Requirement

In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. 　It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, including for example in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. 　It is a broad concept that could speak to any necessary (or sometimes desired) function, attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a customer, organization, internal user, or other stakeholder. 　Requirements can come with different levels of specificity; for example, a requirement specification or requirement "spec" (often imprecisely referred to as "the" spec/specs, but there are actually different sorts of specifications) refers to an explicit, highly objective/clear (and often quantitative) requirement (or sometimes, set of requirements) to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. 　A set of requirements is used as inputs into the design stages of product development. 　Requirements are also an important input into the verification process, since tests should trace back to specific requirements. 　Requirements show what elements and functions are necessary for the particular project. 　When iterative methods of software development or agile methods are used, the system requirements are incrementally developed in parallel with design and implementation. 　With the waterfall model requirements are developed before design and implementation.

Bias

Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. 　Biases can be innate or learned. 　People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. 　In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. 　Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.

Bias (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Bias (/ˈbaɪ.əs/; Ancient Greek: Βίας; Latin: Biantes) may refer to the following characters: Bias, a Megarian prince as a son of King Lelex and brother to Cleson and Pterelaus. 　He was killed by his nephew Pylas, also a Megarian king. 　After the murder, Pylas gave the kingdom to the deposed king of Athens, Pandion and later founded the city of Pylos in Peloponnesus. 　Bias, son of Amythaon and brother of Melampus. 　Bias, son of Melampus and Iphianira thus a nephew of the earlier Bias. 　But his name has been proposed to read "Abas", another son of Melampus. 　Bias, one of the Epigoni and son of Parthenopaeus, one of the Seven Against Thebes. 　Bias, a Trojan prince as one of the sons of King Priam of Troy by other women. 　He was the father of two Trojan warriors, Laogonus and Dardanus. 　Bias, an Athenian soldier who supported Menestheus against the attacks of Hector. 　Bias, a Pylian soldier who fought under their leader Nestor during the Trojan War. 　Bias, one of the Suitors of Penelope who came from Dulichium along with other 56 wooers. 　He, with the other suitors, was slain by Odysseus with the aid of Eumaeus, Philoetius, and Telemachus.

Autumn

Autumn, also known as fall in American English and Canadian English, is one of the four temperate seasons on Earth. 　Outside the tropics, autumn marks the transition from summer to winter, in September (Northern Hemisphere) or March (Southern Hemisphere). 　Autumn is the season when the duration of daylight becomes noticeably shorter and the temperature cools considerably. 　Day length decreases and night length increases as the season progresses until the Winter Solstice in December (Northern Hemisphere) and June (Southern Hemisphere). 　One of its main features in temperate climates is the striking change in colour for the leaves of deciduous trees as they prepare to shed.

Strain (biology)

In biology, a strain is a genetic variant, a subtype or a culture within a biological species. 　Strains are often seen as inherently artificial concepts, characterized by a specific intent for genetic isolation. 　This is most easily observed in microbiology where strains are derived from a single cell colony and are typically quarantined by the physical constraints of a Petri dish. 　Strains are also commonly referred to within virology, botany, and with rodents used in experimental studies.　[citation needed]

Bernard

Bernard (Bernhard) is a French and West Germanic masculine given name. 　It is also a surname. 　The name is attested from at least the 9th century. 　West Germanic Bernhard is composed from the two elements bern "bear" and hard "brave, hardy". 　Its native Old English reflex was Beornheard, which was replaced by the French form Bernard that was brought to England after the Norman Conquest. 　The name Bernhard was notably popular among Old Frisian speakers. 　Its wider use was popularized due to Saint Bernhard of Clairvaux (canonized in 1174). 　Bernard is the second most common surname in France.

