POST (HTTP)

In computing, POST is a request method supported by HTTP used by the World Wide Web.
By design, the POST request method requests that a web server accepts the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. It is often used when uploading a file or when submitting a completed web form.
In contrast, the HTTP GET request method retrieves information from the server. As part of a GET request, some data can be passed within the URL's query string, specifying (for example) search terms, date ranges, or other information that defines the query.
As part of a POST request, an arbitrary amount of data of any type can be sent to the server in the body of the request message. A header field in the POST request usually indicates the message body's Internet media type.
Posting data.
The world wide Web and HTTP are based on a number of request methods or 'verbs', including POST and GET as well as PUT, DELETE, and several others. Web browsers normally use only GET and POST, but RESTful online apps make use of many of the others. POST's place in the range of HTTP methods is to send a representation of a new data entity to the server so that it will be stored as a new subordinate of the resource identified by the URI. For example, for the URI codice_1, POST requests might be expected to represent new customers, each including their name, address, contact details and so on. Early website designers strayed away from this original concept in two important ways. First, there is no technical reason for a URI to textually describe the web resource subordinate to which POST data will be stored. In fact, unless some effort is made, the last part of a URI will more likely describe the web application's processing page and its technology, such as codice_2. Secondly, given most web browsers' natural limitation to use only GET or POST, designers felt the need to re-purpose POST to do many other data submission and data management tasks, including the alteration of existing records and their deletion.
Efforts by some influential writers to remedy the first point began as early as 1998. Web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and others make it easier for designers to provide their users with semantic URLs. With regard to the second point, it is possible to use client-side scripting, or to write standalone apps, to make use of the other HTTP methods where they are relevant, but outside of this most web forms that submit or alter server data continue to use POST for the purpose.
That is not to say that every web form should specify codice_3 in its opening tag. Many forms are used to specify more precisely the retrieval of information from the server, without any intention of altering the main database. Search forms, for example, are ideally suited to having codice_4 specified.
There are times when HTTP GET is less suitable even for data retrieval. An example of this is when a great deal of data would need to be specified in the URL. Browsers and web servers can have limits on the length of the URL that they will handle without truncation or error. Percent-encoding of reserved characters in URLs and query strings can significantly increase their length, and while Apache HTTP Server can handle up to 4,000 characters in a URL, Microsoft Internet Explorer is limited to 2,048 characters in any URL. Equally, HTTP GET should not be used where sensitive information, such as usernames and passwords, have to be submitted along with other data for the request to complete. Even if HTTPS is used, preventing the data from being intercepted in transit, the browser history and the web server's logs will likely contain the full URL in plaintext, which may be exposed if either system is hacked. In these cases, HTTP POST should be used.
Use for submitting web forms.
When a web browser sends a POST request from a web form element, the default Internet media type is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". This is a format for encoding key-value pairs with possibly duplicate keys. Each key-value pair is separated by an '&' character, and each key is separated from its value by an '=' character. Keys and values are both escaped by replacing spaces with the '+' character and then using percent-encoding on all other non-alphanumeric characters.
For example, the key-value pairs
are encoded as
Starting with HTML 4.0, forms can also submit data in multipart/form-data as defined in RFC 2388 (See also RFC 1867 for an earlier experimental version defined as an extension to HTML 2.0 and mentioned in HTML 3.2).
The special case of a POST to the same page that the form belongs to is known as a postback.
Affecting server state.
Per RFC 7231, the POST method is not idempotent, meaning that multiple identical requests might not have the same effect than transmitting the request only once. POST is therefore suitable for requests which change the state each time they are performed, for example submitting a comment to a blog post or voting in an online poll. GET is defined to be nullipotent, with no side-effects, and idempotent operations have "no side effects on second or future requests". For this reason, web crawlers such as search engine indexers normally use the GET and HEAD methods exclusively, to prevent their automated requests from performing such actions.
However, there are reasons why POST is used even for idempotent requests, notably if the request is very long. Due to restrictions on URLs, the query string the GET method generates may become very long, especially due to percent-encoding.


Will Rogers phenomenon

The Will Rogers phenomenon is obtained when moving an element from one set to another set raises the average values of both sets. It is based on the following statement, sometimes attributed (without any evidence) to comedian Will Rogers:
When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.
The effect will occur when both of these conditions are met:
Numerical examples.
Consider the sets R and S
The arithmetic mean of R is 2.5, and the arithmetic mean of S is 7.
However, if 5 is moved from S to R, producing
then the arithmetic mean of R increases to 3, and the arithmetic mean of S increases to 7.5.
Consider this more illustrative example
with arithmetic means 1.5 for R and 10,033 for S.
Moving 99 from S to R gives means 34 and 15,000. 99 is orders of magnitude above 1 and 2, and orders of magnitude below 10,000 and 20,000. It should come as no surprise that the transfer of 99 increases the mean of both R and S.
The element which is moved does not have to be the very lowest of its set; it merely has to have a value that lies between the means of the two sets. Consider this example:
Moving "10", which is larger than R's mean of 7 and smaller than S's mean of 12, from S to R will raise the mean of R from 7 to 7.375, and the mean of S from 12 to 12.333. The effect still occurs, but less dramatically.
Stage migration.
One real-world example of the Will Rogers phenomenon is seen in the medical concept of stage migration. In medical stage migration, improved detection of illness leads to the movement of people from the set of healthy people to the set of unhealthy people.
Because these people are not healthy, removing them from the set of healthy people increases the average lifespan of the healthy group. Likewise, the migrated people are healthier than the people already in the unhealthy set, so adding them raises the average lifespan of that group as well. Both lifespans are statistically lengthened, even if early detection of a cancer does not lead to better treatment: because it is detected earlier, more time is lived in the "unhealthy" set of people. In this form, the paradox can be viewed an instance of the equivocation fallacy . Equivocation occurs when one term is used with multiple meanings in order to mislead the listener into unwarranted comparisons, and life span statistics before and after a stage migration use different meanings of "unhealthy", as the cutoff for detection is different.


Fhourstones

In computer science, Fhourstones is an integer benchmark that efficiently solves positions in the game of Connect-4. It was written by John Tromp in 1996-2008, and is incorporated into the Phoronix Test Suite. The measurements are reported as the number of game positions searched per second.
Available in both ANSI-C and Java, it is quite portable and compact (under 500 lines of source), and uses 50Mb of memory.
The benchmark involves (after warming up on three easier positions) solving the entire game, which takes about ten minutes on contemporary PCs, scoring between 1000 and 12,000 kpos/sec. It has been described as more realistic than some other benchmarks.
Fhourstones was named as a pun on Dhrystone (itself a pun on Whetstone), as "dhry" sounds the same as "drei", German for "three": fhourstones is an increment on dhrystones.


Frasilah

A frasilah is a historical weight unit that was used in the 19th century on the island of Zanzibar and in eastern Africa. A frasilah is equivalent to about . This weight unit was used mainly by the Arabs involved in the ivory trade to weigh the mass of elephant tusks and other goods used in the trade, such as beads, cloth and brass wire. In 1871, a frasilah of ivory could be purchased inland for 20 US$ (around 500 US$ in 2011) in goods and sold in Zanzibar for about 60 US$ (around 1 500 US$ in 2011).


Fan chart (statistics)

A fan chart is made of a group of dispersion fan diagrams,
which may be positioned according to two categorising dimensions.
A "dispersion fan diagram" is a circular diagram which
reports the same information about a dispersion as a box plot:
namely median, quartiles, and two extreme values.
Elements.
The elements of a dispersion fan diagram
are:
The scale on the circular line begins at the left
with the starting value (e. g. with zero).
The following values are applicated clockwise.
The white tail of diameter indicates the median.
The dark fan indicates the dispersion of the middle half of the observed
values; thus it encompasses the values from the first to the third quartile.
The white feathers indicate the dispersion of the middle 90% of the
observed values.
The length of the white part of the diameter corresponds with the number
of observations.
Application.
A fan chart gives a quick summary of observed values which depend from two variables. This is possible thanks of a dense representation
and a constant size which does not depend on the size of the single dispersion fan diagrams.
An essential advantage compared to a sequence of box plots
is the possibility to compare dispersion fan diagrams not only within one direction
but within two directions (horizontally and vertically).
Example.
The following example presents data from the data set "MathAchieve"
which is part of the R package
"nlme"
of José Pinheiro et al.
It contains mathematics achievement scores of 7185 students.
The students are categorised
according to sex and membership of a minority ethnic group.
The graphics show the mathematics achievement scores in dependency
on the socio-economic status of the students (x axis)
and on the average socio-economic status of all students
at the same school (y axis).
The four graphic panels differentiate the students
according to sex and membership of a minority ethnic group.
The fan charts reveals clearly how the median value
is partially following a big main tendency
while the values of the single subgroups (with the cells) scatter largely
what could lead to doubts about a possible correlation.


4900 Maymelou


Straton tube

The Straton tube, by Siemens Healthineers (formerly Siemens Medical Solutions), Erlangen, Germany) is the first X-ray tube from the class of rotating envelope tubes (RET) to be used for computed tomography.
With rotating envelope tubes, the entire vacuum tube rotates with respect to the anode axis, versus rotating anode tubes, in which the target disk rotates inside a stationary vacuum tube. The target cools by conduction rather than radiation. Heat storage is less important, and waiting times are eliminated.


