Relational model

The relational model for database management is a database model based on first-order predicate logic, first formulated and proposed in 1969 by Edgar Codd.

Its core idea is to describe a database as a collection of predicates over a finite set of predicate variables, describing constraints on the possible values and combinations of values. The content of the database at any given time is a finite model (logic) of the database, i.e. a set of relations, one per predicate variable, such that all predicates are satisfied. A request for information from the database (a database query) is also a predicate.

The purpose of the relational model is to provide a declarative method for specifying data and queries: we directly state what information the database contains and what information we want from it, and let the database management system software take care of describing data structures for storing the data and retrieval procedures for getting queries answered.

Information ecology

In the context of an evolving information society, the term information ecology was coined by various persons in the 1980s and 1990s. It marks a connection between ecological ideas with the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment and has been gaining progressively wider acceptance in a growing number of disciplines. "Information ecology" often is used as metaphor, viewing the informational space as an ecosystem.

Malware

Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent. The term is a portmanteau of the words malicious and software. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.

Many normal computer users are however still unfamiliar with the term, and most never use it. Instead, "computer virus" is incorrectly used in common parlance and even in the media to describe all kinds of malware, though not all malware are viruses.

Software is considered malware based on the perceived intent of the creator rather than any particular features. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, and other malicious and unwanted software. In law, malware is sometimes known as a computer contaminant, for instance in the legal codes of California, West Virginia, and several other American states.

Virus removal

One possibility on Windows Me, Windows XP and Windows Vista is a tool known as System Restore, which restores the registry and critical system files to a previous checkpoint. Often a virus will cause a system to hang, and a subsequent hard reboot will render a system restore point from the same day corrupt. Restore points from previous days should work provided the virus is not designed to corrupt the restore files. Some viruses, however, disable system restore and other important tools such as Task Manager and Command Prompt. An example of a virus that does this is CiaDoor.

Administrators have the option to disable such tools from limited users for various reasons. The virus modifies the registry to do the same, except, when the Administrator is controlling the computer, it blocks all users from accessing the tools. When an infected tool activates it gives the message "Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator.", even if the user trying to open the program is the administrator.

Users running a Microsoft operating system can go to Microsoft's website to run a free scan, if they have their 20-digit registration number.

E-mail client

An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka email reader is a frontend computer program used to manage email.

Sometimes, the term e-mail client is also used to refer to any agent acting as a client toward an e-mail server, independently of it being a real MUA, a relaying server, or a human typing directly on a telnet terminal. In addition, a web application providing the relevant functionality is sometimes considered an email client.

Robot software

Robot software is the coded commands that tell a mechanical device (known as a robot) what tasks to perform and control its actions. Robot software is used to perform tasks and automate tasks to be performed. Programming robots is a non-trivial task. Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.

Some robot software aims at developing intelligent mechanical devices. Though common in science fiction stories, such programs are yet to become common-place in reality and much development is yet required in the field of artificial intelligence before they even begin to approach the science fiction possibilities. Pre-programmed hardware may include feedback loops such that it can interact with its environment, but does not display actual intelligence.

Currently, malicious programming of robots is of some concern, particularly in large industrial robots. The power and size of industrial robots mean they are capable of inflicting severe injury if programmed incorrectly or used in an unsafe manner. One such incident occurred on 21 July 1984 when a man was crushed to death by an industrial robot. That incident was an accident, but shows the potential risks of working with robots. In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics were developed for robots to obey and avoid malicious actions.

Behavior-based robotics

Behavior-based robotics or behavioral robotics or behavioural robotics is the branch of robotics that incorporates modular or behavior based AI (BBAI).

The school of behavior-based robots owes much to work undertaken in the 1980s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Professor Rodney Brooks, who with students and colleagues built a series of wheeled and legged robots utilising the subsumption architecture. Brooks' papers, often written with lighthearted titles such as "Planning is just a way of avoiding figuring out what to do next", the anthropomorphic qualities of his robots, and the relatively low cost of developing such robots, popularised the behavior-based approach.

Brooks' work builds - whether by accident or not - on two prior milestones in the behavior-based approach. In the 1950s, W. Grey Walter, an English scientist with a background in neurological research, built a pair of vacuum tube-based robots that were exhibited at the 1951 Festival of Britain, and which have simple but effective behavior-based control systems.

The second milestone is Valentino Braitenberg's 1984 book, "Vehicles - Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" (MIT Press). He describes a series of thought experiments demonstrating how simply wired sensor/motor connections can result in some complex-appearing behaviors such as fear and love.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics, also called "Engineering psychology" or "human factors", is the application of scientific information concerning objects, systems and environment for human use (definition adopted by the International Ergonomics Association in 2007). Ergonomics is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximize the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. However, ergonomics comes into everything which involves people. Work systems, sports and leisure, health and safety should all embody ergonomics principles if well designed.

It is the applied science of equipment design intended to maximize productivity by reducing operator fatigue and discomfort. The field is also called biotechnology, human engineering, and human factors engineering. Ergonomic research is primarily performed by ergonomists who study human capabilities in relationship to their work demands. Information derived from ergonomists contributes to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.

Robot kit

A robot kit is a special construction kit for building robots, especially autonomous mobile robots.

Toy robot kits are also supplied by several companies. They are mostly made of plastics elements like Lego Mindstorms and the Robotis Bioloid, or aluminium elements like Lynxmotion's Servo Erector Set and the qfix kit.

The kits can consist of: structural elements, mechanical elements, motors (or other actuators), sensors and a controller board to control the inputs and outputs of the robot. In some cases, the kits can be available without electronics as well, to provide the user the opportunity to use his or her own.

