AcharyaChanakya/simple-wikipedia huggingface dataset:
The idea came from Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", "Therefore... probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form..."
Kinetic energy is the energy that an object has because of its motion. This energy can be converted into other kinds, such as gravitational or electric potential energy, which is the energy that an object has because of its position in a gravitational or electric field.
Kinetic Energy is the maximum amount of work a moving body due to its motion can do, whereas Potential energy is the maximum amount of work a body can do due to its configuration or position in a field force. Kinetic Energy is valid for all sorts of forces as seen from this derivation.
but Potential Energy is not as can be seen here
which clearly suggests that only conservative forces can have potential energy associated with them.
The translational kinetic energy of an object is:
The rotational kinetic energy of an object is:
Potential energy
Potential energy is the stored or pent-up energy of an object. It is often contrasted with kinetic energy.
In physics, potential energy is the energy which an object has due to its position in a force field or which a system has due to the way its parts are arranged.
Common types include the gravitational potential energy of an object that depends on its vertical position and mass, the elastic potential energy of an extended spring, and the electric potential energy of a charge in an electric field. The SI unit for energy is the joule (symbol J).
Potential energy is often associated with restoring forces such as a spring or the force of gravity. The action of stretching the spring or lifting the mass is performed by an external force that works against the force field of the potential. This work is stored in the force field, which is said to be stored as potential energy. If the external force is removed the force field acts on the body to perform the work as it moves the body back to the initial position, reducing the stretch of the spring or causing a body to fall. When this happens, potential energy changes into kinetic energy. The total energy stays the same because of the law of conservation of energy.
Physicists say that potential energy is the difference between the energy of an object in a given position and its energy at a reference position.
Bringing a rock uphill increases its potential energy under gravity. Stretching a rubber band increases its elastic potential energy, which is a form of electric potential energy. A mixture of a fuel and an oxidant has a chemical potential energy, which is another form of electric potential energy. Batteries too have chemical potential energy.
There are various types of potential energy, each associated with a particular type of force.
Gravitational potential energy is experienced by an object when height and mass is a factor in the system. Gravitational potential energy causes objects to move towards each other.
If an object is lifted a certain distance from the surface from the Earth, the force experienced is caused by weight and height.
Work is defined as force over a distance, and work is another word for energy. The potential energy added when you lift an object is:
Here, formula_5 is the acceleration due to gravity.
The total work done by gravitational potential energy when an object falls from position 1 to position 2 is:
Electric potential energy is experienced by charges both different and alike, as they repel or attract each other. Charges can either be positive (+) or negative (-), where opposite charges attract and similar charges repel.
If two charges were placed a certain distance away from each other, the potential energy stored between the charges can be calculated by:
Elastic potential energy is experienced when a rubbery material is pulled away or pushed together. A spring for example stores elastic potential energy. The amount of potential energy the material has depends on the distance pulled or pushed. The longer the distance pushed, the greater the elastic potential energy the material has.
If a material is pulled or pushed, the potential energy can be calculated by:
A ship is a large vehicle used to travel on water. It is bigger than a boat. Most are cargo ships, which carry most of the world's international trade. There are also many warships, passenger ships and other kinds for different purposes.
When people talk about a ship, they often use the pronoun "she". For example: She was launched on 29 December 1878.
The first ships used oars or the wind (or both) to make them move.
From about 4000 BC the Ancient Egyptians were making wooden sail boats. By 1200 BC the Phoenicians and Greeks had begun to make bigger sailing ships which were about 30 metres (100 feet) long and could carry 90180 tonnes of cargo. The Romans made even bigger ships which could carry up to 1,000 people and 1,000 tonnes of cargo. The 8th century saw the rise of the Vikings, who were famous for their "longships" and which were mainly used for raiding other countries, but also for trading. The longships had flat bottoms so they could move in shallow (not deep) rivers.
Sailing ships were used for thousands of years, but they were very important from the Age of Discovery to the 19th century. The Chinese admiral Zheng He commanded a fleet of large 'treasure ships' on seven voyages all over Asia up to East-Africa in the early fifteenth century. The most successful and largest fleet in the 17th century was the Dutch fleet (see the Netherlands). For trade and transport the Dutch often used a particular kind of trading ship, called a flute ("fluyt" in Dutch). Transport of people and cargo on sailing ships became rare in the early 20th century.
Some famous ships from this era include:
In the 19th century, steamboats became commonplace.
