1.
United States
–
Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
2.
Springfield, Massachusetts
–
Springfield is a city in western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers, the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern Mill River. As of the 2010 Census, the population was 153,060. Metropolitan Springfield, as one of two areas in Massachusetts, had an estimated population of 698,903 as of 2009. The first Springfield in the New World, it is the largest city in Western New England, and the urban, economic and it is the third-largest city in Massachusetts and fourth-largest in New England after Boston, Worcester, and Providence. Hartford, the capital of Connecticut, lies 23.9 miles south of Springfield, bradley International Airport, which sits 12 miles south of Metro Center Springfield, is Hartford-Springfields airport. Springfield was founded in 1636 by English Puritan William Pynchon as Agawam Plantation under the administration of the Connecticut Colony, in 1641 it was renamed after Pynchons hometown of Springfield, Essex, England, following incidents that precipitated the settlement joining the Massachusetts Bay Colony. From 1777 until its closing during the Vietnam War, the Springfield Armory attracted skilled laborers to Springfield, arsenal at Springfield during Shays Rebellion of 1787 led directly to the formation of the U. S. Springfield is located at 42°6′45″N 72°32′51″W, according to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 33.2 square miles, of which 32.1 square miles is land and 1.1 square miles is water. Once nicknamed The City in a Forest, Springfield features over 4, aside from its rivers, Springfields 2nd most prominent topographical feature is the citys 735 acres Forest Park, designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Forest Park also borders Western Massachusetts most affluent town, Longmeadow, Springfield shares borders with other well-heeled suburbs such as East Longmeadow, Wilbraham, Ludlow and the de-industrializing city of Chicopee. The small cities of Agawam and West Springfield, Massachusetts lie less than a mile from Springfields Metro Center, across the Connecticut River. The City of Springfield also owns the Springfield Country Club, which is located in the city of West Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield, like other cities in southern New England, has a continental climate with four distinct seasons. Winters are cold with a average in January of around 26 °F. During winter, noreaster storms can drop significant snowfalls on Springfield, Springfields summers are very warm and sometimes humid. During summer, several times per month, on hot days afternoon thunderstorms will develop when unstable warm air collides with approaching cold fronts, the daily average in July is around 74 °F. Usually several days during the summer exceed 90 °F, constituting a heat wave, Spring and fall temperatures are usually pleasant, with mild days and crisp, cool nights
3.
Massachusetts
–
It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north, and New York to the west. The state is named for the Massachusett tribe, which inhabited the area. The capital of Massachusetts and the most populous city in New England is Boston, over 80% of Massachusetts population lives in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, a region influential upon American history, academia, and industry. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution, during the 20th century, Massachusetts economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Modern Massachusetts is a leader in biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance. Plymouth was the site of the first colony in New England, founded in 1620 by the Pilgrims, in 1692, the town of Salem and surrounding areas experienced one of Americas most infamous cases of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials. In 1777, General Henry Knox founded the Springfield Armory, which during the Industrial Revolution catalyzed numerous important technological advances, in 1786, Shays Rebellion, a populist revolt led by disaffected American Revolutionary War veterans, influenced the United States Constitutional Convention. In the 18th century, the Protestant First Great Awakening, which swept the Atlantic World, in the late 18th century, Boston became known as the Cradle of Liberty for the agitation there that led to the American Revolution. The entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts has played a commercial and cultural role in the history of the United States. Before the American Civil War, Massachusetts was a center for the abolitionist, temperance, in the late 19th century, the sports of basketball and volleyball were invented in the western Massachusetts cities of Springfield and Holyoke, respectively. Many prominent American political dynasties have hailed from the state, including the Adams, both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in Cambridge, have been ranked among the most highly regarded academic institutions in the world. Massachusetts public school students place among the top nations in the world in academic performance, the official name of the state is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While this designation is part of the official name, it has no practical implications. Massachusetts has the position and powers within the United States as other states. Massachusetts was originally inhabited by tribes of the Algonquian language family such as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mahican, and Massachusett. While cultivation of crops like squash and corn supplemented their diets, villages consisted of lodges called wigwams as well as longhouses, and tribes were led by male or female elders known as sachems. Between 1617 and 1619, smallpox killed approximately 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Native Americans, the first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, arrived via the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag people. This was the second successful permanent English colony in the part of North America that later became the United States, the event known as the First Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World which lasted for three days
4.
Dictionary
–
It is a lexicographical product which shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries, Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are called terms instead of words. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types, there are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary, there is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries, the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive, the birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of astonishing lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla, the early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. Philitas of Cos wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other words, words from local dialects. Apollonius the Sophist wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon, the first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amara Sinha c. 4th century CE. Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words, according to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c.835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese, a 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari which mainly dealt with Hindavi, in medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use. The Catholicon by Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with a lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books to be printed, in 1502 Ambrogio Calepinos Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. The first monolingual dictionary written in Europe was the Spanish, written by Sebastián Covarrubias Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, in 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario dellAccademia della Crusca, for Italian, was published. It served as the model for works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French, in 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de lAcadémie française. Between 1712 and 1721 was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau, the Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777, it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published
5.
Noah Webster
–
Noah Webster, Jr. was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the Father of American Scholarship and Education and his blue-backed speller books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read, secularizing their education. According to Ellis, he gave Americans a secular catechism to the nation-state, Webster was born in the Western Division of Hartford to an established family. His father Noah Sr. was a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster and his father was primarily a farmer, though he was also deacon of the local Congregational church, captain of the towns militia, and a founder of a local book society. After American independence, he was appointed a justice of the peace, Websters father never attended college, but he was intellectually curious and prized education. Websters mother spent long hours teaching her children spelling, mathematics, at age six, Webster began attending a dilapidated one-room primary school built by West Hartfords Ecclesiastical Society. Years later, he described the teachers as the dregs of humanity, Websters experiences there motivated him to improve the educational experience of future generations. At age fourteen, his church pastor began tutoring him in Latin, Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday, studying during his senior year with Ezra Stiles, Yales president. His four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War and, because of shortages and threatened British invasions. Webster served in the Connecticut Militia and his father had mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but he was now on his own and had nothing more to do with his family. Webster lacked career plans after graduating from Yale in 1778, later writing that a liberal arts education disqualifies a man for business and he taught school briefly in Glastonbury, but the working conditions were harsh and the pay low. While studying law under future U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, Webster also taught full-time in Hartford—which was grueling, and ultimately impossible to continue. He quit his studies for a year and lapsed into a depression, he then found another practicing attorney to tutor him. As the Revolutionary War was still going on, he could not find work as a lawyer and he received a masters degree from Yale by giving an oral dissertation to the Yale graduating class. Later that year, he opened a private school in western Connecticut that was a success. Nevertheless, he closed it and left town, probably because of a failed romance. He then founded a school catering to wealthy parents in Goshen, New York and, by 1785, he had written his speller, a grammar book. Proceeds from continuing sales of the popular blue-backed speller enabled Webster to spend years working on his famous dictionary
6.
