have reached the Americas (and possibly made contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas) at some point before Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Americas in 1492. Proponents of these theories cite as evidence reports of expeditions and voyages conducted by Muslim navigators and adventurers who they allege reached the Americas from the late 9th century onwards

Cargo

Carg is a term used to denote goods or produce being transported generally for commercial gain, usually on a ship, plane, train, van or truck. Nowadays containers are used in most intermodal long-haul cargo transport.

Cargo represents a concern to U.S. national security. It was reported out of Washington, DC that in 2003 over 6 million cargo containers are entering the United States each year. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the security of this magnitude of cargo has become highlighted. The latest US Government response to this threat is the CSI: Container Security Initiative. CSI is a program intended to help increase security for containerized cargo shipped to the United States from around the world.

Computer-aided software engineering

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is the use of software tools to assist in the development and maintenance of software. Tools used to assist in this way are known as CASE Tools.

Some typical CASE tools are:

* Code generation tools

* Data modeling tools

* UML

* Refactoring tools

* QVT or Model transformation Tools

* Configuration management tools including revision control

Alpha Five

Alpha Five relational database management system and Rapid Application Development system (RAD) for building Windows desktop and Web (including AJAX) applications.

It is created by Alpha Software, Inc., which has been continually producing end-user and developer database application software since 1982. Finalist in the DR Dobbs JOLT awards for 2008 as the Best Development environment with Alpha Five v8 and winner of Product of the Year award from CRN. Applications can be created against its built-in DBF engine and against MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, Enterprise DB, Postgress and any other SQL database engines through ODBC sources. The latest version now incorporates Portable SQL, a feature that allows users to switch database back ends without having to rewrite queries.

Relational model

The relational model for database management is a database model based on predicate logic and set theory. It was first formulated and proposed in 1969 by Edgar Codd with aims that included avoiding, without loss of completeness, the need to write computer programs to express database queries and enforce database integrity constraints. "Relation" is a mathematical term for "table", and thus "relational" roughly means "based on tables". It did not originally refer to the links or "keys" between tables, contrary to popular interpretation of the name.

CrossFTP Server

CrossFTP Server is free secure FTP server program for multiple platforms. It supports FTP, FTPS, and the monitoring of the connections. Its main features are:

* Multi platform support and multithreaded design.
* UTF-8 directory encoding for internationalization support.
* User virtual directory, write permission, idle time-out and upload/download bandwidth limitation support.
* You can monitor all the user activities.
* Anonymous login support.
* Both upload and download files are resumable.
* Handles both ASCII and binary data transfers.
* IP restriction support to allow/ban IPs.
* Database and LDAP can be used to store user data.
* All the FTP messages are customizable.
* Implicit/explicit SSL/TLS support.
* MDTM support - your users can change the date-time stamp of files.
* "MODE Z" support for faster data upload/download.

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE)

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is an approach to apply metaheuristic search techniques like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search to software engineering problems. It is inspired by the observation that many activities in software engineering can be formulated as optimization problems. Due to the computational complexity of these problems, exact optimization techniques of operations research like linear programming or dynamic programming are mostly impractical for large scale software engineering problems. Because of this, researchers and practitioners have used metaheuristic search techniques to find near optimal or good-enough solutions.

solar tracker

A solar tracker is a device for orienting a solar photovoltaic panel or concentrating solar reflector or lens toward the sun. Concentrators, especially in solar cell applications, require a high degree of accuracy to ensure that the concentrated sunlight is directed precisely to the powered device, which is at (or near) the focal point of the reflector or lens. Non-concentrating applications require less accuracy, and a tracker is not necessary, but can substantially improve the amount of power produced by a system by enhancing morning and afternoon performance.

Pharmacists

Pharmacists are health professionals who practice the art and science of pharmacy. In their traditional role, pharmacists typically take a request for medicines from a prescribing health care provider in the form of a medical prescription and dispense the medication to the patient and counsel them on the proper use and adverse effects of that medication. In this role, pharmacists ensure the safe and effective use of medications. Pharmacists also participate in disease state management, where they optimise and monitor drug therapy – often in collaboration with physicians and/or other health professionals.

