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HandWiki is the world's largest wiki-style encyclopedia dedicated to science, technology and computing. It allows you to create and edit articles as long as you have external citations and login account. In addition, this is a content management environment that can be used for collaborative editing of original scholarly content, such as books, manuals, monographs and tutorials.

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Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is an office within the United States Department of Energy. Formed from other energy agencies after the 1973 energy crisis, EERE is led by the Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (Assistant Secretary), who is appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Kelly Speakes-Backman was appointed Acting Assistant Secretary in January 2021.
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  • 14 Nov 2022
Biography
Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harkness (born 1965) is an American scholar, novelist and wine enthusiast, best known as a historian and as the author of the "All Souls" Trilogy, which consists of The New York Times best selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. Born in 1965, Harkness grew up near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of an American-born father an
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Allegory of the Cave
The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, was presented by the Ancient Greece philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e). All three are characterized in relation to dialectic at the end of Books VII and VIII (531d–534e). Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind. Like the fire that cast light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever bound to the impressions that are received through the senses. Even if these interpretations (or, in Kantian terminology, intuitions) are an absurd misrepresentation of reality, we cannot somehow break free from the bonds of our human condition—we cannot free ourselves from phenomenal state just as the prisoners could not free themselves from their chains. If, however, we were to miraculously escape our bondage, we would find a world that we could not understand—the sun is incomprehensible for someone who has never seen it. In other words, we would encounter another "realm", a place incomprehensible because, theoretically, it is the source of a higher reality than the one we have always known; it is the realm of pure Form, pure fact. Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line.
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Biography
Luigi Magni
Luigi Magni (21 March 1928 – 27 October 2013) was an Italian screenwriter and film director. Born in Rome, Magni started his career as a screenwriter, in 1956, with Tempo di villeggiatura.[1] In 1968 he collaborated with Mario Monicelli to a real "event" of the Italian cinema as the transformation of Monica Vitti in a comedic actress with The Girl with the Pistol, and the critical and comme
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Biography
Nakayama Miki
Nakayama Miki (中山 みき, 18 April 1798 – 26 January 1887 by the Japanese calendar[1]) was a nineteenth-century Japanese farmer and religious leader. She is the primary figure of the Japanese new religion Tenrikyo. Followers, who refer to her as Oyasama (おやさま), believe that she was settled as the Shrine of Tsukihi from the moment she experienced a divine revelation in 1838 until h
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Map Database Management
Map database management systems are software programs designed to efficiently store and recall spatial information. They are widely used in localization and navigation, especially in automotive applications. Moreover, they are playing an increasingly important role in the emerging areas of location-based services, active safety functions and advanced driver-assistance systems. Common to these functions is the requirement for an on-board map database that contains information describing the road network. When designed well, a map database enables the rapid indexing and lookup of a large amount of geographic data.
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Patch Verb
In computing, the PATCH method is a request method supported by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol for making partial changes to an existing resource. The PATCH method provides an entity containing a list of changes to be applied to the resource requested using the HTTP Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The list of changes are supplied in the form of a PATCH document. If the requested resource does not exist then the server may create the resource depending on the PATCH document media type and permissions. The changes described in the PATCH document must be semantically well defined but can have a different media type than the resource being patched. Frameworks such as XML, JSON can be used in describing the changes in the PATCH document.
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Topic Review
Robotic Automation Software
The term robotic automation or robotization refer to the automation of industrial and business processes using robots, of various guises. Robotic automation software refers to a class of software products used in the clerical context. Examples of robotic automation include the use of industrial robots in manufacturing and the use of software robots in automating business processes in services industries. In the latter case, the use of the term robot is metaphorical, conveying the similarity of those software products – which are produced to provide a generic automation capability and then configured within the end user environment to execute manual and repetitive tasks – to their industrial robot counterparts. The metaphor is apt in the sense that the software "robot" is now mimicking or replacing a function classically associated with a person, for example in IVR voice recognition and chatbot technology as a means of data collection and distribution, in place of a person conducting a telephone conversation, for example. The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 shows that robotization creates jobs. In general terms, robotic automation corresponds to an emerging trend for technology to replace the functions performed by humans, particularly in the service sector, where the adoption of – and the concept of – robotics falls significantly behind the rate and incidence of adoption of automation within manufacturing.
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Topic Review
GIS and Environmental Governance
Geographic information system (GIS) is a commonly used tool for environmental management, modelling and planning. As simply defined by Michael Goodchild, GIS is as ‘a computer system for handling geographic information in a digital form’. In recent years it has played an integral role in participatory, collaborative and open data philosophies. Social and technological evolutions have elevated ‘digital’ and ‘environmental’ agendas to the forefront of public policy, the global media and the private sector. Government departments routinely use digital spatial platforms to plan and model proposed changes to road networks, building design, greenbelt land, utility provision, crime prevention, energy production, waste management and security. Non-profit organizations also incorporate geospatial and web-mapping approaches into political campaigns to lobby governments, to protest against socially or environmentally harmful companies, and to generate public support. Private business, whether in land management, resource extraction, retail, manufacturing or social media for example, also incorporate GIS into overall profit-making strategies.
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Design 1095 Ship
The Design 1095 ship was an Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) design for a troop transport to be built at New York Shipbuilding Corporation and delivered to the United States Shipping Board (USSB) that, at the end of World War I hostilities, was modified to a combined passenger and cargo vessel. The contract was for thirteen ships, EFC hulls 2579 though 2591, but later adjusted to seven ships with the remainder being changed during construction to the slightly larger ships of EFC Design 1029 built from the start as passenger and cargo ships rather than being modified from the troop ship plan. After initial service as USSB owned ships operated by agents, United States Lines in Atlantic service between New York and Europe with five ships and two ships with Swayne and Hoyt with the Pacific-Argentine-Brazil Line, the ships were sold in 1923 to Robert Dollar Company which initiated the Dollar and successor American President Lines' tradition of naming ships after presidents. The ships inaugurated Dollar's "Round-the-World" service which was continued by American President Lines with additional ships. During World War II the seven ships were used as troop transports, three being converted to hospital ships (2 Army and 1 Navy) and three were lost. The three ships built as Old North State, Panhandle State and Blue Hen State became hospital ships and survived the war. Creole State served as a transport and began conversion to a hospital ship in the closing days of the war but the conversion stopped with peace upon which she was reconverted to become an Army transport for dependent repatriation. Two, President Taylor, built as Granite State and President Grant, built as Centennial State, became total losses after groundings. The ship built as Wolverine State and President Harrison at the time, was on a second voyage to evacuate Marines and civilians from China sailing after 7 December 1941, was grounded in an attempt to deny use by the Japanese, but salvaged and named Kachidoki Maru. While transporting British prisoners of war Kachidoki Maru was torpedoed and sunk by USS Pampanito on 12 September 1944.
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