Webster's Dictionary
–
The term Websters has become a generic trademark in the U. S. for dictionaries of the English language. For this reason the term may refer to any dictionary at all that chooses to use the name. Also, Websters is often used to refer to a generic dictionary, Noah Webster, the author of the readers and spelling books that dominated the American market at the time, spent decades of research in compiling his dictionaries. His first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, Webster was a proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both philological and nationalistic. In A Companion to the American Revolution, John Algeo notes and he was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them. Rather he chose already existing options such as center, color and check on such grounds as simplicity, in William Shakespeares first folios, for example, spellings such as center and color are the most common. He spent the two decades working to expand his dictionary. In 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes containing 70,000 entries, as against the 58,000 of any previous dictionary. There were 2,500 copies printed, at $20 for the two volumes, at first the set sold poorly. When he lowered the price to $15, its sales improved, not all copies were bound at the same time, the book also appeared in publishers boards, other original bindings of a later date are not unknown. In 1841, 82-year-old Noah Webster published an edition of his lexicographical masterpiece with the help of his son. Its title page does not claim the status of second edition, B. L. Hamlen of New Haven, Connecticut, prepared the 1841 printing of the second edition. When Webster died, his heirs sold unbound sheets of his 1841 revision American Dictionary of the English Language to the firm of J. S. & C. Adams of Amherst, Massachusetts. This firm bound and published a number of copies in 1844 – the same edition that Emily Dickinson used as a tool for her poetic composition. However, a $15 price tag on the book made it too expensive to sell easily, Merriam acquired rights from Adams, as well as signing a contract with Webster’s heirs for sole rights. The third printing of the edition was by George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts. This was the first Websters Dictionary with a Merriam imprint, lepore demonstrates Websters innovative ideas about language and politics and shows why Websters endeavours were at first so poorly received. Culturally conservative Federalists denounced the work as radical—too inclusive in its lexicon, meanwhile, Websters old foes, the Jeffersonian Republicans, attacked the man, labelling him mad for such an undertaking
7.
University of Cambridge
–
The University of Cambridge is a collegiate public research university in Cambridge, England, often regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Founded in 1209 and given royal status by King Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world. The university grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with the townspeople, the two ancient universities share many common features and are often referred to jointly as Oxbridge. Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 constituent colleges, Cambridge University Press, a department of the university, is the worlds oldest publishing house and the second-largest university press in the world. The university also operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridges libraries hold a total of around 15 million books, eight million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library. In the year ended 31 July 2015, the university had an income of £1.64 billion. The central university and colleges have an endowment of around £5.89 billion. The university is linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster known as Silicon Fen. It is a member of associations and forms part of the golden triangle of leading English universities and Cambridge University Health Partners. As of 2017, Cambridge is ranked the fourth best university by three ranking tables and no other institution in the world ranks in the top 10 for as many subjects. Cambridge is consistently ranked as the top university in the United Kingdom, the university has educated many notable alumni, including eminent mathematicians, scientists, politicians, lawyers, philosophers, writers, actors, and foreign Heads of State. Ninety-five Nobel laureates, fifteen British prime ministers and ten Fields medalists have been affiliated with Cambridge as students, faculty, by the late 12th century, the Cambridge region already had a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation, due to monks from the nearby bishopric church of Ely. The University of Oxford went into suspension in protest, and most scholars moved to such as Paris, Reading. After the University of Oxford reformed several years later, enough remained in Cambridge to form the nucleus of the new university. A bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach everywhere in Christendom, the colleges at the University of Cambridge were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself, the colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars. There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels, the hostels were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some indicators of their time, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane. Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse, Cambridges first college, the most recently established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s
8.
Spelling reform
–
A spelling reform is a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules of a language. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, reforms that concentrate on removing unnecessary difficulties ought to take account of such arguments. Reform efforts are hampered by habit and, in many countries. Spelling reform may also be associated with wider discussion of what the script should be, language planning. In languages written with alphabetic or syllabary scripts, one might expect there to be a match of the script or spelling with the spoken sound. In cases where spelling takes account of grammatical features these too may become inconsistent, people who use non-standard spelling often suffer from adverse opinions, as a persons mastery of standard spelling is often equated to his or her level of formal education or intelligence. These spelling systems are still phonemic since the pronunciation of a word can be derived from the spelling. The idea of phonemic spelling has also criticized as it would hide morphological similarities between words with different pronunciations, and thus obscure their meanings. In a system of spelling, these semantic units become less distinct. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with an -ed on the end, one of the difficulties in introducing a spelling reform is how to reflect different pronunciations, often linked to regions or classes. If the reform attempts to be phonemic in some model dialect. One may even end up with some regions or subcultures adopting the reform, many technical terms are met more frequently in writing than in speech, so their pronunciation is largely irrelevant and should not be allowed to influence their spelling. English spelling contains many irregularities due to a number of factors, on the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. Modern English has anywhere from 14 to 22 vowel and diphthong phonemes, depending on dialect, a simple phoneme-letter representation of this language within the 26 letters of the English alphabet is impossible. Most spelling reform proposals therefore include multi-letter graphemes, as does current English spelling Diacritic marks have also formed part of spelling reform proposals, a phonemic system would therefore not be universal. A number of proposals have made to reform English spelling. Some were proposed by Noah Webster early in the 19th century and he was in part concerned to distinguish American from British usage
9.
Skunk
–
Skunks are mammals known for their ability to spray a liquid with a strong odor. Different species of skunk vary in appearance from black-and-white to brown or cream colored, 1630s, squunck, from a southern New England Algonquian language seganku, from Proto-Algonquian */šeka, kwa/, from */šek-/ to urinate + */-a, kw/ fox. Skunk has historic use as an insult, attested from 1841, skunk cabbage is attested from 1751, earlier skunkweed. In 1634, a skunk was described in the Jesuit Relations, The other is a low animal, I mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a symbol of sin. I have seen three or four of them and it has black fur, quite beautiful and shining, and has upon its back two perfectly white stripes, which join near the neck and tail, making an oval which adds greatly to their grace. The tail is bushy and well furnished with hair, like the tail of a Fox and it is more white than black, and, at the first glance, you would say, especially when it walks, that it ought to be called Jupiters little dog. But it is so stinking, and casts so foul an odor, no sewer ever smelled so bad. I would not have believed it if I had not smelled it myself, I believe the sin smelled by Saint Catherine de Sienne must have had the same vile odor. Skunk species vary in size from about 15.6 to 37 in long and they have moderately elongated bodies with relatively short, well-muscled legs and long front claws for digging. Although the most common fur color is black and white, some skunks are brown or grey, all skunks are striped, even from birth. They may have a thick stripe across back and tail. Some also have stripes on their legs, skunks are omnivorous, eating both plant and animal material and changing their diets as the seasons change. They eat insects and larvae, earthworms, grubs, rodents, lizards, salamanders, frogs, snakes, birds, moles and they also commonly eat berries, roots, leaves, grasses, fungi and nuts. In settled areas, skunks also seek garbage left by humans, less often, skunks may be found acting as scavengers, eating bird and rodent carcasses left by cats or other animals. Pet owners, particularly those of cats, may experience a skunk finding its way into a garage or basement where pet food is kept, skunks commonly dig holes in lawns in search of grubs and worms. Skunks are one of the predators of the honeybee, relying on their thick fur to protect them from stings. The skunk scratches at the front of the beehive and eats the guard bees that come out to investigate, mother skunks are known to teach this behavior to their young. Skunks are crepuscular and solitary animals when not breeding, though in the parts of their range
10.
