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Topic Review
Traditional Chinese Timekeeping
The traditional Chinese time systems refers to the time standards for divisions of the day used in China until the introduction of the Shixian calendar in 1628 at the beginning of the Qing dynasty.
  • 6.4K
  • 30 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a system of interrelated, internet-connected objects that are able to collect and transfer data over a wireless network without human intervention. The term IoT has been considered as an expanding technique applied in various applications and functions, from smart environments and houses to personal healthcare and others [1]. It is described as a smart concept for the internet relating everything to the Internet and data organization and information exchange [2]. The key features required for employing a large-scale IoT are low-cost sensors, highspeed and error-tolerant data communications, smart computations, and numerous applications.
  • 6.4K
  • 26 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Moral Insanity
Moral insanity referred to a type of mental disorder consisting of abnormal emotions and behaviours in the apparent absence of intellectual impairments, delusions, or hallucinations. It was an accepted diagnosis in Europe and America through the second half of the 19th century. The physician James Cowles Prichard first used the phrase to describe a mental disorder in 1835 in his Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind. He defined moral insanity as: "madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations." The concept of moral insanity was indebted to the work of physician Philippe Pinel, which was acknowledged by Prichard. Pinel had described mental diseases of only partial, affective, insanity. His concept Manie sans délire (Latin – mania sine delirio; French – folie raisonnante or folie lucide raisonnante, monomanie affective; German – Moralisches Irresein) referred to insanity without delusion. That is, the sufferer was thought to be mad in one area only and thus the personality of the individual might be distorted but his or her intellectual faculties were unimpaired. The term 'moral', at that time and taken originally from French, could mean emotional rather than necessarily referring to ethics.
  • 6.4K
  • 28 Oct 2022
Topic Review
6G-IoT Technologies
The advent of 6G-IoT promises a revolutionary leap, integrating AI, expanded coverage, and autonomy in a seamless manner, thereby reshaping industries such as smart agriculture. Presented here are the essential technologies that will make it possible to meet the 6G-IoT requirements.
  • 6.4K
  • 07 Aug 2023
Topic Review
Personality Test
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report questionnaire (Q-data, in terms of LOTS data) measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight (or biased perceptions of others) to downright dissimulation (faking good/faking bad) depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken. The first personality assessment measures were developed in the 1920s and were intended to ease the process of personnel selection, particularly in the armed forces. Since these early efforts, a wide variety of personality scales and questionnaires have been developed, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS), among many others. Although popular especially among personnel consultants, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has numerous psychometric deficiencies. More recently, a number of instruments based on the Five Factor Model of personality have been constructed such as the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. However, the Big Five and related Five Factor Model have been challenged for accounting for less than two-thirds of the known trait variance in the normal personality sphere alone. Estimates of how much the personality assessment industry in the US is worth range anywhere from $2 and $4 billion a year (as of 2013). Personality assessment is used in wide a range of contexts, including individual and relationship counseling, clinical psychology, forensic psychology, school psychology, career counseling, employment testing, occupational health and safety and customer relationship management.
  • 6.4K
  • 13 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Verb–Subject–Object
In linguistic typology, a verb–subject–object (VSO) language is one in which the most typical sentences arrange their elements in that order, as in Ate Sam oranges (Sam ate oranges). VSO is the third-most common word order among the world's languages, after SOV (as in Hindi and Japanese) and SVO (as in English and Mandarin). Families where all or many of the languages are VSO include the following: Spanish resembles Semitic languages such as Arabic in allowing for both VSO and SVO structures: "Jesús vino el jueves"/"Vino Jesús el jueves, "Tu madre dice que no vayas"/"Dice tu madre que no vayas". Many languages, such as Greek, have relatively free word order, where VSO is one of many possible orders. Low level programming languages such as assembly tend to follow VSO order in how they assign bits in a memory word. Although the bit sizes vary between architectures, the general form consists of an opcode (verb) followed by a combination of memory or register addresses (subjects) and/or values (objects).
  • 6.4K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
16S rRNA Next-Generation Sequencing
The 16S rRNA gene is highly conserved in all bacteria (and also archaea). Nonetheless, it contains nine hypervariable regions (V1 - V9), where sequences of these regions can be used to identify and discriminate bacterial genus, sometimes until the species level. This makes the gene a useful tool for phylogenetic studies. With the introduction of next-generation sequencing technologies, 16S rRNA next-generation sequencing (16SNGS) has allowed profiling of bacterial communities found in organisms and the environment, and lead to the discovery of many previously unculturable members of the bacteria kingdom.
