1.
Year
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A year is the orbital period of the Earth moving in its orbit around the Sun. Due to the Earths axial tilt, the course of a year sees the passing of the seasons, marked by changes in weather, the hours of daylight, and, consequently, vegetation and soil fertility. In temperate and subpolar regions around the globe, four seasons are recognized, spring, summer, autumn. In tropical and subtropical regions several geographical sectors do not present defined seasons, but in the seasonal tropics, a calendar year is an approximation of the number of days of the Earths orbital period as counted in a given calendar. The Gregorian, or modern, calendar, presents its calendar year to be either a common year of 365 days or a year of 366 days, as do the Julian calendars. For the Gregorian calendar the average length of the year across the complete leap cycle of 400 years is 365.2425 days. The ISO standard ISO 80000-3, Annex C, supports the symbol a to represent a year of either 365 or 366 days, in English, the abbreviations y and yr are commonly used. In astronomy, the Julian year is a unit of time, it is defined as 365.25 days of exactly 86400 seconds, totalling exactly 31557600 seconds in the Julian astronomical year. The word year is used for periods loosely associated with, but not identical to, the calendar or astronomical year, such as the seasonal year, the fiscal year. Similarly, year can mean the period of any planet, for example. The term can also be used in reference to any long period or cycle, west Saxon ġēar, Anglian ġēr continues Proto-Germanic *jǣran. Cognates are German Jahr, Old High German jār, Old Norse ár and Gothic jer, all the descendants of the Proto-Indo-European noun *yeh₁rom year, season. Cognates also descended from the same Proto-Indo-European noun are Avestan yārǝ year, Greek ὥρα year, season, period of time, Old Church Slavonic jarŭ, Latin annus is from a PIE noun *h₂et-no-, which also yielded Gothic aþn year. Both *yeh₁-ro- and *h₂et-no- are based on verbal roots expressing movement, *h₁ey- and *h₂et- respectively, the Greek word for year, ἔτος, is cognate with Latin vetus old, from the PIE word *wetos- year, also preserved in this meaning in Sanskrit vat-sa- yearling and vat-sa-ras year. Derived from Latin annus are a number of English words, such as annual, annuity, anniversary, etc. per annum means each year, anno Domini means in the year of the Lord. No astronomical year has an number of days or lunar months. Financial and scientific calculations often use a 365-day calendar to simplify daily rates, in the Julian calendar, the average length of a year is 365.25 days. In a non-leap year, there are 365 days, in a year there are 366 days
2.
Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
3.
Calendar
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A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, a date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a record of such a system. A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. The most common type of calendar was the lunisolar calendar. Latin calendarium meant account book, register, the Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century. The course of the Sun and the Moon are the most evident forms of timekeeping, nevertheless, the Roman calendar contained very ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year. The first recorded calendars date to the Bronze Age, dependent on the development of writing in the Ancient Near East, a larger number of calendar systems of the Ancient Near East becomes accessible in the Iron Age, based on the Babylonian calendar. This includes the calendar of the Persian Empire, which in turn gave rise to the Zoroastrian calendar as well as the Hebrew calendar, calendars in antiquity were lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years. This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been attempts to model the pattern of intercalation algorithmically. The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, the Julian calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon but simply followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. This created a dissociation of the month from the lunation. The Islamic calendar is based on the prohibition of intercalation by Muhammad and this resulted in an observationally based lunar calendar that shifts relative to the seasons of the solar year. The first calendar reform of the modern era was the Gregorian calendar. Such ideas are mooted from time to time but have failed to gain traction because of the loss of continuity, massive upheaval in implementation, a full calendar system has a different calendar date for every day. Thus the week cycle is by not a full calendar system. The simplest calendar system just counts time periods from a reference date and this applies for the Julian day or Unix Time
4.
Ordinal number
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In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is one generalization of the concept of a natural number that is used to describe a way to arrange a collection of objects in order, one after another. Any finite collection of objects can be put in order just by the process of counting, labeling the objects with distinct whole numbers, Ordinal numbers are thus the labels needed to arrange collections of objects in order. An ordinal number is used to describe the type of a well ordered set. Whereas ordinals are useful for ordering the objects in a collection, they are distinct from cardinal numbers, although the distinction between ordinals and cardinals is not always apparent in finite sets, different infinite ordinals can describe the same cardinal. Like other kinds of numbers, ordinals can be added, multiplied, a natural number can be used for two purposes, to describe the size of a set, or to describe the position of an element in a sequence. When restricted to finite sets these two concepts coincide, there is one way to put a finite set into a linear sequence. This is because any set has only one size, there are many nonisomorphic well-orderings of any infinite set. Whereas the notion of number is associated with a set with no particular structure on it. A well-ordered set is an ordered set in which there is no infinite decreasing sequence, equivalently. Ordinals may be used to label the elements of any given well-ordered set and this length is called the order type of the set. Any ordinal is defined by the set of ordinals that precede it, in fact, the most common definition of ordinals identifies each ordinal as the set of ordinals that precede it. For example, the ordinal 42 is the type of the ordinals less than it, i. e. the ordinals from 0 to 41. Conversely, any set of ordinals that is downward-closed—meaning that for any ordinal α in S and any ordinal β < α, β is also in S—is an ordinal. There are infinite ordinals as well, the smallest infinite ordinal is ω, which is the type of the natural numbers. After all of these come ω·2, ω·2+1, ω·2+2, and so on, then ω·3, now the set of ordinals formed in this way must itself have an ordinal associated with it, and that is ω2. Further on, there will be ω3, then ω4, and so on, and ωω, then ωωω, then later ωωωω and this can be continued indefinitely far. The smallest uncountable ordinal is the set of all countable ordinals, in a well-ordered set, every non-empty subset contains a distinct smallest element. Given the axiom of dependent choice, this is equivalent to just saying that the set is ordered and there is no infinite decreasing sequence
5.
Anno Domini
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The terms anno Domini and before Christ are used to label or number years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The term anno Domini is Medieval Latin and means in the year of the Lord, There is no year zero in this scheme, so the year AD1 immediately follows the year 1 BC. This dating system was devised in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor, the Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world today. Traditionally, English followed Latin usage by placing the AD abbreviation before the year number, however, BC is placed after the year number, which also preserves syntactic order. The abbreviation is widely used after the number of a century or millennium. Because BC is the English abbreviation for Before Christ, it is sometimes concluded that AD means After Death. However, this would mean that the approximate 33 years commonly associated with the life of Jesus would not be included in either of the BC, astronomical year numbering and ISO8601 avoid words or abbreviations related to Christianity, but use the same numbers for AD years. The Anno Domini dating system was devised in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus to enumerate the years in his Easter table. His system was to replace the Diocletian era that had used in an old Easter table because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians. The last year of the old table, Diocletian 247, was followed by the first year of his table. Thus Dionysius implied that Jesus Incarnation occurred 525 years earlier, without stating the year during which his birth or conception occurred. Blackburn & Holford-Strevens briefly present arguments for 2 BC,1 BC, There were inaccuracies in the list of consuls There were confused summations of emperors regnal years It is not known how Dionysius established the year of Jesuss birth. It is convenient to initiate a calendar not from the day of an event. For example, the Islamic calendar begins not from the date of the Hegira, at the time, it was believed by some that the Resurrection and end of the world would occur 500 years after the birth of Jesus. The old Anno Mundi calendar theoretically commenced with the creation of the based on information in the Old Testament. It was believed that, based on the Anno Mundi calendar, Anno Mundi 6000 was thus equated with the resurrection and the end of the world but this date had already passed in the time of Dionysius. The Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede, who was familiar with the work of Dionysius Exiguus, used Anno Domini dating in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. e. On the continent of Europe, Anno Domini was introduced as the era of choice of the Carolingian Renaissance by the English cleric and scholar Alcuin in the late eighth century
6.