Customs

Customs is an authority or agency in a country responsible for collecting tariffs and for controlling the flow of goods, including animals, transports, personal effects, and hazardous items, into and out of a country. 　Traditionally, customs has been considered as the fiscal subject that charges customs duties (i.e. tariffs) and other taxes on import and export. 　In recent decades, the views on the functions of customs have considerably expanded and now covers three basic issues: taxation, security, and trade facilitation. 　Each country has its own laws and regulations for the import and export of goods into and out of a country, enforced by their respective customs authorities; the import/export of some goods may be restricted or forbidden entirely. 　A wide range of penalties are faced by those who break these laws.

Alien

Look up alien or aliens in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. 　Alien primarily refers to: Alien (law), a person in a country who is not a national of that country Enemy alien, the above in times of war Extraterrestrial life, life which does not originate from Earth Specifically, intelligent extraterrestrial beings; see List of alleged extraterrestrial beings For fictional extraterrestrial life, see Extraterrestrials in fiction Introduced species, a species not native to its environment Alien(s), or The Alien(s) may also refer to:

Clinton

Clinton is an English toponymic surname, indicating one's ancestors came from English places called Glympton or Glinton. 　Clinton has frequently been used as a given name since the late 19th century. 　Baron Clinton is a title of peerage in England, originally created in 1298. 　Notable people with the name Clinton include:

Craft

A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and knowledge of skilled work. 　In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier, the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale production of goods, or their maintenance, for example by tinkers. 　The traditional term craftsman is nowadays often replaced by artisan and by craftsperson (craftspeople). 　Historically, the more specialized crafts with high-value products tended to concentrate in urban centers and formed guilds. 　The skill required by their professions and the need to be permanently involved in the exchange of goods often demanded a generally higher level of education, and craftsmen were usually in a more privileged position than the peasantry in societal hierarchy. 　The households of craftsmen were not as self-sufficient as those of people engaged in agricultural work, and therefore had to rely on the exchange of goods. 　Some crafts, especially in areas such as pottery, woodworking, and various stages of textile production, could be practiced on a part-time basis by those also working in agriculture, and often formed part of village life. 　When an apprentice finished his apprenticeship, he became a journeyman searching for a place to set up his own shop and make a living. 　After he set up his own shop, he could then call himself a master of his craft. 　This stepwise approach to mastery of a craft, which includes the attainment of some education and skill, has survived in some countries until today. 　But crafts have undergone deep structural changes since and during the era of the Industrial Revolution. 　The mass production of goods by large-scale industry has limited crafts to market segments in which industry's modes of functioning or its mass-produced goods do not satisfy the preferences of potential buyers. 　As an outcome of these changes, craftspeople today increasingly make use of semi-finished components or materials and adapt these to their customers' requirements or demands. 　Thus, they participate in a certain division of labour between industry and craft.

Closure (psychology)

Closure or need for closure (NFC), used interchangeably with need for cognitive closure (NFCC), are social psychological terms that describe an individual's desire for a clear, firm answer or peaceful resolution to a question or problem to avert ambiguity. 　The term "need" denotes a motivated tendency to seek out information. 　The need for closure is the motivation to find an answer to an ambiguous situation. 　This motivation is enhanced by the perceived benefits of obtaining closure, such as the increased ability to predict the world and a stronger basis for action. 　This motivation is also enhanced by the perceived costs of lacking closure, such as dealing with uncertainty. 　A sense of closure is not usually possible with ambiguous loss, such as a missing person, and the hoped-for benefits, such as a sense of relief after the death of a person who inflicted harm, are not necessarily obtained. 　Because of this mismatch between what individuals hope will happen if they achieve closure and what they actually experience, the idea of getting closure has been described as a myth. 　The level of the need for cognitive closure is a fairly stable individual characteristic. 　It can affect what information individuals seek out and how they process it. 　This need can be affected by situational factors. 　For example, in the presence of circumstances that increase the need for closure, individuals are more likely to use simple cognitive structures to process information. 　According to Kruglanski et al., need for closure exerts its effects via two general tendencies: the urgency tendency (the inclination to attain closure as quickly as possible) and the permanence tendency (the tendency to maintain it for as long as possible). 　Together, these tendencies may produce the inclinations to seize and then freeze on early judgmental cues, reducing the extent of information processing and hypothesis generation and introducing biases in thinking.

