text:
IMF (disambiguation)

The IMF, or International Monetary Fund is an international organization.

IMF may also refer to:

Entertainment

 * Impossible Missions Force, a fictional secret espionage agency in the Mission: Impossible television and film series
 * International Music Feed, a music video television network
 * Internationale Medien und Film, see Intermedia (company)

Science and technology

 * Immunofluorescence Labeling, a method used in immunology and cytology
 * Individual Master File, the system used by the IRS to process tax transactions
 * Inframammary fold, in anatomy
 * Intern in Marriage and Family Therapy
 * Initial mass function, in stellar astronomy
 * Intelligent Message Filter, a Microsoft anti-spam technology for Exchange/Outlook
 * Intermolecular forces, non-bonding electrostatic forces between molecules
 * Interoperable Master Format, a file-based format standardized by SMPTE for finished audio-visual masters, including movies, episodic content, advertisements, and shorts
 * Interplanetary magnetic field, in space
 * Intramuscular fat, in anatomy

Other uses

 * International Myeloma Foundation, a non-profit serving patients with a cancer of plasma cells in the bone marrow
 * International Metalworkers' Federation, a global union federation
 * Internationale Maifestspiele Wiesbaden, International May Festival
 * Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme, aka International Motorcycling Federation
 * Indian Mountaineering Foundation, a national body organising high-altitude expeditions in the Himalayas

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: IMF (disambiguation)


text:
Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. It is related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field, which is an organizational unit that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions emerge. Large engineering teams are usually interdisciplinary, as a power station or mobile phone or other project requires the melding of several specialties. However, the term "interdisciplinary" is sometimes confined to academic settings.

The term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies—along with their specific perspectives—in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of HIV/AIDS or global warming requires understanding of diverse disciplines to solve complex problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies. Interdisciplinarity can likewise be applied to complex subjects that can only be understood by combining the perspectives of two or more fields.

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.

Development
Although "interdisciplinary" and "interdisciplinarity" are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy. Julie Thompson Klein attests that "the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge", while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy) to further understand their own material. The building of Roman roads required men who understood surveying, material science, logistics and several other disciplines. Any broadminded humanist project involves interdisciplinarity, and history shows a crowd of cases, as seventeenth-century Leibniz's task to create a system of universal justice, which required linguistics, economics, management, ethics, law philosophy, politics, and even sinology.

Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology paid little attention to the social analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined science, technology and society programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as nanotechnology, which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include quantum information processing, an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science, and bioinformatics, combining molecular biology with computer science. Sustainable development as a research area deals with problems requiring analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres; often an integration of multiple social and natural science disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is also key to the study of health sciences, for example in studying optimal solutions to diseases. Some institutions of higher education offer accredited degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies.

At another level, interdisciplinarity is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization and isolation in information silos. On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another.

Barriers
Because most participants in interdisciplinary ventures were trained in traditional disciplines, they must learn to appreciate differences of perspectives and methods. For example, a discipline that places more emphasis on quantitative rigor may produce practitioners who are more scientific in their training than others; in turn, colleagues in "softer" disciplines who may associate quantitative approaches with difficulty grasp the broader dimensions of a problem and lower rigor in theoretical and qualitative argumentation. An interdisciplinary program may not succeed if its members remain stuck in their disciplines (and in disciplinary attitudes). Those who lack experience in interdisciplinary collaborations may also not fully appreciate the intellectual contribution of colleagues from those discipline. From the disciplinary perspective, however, much interdisciplinary work may be seen as "soft", lacking in rigor, or ideologically motivated; these beliefs place barriers in the career paths of those who choose interdisciplinary work. For example, interdisciplinary grant applications are often refereed by peer reviewers drawn from established disciplines; interdisciplinary researchers may experience difficulty getting funding for their research. In addition, untenured researchers know that, when they seek promotion and tenure, it is likely that some of the evaluators will lack commitment to interdisciplinarity. They may fear that making a commitment to interdisciplinary research will increase the risk of being denied tenure.

