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Topic Review
UCSC Genome Browser
The UCSC Genome Browser is an on-line, and downloadable, genome browser hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). It is an interactive website offering access to genome sequence data from a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate species and major model organisms, integrated with a large collection of aligned annotations. The Browser is a graphical viewer optimized to support fast interactive performance and is an open-source, web-based tool suite built on top of a MySQL database for rapid visualization, examination, and querying of the data at many levels. The Genome Browser Database, browsing tools, downloadable data files, and documentation can all be found on the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics website.
  • 1.3K
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
PureSystems
PureSystems is an IBM product line of factory pre-configured components and servers also being referred to as an "Expert Integrated System". The centrepiece of PureSystems is the IBM Flex System Manager in tandem with the so-called "Patterns of Expertise" for the automated configuration and management of PureSystems. PureSystems can host four different operating systems (AIX, IBM i, Linux, Windows) and five hypervisors (Hyper-V, KVM, PowerVM, VMware, Xen) on two different hardware architectures: Power Architecture and x86. PureSystems is marketed as a converged system, which packages multiple information technology components into a single product.
  • 264
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Information Seeking Behavior
Information seeking behavior refers to the way people search for and utilize information. The term was coined by Thomas D. Wilson in his 1981 paper, on the grounds that the current 'information needs' was unhelpful as a basis for a research agenda, since 'need' could not be directly observed, while how people behaved in seeking information could be observed and investigated. However, there is increasing work in the information searching field that is relating behaviors to underlying needs. In 2000, Wilson described information behavior as the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information-seeking, and information use. He described information seeking behavior as purposive seeking of information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal. Information seeking behavior is the micro-level of behavior employed by the searcher in interacting with information systems of all kinds, be it between the seeker and the system, or the pure method of creating and following up on a search. A variety of theories of information behavior – e.g. Zipf's principle of least effort, Brenda Dervin's sensemaking, Elfreda Chatman's life in the round – seek to understand the processes that surround information seeking. The analysis of the most cited publications on information behavior during the first years of this century shows its theoretical nature. Together with some works that have a constructivist focus, using references to Dewey, Kelly, Bruner and Vygotsky, others mention sociological concepts, such as Bourdieu's habitus. Several adopt a constructionist-discursive focus, whereas some, such as Chatman, who can in general be described as using an ethnographic perspective, stand out for the quantity and diversity of references to social research. The term 'information behaviour' was also coined by Wilson and occasioned some controversy on its introduction, but now seems to have been adopted, not only by researchers in information science but also in other disciplines. The digital world is changing human information behavior and process. Focused almost exclusively on information seeking and using, information receiving, a central modality of the process is generally overlooked. As information seeking continues to migrate to the Internet, and artificial intelligence continues to advance the analysis of user behavior on the Internet across a range of user interactions, information receiving moves to the heart of the process, as systems "learn" what users like, want and need, as well as their search habits.
  • 8.4K
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Malfatti Circles
In geometry, the Malfatti circles are three circles inside a given triangle such that each circle is tangent to the other two and to two sides of the triangle. They are named after Gian Francesco Malfatti, who made early studies of the problem of constructing these circles in the mistaken belief that they would have the largest possible total area of any three disjoint circles within the triangle. Malfatti's problem has been used to refer both to the problem of constructing the Malfatti circles and to the problem of finding three area-maximizing circles within a triangle. A simple construction of the Malfatti circles was given by (Steiner 1826), and many mathematicians have since studied the problem. Malfatti himself supplied a formula for the radii of the three circles, and they may also be used to define two triangle centers, the Ajima–Malfatti points of a triangle. The problem of maximizing the total area of three circles in a triangle is never solved by the Malfatti circles. Instead, the optimal solution can always be found by a greedy algorithm that finds the largest circle within the given triangle, the largest circle within the three connected subsets of the triangle outside of the first circle, and the largest circle within the five connected subsets of the triangle outside of the first two circles. Although this procedure was first formulated in 1930, its correctness was not proven until 1994.
  • 699
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Erowid
Erowid, also called Erowid Center, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization that provides information about psychoactive plants and chemicals as well as activities and technologies that can produce altered states of consciousness such as meditation, lucid dreaming, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroceuticals. Erowid documents legal and illegal substances, including their intended and adverse effects. Information on Erowid's website is gathered from diverse sources including published literature, experts in related fields, and the experiences of the general public. Erowid acts as a publisher of new information as well as a library for the collection of documents and images published elsewhere.