At one time, the steamships "Titanic", "Olympic", and "Britannic" were the largest ships in the world, "Titanic" sank on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg, becoming one of the most famous shipwrecks of all time, the "Olympic" was "Titanic" 's nearly identical twin, and actually set sail before "Titanic" and was scrapped in the 1930s after a very successful career including her being a passenger liner and a warship in World War I. The "Britannic" was the largest of these three sister ships, and was supposed to be more grand and elegant than the "Titanic", but before she set sail on her maiden voyage, WWI broke out and she was stripped of her elegant furniture and elaborate paneling and became a hospital ship. During her term as a hospital ship, she was sunk by either a mine or torpedo, no one knows for sure. The "Titanic" lies at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and the "Britannic" lies in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of the Island of Kea.
After World War II ships with diesel engines became commonplace. Passenger airliners replaced passenger ships for long trips in the late 20th century. Cargo ships became much bigger. The main kinds are container ships for mostly manufactured goods, and bulk carriers including oil tankers.
The world's largest ship is the "Prelude", owned by Shell. It is being built on Geoje Island, South Korea. It is 488m long and has the internal capacity greater than the total volume of four large aircraft carriers. What it will do is collect natural gas off the coast of Australia, and liquify it. When liquified, the hydrocarbon takes up 600 times less space than its gas. Smaller tankers will take the liquid gas to its buyers. The ship will do liquifying and temporary storage, which is usually done on land. Shell believes this justifies the cost of the ship.
The shipping yard builds all kinds of structures for the oil industry. It employs 30,000 workers.
A boat is a vehicle used to travel on water. It is smaller than a ship and can be lifted out of the water and carried on a ship. Some boats have sails, some are powered by rowing with oars, and some use motors. Those that use steam engines are steamboats
These boats are usually made of wood. However, some parts are made of metals like steel and aluminium. Expensive boats may have parts from fiberglass or composite materials and some even have helicopter pads. There are some boats that can even go underwater. They are called submarines.
A narrowboat is a boat designed to be used on narrow canals. It is sometimes called a barge.
The Pesse Canoe is likely the oldest boat recovered to date as it was built sometime around 8,000 BCE
The navian is the part of a country's military that fights on water using boats. People in the navy are called navians. The navy is mostly made up of warships. It may also have its own air force and soldiers. It may have special boats that can go underwater, called submarines, or another kind of special boat that is meant to carry airplanes, called aircraft carriers.
Originally, Naval war was fought by ramming other ships and then jumping onto them to fight the crew. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the ships were usually powered by oars. During the Middle Ages, the cannon was invented. These could be shot at other ships from a great distance. Warships around this time also began to use sails instead of oars for power. In the middle 19th century, ships began to be plated in armor for protection. Steam engines allowed them move while carrying the armor, and better ones soon made them much faster. These early warships, called ironclads, are thought to have begun the type of Naval warfare used today. Ships soon became much larger.
Air force
An air force is the branch of a country's military which fights in the air. The air force is made up of aircraft such as fighters, bombers, helicopters and transport aircraft. When a navy has its own air force it is called Naval Aviation.
Air forces began in the early 20th century, usually as part of the army. Most countries separated their air forces in the 1930s and 1940s.
Aircraft in an air force sometimes fly in a formation. Formations are when the aircraft fly in a pattern. Air forces is part of the military.
The biggest air force in the world is the United States Air Force (USAF).
List of words about computers
MarA jio
Jio
Adware is an advertising computer program that can be put there by other people on someone's computer, sometimes without their permission. It is controversial because sometimes businesses put the program there so they can see what people are doing or what web pages they are browsing. They then put an advertisement that is of the same subject as the web-page the person is looking at. This can be good if the person is trying to buy something, but many people do not want advertisements. Many people also do not want other people to find out what they are doing or what web pages they are looking at. An example is in the popular peer-to-peer file sharing program, Kazaa. When someone downloads it, it installs adware on their computer that then sends advertisements to the computer. Some people do not like this so they use an illegally changed version of this program called Kazaa Lite.
Removal tools have been developed to assist users in clearing out these unwanted programs.
Like many programs that people use for security, the program must be changed often. Updating allows the removal tool to recognize new types of adware. This can be done by downloading files over the internet using the 'update' option in the program.
Gender is a word that is used to talk about how people express masculine (traits most people think of as male) or feminine (traits most people think of as female) traits. It is commonly used for a person's sex (male or female) but this word only means someone’s biology (body parts).
"Gender" comes from the Latin word genus which meant "kind" or "type". In the few hundred years before the 1950s, the term 'gender' was used only in the field of grammar. In 1955, a scientist began to use the word "gender" in new ways when referring to people, in a way that was related to their 'sex' but not quite the same. The term was not applied to other animals. They continued to have different “sexes”.
Before the 1950s, the term 'gender' was used only in the field of grammar, and only to distinguish a category of words that are called 'feminine nouns' from other words that are 'masculine nouns'. Early Indo-European languages~had three genders. Languages that come from Latin like Spanish, French, and Italian have lost one, and their nouns are either feminine or masculine in gender. For example, in Spanish, 'house' ("casa") is feminine, and 'day' ("día") is masculine. Some languages still have three genders, like German. Outside of their grammatical category, the word 'gender' was not used to refer to people. At that time, when one spoke about someone being either 'male' or 'female', the word used was "sex".
Merriam Webster officially recognized the pronoun "they" as a singular use pronoun in 2019. According to the dictionary, the word had actually been used as a non-gender binary pronoun since the 1300s. Around the time Merriam Webster made this announcement, artist Sam Smith announced that their correct pronouns were actually they/them. Typically, for those who identify as female, the correct pronouns are she/her, and for males, he/him.
See Grammatical gender for more detail.
Many people often use the terms "sex " and "gender" interchangeably, however, some people now assign them two different meanings. They use the term "sex" to refer to the biological assignment of an individual, which is often based on scientific knowledge. This biological determination is often made at birth. Doctors often assign sex by looking at pre-natal images or directly inspecting genitalia at birth. This determination is still based on our beliefs on gender and sex being the same. The problem lies in what happens when an individual falls outside of the typical categories of "male" or "female". Some medical professionals have turned to the Karyotype method to look at the sex chromosomes to determine biological sex. "Gender", on the other hand, is considered by some to be more of a psychological factor. To them, gender is determined by our expressions, and behaviors rather than scientific knowledge.
Typically, gender has been described by using terms such as man, woman, or even transsexual. These terms are applied to people based on their sex, or sometimes on the basis of culturally constructed characteristics. Although many people may be biologically assigned a sex, the gender they believe themselves to be may not align with this sex. An individual's gender is often assumed by outsiders based on cultural norms: outward appearance, body shape and size, physical activity, etc.. Although an individual's gender identity is determined by psychology, a gender identity can be constructed by wearing particular clothing, language, actions and such, that are associated with that gender in a given society. Psychologist and Feminist Anthropologist Anne Fausto-Sterling calls this embodiment.
In 1955, John Money created the term gender role and began to use it to mean something different from sex. Gender roles are how a society views different genders and how they should act. An example of this would be how some people believe feminine or female people should cook and clean rather than play sports. These roles change over time and differ based on different cultures, but are often ideas that are created by people rather than coming from nature.
The term identity means the mental image someone has of themself as well as some kind of similarity with others in some particular way. Gender identity, specifically, refers to the experiences someone has that are similar to a person of a particular gender. This gender identity affects how a person views themself as well as how they interact with others. Developmental psychologists have found that the development of an identity begins in early adolescence. Learning about what it means to be a particular gender also starts at an early age. During adolescence, children begin to internalize the gender roles in their surroundings and "gender intensification" occurs. Gender intensification means that the child feels more pressure to conform to socially sanctioned gender norms, resulting in deeper gender role differentiation for boys and girls. Biological, can affect gender identity development as well. Research done with animals has shown that pre-natal sex hormones affect the sexual differentiation of the brain.
‘Binary’ comes from the Latin word bini meaning two together. As such binary refers to an idea in which there are only two possible options that are often opposite. This is how most people thought of gender throughout history in many parts of the world with male and female being the only two options.
Thinking of gender in this way can lead to a society with strict gender roles that are in place for a long time to think that those are natural or biological roles that each option has to conform to at birth. Examples of this are women who are not allowed access to education or jobs or men who are expected to not be emotional or soft. Strict binary gender roles are also often tied to reasons for oppression of sexualities outside of the majority. Societies often enforce gender binaries due to concepts like tradition and the idea that their stability relies on keeping this binary in place.
The term LGBTQ is constantly evolving and adding terms to the acronym as knowledge of the community becomes more widely known. As of 2020, the acronym has expanded to LGBTQQIAAP, which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, and Pansexual. The community is, however, mostly referred to as the LGBTQ+ community.
Intersex is the word used to describe the condition where a person has genitals that are not clearly male or female. There is a variety of ways this condition may physically manifest including infants that have enlarged clitorises or a combination of elements of both the male and female genitalia. Sex assignment is often performed on infants that have obvious intersex characteristics, this is often referred to as intersex genital mutilation. Some have recently suggested that medically unnecessary surgeries such as intersex genital mutilation be delayed until the child is old enough to make a medically informed decision with counseling. Many intersex individuals may even go their whole lives without knowing that they are intersex due to a chromosomal abnormality. Typically, females' sex chromosomes are XX and males XY, however, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), XXXY, XXXXY, and XYY are some other possibilities.