Interdisciplinary programs may also fail if they are not given sufficient autonomy. For example, interdisciplinary faculty are usually recruited to a joint appointment, with responsibilities in both an interdisciplinary program (such as women's studies) and a traditional discipline (such as history). If the traditional discipline makes the tenure decisions, new interdisciplinary faculty will be hesitant to commit themselves fully to interdisciplinary work. Other barriers include the generally disciplinary orientation of most scholarly journals, leading to the perception, if not the fact, that interdisciplinary research is hard to publish. In addition, since traditional budgetary practices at most universities channel resources through the disciplines, it becomes difficult to account for a given scholar or teacher's salary and time. During periods of budgetary contraction, the natural tendency to serve the primary constituency (i.e., students majoring in the traditional discipline) makes resources scarce for teaching and research comparatively far from the center of the discipline as traditionally understood. For these same reasons, the introduction of new interdisciplinary programs is often resisted because it is perceived as a competition for diminishing funds.

Due to these and other barriers, interdisciplinary research areas are strongly motivated to become disciplines themselves. If they succeed, they can establish their own research funding programs and make their own tenure and promotion decisions. In so doing, they lower the risk of entry. Examples of former interdisciplinary research areas that have become disciplines, many of them named for their parent disciplines, include neuroscience, cybernetics, biochemistry and biomedical engineering. These new fields are occasionally referred to as "interdisciplines". On the other hand, even though interdisciplinary activities are now a focus of attention for institutions promoting learning and teaching, as well as organizational and social entities concerned with education, they are practically facing complex barriers, serious challenges and criticism. The most important obstacles and challenges faced by interdisciplinary activities in the past two decades can be divided into "professional", "organizational", and "cultural" obstacles.

Interdisciplinary studies and studies of interdisciplinarity
An initial distinction should be made between interdisciplinary studies, which can be found spread across the academy today, and the study of interdisciplinarity, which involves a much smaller group of researchers. The former is instantiated in thousands of research centers across the US and the world. The latter has one US organization, the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (founded in 1979), two international organizations, the International Network of Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (founded in 2010) and the Philosophy of/as Interdisciplinarity Network (founded in 2009). The US's research institute devoted to the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas, was founded in 2008 but is closed as of 1 September 2014, the result of administrative decisions at the University of North Texas.

An interdisciplinary study is an academic program or process seeking to synthesize broad perspectives, knowledge, skills, interconnections, and epistemology in an educational setting. Interdisciplinary programs may be founded in order to facilitate the study of subjects which have some coherence, but which cannot be adequately understood from a single disciplinary perspective (for example, women's studies or medieval studies). More rarely, and at a more advanced level, interdisciplinarity may itself become the focus of study, in a critique of institutionalized disciplines' ways of segmenting knowledge.

In contrast, studies of interdisciplinarity raise to self-consciousness questions about how interdisciplinarity works, the nature and history of disciplinarity, and the future of knowledge in post-industrial society. Researchers at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity have made the distinction between philosophy 'of' and 'as' interdisciplinarity, the former identifying a new, discrete area within philosophy that raises epistemological and metaphysical questions about the status of interdisciplinary thinking, with the latter pointing toward a philosophical practice that is sometimes called 'field philosophy'.

Perhaps the most common complaint regarding interdisciplinary programs, by supporters and detractors alike, is the lack of synthesis—that is, students are provided with multiple disciplinary perspectives but are not given effective guidance in resolving the conflicts and achieving a coherent view of the subject. Others have argued that the very idea of synthesis or integration of disciplines presupposes questionable politico-epistemic commitments. Critics of interdisciplinary programs feel that the ambition is simply unrealistic, given the knowledge and intellectual maturity of all but the exceptional undergraduate; some defenders concede the difficulty, but insist that cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind, even at that level, is both possible and essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions.

While much has been written on the philosophy and promise of interdisciplinarity in academic programs and professional practice, social scientists are increasingly interrogating academic discourses on interdisciplinarity, as well as how interdisciplinarity actually works—and does not—in practice. Some have shown, for example, that some interdisciplinary enterprises that aim to serve society can produce deleterious outcomes for which no one can be held to account.

Politics of interdisciplinary studies
Since 1998, there has been an ascendancy in the value of interdisciplinary research and teaching and a growth in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded at U.S. universities classified as multi- or interdisciplinary studies. The number of interdisciplinary bachelor's degrees awarded annually rose from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 a year by 2005 according to data from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NECS). In addition, educational leaders from the Boyer Commission to Carnegie's President Vartan Gregorian to Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have advocated for interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary approaches to problem-solving in the 21st century. This has been echoed by federal funding agencies, particularly the National Institutes of Health under the direction of Elias Zerhouni, who has advocated that grant proposals be framed more as interdisciplinary collaborative projects than single-researcher, single-discipline ones.