Regnal year
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A regnal year is a year of the reign of a sovereign, from the Latin regnum meaning kingdom, rule. The oldest dating systems were in years, and considered the date as an ordinal. For example, a monarch could have a first year of rule, a year of rule, a third, and so on, but not a zero year of rule. Applying this ancient epoch system to modern calculations of time, which include zero, is led to the debate over when the third millennium began. Regnal years are finite era names, contrary to infinite era names such as Christian era, Jimmu era, Juche era, in ancient times, calendars were counted in terms of the number of years of the reign of the current monarch. Reckoning long periods of times required a king list, the oldest such reckoning is preserved in the Sumerian king list. In Canada, acts of Parliament are dated by the session, the Parliament, the year. While not strictly a regnal year, time in the United States of America can be derived from the Declaration of Independence, for example, the U. S.2017 is the 242nd year of the Independence of the United States of America. Time is also sometimes reckoned in terms of Congress, e. g. House of Representatives Bill 2 of the 112th Congress is dated 112th CONGRESS, 1st Session. An era name was assigned as the name of each year by the leader of the East Asian countries during some portion of their history, the people of the country referred to that year by that name. Era names were used for two millennia by Chinese emperors and are still used in North Korea, Japan and Taiwan. It could last from one year to the length of the leaders reign, if it lasted more than one year, numbers were appended to the era name. If it lasted the length of the leaders reign, then that leader is often referred to by that name posthumously. However, the leader was given a more complex formal posthumous name as well. It should not be confused with a name, by which many leaders are known. The Lanfang Republic era, Republic of Formosa era and Republic of China era are era names without an emperor, the Confucius era and Juche era are based on the year of birth of the thinker or eternal president. The Huangdi era, Dangun era and kōki were counted in terms of the number of years of the reign of the first monarch, some are transliterations of their Chinese era names. Chinese era names were employed in other East Asian countries
7.
Henry VIII of England
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Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. Henry was the second Tudor monarch, succeeding his father, Henry VII, Henry is best known for his six marriages and, in particular, his efforts to have his first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, annulled. Despite his resulting excommunication, Henry remained a believer in core Catholic theological teachings, domestically, Henry is known for his radical changes to the English Constitution, ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings to England. Besides asserting the supremacy over the Church of England, he greatly expanded royal power during his reign. Charges of treason and heresy were commonly used to quash dissent, and he achieved many of his political aims through the work of his chief ministers, some of whom were banished or executed when they fell out of his favour. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich and his contemporaries considered Henry in his prime to be an attractive, educated, and accomplished king, and he has been described as one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne. He was an author and composer, as he aged, Henry became severely obese and his health suffered, contributing to his death in 1547. He is frequently characterised in his life as a lustful, egotistical, harsh. He was succeeded by his son Edward VI, born 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, London, Henry Tudor was the third child and second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Of the young Henrys six siblings, only three – Arthur, Prince of Wales, Margaret, and Mary – survived infancy and he was baptised by Richard Fox, the Bishop of Exeter, at a church of the Observant Franciscans close to the palace. In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at age three, and was inducted into the Order of the Bath soon after. The day after the ceremony he was created Duke of York, in May 1495, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter. Henry was given an education from leading tutors, becoming fluent in Latin and French. Not much is known about his early life – save for his appointments – because he was not expected to become king, as Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father as king, differenced by a label of three points ermine. In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15 of sweating sickness, Arthurs death thrust all his duties upon his younger brother, the 10-year-old Henry. After a little debate, Henry became the new Duke of Cornwall in October 1502, Henry VII gave the boy few tasks. Young Henry was strictly supervised and did not appear in public, as a result, the young Henry would later ascend the throne untrained in the exacting art of kingship
8.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of science of his generation. Gould spent most of his teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996 Gould was also appointed as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, Goulds most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by periods of evolutionary stability. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth. Most of Goulds empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and he also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans and he campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields whose authorities do not overlap. Gould was known by the public mainly from his 300 popular essays in the magazine Natural History. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a Living Legend, Stephen Jay Gould was born and raised in the community of Bayside, a neighborhood of the northeastern section of Queens in New York City. His father Leonard was a stenographer and a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. His mother Eleanor was an artist whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the citys Garment District, when Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex. I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck, Gould once recalled and it was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist. Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion, when asked directly if he was an agnostic in Skeptic magazine, he responded, If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course Id bet no. But, basically, Huxley was right when he said that agnosticism is the honorable position because we really cannot know. Id be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional God, though he had been brought up by a Marxist father, he stated that his fathers politics were very different from his own. In describing his own views, he has said they tend to the left of center. According to Gould the most influential political books he read were C. Wright Mills The Power Elite, while attending Antioch College in the early 1960s, Gould was active in the civil rights movement and often campaigned for social justice
9.