Sheila Bird

Sheila Macdonald Bird (née Gore, born 18 May 1952) OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the "British Medical Journal" ("BMJ") and "BMJ" series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of scrapie.
Record linkage studies in Scotland were central to Bird's work (with others) on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection and on the morbidity and mortality of opioid addiction. Her team first quantified the very high risk of drugs-related death in the fortnight after prison-release, in response to which Bird and Hutchinson proposed a prison-based randomized controlled trial of naloxone, the opioid antagonist, for prisoners-on-release who had a history of heroin injection. Bird introduced the Royal Statistical Society’s statistical seminars for journalists and awards for statistical excellence in journalism. She is the first female statistician to have been awarded four medals by the Royal Statistical Society (Guy bronze, 1989; Austin Bradford Hill, 2000; Chambers, 2010, Howard, 2015).
Early life and education.
Bird was born in Inverness, Scotland on 18 May 1952 to Isabella Agnes Gordon ("née" Macdonald) and Herbert Gore. She was educated at Elgin Academy in Scotland, where the mathematics master, Lewis Grant, introduced her to statistics. She graduated with a joint-honours in mathematics and statistics from the University of Aberdeen. From 1974-1976 she was a research assistant in medical statistics at the University of Edinburgh where she, Jones and Rytter quantified the misuse of statistics in the BMJ. In his editorial, Stephen Lock "took on the chin" their 1977 paper and championed statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Doctoral work followed, begun at the University of Edinburgh and supervised by Stuart Pocock, on the analysis of survival in breast cancer which Bird undertook part-time during a lectureship in statistics at the University of Aberdeen (1976–80) before joining the Medical Research Council's Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge in 1980.
Career.
Bird works for the Medical Research Council (MRC), as Programme Leader at their Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge.
Publication of Bird's 23 articles on ‘Statistics in Question’ in the BMJ led to her running World Health Organization (WHO) workshops on research methods in diarrhoeal diseases for Third World paediatricians, through which she and Dilip Mahalanabis designed and piloted a clinical record-form which was subsequently adopted for all WHO-funded randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of oral rehydration solutions (ORS). The common record facilitated a subsequent exploratory analysis of individual patient data by Bird and Fontaine. This suggested benefit from lower osmolarity solutions, which was then formally tested in a series of RCTs with global change to low osmolarity ORS adopted in 2001.
Back in Cambridge, Bird worked with paediatrician Dr Colin Morley on the British Randomised Evaluation of ALEC Therapy (BREATHE), the first RCT to demonstrate a one-third reduced mortality in premature babies by administration at birth of artificial surfactant. ALEC (artificial lung expanding compound) was named for Alec Bangham FRS, who developed it. Non-Cambridge neonatologists’ prior belief was elicited by ‘trial roulette’ and had centred on a one quarter-reduction, the effect-size that BREATHE was powered to detect.
Work on transplantation statistics in the 1980s with Gilks and Bradley led to beneficial matching being adopted as the basis of UK's exchange of cadaveric donor kidneys. To estimate the potential for cadaveric solid organ donation from brainstem-dead donors, Bird designed UK's first confidential audit of all deaths in intensive care units which revealed that relatives’ refusal –rate (then 30%, since risen to 40%), not doctors’ failure to ask, was the fundamental problem.
Bird led the MRC Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland (1990–1995), which included projection of Scotland's cases of severe immunodeficiency (so-called CD200 cases) and HIV epidemiological studies in prisons, both with co-investigator, clinical immunologist Dr A. Graham Bird.
Bird's work at the interface of public health and other jurisdictions continued. A series of record-linkage studies in Scotland on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection (with Hutchinson and Goldberg) and on the high risk of drugs-related death soon after prison-release (or after hospital-discharge for drug-treatment clients) followed. With Cooper, she estimated UK's dietary exposure to BSE by birth-cohort and they deduced lower susceptibility to vCJD-progression from dietary BSE exposure at older ages. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance at abattoirs for late-stage transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep.
Bird served on four working parties of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS): Counting with Confidence, Statistics and Statisticians in Drug Regulation, Performance Monitoring in the Public Services (as chair) and Statistical Issues in First-in-Man Studies. As RSS's vice-president for external affairs (2005–09), Bird introduced statistical seminars for journalists and the RSS's awards for statistical excellence in journalism; and supported Straight Statistics by contributing over 100 articles, many on H1N1 pandemic influenza, others based on her 20-weekly reporting with Colonel Clive Fairweather on military fatality-rates in Afghanistan by nationality and cause. Bird led the RSS's campaign for legislation to end the late registration of inquest deaths in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Honours and awards.
As Sheila M. Gore, she won the Guy Medal in Bronze in 1989.
Bird was appointed OBE in 2011 for services to social statistics. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.
Personal life.
In September 1999 she and Bird married. Six weeks after their marriage he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme and died in January 2000. Up until his death she published under her maiden name, Gore, however since she has published under her married name of Bird, in her husband's honour.


St Albans Riverside

St Albans Riverside is a park in Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It is linear with long sides between the Thames and Hampton Court Road. It runs from southeast of Garrick's Villa and his Temple to Shakespeare, Garrick's Lawn, Thames Street to a point 90 metres southeast of the interrupting small bridge that serves Tagg's Island.
About.
The area has much greenery and various seating areas. It is named after Aubrey Beauclerk, 5th Duke of St Albans (1740–1802) who moved to Hampton In 1796, living in St Albans Lodge (previously St Albans Bank) before taking up Hanworth Park House.
Local area and landmarks.
A marina followed by sailing club is to the west and Hampton Court Green to the east. Hampton Court Palace is beyond the Green. In the park, is a sundial designed by David Harber in the shape of a steel globe. Below it is a plaque which reads:
The sundial was commissioned by the widow of Gerald George 'Gerry' Braban (1931–1993), who lobbied for and co-funded the bridge to Tagg's Island that was built in the 1990s.
Transport.
The park is served by a cycleway linked with Bushy Park and buses:
Footpaths reach across Bushy Park using the facing Hampton Gate to/from: Hampton Hill Gate, Hampton Wick Gate and Teddington (& Sandy Lane) Gates serving those three districts.


Incomposite interval

An incomposite interval (; ) is a concept in the Ancient Greek theory of music concerning melodic musical intervals () between neighbouring notes in a tetrachord or scale which, for that reason, do not encompass smaller intervals. ( means "uncompounded".) Aristoxenus (fl. 335 BCE) defines melodically incomposite intervals in the following context:
In another place, Aristoxenus clarifies that
It is thus not an issue of the voice being physically incapable of singing a note within an incomposite interval. For example, in the enharmonic genus the distance from the neighbouring scale degrees "lichanos" () to "mesē" () is a ditone—a gap equivalent to the major-third interval between F and A in the modern scale. In such a case the function of the note λιχανός is such that "the 'nature of μελῳδία' somehow requires that it should leap forward at least as far as μέση, without touching down anywhere in between. Any smaller distance is melodically impossible or unintelligible, ἐκμελής".
The nature of the chromatic genus, too, is an attribute of the "kinēsis phonēs" (, "potentiality of the sounds"), so that certain melody types are "brought into being". In other words, "being composite" and "being incomposite" are attributes of the dynamic character of melodic motion. "None of these consists in the voice's coming to rest at points separated by distances of specific and determinate sizes".
An incomposite interval is "bounded by successive notes" in a scale: "If the bounding notes are successive, no note has been left out; if none has been left out, none will intervene; if none intervenes, none will divide the interval; and what does not admit of division will not be composite". Gaudentius (before the 6th century CE) explains incomposite intervals as scale-building elements:
Aristides Quintilianus (writing probably in the 3rd century AD) enumerates the incomposite intervals: "the smallest, so far as their use in melody is concerned, is the enharmonic diesis, followed—to speak rather roughly—by the semitone, which is twice the diesis, the tone, which is twice the semitone, and finally the ditone, which is twice the tone".
These various sizes of incomposite interval depend on the genus of the tetrachord, as explained by Nicomachus in the first century AD:
Thus whether an interval is composite or incomposite is a matter of context (that is, the genus in effect at that point in the melody). A semitone is an incomposite interval in the diatonic or chromatic genera, but not because quarter tone intervals may be difficult to sing in tune. It is a composite interval in the enharmonic genus, where the semitone occurs only as the outer interval of the "pyknon", made of two quarter tones.
Following the strict definition found in Nicola Vicentino's "L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica" (1555), all intervals larger than the major third (or ditone) are necessarily composite. However, for the purpose of his discussion of the "modern practice" of the 16th century, he extended the definition to include larger intervals within the octave. Accordingly, a perfect fourth is "composite" if it is filled in stepwise in a composition (C-D-E-F), but is "incomposite" when it occurs as a melodic leap or harmonic interval, without any intermediary tones.
One 20th-century interpretation is more restrictive than the definitions found in Ancient Greek sources, referring to "a large interval which appears as a melodic step or second in a scale, but which is a skip in other parts of the scale." For example the augmented second in the harmonic minor scale, on A, occurs as a step between F and G, though the equivalent minor third occurs elsewhere, such as a skip between A & C.


Amplified cactus

An amplified cactus is a cactus plant (preferably a "Denmoza" or "Geohintonia") used as a musical instrument. It harnesses the acoustic properties of a cactus, by applying contact microphones and amplifying their projection and tone. Vivien Schweitzer of "The New York Times" reports "Jason Treuting played an amplified cactus, running his hand over the plant's unfriendly spikes to produce an alluring sound like a babbling brook."
The amplified cactus is a medium rarely written for, even in the contemporary music genre. John Cage composed "Child of Tree" (1975) and "Branches" (1976) for what he described as "amplified plant materials". Cage was a large proponent of chance music and felt that the organic nature of music without man-made instruments was very strong and influential. Another of the most famous pieces for amplified cactus is "Degrees of Separation" "Grandchild of Tree" by Paul Rudy which received mention at the Bourges International Competition for Electroacoustic Music in 2000. Rudy mentions in his own program notes: The idea for a cactus and tape work came about when I heard a performance of John Cage's "Child of Tree". I was immediately taken with the sound of the cactus in particular. Taken from its natural environment and placed in the confined and groomed existence of a pot, amplified with a contact microphone, the cactus took on a completely new and interesting character...
A piece by Mark Andre, "...zu Staub..." also features three amplified cacti alongside classical instruments.


