Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating materials, generally including kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between 1,200 and 1,400 °C (2,200 and 2,600 °F). The toughness, strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises mainly from vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the body at these high temperatures.
Porcelain derives its present name from the old Italian porcellana (cowrie shell) because of its resemblance to the translucent surface of the shell. Porcelain can informally be referred to as china or fine china in some English-speaking countries, as China was the birthplace of porcelain making.Properties associated with porcelain include low permeability and elasticity; considerable strength, hardness, toughness, whiteness, translucency and resonance; and a high resistance to chemical attack and thermal shock.
Porcelain has been described as being "completely vitrified, hard, impermeable (even before glazing), white or artificially coloured, translucent (except when of considerable thickness), and resonant." However, the term porcelain lacks a universal definition and has "been applied in a very unsystematic fashion to substances of diverse kinds which have only certain surface-qualities in common".
Porcelain (Matt Cardle album)
Porcelain is the third studio album released by English musician Matt Cardle. The album was released on 25 October 2013 in Ireland, and on 28 October in the United Kingdom. Recording locations include London, Los Angeles and New York. It is primarily written by Cardle but, as with his previous albums, he worked with various songwriters, including Connor Reeves and American R&B artist Brian McKnight. Cardle has also produced the album and played the majority of the instruments.
The lead single was a duet with Spice Girl Melanie C, called "Loving You" which was released on 18 August 2013 and reached number 14 on the UK Singles Chart. A second single, "When You Were My Girl", was released on 13 October 2013. The album was released on digital download and physical CD as well as a very limited number of vinyl copies available through Cardle's official website. Porcelain is Cardle's first album to be released worldwide.
The Porcelain Tour in support of the album took place over the UK and Ireland in April 2014. The album received largely positive reviews. It reached number 11 on the UK Albums Chart, number 3 in the Independent Album Chart and number 22 on the Scottish Album Chart.
Porcelain (Sparta album)
Porcelain is the second album by the band Sparta. It was released on July 13, 2004 on Geffen Records and peaked at #60 on the Billboard 200. The first single released from the album was "Breaking the Broken".
Track listing
Bonus tracks
Personnel
Factor
Factor, a Latin word meaning "who/which acts", may refer to:
Commerce
Science and technology
Biology
Computer science and information technology
Factoring (finance)
Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. A business will sometimes factor its receivable assets to meet its present and immediate cash needs.Forfaiting is a factoring arrangement used in international trade finance by exporters who wish to sell their receivables to a forfaiter. Factoring is commonly referred to as accounts receivable factoring, invoice factoring, and sometimes accounts receivable financing. Accounts receivable financing is a term more accurately used to describe a form of asset based lending against accounts receivable.
Factoring is not the same as invoice discounting (which is called an "Assignment of Accounts Receivable" in American accounting – as propagated by FASB within GAAP). Factoring is the sale of receivables, whereas invoice discounting ("assignment of accounts receivable" in American accounting) is a borrowing that involves the use of the accounts receivable assets as collateral for the loan. However, in some other markets, such as the UK, invoice discounting is considered to be a form of factoring, involving the "assignment of receivables", that is included in official factoring statistics. It is therefore also not considered to be borrowing in the UK. In the UK the arrangement is usually confidential in that the debtor is not notified of the assignment of the receivable and the seller of the receivable collects the debt on behalf of the factor. In the UK, the main difference between factoring and invoice discounting is confidentiality.
Von Neumann algebra
In mathematics, a von Neumann algebra or W*-algebra is a *-algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space that is closed in the weak operator topology and contains the identity operator. They were originally introduced by John von Neumann, motivated by his study of single operators, group representations, ergodic theory and quantum mechanics. His double commutant theorem shows that the analytic definition is equivalent to a purely algebraic definition as an algebra of symmetries.
Two basic examples of von Neumann algebras are as follows. The ring L∞(R) of essentially bounded measurable functions on the real line is a commutative von Neumann algebra, which acts by pointwise multiplication on the Hilbert space L2(R) of square integrable functions. The algebra B(H) of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space H is a von Neumann algebra, non-commutative if the Hilbert space has dimension at least 2.
Von Neumann algebras were first studied by von Neumann (1930) in 1929; he and Francis Murray developed the basic theory, under the original name of rings of operators, in a series of papers written in the 1930s and 1940s (F.J. Murray & J. von Neumann 1936, 1937, 1943; J. von Neumann 1938, 1940, 1943, 1949), reprinted in the collected works of von Neumann (1961).
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