  • 6.4K
  • 18 May 2021
Topic Review
Metallic Nanowires
The fundamental properties of a material can dramatically change when its dimensions are reduced nanometer scale. Metallic nanowires are one-dimensional nanostructures with diameters that are typically in a range of 10-200 nm, and lengths in a range of 5-100 µm. Metallic nanowires have many unique properties that are not seen in their bulk counterparts, such as good thermal and electrical conductivity, high aspect ratio, low sheet resistance, excellent optical transparency, etc. In the past two decades, research into metallic nanowires has encouraged breakthrough technologies in a variety of fields, including flexible transparent conductive films and electrodes, optoelectronic devices, molecular electronics, solar cells,  touch screens, biomedical science, chemical sensors, heat transfer enhancement, etc.
  • 6.4K
  • 29 Oct 2020
Topic Review
The Pathogenesis of Epilepsy
Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurring spontaneous seizures. Drug resistance appears in 30% of patients and it can lead to premature death, brain damage or a reduced quality of life. The purpose of the study was to analyze the drug resistance mechanisms, especially neuroinflammation, in the epileptogenesis. The information bases of biomedical literature Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar and SciVerse were used. To obtain full-text documents, electronic resources of PubMed Central and Research Gate were used. The article examines the recent research of the mechanisms of drug resistance in epilepsy and discusses the hypotheses of drug resistance development (genetic, epigenetic, target hypothesis, etc.). Drug-resistant epilepsy is associated with neuroinflammatory, autoimmune and neurodegenerative processes. Neuroinflammation causes immune, pathophysiological, biochemical and psychological consequences. Focal or systemic unregulated inflammatory processes lead to the formation of aberrant neural connections and hyperexcitable neural networks. Inflammatory mediators affect the endothelium of cerebral vessels, destroy contacts between endothelial cells and induce abnormal angiogenesis (the formation of “leaky” vessels), thereby affecting the blood–brain barrier permeability. Thus, the analysis of pro-inflammatory and other components of epileptogenesis can contribute to the further development of the therapeutic treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy.
  • 6.4K
  • 26 May 2021
Topic Review
Digital Literacy
Digital literacy refers to an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and compose clear information through writing and other media on various digital platforms. Digital literacy is evaluated by an individual's grammar, composition, typing skills and ability to produce text, images, audio and designs using technology. While digital literacy initially focused on digital skills and stand-alone computers, the advent of the internet and use of social media, has caused some of its focus to shift to mobile devices. Similar to other expanding definitions of literacy that recognize cultural and historical ways of making meaning, digital literacy does not replace traditional forms of literacy, and instead builds upon and expands the skills that form the foundation of traditional forms of literacy. Digital literacy should be considered to be a part of the path to knowledge. Digital literacy is built on the expanding role of social science research in the field of literacy as well as on concepts of visual literacy, computer literacy, and information literacy. Overall, digital literacy shares many defining principles with other fields that use modifiers in front of literacy to define ways of being and domain specific knowledge or competence. The term has grown in popularity in education and higher education settings and is used in both international and national standards.
  • 6.4K
  • 31 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Marine Algae and Plants
Marine algae and plants are a diverse collection of marine life that, together with cyanobacteria, form the main primary producers at base of the ocean food chain. Marine primary producers are important because they underpin almost all marine animal life by generating most of the oxygen and food that animals need to exist. Some algae and plants are also ecosystem engineers which change the environment and provide habitats for other marine life. Marine algae includes the largely invisible and often unicellular microalgae, which together with cyanobacteria form the ocean phytoplankton, as well as the larger, more visible and complex multicellular macroalgae commonly called seaweed. Seaweeds are found along coastal areas, living on the floor of continental shelves and washed up in intertidal zones. Some seaweeds drift with plankton in the sunlit surface waters (epipelagic zone) of the open ocean. Back in the Silurian, some phytoplankton evolved into red, brown and green algae. These algae then invaded the land and started evolving into the land plants we know today. Later in the Cretaceous some of these land plants returned to the sea as mangroves and seagrasses. These are found along coasts in intertidal regions and in the brackish water of estuaries. In addition, some seagrasses, like seaweeds, can be found at depths up to 50 metres on both soft and hard bottoms of the continental shelf.
  • 6.4K
  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Wearable Devices for Non-Invasive Sensing
The development of wearable sensors is aimed at enabling continuous real-time health monitoring, which leads to timely and precise diagnosis anytime and anywhere. Unlike conventional wearable sensors that are somewhat bulky, rigid, and planar, research for next-generation wearable sensors has been focused on establishing fully-wearable systems. To attain such excellent wearability while providing accurate and reliable measurements, fabrication strategies should include (1) proper choices of materials and structural designs, (2) constructing efficient wireless power and data transmission systems, and (3) developing highly-integrated sensing systems.