List of solar telescopes

This is a list of solar telescopes built in various countries around the world. A solar telescope is a specialized telescope that is used to observe the Sun.
This list contains ground-based professional observatory telescopes at optical wavelengths in chronological order. Solar telescopes often have multiple focal lengths, and use a various combination of mirrors such as coelostats, lenses, and tubes for instruments including spectrographs, cameras, or coronagraphs. There are many types of instruments that have been designed to observe Earth's Sun, for example, in the 20th century solar towers were common.
Former solar telescopes after 1900.
Telescopes for the Sun have existed for hundreds of years, this list is not complete and only goes back to 1900.
Other types of solar telescopes.
There are much smaller commercial and/or amateur telescopes such as "Coronado Filters" from founder and designer David Lunt, bought by Meade Instruments in 2004 and sells SolarMax solar telescopes up to 8 cm
Most solar observatories observe optically at visible, UV, and near infrared wavelengths, but other things can be observed.


Statistical significance

In statistical hypothesis testing, a result has statistical significance when it is very unlikely to have occurred given the null hypothesis. More precisely, a study's defined significance level, denoted by formula_1, is the probability of the study rejecting the null hypothesis, given that the null hypothesis was assumed to be true; and the "p"-value of a result, "formula_2", is the probability of obtaining a result at least as extreme, given that the null hypothesis is true. The result is statistically significant, by the standards of the study, when formula_3. The significance level for a study is chosen before data collection, and is typically set to 5% or much lower—depending on the field of study.
In any experiment or observation that involves drawing a sample from a population, there is always the possibility that an observed effect would have occurred due to sampling error alone. But if the "p"-value of an observed effect is less than (or equal to) the significance level, an investigator may conclude that the effect reflects the characteristics of the whole population, thereby rejecting the null hypothesis.
This technique for testing the statistical significance of results was developed in the early 20th century. The term "significance" does not imply importance here, and the term "statistical significance" is not the same as research, theoretical, or practical significance. For example, the term clinical significance refers to the practical importance of a treatment effect.
History.
Statistical significance dates to the 1700s, in the work of John Arbuthnot and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who computed the "p"-value for the human sex ratio at birth, assuming a null hypothesis of equal probability of male and female births; see for details.
In 1925, Ronald Fisher advanced the idea of statistical hypothesis testing, which he called "tests of significance", in his publication "Statistical Methods for Research Workers". Fisher suggested a probability of one in twenty (0.05) as a convenient cutoff level to reject the null hypothesis. In a 1933 paper, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson called this cutoff the "significance level", which they named formula_1. They recommended that formula_1 be set ahead of time, prior to any data collection.
Despite his initial suggestion of 0.05 as a significance level, Fisher did not intend this cutoff value to be fixed. In his 1956 publication "Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference," he recommended that significance levels be set according to specific circumstances.
Related concepts.
The significance level formula_1 is the threshold for formula_2 below which the null hypothesis is rejected even though by assumption it were true, and something else is going on. This means that formula_1 is also the probability of mistakenly rejecting the null hypothesis, if the null hypothesis is true. This is also called false positive and type I error.
Sometimes researchers talk about the confidence level instead. This is the probability of not rejecting the null hypothesis given that it is true. Confidence levels and confidence intervals were introduced by Neyman in 1937.
Role in statistical hypothesis testing.
Statistical significance plays a pivotal role in statistical hypothesis testing. It is used to determine whether the null hypothesis should be rejected or retained. The null hypothesis is the default assumption that nothing happened or changed. For the null hypothesis to be rejected, an observed result has to be statistically significant, i.e. the observed "p"-value is less than the pre-specified significance level formula_1.
To determine whether a result is statistically significant, a researcher calculates a "p"-value, which is the probability of observing an effect of the same magnitude or more extreme given that the null hypothesis is true. The null hypothesis is rejected if the "p"-value is less than (or equal to) a predetermined level, formula_1. formula_1 is also called the "significance level", and is the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis given that it is true (a type I error). It is usually set at or below 5%.
For example, when formula_1 is set to 5%, the conditional probability of a type I error, "given that the null hypothesis is true", is 5%, and a statistically significant result is one where the observed "p"-value is less than (or equal to) 5%. When drawing data from a sample, this means that the rejection region comprises 5% of the sampling distribution. These 5% can be allocated to one side of the sampling distribution, as in a one-tailed test, or partitioned to both sides of the distribution, as in a two-tailed test, with each tail (or rejection region) containing 2.5% of the distribution.
The use of a one-tailed test is dependent on whether the research question or alternative hypothesis specifies a direction such as whether a group of objects is "heavier" or the performance of students on an assessment is "better". A two-tailed test may still be used but it will be less powerful than a one-tailed test, because the rejection region for a one-tailed test is concentrated on one end of the null distribution and is twice the size (5% vs. 2.5%) of each rejection region for a two-tailed test. As a result, the null hypothesis can be rejected with a less extreme result if a one-tailed test was used. The one-tailed test is only more powerful than a two-tailed test if the specified direction of the alternative hypothesis is correct. If it is wrong, however, then the one-tailed test has no power.
Significance thresholds in specific fields.
In specific fields such as particle physics and manufacturing, statistical significance is often expressed in multiples of the standard deviation or sigma ("σ") of a normal distribution, with significance thresholds set at a much stricter level (e.g. 5"σ"). For instance, the certainty of the Higgs boson particle's existence was based on the 5"σ" criterion, which corresponds to a "p"-value of about 1 in 3.5 million.
In other fields of scientific research such as genome-wide association studies, significance levels as low as are not uncommon—as the number of tests performed is extremely large.
Limitations.
Researchers focusing solely on whether their results are statistically significant might report findings that are not substantive and not replicable. There is also a difference between statistical significance and practical significance. A study that is found to be statistically significant may not necessarily be practically significant.
Effect size.
Effect size is a measure of a study's practical significance. A statistically significant result may have a weak effect. To gauge the research significance of their result, researchers are encouraged to always report an effect size along with "p"-values. An effect size measure quantifies the strength of an effect, such as the distance between two means in units of standard deviation (cf. Cohen's d), the correlation coefficient between two variables or its square, and other measures.
Reproducibility.
A statistically significant result may not be easy to reproduce. In particular, some statistically significant results will in fact be false positives. Each failed attempt to reproduce a result increases the likelihood that the result was a false positive.
Challenges.
Overuse in some journals.
Starting in the 2010s, some journals began questioning whether significance testing, and particularly using a threshold of =5%, was being relied on too heavily as the primary measure of validity of a hypothesis. Some journals encouraged authors to do more detailed analysis than just a statistical significance test. In social psychology, the journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology" banned the use of significance testing altogether from papers it published, requiring authors to use other measures to evaluate hypotheses and impact.
Other editors, commenting on this ban have noted: "Banning the reporting of "p"-values, as Basic and Applied Social Psychology recently did, is not going to solve the problem because it is merely treating a symptom of the problem. There is nothing wrong with hypothesis testing and "p"-values per se as long as authors, reviewers, and action editors use them correctly." Some statisticians prefer to use alternative measures of evidence, such as likelihood ratios or Bayes factors. Using Bayesian statistics can avoid confidence levels, but also requires making additional assumptions, and may not necessarily improve practice regarding statistical testing.
The widespread abuse of statistical significance represents an important topic of research in metascience.
Redefining significance.
In 2016, the American Statistical Association (ASA) published a statement on "p"-values, saying that "the widespread use of 'statistical significance' (generally interpreted as "'p" ≤ 0.05') as a license for making a claim of a scientific finding (or implied truth) leads to considerable distortion of the scientific process". In 2017, a group of 72 authors proposed to enhance reproducibility by changing the "p"-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005. Other researchers responded that imposing a more stringent significance threshold would aggravate problems such as data dredging; alternative propositions are thus to select and justify flexible "p"-value thresholds before collecting data, or to interpret "p"-values as continuous indices, thereby discarding thresholds and statistical significance. Additionally, the change to 0.005 would increase the likelihood of false negatives, whereby the effect being studied is real, but the test fails to show it.
In 2019, over 800 statisticians and scientists signed a message calling for the abandonment of the term "statistical significance" in science, and the American Statistical Association published a further official statement declaring (page 2):


4055 Magellan

4055 Magellan, provisional designation , is a bright and eccentric asteroid and near-Earth object of the Amor group, approximately 2.5 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 24 February 1985, by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in California, United States. It was later named for Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
Orbit and classification.
"Magellan" orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 1.2–2.4 AU once every 2 years and 6 months (897 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.33 and an inclination of 23° with respect to the ecliptic.
The first observation was made at the Australian Siding Spring Observatory, extending the asteroid's observation arc by just one month prior to its official discovery observation at Palomar.
It has a minimum orbital intersection distance with Earth of , which corresponds to 93.4 lunar distances.
Physical characteristics.
Being a V-type asteroid in the Tholen and SMASS taxonomy, "Magellan" is thought to have originated from the "Rheasilvia crater", a large impact crater on the south-polar surface of 4 Vesta, which is the main-belt's second-most-massive asteroid after 1 Ceres.
Diameter and albedo.
According to observations by the Keck Observatory and to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, "Magellan" measures between 2.2 and 2.8 kilometers in diameter and its surface has a high albedo of 0.31 to 0.33. The "Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link" (LCDB) agrees with the Keck observations, adopting an albedo of 0.31 and a diameter of 2.49 kilometers.
Lightcurves.
Between 2000 and 2015, six rotational lightcurves of "Magellan" were obtained from photometric observations by astronomers Petr Pravec and Brian D. Warner, as well as by the "Mexican Asteroid Photometry Campaign" and the Palomar Transient Factory. The highest rated lightcurve by LCDB's standards was obtained by French amateur astronomer David Romeuf in July 2015, which gave a rotation period of hours with a brightness variation of 0.45 magnitude (). The large variation suggests an elongated shape.
Naming.
This minor planet was named after Portuguese navigator and explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães; c. 1480–1521), who led and died on the first circumnavigation of the Earth during 1519–1522. The minor planet is also named after the modern "Magellan" spacecraft, which was launched by NASA in 1989 and went on to map the surface of Venus. The Portuguese navigator is also honored by the craters Magelhaens on Mars and "Magelhaens" on the Moon. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 2 December 1990 ().