At the same time, many thriving longstanding bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies programs in existence for 30 or more years, have been closed down, in spite of healthy enrollment. Examples include Arizona International (formerly part of the University of Arizona), the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University, and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University; others such as the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, and George Mason University's New Century College, have been cut back. Stuart Henry has seen this trend as part of the hegemony of the disciplines in their attempt to recolonize the experimental knowledge production of otherwise marginalized fields of inquiry. This is due to threat perceptions seemingly based on the ascendancy of interdisciplinary studies against traditional academia.

Examples

 * Communication science: Communication studies takes up theories, models, concepts, etc. of other, independent disciplines such as sociology, political science and economics and thus decisively develops them.
 * Environmental science: Environmental science is an interdisciplinary earth science aimed at addressing environmental issues such as global warming and pollution, and involves the use of a wide range of scientific disciplines including geology, chemistry, physics, ecology, and oceanography. Faculty members of environmental programs often collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to solve complex global environmental problems. Those who study areas of environmental policy such as environmental law, sustainability, and environmental justice, may also seek knowledge in the environmental sciences to better develop their expertise and understanding in their fields.
 * Knowledge management: Knowledge management discipline exists as a cluster of divergent schools of thought under an overarching knowledge management umbrella by building on works in computer science, economics, human resource management, information systems, organizational behavior, philosophy, psychology, and strategic management.
 * Materials science: Field that combines the scientific and engineering aspects of materials, particularly solids. It covers the design, discovery and application of new materials by incorporating elements of physics, chemistry, and engineering.
 * Permaculture: A holistic design science that provides a framework for making design decisions in any sphere of human endeavor, but especially in land use and resource security.
 * Provenance research: Interdisciplinary research comes into play when clarifying the path of artworks into public and private art collections and also in relation to human remains in natural history collections.
 * Sports science: Sport science is an interdisciplinary science that researches the problems and manifestations in the field of sport and movement in cooperation with a number of other sciences, such as sociology, ethics, biology, medicine, biomechanics or pedagogy.
 * Transport sciences: Transport sciences are a field of science that deals with the relevant problems and events of the world of transport and cooperates with the specialised legal, ecological, technical, psychological or pedagogical disciplines in working out the changes of place of people, goods, messages that characterise them.
 * Venture research: Venture research is an interdisciplinary research area located in the human sciences that deals with the conscious entering into and experiencing of borderline situations. For this purpose, the findings of evolutionary theory, cultural anthropology, social sciences, behavioral research, differential psychology, ethics or pedagogy are cooperatively processed and evaluated.

Historical examples
There are many examples of when a particular idea, almost on the same period, arises in different disciplines. One case is the shift from the approach of focusing on "specialized segments of attention" (adopting one particular perspective), to the idea of "instant sensory awareness of the whole", an attention to the "total field", a "sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of structure and configuration". This has happened in painting (with cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. According to Marshall McLuhan, this paradigm shift was due to the passage from an era shaped by mechanization, which brought sequentiality, to the era shaped by the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.

Efforts to simplify and defend the concept
An article in the Social Science Journal attempts to provide a simple, common-sense, definition of interdisciplinarity, bypassing the difficulties of defining that concept and obviating the need for such related concepts as transdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and multidisciplinary:

"To begin with, a discipline can be conveniently defined as any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community of experts. Interdisciplinarity is best seen as bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines. In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary research combines components of two or more disciplines in the search or creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education merges components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction. Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, research, or education as its main objects of study."

In turn, interdisciplinary richness of any two instances of knowledge, research, or education can be ranked by weighing four variables: number of disciplines involved, the "distance" between them, the novelty of any particular combination, and their extent of integration.

Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are important because:

 * 1) "Creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge.
 * 2) Immigrants often make important contributions to their new field.
 * 3) Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar with two or more disciplines.
 * 4) Some worthwhile topics of research fall in the interstices among the traditional disciplines.
 * 5) Many intellectual, social, and practical problems require interdisciplinary approaches.
 * 6) Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind us of the unity-of-knowledge ideal.
 * 7) Interdisciplinarians enjoy greater flexibility in their research.
 * 8) More so than narrow disciplinarians, interdisciplinarians often treat themselves to the intellectual equivalent of traveling in new lands.
 * 9) Interdisciplinarians may help breach communication gaps in the modern academy, thereby helping to mobilize its enormous intellectual resources in the cause of greater social rationality and justice.
 * 10) By bridging fragmented disciplines, interdisciplinarians might play a role in the defense of academic freedom."

Quotations
"'The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories: the Greek instinct was the opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole [...]. The Olympic games were designed to test the arete of the whole man, not a merely specialized skill [...]. The great event was the pentathlon, if you won this, you were a man. Needless to say, the Marathon race was never heard of until modern times: the Greeks would have regarded it as a monstrosity.'"

"'Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is 'a scientist,' and 'knows' very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.'"

"'It is the custom among those who are called 'practical' men to condemn any man capable of a wide survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless he ignores or does not know nine-tenths of the most important relevant facts.'"

title: Interdisciplinarity


text:
Insertion sort

Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. However, insertion sort provides several advantages:

 * Simple implementation: Jon Bentley shows a three-line C/C++ version that is five lines when optimized.
 * Efficient for (quite) small data sets, much like other quadratic (i.e., O(n2)) sorting algorithms
 * More efficient in practice than most other simple quadratic algorithms such as selection sort or bubble sort
 * Adaptive, i.e., efficient for data sets that are already substantially sorted: the time complexity is O(kn) when each element in the input is no more than $k$ places away from its sorted position
 * Stable; i.e., does not change the relative order of elements with equal keys
 * In-place; i.e., only requires a constant amount O(1) of additional memory space
 * Online; i.e., can sort a list as it receives it

When people manually sort cards in a bridge hand, most use a method that is similar to insertion sort.

Algorithm

Insertion sort iterates, consuming one input element each repetition, and grows a sorted output list. At each iteration, insertion sort removes one element from the input data, finds the location it belongs within the sorted list, and inserts it there. It repeats until no input elements remain.

Sorting is typically done in-place, by iterating up the array, growing the sorted list behind it. At each array-position, it checks the value there against the largest value in the sorted list (which happens to be next to it, in the previous array-position checked). If larger, it leaves the element in place and moves to the next. If smaller, it finds the correct position within the sorted list, shifts all the larger values up to make a space, and inserts into that correct position.

The resulting array after k iterations has the property where the first k + 1 entries are sorted ("+1" because the first entry is skipped). In each iteration the first remaining entry of the input is removed, and inserted into the result at the correct position, thus extending the result:

becomes

with each element greater than x copied to the right as it is compared against x.

The most common variant of insertion sort, which operates on arrays, can be described as follows:
 * 1) Suppose there exists a function called Insert designed to insert a value into a sorted sequence at the beginning of an array. It operates by beginning at the end of the sequence and shifting each element one place to the right until a suitable position is found for the new element. The function has the side effect of overwriting the value stored immediately after the sorted sequence in the array.
 * 2) To perform an insertion sort, begin at the left-most element of the array and invoke Insert to insert each element encountered into its correct position. The ordered sequence into which the element is inserted is stored at the beginning of the array in the set of indices already examined. Each insertion overwrites a single value: the value being inserted.

Pseudocode of the complete algorithm follows, where the arrays are zero-based:

i ← 1 while i < length(A) j ← i    while j > 0 and A[j-1] > A[j] swap A[j] and A[j-1] j ← j - 1 end while i ← i + 1 end while

The outer loop runs over all the elements except the first one, because the single-element prefix  is trivially sorted, so the invariant that the first   entries are sorted is true from the start. The inner loop moves element  to its correct place so that after the loop, the first   elements are sorted. Note that the -operator in the test must use short-circuit evaluation, otherwise the test might result in an array bounds error, when   and it tries to evaluate   (i.e. accessing   fails).

After expanding the  operation in-place as   (where   is a temporary variable), a slightly faster version can be produced that moves   to its position in one go and only performs one assignment in the inner loop body:

i ← 1 while i < length(A) x ← A[i] j ← i    while j > 0 and A[j-1] > x         A[j] ← A[j-1] j ← j - 1 end while A[j] ← x     i ← i + 1 end while

The new inner loop shifts elements to the right to clear a spot for.