Although many societies still exist under a gender binary, more and more around the world are becoming more accepting of ideas of gender outside of strict male and female categories. An important thing to know about gender in this form is that the people who exist within them have always existed but have not always been free to express themselves. One example of this is people who are transgender, those who were labeled based on their biological sex, but eventually come to realize that label does not fit what they identify with. In addition to this, some people do not experience gender in a way that fits into a binary at all, and these people are called either non binary or genderqueer.
Another category that is not a part of the gender binary is called intersex. Intersex people are born without obviously male or female genitalia. It is a common practice in hospitals that an intersex baby will have a surgery that makes them one sex. Doctors do this with the belief it will help the child later on in life as they begin to develop during puberty. However, it can cause mental and emotional issues for the child if they begin to struggle with gender identity. Intersexuality is not a well accepted or understood idea in most places, since most people have never heard of it or are willing to accept people who are.
Dutch () is a West Germanic language. It comes from the Netherlands and is the country's official language. It is also spoken in the northern half of Belgium (the region called Flanders), and in the South American country of Suriname. A language known as "Afrikaans" was developed from Dutch by the people in southern Africa and is now spoken mainly in South Africa but also in nearby Namibia. About 22 million people around the world speak Dutch.
Dutch is a West Germanic language The West Germanic branch is divided into English, Frisian, German and Dutch. Dutch has a similar vocabulary and grammar to English but is closer to German.
The North Germanic languages of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic are also part of the Germanic language branch. Dutch is also in some cases like those languages.
The Dutch of before 1170 is called "Old Dutch" (Oudnederlands). The Dutch between 1170 and 1500 is called "Middle Dutch" (Middelnederlands), which is also called "Diets" and so that is why it is called Dutch in English. The word "Dutch" itself came from the Proto-Germanic word "", which means "language of the common people" and then was also used to refer to the Germans and their language. Over time, the Modern English usage now refers to that the Netherlands, not the Germans. The Dutch word for German, "Duits", comes from the same origin.
The oldest Dutch book known is "Wachtendonckse Psalmen", which was written in 900. The first Dutch writer known by name is Hendrik van Veldeke, who was born around 1150.
Dutch uses the letters of the same Roman alphabet as English.
Note: The e can also be a schwa (like in "the")
Vowels are said differently on the if the syllable is "open" or "closed". If a syllable is open, short written vowels are said as long ones. However, short written vowels are said short if the syllable is closed.:
There is, however, an exception to this rule. This is the "e". This is because "e" can also be a "mute e" (Schwa) (IPA character ə). In most words, where an open syllable ends with e it is a short e. Therefore, open syllables with a long e (ee) are written as ee. Example:
There are, however, exceptions to this rule as well. This can be seen in the word "meenemen". This word can be divided into three syllables: mee|ne|men. The e's in the first two syllables are long ones, but the last one is a mute e.
The mute e also occurs in the ending of verbs (usually -en).
Note: In words that end with "-d", the "-d" is pronounced like "-t".
The grammar of Dutch is slightly more complex than that of English. Word order in sentences is different in complex sentences. The basic simple sentence-structure is subject-verb.
Dutch has few grammatical "tenses". These are most used:
The most simple verb-time is the onvoltooide tegenwoordige tijd (ott; present simple). The ott is used when something happens "now", or "regularly" (like "Hij eet regelmatig" (He eats regularly)). Most verbs are conjugated (changed) in a regular form (these verbs are called "regelmatige werkwoorden" (regular verbs)). The word stem of the verb is still there in all of the conjugations (verb changes). The correct way of doing so is
Note: The stem of a verb is the infinitive of the verb without the "-en". In some verbs, the first syllable is open and so any vowel is long. The stem changes to a written long vowel so the stem of "lopen" becomes "loop". If the "-en" is then added to the stem (like with "wij"), the written form becomes short again, but it is still said as a long vowel).
The past form of the ott is the "onvoltooid verleden tijd" (ovt; past simple). How verbs are conjugated (changed) in the ovt is not easy to understand. Mistakes are common because some verbs are add a D, but others add a T. The "'t kofschip" rule is that the verb without "-en" (the stem in most verbs) ends with a consonant, which is also in "'t kofschip", the verb is changed with a T:
The verb can now be changed as the following:
There are some words for wgjch "'t kofschip" is not so easy. In "vrezen" (to fear), the stem of the verb is "vrees" and it looks as if itvis changed with a T. However, it changes instead to a D because "vrezen" without "-en" is "vrez". The Z is not in "'t kofschip" and so the verb is changed to a D.
The verb can now be changed as follows:
Although Dutch has "present continuous" (the -ing form of verbs in English), it is not used often:
Actually, there are three types of continuous verbs in Dutch.
