History of evolutionary thoughtEvolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science.
Biological databaseBiological databases are libraries of biological sciences, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analysis. They contain information from research areas including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microarray gene expression, and phylogenetics. Information contained in biological databases includes gene function, structure, localization (both cellular and chromosomal), clinical effects of mutations as well as similarities of biological sequences and structures.
Levenshtein distanceIn information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. It is named after the Soviet mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965.
Biological anthropologyBiological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a scientific discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. This subfield of anthropology systematically studies human beings from a biological perspective. As a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is further divided into several branches.
Longest common subsequenceA longest common subsequence (LCS) is the longest subsequence common to all sequences in a set of sequences (often just two sequences). It differs from the longest common substring: unlike substrings, subsequences are not required to occupy consecutive positions within the original sequences. The problem of computing longest common subsequences is a classic computer science problem, the basis of data comparison programs such as the diff utility, and has applications in computational linguistics and bioinformatics.
Last universal common ancestorThe last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent population from which all organisms now living on Earth share common descent—the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. This includes all cellular organisms, but not necessarily viruses. The LUCA is not the first life on Earth; it may have lived among a diversity of other organisms whose descendants all died out. Rather LUCA is the most recent form from which all surviving life on Earth is descended.
Minimum description lengthMinimum Description Length (MDL) is a model selection principle where the shortest description of the data is the best model. MDL methods learn through a data compression perspective and are sometimes described as mathematical applications of Occam's razor. The MDL principle can be extended to other forms of inductive inference and learning, for example to estimation and sequential prediction, without explicitly identifying a single model of the data.
Minimum message lengthMinimum message length (MML) is a Bayesian information-theoretic method for statistical model comparison and selection. It provides a formal information theory restatement of Occam's Razor: even when models are equal in their measure of fit-accuracy to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of data is more likely to be correct (where the explanation consists of the statement of the model, followed by the lossless encoding of the data using the stated model).
Bridge (instrument)A bridge is a device that supports the strings on a stringed musical instrument and transmits the vibration of those strings to another structural component of the instrument—typically a soundboard, such as the top of a guitar or violin—which transfers the sound to the surrounding air. Depending on the instrument, the bridge may be made of carved wood (violin family instruments, acoustic guitars and some jazz guitars), metal (electric guitars such as the Fender Telecaster) or other materials.
Alarm managementAlarm management is the application of human factors and ergonomics along with instrumentation engineering and systems thinking to manage the design of an alarm system to increase its usability. Most often the major usability problem is that there are too many alarms annunciated in a plant upset, commonly referred to as alarm flood (similar to an interrupt storm), since it is so similar to a flood caused by excessive rainfall input with a basically fixed drainage output capacity.
