Bic (company)

Société Bic (commonly referred to just as Bic) is a company based in Clichy, France. It is best known for making ballpoint pens. It was founded in 1945 by Baron Marcel Bich and has become known for making disposable consumer products such as lighters, razors, mechanical pencils, and printed paper products.

Products

In 1970, Gillette purchased S. T. Dupont Paris whose principal product was luxury cigarette lighters. During this time Dupont explored the possibilities of marketing a disposable lighter, developing an inexpensive disposable lighter called Cricket, which it introduced in the United States in 1972. Later that year Bic was test marketing a disposable lighter that could provide 3,000 lights before wearing out; Bic introduced this lighter in 1973.

They, as well as the Bic Cristal ballpoint pen, are easily recognizable as a result of their importance in pop culture. As such, they are represented in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The company competes in most markets against Faber-Castell, Global Gillette, Newell Rubbermaid, Pentel and Schwan-Stabilo. The Bic pen, more specifically the Bic Cristal, was the company's first product.

Company

A company is an association or collection of individuals, whether natural persons, legal persons, or a mixture of both. Company members share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various talents and organize their collectively available skills or resources to achieve specific, declared goals. Companies take various forms such as:

A company or association of persons can be created at law as legal person so that the company in itself can accept Limited liability for civil responsibility and taxation incurred as members perform (or fail) to discharge their duty within the publicly declared "birth certificate" or published policy.

Because companies are legal persons, they also may associate and register themselves as companies – often known as a corporate group. When the company closes it may need a "death certificate" to avoid further legal obligations.

Company (Heroes)

The Company refers to a fictional covert international organization in the NBC drama Heroes. Its primary purpose is to identify, monitor and study those individuals with genetically-derived special abilities. The Company played a central role in the plot of Volume Two, during the second season of the series. It is a very notable organization in the series and is connected to several of the characters.

Founders

In season two, Kaito Nakamura revealed that there were twelve founders of the Company, and a photo of the twelve is later seen (listed below under "Group photo"); it did not include Adam Monroe, an immortal human with the ability of rapid cellular regeneration, who is described as the one who "brought them all together." The Company began sometime between January 1977 and February 14, 1977. Monroe was locked away for thirty years on November 2, 1977, concluding that he only spent about 10 to 11 months with the Company. In the first season of the show, Daniel Linderman heads the Company until his demise. He is substituted in the second season by Bob Bishop, who is implied to be the Company's financial source. However, when Sylar kills him in the beginning of Season 3, Angela Petrelli takes over. Several of the founders have children who are posthumans and who are main characters within the series.

Company (disambiguation)

A company is a group of more than one persons to carry out an enterprise and so a form of business organization.

Company may also refer to:

In titles and proper names:

BIC

BIC or Bic may refer to:

Places

People

Other

Bayesian information criterion

In statistics, the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) or Schwarz criterion (also SBC, SBIC) is a criterion for model selection among a finite set of models; the model with the lowest BIC is preferred. It is based, in part, on the likelihood function and it is closely related to the Akaike information criterion (AIC).

When fitting models, it is possible to increase the likelihood by adding parameters, but doing so may result in overfitting. Both BIC and AIC resolve this problem by introducing a penalty term for the number of parameters in the model; the penalty term is larger in BIC than in AIC.

The BIC was developed by Gideon E. Schwarz and published in a 1978 paper, where he gave a Bayesian argument for adopting it.

Definition

The BIC is formally defined as

where

= the observed data;

= the parameters of the model;

= the number of data points in , the number of observations, or equivalently, the sample size;

= the number of free parameters to be estimated. If the model under consideration is a linear regression, is the number of regressors, including the intercept;