Universities worldwide offer programs of study pertaining to conflict research, analysis, and practice. The Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) houses the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution, which offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional training on conflict resolution. Additional graduate programs are offered at Georgetown University, Eastern Mennonite University and Trinity College Dublin. George Mason University’s Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution offers undergraduate, certificate and masters programs in Conflict Analysis and Resolution and a Ph.D. program in The Philosophy in Conflict and Conflict Resolution.
Furthermore, the Pax Ludens Foundation based in the Netherlands is an organization that puts together conflict resolution simulations set in an International Relations scenario to help students learn about the intricacies of where conflict emerges in the world of international politics.
Conflict resolution is a growing area of interest in UK pedagogy, with teachers and students both encouraged to learn about mechanisms that lead to aggressive action, and those that lead to peaceful resolution.
In many schools in the UK, conflict resolution has now become an integral part of the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) programme, chiming,as it does, with the SEAL principles of developing social skills and an understanding of ones own feelings.
In India, masters in conflict analysis and peace building is offered by Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace, in Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi.
Bent Larsen
Jørgen Bent Larsen (4 March 1935–9 September 2010) was a Danish chess Grandmaster. He was a six-time Danish champion, and a candidate for the World Chess Championship on four occasions: 1965, 1968, 1971, and 1977. He won three Interzonal tournaments: Amsterdam 1964, Sousse 1967, and Biel 1976. Larsen won several dozen major international tournaments during his career, and was awarded the first Chess Oscar in 1967. At his best he was rated (FIDE rating list) fourth in the world.
Larsen was the strongest chess player born in Denmark, and the strongest Scandinavian until the emergence of Magnus Carlsen. From the early 1970s, he lived for part of the year in Las Palmas, and in Buenos Aires, with his Argentinian-born wife.
Bent represented Denmark six times in Chess Olympiads, always on first board, and compiled an aggregate score of 75/109 (+61 =28 −20), for 68.8%, according to olimpbase.org. He always played a very high number of games, almost all of the rounds, and won three board medals, one gold and two bronze.
The worst result of his career was his 6–0 defeat by Bobby Fischer in the semi-finals of the Candidates matches in 1971. The match was played in Denver, Colorado. Larsen later claimed in a Kasparov.com interview (1998) that his one-sided loss to Fischer was due in part to his condition during the match: "The organizers chose the wrong time for this match. I was languid with the heat and Fischer was better prepared for such exceptional circumstances... I saw chess pieces through a mist and, thus, my level of playing was not good". Fischer was the great player of the day, and went on to beat Spassky in 1972 for the World Championship.
Google Search
Google Search or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services.
The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in webpages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997, based on earlier search-engine designs.
Google Search provides at least 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports results. ("see below:" Special features). There are special features for numbers, including ranges (70..73), prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions ("10.5 cm in inches"), calculations ( 3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2 ), package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages.
The order of search results (ghits for "Google hits") on Google's search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank called a "PageRank". Google Search provides many options for customized search ("see below:" Search options), using Boolean operators such as: exclusion ("-xx"), inclusion ("+xx"), alternatives ("xx OR yy"), and wildcard ("x * x").
Google's rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string.
Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page.
The PageRank algorithm instead analyses human-generated links, assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are themselves likely to be important. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. PageRank is thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance.
In addition to PageRank, Google over the years has added many other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists, reported to be over 200 different indicators. The details are kept secret due to spammers and in order to maintain an advantage over Google's competitors.
The exact percentage of the total of web pages that Google indexes is not known, as it is very hard to actually calculate.
Google not only indexes and caches web pages but also takes "snapshots" of other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, and so on. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to (X)HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.
Users can customize the search engine, by setting a default language, using the "SafeSearch" filtering technology and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms and retain the data for more than a year. For any query, up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page. The ability to specify the number of results is available only if "Instant Search" is not enabled. If "Instant Search" is enabled, only 10 results are displayed, regardless of this setting.
Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data available in online databases which are accessible by means of queries but not by links. This so-called invisible or deep Web is minimally covered by Google and other search engines. The deep Web contains library catalogs, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, and other content which is dynamically prepared to respond to a query.
Privacy in some countries forbids the showing of some links. For instance in Switzerland any individual can force Google Inc. to delete a link which contains their name.
Since Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters have become eager to influence their website's Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites increase their rankings on Google and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings to draw more searchers to their client's sites.