Puncoviscana Basin


FINA Synchronised Swimming World Cup

The FINA Synchronised Swimming World Cup is an international, synchronized swimming event organized by FINA and currently held every 4 years. It is a top-level international 'synchro' competition. It was first held in 1979, and 2010 saw its twelfth edition.
The event features competition in four different synchro events (Solo, Duet, Team and Free Combination), and allows each entered nation to have 1 entrant per event. The winner of the event is determined by adding a nations points from the four events. (Note: Free Combination was added to the event beginning in 2006.)
As of 2012, Canada, Japan and the USA are the only nations to have swum at all editions of the Cup.


Locrian mode

The Locrian mode is either a musical mode or simply a diatonic scale. On the piano, it is the scale that starts with B and only uses the white keys from there. Its ascending form consists of the key note, a half step, two whole steps, a further half step, and three more whole steps.
\override Score.TimeSignature #'stencil = ##f
\relative c' {
 \clef treble \time 7/4
 c4^\markup { C Locrian mode } des es f ges aes bes c2
</score>
History.
"Locrian" is the word used to describe the inhabitants of the ancient Greek regions of Locris. Although the term occurs in several classical authors on music theory, including Cleonides (as an octave species) and Athenaeus (as an obsolete "harmonia"), there is no warrant for the modern usage of Locrian as equivalent to Glarean's Hyperaeolian mode, in either classical, Renaissance, or later phases of modal theory through the 18th century, or modern scholarship on ancient Greek musical theory and practice.
The name first came to be applied to modal chant theory after the 18th century, when it was used to describe the mode newly-numbered as mode 11, with final on B, ambitus from that note to the octave above, and with semitones therefore between the first and second, and fourth and fifth degrees. Its reciting tone (or tenor) is G, its mediant D, and it has two participants: E and F. The final, as its name implies, is the tone on which the chant eventually settles, and corresponds to the tonic in tonal music. The reciting tone is the tone around which the melody principally centres, the mediant is named from its position between the final and reciting tone, and the participant is an auxiliary note, generally adjacent to the mediant in authentic modes and, in the plagal forms, coincident with the reciting tone of the corresponding authentic mode.
Modern Locrian.
In modern practice, the Locrian may be considered to be a minor scale with the second and fifth scale degrees lowered a semitone. The Locrian mode may also be considered to be a scale beginning on the seventh scale degree of any Ionian, or major scale. The Locrian mode has the formula:
Its tonic chord is a diminished triad (Bdim in the Locrian mode of the diatonic scale corresponding to C major). This mode's diminished fifth and the Lydian mode's augmented fourth are the only modes to have a tritone above the tonic.
Overview.
The Locrian mode is the only modern diatonic mode in which the tonic triad is a diminished chord, which is considered dissonant. This is because the interval between the root and fifth of the chord is a diminished fifth. For example, the tonic triad of B Locrian is made from the notes B, D, F. The root is B and the fifth is F. The diminished-fifth interval between them is the cause for the chord's dissonance.
\override Score.TimeSignature #'stencil = ##f
\relative c' {
 \clef treble \time 7/4
 b4^\markup { B Locrian mode } c d e f g a b2
</score>
The name "Locrian" is borrowed from music theory of ancient Greece. However, what is now called the Locrian mode was what the Greeks called the Diatonic Mixolydian tonos. The Greeks used the term "Locrian" as an alternative name for their "Hypodorian", or "Common" tonos, with a scale running from "mese" to "nete hyperbolaion", which in its diatonic genus corresponds to the modern Aeolian mode. In his reform of modal theory in the "Dodecachordon" (1547), Heinrich Glarean named this division of the octave "Hyperaeolian" and printed some musical examples (a three-part polyphonic example specially commissioned from his friend Sixtus Dietrich, and the Christe from a mass by Pierre de La Rue), though he did not accept Hyperaeolian as one of his twelve modes. The usage of the term "Locrian" as equivalent to Glarean's Hyperaeolian or the ancient Greek (diatonic) Mixolydian, however, has no authority before the 19th century.
Usage.
There are brief passages in works by Sergei Rachmaninov (Prelude in B minor, op. 32, no. 10), Paul Hindemith ("Ludus Tonalis"), and Jean Sibelius (Symphony No. 4 in A minor, op. 63) that have been, or may be, regarded as in the Locrian mode. Claude Debussy's "Jeux" has three extended passages in the Locrian mode.
The theme of the second movement ("Turandot Scherzo") of Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber" (1943) alternates sections in Mixolydian and Locrian modes, ending in Locrian.
English folk musician John Kirkpatrick's song "Dust to Dust" was written in the Locrian mode, backed by his concertina. The Locrian mode is not at all traditional in English music, but was used by Kirkpatrick as a musical innovation.
Björk's "Army of Me" is a rare example of a pop song whose verse is written in the Locrian mode.


Dropped A tuning

Dropped A tuning is an alternate tuning for a 7-string guitar where the lowest string is tuned down ("dropped") from the standard B by one whole step to A as follows A1-E2-A2-D3-G3-B3-E4. Also, for a 6-string guitar, dropped A tuning is achieved by tuning all strings down a 4th with the lowest string tuned 1 additional step down as follows A1-E2-A2-D3-F#3-B3. This is a "drop 1" tuning in the key of B (i.e. tune the whole guitar down a perfect fourth from standard tuning, then tune the 6th string a whole step down). As a result, it uses the same fingering as drop D tuning and drop C tuning.
An alternate dropped A tuning utilizes a guitar tuned to E Standard with the 6th string dropped to a low A, resulting in AADGBE with the 6th and 5th strings an octave apart.
Another variation of this tuning is AEADGB, which imitates a 7 on a six-string, excluding the high E.
Another dropped A tuning is AGCFAD ("drop perfect fourth in the key of the D", i.e. whole guitar is tuned down one step, then the lowest string is dropped to A).


Rutherford (unit)

The rutherford (symbol Rd) is a non-SI unit of radioactive decay. It is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one million nuclei decay per second. It is therefore equivalent to one megabecquerel, and one becquerel equals one microrutherford. One rutherford is equivalent to 2.703 × 10−5 curie.
The unit was introduced in 1946. It was named after British/New Zealand physicist and Nobel laureate Lord Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Prize in 1908), who was an early leader in the study of atomic nucleus disintegrations. After the becquerel was introduced in 1975 as the SI unit for activity, the rutherford became obsolete, and it is no longer commonly used.
Radiation related quantities.
The following table shows radiation quantities in SI and non-SI units:


Manuel Cardona

Manuel Cardona Castro (7 September 1934 – 2 July 2014) was a physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics.
Academic career.
Cardona was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1934. After obtaining a Masters in physics in 1955 from University of Barcelona Cardona was awarded a fellowship to work as a graduate student at Harvard University starting in 1956. At Harvard he began investigations of the dielectric properties of semiconductors, in particular germanium and silicon. With this work as a thesis he received a PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard. From 1959 till 1961 he continued similar work on III-V semiconductors at the RCA Laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1961 he moved to the RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ, where he continued work on the optical properties of semiconductors and started investigations of the microwave properties of superconductors. In 1964 he became a member of the Physics Faculty of Brown University (Providence, RI). In June–September 1965 he taught at the University of Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. In 1971 he moved to Stuttgart, Germany as a founding director of the then-recently created Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Concomitantly he became scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, where he became emeritus in 2000.
Interests.
Cardona's main interests were in the fields of: Raman scattering (and other optical spectroscopies) as applied to semiconductor microstructures, materials with tailor-made isotopic compositions, and high "T"c superconductors, particularly investigations of electronic and vibronic excitations in the normal and superconducting state.
Distinctions and honors.
Besides receiving over at least 61 awards during his career, Cardona held eleven honorary doctorates. Some notable honors include:
Publications.
Cardona has authored over 1,300 scientific publications in international journals, ten monographs on solid state physics and co-authored a textbook on semiconductors. Since 1972, Cardona has served on the Board of Editors of at least seven journals, including being the Editor-in-Chief of "Solid State Communications" from 1992 to 2005.
Some of his works include:
Personal life.
He died in Stuttgart in 2014, where he lived since 1971 with his wife Inge Cardona (née Hecht). He held American, German and Spanish citizenship and had 3 children and 7 grandchildren.


Shavetail

Shavetail was an experimental American rocket developed during the 1950s. Used to evaluate the rapidly developing technology of rocketry, eleven Shavetail rockets were fired during 1959.
Design and development.
Intended to assist in the development of rocket and missile technologies, Shavetail was a small, inexpensive, unguided solid-fueled rocket that was capable of being modified to be tested in various configurations. Among the systems tested was one to ensure precise payload separation at motor burnout.
Operational history.
A series of eleven launches of the Shavetail rocket were conducted in late 1959, starting in August and ending in October. The maximum range of Shavetail was .