" hallo " (hello)
" een " (one)
In number with three digits (e.g. 100), the Dutch change the u into o and replace 1 of the r's. Example:
Creative Commons licenses
The Creative Commons licenses relates to the name of several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002. The licenses were released by "Creative Commons", a United States nonprofit corporation. Everybody can put their own creations under these licenses.
There are four basic license conditions. A simple overview of these four:
It is possible to combine the license elements to allow people to use a work under certain conditions. For example, a combination of the first and fourth is called "CC BY-SA". This stands for "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike". With this license other people can use the work for free, but they must give credit to the original creator, and when they make something new with the work they must give it the same "CC BY-SA" license.
The Free Software Foundation thinks that the Creative Commons system is confusing, because people often forget to tell which of the licenses they use. Instead they suggest to use the Free Art license.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is a Micronesian island nation in the western Pacific Ocean. The capital of Marshall Islands is Majuro. The official languages are Marshallese and English.
National Anthem: Forever Marshall Islands
Roughly 10% of the population of the Marshall Islands can now be found in northwest Arkansas, U.S. Most live and work in the city of Springdale, a community of roughly 50,000. Each year, the Marshallese host a homecoming event so friends and relatives can get together to celebrate, stay in touch with politics at home, and spread their island culture. They meet at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale and have dancing, feasting, volleyball, and basketball. As a population, they are devoted to family and church and bring island dance and song to this corner of Arkansas.
An alphabet is a writing system, a list of symbols for writing. The basic symbols in an alphabet are called "letters". In an alphabet, each letter is a symbol for a sound or related sounds. To make the alphabet work better, more signs assist the reader: punctuation marks, spaces, standard reading direction, and so on.
The name "alphabet" comes from "Aleph" and "Beth", the first two letters in the Phoenician alphabet.
This article is written with the Roman alphabet (or Latin alphabet). It was first used in Ancient Rome to write Latin. Many languages use the Latin alphabet: it is the most used alphabet today.
It seems that the idea of an alphabet – a script based entirely upon sound – has been copied and adapted to suit many different languages. Although no alphabet fits its language perfectly, they are flexible enough to fit any language approximately. The alphabet was a unique invention.
The Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic, and a few others come from the ancient Greek alphabet, which dates back to about 1100 to 800. The Greek alphabet was probably developed from the Phoenician script, which appeared somewhat earlier, and had some similar letter-shapes.
The Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language, usually called Canaanite. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew and also Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. We do not know much about how the alphabetic idea arose, but the Phoenicians, a trading people, came up with letters which were adapted by the early Greeks to produce their alphabet. The one big difference is that the Phoenician script had no pure vowels. Arabic script has vowels which may, or may not, be shown by diacritics (small marks above or below the line). The oldest Qu'ran manuscripts had no diacritics. Israeli children to about the third grade use Hebrew texts with vowel 'dots' added.
No ancient script, alphabetic or not, had pure vowels before the Greeks. The Greek alphabet even has two vowels (Eta) and Epsilon) for 'e' and two (Omega and Omicron) for 'o', to distinguish between the long and short sounds. It appears that careful thought went into both the Phoenician invention and the Greek adaptation, but no details survive of either process.
Semitic scripts apparently derive from "Proto-Sinaitic", a script of which only 31 inscriptions (plus 17 doubtful) are known. It is thought by some researchers that the original source of this script was the Egyptian hieratic script, which by the late Middle Kingdom (about 1900) had added some alphabetic signs for representing the consonants of foreign names. Egyptian activity in Sinai was at its height at that time. A similar idea had been suggested many years previously.
A list of alphabets and examples of the languages they are used for:
Other writing systems do not use letters, but they do (at least in part) represent sounds. For example, many systems represent syllables. In the past such writing systems were used by many cultures, but today they are almost only used by languages people speak in Asia. A "syllabary" is a system of writing that is similar to an alphabet. A syllabary uses one symbol to indicate each syllable of a word, instead of one symbol for each letter of the word. For example, a syllabary would use one symbol to mean the syllable "ga", instead of two letters of the alphabet "g" and "a".
Originally, 1200 BC in the Shang dynasty, Chinese characters were mainly "pictographic", using pictures to show words or ideas. Now only 1% of Chinese characters are pictographic. 97% of modern characters are SP characters. These are a pair of symbols, one for meaning (semantics) and the other for pronunciation. In many cases the P and S parts are put together into one joint character. Chinese is not one spoken language, but many, but the same writing system is used for all. This writing system has been reformed a number of times.
A county is the name for a piece of land. It has a different meaning in different languages. Originally the word was for the land under a count (in Great Britain an earl). Today a "county" is often something between a larger state and a smaller town or district.
County governments keep records and organize elections and laws. They are a kind of local government.
Canada has ten provinces. Five of them have counties in them. In Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, these are local government units, but in Quebec and Prince Edward Island they are now only geographical units.