Millennium celebrations
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The Millennium celebrations were a worldwide, coordinated series of events celebrating New Years Eve in 1999–2000, marking the end of the second millennium and beginning of the new, third millennium. This also marks the ending of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, equally, many private venues, cultural and religious centres held events and a diverse range of memorabilia was created – such as souvenir postage stamps. As with every New Years Eve, many events were timed with the stroke of midnight at the timezone of the location, there were also many events associated with the dawn on 1 January. While there was debate whether the millennium truly begins in 2000 or 2001 the popularity of the round number made New Years 1999–2000 a global celebration. An international television broadcast called 2000 Today was produced by a consortium of 60 broadcasters, some countries in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and hence close to the International Date Line engaged in Millennium politics to argue they were the first to enter the new millennium. The US Navy submarine Topeka positioned itself 400 feet underwater, straddling both the International date line and the equator, at Caroline Island, renamed as Millennium Island in the mid-Pacific, the republic of Kiribati claimed the first land to see the new millennium. On the Chatham Islands there was a Maori blessing, as they faced the Pacific Ocean, a beacon was lit and school children sang. In Auckland, a display on the Harbour made New Zealand the first industrial nation to celebrate the year 2000. Sydney, hosts of the 2000 Summer Olympics, held a fireworks display centering on the Harbour Bridge with the locally famous graffito Eternity being recreated. For the first time in its history, the Sydney Opera House precinct was almost completely cordoned off from the public, instead, tickets costing as much as $2000 each were being sold for Opera House parties. However, public transport and access was available to view the fireworks on the Bridge, in Tokyo, there were a series of concerts and a fireworks display. At midnight, temple bells across Japan were rung 108 times to dispel the evils of mankind, in Beijing, alongside fireworks and dragon dances, President Jiang Zemin lit an eternal flameand pledging China would restore its lost glory. In the Philippines, Millennium Parties simultaneously began in different parts of the Country, moscows Government and its National Government had sponsored parties across the city. In Jerusalem, and particularly at the Mount of Olives, fears that doomsday fanatics. could try to trigger an apocalypse prompted one of Israels biggest peacetime police operations. In Giza, a concert called The Twelve Dreams of the Sun with music by Jean Michel Jarre was held on the pyramids, paris was the focal point of celebrations in France where searchlights and 20,000 strobe lights for the event for installed on the Eiffel tower. In Rome, Pope John Paul II led a traditional Te Deum service at St. Pauls Cathedral, in London, attention focused around Big Ben, the Millennium Dome and fireworks display, called the River of Fire went along several kilometers of the Thames. The Irish national television channel RTÉ produced a marathon 19-hour broadcast called Millennium Eve, rio de Janeiro held a special party led by Gal Costa at minutes to midnight. Meanwhile, in Bermuda celebrations were marked as the first Caribbean nation to crossover to the new millennium reached it highest at midnight
10.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He is perhaps most famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001, A Space Odyssey, Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, in 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award which is given by UNESCO for popularizing science. These along with his fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker Prophet of the Space Age. His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, for many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the Big Three of science fiction. Clarke was a proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society, in 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system, an idea which won him the Franklin Institutes Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1963, and other honours. Later he was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–47, Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year he discovered the ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his fame later on in the 1980s, from being the host of television shows such as Arthur C. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death and he was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lankas highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005. Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, England, and grew up in nearby Bishops Lydeard, as a boy, he grew up on a farm enjoying stargazing, fossil collecting, and reading American science fiction pulp magazines. He received his education at Huish Grammar school in Taunton. Early influences included dinosaur cigarette cards, which led to an enthusiasm for fossils starting about 1925, in his teens, he joined the Junior Astronomical Association and contributed to Urania, the societys journal, which was edited in Glasgow by Marion Eadie. At Clarkes request, she added an Astronautics Section, which featured a series of articles by him on spacecraft and he moved to London in 1936 and joined the Board of Education as a pensions auditor. Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on ground-controlled approach radar, as documented in the semi-autobiographical Glide Path, although GCA did not see much practical use during the war, it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949 after several years of development. Clarke initially served in the ranks, and was an instructor on radar at No.2 Radio School. He was commissioned as an officer on 27 May 1943
11.
Analogy
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Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another, or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process. The word analogy can also refer to the relation between the source and the target themselves, which is often, though not necessarily, a similarity, as in the biological notion of analogy. Analogy plays a significant role in solving, as well as decision making, perception, memory, creativity, emotion, explanation. It lies behind basic tasks such as the identification of places, objects and people, for example, in face perception and it has been argued that analogy is the core of cognition. Specific analogical language comprises exemplification, comparisons, metaphors, similes, allegories, and parables, phrases like and so on, and the like, as if, and the very word like also rely on an analogical understanding by the receiver of a message including them. Analogy is important not only in language and common sense but also in science, philosophy. In cognitive linguistics, the notion of conceptual metaphor may be equivalent to that of analogy, Analogy has been studied and discussed since classical antiquity by philosophers, scientists, and lawyers. The last few decades have shown a renewed interest in analogy, in ancient Greek the word αναλογια originally meant proportionality, in the mathematical sense, and it was indeed sometimes translated to Latin as proportio. From there analogy was understood as identity of relation between any two ordered pairs, whether of mathematical nature or not, kants Critique of Judgment held to this notion. Kant argued that there can be exactly the same relation between two different objects. The same notion of analogy was used in the US-based SAT tests, for example, Hand is to palm as foot is to ____. This relation is not apparent in some definitions of palm and sole, where the former is defined as the inner surface of the hand. Analogy and abstraction are different cognitive processes, and analogy is often an easier one and this analogy is not comparing all the properties between a hand and a foot, but rather comparing the relationship between a hand and its palm to a foot and its sole. While a hand and a foot have many dissimilarities, the focuses on their similarity in having an inner surface. A computer algorithm has achieved human-level performance on multiple-choice analogy questions from the SAT test, the algorithm measures the similarity of relations between pairs of words by statistical analysis of a large collection of text. It answers SAT questions by selecting the choice with the highest relational similarity, Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle actually used a wider notion of analogy. They saw analogy as a shared abstraction, analogous objects did not share necessarily a relation, but also an idea, a pattern, a regularity, an attribute, an effect or a philosophy. These authors also accepted that comparisons, metaphors and images could be used as arguments, analogies should also make those abstractions easier to understand and give confidence to the ones using them
12.
Reuters
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Reuters /ˈrɔɪtərz/ is an international news agency headquartered in London, England. It is a division of Thomson Reuters, until 2008, the Reuters news agency formed part of an independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data. Since the acquisition of Reuters Group by the Thomson Corporation in 2008, Reuters transmits news in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Urdu, and Chinese. The Reuter agency was established in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter in Britain at the London Royal Exchange, Paul Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848. Upon moving to England, he founded Reuters Telegram Company in 1851, headquartered in London, the company initially covered commercial news, serving banks, brokerage houses, and business firms. The first newspaper client to subscribe was the London Morning Advertiser in 1858, Reuters agency built a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world as the first to report news scoops from abroad. Reuters was the first to report Abraham Lincolns assassination in Europe, for instance, in 1872, Reuters expanded into the far east, followed by South America in 1874. Both expansions were made possible by advances in overland telegraphs and undersea cables, in 1883, Reuters began transmitting messages electrically to London newspapers. In 1923, Reuters began using radio to transmit news internationally, in 1925, The Press Association of Great Britain acquired a majority interest in Reuters, and full owners some years later. During the world wars, The Guardian reported that Reuters came under pressure from the British government to national interests. In 1941 Reuters deflected the pressure by restructuring itself as a private company, the new owners formed the Reuters Trust. In 1941, the PA sold half of Reuters to the Newspaper Proprieters Association, the Reuters Trust Principles were put in place to maintain the companys independence. At that point, Reuters had become one of the major news agencies. In 1961, Reuters scooped news of the erection of the Berlin Wall, in 1981, Reuters began making electronic transactions on its computer network, and afterwards developed a number of electronic brokerage and trading services. Reuters was floated as a company in 1984, when Reuters Trust was listed on the stock exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange. Reuters published the first story of the Berlin Wall being breached in 1989, share price grew during the dotcom boom, then fell after the banking troubles in 2001. In 2002, Brittanica wrote that most news throughout the world came from three major agencies, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, Reuters merged with Thomson Corporation in Canada in 2008, forming Thomson Reuters. In 2009, Thomson Reuters withdrew from the LSE and the NASDAQ, instead listing its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the last surviving member of the Reuters family founders, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, died at age 96 on 25 January 2009
13.