HDTV blur

HDTV blur is a common term used to describe a number of different artifacts on consumer modern high definition television sets:

The following factors are generally the primary or secondary causes of HDTV blur; in some cases more than one of these factors may be in play at the studio or receiver end of the transmission chain.

• Pixel response time on LCD displays (blur in the color response of the active pixel)
• Slower camera Shutter speeds common in hollywood production films (blur in the HDV content of the film)
• Blur from eye tracking fast moving objects on sample-and-hold LCD, Plasma, or Microdisplay.
• Resolution resampling (blur due to resizing image to fit the native resolution of the HDTV)
• Blur due to 3:2 pulldown and/or motion-speed irregularities in framerate conversions from film to video
• Computer generated motion blur introduced by video games

Acoustic Intelligence

Sensors relatively close to a nuclear event, or a high-explosive test simulating a nuclear event, can detect, using acoustic methods, the pressure produced by the blast. These include infrasound microbarographs (acoustic pressure sensors) that detect very low-frequency sound waves in the atmosphere produced by natural and man-made events.

Closely related to the microbarographs, but detecting pressure waves in water, are hydro-acoustic sensors, both underwater microphones and specialized seismic sensors that detect the motion of islands.

Derivative action

The derivative part is concerned with the rate-of-change of the error with time: If the measured variable approaches the setpoint rapidly, then the actuator is backed off early to allow it to coast to the required level; conversely if the measured value begins to move rapidly away from the setpoint, extra effort is applied — in proportion to that rapidity — to try to maintain it.

Derivative action makes a control system behave much more intelligently. On systems like the temperature of a furnace, or perhaps the motion-control of a heavy item like a gun or camera on a moving vehicle, the derivative action of a well-tuned PID controller can allow it to reach and maintain a setpoint better than most skilled human operators could.

System dynamics

System Dynamics was founded in the late 1950s by Jay W. Forrester of the MIT Sloan School of Management with the establishment of the MIT System Dynamics Group. At that time, he began applying what he had learned about systems during his work in electrical engineering to everyday kinds of systems. Determining the exact date of the founding of the field of system dynamics is difficult and involves a certain degree of arbitrariness.

Jay W. Forrester joined the faculty of the Sloan School at MIT in 1956, where he then developed what is now System Dynamics. The first published article by Jay W. Forrester in the Harvard Business Review on "Industrial Dynamics", was published in 1958. The members of System Dynamics Society have chosen 1957 to mark the occasion as it is the year in which the work leading to that article, which described the dynamics of a manufacturing supply chain, was done.

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist feminism states that capitalism, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of women's oppression.

According to Marxist theory, in capitalist societies the individual is shaped by class relations; that is, people's capacities, needs and interests are seen to be determined by the mode of production that characterises the society they inhabit. Marxist feminists see gender inequality as determined ultimately by the capitalist mode of production. Gender oppression is class oppression and women's subordination is seen as a form of class oppression which is maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class. Marxist feminists have extended traditional Marxist analysis by looking at domestic labour as well as wage work in order to support their position.

Health psychology

Health psychology concerns itself with understanding how biology, behavior, and social context influence health and illness. Health psychologists generally work alongside other medical professionals in clinical settings, although many also teach and conduct research. Although its early beginnings can be traced to the kindred field of clinical psychology, four different approaches to health psychology have been defined: clinical, public health, community and critical health psychology.

Quantitative psychology

Quantitative psychology involves the application of mathematical and statistical modeling in psychological research, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing and explaining behavioral data. The term Quantitative psychology is relatively new and little used (only recently have Ph.D. programs in quantitative psychology been formed), and it loosely covers the longer standing subfields psychometrics and mathematical psychology.

Psychometrics is the field of psychology concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. Measurement of these unobservable phenomena is difficult, and much of the research and accumulated knowledge in this discipline has been developed in an attempt to properly define and quantify such phenomena. Psychometric research typically involves two major research tasks, namely: (i) the construction of instruments and procedures for measurement; and (ii) the development and refinement of theoretical approaches to measurement.

Nihilism

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, not something) is a philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following:
• there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator,
• a "true morality" does not exist, and
• objective secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has, in a sense, no truth, and no action is objectively preferable to any other.
The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously with anomie to denote a general mood of despair at the pointlessness of existence.