Atlas

An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets (and their satellites) in the Solar System. Furthermore, atlases of anatomy exist, mapping out the human body or other organisms. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic features and political boundaries, many atlases often feature geopolitical, social, religious and economic statistics. They also have information about the map and places in it.

Etymology

The word atlas dates from 1636, first in reference to the English translation of Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi (1585) by Flemish geographer Gerhardus Mercator, who might have been the first to use this word in this way. A picture of the Titan Atlas holding up the world appeared on the frontispiece of this and other early map collections.

History

The first work that contained systematically arranged woodcut maps of uniform size, intended to be published in a book, thus representing the first modern atlas, was De Summa totius Orbis (1524–26) by the 16th-century Italian cartographer Pietro Coppo. Nonetheless, this distinction is conventionally awarded to the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius who in 1570 published the collection of maps Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

Atlas (computer)

The Atlas Computer was a joint development between the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and Plessey. The first Atlas, installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962, was one of the world's first supercomputers, considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at that time. It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. It was a second-generation machine, using discrete germanium transistors. Two other Atlas machines were built: one for British Petroleum and the University of London, and one for the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton near Oxford.

A derivative system was built by Ferranti for Cambridge University. Called the Titan, or Atlas 2, it had a different memory organisation and ran a time-sharing operating system developed by Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. Two further Atlas 2s were delivered: one to the CAD Centre in Cambridge (later called CADCentre, then AVEVA), and the other to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), Aldermaston.

Atlas (topology)

In mathematics, particularly topology, one describes a manifold using an atlas. An atlas consists of individual charts that, roughly speaking, describe individual regions of the manifold. If the manifold is the surface of the Earth, then an atlas has its more common meaning. In general, the notion of atlas underlies the formal definition of a manifold and related structures such as vector bundles and other fibre bundles.

Charts

The definition of an atlas depends on the notion of a chart. A chart for a topological space M (also called a coordinate chart, coordinate patch, coordinate map, or local frame) is a homeomorphism from an open subset U of M to an open subset of Euclidean space. The chart is traditionally recorded as the ordered pair .

Formal definition of atlas

An atlas for a topological space M is a collection of charts on M such that . If the codomain of each chart is the n-dimensional Euclidean space and the atlas is connected, then M is said to be an n-dimensional manifold.

Guide (software company)

Guide is a Miami, Florida based technology startup company developing a newsreader app that translates text from online news sources, blogs and social media streams into streaming audio and video. The company's apps include animal character readers.The company was founded in 2012 by chief executive officer Freddie Laker, and privately launched its mobile app in alpha in February 2013.

Guide app

Guide is a visual newsreader app for personal computers, mobile devices and Smart TV, which uses text-to-speech and avatar technologies to turn text-based online news, blogs and social media updates into video content. These technologies allow Guide to turn articles into news program-style episodes, incorporating video or images from the original source, while the text content of the article or blog post is read aloud by a virtual news anchor. The app creates a "channel" for each site or news source, within which individual blog posts or news articles are separate episodes.

Guide allows users to choose from three different virtual news anchors in the base application, and the company has stated it will offer additional avatars and newsroom backgrounds for purchase. An alpha version of the app, for iPad only, was privately released on February 8, 2013.

Compendium

A compendium (plural: compendia) is a concise compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern a specific field of human interest or endeavour (for example: hydrogeology, logology, ichthyology, phytosociology or myrmecology), while a general encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of all human knowledge.

The word compendium arrives from the Latin word "compenso", meaning "to weigh together or balance". The 21st century has seen the rise of democratized, online compendia in various fields.

Examples

An example would be the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a concise 598-question-and-answer book which summarises the teachings of the Catholic Faith and Morals.

The Bible is another example of a compendium - a group of many writings of the prophets and apostles over a period of time, whose books are put together to form the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Some well known literary figures have written their own compendium. An example would be Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and an enthusiastic gourmand. His compendium on food titled From Absinthe to Zest serves as an alphabet for food lovers.

GUIDE International

GUIDE (Guidance of Users of Integrated Data-Processing Equipment) was a users' group for users of IBM computer systems.

GUIDE was formed in 1956; it was incorporated in 1970 as a non-profit organization under the name of GUIDE International Corporation. At its peak GUIDE had a membership of around 2,000 companies and institutions.

In 1994 in Europe GUIDE merged with the European arm of SHARE, another major IBM users' group forming GSE (Guide Share Europe).

In the US GUIDE ceased operation in September 1999. Although the groups did not merge, many of GUIDE's activities and projects were taken over by SHARE, and GUIDE suggested to its members that they join SHARE. In August 2000, SHARE took over the guide.org domain name.

See also

References

External links