Business Japanese Proficiency Test

The is a Japanese language proficiency test designed to objectively measure a person's practical communicative skills in communicating and responding to information on a Japanese-language business environment. Unlike its counterpart Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) which focuses more on general Japanese, BJT is not designed for measuring Japanese language knowledge nor business knowledge but instead, BJT is designed to measure a person’s practical communicative ability to utilize and respond to given information, ability to express thoughts and opinions, and at the same time promote ideas or projects to people of different backgrounds and expertise.
The BJT is not only engineered to measure a person’s verbal communicative skills, but also the ability to understand and use Japanese with the aid of text, diagrams, photographs and any other available information in emails or faxes, etc. and at the same time to appropriately perform tasks and workloads suited to a Japanese-language business environment.
The Business Japanese Proficiency Test covers the full range of events or situations that may arise on a Japanese-language business environment.
History.
The test was first offered in 1996 and was revised in 2003. It was originally administered by the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). In April 2009, however, oversight was transferred to the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Public Interest Foundation: the same organization that administers the Kanji kentei.
On August 18, 2010, it was announced that the test would "be discontinued at the end of the current fiscal year". However, on November 25, 2010, it was announced that the test would be "relaunched".
Examination and scoring.
The Business Japanese Proficiency Test is split into three parts, Listening Comprehension, Listening and Reading Comprehension and Reading Comprehension.
The test is scored out of a possible 800. The score is then ranked on a scale of 6 levels: J5, J4, J3, J2, J1, J1+, with J1+ being the highest and J5 the lowest.
Testing locations.
Starting April 2017, the BJT is now being delivered as a computer based test via the Pearson Vue delivery system, a radical change from the industry standard paper based testing.
As of 2018, the BJT is now available in more than 16 countries via the Pearson Vue testing network.


UkabazUmorezU

, translated in English to "slow and steady wins the race," is the fifth studio album by Japanese musician Sugai Ken and his first LP for the New York-based independent label RVNG Intl. Continuing the ambient electroacoustic style of Ken's previous albums, "UkabazUmorezU" is a set of musical representations of Japanese folk traditions and "artificial" versions of passageways in the Kanagawa Prefecture during the nighttime. It was released on October 20, 2017 to favorable critical reviews.
Concept and composition.
As with previous works by Sugai Ken, "UkabazUmorezU" follows an ambient electroacoustic style "that hums with the vibrancy of people and tradition, deftly straddling the temporal gap between past and present, myth and reality," "Fact" summarized. The title of "UkabazUmorezU" translates to "slow and steady wins the race," which, according to Ken, means "the perseverance of an idea through originality in a world highly influenced by trends." A major concept of the album is Japanese artists' exposure to aspects of art of the Western world, such as a yokai-esque "atmosphere" "speaking through a Western electroacoustic motif," RVNG Intl.'s press release stated.
The sound of "UkabazUmorezU" is based on Ken's personal interest in an "obscured horizon." "UkabazUmorezU" involves Ken imagining real-life passageways in the Kanagawa Prefecture during the nighttime before coming up with audio representations of "artificial" versions of them that are "tethered to but abstracted from the natural world" and contain "recontextualized Japanese rituals and tradition." The album mainly consists of synthesizers and recordings and synthesized replications of actual places in Japan and their folk traditions. "Ganoubyoushi" involves the slapping of a Japanese hand fan with conversations in the background to represent the tradition of hand fans, while "Wochikaeri to Uzume" is about an old woman rejuvenating with the help of her respect to water.
Ray Philp of "Resident Advisor" found it different from Ken's past works for its use of "unlikely" source material, such as the James Ferraro-style "sighing vocal synths" and "funny animal samples." He analyzed some of the tracks, including "Wochikaeri To Uzume" and ""Ganoubyoshi," felt more like "hallucinations" of random sound effects and instruments rather than sound portrayals of Kanagawa. Some songs, such as "Katsura," "Doujiri" and "Wochikaeri To Uzume," have cartoonish orchestral instruments and slapstick foley that add a surreal element to the album and recall Ken's childhood. A "Tiny Mix Tapes" found the album different from other ambient records: most ambient albums "resist boundaries and contouring," but "UkabazUmorezU" is "more particular, insular, imaginary, and full of contours shaped by [...] moments and the spaces between them."
Release and reception.
Ken first contacted RVNG Intl. in the winter of 2015 about joining the label. It let him join after the 2016 release of his album "On The Quakefish", and his first release for the label, as well as the lead single of "UkabazUmorezU", was "Wochikaeri to Uzume," which came out on August 9, 2017. The video for "Doujiri," released on October 27, 2017, was directed by Kiyotaka “Kiyo” Sumiyoshi and is a visual representation of Ken’s folk-inspired musical style, taking place in a "shadowy forest inhabited by ancient spirits," "The Attic" summarized. RVNG Intl. distributed "UkabazUmorezU" on October 20, 2017 via CD and digital download and the vinyl version on November 10. The album garnered favorables from sources such as "Resident Advisor" and "Tiny Mix Tapes" upon its release.
Track listing.
Derived from the RVNG Intl. official website, with bonus track lengths derived from the official Sugai Ken Bandcamp.
Personnel.
Derived from the liner notes of "UkabazUmorezU".


