Shyness (also called diffidence) is the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness especially when a person is in proximity to other people. This commonly occurs in new situations or with unfamiliar people. Shyness can be a characteristic of people who have low self-esteem. Stronger forms of shyness are usually referred to as social anxiety or social phobia.
The primary defining characteristic of shyness is a largely ego-driven fear of what other people will think of a person's behavior. This results in a person becoming scared of doing or saying what he or she wants to out of fear of negative reactions, being laughed at or humiliated, criticism, and/or rejection. A shy person may simply opt to avoid social situations instead.
One important aspect of shyness is social skills development. Schools and parents may implicitly assume children are fully capable of effective social interaction. Social skills training is not given any priority (unlike reading and writing) and as a result, shy students are not given an opportunity to develop their ability to participate in class and interact with peers. Teachers can model social skills and ask questions in a less direct and intimidating manner in order to gently encourage shy students to speak up in class, and make friends with other children.
In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, HTML: ­ ­) or syllable hyphen (EBCDIC: 0xCA), abbreviated SHY, is a code point reserved in some coded character sets for the purpose of breaking words across lines by inserting visible hyphens. Two alternative ways of using the soft-hyphen character for this purpose have emerged, depending on whether the encoded text will be broken into lines by its recipient, or has already been preformatted by its originator.
The use of SHY characters in text that will be broken into lines by the recipient is the application context considered by the post-1999 HTML and Unicode specifications, as well as some word-processing file formats. In this context, the soft hyphen may also be called a discretionary hyphen or optional hyphen. It serves as an invisible marker used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is re-flowed. It becomes visible only after word wrapping at the end of a line. The soft hyphen's Unicode semantics and HTML implementation are in many ways similar to Unicode's zero-width space.
SHY is an Italian owned fashion label specialising in women's shoes and handbags. It was founded in Riviera del Brenta, Venice in 2001. SHY are considered high fashion and have very few stores, all of which are within Europe. SHY gained much attention in the fashion world by being featured in Vogue magazine in March, 2005.
SHY have one flagship store, in Crocus City Mall, Moscow. The main showroom is on the commercial road of Via Marcona in Milan. Outside Italy, SHY shoes can be found in high end fashion stores such as Maryon's in Australia, Tracey Ross in the USA, Joyce in Hong Kong and La Scarpa in Istanbul. They often have a stand at upmarket shoe events such as the Micam Shoe-event in Milan in 2006, also having season long exhibitions at cities such as Paris and Milan.
SHY release a new themed collection twice a year, one for spring/summer and one for fall/winter. The collections often revolve around a central theme such as bright colours or metal, and the collection usually contains different styles of shoe such as stilettos, sandals, boots and usually have a similarly styled handbag. In each collection, there are different themed sets, each one consisting of 6-8 different shoes and 2-3 handbags. At the SHY store and high end retailers, the shoes retail at over €400 (£270) and the handbags retail at over €500 (£340).
An aquarium (plural: aquariums or aquaria) is a vivarium of any size having at least one transparent side in which water-dwelling plants or animals are kept and displayed. Fishkeepers use aquaria to keep fish, invertebrates, amphibians, aquatic reptiles such as turtles, and aquatic plants. The term, coined by English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, combines the Latin root aqua, meaning water, with the suffix -arium, meaning "a place for relating to". The aquarium principle was fully developed in 1850 by the chemist Robert Warington, who explained that plants added to water in a container would give off enough oxygen to support animals, so long as their numbers do not grow too large. The aquarium craze was launched in early Victorian England by Gosse, who created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in 1853, and published the first manual, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea in 1854.
An aquarist owns fish or maintains an aquarium, typically constructed of glass or high-strength acrylic. Cuboid aquaria are also known as fish tanks or simply tanks, while bowl-shaped aquaria are also known as fish bowls. Size can range from a small glass bowl to immense public aquaria. Specialized equipment maintains appropriate water quality and other characteristics suitable for the aquarium's residents.
Aquarium is the debut studio album by Danish-Norwegian band Aqua. The album was released in Scandinavia on 26 March 1997 and in the United States on 9 September 1997. Although the group had been together for three years under their original name Joyspeed, their only release under that name was a single called "Itzy Bitsy Spider". The album is best known for including the successful singles "Barbie Girl", "Doctor Jones" and "Turn Back Time", the first of those being a huge hit across the globe. (The album was preceded by the two singles "Roses Are Red" and "My Oh My", with the latter re-released in 1998.)
The album's third single, "Barbie Girl" brought the group to international attention after reaching number one in both Denmark and Norway, as well as across Europe and in Australia and New Zealand. It would later peak at number 7 in the US. Its success helped the album reach number one in both the group's home countries, and make the top 10 in the UK and US. While not selling as highly "Barbie Girl", the album's fourth single "Doctor Jones" was released in late 1997/early 1998 and became a number one in Denmark, Norway, Australia and the UK. "Turn Back Time" would later give the group their third consecutive number one single in the UK, despite only reaching number 16 in Denmark. The final single, "Good Morning Sunshine" failed to chart highly and was only released in select regions like the earlier "Lollipop (Candyman)", the group's only other song to chart in the US. The album has sold 14 million copies worldwide.
An aquarium is a clear-sided container in which water-dwelling plants and animals are kept.
Aquarium (or the plural Aquaria) may also refer to: