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By The Numbers |
In America, India remained the leading country of origin of foreign students for the seventh consecutive time in financial year 2008, increasing by 13% to 94,563 students.
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Exams alert |
SNAP 09 Test is a common written test for the admission processes of Symbiosis postgraduate institutes, conducted under the aegis of SIEC Deemed University. Last Date for Registration is 24th Nov, 2009 Test Date is 20th Dec 2009. |
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Thus Spake |
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out. |
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Interesting Facts |
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American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
The world's first University was established in Takshila, India in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. |
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Did you know |
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Television: In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 20-year old university student in Germany, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization. By 1927, Russian inventor Leon Theremin developed a mirror drum-based television system which used interlacing to achieve an image resolution of 100 lines. |
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Metadata |
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Metadata (meta data, or sometimes meta information) is "data about data", of any sort in any media. Metadata is text, voice, or image that describes what the audience wants or needs to see or experience. The audience could be a person, group, or software program. Metadata is important because it aids in clarifying and finding the actual data. |
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Smile Please..! |
Qualifying for Heaven |
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Recently a teacher, a garbage collector, and a lawyer wound up together at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter informed them that in order to get into Heaven, they would each have to answer one question.
St. Peter addressed the teacher and asked, "What was the name of the ship that crashed into the iceberg? They just made a movie about it."
The teacher answered quickly, "That would be the Titanic." St. Peter let him through the gate.
St. Peter turned to the garbage man and, figuring Heaven didn't *really* need all the odors that this guy would bring with him, decided to make the question a little harder: "How many people died on the ship?"
Fortunately for him, the trash man had just seen the movie. "1,228," he answered.
"That's right! You may enter."
St. Peter turned to the lawyer. "Name them."
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Installing a Carpet
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A carpet layer had just finished installing carpet for a lady. He stepped out for a smoke, only then he realized that he'd lost his cigarettes.
In the middle of the room, under the carpet, was a hump.
"No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes," he said to himself. He proceeded to get out his hammer and flattened the hump.
As he was cleaning up, the lady came in. "Here," she said, handling him his pack of cigarettes. "I found them in the hall."
"Now," she said, "if only I could find my parakeet."
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From The Editors Desk |
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Heartiest Greetings!
In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an article on "Metadata" the article provides Introduction, purpose and various applications of metadata.
Our regular section on "Exam Alerts" informs you of the important dates of the upcoming entrance examinations. The section on "Complex simplicities" provides an introduction to the concepts of Palette (computing), Fuzzy logic and RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
More >>
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Complex Simplicities |
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In computer graphics, a palette is either a given, finite set of colors for the management of digital images (that is, a color palette), or a small on-screen graphical element for choosing from a limited set of choices, not necessarily colors (such as a tools palette).
Microsoft Windows applications manage the palette of 4-bit or 8-bit indexed color display devices through specialized functions of the Win32 API (for High color and True color display modes, such functions lacks any interesting functionality). These APIs deals with the so-called system palette and with many logical palettes.
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Fuzzy logic |
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Fuzzy logic is a form of multi-valued logic derived from fuzzy set theory to deal with reasoning that is approximate rather than precise. In contrast with "crisp logic", where binary sets have binary logic, the fuzzy logic variables may have a membership value of not only 0 or 1 that is; the degree of truth of a statement can range between 0 and 1 and is not constrained to the two truth values of classic propositional logic. Furthermore, when linguistic variables are used, these degrees may be managed by specific functions.
