Portal:Technology
Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life.
Technological advancements have led to significant changes in society. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistoric times, followed by the control of fire, which contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age allowed greater travel and the creation of more complex machines. More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy. (Full article...)
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Flag of convenience (FOC) is a business practice whereby a ship's owners register a merchant ship in a ship register of a country other than that of the ship's owners, and the ship flies the civil ensign of that country, called the flag state. The term is often used pejoratively, and although common, the practice is sometimes regarded as contentious.
Each merchant ship is required by international law to be registered in a registry created by a country, and a ship is subject to the laws of that country, which are used also if the ship is involved in a case under admiralty law. A ship's owners may elect to register a ship in a foreign country so as to avoid the regulations of the owners' country, which may, for example, have stricter safety standards. They may also select a jurisdiction to reduce operating costs, avoiding higher taxes in the owners' country and bypassing laws that protect the wages and working conditions of mariners. The term "flag of convenience" has been used since the 1950s. A registry which does not have a nationality or residency requirement for ship registration is often described as an open registry. Panama, for example, offers advantages such as easier registration (often online), the ability to employ cheaper foreign labour, and an exemption on income taxes. (Full article...)
The Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue station (also known as Coney Island Terminal and signed on some trains as either Coney Island or Stillwell Avenue) is a New York City Subway terminal in Coney Island, Brooklyn. It is the railroad-south terminus for the D, F, N, and Q trains at all times and for the <F> train during rush hours in the peak direction.
Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue has eight tracks and four island platforms, with trains entering from both compass north and south. Opened in 1919–1920, the large facility was designed at a time when Coney Island was the primary summer resort area for the New York metropolitan area, with all of the rail lines in southern Brooklyn funneling service to the area. The station has seen many service patterns throughout its history, and was completely renovated from 2001 to 2004. (Full article...)
Holland Village MRT station is an underground Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station on the Circle line (CCL), located along the boundary of Bukit Timah and Queenstown planning areas in Singapore. Situated close to the junction of Holland Avenue and Holland Road, it primarily serves the area of Holland Village, where its name was derived from. The station is operated by SMRT Trains.
First announced as Holland MRT station in 2003, the station was renamed Holland Village through a public poll in 2005. The station opened on 8 October 2011 when Stages 4 and 5 of the CCL stations opened. The station features Holland Beat by Jeremy Sharma as part of the MRT network's Art-in-Transit programme. (Full article...)
In graph theory and graph algorithms, a feedback arc set or feedback edge set in a directed graph is a subset of the edges of the graph that contains at least one edge out of every cycle in the graph. Removing these edges from the graph breaks all of the cycles, producing an acyclic subgraph of the given graph, often called a directed acyclic graph. A feedback arc set with the fewest possible edges is a minimum feedback arc set and its removal leaves a maximum acyclic subgraph; weighted versions of these optimization problems are also used. If a feedback arc set is minimal, meaning that removing any edge from it produces a subset that is not a feedback arc set, then it has an additional property: reversing all of its edges, rather than removing them, produces a directed acyclic graph.
Feedback arc sets have applications in circuit analysis, chemical engineering, deadlock resolution, ranked voting, ranking competitors in sporting events, mathematical psychology, ethology, and graph drawing. Finding minimum feedback arc sets and maximum acyclic subgraphs is NP-hard; it can be solved exactly in exponential time, or in fixed-parameter tractable time. In polynomial time, the minimum feedback arc set can be approximated to within a polylogarithmic approximation ratio, and maximum acyclic subgraphs can be approximated to within a constant factor. Both are hard to approximate closer than some constant factor, an inapproximability result that can be strengthened under the unique games conjecture. For tournament graphs, the minimum feedback arc set can be approximated more accurately, and for planar graphs both problems can be solved exactly in polynomial time. (Full article...)
Trondheim Airport Station (IATA code: TRD), also known as Værnes Station (Norwegian: Værnes holdeplass), is a railway station located within the terminal complex of Trondheim Airport, Værnes in Stjørdal municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. Situated on the Nordland Line, it serves both express trains and the Trøndelag Commuter Rail both operated by SJ Norge. The station was opened on 15 November 1994 along with a new terminal at the airport, making it the first airport rail link in the Nordic Countries. The station cost 24 million kr, and was built along the existing railway line. In each direction, the station handles one to two hourly commuter rail services, and three daily express services. Travel time to Trondheim is 38 minutes, while it is 9 hours and 5 minutes to Bodø. Access to the airport terminal is outdoors, but sheltered. (Full article...)