Closure (sociology)

Social closure refers to the phenomenon by which groups maintain their resources by the exclusion of others from their group based on varied criteria. 　Closure is ubiquitous, being found in groups all over the world at all sizes and classes. 　Some examples of social closure include, “Access to private schools follows explicit rules and depends on financial capacities; access to university depends on a certificate or diploma, eventually from certain schools only; membership in a highly prestigious club depends on economic and social capital and the respective social networks; and finally, in the case of migration, people will have to be eligible for citizenship and pass the thorny path of naturalization.”

Closure (topology)

In topology, the closure of a subset S of points in a topological space consists of all points in S together with all limit points of S. The closure of S may equivalently be defined as the union of S and its boundary, and also as the intersection of all closed sets containing S. Intuitively, the closure can be thought of as all the points that are either in S or "near" S. A point which is in the closure of S is a point of closure of S. The notion of closure is in many ways dual to the notion of interior.

Dialogue

Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. 　As a philosophical or didactic device, it is chiefly associated in the West with the Socratic dialogue as developed by Plato, but antecedents are also found in other traditions including Indian literature.

Hypothesis

A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. 　For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. 　Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories. 　Even though the words "hypothesis" and "theory" are often used interchangeably, a scientific hypothesis is not the same as a scientific theory. 　A working hypothesis is a provisionally accepted hypothesis proposed for further research in a process beginning with an educated guess or thought. 　A different meaning of the term hypothesis is used in formal logic, to denote the antecedent of a proposition; thus in the proposition "If P, then Q", P denotes the hypothesis (or antecedent); Q can be called a consequent. 　P is the assumption in a (possibly counterfactual) What If question. 　The adjective hypothetical, meaning "having the nature of a hypothesis", or "being assumed to exist as an immediate consequence of a hypothesis", can refer to any of these meanings of the term "hypothesis".

Laughter

Laughter is a pleasant physical reaction and emotion consisting usually of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system. 　It is a response to certain external or internal stimuli. 　Laughter can rise from such activities as being tickled, or from humorous stories or thoughts. 　Most commonly, it is considered an auditory expression of a number of positive emotional states, such as joy, mirth, happiness, or relief. 　On some occasions, however, it may be caused by contrary emotional states such as embarrassment, surprise, or confusion such as nervous laughter or courtesy laugh. 　Age, gender, education, language, and culture are all indicators as to whether a person will experience laughter in a given situation. 　Some other species of primate (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) show laughter-like vocalizations in response to physical contact such as wrestling, play chasing or tickling. 　Laughter is a part of human behavior regulated by the brain, helping humans clarify their intentions in social interaction and providing an emotional context to conversations. 　Laughter is used as a signal for being part of a group—it signals acceptance and positive interactions with others. 　Laughter is sometimes seen as contagious, and the laughter of one person can itself provoke laughter from others as a positive feedback. 　The study of humor and laughter, and its psychological and physiological effects on the human body, is called gelotology.

Luminosity

Luminosity is an absolute measure of radiated electromagnetic power (light), the radiant power emitted by a light-emitting object over time. 　In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of electromagnetic energy emitted per unit of time by a star, galaxy, or other astronomical objects. 　In SI units, luminosity is measured in joules per second, or watts. 　In astronomy, values for luminosity are often given in the terms of the luminosity of the Sun, L⊙. 　Luminosity can also be given in terms of the astronomical magnitude system: the absolute bolometric magnitude (Mbol) of an object is a logarithmic measure of its total energy emission rate, while absolute magnitude is a logarithmic measure of the luminosity within some specific wavelength range or filter band. 　In contrast, the term brightness in astronomy is generally used to refer to an object's apparent brightness: that is, how bright an object appears to an observer. 　Apparent brightness depends on both the luminosity of the object and the distance between the object and observer, and also on any absorption of light along the path from object to observer. 　Apparent magnitude is a logarithmic measure of apparent brightness. 　The distance determined by luminosity measures can be somewhat ambiguous, and is thus sometimes called the luminosity distance.