Fuzzy logic emerged as a consequence of the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Though fuzzy logic has been applied to many fields, from control theory to artificial intelligence, it still remains controversial among most statisticians, who prefer Bayesian logic, and some control engineers, |
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Interesting Facts |
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American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class. |
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The world's first University was established in Takshila, India in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education |
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The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer. |
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A 30-minute cartoon may contain over 18,000 separate drawings. |
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Americans spend $2 billion per year on candles. |
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A Blue whale's tongue weighs more than an elephant. |
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The most powerful laser in the world, the Nova laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, USA, generates a pulse of energy equal to 100,000,000,000,000 watts of power for .000000001 second to a target the size of a grain of sand. |
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In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful. |
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Father's Day was first observed in Spokane, Washington, in 1910. Sonora Louise Smart Dodd,of Washington, first proposed the idea of a "father's day" in 1909. |
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The chemical pectin, found in ripe fruit, causes jam to set when cooling. |
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Like a bat, dolphins use echolocation to navigate and hunt, bouncing high-pitched sounds off of objects, and listening for the echoes. |
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Did you know |
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Television: In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 20-year old university student in Germany, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization. By 1927, Russian inventor Leon Theremin developed a mirror drum-based television system which used interlacing to achieve an image resolution of 100 lines. In 1936, Kalman Tihanyi described the principle of plasma television, the first flat panel system. A 103-inch plasma TV from Panasonic is the largest plasma TV currently available in the market. The first TV commercial showed a Bulova watch ticking onscreen for exactly 60 seconds. |
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Silver: Silver was discovered about 4000 BC. In the earliest Egyptian records, silver was considered more precious than gold. By the 1700s, Spaniards developed mines in Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru. 60% is used in photography. Argentina was named from Argentum, the element of silver's Latin name. Silver is used for water purification, because it prevents bacteria growth. It's a great alternative to powerful chemicals, such as chlorine and bromine. Alexander the Great was advised by Aristotle to store boiled water in silver containers to prevent diseases. Silver alloys are used in dental fillings, a very safe and durable material for constant contact with such a busy part of the human body. In a dozen or more languages, the words 'money' and 'silver' are the same. Almost |
every computer, cell phone, and appliance contains silver. Silver is used in long life batteries. Billions of silver oxide-zinc batteries are in use everyday powering everything from quartz watches to digital cameras. |
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Honey: Honey dates back for 150 million years. A cave painting depicting an androgynous figure robbing honey out of the hive was found in the Cave of the Spider in Valencia, Spain. Greeks and Roman referred to honey as a food fit for the gods. On average a worker bee will make 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. Honey contains vitamins and antioxidants, but is fat free, cholesterol free and sodium free. Honey has 18 calories more per tablespoon than granulated sugar. Honey has 64 calories, while granulated sugar has 46 calories per tablespoon. Honey can improve Athletic Performance. The color and flavor of honey differ depending on the bees' nectar source (the blossoms). Honey is the ONLY food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water. Out of 20,000 species of bees, only 4 make honey. |
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Salt:Salt is vital to prevent excess saliva production to the point that it flows out of the mouth during sleep. Needing to constantly mop up excess saliva indicates salt shortage. Salt is a vital substance for the survival of all living creatures, particularly humans. Water and salt regulate the water content of the body. Ocean salt alone possesses the power to restore wholeness to the human internal seas, our body fluids. Salt is vital for preventing varicose veins and spider veins on the legs and thighs. Twenty-seven percent of the body's salt is in the bones. Osteoporosis results when the body needs more salt and takes it from the body. Bones are twenty-two percent water. |
Consumption of too much salt can be deadly. You need to take about 1 gram of salt per kilogram of weight to die and this was used as a method of ritual suicide in China especially amongst the nobility as salt was so expensive. |
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Snow: Snow is not white, is actually clear / transparent. If the weather get cold enough that it doesn't snow. Because snow is frozen water, if there are not enough water droplets in the air it can't snow. The largest snowflakes in the world fell across Fort Keogh in Montana (USA) on 28 January 1887. Snow is technically a mineral, like iron and salt. The snow in Antarctica is mostly so hard and flat that it reflects sound as well as light. The most snow produced in a single snowstorm is 4.8 meters (15.75ft) at Mt Shasta Ski Bowl, California (USA) between 13 and 19 February 1959. Snow on the ground varies in density anywhere from 3 to 55 pounds per cubic foot. Any denser than that and scientists call it ice. |
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Metadata |
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Metadata (meta data, or sometimes meta information) is "data about data", of any sort in any media. Metadata is text, voice, or image that describes what the audience wants or needs to see or experience. The audience could be a person, group, or software program. Metadata is important because it aids in clarifying and finding the actual data. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels, such as a database schema. In data processing, metadata provides information about, or documentation of, other data managed within an application or environment. This commonly defines the structure or schema of the primary data. For example, metadata would document data about data elements or attributes, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about records or data structures (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Metadata may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data. It may be recorded with high or low granularity. |
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An example of metadata occurs within file systems. Associated with every file on the storage medium is metadata that records the date the file was created, the date it was last modified and the date the file (or indeed the metadata itself) was last accessed.