3001: The Final Odyssey
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3001, The Final Odyssey is a 1997 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. It is the fourth and final book in Clarkes Space Odyssey series and this novel begins with a brief prologue describing the bioforms — dubbed the First-Born — who created the black monoliths. They evolved from primordial soup, and over the course of millions of years, perceiving that nothing was more precious than mind, they catalysed the evolution of intelligent species wherever they went, by increasing the intelligent species chance of survival. After visiting Earth, the First-Born found a way to impress themselves into the fabric of space and time, meanwhile, the monoliths—implied to have been forgotten by their creators when they ascended to a higher state of being—continued to watch over their subjects. 3001 follows the adventures of Frank Poole, the astronaut killed by the HAL9000 computer in 2001, one millennium later, Pooles freeze-dried body is discovered in the Kuiper belt by a comet-collecting space tug named the Goliath, and revived. Poole is taken home to learn about the Earth in the year 3001, humans have also colonised the Jovian moons Ganymede and Callisto. TMA-1, the black monolith found on the Moon in 1999, has brought to Earth in 2006. Presumably, the monolith was empowered to obliterate the nascent biosphere of Jupiter, Frank conscripts Bowman and HAL, who have now become a single entity—Halman—residing in the monoliths computational matrix, to infect the monolith with a computer virus. The monolith does receive orders to exterminate humanity, and duplicates itself, due to Halman having already infected the first monolith, all the monoliths disintegrate. At the close of the story, Poole and other land on Europa to start peaceful relations with the primitive native Europans. A statement is made that the monoliths makers will not determine humanitys fate until the Last Days and this portrayal of the monoliths is different from that in the earlier novels. In particular, the 2001 monolith was capable of faster-than-light transmission, in 2010, an apparition of Bowman appeared before Floyd, warning that the Leonovs crew must leave Jupiter within fifteen days. Floyd had difficulty convincing the rest of the crew, which would have much easier had he been in possession of the video recording of the incident shown to Poole by Dr. Allister Kim in 3001. The epilogue of 2010, titled 20,001, could not have happened as portrayed because of the disappearance of the monoliths at the end of 3001, the story features a ring-shaped habitat in geostationary orbit around Earth, connected by four towers equally spaced around the equator. In the epilogue of 2061, Odyssey Three however, the ring-shaped habitat reportedly has six towers instead of four, additionally, some of the dates are changed. The USSR is acknowledged as having collapsed in 1991, whereas in the three books it lasts well into the twenty-first century. These parallel universes are a part of Clarkes retroactive continuity and it was reported on Yahoo Entertainment in 2000 that M. G. M. and actor/director Tom Hanks were in discussions regarding turning both 2061, Odyssey Three and 3001, The Final Odyssey into movies. An update in 2001 stated that there was no development on the project
14.
Utopia
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A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia and you could also say that utopia is a perfect place that has been made so there are no problems. The term has been used to describe intentional communities, the term utopia was coined from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The word comes from Greek, οὐ and τόπος and means no-place, however, in standard usage, the words meaning has narrowed and now usually describes a non-existent society that is intended to be viewed as considerably better than contemporary society. Eutopia, derived from Greek εὖ and τόπος, means good place, in English, eutopia and utopia are homophonous, which may have given rise to the change in meaning. Chronologically, the first recorded utopian proposal is Platos Republic, part conversation, part fictional depiction, and part policy proposal, Republic would categorize citizens into a rigid class structure of golden, silver, bronze and iron socioeconomic classes. The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be benign oligarchs, plato stressed this structure many times in both quotes by him and in his published works, such as the Republic. The wisdom of these rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, the educational program for the rulers is the central notion of the proposal. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, during the 16th century, Thomas Mores book Utopia proposed an ideal society of the same name. Some maintain the position that Mores Utopia functions only on the level of a satire, but the homophonic prefix eu-, meaning good, also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly good place is really no place. Ecological utopian society describes new ways in which society should relate to nature and these works perceive a widening gap between the modern Western way of living that destroys nature and a more traditional way of living before industrialization. Ecological utopias may advocate a society that is more sustainable, according to the Dutch philosopher Marius de Geus, ecological utopias could be inspirational sources for movements involving green politics. Particularly in the early 19th century, several ideas arose. These ideas are often grouped in a utopian socialist movement. A once common characteristic is a distribution of goods, frequently with the total abolition of money. Citizens only do work which they enjoy and which is for the good, leaving them with ample time for the cultivation of the arts. One classic example of such a utopia was Edward Bellamys Looking Backward, Another socialist utopia is William Morriss News from Nowhere, written partially in response to the top-down nature of Bellamys utopia, which Morris criticized. However, as the socialist movement developed, it moved away from utopianism, in a materialist utopian society, the economy is perfect, there is no inflation, and only perfect social and financial equality exists
15.
Year 2000 problem
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The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or Y2K, was a computer bug related to the formatting and storage of calendar data. Problems were anticipated, and arose, because twentieth-century software often represented the year with only the final two digits—making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The assumption of a date in such programs caused various errors, such as the incorrect display of dates. It identifies two problems that may exist in computer programs. First, the practice of representing the year with two digits became problematic with logical error arising upon rollover from x99 to x00. This had caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the. Ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid, years divisible by 100 are not leap years, except for years that are divisible by 400. Thus the year 2000 was a leap year, companies and organisations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to address the anticipated problem. Very few computer failures were reported when the clocks rolled over into 2000 and it is not known how many problems went unrecorded. Y2K is a numeronym and was the abbreviation for the year 2000 software problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for year, and k for the SI unit prefix kilo meaning 1000, hence, 2K signifies 2000. It was also named the Millennium Bug because it was associated with the popular roll-over of the millennium, the Year 2000 problem was the subject of the early book, Computers in Crisis by Jerome and Marilyn Murray. The first recorded mention of the Year 2000 Problem on a Usenet newsgroup occurred on Friday,18 January 1985, the acronym Y2K has been attributed to David Eddy, a Massachusetts programmer, in an e-mail sent on 12 June 1995. He later said, People were calling it CDC, FADL, Y2K just came off my fingertips. It was therefore important for programmers to reduce usage. As space on disc and tape was also expensive, this also saved money by reducing the size of stored data files, many computer programs stored years with only two decimal digits, for example,1980 was stored as 80. Some such programs could not distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900, other programs tried to represent the year 2000 as 19100. This could cause a failure and cause date comparisons to produce incorrect results
16.