The word "county" is the English name for the Chinese word "xiàn" (县 or 縣). On Mainland China under the People's Republic of China, counties are the third level of local government. On Taiwan, the county is the highest governmental level below the Republic of China central government.
There are about 2,000 counties in China; this number is about the same as in the Han dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The county is one of the oldest levels of government in China.
In the past, "prefecture" and "district" were names for "xiàn", before the Republic of China. People started using the English name "county" after the start of the Republic of China.
The head of a county is the magistrate.
Counties started to be units of regional self-government in Croatia in 1990. There are twenty counties and the city of Zagreb which has the same status. They are called "županije" and their leader is a "župan".
There was a change in the historical counties of France in 1790 after the Revolution. The new government unit was the "département". But French people use the word county (comté) in the name of the Free County region, the old Free County of Burgundy.
The government unit of Hungary is "megye", or in Latin: "comitatus". This is the same as the word "county". Today Hungary has 19 counties, 20 city counties and 1 capital, Budapest. The comitatus was also the unit in the Kingdom of Hungary.
Ireland originally had 32 counties in the nineteenth century. 26 of these later formed the Republic of Ireland and 6 formed Northern Ireland. The counties were in 4 provinces - Leinster (12 counties), Munster (6) Connacht (5) and Ulster (9).
In the 1970s in Northern Ireland and in the 1990s in the Republic of Ireland, there was a change in the county numbers and borders (where they started and finished). In the Republic, for example, the change broke Dublin County into four parts: Dublin City, Dún Laoghaire - Rathdown, Fingal, and South Dublin. 'County Tipperary' is really two counties, Tipperary North Riding and Tipperary South Riding. The towns Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford are now separated from the countryside areas of their counties. So the Republic of Ireland now has thirty-four "county-level" units. But for sports, culture etc. people normally talk about the original 32 counties and 4 provinces.
Each county has a flag/colours and often a nickname too.
"County" is one name for "gun" (郡), which is a part of a prefecture. Other names for "gun" are "rural district", "rural area" or "district". People do not like to use "district" because the usual translation of "district" is "choume" (丁目).
Today, "counties" have no political power or organisation use. Postal services use it.
After New Zealand ended its provinces in 1876, they began using a county system as in other countries. They used it until 1989.
During the second half of the 20th century, many people went to the country counties from nearby cities. Because of this, sometimes they put the two together, making a "district" (e.g. Rotorua). Or sometimes they changed the name to "district" (e.g. Waimairi) or "city" (e.g. Manukau).
In 1974 they had a big change; they made the organisation the same all over New Zealand. Today the country has cities and districts, but no counties.
Norway has 19 Counties (singular "fylke", plural "fylker", literally "folk"). Until 1972, Bergen was a county, but today it is a municipality in the county of Hordaland. All counties have municipalities (singular "kommune", plural "kommuner").
Each county has an assembly ("fylkesting"). Norwegians choose the people in the assembly every 4 years. The counties work with high schools and roads, etc. Some people, and political parties, such as the Conservatives, "Høyre", want the end of the counties. Others want to make some of them into larger regions.
In English we normally call the Polish second-level organisation unit "powiat" a "county" or "district".
The smaller units of Romania are called "judeţ" (plural: "judeţe"). This name comes from "jude", a judge of a city. Today Romania has 40 counties and the capital, Bucharest has a separate status.
We sometimes call the units of Serbia ("okrug") counties, but more often we call them districts.
In 1634 the old provinces in Sweden had a new name: counties. Today there are 21 Counties, and in each County there are Municipalities.
The Swedish name is "Län".
"See also List of counties of the United Kingdom"
In the United Kingdom there are 92 traditional counties (also known as shires), 86 in Great Britain and 6 in Northern Ireland. The British counties are different ages.
In England, in Anglo-Saxon times, "Shires" were units for getting taxes. They usually had a town at their centre. People called these towns the "shire town". The shires had the same name as their shire town (for example Bedford"shire"). Later people called these towns the "county town". The name "county" came from the Normans, from a Norman word for an area under a Count (lord).
In 1539 Wales got thirteen counties. The counties in Scotland are this age or older.
The county boundaries (borders) of England are different today. In medieval times, some important cities got the status of counties, for example London, Bristol and Coventry. Some small places, e.g. Islandshire, were also counties. In 1844, a lot of these small places returned to their old counties.
The name "county" is also used in 48 of the 50 states of the United States, for the next government unit smaller than the state. Louisiana uses the name "parishes" and Alaska uses "boroughs". The U.S. Census Bureau lists 3,141 counties or organisation units of this sort. The power of the county government is very different in every state.
In New England, counties are mostly for law. In Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, they have no governmental use; they are only geographic names. Most power is in the New England town.
