The astronomical unit is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and equal to about 150 million kilometres or ~8 light minutes. The actual distance from Earth to the Sun varies by about 3% as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once each year. The astronomical unit was originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion; however, since 2012 it has been defined as exactly 149597870700 m.
Gematria is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period. GDP (nominal) per capita does not, however, reflect differences in the cost of living and the inflation rates of the countries; therefore, using a basis of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) may be more useful when comparing living standards between nations, while nominal GDP is more useful comparing national economies on the international market. Total GDP can also be broken down into the contribution of each industry or sector of the economy. The ratio of GDP to the total population of the region is the per capita GDP and the same is called Mean Standard of Living.
In economics, the Gini coefficient, also the Gini index and the Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or the wealth inequality within a nation or a social group. The Gini coefficient was developed by the statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the worldwide exchange and communication of date- and time-related data. It is maintained by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988, with updates in 1991, 2000, 2004, and 2019. The standard aims to provide a well-defined, unambiguous method of representing calendar dates and times in worldwide communications, especially to avoid misinterpreting numeric dates and times when such data is transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times.
Kwanzaa is an annual celebration of African-American culture from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu, usually on the sixth day. It was created by activist Maulana Karenga, based on African harvest festival traditions from various parts of Africa, including West and Southeast Africa. Kwanzaa was first celebrated in 1966.
MATLAB is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages.
Nihilism is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.
Portable Network Graphics is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) — unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green, and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue.
In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo-units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, they are pure numbers with no associated units of measurement. Commonly used are parts-per-million, parts-per-billion, parts-per-trillion and parts-per-quadrillion. This notation is not part of the International System of Units (SI) system and its meaning is ambiguous.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. He wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, critique of economy, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard can be also seen as a critic of post-structuralism and has distanced himself from postmodernism.
A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a mathematical algorithm that maps data of an arbitrary size to a bit array of a fixed size. It is a one-way function, that is, a function for which it is practically infeasible to invert or reverse the computation. Ideally, the only way to find a message that produces a given hash is to attempt a brute-force search of possible inputs to see if they produce a match, or use a rainbow table of matched hashes. Cryptographic hash functions are a basic tool of modern cryptography.
In null hypothesis significance testing, the p-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the results actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small p-value means that such an extreme observed outcome would be very unlikely under the null hypothesis. Reporting p-values of statistical tests is common practice in academic publications of many quantitative fields. Since the precise meaning of p-value is hard to grasp, misuse is widespread and has been a major topic in metascience.
In chess, the chess piece relative value system conventionally assigns a point value to each piece when assessing its relative strength in potential exchanges. These values help determine how valuable a piece is strategically. They play no formal role in the game but are useful to players.
ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, is an international standard defining codes for writing systems or scripts. Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric code.
The exchange in chess refers to a situation in which one player exchanges a minor piece for a rook. The side which wins the rook is said to have won the exchange, while the other player has lost the exchange, since the rook is usually more valuable. Alternatively, the side that has won the rook is up the exchange, and the other player is down the exchange. The opposing captures often happen on consecutive moves, although this is not strictly necessary. It is generally detrimental to lose the exchange, although occasionally one may find reason to purposely do so; the result is an exchange sacrifice. The minor exchange is an uncommon term for the exchange of a bishop and knight.
ContextObjects in Spans (COinS) is a method to embed bibliographic metadata in the HTML code of web pages. This allows bibliographic software to publish machine-readable bibliographic items and client reference management software to retrieve bibliographic metadata. The metadata can also be sent to an OpenURL resolver. This allows, for instance, searching for a copy of a book at a specific library.
The England cricket team toured West Indies from 1 March to 5 May 2004 as part of the 2003–04 West Indian cricket season. The tour included four Tests and seven One Day Internationals.
The United States dollar is the official currency of the United States and its territories. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it into 100 cents, and authorized the minting of coins denominated in dollars and cents. U.S. banknotes are issued in the form of Federal Reserve Notes, popularly called greenbacks due to their historically predominantly green color.