Cucurbita
–
Cucurbita is a genus of herbaceous vines in the gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, also known as cucurbits, native to the Andes and Mesoamerica. Five species are grown worldwide for their fruit, variously known as squash, pumpkin, or gourd depending on species, variety, and local parlance. Other kinds of gourd, also called bottle-gourds, are native to Africa and belong to the genus Lagenaria and these other gourds are used as utensils or vessels, and their young fruits are eaten much like those of Cucurbita species. Most Cucurbita species are vines that grow several meters in length and have tendrils. The yellow or orange flowers on a Cucurbita plant are of two types, female and male, the female flowers produce the fruit and the male flowers produce pollen. Many North and Central American species are visited by specialist bee pollinators, the fruits of the genus Cucurbita are good sources of nutrients, such as vitamin A and vitamin C, among other nutrients according to species. The plants also contain phytochemicals, such as cucurbitin, cucurmosin. There is debate about the taxonomy of the genus, as the number of accepted species varies from 13 to 30, the five domesticated species are Cucurbita argyrosperma, C. ficifolia, C. maxima, C. moschata, and C. pepo. All of these can be treated as winter squash because the fruits can be stored for months, however. Cucurbita fruits have played a role in culture for at least 2,000 years. They are often represented in Moche ceramics from Peru, after Christopher Columbuss arrival in the New World, paintings of squashes started to appear in Europe early in the sixteenth century. The fruits have culinary uses including pumpkin pie, biscuits, bread, desserts, puddings, beverages. Pumpkins and other Cucurbita fruits are celebrated in festivals and in flower, Cucurbita species fall into two main groups. The first group are annual or short-lived perennial vines and are mesophytic, the second group are perennials growing in arid zones and so are xerophytic, tolerating dry conditions. Cultivated Cucurbita species were derived from the first group, growing 5 to 15 meters in height or length, the plant stem produces tendrils to help it climb adjacent plants and structures or extend along the ground. Most species do not readily root from the nodes, an exception is C. ficifolia. The vine of the perennial Cucurbita can become semiwoody if left to grow, there is wide variation in size, shape, and color among Cucurbita fruits, and even within a single species. C. ficifolia is an exception, being uniform in appearance
11.
Round Table
–
The Round Table is King Arthurs famed table in the Arthurian legend, around which he and his Knights congregate. As its name suggests, it has no head, implying that everyone who sits there has equal status, the table was first described in 1155 by Wace, who relied on previous depictions of Arthurs fabulous retinue. The symbolism of the Round Table developed over time, by the close of the 12th century it had come to represent the order associated with Arthurs court. The Round Table first appears in Waces Roman de Brut, a Norman language adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia Regum Britanniae finished in 1155, Wace says Arthur created the Round Table to prevent quarrels among his barons, none of whom would accept a lower place than the others. Layamon added to the story when he adapted Waces work into the Middle English Brut in the early 13th century, in response a Cornish carpenter built an enormous but easily transportable Round Table to prevent further dispute. Wace claims he was not the source of the Round Table, some scholars have doubted this claim, while others believe it may be true. Though the Round Table itself is not mentioned until Wace, the concept of Arthur having a court made up of many prominent warriors is much older. Geoffrey of Monmouth says that after establishing peace throughout Britain, Arthur increased his personal entourage by inviting very distinguished men from far-distant kingdoms to join it, though no Round Table appears in the early Welsh texts, Arthur is associated with various items of household furniture. A henge at Eamont Bridge near Penrith, Cumbria is known as King Arthurs Round Table, the still-visible Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon has been associated with the Round Table. and has been suggested as a possible source for the legend. The Round Table takes on new dimensions in the romances of the late 12th and early 13th century, where it becomes a symbol of the famed order of chivalry which flourishes under Arthur. In Robert de Borons Merlin, written around the 1190s, the wizard Merlin creates the Round Table in imitation of the table of the Last Supper and of Joseph of Arimatheas Holy Grail table. This table, here made for Arthurs father Uther Pendragon rather than Arthur himself, has twelve seats and this seat must remain empty until the coming of the knight who will achieve the Grail. The Didot Perceval, a continuation of Roberts work, takes up the story. The prose cycles of the 13th century, the Lancelot-Grail cycle, here it is the perfect knight Galahad, rather than Percival, who assumes the empty seat, now called the Siege Perilous. Galahads arrival marks the start of the Grail quest as well as the end of the Arthurian era, in these works the Round Table is kept by King Leodegrance of Cameliard after Uthers death, Arthur inherits it when he marries Leodegrances daughter Guinevere. Other versions treat the Round Table differently, for instance Italian Arthurian works often distinguish between the Old Table of Uthers time and Arthurs New Table, during the Middle Ages, festivals called Round Tables were celebrated throughout Europe in imitation of Arthurs court. These events featured jousting, dancing, and feasting, and in some cases attending knights assumed the identities of Arthurs entourage, the earliest of these was held in Cyprus in 1223 to celebrate a knighting. Round Tables were popular in various European countries through the rest of the Middle Ages and were at times very elaborate, René of Anjou even erected an Arthurian castle for his 1446 Round Table
12.