  • 1.6K
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Comparison Between Esperanto and Ido
Ido, like Esperanto, is a constructed international auxiliary language. L. L. Zamenhof published his constructed language under the pseudonym Dr Esperanto in 1887. It immediately became popular, but soon people were making suggestions as to how they thought it might be improved. Zamenhof responded by making a list of possible changes to Esperanto and in 1894 put them before the Esperanto community. If accepted they would create what Dr Zamenhof called "a Reformed Esperanto". This proposed reformed Esperanto is sometimes referred to as Esperanto 1894. However, when the Esperanto community was invited to vote on whether to adopt the proposals, they rejected the proposals by a large majority. Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote. The languages of Esperanto and Ido remain close, and largely mutually intelligible, like two dialects of the same language. Just as dialects of a language are quite often sources of new words for that language through literature, so Ido has contributed many neologisms to Esperanto (especially in poetic substitutes for long words using the mal- prefix). One study conducted with 20 college students at Columbia University circa 1933 suggests that Esperanto's system of correlative words is easier to learn than Ido's. Two other studies by the same researchers suggest no significant overall difference in difficulty of learning between Esperanto and Ido for educated American adults, but the sample sizes were again small: in the two tests combined, only 32 test subjects studied Ido. The researchers concluded that additional comparative studies of Esperanto and Ido are needed.
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  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Virtual LAN
A virtual LAN (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2). LAN is the abbreviation for local area network and in this context virtual refers to a physical object recreated and altered by additional logic. VLANs work by applying tags to network frames and handling these tags in networking systems – creating the appearance and functionality of network traffic that is physically on a single network but acts as if it is split between separate networks. In this way, VLANs can keep network applications separate despite being connected to the same physical network, and without requiring multiple sets of cabling and networking devices to be deployed. VLANs allow network administrators to group hosts together even if the hosts are not directly connected to the same network switch. Because VLAN membership can be configured through software, this can greatly simplify network design and deployment. Without VLANs, grouping hosts according to their resource needs the labor of relocating nodes or rewiring data links. VLANs allow devices that must be kept separate to share the cabling of a physical network and yet be prevented from directly interacting with one another. This managed sharing yields gains in simplicity, security, traffic management, and economy. For example, a VLAN can be used to separate traffic within a business based on individual users or groups of users or their roles (e.g. network administrators), or based on traffic characteristics (e.g. low-priority traffic prevented from impinging on the rest of the network's functioning). Many Internet hosting services use VLANs to separate customers' private zones from one other, allowing each customer's servers to be grouped in a single network segment no matter where the individual servers are located in the data center. Some precautions are needed to prevent traffic "escaping" from a given VLAN, an exploit known as VLAN hopping. To subdivide a network into VLANs, one configures network equipment. Simpler equipment might partition only each physical port (if even that), in which case each VLAN runs over a dedicated network cable. More sophisticated devices can mark frames through VLAN tagging, so that a single interconnect (trunk) may be used to transport data for multiple VLANs. Since VLANs share bandwidth, a VLAN trunk can use link aggregation, quality-of-service prioritization, or both to route data efficiently.
  • 354
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Operad Theory
Operad theory is a field of mathematics concerned with prototypical algebras that model properties such as commutativity or anticommutativity as well as various amounts of associativity. Operads generalize the various associativity properties already observed in algebras and coalgebras such as Lie algebras or Poisson algebras by modeling computational trees within the algebra. Algebras are to operads as group representations are to groups. An operad can be seen as a set of operations, each one having a fixed finite number of inputs (arguments) and one output, which can be composed one with others. They form a category-theoretic analog of universal algebra. Operads originate in algebraic topology from the study of iterated loop spaces by J. Michael Boardman and Rainer M. Vogt, and J. Peter May. The word "operad" was created by May as a portmanteau of "operations" and "monad" (and also because his mother was an opera singer). Interest in operads was considerably renewed in the early 90s when, based on early insights of Maxim Kontsevich, Victor Ginzburg and Mikhail Kapranov discovered that some duality phenomena in rational homotopy theory could be explained using Koszul duality of operads. Operads have since found many applications, such as in deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds, the Deligne conjecture, or graph homology in the work of Maxim Kontsevich and Thomas Willwacher.
  • 937
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes
CADP (Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes) is a toolbox for the design of communication protocols and distributed systems. CADP is developed by the CONVECS team (formerly by the VASY team) at INRIA Rhone-Alpes and connected to various complementary tools. CADP is maintained, regularly improved, and used in many industrial projects. 
  • 328
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
CONFER
CONFER is one of the first computer conferencing systems. Highly sophisticated for its time, it was developed in 1975 at the University of Michigan by then graduate student Robert Parnes. The CONFER system continued to be a widely used communication tool until 1999. CONFER is the progenitor of the computer conferencing systems Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP.
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  • 09 Oct 2022
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