Odometer
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An odometer or odograph is an instrument that indicates distance travelled by a vehicle, such as a bicycle or automobile. The device may be electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, the noun derives from the Greek words hodós and métron. Possibly the first evidence for the use of an odometer can be found in the works of the ancient Roman Pliny, both authors list the distances of routes traveled by Alexander the Great as by his bematists Diognetus and Baeton. However, the accuracy of the bematistss measurements rather indicates the use of a mechanical device. 2% from the actual distance. From the nine surviving bematists measurements in Plinys Naturalis Historia eight show a deviation of less than 5% from the actual distance, three of them being within 1%. An odometer for measuring distance was first described by Vitruvius around 27 and 23 BC, hero of Alexandria describes a similar device in chapter 34 of his Dioptra. Some researchers have speculated that the device might have included technology similar to that of the Greek Antikythera mechanism, the odometer of Vitruvius was based on chariot wheels of 4 feet diameter turning 400 times in one Roman mile. For each revolution a pin on the axle engaged a 400 tooth cogwheel thus turning it one complete revolution per mile and this engaged another gear with holes along the circumference, where pebbles were located, that were to drop one by one into a box. The distance traveled would thus be given simply by counting the number of pebbles, whether this instrument was ever built at the time is disputed. Leonardo da Vinci later tried to build it himself according to the description, however, in 1981 engineer Andre Sleeswyk built his own replica, replacing the square-toothed gear designs of da Vinci with the triangular, pointed teeth found in the Antikythera mechanism. With this modification, the Vitruvius odometer functioned perfectly, the odometer was also independently invented in ancient China, possibly by the prolific inventor and early scientist Zhang Heng of the Han Dynasty. By the 3rd century, the Chinese had termed the device as the jì lĭ gŭ chē, there is speculation that some time in the 1st century BC, the beating of drums and gongs were mechanically-driven by working automatically off the rotation of the road-wheels. This might have actually been the design of one Loxia Hong, the odometer was used also in subsequent periods of Chinese history. In the historical text of the Jin Shu, the oldest part of the compiled text, the passage in the Jin Shu expanded upon this, explaining that it took a similar form to the mechanical device of the south-pointing chariot invented by Ma Jun. As recorded in the Song Shi of the Song Dynasty, the odometer and south-pointing chariot were combined into one wheeled device by engineers of the 9th century, 11th century, and 12th century. The Sun Tzu Suan Ching, dated from the 3rd century to 5th century, the historical text of the Song Shi, recording the people and events of the Chinese Song Dynasty, also mentioned the odometer used in that period. At the completion of every li, the figure of a man in the lower storey strikes a drum, at the completion of every ten li. The carriage-pole ends in a phoenix-head, and the carriage is drawn by four horses, the escort was formerly of 18 men, but in the 4th year of the Yung-Hsi reign-period the emperor Thai Tsung increased it to 30
17.
Dinosaur in a Haystack
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Dinosaur in a Haystack is the seventh volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column The View of Life published in Natural History magazine, the book deals with themes familiar to Goulds writing, evolution, science biography, probabilities, and strange oddities found in nature. His essay Poes Greatest Hit analyzes the controversial conchology textbook The Conchologists First Book, Poes volume on natural history sold out within two months, and was his only book republished during his lifetime. Essay Dinomania is a review of Michael Crichtons novel and Steven Spielbergs blockbuster film, Goulds book received favorable reviews in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times. Up Against the Wall - by Steve Jones Essay Summaries - by Lawrence N. Goeller Dinosaur in a Haystack Review - by Danny Yee Book review by Kathryn Denning Two Cultures - by Howard A
18.
Dionysius Exiguus
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Dionysius Exiguus (Latin for Dionysius the Humble, c. AD544 was a 6th-century monk born in Scythia Minor. He was a member of a community of Scythian monks concentrated in Tomis, Dionysius is best known as the inventor of the Anno Domini era, which is used to number the years of both the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar. Some churches adopted his computus for the dates of Easter and these Collectiones canonum Dionysianae had great authority in the West, and continues to guide church administrations. Dionysius also wrote a treatise on elementary mathematics, according to his friend and fellow-student, Cassiodorus, Dionysius although by birth a Scythian, was in character a true Roman, most learned in both tongues. He was also a thorough catholic Christian and an accomplished Scripturist, by the 6th century, the term Scythian could mean an inhabitant of Scythia Minor, or simply someone from the north-east of the Greco-Roman world, centred on the Mediterranean. The term had a meaning, devoid of clear ethnic attributes. Furthermore, since none of the Scythian monks expressed any kinship, by blood or spiritual, with the Arian Goths who at that time ruled Italy, a Gothic origin for Dionysius is questionable. By the time of the flourishing of the Scythian monks, the provinces from the Lower Danube, most likely Dionysius was also of local Thraco-Roman origin, like Vitalians family to whom he was related, and the rest of the Scythian monks and other Thraco-Roman personalities of the era. Of great importance were the contributions of Dionysius to the tradition of canon law, a collection of synodal decrees, of which he has left two editions, a. This contains canons of Oriental synods and councils only in Greek and Latin, another bilingual version of Greek canons, undertaken at the instance of Pope Hormisdas, only the preface has been preserved. A collection of papal Constitutions from Siricius to Anastasius II, Dionysius is best known as the inventor of the Anno Domini era, which is used to number the years of both the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar. He used it to identify the several Easters in his Easter table, how he arrived at that number is unknown, but there is evidence of the system he applied. It has been suggested that he arranged the numbers so that leap years would be exactly divisible by four, and that his new table would begin one Victorian cycle, i. e.532 years, after his new epoch. The Anno Domini era became dominant in western Europe only after it was used by the Venerable Bede to date the events in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. Evidence exists that Dionysius desire to replace Diocletian years with a based on the incarnation of Christ was to prevent people from believing the imminent end of the world. At the time, some believed that the Second Coming and end of the world would occur 500 years after the birth of Jesus, the current Anno Mundi calendar commenced with the creation of the world based on information in the Old Testament. It was believed that, based on the Anno Mundi calendar, Anno Mundi 6000 was thus equated with the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. In 525, Dionysius prepared a table of the dates of Easter
19.
