DemographyDemography () is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings. Demographic analysis examines and measures the dimensions and dynamics of populations; it can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as education, nationality, religion, and ethnicity. Educational institutions usually treat demography as a field of sociology, though there are a number of independent demography departments.
British Doctors StudyThe British Doctors' Study was a prospective cohort study which ran from 1951 to 2001, and in 1956 provided convincing statistical proof that tobacco smoking increased the risk of lung cancer. Although there had been suspicions of a link between smoking and various diseases, the evidence for this link had been largely circumstantial. In fact, smoking had been advertised as "healthy" for many years, and there had been no clear explanation why rates of lung cancer had soared.
DesignA design is a concept of either an object, a process, or a system that is specific and, in most cases, detailed. Design refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, though it is sometimes used to refer to the nature of something. The verb to design expresses the process of developing a design. In some cases, the direct construction of an object without an explicit prior plan may also be considered to be a design (such as in some artwork and craftwork).
Population dynamicsPopulation dynamics is the type of mathematics used to model and study the size and age composition of populations as dynamical systems. Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical biology, which has a history of more than 220 years, although over the last century the scope of mathematical biology has greatly expanded. The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the Malthusian growth model.
Transformational grammarIn linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations (called transformations) to produce new sentences from existing ones. The method is commonly associated with American linguist Noam Chomsky.
Demographic transitionIn demography, demographic transition is a phenomenon and theory which refers to the historical shift from high birth rates and high death rates in societies with minimal technology, education (especially of women) and economic development, to low birth rates and low death rates in societies with advanced technology, education and economic development, as well as the stages between these two scenarios.
EnergiewendeThe Energiewende (ʔɛnɐˈɡiːˌvɛndə) is the ongoing transition by Germany to a low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply. The new system intends to rely heavily on renewable energy (particularly wind, photovoltaics, and hydroelectricity), energy efficiency, and energy demand management. The last nuclear power plants were shut down in 2023; all existing coal-fired generation will be retired by 2038.
Scale spaceScale-space theory is a framework for multi-scale signal representation developed by the computer vision, and signal processing communities with complementary motivations from physics and biological vision. It is a formal theory for handling image structures at different scales, by representing an image as a one-parameter family of smoothed images, the scale-space representation, parametrized by the size of the smoothing kernel used for suppressing fine-scale structures.
Scale space implementationIn the areas of computer vision, and signal processing, the notion of scale-space representation is used for processing measurement data at multiple scales, and specifically enhance or suppress image features over different ranges of scale (see the article on scale space). A special type of scale-space representation is provided by the Gaussian scale space, where the image data in N dimensions is subjected to smoothing by Gaussian convolution.
Environmental sociologyEnvironmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems. Environmental sociology emerged as a subfield of sociology in the late 1970s in response to the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s.