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Metadata is used to facilitate the understanding, usage, and management of data, both by human and computers. Thus metadata can describe the data conceptually so that others can understand them; it can describe the data syntactically so others can use them; and the two types of descriptions to get her can facilitate decisions about how to manage the data. The metadata required to effectively work with data varies with the type of data, their context of use, and their purpose. Often data providers will provide users access to a variety of metadata fields, which can be used individually or in combinations, and applied by different users to achieve different goals. These users can be human 'end users', or other computing systems. |
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| Video Recording |
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The television show or movie recorded on a digital video recorder has extensive metadata. These may include the title, director, actors, summary of the contents, length of the recording, critical rating, and the data and source of this recording. System use metadata includes the file name and current status (viewing status, 'save until' date). |
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The HTML format used to define web pages allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, from simple descriptive text, dates and keywords to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards. Pages can be geo tagged with coordinates. Metadata may be included in the page's header or in a separate file. Micro formats allow metadata to be added to on-page data in a way that users don't see, but Metadata can be classified by: |
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Content: Metadata can either describe the resource itself (for example, name and size of a file) or the content of the resource. |
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Mutability: With respect to the whole resource, metadata can be either immutable (for example, the "Title" of a video does not change as the video itself is being played) or mutable (the "Scene description" does change). |
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Logical function: There are three layers of logical function: at the bottom the sub symbolic layer that contains the raw data itself, then the symbolic layer with metadata describing the raw data, and on the top the logical layer containing metadata that allows logical reasoning using the symbolic layer |
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Descriptive metadata. |
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Administrative metadata. |
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Structural metadata. |
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Technical metadata. |
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Use metadata. |
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Storage |
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Metadata can be stored either internally, in the same file as the data, or externally, in a separate file. Metadata that are embedded with content is called embedded metadata. A data repository typically stores the metadata detached from the data. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages: |
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Internal storage allows transferring metadata together with the data it describes; thus, metadata is always at hand and can be manipulated easily. This method creates high redundancy and does not allow holding metadata together. |
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External storage allows bundling metadata, for example in a database, for more efficient searching. There is no redundancy and metadata can be transferred simultaneously when using streaming. However, as most formats use URIs for that purpose, the method of how the metadata is linked to its data should be treated with care. |
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Moreover, there is the question of data format: storing metadata in a human-readable format such as XML can be useful because users can understand and edit it without specialized tools. On the other hand, these formats are not optimized for storage capacity; it may be useful to store metadata in a binary. |
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| Business Intelligence metadata |
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Business Intelligence is the process of analyzing large amounts of corporate data, usually stored in large databases such as a Data Warehouse, tracking business performance, detecting patterns and trends, and helping enterprise business users make better decisions. Business Intelligence metadata describes how data is queried, filtered, analyzed, and displayed in Business Intelligence software tools, such as Reporting tools, OLAP tools, Data Mining tools. |
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Data Mining metadata: The descriptions and structures of Data Sets, Algorithms, Queries |
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OLAP metadata: The descriptions and structures of Dimensions, Cubes, Measures (Metrics), Hierarchies, Levels, Drill Paths |
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Reporting metadata: The descriptions and structures of Reports, Charts, Queries, Data Sets, Filters, Variables, Expressions |
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Business Intelligence metadata can be used to understand how corporate financial reports reported to Wall Street are calculated, how the revenue, expense and profit are aggregated from individual sales transactions stored in the data warehouse. A good understanding of Business Intelligence metadata is required to solve complex problems such as compliance with corporate governance standards, such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) or Basel II. |
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Image metadata |
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Examples of image files containing metadata include Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) and Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Having metadata about images embedded in TIFF or EXIF files is one way of acquiring additional data about an image. Tagging pictures with subjects, related emotions, and other descriptive phrases helps Internet users find pictures easily rather than having to search through entire image collections. A prime example of an image tagging service is Flickr, where users upload images and then describe the contents. Other patrons of the site can then search for those tags. Flickr uses a folksonomy: a free-text keyword system in which the community defines the vocabulary through use rather than through a controlled vocabulary. |
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Users can also tag photos for organization purposes using Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) language, for example. Digital photography is increasingly making use of technical metadata tags describing the conditions of exposure. Photographers shooting Camera RAW file formats can use applications such as Adobe Bridge or Apple Computer's Aperture to work with camera metadata for post-processing. |
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Palette |
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In computer graphics, a palette is either a given, finite set of colors for the management of digital images (that is, a color palette), or a small on-screen graphical element for choosing from a limited set of choices, not necessarily colors (such as a tools palette).