Emotion

Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. 　There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. 　Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity. 　Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades with many fields contributing including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, and computer science. 　The numerous theories that attempt to explain the origin, function and other aspects of emotions have fostered more intense research on this topic. 　Current areas of research in the concept of emotion include the development of materials that stimulate and elicit emotion. 　In addition, PET scans and fMRI scans help study the affective picture processes in the brain. 　From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity." 　Emotions produce different physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes. 　The original role of emotions was to motivate adaptive behaviors that in the past would have contributed to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection. 　In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. 　Other theories, however, claim that emotion is separate from and can precede cognition. 　Consciously experiencing an emotion is exhibiting a mental representation of that emotion from a past or hypothetical experience, which is linked back to a content state of pleasure or displeasure. 　The content states are established by verbal explanations of experiences, describing an internal state. 　Emotions are complex. 　There are various theories on the question of whether or not emotions cause changes in our behaviour. 　On the one hand, the physiology of emotion is closely linked to arousal of the nervous system. 　Emotion is also linked to behavioral tendency. 　Extroverted people are more likely to be social and express their emotions, while introverted people are more likely to be more socially withdrawn and conceal their emotions. 　Emotion is often the driving force behind motivation. 　On the other hand, emotions are not causal forces but simply syndromes of components, which might include motivation, feeling, behaviour, and physiological changes, but none of these components is the emotion. 　Nor is the emotion an entity that causes these components. 　Emotions involve different components, such as subjective experience, cognitive processes, expressive behavior, psychophysiological changes, and instrumental behavior. 　At one time, academics attempted to identify the emotion with one of the components: William James with a subjective experience, behaviorists with instrumental behavior, psychophysiologists with physiological changes, and so on. 　More recently, emotion is said to consist of all the components. 　The different components of emotion are categorized somewhat differently depending on the academic discipline. 　In psychology and philosophy, emotion typically includes a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states. 　A similar multi-componential description of emotion is found in sociology. 　For example, Peggy Thoits described emotions as involving physiological components, cultural or emotional labels (anger, surprise, etc.), expressive body actions, and the appraisal of situations and contexts. 　Nowadays most research into emotions in the clinical and well-being context focuses on emotion dynamics in daily life, predominantly the intensity of specific emotions, and their variability, instability, inertia, and differentiation, and whether and how emotions augment or blunt each other over time, and differences in these dynamics between people and along the lifespan.

Reservoir

A reservoir (/ˈrɛzərvwɑːr/; from French réservoircode: fra promoted to code: fr [ʁezɛʁvwaʁ]) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. 　Such a dam may be either artificial, built to store fresh water or it may be a natural formation. 　Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including controlling a watercourse that drains an existing body of water, interrupting a watercourse to form an embayment within it, through excavation, or building any number of retaining walls or levees. 　In other contexts, "reservoirs" may refer to storage spaces for various fluids; they may hold liquids or gases, including hydrocarbons. 　Tank reservoirs store these in ground-level, elevated, or buried tanks. 　Tank reservoirs for water are also called cisterns. 　Most underground reservoirs are used to store liquids, principally either water or petroleum.

Liberation (pharmacology)

Liberation is the first step in the process by which medication enters the body and liberates the active ingredient that has been administered. 　The pharmaceutical drug must separate from the vehicle or the excipient that it was mixed with during manufacture. 　Some authors split the process of liberation into three steps: disintegration, disaggregation and dissolution. 　A limiting factor in the adsorption of pharmaceutical drugs is the degree to which they are ionized, as cell membranes are relatively impermeable to ionized molecules. 　The characteristics of a medication's excipient play a fundamental role in creating a suitable environment for the correct absorption of a drug. 　This can mean that the same dose of a drug in different forms can have different bioequivalence, as they yield different plasma concentrations and therefore have different therapeutic effects. 　Dosage forms with modified release (such as delayed or extended release) allow this difference to be usefully applied.

