Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology (from δένδρον, dendron, "tree limb"; χρόνος, khronos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia), or tree-ring dating, is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree rings, also known as growth rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year. This has three main areas of application: paleoecology, where it is used to determine certain aspects of past ecologies (most prominently climate); archaeology and the history of art and architecture, where it is used to date old panel paintings on wood, buildings, etc.; and radiocarbon dating, where it is used to calibrate radiocarbon ages (see below). In some areas of the world, it is possible to date wood back a few thousand years, or even many thousands. As of 2013, fully anchored chronologies in the northern hemisphere extend back 13,900 years.

History

The Greek botanist Theophrastus (ca. 371 – ca. 287 BC) first mentioned that the wood of trees has rings. In his Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting), Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to mention that trees form rings annually and that their thickness is determined by the conditions under which they grew. In 1737, French investigators Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon examined the effect of growing conditions on the shape of tree rings. They found that in 1709, a severe winter produced a distinctly dark tree ring, which served as a reference for subsequent European naturalists. In the U.S., Alexander Catlin Twining (1801–1884) suggested in 1833 that patterns among tree rings could be used to synchronize the dendrochronologies of various trees and thereby to reconstruct past climates across entire regions. The English polymath Charles Babbage proposed using dendrochronology to date the remains of trees in peat bogs or even in geological strata (1835, 1838).

*-algebra

In mathematics, and more specifically in abstract algebra, a *-algebra (or involutive algebra) is a mathematical structure consisting of two involutive rings R and A, where R is commutative and A has the structure of an associative algebra over R. Involutive algebras generalize the idea of a number system equipped with conjugation, for example the complex numbers and complex conjugation, matrices over the complex numbers and conjugate transpose, and linear operators over a Hilbert space and Hermitian adjoints.

Terminology

*-ring

In mathematics, a *-ring is a ring with a map * : A → A that is an antiautomorphism and an involution.

More precisely, * is required to satisfy the following properties:

for all x, y in A.

This is also called an involutive ring, involutory ring, and ring with involution. Note that the third axiom is actually redundant, because the second and fourth axioms imply 1* is also a multiplicative identity, and identities are unique.

Ring (Suzuki novel)

Ring (リング, Ringu) is a Japanese mystery horror novel by Koji Suzuki, first published in 1991, and set in modern-day Japan. It was the basis for a 1995 television film (Ring: Kanzenban),a television series (Ring: The Final Chapter), a film of the same name (1998's Ring), and two remakes of the 1998 film: a South Korean version (The Ring Virus) and an American version (The Ring).

Plot synopsis

After four teenagers mysteriously die simultaneously in Tokyo, Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter and uncle to one of the deceased, decides to launch his own personal investigation. His search leads him to "Hakone Pacific Land", a holiday resort where the youths were last seen together exactly one week before their deaths. Once there he happens upon a mysterious unmarked videotape. Watching the tape, he witnesses a strange sequence of both abstract and realistic footage, including an image of an injured man, that ends with a warning revealing the viewer has a week to live. Giving a single means of avoiding death, the tape's explanation ends suddenly having been overwritten by an advertisement. The tape has a horrible mental effect on Asakawa, and he doesn't doubt for a second that its warning is true.

Ringtone

A ringtone or ring tone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call or text message. Not literally a tone nor an actual (bell-like) ring any more, the term is most often used today to refer to customizable sounds used on mobile phones.

Background

A phone “rings” when its network indicates an incoming call and the phone thus alerts the recipient. For landline telephones, the call signal can be an electric current generated by the switch or exchange to which the telephone is connected, which originally drove an electric bell. For mobile phones, the network sends the phone a message indicating an incoming call. The sound the caller hears is called the ringback tone, which is not necessarily directly related.

The electromagnetic bell system is still in widespread use. The ringing signal sent to a customer's telephone is 90 volts AC at a frequency of 20 hertz in North America. In Europe it is around 60-90 volts AC at a frequency of 25 hertz. Some non-Bell Company system party lines in the US used multiple frequencies (20/30/40 Hz, 22/33/44 Hz, etc.) to allow "selective" ringing.

Tree (data structure)

In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type (ADT)--or data structure implementing this ADT--that simulates a hierarchical tree structure, with a root value and subtrees of children with a parent node, represented as a set of linked nodes.

A tree data structure can be defined recursively (locally) as a collection of nodes (starting at a root node), where each node is a data structure consisting of a value, together with a list of references to nodes (the "children"), with the constraints that no reference is duplicated, and none points to the root.

Alternatively, a tree can be defined abstractly as a whole (globally) as an ordered tree, with a value assigned to each node. Both these perspectives are useful: while a tree can be analyzed mathematically as a whole, when actually represented as a data structure it is usually represented and worked with separately by node (rather than as a list of nodes and an adjacency list of edges between nodes, as one may represent a digraph, for instance). For example, looking at a tree as a whole, one can talk about "the parent node" of a given node, but in general as a data structure a given node only contains the list of its children, but does not contain a reference to its parent (if any).

Tree (Gaelic Storm album)

Tree is a 2001 album by Gaelic Storm.

Track listing

Beggarman, Black is the Colour, New York Girl, An Poc Ar Buile, and Go Home Girl are traditionals. Beggarman, which is played fast, is a standard in their live set list and features a didgeridoo very prominently. Black is the Colour, sung by guitarist Steve Twigger, is very slow and mournful, reminiscent of the original composition from the previous album She Was the Prize. An Poc Ar Buile is the band's first venture in the Irish language. The song is normally slowly sung, but Gaelic Storm puts a twist into it by singing it fast, complete with hoots and hollers. Go Home, Girl is a faster tune about a girl who falls in love with a gypsy, only to have her advances turned down for an ironic reason.

2–3–4 tree

In computer science, a 2–3–4 tree (also called a 2–4 tree) is a self-balancing data structure that is commonly used to implement dictionaries. The numbers mean a tree where every node with children (internal node) has either two, three, or four child nodes:

2-node

2-node

3-node

3-node

4-node

4-node

2–3–4 trees are B-trees of order 4; like B-trees in general, they can search, insert and delete in O(log n) time. One property of a 2–3–4 tree is that all external nodes are at the same depth.

2–3–4 trees are an isometry of red–black trees, meaning that they are equivalent data structures. In other words, for every 2–3–4 tree, there exists at least one red–black tree with data elements in the same order. Moreover, insertion and deletion operations on 2–3–4 trees that cause node expansions, splits and merges are equivalent to the color-flipping and rotations in red–black trees. Introductions to red–black trees usually introduce 2–3–4 trees first, because they are conceptually simpler. 2–3–4 trees, however, can be difficult to implement in most programming languages because of the large number of special cases involved in operations on the tree. Red–black trees are simpler to implement, so tend to be used instead.