William P. Bidelman

William Pendry Bidelman ( ; September 25, 1918 – May 3, 2011) whose friends called him "Billy", was an American astronomer.
Born in Los Angeles, and raised in North Dakota, he was noted for classifying the spectra of stars, and considered a pioneer in recognizing and classifying sub-groups of the peculiar stars.
Bidelman's undergraduate degree was from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in astronomy was from the University of Chicago under advisor William Wilson Morgan. He was a physicist in the Army during World War II. A professional astronomer for over 50 years, Bidelman taught for ~41 years at The University of Chicago, The University of California,
He co-discovered the class of barium stars with Philip Keenan, the phosphorus and the mercury stars, and was the first to describe the hydrogen-deficient carbon stars.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Bidelman was raised in North Dakota, where he met his future wife of 69 years. He was a father of four and a grandfather. As an Emeritus Professor William P. Bidelman continued working in astronomy after he retired from teaching, and was 92 when he died in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Education.
As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Bidelman received an Honorary Harvard College Scholarship for academic excellence in 1939. He graduated in 1940. Bidelman entered the graduate program at the University of Chicago affiliated with Yerkes Observatory. His doctoral advisor was William W.Morgan, who discovered the first definite evidence that our Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, and, with Philip Keenan, the Morgan-Keener (MK) system of stellar classification. As a graduate student, Bidelman assisted Morgan and Keenan by taking some of the spectrograms for their book, "An Atlas of Stellar Spectra".
For his 1943 dissertation, Bidelman reported the Double Cluster in the I Persei association is physically associated with neighborhood supergiant stars, and is part of an association of O- and B-type stars, and designated 47 stars as its members. Bidelman received his Ph.D. in 1943. The Yerkes astronomy graduate program directed by Otto Struve began issuing degrees in 1940, and he was among their first ten graduates.
Career.
Bidelman served in the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground for over 2 years during World War II. He attended the 1942 American Astronomical Society's annual meeting despite a small assembly due to gasoline rationing during World War II.
University of Chicago, Yerkes Observatory.
In 1945, when Bidelman left Aberdeen he was hired at Yerkes as an Instructor. Under Otto Struve Yerkes became the leading astrophysics center, when he directed it. In addition to Bidelman, by 1946 the Yerkes astronomy staff included Paul Ledoux, Arne Slettebak, Armin Deutsch, Marshall Wrubel, Arthur D. Code, Carlos Cesco, Víctor M. Blanco, W. W. Morgan, Otto Struve, Jesse L. Greenstein, Gerard P. Kuiper, George Van Biesbroeck, Louis G. Henyey Anne B. Underhill, Guido Münch, Nancy G. Roman, and the two future Nobel Prize winners, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Gerhard Herzberg. Other astronomers at Yerkes when Bidelman was there were Kaj Strand, W. Albert Hiltner, Aden B. Meinel, and visiting professors Bengt Strömgren from Denmark, and Jan Oort, Hendrik C. van de Hulst and Adriaan Blaauw from the Netherlands. George Herbig, also there, remembered it as an "exciting, stimulating place to work" and a "powerhouse in astronomy" while under Struve's direction.
Bidelman spent long hours observing in remote west Texas at McDonald Observatory because he, like other Yerkes faculty, was also an astronomer at the University of Texas (UT). At the suggestion of Struve, the two universities had cooperated to create McDonald Observatory when the UT system had no astronomy department but W. J. McDonald gave them money in 1926 for an observatory, while in Wisconsin, the Yerkes astronomers needed a larger telescope but lacked the funds to obtain one.
Otto Struve, who directed both Yerkes and McDonald, has been described as dedicated yet demanding. His managerial style included daily inspections of the faculty to see if they were working. Despite reports of tensions there was also "close knit camaraderie" and "boisterous parties" evidenced by Yerkes "spontaneous party songs" including "The Billy Bidelman Song". Sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", it consisted of repeating three times the line: "Struve, Kuiper, Hiltner, Morgan, Chandrasekhar too," followed by: "And Billy Bidelman".
In 1946, W. W. Morgan and William P. Bidelman published a paper on interstellar reddening using the MK system of spectral classifications and photoelectric photometry. Morgan later said this paper with Bidelman on interstellar reddening was "the principal paper along the way" to the UBV system, which he devised with Harold Johnson.
In 1947, Bidelman became first to note the concentration of type M supergiant stars around "χ" Per, suggesting they were young Population I objects.
This group, along with the Double Cluster, was later named the Perseus OB1 Association. Based on its radial velocity, Bidelman also became first to see that S Persei is part of the Per OB1 association, which was later confirmed. Among the first stars that were studied at far-infrared wavelengths, M-type supergiants may be used to find the spiral arms of our galaxy. Bidelman found four red supergiant stars in 1947, bringing the total then known to 13. How red supergiant stars evolved was considered an "astronomical puzzle", so the Double Cluster was used to test ideas about the evolution of red supergiant stars during the 1960s. The M-type supergiants of "h" and "χ" Per became the prototypes of this class of stars, and the major source of data for their properties.
Unlike most the usual relatively young star clusters including few supergiant stars, 18 were found in the Double Cluster of Perseus by 2007, which Robert F. Wing noted as the 60th anniversary of Bidelman's "important paper", saying Bidelman's 1947 two-dimensional classifications of the then-known supergiants in "h" and "χ" Per had "served as the benchmark" for later studies of the red supergiant stars.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, so stars displaying very little hydrogen in their atmospheres are chemically peculiar stars. There are many kinds of hydrogen-deficient stars. Upsilon Sagittarii is a hydrogen-deficient star. It is a very luminous, variable, and unusual eclipsing binary with a spectrum quite difficult to classify. In 1949, Bidelman was possibly the first to suggest that Upsilon (υ) Sagittarii's violet-shifted absorption lines, which apparently takes place during some conjunctions of this binary pair when star 2 advances in front of star 1, could be caused by gas streaming from the primary star. Bidelman suggested when the displaced H-alpha(Hα) absorption line was present, it happened at regular intervals when the primary star was furthest away from Earth.
Upsilon Sag was the only example of a star of its type until Bidelman discovered another star similar to it, HD 30353. This star became known as "Bidelman's star".
Bidelman and Keenan were the first to regard the barium star red giants as different from other red giants and to describe them as a spectroscopic class. Barium is a heavy metal element made by certain advanced stars with a helium-burning shell surrounding a spent carbon core In addition to the λ4554 barium line, some other characteristics of the group were two enhanced strontium (SR II) lines, at λ4077 and another at λ4215 blended with the head of the CN band, and also an enhanced G band due to CH and possibly CN. There are some supergiant stars with these BA II, strontium lines and CN band, but the G and K-type stars Bidelman and Keenan described did not appear to be supergiants.
G, K, and M-type giants, the most complex area of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (HR) diagram, have spectra so complicated "many astronomers have shied away from studying them".
Eventually, Robert McClure discovered that essentially all barium stars began with a companion star that made the s-process elements, and when the companion star aged into a white dwarf, a stellar wind moved what was made by one star to the other star, a shifting of mass from an Asymptotic giant branch(AGB) star that turned into a white dwarf, to its companion star.
Bidelman was the first to find three unusual A- and F-type high-latitude bright stars, HR 6144, 89 Herculis, and HD 161796 in the high galactic plane, an unexpected place for supergiant stars to be found.
Astronomers expect to find massive young stars that are five to twenty times the mass of the Sun, on the galactic plane, a place where stars form, but it is rare to find stars like Her 89, with a spectrum that appears to be a young supergiant so far from the Galactic plane. Regarding these stars with characteristics of Population I supergiants, yet found at high galactic latitude, another astronomer wrote, "If I were a theoretician, I would simply say, 'They can't be, therefore they aren't'".
Bidelman's 1951 study also isolated the G- and K-type giant stars with weak G-bands as a class of peculiar giants.
University of California, Lick Observatory (1953–1963).
In October 1953, Bidelman was hired as an assistant astronomer at Lick Observatory. This observatory of the University of California is located on Mount Hamilton (California). The Bidelman family lived on Mount Hamilton and the children attended a one-room school where it was an hour's drive to the nearest grocery store. According to Stanislaus Vasilevskis, due to the lack of a high school for children and other features, Bidelman moved from Mount Hamilton to San Jose, and commuted to work.
Otto Struve had left the Chicago for The University of California in 1950. Bidelman lectured for Struve's Graduate Seminar on Astrophysics at Berkeley in 1955. He and George Herbig also gave ten lectures together on stellar spectroscopy at Berkeley during the 1954–55 academic year. Bidelman served on the program committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting in 1955.
In 1953, Bidelman was the first to describe the hydrogen–deficient carbon star group, although Hans Ludendorff had found the appearance of weak hydrogen in R CrB in 1906.
In 1951, Bidelman informed other astronomers of his intentions to publish a catalogue with data for all known emission-line stars and requested they contribute data to be incorporated into it. He researched emission-line stars for his catalogue and bibliography at Yerkes Observatory (Wisconsin) and McDonald Observatory (Texas), and spent six weeks during the summer at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories (California), funded by the Department of Naval Research. While at Yerkes, Morgan, Strömgren, and Chandrasekhar had encouraged Bidelman to prepare such a catalogue, and his catalogue and bibliography of 1,640 middle and late-type emission-line stars was among the ten most-cited papers in astronomy in 1954. Bidelman's catalogue included many stars with Ca II H and K emission. In 1996, Helmut Abt researched which papers published in 1954 were cited most frequently from 1955 to 1995, and Bidelman's Catalog and Bibliography ranked among the top four.
Bidelman served on the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Nominating Committee and Publications Committees in 1955. When Seth B. Nicholson, Chairman of the Publications Committee for thirteen years retired, he nominated Bidelman as the next chairman. Bidelman resigned from the Nominating Committee, and became the Editor of the "Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific". the scientific journal of the ASP, which gives the gives the Bruce Gold Medal.
In 1957, the Directors discussed but did not act on making the Editor a salaried position. In 1958, the Publications Committee published over 100 papers, over 20 book reviews, and two symposia. Re-elected to the Board of Directors, Bidelman was authorized to spend up to $1,000 for editorial assistance in 1959, and they published over 90 papers from ~38 institutions, 15 book reviews and a symposium. His report noted it was a time-consuming task, made more difficult because he had been out of the country for two months that year. in 1960, they published six issues including 100 papers from ten countries, other articles and book reviews, and fulfilled reprint orders.
He was Third Vice President of ASP in 1961, and they published six issues totaling 543 pages, including 100 articles from the United States and nine other countries, and other papers. Bidelman's annual report said being "largely responsible for the welfare" of the journal for approximately five years had been a considerable burden and having found it impossible to find a sufficiently competent technical assistant on Mount Hamilton and not being able to fulfill his obligations to both the University and to ASP, he requested to resign effective July 1, 1961, He was re-elected to the Board of Directors. his resignation became effective in mid-August and an assistant editor was added to the staff in September. Bidelman summarized his experiences in a 1989 talk entitled "A funny thing happened on the way to the Stanford Press - reminiscences of Five Years with the "PASP"".
In 1962, Bidelman helped Soviet astronomers edit a manuscript for English readers, He continued on the ASP Publications Committee, no longer as chair, in 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. When Helmut Abt explored the number of reference errors in astronomy journal articles in 1992, he said the only astronomical editor he was aware of who checked every reference in his journal and found many errors "to which he called the author's attention—was William P. Bidelman when he edited these "Publications"".
While he was editor, Bidelman was the general supervisor of the students at Lick Observatory. According to Hyron Spinrad, Bidelman encouraged astronomy students at the Berkeley campus to make observations at Lick Observatory. Spinrad recalled: "I don't know how he was regarded on Mt. Hamilton, but at Berkeley he was regarded as sort of a good will emissary from the mountain".
In March 1962, Bidelman used three peculiar stars, 3 Centauri, κ Cancri and 112 Herculis, to make the first certain identification of the rare element gallium II (Ga II) in stellar spectra, with lab work assistance by Charles H. Corliss at the National Bureau of Standards, which they reported in May 1962.
T Tauri, the prototype of the T-Tauri stars, is a young star found in the constellation Taurus. In November 1962, Bidelman found ~100 times more gallium I in the spectrum of T Tauri than is found in the spectrum of the sun. Bidelman noted that it was at present "impossible to explain these abundance anomalies in terms of known nucleogenesis patterns".
University of Michigan (1963–1969).
Bidelman became a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan in Fall 1963.
At the University of Michigan, Freeman D. Miller and Bidelman began to direct the complete reactivation of the Curtis Schmidt telescope, to search for stars with spectra that showed unusual chemical compositions. After the University of Michigan agreed in 1966 to transfer the telescope to South America, the telescope was moved to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, for astronomical viewing in the Southern Hemisphere which was completed in 1967. Under a National Science Foundation grant to Bidelman, Darrell Jack MacConnell moved the telescope, and the two later conducted research using objective-prism plates taken with by the Curtis Schmidt.
In the early 1960s Bidelman gave a colloquium at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where Bidelman suggested it would be feasible to reclassify all stars listed in the Henry Draper Catalogue on the MK system. Graduate student, Nancy Houk heard Bidelman's colloquium and became interested in classifying. Only about 23,000 of the HD stars had Morgan-Keenan classifications, and those had been classified by different people using different standards and sometimes chosen out of interest, creating an biased sample.
Reclassifying all HD stars the same way would create a vast data set that could be used as a teaching data set for a computer to encourage automated classifications which would be as better telescopes looked at for fainter stars. Houk eventually led the Michigan Survey and because it was anticipated that the work which she began in 1970 would not be completed until 2004, Bidelman used the same Curtis Schmidt objective-prism lens plates to begin an "early results" program. Bidelman recalled:
By 1964, Bidelman reported finding ~150 peculiar stars, about 80% were believed to be new discoveries. In 1966, Bidelman reported finding Praseodymium III in χ Lupi and with the Curtis Schmidt telescope, Bidelman and Robert Victor made provisional identifications of 23 peculiar stars including 3 new metallic line stars. By 1969, Bidelman and his assistants discovered ~90 new, mainly F- and G-type supergiant stars, 33 new B-type emission (Be) stars, ~75 new metallic-line stars, over 150 new peculiar A-type stars, and other astronomical objects of interest.
With the help of MacConnell and research assistants Bond, Frye and Humphreys, Bidelman discovered 53 new Barium (Ba II) stars, 26 new late-type giants which had strong Ca II emission lines, new supergiants of various spectral classes and G- and K-type stars with very weak CH absorption in their spectra.
The first worldwide milestone in creating one or more astronomical data centers was the first discussion in 1966 at a National Science Foundation event in Maryland. The second was when Bidelman was president of the International Astronomical Union's Commission 45 and they discussed the issue at the 1967 IAU meeting in Prague Czechoslovakia. At this meeting in Prague: "W.P. Bidelman spoke of the need for a general reference catalogue giving full bibliographic data for individual stars". Bidelman said it would include about a million stars and require the resources of an organization like NASA, and some members of the Commission supported the proposal.