Millennialism
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Premillennialism, in Christian eschatology, is the belief that Jesus will physically return to the earth to gather His saints before the Millennium, a literal thousand-year golden age of peace. This return is referred to as the Second Coming, the doctrine is called premillennialism because it holds that Jesus physical return to earth will occur prior to the inauguration of the Millennium. For the last century, the belief has been common in Evangelicalism according to surveys on this topic, Premillennialism is based upon a literal interpretation of Revelation 20, 1–6 in the New Testament, which describes Jesus reign in a period of a thousand years. It views this future age as a time of fulfillment for the hope of Gods people as given in the Old Testament. Post-millennialism, for example, agrees with premillennialism about the future reign of Christ. Postmillennialists hold to the view that the second coming will happen after the millennium, historically Christian premillennialism has also been referred to as chiliasm or millenarianism. The current religious term premillennialism did not come into use until the mid-19th century, the concept of a temporary earthly messianic kingdom at the Messiahs coming was not an invention of Christianity. Instead it was an interpretation developed within the apocalyptic literature of early Judaism. In Judaism during the Christian intertestamental period, there was a distinction between the current age and the “age to come”. The “age to come” was commonly viewed as a nationalistic Golden Age in which the hopes of the prophets would become a reality for the nation of Israel, on the surface, the biblical prophets revealed an “age to come” which was monolithic. Seemingly the prophets did not write of a two-phase eschaton consisting of a messianic age followed by an eternal state. However, that was the concept that some Jewish interpreters did derive from their exegesis and their conclusions are found in some of the literature and theology of early Judaism within the centuries both before and during the development of the Christian New Testament. This work likely dates to the early 2nd century and shows a schematization of the divine history divided into ten periods of time called “weeks. ”In the apocalypse. However, after the week, the temporary earthly messianic age begins. After the temporary messianic kingdom, the creation of the new heavens, Second Esdras likely dates from soon after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. The apocryphal book was apparently an attempt to explain the difficulties associated with the destruction of Jerusalem, during one of the visions in the book, Ezra receives a revelation from the angel Uriel. The angel explains that prior to the last judgment, the Messiah will come, seven days after this cataclysmic event, the resurrection and the judgment will occur followed by the eternal state. The Jewish belief in a temporary messianic age continued during
20.
Millennium Dome
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Located on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London, England, the exhibition was open to the public from 1 January to 31 December 2000. The project and exhibition was the subject of political controversy as it failed to attract the number of visitors anticipated. All of the exhibition and associated complex has since been demolished. The dome still exists, and it is now a key feature of The O2. The Prime Meridian passes the edge of the Dome and the nearest London Underground station is North Greenwich on the Jubilee line. The dome is one of the largest of its type in the world, in plan view it is circular,365 m in diameter. It has become one of the United Kingdoms most recognisable landmarks and it can easily be seen on aerial photographs of London. Its exterior is reminiscent of the Dome of Discovery built for the Festival of Britain in 1951, the architect was Richard Rogers and the contractor was a joint venture company, McAlpine/Laing Joint Venture formed between Sir Robert McAlpine and Laing Management. The building structure was engineered by Buro Happold, and the roof structure weighs less than the air contained within the building. Although referred to as a dome it is not strictly one as it is not self-supporting, but is in fact a giant Big Top, for this reason, it has been disparagingly referred to as the Millennium Tent. The twelve posts represent the months of the year, another reference to time in its dimensions, alongside its height. The canopy is made of PTFE-coated glass fibre fabric, a durable and weather-resistant plastic and its symmetry is interrupted by a hole through which a ventilation shaft from the Blackwall Tunnel rises. The land was previously derelict and contaminated by toxic sludge from East Greenwich Gas Works that operated from 1889 to 1985, the clean-up operation was seen by the then Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine as an investment that would add a large area of useful land to the crowded capital. The incoming Labour government elected in 1997 under Tony Blair greatly expanded the size, scope and it also significantly increased expectations of what would be delivered. Just before its opening Blair claimed the Dome would be a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, in the words of BBC correspondent Robert Orchard, the Dome was to be highlighted as a glittering New Labour achievement in the next election manifesto. Fisher Athletic were a team interested in moving to the Dome. The Dome was planned to take over the functions performed by the London Arena and this is the function which The O2 Arena has now undertaken. Night Rain and Faith Festivals Calendar Self Portrait, sponsored by Marks & Spencer, sculpture design by Gerald Scarfe What we do, Work, the Journey Zone, outlining the history and development of transport, was one of the few singled out for praise
21.
Time
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Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Time is often referred to as the dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions. Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers, one view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe—a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is referred to as Newtonian time. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as what a clock reads. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities, Time is used to define other quantities—such as velocity—so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. The operational definition leaves aside the question there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy. Furthermore, it may be there is a subjective component to time. Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a motivation in navigation. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time, examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value as well as value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day. In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day whereas the calendar is consulted for periods longer than a day, increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously. The number that marks the occurrence of an event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from a fiducial epoch—a central reference point. Artifacts from the Paleolithic suggest that the moon was used to time as early as 6,000 years ago. Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, either 12 or 13 lunar months, without intercalation to add days or months to some years, seasons quickly drift in a calendar based solely on twelve lunar months
22.
Time standard
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A time standard is a specification for measuring time, either the rate at which time passes, or points in time, or both. In modern times, several time specifications have been recognized as standards. An example of a kind of time standard can be a time scale, a standard for civil time can specify both time intervals and time-of-day. Standardized time measurements are made using a clock to count periods of some cyclic change, historically, time standards were often based on the Earths rotational period. From the late 17th century to the 19th century it was assumed that the Earths daily rotational rate was constant. Time standards based on Earth rotation were replaced for use from 1952 onwards by an ephemeris time standard based on the Earths orbital period. Various types of second and day are used as the time interval for most time scales. Other intervals of time are usually defined in terms of these two, apparent solar time is based on the solar day, which is the period between one solar noon and the next. A solar day is approximately 24 hours of mean time, as the variation accumulates over a few weeks, there are differences as large as 16 minutes between apparent solar time and mean solar time. However, these cancel out over a year. There are also other perturbations such as Earths wobble, but these are less than a second per year, sidereal time is time by the stars. A sidereal rotation is the time it takes the Earth to make one revolution with respect to the stars and it is well known that observations of the Sun pose substantial obstacles to the achievement of accuracy in measurement. Mean solar time was originally apparent solar time corrected by the equation of time, Greenwich Mean Time was originally mean time deduced from meridian observations made at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The principal meridian of that observatory was chosen in 1884 by the International Meridian Conference to be the Prime Meridian. GMT either by name or as mean time at Greenwich used to be an international time standard. The more current refined version of UT, UT1, is still in reality mean time at Greenwich, Greenwich Mean Time is still the legal time in the UK. But Coordinated Universal Time is in actual use in the UK. Universal Time is mean solar time at 0° longitude, some implementations are UT0 is the time of a particular place of observation
23.
