Random Articles (Page 6)

Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Physiognomy

🔗 Psychology 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Occult

Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις, 'physis', meaning "nature", and 'gnomon', meaning "judge" or "interpreter") is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. The term can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object, or terrain without reference to its implied characteristics—as in the physiognomy of an individual plant (see plant life-form) or of a plant community (see vegetation).

Physiognomy as a practice meets the contemporary definition of pseudoscience and it is so regarded among academic circles because of its unsupported claims; popular belief in the practice of physiognomy is nonetheless still widespread and modern advances in artificial intelligence have sparked renewed interest in the field of study. The practice was well-accepted by ancient Greek philosophers, but fell into disrepute in the Middle Ages while practised by vagabonds and mountebanks. It revived and was popularised by Johann Kaspar Lavater, before falling from favor in the late 19th century. Physiognomy in the 19th century is particularly noted as a basis for scientific racism. Physiognomy as it is understood today is a subject of renewed scientific interest, especially as it relates to machine learning and facial recognition technologyThe main interest for scientists today are the risks, including privacy concerns, of physiognomy in the context of facial recognition algorithms.

Physiognomy is sometimes referred to as 'anthroposcopy', a term originating in the 19th century.

🔗 Hoag's Object

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. The galaxy is named after Arthur Hoag who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy with eight billion stars, spanning roughly 100,000 light years.

Discussed on

🔗 Gunslinger Effect

🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Physiology

The gunslinger effect, also sometimes called Bohr's law or the gunfighter's dilemma, is a psychophysical theory which says that an intentional or willed movement is slower than an automatic or reaction movement. The concept is named after physicist Niels Bohr, who first deduced that the person who draws second in a gunfight will actually win the shoot-out.

Discussed on

🔗 Sloyd

🔗 Education

Sloyd (Slöjd), also known as Educational sloyd, is a system of handicraft-based education started by Uno Cygnaeus in Finland in 1865. The system was further refined and promoted worldwide, and was taught in the United States until the early 20th Century. It is still taught as a compulsory subject in Finnish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian schools.

Discussed on

  • "Sloyd" | 2017-10-22 | 131 Upvotes 38 Comments

🔗 Gotthard Base Tunnel

🔗 Trains 🔗 Bridges and Tunnels

The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT; German: Gotthard-Basistunnel, Italian: Galleria di base del San Gottardo, Romansh: Tunnel da basa dal Son Gottard) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. It opened on 1 June 2016, and full service began on 11 December 2016. With a route length of 57.09 km (35.5 mi), it is the world's longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps. It lies at the heart of the Gotthard axis and constitutes the third tunnel connecting the cantons of Uri and Ticino, after the Gotthard Tunnel and the Gotthard Road Tunnel.

The link consists of two single-track tunnels connecting Erstfeld (Uri) with Bodio (Ticino) and passing below Sedrun (Graubünden). It is part of the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA) project, which also includes the Ceneri Base Tunnel further south (scheduled to open late 2020) and the Lötschberg Base Tunnel on the other main north–south axis. It is referred to as a "base tunnel" since it bypasses most of the existing Gotthard railway line, a winding mountain route opened in 1882 across the Saint-Gotthard Massif, which was operating at its capacity before the opening of the GBT. The new base tunnel establishes a direct route usable by high-speed rail and heavy freight trains.

The main purpose of the Gotthard Base Tunnel is to increase local transport capacity through the Alpine barrier, especially for freight, notably on the Rotterdam–Basel–Genoa corridor, and more specifically to shift freight volumes from trucks to freight trains. This both significantly reduces the danger of fatal road crashes involving trucks, and reduces the environmental damage caused by heavy trucks. The tunnel provides a faster connection between the canton of Ticino and the rest of Switzerland, as well as between northern and southern Europe, cutting the Basel/Zürich–Lugano–Milan journey time for passenger trains by one hour (and from Lucerne to Bellinzona by 45 minutes).

After 64 percent of Swiss voters accepted the NRLA project in a 1992 referendum, first preparatory and exploratory work began in 1996. The official start of construction began on 4 November 1999 at Amsteg. Drilling operations in the eastern tunnel were completed on 15 October 2010 in a breakthrough ceremony broadcast live on Swiss TV, and in the western tunnel on 23 March 2011. The tunnel's constructor, AlpTransit Gotthard AG, originally planned to hand over the tunnel to Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) in operating condition in December 2016 but, on 4 February 2014, the handover date was changed to 5 June 2016 with the start of an 850-day opening countdown calendar on the AlpTransit homepage. As of 1998, the total projected cost of the project was CHF 6.323 billion; as of December 2015, the final cost is projected as CHF 9.560 billion. Nine people died during construction.

Discussed on

🔗 Toba catastrophe theory

🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Indonesia

The Toba supereruption was a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the Earth's largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode.

In 1993, science journalist Ann Gibbons posited that a population bottleneck occurred in human evolution about 70,000 years ago, and she suggested that this was caused by the eruption. Geologist Michael R. Rampino of New York University and volcanologist Stephen Self of the University of Hawaii at Manoa support her suggestion. In 1998, the bottleneck theory was further developed by anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Both the link and global winter theories are controversial. The Toba event is the most closely studied supereruption.

Discussed on

🔗 Reservoir computing

🔗 Computing

Reservoir computing is a framework for computation that may be viewed as an extension of neural networks. Typically an input signal is fed into a fixed (random) dynamical system called a reservoir and the dynamics of the reservoir map the input to a higher dimension. Then a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The main benefit is that training is performed only at the readout stage and the reservoir is fixed. Liquid-state machines and echo state networks are two major types of reservoir computing. One important feature of this system is that it can use the computational power of naturally available systems which is different from the neural networks and it reduces the computational cost.

Discussed on

🔗 Timeline of programming languages

🔗 Computing

This is a record of historically important programming languages, by decade.

Discussed on

🔗 Select Parts of the Bible for the Use of the Slaves in the British West-India

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Bible 🔗 England

Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands, sometimes referred to as a slave bible, is an abbreviated version of the Bible specifically made for teaching a pro-slavery version of Christianity to enslaved people in the British West Indies.

🔗 Hierarchical Clustering

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Databases

In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into two categories:

  • Agglomerative: This is a "bottom-up" approach: Each observation starts in its own cluster, and pairs of clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy.
  • Divisive: This is a "top-down" approach: All observations start in one cluster, and splits are performed recursively as one moves down the hierarchy.

In general, the merges and splits are determined in a greedy manner. The results of hierarchical clustering are usually presented in a dendrogram.

Hierarchical clustering has the distinct advantage that any valid measure of distance can be used. In fact, the observations themselves are not required: all that is used is a matrix of distances. On the other hand, except for the special case of single-linkage distance, none of the algorithms (except exhaustive search in O ( 2 n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(2^{n})} ) can be guaranteed to find the optimum solution.

Discussed on