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🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 IRC

Microsoft Comic Chat (later Microsoft Chat, but not to be confused with Windows Chat, or WinChat) is a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, first released with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Comic Chat was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander, with Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group and later a group he managed in Microsoft's Internet Division.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Finland

Wiio's laws are humoristically formulated observations about how humans communicate.

Wiio's laws are usually summarized with "Human communications usually fail except by accident", which is the main observation made by Professor Osmo Antero Wiio in 1978.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Physics 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

A vacuum airship, also known as a vacuum balloon, is a hypothetical airship that is evacuated rather than filled with a lighter-than-air gas such as hydrogen or helium. First proposed by Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi in 1670, the vacuum balloon would be the ultimate expression of lifting power per volume displaced.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft

MSX-DOS is a discontinued disk operating system developed by Microsoft for the 8-bit home computer standard MSX, and is a cross between MS-DOS v1.25 and CP/M-80 v2.2.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Scientific modeling

In computer science and operations research, the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. Artificial Ants stand for multi-agent methods inspired by the behavior of real ants. The pheromone-based communication of biological ants is often the predominant paradigm used. Combinations of Artificial Ants and local search algorithms have become a method of choice for numerous optimization tasks involving some sort of graph, e.g., vehicle routing and internet routing. The burgeoning activity in this field has led to conferences dedicated solely to Artificial Ants, and to numerous commercial applications by specialized companies such as AntOptima.

As an example, Ant colony optimization is a class of optimization algorithms modeled on the actions of an ant colony. Artificial 'ants' (e.g. simulation agents) locate optimal solutions by moving through a parameter space representing all possible solutions. Real ants lay down pheromones directing each other to resources while exploring their environment. The simulated 'ants' similarly record their positions and the quality of their solutions, so that in later simulation iterations more ants locate better solutions. One variation on this approach is the bees algorithm, which is more analogous to the foraging patterns of the honey bee, another social insect.

This algorithm is a member of the ant colony algorithms family, in swarm intelligence methods, and it constitutes some metaheuristic optimizations. Initially proposed by Marco Dorigo in 1992 in his PhD thesis, the first algorithm was aiming to search for an optimal path in a graph, based on the behavior of ants seeking a path between their colony and a source of food. The original idea has since diversified to solve a wider class of numerical problems, and as a result, several problems have emerged, drawing on various aspects of the behavior of ants. From a broader perspective, ACO performs a model-based search and shares some similarities with estimation of distribution algorithms.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science

In the field of social psychology, illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias wherein a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.

The term illusory superiority was first used by the researchers Van Yperen and Buunk, in 1991. The phenomenon is also known as the above-average effect, the superiority bias, the leniency error, the sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect, named after the fictional town where all the children are above average. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority shown by people on a task where their level of skill is low.

A vast majority of the literature on illusory superiority originates from studies on participants in the United States. However, research that only investigates the effects in one specific population is severely limited as this may not be a true representation of human psychology. More recent research investigating self-esteem in other countries suggests that illusory superiority depends on culture. Some studies indicate that East Asians tend to underestimate their own abilities in order to improve themselves and get along with others.

🔗 Portugal 🔗 Japan 🔗 Glossaries

Many Japanese words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese language when Portuguese Jesuit priests introduced Christian ideas, Western science, technology and new products to the Japanese during the Muromachi period (15th and 16th centuries).

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Japan and the first to establish direct trade between Japan and Europe, in 1543. During the 16th and 17th century, Portuguese Jesuits had undertaken a great work of Catechism, that ended only with religious persecution in the early Edo period (Tokugawa Shogunate). The Portuguese were the first to translate Japanese to a Western language, in the Nippo Jisho (日葡辞書, literally the "Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary") or Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam compiled by Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues, and published in Nagasaki in 1603, who also wrote a grammar Arte da Lingoa de Iapam (日本大文典, nihon daibunten). The dictionary of Japanese-Portuguese explained 32,000 Japanese words translated into Portuguese. Most of these words refer to the products and customs that first came to Japan via the Portuguese traders.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Mythology

Glycon (Ancient Greek: Γλύκων Glýkōn, gen: Γλύκωνος Glýkōnos), also spelled Glykon, was an ancient snake god. He had a large and influential cult within the Roman Empire in the 2nd century, with contemporary satirist Lucian providing the primary literary reference to the deity. Lucian claimed Glycon was created in the mid-2nd century by the Greek prophet Alexander of Abonoteichos. Lucian was ill-disposed toward the cult, calling Alexander a false prophet and accusing the whole enterprise of being a hoax: Glycon himself was supposedly a hand puppet.