Exploration

Exploration is the process of exploring, an activity which has some expectation of discovery. 　Organised exploration is largely a human activity, but exploratory activity is common to most organisms capable of directed locomotion and the ability to learn, and has been described in, amongst others, social insects foraging behaviour, where feedback from returning individuals affects the activity of other members of the group. 　Exploration has been defined as: To travel somewhere in search of discovery. 　To examine or investigate something systematically. 　To examine diagnostically. 　To (seek) experience first hand. 　To wander without any particular aim or purpose. 　In all these definitions there is an implication of novelty, or unfamiliarity or the expectation of discovery in the exploration, whereas a survey implies directed examination, but not necessarily discovery of any previously unknown or unexpected information. 　The activities are not mutually exclusive, and often occur simultaneously to a variable extent. 　The same field of investigation or region may be explored at different times by different explorers with different motivations, who may make similar or different discoveries. 　Intrinsic exploration involves activity that is not directed towards a specific goal other than the activity itself. 　Extrinsic exploration has the same meaning as appetitive behavior.　[clarification needed] It is directed towards a specific goal.

Innovation

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. 　ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value". 　Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies. 　Innovation often takes place through the development of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art works or business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society. 　Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention: innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (i.e. new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in a market or society, and not all innovations require a new invention. 　Technical innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. 　The opposite of innovation is exnovation.

Alaska

Alaska (/əˈlæskə/ (listen) ə-LAS-kə) is a U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. 　A semi-exclave of the U.S., it borders British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada to the east, and it shares a western maritime border in the Bering Strait with the Russian Federation's Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. 　To the north are the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas of the Arctic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean lies to the south and southwest. 　Alaska is the largest U.S. state by area, comprising more total area than the next three largest states of Texas, California, and Montana combined, and is the seventh-largest subnational division in the world. 　It is the third-least populous and most sparsely populated U.S. state, but with a population of 736,081 as of 2020, is the continent's most populous territory located mostly north of the 60th parallel, more than quadruple the combined populations of Northern Canada and Greenland. 　The state capital of Juneau is the second-largest city in the United States by area, and the former capital of Alaska, Sitka, is the largest U.S. city by area. 　Approximately half of Alaska's residents live within the Anchorage metropolitan area. 　Indigenous people have lived in Alaska for thousands of years, and it is widely believed that the region served as the entry point for the initial settlement of North America by way of the Bering land bridge. 　The Russian Empire was the first to actively colonize the area beginning in the 18th century, eventually establishing Russian America, which spanned most of the current state, and promoted and maintained a native Alaskan Creole population. 　The expense and logistical difficulty of maintaining this distant possession prompted its sale to the U.S. in 1867 for US$7.2 million (equivalent to $140 million in 2021). 　The area went through several administrative changes before becoming organized as a territory on May 11, 1912. 　It was admitted as the 49th state of the U.S. on January 3, 1959. 　Abundant natural resources have enabled Alaska—with one of the smallest state economies—to have one of the highest per capita incomes, with commercial fishing, and the extraction of natural gas and oil, dominating Alaska's economy. 　U.S. Armed Forces bases and tourism also contribute to the economy; more than half the state is federally-owned land containing national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges. 　The Indigenous population of Alaska is proportionally the highest of any U.S. state, at over 15 percent. 　Various Indigenous languages are spoken, and Alaskan Natives are influential in local and state politics.

Hallway

A hallway or corridor is an interior space in a building that is used to connect other rooms. 　Hallways are generally long and narrow. 　Hallways must be sufficiently wide to ensure buildings can be evacuated during a fire, and to allow people in wheelchairs to navigate them. 　The minimum width of a hallway is governed by building codes. 　Minimum widths in residences are 36 inches (910 mm) in the United States. 　Hallways are wider in higher-traffic settings, such as schools and hospitals. 　In 1597 John Thorpe is the first recorded architect to replace multiple connected rooms with rooms along a corridor each accessed by a separate door.