CD-ROM
–
A CD-ROM /ˌsiːˌdiːˈrɒm/ is a pre-pressed optical compact disc which contains data. The name is an acronym which stands for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory, computers can read CD-ROMs, but cannot write to CD-ROMs which are not writable or erasable. From the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software for computers, some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer. An early CD-ROM format was developed by Sony and Denon, introduced at a Japanese computer show in 1984 and it was an extension of Compact Disc Digital Audio, and adapted the format to hold any form of digital data, with a capacity of 540 MiB. The Yellow Book is the standard that defines the format of CD-ROMs. One of a set of books that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats. CD-ROMs are identical in appearance to audio CDs, and data are stored and retrieved in a similar manner. Discs are made from a 1.2 mm thick disc of polycarbonate plastic, data is stored on the disc as a series of microscopic indentations. A laser is shone onto the surface of the disc to read the pattern of pits. This pattern of changing intensity of the beam is converted into binary data. Several formats are used for data stored on discs, known as the Rainbow Books. The Yellow Book, published in 1988, defines the specifications for CD-ROMs, the CD-ROM standard builds on top of the original Red Book CD-DA standard for CD audio. Other standards, such as the White Book for Video CDs, the Yellow Book itself is not freely available, but the standards with the corresponding content can be downloaded for free from ISO or ECMA. There are several standards that define how to structure data files on a CD-ROM, ISO9660 defines the standard file system for a CD-ROM. ISO13490 is an improvement on this standard which adds support for non-sequential write-once and re-writeable discs such as CD-R and CD-RW, as well as multiple sessions. The ISO13346 standard was designed to address most of the shortcomings of ISO9660, and a subset of it evolved into the UDF format, which was adopted for DVDs. The bootable CD specification was issued in January 1995, to make a CD emulate a hard disk or floppy disk, is called El Torito, data stored on CD-ROMs follows the standard CD data encoding techniques described in the Red Book specification. This includes cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, eight-to-fourteen modulation, and the use of pits, the structures used to group data on a CD-ROM are also derived from the Red Book
13.
The Chicago Manual of Style
–
The Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its sixteen editions have prescribed writing and citation styles used in publishing. It is one of the most widely used and respected style guides in the United States, CMOS deals with aspects of editorial practice, from American English grammar and use for document preparation. The Chicago Manual of Style is published in hardcover and online, the Chicago Manual of Style also discusses the parts of a book and the editing process. An annual subscription is required for access to the content of the Manual. The Chicago Manual of Style is used in social science publications. It remains the basis for the Style Guide of the American Anthropological Association, many small publishers throughout the world adopt it as their style. The Chicago Manual of Style includes chapters relevant to publishers of books and it is used widely by academic and some trade publishers, as well as editors and authors who are required by those publishers to follow it. Kate L. Turabians A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, Chicago style offers writers a choice of several different formats. It allows the mixing of formats, provided that the result is clear, two types of citation styles are provided. In both cases, two parts are needed, first, notation in the text, which indicates that the information immediately preceding was from another source, and second, the full citation, which is placed at another location. Using author-date style, the text is indicated parenthetically with the last name of the author. Research has found that students do not always cite their work properly, when page numbers are used, they are placed along with the authors last name and date of publication after an interposed comma. Research has found that students do not always cite their work properly, if the authors name is used in the text, only the date of publication need be cited parenthetically. Research done by Smith found that students do not always cite their work properly, in-text citations are usually placed just inside a mark of punctuation. An exception to rule is for block quotations, where the citation is placed outside the punctuation. The full citation for the source is included in a references section at the end of the material. As publication dates are prominent in this style, the reference entry places the publication following the author name
14.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary
–
Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged was published in September 1961. It was edited by Philip Babcock Gove and a team of lexicographers who spent 757 editor-years and it contained more than 450,000 entries, including more than 100,000 new entries and as many new senses for entries carried over from previous editions. The final definition, Zyzzogeton, was written on October 17,1960, the final etymology was recorded on October 26, the final copy went to the typesetters, RR Donnelley, on December 2. The book was printed by the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first edition had 2,726 pages, weighed 13½ lbs, and originally sold for $47.50. The changes were the most radical in the history of the Unabridged, although it was an unprecedented masterwork of scholarship, it was met with considerable criticism for its descriptive approach. It told how the language was used, not how it ought to be used, prior to Websters Third the Unabridged had been expanded with each new edition, with minimal deletion. To make room for 100,000 new words, Gove now made sweeping deletions and he eliminated the nonlexical matter that more properly belongs to an encyclopedia, including all names of people and places. There were no more mythological, biblical, and fictional names, nor the names of buildings, historical events, the rationale was that, while useful, these are not strictly about language. The number of small text illustrations was reduced, page size increased, all this was considered necessary because of the large amount of new material, and Websters Second had almost reached the limits of mechanical bookbinding. The fact that the new book had about 700 fewer pages was justified by the need to allow room for future additions, in style and method, the dictionary bore little resemblance to earlier editions. Instead of capitalizing American, for example, the dictionary had labels next to the entries reading cap and this allowed informative distinctions to be drawn, gallic is usu cap while gallicism is often cap and gallicize is sometimes cap. The reviews of the Third edition were highly favorable in Britain, robert Chapman, a lexicographer, canvassed fellow lexicographers at Funk & Wagnalls, who had used the new edition daily for three years. The consensus held that the Third was an achievement, a monument of scholarship. Chapman concluded that the cranks and intransigents who advise us to hang on to the NID2 are plain fools who deny themselves the riches of a great book. This dictionary became preferred as a source by two influential style guides in the United States, although each one directs writers to go first to other, shorter dictionaries. The Associated Press Stylebook, used by most newspapers in the United States, in the early 1960s, Websters Third came under attack for its permissiveness and its failure to tell people what proper English was. As historian Herbert Morton explained, Websters Second was more than respected and it was accepted as the ultimate authority on meaning and usage and its preeminence was virtually unchallenged in the United States. It did not provoke controversies, it settled them, Goves stance was an exemplar of descriptivist linguistics, describing language as it is or has been used
15.
Linguistic prescription
–
Linguistic prescription is the practice of elevating one variety or manner of language use over another. It may imply that some forms are incorrect, improper, or illogical, or lack communicative effect, sometimes informed by linguistic purism, these normative practices may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, and syntax. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use, Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct form, or advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to change, if radical. Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with linguistics, which observes. The basis of research is text analysis and field study. Description, however, may include researchers observations of their own language usage, the chief aim of linguistic prescription can be to specify standard language forms in a way that is easily taught and learned. Prescription may apply to most aspects of language, including spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, syntax, while such a lingua franca may evolve by itself, the desire to formulate and define it is widespread in most parts of the world. Writers or communicators often adhere to prescriptive rules to make their communication clearer, similarly, stability of a language over time helps one to understand writings from the past. In addition, it is useful to have a standard so as to be able to decide whether or not a speaker or writer is using an educated form of the language. Linguistic prescription may also be used to impose a political ideology, during the second half of the 20th century, politically motivated efforts driven by various advocacy groups had considerable influence on language use under the broad banner of political correctness. These successfully imposed special rules for anti-sexist, anti-racist or generically anti-discriminatory language, george Orwell criticized the use of euphemisms and convoluted phrasing as a means of hiding insincerity in Politics and the English Language. His fictional Newspeak is a parody of ideologically motivated linguistic prescriptivism, prescription presupposes authorities whose judgment may be followed by other speakers and writers. The Duden grammar has a status for German. Although lexicographers often see their work as purely descriptive, dictionaries are widely regarded as prescriptive authorities, books such as Lynne Trusss Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules, also seek to exert an influence. Linguistic prescription is regulated formally in some places, the Académie française in Paris is a French national body whose recommendations are widely respected, though not legally enforceable there. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent spelling reforms were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by the government, some met with significant dissent, for example the German orthography reform of 1996. Other kinds of authorities exist in specific settings, such as establishing a house style specifying preferred spellings or grammatical forms
16.
