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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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Mechanism Design
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics (markets, auctions, voting procedures) to networked-systems (internet interdomain routing, sponsored search auctions). Mechanism design studies solution concepts for a class of private-information games. Leonid Hurwicz explains that 'in a design problem, the goal function is the main "given", while the mechanism is the unknown. Therefore, the design problem is the "inverse" of traditional economic theory, which is typically devoted to the analysis of the performance of a given mechanism.' So, two distinguishing features of these games are: The 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".
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  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Sound Card
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications. Sound functionality can also be integrated onto the motherboard, using components similar to those found on plug-in cards. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a sound card. Sound processing hardware is also present on modern video cards with HDMI to output sound along with the video using that connector; previously they used a S/PDIF connection to the motherboard or sound card. Typical uses of sound cards or sound card functionality include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection. Sound cards are also used for computer-based communication such as voice over IP and teleconferencing.
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  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Video Games in Education
This page includes some history of video games being used as an additional or alternative method to traditional education. This page presents why using video games are beneficial to use for educational purposes in the classroom as well as the limitations. This page additionally discusses how learning from video games outside the classroom is possible as well.
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  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Grand Central Dispatch
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD or libdispatch), is a technology developed by Apple Inc. to optimize application support for systems with multi-core processors and other symmetric multiprocessing systems. It is an implementation of task parallelism based on the thread pool pattern. The fundamental idea is to move the management of the thread pool out of the hands of the developer, and closer to the operating system. The developer injects "work packages" into the pool oblivious of the pool's architecture. This model improves simplicity, portability and performance. GCD was first released with Mac OS X 10.6, and is also available with iOS 4 and above. The name "Grand Central Dispatch" is a reference to Grand Central Terminal. The source code for the library that provides the implementation of GCD's services, libdispatch, was released by Apple under the Apache License on September 10, 2009. It has been ported to FreeBSD 8.1+, MidnightBSD 0.3+, Linux, and Solaris. Attempts in 2011 to make libdispatch work on Windows were not merged into upstream. Apple has its own port of libdispatch.dll for Windows shipped with Safari and iTunes, but no SDK is provided. Since around 2017, the original libdispatch repository hosted by Nick Hutchinson was deprecated in favor of a version that is part of the Swift core library created in June 2016. The new version supports more platforms, notably including Windows.
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Topic Review
Intergroup Dialogue
Intergroup dialogue is a "face to face facilitated conversation between members of two or more social identity groups that strives to create new levels of understanding, relating and action." This process promotes conversation around controversial issues, specifically, in order to generate new "collective visions" that uphold the dignity of all people. Intergroup dialogue is based in the philosophies of the democratic and popular education movements. It is most commonly used on college campuses, but may assume different namesakes in other settings.
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  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Injection
An injection (often and usually referred to as a "shot" in US English, a "jab" in UK English, or a "jag" in Scottish English and Scots) is the act of administering a liquid, especially a drug, into a person's body using a needle (usually a hypodermic needle) and a syringe. An injection is considered a form of parenteral drug administration; it does not involve absorption in the digestive tract. This allows the medication to be absorbed more rapidly and avoid the first pass effect. There are many types of injection, which are generally named after the body tissue the injection is administered into. This includes common injections such as subcutaneous, intramuscular, and intravenous injections, as well as less common injections such as intraperitoneal, intraosseous, intracardiac, intraarticular, and intracavernous injections. Injections are among the most common health care procedures, with at least 16 billion administered in developing and transitional countries each year. Of these, 95% are used in curative care or as treatment for a condition, 3% are to provide immunizations/vaccinations, and the rest are used for other purposes, including blood transfusions. The term injection is sometimes used synonymously with inoculation, but injection does not only refer to the act of inoculation. Injections generally administer a medication as a bolus (or one-time) dose, but can also be used for continuous drug administration. After injection, a medication may be designed to be released slowly, called a depot injection, which can produce long-lasting effects. An injection necessarily causes a small puncture wound to the body, and thus may cause localized pain or infection. The occurrence of these side effects varies based on injection location, the substance injected, needle gauge, procedure, and individual sensitivity. Rarely, more serious side effects including gangrene, sepsis, and nerve damage may occur. Fear of needles, also called needle phobia, is also common and may result in anxiety and fainting before, during, or after an injection. To prevent the localized pain that occurs with injections the injection site may be numbed or cooled before injection and the person receiving the injection may be distracted by a conversation or similar means. To reduce the risk of infection from injections, proper aseptic technique should be followed to clean the injection site before administration. If needles or syringes are reused between people, or if an accidental needlestick occurs, there is a risk of transmission of bloodborne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. Unsafe injection practices contribute to the spread of bloodborne diseases, especially in less-developed countries. To combat this, safety syringes exist which contain features to prevent accidental needlestick injury and reuse of the syringe after it is used once. Furthermore, recreational drug users who use injections to administer the drugs commonly share or reuse needles after an injection. This has led to the development of needle exchange programs and safe injection sites as a public health measure, which may provide new, sterile syringes and needles to discourage the reuse of syringes and needles. Used needles should ideally be placed in a purpose-made sharps container which is safe and resistant to puncture. Some locations provide free disposal programs for such containers for their citizens.
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Topic Review
Geobiology
Geobiology is a field of scientific research that explores the interactions between the physical Earth and the biosphere. It is a relatively young field, and its borders are fluid. There is considerable overlap with the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, paleontology, and particularly soil science and biogeochemistry. Geobiology applies the principles and methods of biology, geology, and soil science to the study of the ancient history of the co-evolution of life and Earth as well as the role of life in the modern world. Geobiologic studies tend to be focused on microorganisms, and on the role that life plays in altering the chemical and physical environment of the pedosphere, which exists at the intersection of the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and/or cryosphere. It differs from biogeochemistry in that the focus is on processes and organisms over space and time rather than on global chemical cycles. Geobiological research synthesizes the geologic record with modern biologic studies. It deals with process - how organisms affect the Earth and vice versa - as well as history - how the Earth and life have changed together. Much research is grounded in the search for fundamental understanding, but geobiology can also be applied, as in the case of microbes that clean up oil spills. Geobiology employs molecular biology, environmental microbiology, organic geochemistry, and the geologic record to investigate the evolutionary interconnectedness of life and Earth. It attempts to understand how the Earth has changed since the origin of life and what it might have been like along the way. Some definitions of geobiology even push the boundaries of this time frame - to understanding the origin of life and to the role that humans have played and will continue to play in shaping the Earth in the Anthropocene.
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Topic Review
Blue Diamond
Blue diamond is a type of diamond which exhibits all of the same inherent properties of the mineral except with the additional element of blue color in the stone. They are colored blue by trace amounts of boron that contaminate the crystalline lattice structure. Blue diamonds belong to a subcategory of diamonds called fancy color diamonds, the generic name for diamonds that exhibit intense color. Blue diamonds range in grade from Flawless to Included, just as in the case of white diamonds.
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Topic Review
Composition (Objects)
Compositional objects are wholes instantiated by collections of parts. If an ontology wishes to permit the inclusion of compositional objects it must define which collections of objects are to be considered parts composing a whole. Mereology, the study of relationships between parts and their wholes, provides specifications on how parts must relate to one another in order to compose a whole.
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Topic Review
Rouge Forum
The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists, which focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice.
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