In other places than New England, counties are for the police, water, gas and electricity, libraries, statistics and birth certificates. "County sheriffs" are the head of the police in some states, for areas outside of cities and towns. Other places have "County Police" and county sheriffs are for law. Each county has a "county seat", usually the biggest town, where the county offices are.
In Western states, for example California, the county is the basic unit of local government.
New York University, also known as NYU, is a research university in New York City. It is the largest private university in the United States, and is highly regarded in the nation as well as around the world.
In 2020, it was ranked as the 11th best university in the United States by the QS World University Rankings: USA, and as the 28th best university in the world by U.S. News & World Report. In addition, NYU is highly ranked in the fields of Law, Medicine, Mathematics, Business, Psychology, Communications, Performing Arts, Film, Economics, and Philosophy.
The university was founded as "University of the City of New York" in 1831 by a prominent group of New York City residents led by then United States Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. The school was officially renamed New York University in 1896.
37 Nobel Prize winners have been produced by NYU, the 12th most in the United States and 19th most in the world. Three heads of state attended NYU: Ma Ying-jeou of the Republic of China, Ephraim Katzir of Israel, and Guillermo Endara of Panama. Many American politicians also attended NYU, including Bill de Blasio, Carol Bellamy, and Rudy Giuliani. Many successful actors and movie directors attended NYU, including Martin Scorcese, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Mahershala Ali, Woody Allen, and Adam Sandler. Other famous alumni include the creator of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk, singer Lady Gaga, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, author Suzanne Collins, and former special counsel Robert Mueller.
NYU is one of the places where 5G was created, as well as where many of the foundations of modern electromagnetic theory were discovered.
In addition to its main campus in New York City, NYU also has degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. NYU Abu Dhabi has produced more Rhodes Scholars per student than any other university in the world.
Bees are flying insects of the Hymenoptera, which also includes ants, wasps and sawflies. There are about 20,000 species of bees. Bees collect pollen from flowers. Bees can be found on all continents except Antarctica.
Bees fall into four groups:
The European Honey Bee (called "Apis mellifera" by Biologists), is kept by humans for honey. Keeping bees to make honey is called Beekeeping, or apiculture.
The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were pollinated by insects such as big beetles, long before bees first appeared. Bees are different because they are "specialized" as pollination agents, with behavioral and physical modifications that make pollination easier. Bees are generally better at the task than other pollinating insects such as beetles, flies, butterflies and pollen wasps. The appearance of such floral specialists is believed to have driven the adaptive radiation of the angiosperms, and, in turn, the bees themselves.
Bees, like ants, are a specialized form of wasp. The ancestors of bees were wasps in a family which preyed on other insects. The switch from insect prey to pollen may have resulted from the capture of prey insects that were covered with pollen when they were fed to the wasp larvae. Similar behaviour could be switched to pollen collection. This same evolutionary scenario has occurred within the vespoid wasps, where the group known as "pollen wasps" also evolved from predatory ancestors.
A recently reported bee fossil, of the genus "Melittosphex", is considered "an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea, sister-group to the modern bees", and dates from the Lower Cretaceous (~100 mya). Features of its morphology place it clearly within the bees, but it retains two unmodified ancestral traits of the legs which betray its origin. The issue is still under debate, and the phylogenetic relationships among bee families are poorly understood.
Like other insects, the body of a bee can be divided into three parts: the head, thorax (the middle part), and abdomen (the back part). Also like other insects, bees have three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings. Many bees are hairy and have yellow and black or orange and black warning colors.
Many bees have stings (like a hollow needle) on the rear of their bodies. If they get confused, angry, or scared they may sting, and inject venom, which hurts. Once a worker bee has stung it dies after a short while, but other types of bee and wasp can sting again. Some people are allergic to bee stings and can even die from them.
Some bees are eusocial insects; this means they live in organized groups called colonies. Honey bees, the kind of bee used in beekeeping, are eusocial. The home of a bee colony is called a hive. One hive is made up of only one queen.
There are three kinds of bees in a honey bee colony. A queen bee is the most important bee in the colony because she will lay the eggs. The queen bee only uses her stinger to sting other queen bees. The queen is usually the mother of the worker bees. She ate a special jelly called royal jelly from when she was young. Worker bees are females too, and they are the bees that collect pollen from flowers and will fight to protect the colony. Workers do a waggle dance to tell the others where they have found nectar; Karl von Frisch discovered this.
Drone bees (males) mate with the queen bee so that she can lay eggs. The only function of the male drone is to mate. They do no other work in the hive.
Dragonflies are flying insects of the order Odonata. There are about 5,300 species of dragonfly. The adults eat other flying insects.
