BIC

BIC or Bic may refer to:

Places

People

Other

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.

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;

Barka

Barka, Barca or Barqa or Barkah may refer to:

Places

People

Barka, Oman

Barka (Arabic: بركاء‎) is a coastal city in the region Al Bāţinah, in northern Oman.

The town is emerging as a tourist resort. Nearby is Bait Na'aman (Nu'man), a four-towered fort of the 17th-century iman Bil'arab bin Sultan, renovated in 1991. The town is also known for "bull butting," a pushing contest between specially raised great Brahmin bulls, and for its halwa confectionery.

There are two major resorts in Barka, the Al-Sawadi resort and the Al-Nahda resort. In addition, a new quarter is now under construction in Barka, called "Blue City" (المدينة الزقاء), located in Sawadi. The development is 8 km from Sawadi beach, and many international companies are involved in Barka development projects. There is an estimated $15 billion in new construction currently taking place in Barka.

Barka (Eritrea)

Barka was a province of Eritrea until 1996, when it was divided between present day Gash-Barka and Anseba regions. Its capital was Agordat.