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Microsoft Windows applications manage the palette of 4-bit or 8-bit indexed color display devices through specialized functions of the Win32 API (for High color and True color display modes, such functions lacks any interesting functionality). These APIs deals with the so-called system palette and with many logical palettes.
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The system palette is a copy in RAM of the color display's hardware registers, primarily a physical palette, and it is a unique, shared common resource of the system. At boot, it is loaded with the default system palette (mainly a master palette which works well enough with most programs). |
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When a given application intends to output colorized graphics and/or images, it can set their own logical palette, that is, its own private selection of colors (up to 256). It is supposed that every graphic element that the application tries to show on screen employs the colors of its logical palette. Every program can manage freely one or more logical palettes without further expected interference (in advance). |
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Fuzzy logic |
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Fuzzy logic is a form of multi-valued logic derived from fuzzy set theory to deal with reasoning that is approximate rather than precise. In contrast with "crisp logic", where binary sets have binary logic, the fuzzy logic variables may have a membership value of not only 0 or 1 that is; the degree of truth of a statement can range between 0 and 1 and is not constrained to the two truth values of classic propositional logic. Furthermore, when linguistic variables are used, these degrees may be managed by specific functions. |
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Fuzzy logic emerged as a consequence of the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Though fuzzy logic has been applied to many fields, from control theory to artificial intelligence, it still remains controversial among most statisticians, who prefer Bayesian logic, and some control engineers, who prefer traditional two-valued logic. |
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A basic application might characterize sub ranges of a continuous variable. For instance, a temperature measurement for anti-lock brakes might have several separate membership functions defining particular temperature ranges needed to control the brakes properly. Each function maps the same temperature value to a truth value in the 0 to 1 range. These truth values can then be used to determine how the brakes should be controlled. |
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Fuzzy logic temperature |
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In this image, the meaning of the expressions cold, warm, and hot is represented by functions mapping a temperature scale. A point on that scale has three "truth values" one for each of the three functions. The vertical line in the image represents a particular temperature that the three arrows (truth values) gauge. Since the red arrow points to zero, this temperature may be interpreted as "not hot". The orange arrow (pointing at 0.2) may describe it as "slightly warm" and the blue arrow (pointing at 0.8) "fairly cold". |
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A basic application might characterize sub ranges of a continuous variable. For instance, a temperature measurement for anti-lock brakes might have several separate membership functions defining particular temperature ranges needed to control the brakes properly. Each function maps the same temperature value to a truth value in the 0 to 1 range. These truth values can then be used to determine how the brakes should be controlled. |
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Air conditioners and Rice cookers |
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Automobile and such vehicle subsystems as automatic transmissions, ABS and cruise control |
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Tokyo monorail, Cameras, Digital image processing, such as edge detection. Dishwashers and Elevators |
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Some microcontrollers and microprocessors (e.g. Freescale 68HC12) |
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Hydrometeor classification algorithms for polarimetric weather radar |
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Language filters on message boards and chat rooms for filtering out offensive text |
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The Massive engine used in the Lord of the Rings films, which allowed large-scale armies to enact random yet orderly movements |
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Mineral Deposit estimation and Pattern recognition in Remote Sensing |
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Video game artificial intelligence and Home appliances (e.g. washing machine) |
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From The Editors Desk |
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| Kayalvizhi M.S |
| Email - kayal@mindlogicx.com |
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| Heartiest Greetings! |
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In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an article on "Metadata" the article provides Introduction, purpose and various applications of metadata.
Our regular section on "Exam Alerts" informs you of the important dates of the upcoming entrance examinations. The section on "Complex simplicities" provides an introduction to the concepts of Palette (computing), Fuzzy logic and RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
We hope you would find the information presented in this issue of Youniverse interesting and useful. |
We welcome your thought, views, comments & suggestions to share information as knowledge. |
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| Editor |
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Feedback |
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Please provide us with your feedback on how you feel about the Youniverse newsletter.You can also send us your queries on the VEDAS services. |
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