Public domain
–
The term public domain has two senses of meaning. Anything published is out in the domain in the sense that it is available to the public. Once published, news and information in books is in the public domain, in the sense of intellectual property, works in the public domain are those whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Examples for works not covered by copyright which are therefore in the domain, are the formulae of Newtonian physics, cooking recipes. Examples for works actively dedicated into public domain by their authors are reference implementations of algorithms, NIHs ImageJ. The term is not normally applied to situations where the creator of a work retains residual rights, as rights are country-based and vary, a work may be subject to rights in one country and be in the public domain in another. Some rights depend on registrations on a basis, and the absence of registration in a particular country, if required. Although the term public domain did not come into use until the mid-18th century, the Romans had a large proprietary rights system where they defined many things that cannot be privately owned as res nullius, res communes, res publicae and res universitatis. The term res nullius was defined as not yet appropriated. The term res communes was defined as things that could be enjoyed by mankind, such as air, sunlight. The term res publicae referred to things that were shared by all citizens, when the first early copyright law was first established in Britain with the Statute of Anne in 1710, public domain did not appear. However, similar concepts were developed by British and French jurists in the eighteenth century, instead of public domain they used terms such as publici juris or propriété publique to describe works that were not covered by copyright law. The phrase fall in the domain can be traced to mid-nineteenth century France to describe the end of copyright term. In this historical context Paul Torremans describes copyright as a coral reef of private right jutting up from the ocean of the public domain. Because copyright law is different from country to country, Pamela Samuelson has described the public domain as being different sizes at different times in different countries. According to James Boyle this definition underlines common usage of the public domain and equates the public domain to public property. However, the usage of the public domain can be more granular. Such a definition regards work in copyright as private property subject to fair use rights, the materials that compose our cultural heritage must be free for all living to use no less than matter necessary for biological survival
17.
Thesaurus
–
Although including synonyms, a thesaurus should not be taken as a complete list of all the synonyms for a particular word. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus entry does not give the definition of words, in library science and information science, thesauri have been widely used to specify domain models. Recently, thesauri have been implemented with Simple Knowledge Organization System, the word thesaurus is derived from 16th-century New Latin, in turn from Latin thēsaurus, which is the Latinisation of the Greek θησαυρός, treasure, treasury, storehouse. The word thēsauros is of uncertain etymology, douglas Harper derives it from the root of the Greek verb τιθέναι tithenai, to put, to place. Robert Beekes rejected an Indo-European derivation and suggested a Pre-Greek suffix *-arwo-, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the term thesaurus was applied to any dictionary or encyclopedia, as in the Thesaurus linguae latinae, and the Thesaurus linguae graecae. The meaning collection of words arranged according to sense is first attested in 1852 in Rogets title, in antiquity, Philo of Byblos authored the first text that could now be called a thesaurus. In Sanskrit, the Amarakosha is a thesaurus in verse form, the first modern thesaurus was Rogets Thesaurus, first compiled in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget, and published in 1852. Since its publication it has never been out of print and is still a widely used work across the English-speaking world, entries in Rogets Thesaurus are listed conceptually rather than alphabetically. AGRIS Controlled vocabulary Knowledge Organization Systems Ontology Simple Knowledge Organisation System ISO25964 The dictionary definition of thesaurus at Wiktionary
18.
Synonyms
–
A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy, the word comes from Ancient Greek sýn and ónoma. An example of synonyms are the words begin, start, commence, words can be synonymous when meant in certain senses, even if they are not synonymous in all of their senses. For example, if one talks about a time or an extended time, long. Some academics call the former type cognitive synonyms to distinguish them from the latter type, some lexicographers claim that no synonyms have exactly the same meaning because etymology, orthography, phonic qualities, ambiguous meanings, usage, etc. make them unique. Different words that are similar in meaning usually differ for a reason, feline is more formal than cat, long and extended are only synonyms in one usage, synonyms are also a source of euphemisms. In the figurative sense, two words are said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation. a widespread impression that. Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy, as when, for example, thus a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym. The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and it has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation and schema. Synonyms can be any part of speech, as long as both words belong to the part of speech. Such like, he expired means the same as he died, in English, many synonyms emerged in the Middle Ages, after the Norman conquest of England. While Englands new ruling class spoke Norman French, the lower classes continued to speak Old English, thus, today we have synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman. For more examples, see the list of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English, the purpose of a thesaurus is to offer the user a listing of similar or related words, these are often, but not always, synonyms. The word poecilonym is a synonym of the word synonym. It is not entered in most major dictionaries and is a curiosity or piece of trivia for being a word because of its meta quality as a synonym of synonym. Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings, for example, hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle, homophones are words that have the same pronunciation, but different meanings. For example, witch and which are homophones in most accents, homographs are words that have the same spelling, but have different pronunciations
19.
Geography
–
Geography is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of Earth. The first person to use the word γεωγραφία was Eratosthenes, Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of the Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. It is often defined in terms of the two branches of geography and physical geography. Geography has been called the world discipline and the bridge between the human and the physical sciences, Geography is a systematic study of the Earth and its features. Traditionally, geography has been associated with cartography and place names, although many geographers are trained in toponymy and cartology, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study the space and the temporal database distribution of phenomena, processes, because space and place affect a variety of topics, such as economics, health, climate, plants and animals, geography is highly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of the approach depends on an attentiveness to the relationship between physical and human phenomena and its spatial patterns. Names of places. are not geography. know by heart a whole gazetteer full of them would not, in itself and this is a description of the world—that is Geography. In a word Geography is a Science—a thing not of mere names but of argument and reason, of cause, just as all phenomena exist in time and thus have a history, they also exist in space and have a geography. Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main fields, human geography and physical geography. The former largely focuses on the environment and how humans create, view, manage. The latter examines the environment, and how organisms, climate, soil, water. The difference between these led to a third field, environmental geography, which combines physical and human geography. Physical geography focuses on geography as an Earth science and it aims to understand the physical problems and the issues of lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, pedosphere, and global flora and fauna patterns. Physical geography can be divided into broad categories, including, Human geography is a branch of geography that focuses on the study of patterns. It encompasses the human, political, cultural, social, and it requires an understanding of the traditional aspects of physical and human geography, as well as the ways that human societies conceptualize the environment. Integrated geography has emerged as a bridge between the human and the geography, as a result of the increasing specialisation of the two sub-fields. Examples of areas of research in the environmental geography include, emergency management, environmental management, sustainability, geomatics is concerned with the application of computers to the traditional spatial techniques used in cartography and topography
20.
