A mirror or looking-glass is something that reflects light. One common "plane mirror" is a piece of special flat glass that a person can look into to see a reflection of themselves or what is behind them.
Sometimes, a flat piece of metal or the surface of water can act like a mirror.
The reason you are able to see yourself in a mirror is because light comes in and gets reflected, and that's how you are able to see your reflection.
Mirrors can have magnification properties, making images appear smaller or larger than their actual size. They can also be concave (curved inward) or convex (curved outward), making the reflected angle and view to be smaller or larger, respectively. Special mirrors can make a person's appearance look quite strange.
Also, in a mirror, writing appears backwards, as a "mirror image" of the original writing.
Mirrors are usually made out of glass with metal on the back, called "silvering" even if the metal is not silver. Some mirrors are made of polished metal, which is less breakable.
Mirrors with a curved surface can make things appear bigger or smaller, like a lens does.
Space probe
A space probe is an unmanned space mission, usually a small spacecraft sent out to find out information about a planet or other far away thing. As a tool of space exploration a planetary probe may land on the planet, or orbit around it, or merely fly by closely. Probes use radio waves to send information back to Earth or sometimes to a manned spacecraft. A space observatory leaves the Earth to look at distant objects, but does not go near the objects, so it is not called a "probe".
Blue's Clues
Blue's Clues is an American television series for young children. It aired on Nickelodeon from September 8, 1996 to August 6, 2006, and has been repeated since then. On the show, Blue is a blue dog. Her owner was Steve, until 2002, when Steve went off to college. Now Steve's younger brother, Joe, owns her.
The producers got ideas from child development and early-childhood education. Innovative animation and other techniques helped their viewers learn. The show follows an animated blue-spotted dog named Blue as she plays a game with the host and the viewers.
"Blue's Clues" became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on American commercial television and was critical to Nickelodeon's growth. It has been called "one of the most successful, critically acclaimed, and ground-breaking preschool television series of all time".
"Blue's Clues" was developed during difficult period for children's television. In 1990, Congress had passed the Children's Television Act. This required networks and TV stations to devote a portion of their programming to children's shows. The legislation set no guidelines or criteria for educational programs and had no provisions for enforcement. According to author Diane Tracy, "The state of children's television was pretty dismal.
Since the late 1960s, PBS was one of the few sources for children's educational television programming in the U.S., and most other U.S. children's TV shows were violent and created for the purpose of selling toys. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in 1997 that the commercial broadcast networks had to air educational children's programs for a minimum of three hours per week. The cable network Nickelodeon, which had been airing programs for six- to twelve-year-olds, was not legally bound by this legislation but complied with it anyway many years before the laws and regulations were passed.
The show's producers and creators presented material in a narrative format instead of the more traditional magazine format. They used repetition to reinforce its curriculum, and structured every episode the same way.
They used research about child development and young children's viewing habits that had been done in the thirty years since the start of "Sesame Street" in the U.S. This revolutionized the genre by inviting their viewers' involvement. Research was part of the creative and decision-making process in the production of the show and was integrated into all aspects and stages of the creative process. "Blue's Clues" was the first cutout animation series for preschoolers. It looks like a storybook with primary colors and simple construction paper shapes of familiar objects with varied colors and textures.
Its home-based setting is familiar to American children, but has a look unlike other children's TV shows. A live production of "Blue's Clues", which used many of the production innovations developed by the show's creators, toured the U.S. starting in 1999. As of 2002, over 2 million people had attended over 1,000 performances.
Malcolm Gladwell noted that Sesame Street appealed to both children and adults, but Blue's Clues was solely aimed at preschool children. They like stories, repetition and joining in the answers. "Every" episode of Blue was tested on preschool children, and the research noted how much of the time children watched the screen. The order of clues was tested. All aspects of the program could be changed if the testing suggested it would work better some other way.
By 2002, "Blue's Clues" had received several awards for excellence in children's programming, educational software, and licensing, and had been nominated for nine Emmy Awards. It has been syndicated in 120 countries and translated into 15 languages. Regional versions of the show featuring local hosts have been produced in other countries. It was one of the first preschool shows to incorporate American Sign Language into its content. The show's extensive use of research in its development and production process inspired several research studies that have provided evidence for its effectiveness as a learning tool.
Ford Motor Company
The Ford Motor Company (often known as Ford) is an American company that makes vehicles. This company is named after its founder, Henry Ford.
These brands are also made by Ford:
In 1896, Henry Ford had an idea to make a Quadricycle, the first "horseless carriage" he built. This four-wheeled vehicle was very different from cars we drive now. It was very different even from vehicles Ford produced just a few years later. Even so, this was the start of Ford's career as a businessman. Until the Quadricycle, Ford's work had been experimental and theoretical. For example, in the 1890s, Ford built a gas engine on his kitchen table — just an engine with nothing to power. Enough people liked the Quadricycle, and much could be done with the it, so it led to the beginning of Ford's business.
Ford Motor Company started on June 16, 1903, when Henry Ford and 11 business helpers signed papers to form the company. Their first Ford production car, the Model A, was sold in Detroit, Michigan a few months later. (This Model A should not be confused with their more famous Model A, which came out in 1927). With $280,000 (around 165 000 pounds), the early businessmen made what was to become one of the world's largest companies. Few companies changed the history and development of industry and society in the 20th century as much as Ford Motor Company.
Ford Motor Company's most important contribution to automotive manufacturing was the (moving) assembly line. First implemented at the Highland Park plant (in Michigan, US) in 1913, this new method let each workers to stay in one place, to do the same job repeatedly as the vehicles went by on the assembly line. The line proved to be very efficient; it helped the company make more cars, and make them cheaper than other car companies could do at the time. Before using the assembly line, Ford made 12,000 Model T's in a year. With the assembly line, Ford could make 12,000 Model T's in just two days. Ford had discovered how to make more cars that more people could afford to buy. He even paid his workers higher salaries than other car companies and still made money.