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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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Antarctic Circumpolar Current
File:Thermohaline Circulation using Improved Flow Field.ogv The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is an ocean current that flows clockwise (as seen from the South Pole) from west to east around Antarctica. An alternative name for the ACC is the West Wind Drift. The ACC is the dominant circulation feature of the Southern Ocean and has a mean transport estimated at 100-150 Sverdrups (Sv, million m³/s), or possibly even higher, making it the largest ocean current. The current is circumpolar due to the lack of any landmass connecting with Antarctica and this keeps warm ocean waters away from Antarctica, enabling that continent to maintain its huge ice sheet. Associated with the Circumpolar Current is the Antarctic Convergence, where the cold Antarctic waters meet the warmer waters of the subantarctic, creating a zone of upwelling nutrients. These nurture high levels of phytoplankton with associated copepods and krill, and resultant foodchains supporting fish, whales, seals, penguins, albatrosses, and a wealth of other species. The ACC has been known to sailors for centuries; it greatly speeds up any travel from west to east, but makes sailing extremely difficult from east to west, although this is mostly due to the prevailing westerly winds. Jack London's story "Make Westing" and the circumstances preceding the mutiny on the Bounty poignantly illustrate the difficulty it caused for mariners seeking to round Cape Horn westbound on the clipper ship route from New York to California. The eastbound clipper route, which is the fastest sailing route around the world, follows the ACC around three continental capes – Cape Agulhas (Africa), South East Cape (Australia), and Cape Horn (South America). The current creates the Ross and Weddell gyres.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
LiveJournal
LiveJournal (Russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law. As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Eclipse
Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It is the second-most-popular IDE for Java development, and, until 2016, was the most popular. Eclipse is written mostly in Java and its primary use is for developing Java applications, but it may also be used to develop applications in other programming languages via plug-ins, including Ada, ABAP, C, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, D, Erlang, Fortran, Groovy, Haskell, JavaScript, Julia, Lasso, Lua, NATURAL, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, R, Ruby (including Ruby on Rails framework), Rust, Scala, and Scheme. It can also be used to develop documents with LaTeX (via a TeXlipse plug-in) and packages for the software Mathematica. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) for Java and Scala, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, and Eclipse PDT for PHP, among others. The initial codebase originated from IBM VisualAge. The Eclipse software development kit (SDK), which includes the Java development tools, is meant for Java developers. Users can extend its abilities by installing plug-ins written for the Eclipse Platform, such as development toolkits for other programming languages, and can write and contribute their own plug-in modules. Since the introduction of the OSGi implementation (Equinox) in version 3 of Eclipse, plug-ins can be plugged-stopped dynamically and are termed (OSGI) bundles. Eclipse software development kit (SDK) is free and open-source software, released under the terms of the Eclipse Public License, although it is incompatible with the GNU General Public License. It was one of the first IDEs to run under GNU Classpath and it runs without problems under IcedTea.
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Topic Review
Business System Planning
Business systems planning (BSP) is a method of analyzing, defining and designing the information architecture of organizations. It was introduced by IBM for internal use only in 1981, although initial work on BSP began during the early 1970s. BSP was later sold to organizations. It is a complex method dealing with interconnected data, processes, strategies, aims and organizational departments. BSP was a new approach to IA; its goals are to: The result of a BSP project is a technology roadmap aligning investments and business strategy. BSP comprises 15 steps, which are classified into three sections by function.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
XTS-400
The XTS-400 is a multilevel secure computer operating system. It is multiuser and multitasking that uses multilevel scheduling in processing data and information. It works in networked environments and supports Gigabit Ethernet and both IPv4 and IPv6. The XTS-400 is a combination of Intel x86 hardware and the Secure Trusted Operating Program (STOP) operating system. XTS-400 was developed by BAE Systems, and originally released as version 6.0 in December 2003. STOP provides high-assurance security and was the first general-purpose operating system with a Common Criteria assurance level rating of EAL5 or above. The XTS-400 can host, and be trusted to separate, multiple, concurrent data sets, users, and networks at different sensitivity levels. The XTS-400 provides both an untrusted environment for normal work and a trusted environment for administrative work and for privileged applications. The untrusted environment is similar to traditional Unix environments. It provides binary compatibility with Linux applications running most Linux commands and tools as well as most Linux applications without the need for recompiling. This untrusted environment includes an X Window System GUI, though all windows on a screen must be at the same sensitivity level. To support the trusted environment and various security features, STOP provides a set of proprietary APIs to applications. In order to develop programs that use these proprietary APIs, a special software development environment (SDE) is needed. The SDE is also needed in order to port some complicated Linux/Unix applications to the XTS-400. A new version of the STOP operating system, STOP 7 has since been introduced, with claims to have improved performance and new features such as RBAC.