The University of Texas at Austin (1969–1970).
In 1969, Bidelman was a Professor in the astronomy department at Austin. By the end of the 1960s, astronomers had begun to discuss the possibility of creating astronomical data centers. In a letter in 1969, Luboš Perek wrote that an astronomer who wanted a star's MK classification might search through 5 to 100 papers "according to his temperament" then give up, or take a plate to determine the type, or choose another star. Astronomers might observe the same star under different names. Catalogs, though useful, were often created as personal endeavors by astronomers near retirement and usually published only once, and while astronomical data increased rapidly, there were few making catalogs. In 1969, Bidelman became one of the six astronomers funded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to study the feasibility of a computerized data center.
In 1970, the first official IAU debate on astronomical data centers took place. After a temporary IAU working group held meetings, and representatives from 16 countries showed interest, the IAU established the first permanent Working Group on Numerical Data, and Bidelman became one of its "main data center leaders" to plan centers to make data more reliable and accessible. Their first goal was to distribute information on existing Data Centers as well as lists of data errors. The Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center, NASA Astrophysics Data System, and data centers in Japan and by the Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Science were among the first centers developed, and said many goals in creating data centers were eventually met and, as A. Heck noted, "sometimes largely facilitated by not-so-quickly-expected technologies such as the electronic networking of the planet".
While at Austin in 1970, Bidelman, MacConnell and Frye published findings on six new stars showing strong neutral helium lines whose spectra appeared different from other "hydrogen deficient" stars, on objective prism plates from Cerro Tololo, Chile.
By the end of the school year, Bidelman resigned to accept the position of Director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory and Chairman of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Ohio.
Case Western Reserve University (1970–2011).
Bidelman directed the Warner and Swasey Observatory from 1970 to 1975, and was a Professor of astronomy from 1970 to 1986. In June 1970, Bidelman began as Chairman and Director. Bidelman's office was at the old Taylor Road Observatory, given to the University by the Warner & Swasey Company in 1920. Due to light pollution from the city of Cleveland, by the 1950s viewing was difficult and the Burrell Schmidt telescope was relocated ~30 miles away to Geauga County.
In 1973, Bidelman and MacConnell provided data on a variety of B-emission (Be) and shell stars, peculiar stars, weak-metal stars and other bright stars of the southern hemisphere, covering ~81% of the southern sky. They said when completed, Houk's more comprehensive study would "provide spectral date of inestimable value to stellar astronomers" and should supersede their report, but they did it as an "early result" study. Using CTIO objective –prism plates they found nearly 800 previously unknown A-type peculiar stars. They also found 34 weak G-band giants stars in the southern hemisphere. Their study was called a "major contribution" in providing data to help identify the relatively rare Population II stars. It created an unbiased sample, and doubled the number of known peculiar A-type (Ap) stars. After nineteen years of study by various investigators, in 2014, Beers et al. studied 302 of the Bidelman-MacConnell possible weak-metal stars and concluded that a metal-weak thick disk (MWTD) is present in the Milky Way galaxy, and noted its importance in understanding the development of our galaxy.
In 1962 and 1966, Bidelman had reported that the wavelength of "λ" 3984 varied somewhat from star to star, and stated differences in the ratios of mercury isotopes could be the reason. Bidelman was the first to note this, and in 1974, Michaud, Reeves and Charland, considering the isotopic abundances to be real, and that Hg was in fact overabundant and not an artifact of blending, suggested the mercury overabundances were due to radiation pressure that caused the element to pile up until radiation and gravitational forces almost cancelled each other, then its isotopes would separate, sorting themselves. Michaud suggested that element segregation would proceed naturally due to gravitational settling and radiation pressure if the stellar atmosphere was steady.
In 1975, Bidelman and San-Gak Lee reported spectral classifications for 601 proper-motion stars that had been listed in both a Lowell Observatory survey under Henry L. Giclas, and the "Luyten" "Two-Tenths Catalogue" and supplement, and their report included data from Gerard Kuiper. Kuiper and Bidelman had been at Yerkes Observatory at the same time.
 For six years Kuiper had worked to classify ~3,200 high proper motion stars using ~9,000 spectra taken at Yerkes and McDonald, and with an added 300 spectra from Luyten, Kuiper had planned to publish the data with Luyten. Bidelman called it "very important spectroscopic work and a "large-scale assault" on the problem of unclassified proper motion stars.
When Kuiper ran out of stars of large proper motion and parallax in a region of sky, he observed the planets and their moons "nicely lined up" in that region. When Kuiper found evidence of an atmosphere on Saturn's moon, Titan, his research changed focus and much of his data on proper motion stars remained unpublished. Kuiper died in 1973.
Following his paper with Lee, Bidelman had "renewed interest" in proper motion stars and asked whether Kuiper's unpublished proper motion material could be found. With help from the Kuiper Memorial Committee at the University of Arizona, Ewen A. Whitaker, Elizabeth Roemer, and Helmut Abt, Bidelman obtained copies of five of Kuiper's notebooks which had stars noted by name and right ascension without declination, and many with multiple spectra and more than one classification. Bidelman established a card file for every star or binary pair, and sought to find the exact star Kuiper observed. His goal was not to create definitive spectral types or change Kuiper's classifications, but to set out clearly "the enormous amount of useful spectral data relating to these objects gathered by an energetic and most talented astronomer to whom many, including the writer, owe much. This work represents a partial repayment of that debt". He estimated there could be ~1,000 stars with better spectral types than otherwise known. Bidelman worked on Kuiper's data. and published it in 1985.
In 1975, Peter Pesch replaced Bidelman as Director of the Observatory and Chairman of the Astronomy department. While Bidelman had been the observatory director, three of Bidelman's graduate students, Craig Chester, Cynthia Irvine, and William Smethells, were part of a group from CWRU who wanted to begin their own observatory. The outlook for employment in research astronomy was bleak, so the group began a mail-order business and took part-time jobs to solve their "food on the table problem" while seeking to build an observatory in California, and Bidelman gave them their first cash donation. Other donations followed, and the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy opened in 1984.
In 1976, Bidelman headed an IAU working group on the proper designation for astronomical objects. At a 1978 symposium discussion following a paper Bidelman stated he wanted to make a slightly off-topic point about nomenclature, and asked whether the star under discussion, VI Cyg #5 is the same star as BD+40° 4220. Informed it is and another one of its names is V729 Cyg, Bidelman responded, "Well, I'd like to say, as a member of an IAU Commission concerned with such things, that one should adopt a consistent labeling for a star". After being seconded by Underhill, he added: "We don't all have encyclopedic memories".
The Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio, suffered from light pollution, and was moved first to a better viewing site in Ohio, then later to Kitt Peak, Arizona, in 1979. By 1979, Houk had classified 69,000 southern stars. As she finished the southern classifications, Bidelman became responsible to oversee taking the northern plates at CWRU's new Kitt Peak observation site in Arizona. The Curtis Schmidt telescope that was used for the southern all-sky survey was a twin to the Burrell Schmidt used in the northern survey.
When the telescope at Kitt Peak became operational in 1981, Bidelman continued his "early-results" research involving "systematic, but nonetheless somewhat cursory inspection" to classify stars for the northern hemisphere that had been given HD numbers, and published the spectral data in 1983. Bidelman identified 175 peculiar or otherwise interesting stars, most thought to be new discoveries.
Bidelman was the first to identify the peculiar F str λ4077 dwarfs. As part of the "early results" program, in 1981, 1983 and 1985 Bidelman found 21 stars he identified as "F str λ 4077". Almost nothing was known about these stars other than Bidelman's spectral classification. Later researchers found evidence that about half are main-sequence counterparts of Barium stars.
Bidelman retired from teaching at Case Western in 1986. He became a Professor Emeritus, and in 1990 and 1991 continued to do research and remained active in the astronomy department. As a Professor Emeritus, Bidelman continued with the Henry Draper Reclassification project with Houk and the Michigan Spectral Survey and compiled identification of stars in the "IRAS" Low-Resolution Spectral Catalogue.
Bidelman became interested in the Star of Bethlehem and argued it was involved planetary conjunctions. In 1991, Bidelman used astronomical tables by Bryant Tuckerman and Jean Meeus to investigate Roger Sinnott's suggestion that two close conjunctions of Venus and Jupiter on the morning of August 12, 3 BC, and the evening of June 17, 2 BC, could explain the Star of Bethlehem. He found that for these two planets, an easily observable morning conjunction is "invariably followed" by an evening conjunction approximately ten months later whenever the morning conjunction has an elongation of at least 19°. Bidelman found 28 such pairs of Venus-Jupiter conjunctions in the ~100 years before the birth of Christ, although the 3 and 2 BC conjunctions appeared closer together. Bidelman noted that John Mosley has shown the August 3 BC morning conjunction was ~4.3 arcminutes, and the June 2 BC evening conjunction was an "extremely close" 0.5 arcminutes, and Bidelman considered some historical events to determine the date of Christ's birth, and noted these conjunctions took place in Leo, a constellation associated with Judaism and the Tribe of Judah. Bidelman suggested the conjunctions in 3 and 2 BC are a plausible explanation for the Star of Bethlehem.
In a brief 1991 Newsweek on Air interview about the Star of Bethlehem, when asked when and why he became interested in the topic, Bidelman said he had always been an astronomer, and it is of astronomical interest. When asked whether he thought his theory demystified Christmas, Bidelman replied:
In 1992, almost 50 years after his thesis paper, Bidelman stated "On revient toujours à ses premières amours" ("One always returns to his first loves") when he returned to the topic of his dissertation in 1992 and he considered it "perhaps worth mentioning" that two stars seen then had completely changed their spectral appearance.
In 1993, Bidelman provided data on 177 known and possible asymptotic giant branch stars, saying he was confident many would "prove to be interesting and important. Unfortunately, I don't know which ones!" Bidelman's list of high Strömgren c1 index high galactic latitude stars included promising post-AGB candidates to lead to finds of similar objects to better understand the post-AGB sub-groups of stars.
Invited to speak at the 1996 IAU Symposium on carbon stars Bidelman declined on advice from his doctor, but sent introductory comments in which he said:
Pointing out that observers sometimes "note things that don't seem to make much sense, but which later are realized to have been very significant indeed", he traced a brief history of "this stellar oddball" and concluded:
In May 1998, the Case astronomy students and graduates held a 2-day "Kth" reunion to honor Bidelman and new retiree Peter Pesch.
Bidelman (1969) once said that the problem of the Ap stars (1969) is that "stars of unusual spectrum are doing unusual things". In 2002, Bidelman suggested the peculiar magnetic A stars may have once been close binaries that "merged and are now in the process of learning to live as single objects", and suggested in 2005 that Przybylski's Star may be one such object.
In Case Western University's 2008 astronomy department newsletter, Chair Heather Morrison wrote they were sorry to say goodbye to Professor Bidelman, who had turned 90 "and has decided to finish his distinguished career in Astronomy by retiring for a second time".
Honors.
Bidelman was elected to the American Astronomical Society in 1944. and was a member for over 65 years. He was president of the Cleveland Astronomical Society from 1973 to 1976. Bidelman was elected to the international science honor society Sigma Xi by Case Western Reserve University. The minor planet 9398 Bidelman (1994 SH3), discovered by the Arizona group Spacewatch at Kitt Peak on September 28, 1994 was named in his honor. It is an outer main belt asteroid. The peculiar supergiant star HD 30353 is named "Bidelman's star".
Personal life.
William Pendry Bidelman was born on September 25, in 1918 in Los Angeles, California. Bidelman's father, the son of Howard Bidelman and Julia Pendry, had the same name but Bidelman did not use the designation "Jr.," after college. When the family experienced financial difficulties, Bidelman moved with his mother to Grand Forks, North Dakota where his grandparents raised him. As a boy, Bidelman wrote to Alfred H. Joy at Mount Wilson, to ask how to become an astronomer. They later served together on the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Publications Committee in 1955 and 1956. He met his future wife, Verna Shirk, in grade school and became "smitten" with her at age 10.
In a Grand Forks Central High School competition, Bidelman's tribute to North Dakota was judged best, and was read on October 20, 1935 at the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, an annual event for essays by high school students about their states. In his essay, Bidelman praised North Dakota for its plains "covered with an ocean of wheat, rolling gently in the soft summer breezes", its rolling prairies, mighty rivers; International Peace Garden "in the heart of this continent", its industry, agriculture, and its "scores of untold secrets which have not been discovered to this day". He finished by quoting state poet James W. Foley, by writing: "North Dakota, hail to you!"
At a 1977 IAU Symposium honoring the memory of [[Henry Norris Russell]], Bidelman recalled reading during his high school years the "fascinating and inspiring" monthly articles Russell wrote for "Scientific American". Saying it was "an important part of my early scientific education", Bidelman suggested they might be worth reprinting.
Asked to make some remarks at that symposium, Bidelman said he had little personal knowledge of Russell, but could believe the comments he had heard that Russell was both a great scientist and a great human being, because he had found it to be true of most other influential astronomers. In addition to Alfred Joy, Bidelman recalled "with great pleasure" [[Bart Bok]], [[Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin]] and [[Martin Schwarzschild]] from Harvard, and "the whole motley Yerkes crew: Struve, Greenstein, Henyey, Chandrasekhar, Kuiper and all the rest", and stated he marveled at his youthful contacts with them and their passionate devotion to science and to life. He ended his speech by saying:
Among Bidelman's many interests were [[baseball]], [[philately]], music, and [[Square dance|square dancing]]. His wife, Verna Pearl Shirk was born in 1918 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She graduated from the [[University of North Dakota]], and was a teacher and a poet who used her time for family, friends, and church work. The Bidelman's had four children, and also grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One daughter died in 2000, and Verna Bidelman died in 2009. They were married 69 years. Bidelman died at 92 on May 3, 2011 in Tennessee.
Select bibliography.
These journal articles are William P. Bidelman's five most-cited works on the NASA [[Astrophysics Data System]] as of July 2017.
External links.
[[Category:1918 births]]
[[Category:2011 deaths]]
[[Category:People from Grand Forks, North Dakota]]
[[Category:People from Grand Forks County, North Dakota]]
[[Category:People from North Dakota]]
[[Category:American astronomers]]
[[Category:American physicists]]
[[Category:American astrophysicists]]
[[Category:Spectroscopists]]
[[Category:United States Army personnel of World War II]]
[[Category:Harvard University alumni]]
[[Category:University of Chicago alumni]]
[[Category:University of Chicago faculty]]
[[Category:University of California faculty]]
[[Category:University of Michigan faculty]]
[[Category:University of Texas at Austin faculty]]
[[Category:Case Western Reserve University faculty]]
[[Category:Scientists from Cleveland]]