The algorithm can also be implemented in a recursive way. The recursion just replaces the outer loop, calling itself and storing successively smaller values of n on the stack until n equals 0, where the function then returns up the call chain to execute the code after each recursive call starting with n equal to 1, with n increasing by 1 as each instance of the function returns to the prior instance. The initial call would be insertionSortR(A, length(A)-1).

function insertionSortR(array A, int n)    if n > 0 insertionSortR(A, n-1) x ← A[n] j ← n-1 while j >= 0 and A[j] > x            A[j+1] ← A[j] j ← j-1 end while A[j+1] ← x    end if end function

It does not make the code any shorter, it also does not reduce the execution time, but it increases the additional memory consumption from $O(1)$ to $O(N)$ (at the deepest level of recursion the stack contains $N$ references to the A array, each with accompanying value of variable n from $N$ down to 1).

Best, worst, and average cases
The best case input is an array that is already sorted. In this case insertion sort has a linear running time (i.e., O(n)). During each iteration, the first remaining element of the input is only compared with the right-most element of the sorted subsection of the array.

The simplest worst case input is an array sorted in reverse order. The set of all worst case inputs consists of all arrays where each element is the smallest or second-smallest of the elements before it. In these cases every iteration of the inner loop will scan and shift the entire sorted subsection of the array before inserting the next element. This gives insertion sort a quadratic running time (i.e., O(n2)).

The average case is also quadratic, which makes insertion sort impractical for sorting large arrays. However, insertion sort is one of the fastest algorithms for sorting very small arrays, even faster than quicksort; indeed, good quicksort implementations use insertion sort for arrays smaller than a certain threshold, also when arising as subproblems; the exact threshold must be determined experimentally and depends on the machine, but is commonly around ten.

Example: The following table shows the steps for sorting the sequence {3, 7, 4, 9, 5, 2, 6, 1}. In each step, the key under consideration is underlined. The key that was moved (or left in place because it was the biggest yet considered) in the previous step is marked with an asterisk.

3 7  4  9  5  2  6  1 3* 7  4  9  5  2  6  1 3  7* 4  9  5  2  6  1 3  4* 7  9  5  2  6  1 3  4  7  9* 5  2  6  1 3  4  5* 7  9  2  6  1 2* 3  4  5  7  9  6  1 2  3  4  5  6* 7  9  1  1* 2  3  4  5  6  7  9

Relation to other sorting algorithms
Insertion sort is very similar to selection sort. As in selection sort, after k passes through the array, the first k elements are in sorted order. However, the fundamental difference between the two algorithms is that insertion sort scans backwards from the current key, while selection sort scans forwards. This results in selection sort making the first k elements the k smallest elements of the unsorted input, while in insertion sort they are simply the first k elements of the input.

The primary advantage of insertion sort over selection sort is that selection sort must always scan all remaining elements to find the absolute smallest element in the unsorted portion of the list, while insertion sort requires only a single comparison when the (k + 1)-st element is greater than the k-th element; when this is frequently true (such as if the input array is already sorted or partially sorted), insertion sort is distinctly more efficient compared to selection sort. On average (assuming the rank of the (k + 1)-st element rank is random), insertion sort will require comparing and shifting half of the previous k elements, meaning that insertion sort will perform about half as many comparisons as selection sort on average.

In the worst case for insertion sort (when the input array is reverse-sorted), insertion sort performs just as many comparisons as selection sort. However, a disadvantage of insertion sort over selection sort is that it requires more writes due to the fact that, on each iteration, inserting the (k + 1)-st element into the sorted portion of the array requires many element swaps to shift all of the following elements, while only a single swap is required for each iteration of selection sort. In general, insertion sort will write to the array O(n2) times, whereas selection sort will write only O($n$) times. For this reason selection sort may be preferable in cases where writing to memory is significantly more expensive than reading, such as with EEPROM or flash memory.

While some divide-and-conquer algorithms such as quicksort and mergesort outperform insertion sort for larger arrays, non-recursive sorting algorithms such as insertion sort or selection sort are generally faster for very small arrays (the exact size varies by environment and implementation, but is typically between 7 and 50 elements). Therefore, a useful optimization in the implementation of those algorithms is a hybrid approach, using the simpler algorithm when the array has been divided to a small size.