Biography
–
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a persons life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a persons life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing, works in diverse media, from literature to film, form the genre known as biography. An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times, an autobiography is written by the person himself or herself, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter. At first, biographical writings were regarded merely as a subsection of history with a focus on an individual of historical importance. The independent genre of biography as distinct from general history writing, began to emerge in the 18th century, one of the earliest of the biographers was Plutarch, and his Parallel Lives, published about 80 A. D. covers prominent figures in the classical world. Cornelius Nepos published a work, his Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae. Perhaps the earliest extant biography that does not contain mythological material is The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, in the early Middle Ages, there was a decline in awareness of the classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks, and priests used this period to write biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to the fathers, martyrs, popes. Their works were meant to be inspirational to the people and vehicles for conversion to Christianity, one significant secular example of a biography from this period is the life of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard. Early biographical dictionaries were published as compendia of famous Islamic personalities from the 9th century onwards and they contained more social data for a large segment of the population than other works of that period. And then began the documentation of the lives of other historical figures who lived in the medieval Islamic world. By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of kings, knights, the most famous of such biographies was Le Morte dArthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur, following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasaris Lives of the Artists was the landmark biography focusing on secular lives, vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early bestseller. Two other developments are noteworthy, the development of the press in the 15th century
21.
Sport
–
Usually the contest or game is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a tie game, others provide tie-breaking methods, to one winner. A number of such two-sided contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion, many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, each against each other, however, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. Sports are usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, winning can be determined by physical events such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. It can also be determined by judges who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information may be widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a source of entertainment for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport venues. Sports betting is in some cases severely regulated, and in some cases is central to the sport, kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to $620 billion as of 2013. The worlds most accessible and practised sport is running, while football is the most popular spectator sport. The word Sport comes from the Old French desport meaning leisure, other meanings include gambling and events staged for the purpose of gambling, hunting, and games and diversions, including ones that require exercise. Rogets defines the noun sport as an activity engaged in for relaxation, the singular term sport is used in most English dialects to describe the overall concept, with sports used to describe multiple activities. American English uses sports for both terms, the precise definition of what separates a sport from other leisure activities varies between sources. They also recognise that sport can be physical, primarily mind, predominantly motorised, primarily co-ordination. The inclusion of sports within sport definitions has not been universally accepted. Whilst SportAccord recognises a number of mind sports, it is not open to admitting any further mind sports. According to Council of Europe, European Sports Charter, article 2, other bodies advocate widening the definition of sport to include all physical activity. For instance, the Council of Europe include all forms of physical exercise, in competitive events, participants are graded or classified based on their result and often divided into groups of comparable performance
22.
AskMeNow
–
AskMeNow Inc. was an American public corporation, specializing in mobile search and mobile advertising. The Irvine, California based company officially launched in November 2005, askMeNows primary offering was a consumer mobile search product which utilized proprietary technology to offer a natural language based interaction and dynamic content provision platform. AskMeNow signed a agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring natural language processing to English Wikipedia. The beta product, AskWiki, integrated some of the semantic web, the AskWiki engine was able to parse natural language statements and return specific answers rather than just relevant articles. The contract between AskMeNow and Wikimedia was rescinded after Jimmy Wales announced his own for profit search engine named Wikia, AskMeNow partnered with a variety of content publishers to offer mobile access to these publishers’ content. These partnerships included National Hockey League, Merriam-Webster, Encyclopædia Britannica, AskMeNow had established distribution partnerships with Alltel in the US and Rogers Wireless and Bell Mobility in Canada
23.
Text messaging
–
The term originally referred to messages sent using the Short Message Service. It has grown beyond alphanumeric text to include multimedia messages containing digital images, videos, as of 2017, text messages are used by youth and adults for personal, family and social purposes and in business, government and non-governmental organizations for communication between colleagues. As with emailing, in the 2010s, the sending of short informal messages has become an part of many cultures. This makes texting a quick and easy way to communicate with friends and colleagues, Text messages can also be used to interact with automated systems, for example, to order products or services from e-commerce websites, or to participate in online contests. The service is referred to by different colloquialisms depending on the region, the sender of a text message is commonly referred to as a texter. In 1933 RCA Communications, New York introduced the first telex service, the first messages over RCA transatlantic circuits were between New York City and London and, in the first year of operation, approximately seven million words were transmitted. Radio has long sent alphanumeric messages via radiotelegraphy, the University of Hawaii began using radio to send digital information as early as 1971, using ALOHAnet. Friedhelm Hillebrand conceptualised SMS in 1984 while working for Deutsche Telekom, sitting at a typewriter at home, Hillebrand typed out random sentences and counted every letter, number, punctuation, and space. Almost every time, the messages contained fewer than 160 characters, with Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom, he developed a proposal for the GSM meeting in February of 1985 in Oslo. The first technical solution evolved in a GSM subgroup under the leadership of Finn Trosby and it was further developed under the leadership of Kevin Holley and Ian Harris. SMS forms a part of SS7. This was part of ISDN and since GSM is based on this, messages could be sent and received on ISDN phones, and these can send SMS to any GSM phone. The possibility of doing something is one thing, implementing it another, modern SMS text messaging is usually messaging from one mobile phone to another mobile phone. Radiolinja became the first network to offer a commercial person-to-person SMS text messaging service in 1994, GSM was not allowed in the United States and the radio frequencies were blocked and awarded to US Carriers to use US technology. Hence there is no development in the US in mobile messaging service, American Personal Communications, the first GSM carrier in America, provided the first text-messaging service in the United States. Sprint Telecommunications Venture, a partnership of Sprint Corp. and three large companies, owned 49 percent of APC. The Sprint venture was the largest single buyer at a spectrum auction that raised $7.7 billion in 2005 for PCS licenses. APC operated under the name of Sprint Spectrum and launched its service on November 15,1995 in Washington, D. C. and in Baltimore
24.