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Topic Review
Argument Technology
Argument technology is a sub-field of artificial intelligence that focuses on applying computational techniques to the creation, identification, analysis, navigation, evaluation and visualisation of arguments and debates. In the 1980s and 1990s, philosophical theories of arguments in general, and argumentation theory in particular, were leveraged to handle key computational challenges, such as modeling non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and designing robust coordination protocols for multi-agent systems. At the same time, mechanisms for computing semantics of Argumentation frameworks were introduced as a way of providing a calculus of opposition for computing what it is reasonable to believe in the context of conflicting arguments. With these foundations in place, the area was kick-started by a workshop held in the Scottish Highlands in 2000, the result of which was a book coauthored by philosophers of argument, rhetoricians, legal scholars and AI researchers. Since then, the area has been supported by various dedicated events such as the International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA) which has run annually since 2001; the International Workshop on Argument in Multi Agent Systems (ArgMAS) annually since 2004; the Workshop on Argument Mining, annually since 2014, and the Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA), biennially since 2006. Since 2010, the field has also had its own journal, Argument & Computation, which was published by Taylor & Francis until 2016 and since then by IOS Press. One of the challenges that argument technology faced was a lack of standardisation in the representation and underlying conception of argument in machine readable terms. Many different software tools for manual argument analysis, in particular, developed idiosyncratic and ad hoc ways of representing arguments which reflected differing underlying ways of conceiving of argumentative structure. This lack of standardisation also meant that there was no interchange between tools or between research projects, and little re-use of data resources that were often expensive to create. To tackle this problem, the Argument Interchange Format set out to establish a common standard that captured the minimal common features of argumentation which could then be extended in different settings. Since about 2018, argument technology has been growing rapidly, with, for example, IBM's Grand Challenge, Project Debater, results for which were published in Nature in March 2021; German research funder, DFG's nationwide research programme on Robust Argumentation Machines, RATIO, begun in 2019; and UK nationwide deployment of The Evidence Toolkit by the BBC in 2019. A 2021 video narrated by Stephen Fry provides a summary of the societal motivations for work in argument technology. Argument technology has applications in a variety of domains, including education, healthcare, policy making, political science, intelligence analysis and risk management and has a variety of sub-fields, methodologies and technologies.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Ocean-bottom Seismometer
An ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) is a seismometer that is designed to record the earth motion under oceans and lakes from man-made sources and natural sources. Sensors at the sea floor are used to observe acoustic and seismic events. Seismic and acoustic signals may be caused by different sources, by earthquakes and tremors as well as by artificial sources. Computing and analyzing the data yields information about the kind of source and, in case of natural seismic events, the geophysics and geology of the sea floor and the deeper crust. The deployment of OBS along a profile will give information about the deep structure of the Earth's crust and upper mantle in offshore areas. OBS may be equipped with a maximum of a three-component geophone in addition to a hydrophone, and thus it needs a capacity of more than 144 Mbytes, which would be the minimum for an adequate MCS profiling. In a typical survey, the instruments should be operational for several days (deployments can exceed 12 months), which requires a data storage capacity of more than 500 Mbyte. Other experiments, such as tomographic investigations within a 3D-survey or seismological monitoring, demand even larger capacities.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Soyombo Alphabet
The Soyombo alphabet (Mongolian: Соёмбо бичиг, Soyombo biçig) is an abugida developed by the monk and scholar Zanabazar in 1686 to write Mongolian. It can also be used to write Tibetan and Sanskrit. A special character of the script, the Soyombo symbol, became a national symbol of Mongolia, and has appeared on the national flag since 1921, and on the Emblem of Mongolia since 1960, as well as money, stamps, etc.
  • 2.1K
  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Sannyasa
Sannyasa (saṃnyāsa) is the life stage of renunciation within the Hindu philosophy of four age-based life stages known as ashramas, with the first three being Brahmacharya (bachelor student), Grihastha (householder) and Vanaprastha (forest dweller, retired). Sannyasa is traditionally conceptualized for men or women in late years of their life, but young brahmacharis have had the choice to skip the householder and retirement stages, renounce worldly and materialistic pursuits and dedicate their lives to spiritual pursuits. Sannyasa is a form of asceticism, is marked by renunciation of material desires and prejudices, represented by a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, and has the purpose of spending one's life in peaceful, love-inspired, simple spiritual life. An individual in Sanyasa is known as a Sannyasi (male) or Sannyasini (female) in Hinduism, which in many ways parallel to the Sadhu and Sadhvi traditions of Jain monasticism, the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis of Buddhism and the monk and nun traditions of Christianity, respectively. Sannyasa has historically been a stage of renunciation, ahimsa (non-violence) peaceful and simple life and spiritual pursuit in Indian traditions. However, this has not always been the case. After the invasions and establishment of Muslim rule in India, from the 12th century through the British Raj, parts of the Shaiva and Vaishnava ascetics metamorphosed into a military order, to rebel against persecution, where they developed martial arts, created military strategies, and engaged in guerrilla warfare. These warrior sanyasis (ascetics) played an important role in helping European colonial powers establish themselves in India.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (abbreviated CHS; previously the UPMC Center for Health Security, the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies) is an independent, nonprofit organization of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and part of the Environmental Health and Engineering department. It is concerned with the areas of health consequences from epidemics and disasters as well as averting biological weapons development, and implications of biosecurity for the bioeconomy. It is a think tank that does policy research and gives policy recommendations to the United States government as well as the World Health Organization and the UN Biological Weapons Convention.
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