Supernal Music


Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers

The Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT ; ) is an assessment examination for the language proficiency of teachers in Hong Kong. According to regulations, any teachers teaching English language or Putonghua (a.k.a. Mandarin Chinese) in Hong Kong, where Cantonese Chinese is mostly spoken, must have passed the LPAT, i.e. achieved a grade of not lower than Level 3 in each part of the assessment.
Introduction.
The LPAT examination is jointly held by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) and the Education Bureau (EDB) of the Hong Kong Government. There are two assessment examinations held annually in March and September, candidates are required to apply for the examination in beginning of October(?-no later than one month-?) before the examination commence and application is open to public. However, after 2006, the examination will be held once only in March. Since the Academic Year of 2004, all new language teachers are required to have the minimum requirement of LPAT met before they can start teaching full-time.
HKEAA administer the oral and written portion of the examination, while the classroom language assessment is administered by the EDB.
English Language.
The English language examination consists of five papers:
Putonghua.
The Putonghua examination consists of four papers:


6592 Goya


Asymmetric cointegration

In economics, testing for an asymmetric cointegration relationship among variables implies distinguishing the positive and the negative effects of the error obtained from the cointegration regression. In order to do that, economists usually use the asymmetric cointegration framework proposed by Enders and Siklos in 2001. Asymmetric cointegration comes from the analysis of multivariate combinations arising from the decomposition of the series into positive and negative values of its cumulative sums; see Lardic and Mignon (2008, p. 484).
According to Cook (2006), testing for a potential asymmetric cointegration extends the analysis in further directions to allow for a possibility that other standard cointegration tests may fail to detect an underlying cointegration relationship and therefore, the threshold autoregressive and momentum-threshold cointegration tests are applied to investigate the hypothesis that the cointegration relationship between banking sector development indicators and remittances is of an asymmetric form which splits the speed of adjustments into two parts based on the direction of the equilibrium error.


Dot plot (statistics)

A dot chart or dot plot is a statistical chart consisting of data points plotted on a fairly simple scale, typically using filled in circles. There are two common, yet very different, versions of the dot chart. The first has been used in hand-drawn (pre-computer era) graphs to depict distributions going back to 1884. The other version is described by William S. Cleveland as an alternative to the bar chart, in which dots are used to depict the quantitative values (e.g. counts) associated with categorical variables.
Dot plots.
The dot plot as a representation of a distribution consists of group of data points plotted on a simple scale. Dot plots are used for continuous, quantitative, univariate data. Data points may be labelled if there are few of them.
Dot plots are one of the simplest statistical plots, and are suitable for small to moderate sized data sets. They are useful for highlighting clusters and gaps, as well as outliers. Their other advantage is the conservation of numerical information. When dealing with larger data sets (around 20–30 or more data points) the related stemplot, box plot or histogram may be more efficient, as dot plots may become too cluttered after this point. Dot plots may be distinguished from histograms in that dots are not spaced uniformly along the horizontal axis.
Although the plot appears to be simple, its computation and the statistical theory underlying it are not simple. The algorithm for computing a dot plot is closely related to kernel density estimation. The size chosen for the dots affects the appearance of the plot. Choice of dot size is equivalent to choosing the bandwidth for a kernel density estimate.
In the "R" programming language this type of plot is also referred to as a stripchart
or stripplot.
Cleveland dot plots.
Dot plot may also refer to plots of points that each belong to one of several categories. They are an alternative to bar charts or pie charts, and look somewhat like a horizontal bar chart where the bars are replaced by a dots at the values associated with each category. Compared to (vertical) bar charts and pie charts, Cleveland argues that dot plots allow more accurate interpretation of the graph by readers by making the labels easier to read, reducing non-data ink (or graph clutter) and supporting table look-up.


Bond tester

A bond tester is a scientific instrument used to measure the mechanical strength of bonds, evaluate bond strength distributions or determine compliance with specified bond strength requirements of the applicable acquisition document. Typically a load is applied to a bond by a hook or shear tool, whereafter a force measurement is taken and the failure mode of the tested sample is recorded. More often than not bond tests are destructive and samples are scrapped after testing. In aerospace and medical applications, non destructive testing is common, whereby the bond is loaded up to a point to reveal nonacceptable bonds while avoiding damage to acceptable bonds.
Electrical and thermal bonds are such an integral part of electronic and semiconductor construction that they may often be taken for granted. Modern electronic assembly methods employ a myriad of bonding processes, each one a vital step in the manufacture of the final product. A typical consumer product such as a laptop computer may contain hundreds of thousands of bonds yet if one fails it will probably result in a system breakdown.
For an automatic test PC controlled moving table allows any number of bonds to be tested automatically from a stored program.
Results can be analysed and output immediately or exported in a number of data base formats for subsequent analysis as desired.
Powerful extended capabilities enable measurements such as force/time or force/distance curves to be made and deliver more data about the quality of the bond tested.
The most common test types performed on a bond tester are the wire pull test, which generally puts an upward force on a gold/aluminum/silver/copper wire, and the die shear test, which generally comprises loading a die from the side. When equipped with tweezers, bond testers may also perform cold bump pull tests. During such a test, a solder ball down to 50 µm in diameter is reform it to the shape something like a mushroom and then pulled off the surface. Modern bond testers can perform a wide variety of tests with high precision, because automation eliminates human influence on the measurement.
Two industry leaders are Nordson DAGE and XYZTec.
Standards.
MIL-STD-883, JEDEC and other standards are commonly followed in the industry.