Wiki
–
A wiki is a website that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser. In a typical wiki, text is written using a markup language. A wiki is run using wiki software, otherwise known as a wiki engine, there are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as bug tracking systems. Some wiki engines are open source, whereas others are proprietary, some permit control over different functions, for example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control, other rules may also be imposed to organize content. Wikipedia is not a wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis. There are at least tens of thousands of other wikis in use, both public and private, including functioning as knowledge management resources, notetaking tools, community websites. The English-language Wikipedia has the largest collection of articles, as of September 2016, ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as the simplest online database that could possibly work. Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning quick, Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not. A wiki is not a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers, instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape. A wiki enables communities of editors and contributors to write documents collaboratively, all that people require to contribute is a computer, Internet access, a web browser and a basic understanding of a simple markup language. A single page in a website is referred to as a wiki page, while the entire collection of pages. A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, a wiki allows non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, while also allowing for editor argument, debate and interaction regarding the content and formatting. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated, generally, there is no review by a moderator or gatekeeper before modifications are accepted and thus lead to changes on the website. Many wikis are open to alteration by the public without requiring registration of user accounts. Many edits can be made in real-time and appear almost instantly online, however, this feature facilitates abuse of the system. Private wiki servers require user authentication to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them, maged N. Kamel Boulos, Cito Maramba and Steve Wheeler write that the open wikis produce a process of Social Darwinism. Unfit sentences and sections are ruthlessly culled, edited and replaced if they are not considered fit, while such openness may invite vandalism and the posting of untrue information, this same openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a quality wiki page
25.
Phonetic transcription
–
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, the pronunciation of words in many languages, as distinct from their written form, has undergone significant change over time. Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language, standard orthography in some languages, particularly French, English, and Irish, is often irregular, and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling. For example, the words bough and through do not rhyme in English, in French, the sequence -ent is pronounced /ɑ̃/ in accent, but is silent in posent. Other languages, such as Spanish and Italian have a more consistent—though still imperfect—relationship between orthography and pronunciation, therefore, phonetic transcription can provide a function that orthography cannot. It displays a one-to-one relationship between symbols and sounds, unlike traditional writing systems, Phonetic transcription may aim to transcribe the phonology of a language, or it may be used to go further and specify the precise phonetic realisation. In all systems of transcription there is a distinction between broad transcription and narrow transcription, the difference between broad and narrow is a continuum. The advantage of the transcription is that it can help learners to get exactly the right sound. The disadvantage is that a transcription is rarely representative of all speakers of a language. Most Americans and Australians would pronounce the /t/ of little as a tap, some people in southern England would say /t/ as and/or the second /l/ as or something similar. A further disadvantage in less technical contexts is that narrow transcription involves a number of symbols that may be unfamiliar to non-specialists. The advantage of the transcription is that it usually allows statements to be made which apply across a more diverse language community. It is thus appropriate for the pronunciation data in foreign language dictionaries. A rule of thumb in many linguistics contexts is therefore to use a narrow transcription when it is necessary for the point being made, most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols. The International Phonetic Alphabet is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets and it was originally created by primarily British language teachers, with later efforts from European phoneticians and linguists. It has changed from its earlier intention as a tool of foreign language pedagogy to an alphabet of linguists. It is currently becoming the most often seen alphabet in the field of phonetics and this is sometimes labeled the Americanist phonetic alphabet, but this is misleading because it has always been widely used for languages outside the Americas. The difference between these alphabets and IPA is small, although often the specially created characters of the IPA are abandoned in favour of existing characters with diacritics or digraphs
26.
Unicode
–
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
27.
International Phonetic Association
–
The International Phonetic Association is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA’s major contribution to phonetics is the International Phonetic Alphabet—a notational standard for the representation of all languages. The acronym IPA is used to refer to both the association and the alphabet, the IPA also publishes the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. In addition, it arranges for the quadrennial International Congress of Phonetic Sciences through its affiliate, the group, led by Paul Passy, called itself initially Dhi Fonètik Tîcerz Asóciécon. The IPA’s early peak of membership and influence in education circles was around 1914, world War I and its aftermath severely disrupted the Associations activities, and the Journal did not resume regular publication until 1922. Since then, there have been several sets of changes to the Alphabet, the IPA also has given examinations in phonetics since 1908, awarding Certificates of Proficiency in the phonetics of English, French, or German. List of phonetics topics Language reform International Phonetic Association, handbook of the International Phonetic Association, A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet
28.
ASCII
–
ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6,1960, the first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting of lists, and added features for other than teleprinters. Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, for example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters,33 are non-printing control characters that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, of these, the IANA encourages use of the name US-ASCII for Internet uses of ASCII. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute and ultimately the American National Standards Institute, there was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting, the X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters, renaming some control characters and moving or removing others. ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3. 4-1967, then USAS X3. 4-1968, ANSI X3. 4-1977 and they proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems, like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols. This allows digital devices to communicate each other and to process, store. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters,10 numerical digits, ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of a function, which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is reliable for data transmission. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code, the committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal
29.
Index card
–
An index card consists of card stock cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards either serves as, or aids the creation of and this system was invented by Carl Linnaeus, around 1760. The most common size for index cards in North America and UK is 3 by 5 inches, other sizes widely available include 4 by 6 inches,5 by 8 inches and ISO-size A7. Cards are available in blank, ruled and grid styles in a variety of colors, special divider cards with protruding tabs and a variety of cases and trays to hold the cards are also sold by stationers and office product companies. They are part of standard stationery and office supplies all around the globe, professional book indexers used index cards in the creation of book indexes until they were replaced by indexing software in the 1980s and 1990s. Index cards are used for events and are helpful for planning. Similar catalogs were used by law firms and other entities to organize large quantities of stored documents, using cards to create an index was the brainchild of 18th-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is known as the father of modern taxonomy for his work on categorizing species. He needed a system for organizing data that was expandable and able to be rearranged easily, so he kept each datum on individual sheets and could add new sheets and reorganize simply. Card catalogs as currently known arose in the 19th century, in the late 1890s, edge-notched cards were invented, which allowed for easy sorting of data by means of a needle-like tool. These edge-notched cards were phased out in the 1980s in favor of computer databases, kardex became a common noun, especially in the medical records field where filing a kardex came to mean filling out a patient record on an index card. Vladimir Nabokov wrote his works on index cards, a mentioned in his work Pale Fire. Edge-notched card Hipster PDA Paper sizes Punched card Rolodex Markus Krajewski, MIT Press, Cambridge 2011, ISBN 978-0-262-01589-9 Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, Rewriting the system of nature, Linnaeuss use of writing technologies
30.