Variants
D.L. Shell made substantial improvements to the algorithm; the modified version is called Shell sort. The sorting algorithm compares elements separated by a distance that decreases on each pass. Shell sort has distinctly improved running times in practical work, with two simple variants requiring O(n3/2) and O(n4/3) running time.

If the cost of comparisons exceeds the cost of swaps, as is the case for example with string keys stored by reference or with human interaction (such as choosing one of a pair displayed side-by-side), then using binary insertion sort may yield better performance. Binary insertion sort employs a binary search to determine the correct location to insert new elements, and therefore performs ⌈log2 n⌉ comparisons in the worst case. When each element in the array is searched for and inserted this is O(n log n). The algorithm as a whole still has a running time of O(n2) on average because of the series of swaps required for each insertion.

The number of swaps can be reduced by calculating the position of multiple elements before moving them. For example, if the target position of two elements is calculated before they are moved into the proper position, the number of swaps can be reduced by about 25% for random data. In the extreme case, this variant works similar to merge sort.

A variant named binary merge sort uses a binary insertion sort to sort groups of 32 elements, followed by a final sort using merge sort. It combines the speed of insertion sort on small data sets with the speed of merge sort on large data sets.

To avoid having to make a series of swaps for each insertion, the input could be stored in a linked list, which allows elements to be spliced into or out of the list in constant time when the position in the list is known. However, searching a linked list requires sequentially following the links to the desired position: a linked list does not have random access, so it cannot use a faster method such as binary search. Therefore, the running time required for searching is O(n), and the time for sorting is O(n2). If a more sophisticated data structure (e.g., heap or binary tree) is used, the time required for searching and insertion can be reduced significantly; this is the essence of heap sort and binary tree sort.

In 2006 Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, and Mosteiro published a new variant of insertion sort called library sort or gapped insertion sort that leaves a small number of unused spaces (i.e., "gaps") spread throughout the array. The benefit is that insertions need only shift elements over until a gap is reached. The authors show that this sorting algorithm runs with high probability in O(n log n) time.

If a skip list is used, the insertion time is brought down to O(log n), and swaps are not needed because the skip list is implemented on a linked list structure. The final running time for insertion would be O(n log n).

List insertion sort code in C
If the items are stored in a linked list, then the list can be sorted with O(1) additional space. The algorithm starts with an initially empty (and therefore trivially sorted) list. The input items are taken off the list one at a time, and then inserted in the proper place in the sorted list. When the input list is empty, the sorted list has the desired result.

The algorithm below uses a trailing pointer for the insertion into the sorted list. A simpler recursive method rebuilds the list each time (rather than splicing) and can use O(n) stack space.

title: Insertion sort


text:
Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word ignoble.

Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the Ig Nobel Prizes are presented by Nobel laureates in a ceremony at the Sanders Theater at Harvard University, and are followed by the winners' public lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

History
The Ig Nobels were created in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, who has been the master of ceremonies at all awards ceremonies. Awards were presented at that time for discoveries "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced". Ten prizes are awarded each year in many categories, including the Nobel Prize categories of physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, economics, and peace, but also other categories such as public health, engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary research. The Ig Nobel Prizes recognize genuine achievements, with the exception of three prizes awarded in the first year to fictitious scientists Josiah S. Carberry, Paul DeFanti, and Thomas Kyle.

The awards are sometimes criticism via satire, as in the two awards given for homeopathy research, prizes in "science education" to the Kansas State Department of Education and Colorado State Board of Education for their stance regarding the teaching of evolution, and the prize awarded to Social Text after the Sokal affair. Most often, however, they draw attention to scientific articles that have some humorous or unexpected aspect. Examples range from the discovery that the presence of humans tends to sexually arouse ostriches, to the statement that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements for being the location of Hell, to research on the "five-second rule", a tongue-in-cheek belief that food dropped on the floor will not become contaminated if it is picked up within five seconds.

Sir Andre Geim, who had been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for levitating a frog by magnetism, was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for his work with the electromagnetic properties of graphene. He is the only individual, as of 2023, to have received both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel.