Dragonflies have large compound eyes, which is their main sense organ. They have four strong transparent wings, and a long body.
Dragonflies are usually found around lakes, ponds, streams and wetlands. They are predators which eat mosquitoes, and other small insects such as flies, bees, ants, and butterflies. Their larvae, known as 'nymphs', are aquatic. They are also carnivorous.
Because their legs are adapted to grab prey in the air, they are not adapted for moving on land. Once they perch, they rarely use their legs for walking.
Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. In the rain forests of the Carboniferous and Permian periods, some species had wingspans of over . Oxygen levels were quite high at that time.
Dragonflies are in one suborder of the Odonata, and their relatives, the damselflies, are in another suborder. Some people mistake the damselfly for the dragonfly, because they look similar.
Adult damselflies have thinner, more delicate bodies than those of dragonflies. This you can see even when they are flying. When at rest, most damselflies hold their wings together above the body. Most dragonflies hold their wings horizontally. The eyes of dragonflies are larger, and touch each other.
Female dragonflies lay eggs in or near water, often on plants. When laying eggs, some species go under the water to lay their eggs on a good surface. The eggs then hatch into nymphs. While in the nymph stage they eat mosquito larvae and other things.
Most of a dragonfly's life is spent in the nymph form, beneath the water's surface. It is quite active. It can extend its jaws in front of its mouth to catch prey. Tiny vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish are part of its diet. Some nymphs even hunt on land. They draw water in and out of their rectum. They can move fast by squirting water out of the anus. They also have gills in their rectum.
The larval stage of large dragonflies may last as long as five years. In smaller species, this stage may last between two months and three years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant. Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. The adult stage of larger species of dragonfly can last as long as five or six months.
Dragonflies experience incomplete metamorphosis: the nymphs (called naiads) swim and live underwater, like fish. The female dragonfly lays her fertilized eggs near or right in the water. The naiads – which do not look much like dragonflies at all – hatch and immediately take to the water.
While living in the water, the naiads eat as many aquatic insects as possible, as well as other small creatures like tadpoles and minnows. Hidden among the plants, a naiad will lie in wait for prey to swim by. It can then squeeze water out of the rear of its abdomen like a jet stream. This moves the naiad forward very quickly, allowing it to snatch its prey with its powerful jaws. Some naiads even have a long lower jaw that can shoot out and grab prey.
Naiads live in the water for weeks (or even years in some species) and undergo a series of moults to grow. When a naiad is ready for its final moult, it finds a stick or other object sticking out of the water. It use this to crawl out of the water, and wait for its exoskeleton to dry. As the exoskeleton cracks open at the seam, the adult dragonfly crawls out.
Dragonflies have tremendous eyesight. Their compound eyes are very large and have up to 50,000 individual lenses. Their eyes wrap around the top of the head. As a result, they have a wide field of vision: they can see almost everywhere at once. Sight is by far their most important sense, used to catch flies and avoid birds.
In flight the adult dragonfly can move in six directions; upward, downward, forward, back, and side to side. They can also hover quite well in midair, and then they can take off at speeds of up to . Scientists discovered dragonflies can move each of their four wings independently which gives them their flying abilities. Dragonflies bend and twist their wings to cause little whirlwinds that move the air even faster over the upper part of the airfoil, reducing air pressure even more than most flying animals can. This gives them a lot of lift, even in the face of powerful winds.
The flight style of different families of dragonfly is one of their distinguishing features. It gives rise to some terms which are widely used by dragonfly observers:
Hawkers (family Aeshnidae). They are among the largest and fastest flying dragonflies. The adults live mostly in the air, and even mate in flight. They have large and powerful wings, and can fly forwards or backwards or hover like a helicopter. The wings are always extended horizontally.
Skimmers or perchers are the very large family Libellulidae. There are several flight styles amongst its genera. The genus "Sympetrum" lives in the northern hemisphere and has 50 species. It breeds in ponds and searches over meadows. There are at least 100 other genera.
Cruisers (family Macromiidae). They usually fly over bodies of water (and roads) straight down the middle. They have green eyes which just barely meet at the top of the head. Females of this family lack an ovipositor at the end of the abdomen and lay their eggs by dipping the abdomen in the water as they fly over.
Some dragonflies adjust their resting position to prevent overheating. They may use a handstand-like position to prevent overheating on sunny days. The abdomen is raised until its tip points at the sun, minimizing their surface area exposed to the heat. The position is called the obelisk posture. The species that do this are called 'perchers'; they are "sit and wait" predators which spend much of their time keeping still.
There are predators which eat dragonflies. The birds known a bee-eaters do regularly take dragonflies. Also, despite their good eyesight, dragonflies apparently cannot see spiders' webs, so they get caught there.