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Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism (Russian: Лысенковщина, romanized: Lysenkovshchina, [ɫɨˈsɛnkəfɕːʲɪnə], Ukrainian: лисенківщина, Template:IPA-uk) was a political campaign led by Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned. Other countries of the Eastern Bloc including the People's Republic of Poland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees, as did the People's Republic of China for some years. The government of the USSR supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
  • 5.0K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Neoabolitionism
Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations motivated by the spirit of racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about African-American history, slavery, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. As abolitionists had worked in the 19th century to end slavery and provide equal rights under the US Constitution to blacks, the new activists worked to enforce constitutional rights for all citizens and restore equality under the law for African Americans, including suffrage and civil rights. In the late 20th century some historians emphasized the worlds of African Americans in their own words, in their own communities, to recognize them as agents, not victims. Publishing in the mid-1960s and through the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to revise traditional accounts of slavery in the United States, reconstruction, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Some major historians began to apply the term "neoabolitionist" to such historians, and some of this group identified as such.
  • 1.6K
  • 03 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Propagating Rifts
Propagating rifts are seafloor features associated with spreading centers at mid-ocean ridges and back-arc basins. They are more commonly observed on faster rate spreading centers (50 mm/year or more). These features are formed by the lengthening of one spreading segment at the expense of an offset neighboring spreading segment. Hence, these are remnant features produced by migration of the tip of a spreading center. In other words, as the tip of a spreading center migrates or grows, the plate itself grows at the expense of the shrinking plate, transferring lithosphere from the shrinking plate to the growing plate.
  • 971
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Mac Transition to Apple Silicon
The Mac transition to Apple Silicon is the planned two-year process of introducing ARM64-based Apple silicon to, and deprecating Intel's x86-64 from, Apple's Macintosh line of computers. CEO Tim Cook announced the plan in his WWDC keynote address on June 22, 2020. The transition is the third time Apple has migrated Macintosh to a new instruction set architecture (ISA). The first was the switch from the Mac's original Motorola 68000 series architecture to the new PowerPC platform in 1994, and the second was the transition from PowerPC to Intel x86, which was formally announced in June 2005. Apple first utilized the ARM architecture in 1993 in its Newton personal digital assistant, and since then has extensively deployed it throughout other product lines including iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple Watch. Apple has designed its own custom ARM chips since 2009.
  • 3.4K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Pride
Pride is an emotional state deriving positive affect from the perceived value of a person or thing with which the subject has an intimate connection. It may be inwardly or outwardly directed. With a negative connotation pride refers to a foolishly and irrationally corrupt sense of one's personal value, status or accomplishments, used synonymously with hubris. With a positive connotation, pride refers to a content sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, and a fulfilled feeling of belonging. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion which requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions (e.g. that pride is distinct from happiness and joy) through language-based interaction with others. Some social psychologists identify the nonverbal expression of pride as a means of sending a functional, automatically perceived signal of high social status. In contrast, pride could also be defined as a lowly disagreement with the truth. One definition of pride comes from St. Augustine: "the love of one's own excellence". A similar definition comes from Meher Baba: "Pride is the specific feeling through which egoism manifests." Pride is sometimes viewed as corrupt or as a vice, sometimes as proper or as a virtue. While some philosophers such as Aristotle (and George Bernard Shaw) consider pride (but not hubris) a profound virtue, some world religions consider pride's fraudulent form a sin, such as is expressed in Proverbs 11:2 of the Hebrew Bible. In Judaism, pride is called the root of all evil. When viewed as a virtue, pride in one's abilities is known as virtuous pride, greatness of soul or magnanimity, but when viewed as a vice it is often known to be self-idolatry, sadistic contempt, vanity or vainglory. Pride can also manifest itself as a high opinion of one's nation (national pride), ethnicity (ethnic pride) and sexual identity.
  • 4.7K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Fair Pie-Cutting
The fair pie-cutting problem is a variation of the fair cake-cutting problem, in which the resource to be divided is circular. As an example, consider a birthday cake shaped as a disk. The cake should be divided among several children such that no child envies another child (as in a standard cake-cutting problem), with the additional constraint that the cuts must be radial, so that each child receives a circular sector. A possible application of the pie model might be for dividing an island’s shoreline into connected lots. Another possible application is in division of periodic time, such as dividing a daily cycle into "on-call" periods.
  • 865
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Species Problem
The species problem is the set of questions that arises when biologists attempt to define what a species is. Such a definition is called a species concept; there are at least 26 recognized species concepts. A species concept that works well for sexually reproducing organisms such as birds is useless for species that reproduce asexually, such as bacteria. The scientific study of the species problem has been called microtaxonomy. One common, but sometimes difficult, question is how best to decide which species an organism belongs to, because reproductively isolated groups may not be readily recognizable, and cryptic species may be present. There is a continuum from reproductive isolation with no interbreeding, to panmixis, unlimited interbreeding. Populations can move forward or backwards along this continuum, at any point meeting the criteria for one or another species concept, and failing others. Many of the debates on species touch on philosophical issues, such as nominalism and realism, and on issues of language and cognition. The current meaning of the phrase "species problem" is quite different from what Charles Darwin and others meant by it during the 19th and early 20th centuries. For Darwin, the species problem was the question of how new species arose. Darwin was however one of the first people to question how well-defined species are, given that they constantly change.
  • 5.1K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Berlekamp's Root Finding Algorithm
In number theory, Berlekamp's root finding algorithm, also called the Berlekamp–Rabin algorithm, is the probabilistic method of finding roots of polynomials over a field [math]\displaystyle{ \mathbb Z_p }[/math]. The method was discovered by Elwyn Berlekamp in 1970 as an auxiliary to the algorithm for polynomial factorization over finite fields. The algorithm was later modified by Rabin for arbitrary finite fields in 1979. The method was also independently discovered before Berlekamp by other researchers.
  • 1.8K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Picture Exchange Communication System
The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an augmentative and alternative communication system developed and produced by Pyramid Educational Consultants, Inc. PECS was developed in 1985 at the Delaware Autism Program by Andy Bondy, PhD, and Lori Frost, MS, CCC-SLP. The developers of PECS noticed that traditional communication techniques, including speech imitation, sign language, and picture point systems, relied on the teacher to initiate social interactions and none focused on teaching students to initiate interactions. Based on these observations, Bondy and Frost created a functional means of communication for individuals with a variety of communication challenges. Although PECS was originally developed for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), its use has become much more widespread. Through the years, PECS has been successfully implemented with individuals with varying diagnoses across the aged span. PECS is an evidence-based practice that has been highly successful with regard to the development of functional communication skills.
  • 1.1K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gee Bee Model R
The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster was a special purpose racing aircraft made by Granville Brothers Aircraft of Springfield, Massachusetts at the now-abandoned Springfield Airport (Massachusetts). Gee Bee stands for Granville Brothers.
  • 1.2K
  • 02 Nov 2022
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