Metrology
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The field of metrology is important for establishing a common understanding of units, which is crucial in linking human activities. This led to the creation of the decimal based metric system in 1795 to establish a set of standards for types of measurements. This has since evolved into the International System of Units as a result of a made in the 11th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures in 1960. The NMS greatly effects how measurements are undertaken in the country and this has wide reaching impacts in a variety of different regions of society. It has implications in the area of economies, energy, environment, health, manufacturing, industry, consumer confidence, the effects of metrology on trade and the economy are some of the easiest observed societal impacts. The field of metrology is important for establishing a common understanding of units and these base concepts of metrology are propagated by the three main fields of metrology, which are, scientific or fundamental metrology, applied, technical or industrial metrology, and legal metrology. While there is no definition of fundamental metrology it is considered to be the top level of scientific metrology that strives for the highest level of accuracy. The BIPM maintains a database of the calibration and measurement capabilities of various institutes around the world. These institutes, whose activities are peer-reviewed, provide the reference points for metrological traceability. In the area of measurement, the BIPM has identified nine metrology areas, including length, mass, although the emphasis in this area of metrology is on the measurements themselves, traceability of the calibration of the measurement devices is necessary to ensure confidence in the measurements. Industrial metrology is important to the economical and industrial development of a country, such statutory requirements might arise from, amongst others, the needs for protection of health, public safety, the environment, enabling taxation, protection of consumers and fair trade. The International Organization for Legal Metrology was established to assist in harmonising such regulations across national boundaries to ensure that legal requirements do not inhibit trade. In Europe WELMEC was established in 1990 to promote cooperation on the field of metrology in the European Union. Throughout history the ability to make measurements has been instrumental in the progress of mankind, the ability to measure alone is not sufficient, rather the ability to compare separate measurements and have agreeability is crucial for the measurements to be meaningful. The first record of a permanent standard is from 2900 BC, the cubit was decreed to be the length of the Pharaohs forearm plus the width of his hand and replica standards were given out to builders. The success of standardized length during the building of the pyramids is evidenced by the lengths of the pyramid bases differing by no more than 0. 05%, other civilizations produced their own measurement standards that were accepted throughout their nations. The architecture of the Roman and Greek empires were based on their own systems of measurement. Nonetheless, the fall of great empires and the rise of the Dark Ages caused much of measurement knowledge
24.
Coordinated Universal Time
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Coordinated Universal Time, abbreviated to UTC, is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean time at 0° longitude. It is one of closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time. For most purposes, UTC is considered interchangeable with GMT, the first Coordinated Universal Time was informally adopted on 1 January 1960. This change also adopted leap seconds to simplify future adjustments, a number of proposals have been made to replace UTC with a new system that would eliminate leap seconds, but no consensus has yet been reached. Leap seconds are inserted as necessary to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of universal time, see the Current number of leap seconds section for the number of leap seconds inserted to date. The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC and this abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT, while French speakers proposed TUC, the compromise that emerged was UTC, which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time. Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, the westernmost time zone uses UTC−12, being twelve hours behind UTC, the easternmost time zone, theoretically, uses UTC+12, being twelve hours ahead of UTC. In 1995, the nation of Kiribati moved those of its atolls in the Line Islands from UTC-10 to UTC+14 so that the country would all be on the same day. UTC is used in internet and World Wide Web standards. The Network Time Protocol, designed to synchronise the clocks of computers over the internet, computer servers, online services and other entities that rely on having a universally accepted time use UTC as it is more specific than GMT. If only limited precision is needed, clients can obtain the current UTC from a number of official internet UTC servers, for sub-microsecond precision, clients can obtain the time from satellite signals. UTC is also the standard used in aviation, e. g. for flight plans. Weather forecasts and maps all use UTC to avoid confusion about time zones, the International Space Station also uses UTC as a time standard. Amateur radio operators often schedule their radio contacts in UTC, because transmissions on some frequencies can be picked up by many time zones, UTC is also used in digital tachographs used on large goods vehicles under EU and AETR rules. UTC divides time into days, hours, minutes and seconds, days are conventionally identified using the Gregorian calendar, but Julian day numbers can also be used. Each day contains 24 hours and each hour contains 60 minutes, the number of seconds in a minute is usually 60, but with an occasional leap second, it may be 61 or 59 instead
25.
Universal Time
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Universal Time is a time standard based on Earths rotation. It is a continuation of Greenwich Mean Time, i. e. the mean solar time on the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, London. In fact, the expression Universal Time is ambiguous, as there are versions of it. All of these versions of UT, except for UTC, are based on Earths rotation relative to distant celestial objects, UTC is based on International Atomic Time, with leap seconds added to keep it within 0.9 second of UT1. Prior to the introduction of time, each municipality throughout the civilized world set its official clock, if it had one. Greenwich Mean Time, where all clocks in Britain were set to the time, was established to solve this problem. Chronometers or telegraphy were used to synchronize these clocks, Standard time, as originally proposed by Scottish-Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming in 1879, divided the world into twenty-four time zones, each one covering 15 degrees of longitude. All clocks within each zone would be set to the time as the others. This location was chosen because by 1884 two-thirds of all nautical charts, the conference did not adopt Flemings time zones because they were outside the purpose for which it was called, which was to choose a basis for universal time. During the period between 1848 and 1972, all of the countries adopted time zones based on the Greenwich meridian. The term Greenwich Mean Time persists, however, in usage to this day in reference to civil timekeeping. Based on the rotation of the Earth, time can be measured by observing celestial bodies crossing the meridian every day. Astronomers found that it was accurate to establish time by observing stars as they crossed a meridian rather than by observing the position of the Sun in the sky. Nowadays, UT in relation to International Atomic Time is determined by Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations of distant quasars, the rotation of the Earth and UT are monitored by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. The International Astronomical Union also is involved in setting standards, the rotation of the Earth is somewhat irregular, and is very gradually slowing due to tidal acceleration. Furthermore, the length of the second was determined from observations of the Moon between 1750 and 1890. All of these cause the mean solar day, on the average, to be slightly longer than the nominal 86,400 SI seconds. As UT is slightly irregular in its rate, astronomers introduced Ephemeris Time, thus, civil broadcast standards for time and frequency usually follow International Atomic Time closely, but occasionally step in order to prevent them from drifting too far from mean solar time
26.
DUT1
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The time correction DUT1 is the difference between Universal Time, which is defined by Earths rotation, and Coordinated Universal Time, which is defined by a network of precision atomic clocks. DUT1 = UT1 − UTC UTC is maintained via leap seconds, forecast values of DUT1 are published by IERS Bulletin A. Weekly updated values of DUT1 with 0.1 s precision are broadcast by several time signal services, including WWV and these services transmit one pulse per second of some sort. To represent positive DUT1 values from +0.1 to +0.8 seconds, the number of emphasized pulses gives the value of DUT1. Negative DUT1 values, from −0.1 to −0.8 seconds, are represented by emphasizing pulses 9 through 16. For example, a DUT1 value of −0.4 would be transmitted by emphasizing pulses 9 through 12, the Russian time signal RWM transmits an additional correction dUT1 in 0.02 s increments. Positive values of dUT1 from +0.02 to +0.08 s are encoded by emphasizing pulses 21 through 24, the actual value of DUT1 is approximated by the sum of the transmitted DUT1 + dUT1. The longwave RBU time signal also transmits dUT1, iTU-R Recommendation TF. 460-4, Standard-frequency and time-signal emissions. IERS Rapid Service/Prediction Center http, //scienceworld. wolfram. com/astronomy/Time. html http, //maia. usno. navy. mil/ser7/deltat. data
27.