Bilingual dictionary
–
A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be unidirectional, meaning that they list the meanings of words of one language in another, or can be bidirectional, allowing translation to, bidirectional bilingual dictionaries usually consist of two sections, each listing words and phrases of one language alphabetically along with their translation. In addition to the translation, a bilingual dictionary usually indicates the part of speech, gender, verb type, declension model, other features sometimes present in bilingual dictionaries are lists of phrases, usage and style guides, verb tables, maps and grammar references. In contrast to the dictionary, a monolingual dictionary defines words. The Roman Emperor Claudius is known to have compiled an Etruscan-Latin dictionary, one substantial bilingual dictionary was the Mahāvyutpatti. Dictionaries from Hebrew and Aramaic into medieval French were composed in the European Jewish communities in the 10th century CE and these were used for understanding and teaching the Talmud and other Jewish texts. The most important challenge for practical and theoretical lexicographers is to define the functions of a bilingual dictionary, a bilingual dictionary works to help users translate texts from one language into another or to help users understand foreign-language texts. In such situations users will require the dictionary to contain different types of data that have been selected for the function in question. If the dictionary is intended to translate texts, it will need to include not only equivalents but also collocations. The British lexicographer Robert Ilson gives example definitions from the Collins-Robert French-English English-French Dictionary, both phrases can be understood reasonably well from their constituents and have fairly obvious contrasts with garde urbain in French or with urban policeman in English. But garde champêtre has a specific unpredictable contrast within the system of French. But a gendarme is a member of a police force that is technically part of the French Army whereas a garde champêtre is employed by a local commune. Rural policeman has no such contrast, for example, in English, a ticket can provide entrance to a movie theater, authorize a bus or train ride, or can be given to you by a police officer for exceeding the posted speed limit. Recently, a method for the disambiguation of the entries of bilingual dictionaries has been proposed that makes use of specific kinds of graphs. As a result, translations in each entry of the dictionary are assigned the specific sense they refer to, to mitigate the problem of one word having multiple meanings and its translation having multiple, but not necessarily corresponding meanings, the user should perform a reverse lookup. Reverse lookups can usually be performed faster with Dictionary programs and online dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries are available in a number of formats, and often include a grammar reference and usage examples. Printed dictionaries – Printed dictionaries range from small pocket-sized editions to large, Dictionary programs – software that allows words or phrases to be input and translated on computers and smart phones. Visual dictionaries – A visual dictionary is a dictionary that relies primarily on illustrations to provide the user with a reliable way of identifying the correct translation
31.
International Standard Serial Number
–
An International Standard Serial Number is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title, ISSN are used in ordering, cataloging, interlibrary loans, and other practices in connection with serial literature. The ISSN system was first drafted as an International Organization for Standardization international standard in 1971, ISO subcommittee TC 46/SC9 is responsible for maintaining the standard. When a serial with the content is published in more than one media type. For example, many serials are published both in print and electronic media, the ISSN system refers to these types as print ISSN and electronic ISSN, respectively. The format of the ISSN is an eight digit code, divided by a hyphen into two four-digit numbers, as an integer number, it can be represented by the first seven digits. The last code digit, which may be 0-9 or an X, is a check digit. Formally, the form of the ISSN code can be expressed as follows, NNNN-NNNC where N is in the set, a digit character. The ISSN of the journal Hearing Research, for example, is 0378-5955, where the final 5 is the check digit, for calculations, an upper case X in the check digit position indicates a check digit of 10. To confirm the check digit, calculate the sum of all eight digits of the ISSN multiplied by its position in the number, the modulus 11 of the sum must be 0. There is an online ISSN checker that can validate an ISSN, ISSN codes are assigned by a network of ISSN National Centres, usually located at national libraries and coordinated by the ISSN International Centre based in Paris. The International Centre is an organization created in 1974 through an agreement between UNESCO and the French government. The International Centre maintains a database of all ISSNs assigned worldwide, at the end of 2016, the ISSN Register contained records for 1,943,572 items. ISSN and ISBN codes are similar in concept, where ISBNs are assigned to individual books, an ISBN might be assigned for particular issues of a serial, in addition to the ISSN code for the serial as a whole. An ISSN, unlike the ISBN code, is an identifier associated with a serial title. For this reason a new ISSN is assigned to a serial each time it undergoes a major title change, separate ISSNs are needed for serials in different media. Thus, the print and electronic versions of a serial need separate ISSNs. Also, a CD-ROM version and a web version of a serial require different ISSNs since two different media are involved, however, the same ISSN can be used for different file formats of the same online serial
32.
Softpedia
–
Softpedia is a website from Romania that indexes information and provides primarily software information and downloads. Its main sections are Windows, Mac, Linux, Games, Drivers, Mobile, Webscripts and it also covers technology and science topics from both external and in-house sources, and it provides software and game reviews. Wherever possible, it one or more screenshots of each application. Softpedia does not repack software for distribution and it provides direct downloads of software in its original distribution form, links to developers downloads, or both. Softpedia is a destination for software downloads. It is owned by SoftNews NET SRL
33.
Webby Award
–
Categories include websites, advertising and media, online film and video, mobile sites and apps, and social. Two winners are selected in each category, one by members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, each winner presents a five-word acceptance speech, a trademark of the annual awards show. Hailed as the Internet’s highest honor, the award is one of the older Internet-oriented awards, the Webby Awards began in 1996, sponsored by the Academy of Web Design and Cool Site of the Day. The first Webby Awards were produced by Kay Dangaard at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel as a nod to the first site of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and that first year, they were called Webbie Awards. The first Site of the Year winner was the pioneer webisodic serial The Spot, todays Webbys were founded by Tiffany Shlain when she was hired by the The Web Magazine to establish the awards. The event was held in San Francisco from 1996 to 2004, after the first year the awards became more successful than the magazine and IDG closed the publication. Shlain continued to run The Webby Awards with the help of Maya Draisin until 2004, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which selects the winners of The Webby Awards, was established in 1998 by co-founders Tiffany Shlain, Spencer Ante and Maya Draisin. David-Michel Davies, CEO of Webby Media Group, current Executive Director of the Webby Awards, in 2009, the 13th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries. That same year, more than 500,000 votes were cast in The Webby Peoples Voice Awards, in 2012, the sixteenth Annual Webby awards received 1.5 million votes from more than 200 countries for the Peoples Voice awards. In 2015, the 19th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 13,000 entries from all 50 U. S. states, during the Call for Entries phase, each entry is rated by Associate Members of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Entries that receive the highest marks during this first round of voting are included on category-specific shortlists, deloitte provides vote tabulation consulting for the Webby Awards. Winners of both the Academy-selected and People’s Voice-selected awards are invited to the Webbys, the Webby Awards are presented in over a hundred categories among all four types of entries. A website can be entered in categories and receive multiple awards. In each category, two awards are handed out, a Webby Award selected by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, past winners include Amazon. com, eBay, Travel + Leisure, SimplyHired. com, Kayak. com, Yahoo. Each year, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences also honors individuals with Webby Special Achievement Awards, since 2005, The Webby Awards has been presented in New York City. Comedian Rob Corddry hosted the ceremony from 2005 to 2007, seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live hosted in 2008 and 2009, B. J. Novak of NBCs The Office in 2010, and Lisa Kudrow in 2011. Comedian, actor, and writer Patton Oswalt hosted from 2012 to 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress will host the 19th Annual Webby Awards. The Webbys are famous for limiting recipients to five-word speeches, which are often humorous, in 2005 when accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award, former Vice President Al Gores speech was Please dont recount this vote