  • 6.4K
  • 09 Feb 2021
Topic Review
Pan-Tompkins Algorithm
The Pan-Tompkins algorithm is commonly used to detect QRS complexes in electrocardiographic signals (ECG). The QRS complex represents the ventricular depolarization and the main spike visible in an ECG signal (see figure). This feature makes it particularly suitable for measuring heart rate, the first way to assess the heart health state. In the first derivation of Einthoven of a physiological heart, the QRS complex is composed by a downward deflection (Q wave), an high upward deflection (R wave) and a final downward deflection (S wave). The Pan-Tompkins algorithm applies a series of filters to highlight the frequency content of this rapid heart depolarization and removes the background noise. Then, it squares the signal to amplify the QRS contribute. Finally, it applies adaptive thresholds to detect the peaks of the filtered signal. The algorithm was proposed by Jiapu Pan and Willis J. Tompkins in 1985, in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering . The performance of the method was tested on an annotated arrhythmia database (MIT/BIH) and evaluated also in presence of noise. Pan and Tompkins reported that the 99.3 percent of QRS complexes was correctly detected.
  • 6.4K
  • 24 Oct 2022
Topic Review
9K111 Fagot
The 9K111 Fagot (Russian: Фагот; "bassoon") is a second-generation tube-launched SACLOS wire-guided anti-tank missile system of the Soviet Union for use from ground or vehicle mounts. The 9K111 Fagot missile system was developed by the Tula KBP Design Bureau for Instrument Building. "9M111" is the GRAU designation of the missile. Its NATO reporting name is AT-4 Spigot.
  • 6.4K
  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Fake News and Potentially Manipulative Content
At the core of numerous definitions of fake news lies a statement that it contains information that does not correlate with facts and that it is directed towards disinforming the public in a conscious manner, which implies that the major features of fake news are untruthfulness/incorrectness and intended deception. For this reason, Jaster and Lanuis attribute the lack of truth and lack of truthfulness to the notion of fake news and, using this as a starting point, they claim that fake news is “wrong or deceptive (lack of truth) and that it is released with the intention of deceiving or, eventually, discrediting or neglecting the truth (lack of truthfulness)”. In her efforts to draw a line between fake news and the contents similar to it, Milica Kulić defines the former as “incorrect information containing unprovable, mostly completely fabricated data or claims, as well as quotations, released with a view to deceiving audiences”.
  • 6.4K
  • 26 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Novel 1,2,4-Oxadiazole Derivatives
Five-membered 1,2,4-oxadiazole heterocyclic ring has received considerable attention because of its unique bioisosteric properties and an unusually wide spectrum of biological activities. Thus, it is a perfect framework for the novel drug development. After a century since the 1,2,4-oxadiazole have been discovered, the uncommon potential attracted medicinal chemists’ attention, leading to the discovery of a few presently accessible drugs containing 1,2,4-oxadiazole unit. It is worth noting that the interest in a 1,2,4-oxadiazoles’ biological application has been doubled in the last fifteen years. Herein, after a concise historical introduction, we present a comprehensive overview of the recent achievements in the synthesis of 1,2,4-oxadiazole-based compounds and the major advances in their biological applications in the period of the last five years as well as brief remarks on prospects for further development.
  • 6.4K
  • 03 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Clays and the Origin of Life
Clays are able to replicate and drive the evolution of metabolism; they have the catalytic ability to synthesize monomers (amino acids, nucleotides and so on) and polymerize them, resulting in RNA–peptide worlds in which RNA replicates (genes) and, in cooperation with coded peptides, drives the evolution of the cell. 
  • 6.4K
  • 25 Feb 2022
Topic Review
Geotourism
Geotourism is a form of nature tourism that provides a more immersive experience by exploring the geological richness of the destination. In their natural form or explored as thermal springs and spas, landscape elements and geological formations offer visitors a richer and more holistic experience.
  • 6.4K
  • 06 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Intermittent Energy Source
An intermittent energy source is any source of energy that is not continuously available for conversion into electricity and outside direct control because the used primary energy cannot be stored. Intermittent energy sources may be predictable but cannot be dispatched to meet the demand of an electric power system. The use of intermittent sources in an electric power system usually displaces storable primary energy that would otherwise be consumed by other power stations. Another option is to store electricity generated by non-dispatchable energy sources for later use when needed, e.g. in the form of pumped storage, compressed air or in batteries. A third option is the sector coupling e.g. by electric heating for district heating schemes. The use of small amounts of intermittent power has little effect on grid operations. Using larger amounts of intermittent power may require upgrades or even a redesign of the grid infrastructure.
  • 6.4K
  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Paradigm Shift
A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions, beliefs, or frameworks that guide a particular field of knowledge or practice. It represents a transformative departure from established models of thought, leading to a reevaluation of existing principles and often opening new avenues for understanding and problem-solving within that domain.
  • 6.4K
  • 25 Jan 2024
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