International Atomic Time
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International Atomic Time is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earths geoid. It is the basis for Coordinated Universal Time, which is used for civil timekeeping all over the Earths surface, and for Terrestrial Time, as of 31 December 2016 when another leap second was added, TAI is exactly 37 seconds ahead of UTC. The 37 seconds results from the difference of 10 seconds at the start of 1972. TAI may be reported using traditional means of specifying days, carried over from non-uniform time standards based on the rotation of the Earth, specifically, both Julian Dates and the Gregorian calendar are used. TAI in this form was synchronised with Universal Time at the beginning of 1958, TAI as a time scale is a weighted average of the time kept by over 400 atomic clocks in over 50 national laboratories worldwide. The clocks are compared using GPS signals and two-way satellite time, due to the signal averaging it is an order of magnitude more stable than its best clock alone would be. The majority of the clocks are caesium clocks, the definition of the SI second is written in terms of caesium, the participating institutions each broadcast, in real time, a frequency signal with timecodes, which is their estimate of TAI. Time codes are published in the form of UTC, which differs from TAI by a well-known integer number of seconds. These time scales are denoted in the form UTC in the UTC form, the TAI form may be denoted TAI. The latter is not to be confused with TA, which denotes an independent atomic time scale, the clocks at different institutions are regularly compared against each other. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, combines these measurements to retrospectively calculate the average that forms the most stable time scale possible. This combined time scale is published monthly in Circular T, and is the canonical TAI and this time scale is expressed in the form of tables of differences UTC-UTC for each participating institution k. Errors in publication may be corrected by issuing a revision of the faulty Circular T or by errata in a subsequent Circular T, aside from this, once published in Circular T the TAI scale is not revised. In hindsight it is possible to discover errors in TAI, doing so does not create another version of TAI, it is instead considered to be creating a better realisation of Terrestrial Time. Early atomic time scales consisted of quartz clocks with frequencies calibrated by an atomic clock. Atomic timekeeping services started experimentally in 1955, using the first caesium atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory, the Greenwich Atomic scale began in 1955 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The International Time Bureau began a time scale, Tm or AM, in July 1955, both the BIH scale and A.1 were defined by an epoch at the beginning of 1958, it was set to read Julian Date 2436204.5 at the corresponding UT2 instant. The procedures used by the BIH evolved, and the name for the time scale changed, A3 in 1963 and this synchronisation was inevitably imperfect, depending as it did on the astronomical realisation of UT2
28.
12-hour clock
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The 12-hour clock is a time convention in which the 24 hours of the day are divided into two periods, a. m. and p. m. Each period consists of 12 hours numbered,12,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, and 11. The 24 hour/day cycle starts at 12 midnight, runs through 12 noon, the 12-hour clock was developed over time from the mid-second millennium BC to the 16th century AD. The natural day- and night division of a calendar day forms the basis as to why each day is split into two cycles. Originally there were two cycles, one cycle which could be tracked by the position of the Sun followed by one cycle which could be tracked by the Moon and this would eventually evolve into the two 12-hour periods that started at midnight and noon which are used today. Noon itself is rarely abbreviated today, but if it is, the 12-hour clock can be traced back as far as Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Both an Egyptian sundial for daytime use and an Egyptian water clock for night-time use were found in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, dating to c.1500 BC, these clocks divided their respective times of use into 12 hours each. The Romans also used a 12-hour clock, daylight was divided into 12 equal hours, in Northern Europe these dials generally used the 12-hour numbering scheme in Roman numerals, but showed both a. m. and p. m. periods in sequence. This is known as the system, and can be seen on many surviving clock faces, such as those at Wells. Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Italy, numbering was more likely to be based on the 24-hour system, the 12-hour clock was used throughout the British empire. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the 12-hour analog dial, the 24-hour analog dial was reserved for more specialized applications, such as astronomical clocks and chronometers. Most analog clocks and watches use the 12-hour dial, on which the shorter hour hand rotates once every 12 hours. Some analog clock dials have a ring of numbers along with the standard 1-to-12 numbered ring. The number 12 is paired either with a 00 or a 24, while the numbers 1 through 11 are paired with the numbers 13 through 23 and this modification allows the clock to be read also in the 24-hour notation. This kind of 12-hour clock can be found in countries where the 24-hour clock is preferred, in several countries the 12-hour clock is the dominant written and spoken system of time. Other countries use the 12-hour clock mainly in spoken time, while the 24-hour notation is written, in most countries the 12-hour clock is used in speech alongside the 24-hour clock. The 12-hour clock in speech often uses such as in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. Outside of English-speaking countries, the terms a. m. and p. m. are seldom used and often unknown
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24-hour clock
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The 24-hour clock is the convention of time keeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided into 24 hours, indicated by the hours passed since midnight, from 0 to 23. This system is the most commonly used time notation in the world today, in the practice of medicine, the 24-hour clock is generally used in documentation of care as it prevents any ambiguity as to when events occurred in a patients medical history. It is popularly referred to as time in the United States. In the case of a second, the value of ss may extend to 60. A leading zero is added for numbers under 10 and this zero is optional for the hours, but very commonly used in computer applications, where many specifications require it. Where subsecond resolution is required, the seconds can be a fraction, that is. The most commonly used separator symbol between hours, minutes and seconds is the colon, which is also the used in ISO8601. In the past, some European countries used the dot on the line as a separator, in some contexts, no separator is used and times are written as, for example,2359. In East Asia, time notation was 24-hour before westernization in modern times, the clocks were changed into 12 dual-hours style when they were shipped to China in the Qing dynasty. In the 24-hour time notation, the day begins at midnight,00,00, and the last minute of the day begins at 23,59. Where convenient, the notation 24,00 may also be used to refer to midnight at the end of a given date – that is,24,00 of one day is the time as 00,00 of the following day. The notation 24,00 mainly serves to refer to the end of a day in a time interval. A typical usage is giving opening hours ending at midnight, similarly, some railway timetables show 00,00 as departure time and 24,00 as arrival time. Legal contracts often run from the date at 00,00 until the end date at 24,00. While the 24-hour notation unambiguously distinguishes between midnight at the start and end of any date, there is no commonly accepted distinction among users of the 12-hour notation. Sometimes the use of 00,00 is also avoided, in variance with this, the correspondence manual for the U. S. Navy and U. S. Marine Corps formerly specified 0001 to 2400. The manual was updated in June 2015 to use 0000 to 2359, time-of-day notations beyond 24,00 are not commonly used and not covered by the relevant standards. In most countries, computers by default show the time in 24-hour notation, for example, Microsoft Windows and macOS activate the 12-hour notation by default only if a computer is in a handful of specific language and region settings
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Civil time
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In modern usage, civil time refers to statutory time scales designated by civilian authorities, or to local time indicated by clocks. UTC is calculated by reference to atomic clocks, and was adopted in 1972, in traditional astronomical usage, civil time was mean solar time reckoned from midnight. Before 1925, the astronomical time 00,00,00 meant noon, in 1928, the International Astronomical Union introduced the term Universal Time for GMT beginning at midnight, but the two Nautical Almanac Offices did not accept it until 1952. Category, Time by country Category, Time zones Time Scales