Software Process Innovation

Software process innovation can take the form of the development of new techniques, tools or methods for software development, as for example with extreme programming (XP) or SCRUM. It can concentrate on one phase of a more traditional development process, such as requirements elicitation - introducing more creative or imaginative techniques or tools. Software process innovations can be user-led , where expert users collaborate in the writing of software which meets their own needs (for example the Linux community). Process innovation can also focus on market analysis:where the demand for new software products lies. Common to many software process innovations is a focus on productive work, and the avoidance of thrashing – unfocused work which is neither productive nor generating new ideas. A more modern pre-occupation is with ‘flow’ , (Csíkszentmihályi’s description of a mental state characterized by high energy and focus) in a software team

The relationship between software process innovation and innovative software products is a complex one. At the moment there is no particular evidence that innovative software processes necessarily result in innovative software products. Some forms of innovative software products may be best developed using traditional methods .

National Transportation Research Center (NRTC)

The National Transportation Research Center (NRTC) is an institution, located in Knoxville, Tennessee, that conducts research and development aimed at increasing the efficiency and safety of transportation systems and reducing their energy utilization and effects on the environment.

It is operated as a partnership between the United States Department of Energy, the University of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and is located approximately half-way between the university campus and the ORNL site in Oak Ridge.

Islamic Golden Age

The Islamic Golden Age, also sometimes known as the Islamic Renaissance, is traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century, though some have extended it to the 15th or 16th centuries. During this period, engineers, scholars and traders in the Islamic world contributed to the arts, agriculture, economics, industry, law, literature, navigation, philosophy, sciences, and technology, both by preserving and building upon earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own. Howard R. Turner writes: "Muslim artists and scientists, princes and laborers together created a unique culture that has directly and indirectly influenced societies on every continent."

Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange has been one of the most significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that occurred after 1492. Many new and different goods were exchanged between the two hemispheres of the Earth, and it began a new revolution in the Americas and in Europe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus' first voyage launched an era of large-scale contact between the Old and the New World that resulted in this ecological revolution: hence the name "Columbian" Exchange.

Entity-relationship model

An Entity-relationship model is an abstract conceptual representation of structured data. Entity-relationship modeling is a relational schema database modeling method, used in software engineering to produce a type of conceptual data model (or semantic data model) of a system, often a relational database, and its requirements in a top-down fashion. Diagrams created using this process are called entity-relationship diagrams, or ER diagrams for short. Originally proposed in 1976 by Dr. Pin-Shan (Peter) Chen many variants of the process have subsequently been devised.

HSQLDB

HSQLDB is a relational database management system written in Java. It is based on Thomas Mueller's discontinued Hypersonic SQL Project.[1] He later developed H2 as a complete rewrite.

HSQLDB is available under a BSD license.

It has a JDBC driver and supports a rich subset of SQL-92, SQL-99, and SQL:2003 standards. It offers a fast, small (less than 100k in one version, around 600k in the standard version) database engine which offers both in-memory and disk-based tables. Embedded and server modes are available.

Relational model

The relational model for database management is a database model based on predicate logic and set theory. It was first formulated and proposed in 1969 by Edgar Codd with aims that included avoiding, without loss of completeness, the need to write computer programs to express database queries and enforce database integrity constraints. "Relation" is a mathematical term for "table", and thus "relational" roughly means "based on tables". It did not originally refer to the links or "keys" between tables, contrary to popular interpretation of the name.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

In computing, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network, such as over the Internet.

FTP is a commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any TCP/IP based network to manipulate files on another computer on that network regardless of which operating systems are involved (if the computers permit FTP access). There are many existing FTP client and server programs. FTP servers can be set up anywhere between game servers, voice servers, internet hosts, and other physical servers.

Systems design

If the broader topic of product development "blends the perspective of marketing, design, and manufacturing into a single approach to product development, then design is the act of taking the marketing information and creating the design of the product to be manufactured. Systems design is therefore the process of defining and developing a systems to satisfy specified requirements of the market or customer. Until the 1990s systems design had a crucial and respected role in the data processing industry. In the 1990s standardization of hardware and software resulted in the ability to build modular systems. The increasing importance of software running on generic platforms has enhanced the discipline of software engineering.

Object-oriented analysis and design methods are becoming the most widely used methods for computer system design. The UML has become the standard language used in Object-oriented analysis and design. It is widely used for modeling software systems and is increasingly used for designing non-software systems and organizations.

HDTV blur

HDTV blur is a common term used to describe a number of different artifacts on consumer modern high definition television sets:
The following factors are generally the primary or secondary causes of HDTV blur; in some cases more than one of these factors may be in play at the studio or receiver end of the transmission chain.
• Pixel response time on LCD displays (blur in the color response of the active pixel)
• Slower camera Shutter speeds common in hollywood production films (blur in the HDV content of the film)
• Blur from eye tracking fast moving objects on sample-and-hold LCD, Plasma, or Microdisplay.
• Resolution resampling (blur due to resizing image to fit the native resolution of the HDTV)
• Blur due to 3:2 pulldown and/or motion-speed irregularities in framerate conversions from film to video
• Computer generated motion blur introduced by video games

Pharmacognosy

Pharmacognosy is the study of medicines derived from natural sources. The American Society of Pharmacognosy defines pharmacognosy as "the study of the physical, chemical, biochemical and biological properties of drugs, drug substances or potential drugs or drug substances of natural origin as well as the search for new drugs from natural sources."