Sunday, November 25, 2007

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any contrived (i.e. artificial) system. The term is often applied to common purpose computers and also in the field of scientific investigation into the theory and practical application of AI. "AI" the name is often used in works of science fiction to refer to that which exhibits artificial intelligence as well, as in "the AI" referring to a singular discrete or distributed mechanism. Modern AI research is disturbed with producing useful machines to automate human tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include: scheduling resources such as military units, answering questions about products for customers, thoughtful and transcribing speech, and recognizing faces in CCTV cameras.

As such, it has become an engineering control, focused on providing solutions to practical problems. AI methods were used to plan units in the first Gulf War, and the costs saved by this efficiency have repaid the US government's entire investment in AI research since the 1950s. AI systems are now in routine use in many businesses, hospitals and military units approximately the world, as well as being built into many common home computer software applications and video games. (See Raj Reddy's AAAI paper for a complete review of real-world AI systems in deployment today.) AI methods are often employed in cognitive science research, which openly tries to model subsystems of human cognition.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

camera

A camera is a mechanism used to take pictures, either singly or in sequence, with or without sound, such as with video cameras. The name is derivative from camera obscura, Latin for "dark chamber", an early mechanism for projecting images in which an entire room functioned much as the interior workings of a modern photographic camera, except there was no way at this time to record the image short of manually tracing it. Cameras may work with the visual range or other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Every camera consists of some type of enclosed chamber, with an opening or space at one end for light to enter, and a recording or viewing surface for capturing the light at the other end. This distance of the aperture is often controlled by an diaphragm mechanism, but some cameras have a fixed-size aperture.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Seedless fruits

Seedlessness is an imperative feature of some fruits of commerce. Profitable cultivars of bananas and pineapples are examples of seedless fruits. Some cultivars of citrus fruits (especially navel oranges and mandarin oranges), table grapes, grapefruit, and watermelons are esteemed for their seedlessness. In some species, seedlessness is the result of parthenocarpy, where fruits locate without fertilization. Parthenocarpic fruit situate may or may not require pollination. Most seedless citrus fruits want a pollination stimulus; bananas and pineapples do not. Seedlessness in table grapes domino effect from the abortion of the embryonic plant that is produced by fertilization, a phenomenon known as stenospermocarpy which requires normal pollination and fertilization.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Multiple fruit

A multiple fruit is one formed from a group of flowers (called an inflorescence). Each flower produces a fruit, but these adult into a single mass. Examples of multiple fruit is the pineapple, edible fig, mulberry, osage-orange, and breadfruit.In a few plants, such as this noni, flowers are produced repeatedly along the stem and it is possible to see together examples of flowering, fruit development, and fruit ripening.

In the photograph on the right, stages of flowering and fruit development in the noni or Indian mulberry (Morinda citrifolia) can be observed on a single branch. First an inflorescence of white flowers called a top is produced. After fertilization, each flower develops into a drupe, and as the drupes expand, they develop into connate (merge) into a multiple fleshy fruit called a syncarpet.