Ceremony
The prizes are mostly presented by Nobel laureates, originally at a ceremony in a lecture hall at MIT but since 1994 in the Sanders Theater at Harvard University. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 event was held fully online. The event contains a number of running jokes, including Miss Sweetie Poo, a little girl who repeatedly cries out, "Please stop: I'm bored", in a high-pitched voice if speakers go on too long. The awards ceremony is traditionally closed with the words: "If you didn't win a prize—and especially if you did—better luck next year!"

The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard–Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard–Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

Throwing paper planes onto the stage is a long-standing tradition. For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official "Keeper of the Broom". Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards because he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.

The "Parade of Ignitaries" into the hall includes supporting groups. At the 1997 ceremonies, a team of "cryogenic sex researchers" distributed a pamphlet titled "Safe Sex at Four Kelvin." Delegates from the Museum of Bad Art are often on hand to display some pieces from their collection.

Outreach
The ceremony is recorded and broadcast on National Public Radio in the US and is shown live over the Internet. The recording is broadcast each year, on the Friday after US Thanksgiving, on the public radio program Science Friday. In recognition of this, the audience chants the name of the radio show's host, Ira Flatow.

Two books have been published with write-ups on some winners: The Ig Nobel Prize and The Ig Nobel Prize 2, the latter of which was later retitled The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself.

An Ig Nobel Tour has been an annual part of National Science week in the United Kingdom since 2003. The tour has also traveled to Australia several times, Aarhus University in Denmark in April 2009, Italy and the Netherlands.

Reception
A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs. For instance, in 2006, a study showing that one of the malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology. As a direct result of these findings, traps baited with this cheese have been placed in strategic locations in some parts of Africa to combat the epidemic of malaria. Andre Geim, before sharing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on graphene, shared the Physics Ig Nobel in 2000 with Michael Berry for the magnetic levitation of a frog, which by 2022 was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility.

title: Ig Nobel Prize


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Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (29 May 1860 – 18 May 1909) was a Spanish virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor. He is one of the foremost composers of the Post-Romantic era who also had a significant influence on his contemporaries and younger composers. He is best known for his piano works based on Spanish folk music idioms. Isaac Albéniz was close to the Generation of '98.

Transcriptions of many of his pieces, such as Asturias (Leyenda), Granada, Sevilla, Cadiz, Córdoba, Cataluña, Mallorca, and Tango in D, are important pieces for classical guitar, though he never composed for the guitar. Some of Albéniz's personal papers are held in the Library of Catalonia.

Life

Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz (a customs official) and his wife, Maria de los Dolores Pascual, Albéniz was a child prodigy who first performed at the age of four. At age seven, after apparently taking lessons from Antoine François Marmontel, he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Conservatoire de Paris, but he was refused admission because he was believed to be too young. By the time he had reached 12, he had made many attempts to run away from home.

His concert career began at the age of nine when his father toured both Isaac and his sister, Clementina, throughout northern Spain. A popular myth is that at the age of twelve Albéniz stowed away in a ship bound for Buenos Aires. He then found himself in Cuba, then in the United States, giving concerts in New York and San Francisco and then travelled to Liverpool, London and Leipzig. By age 15, he had already given concerts worldwide. This story is not entirely false, Albéniz did travel the world as a performer; however, he was accompanied by his father, who as a customs agent was required to travel frequently. This can be attested by comparing Isaac's concert dates with his father's travel itinerary.

In 1876, after a short stay at the Leipzig Conservatory, he went to study at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels after King Alfonso's personal secretary, Guillermo Morphy, obtained him a royal grant. Count Morphy thought highly of Albéniz, who would later dedicate Sevilla to Morphy's wife when it premiered in Paris in January 1886.

In 1880 Albéniz went to Budapest, Hungary, to study with Franz Liszt, only to find out that Liszt was in Weimar, Germany.

In 1883 he met the teacher and composer Felip Pedrell, who inspired him to write Spanish music such as the Chants d'Espagne. The first movement (Prelude) of that suite, later retitled after the composer's death as Asturias (Leyenda), is now part of the classical guitar repertoire, even though it was originally composed for piano. Many of Albéniz's other compositions were also transcribed for guitar by Francisco Tárrega. At the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition, the piano manufacturer Érard sponsored a series of 20 concerts featuring Albéniz's music.

The apex of Albéniz's concert career is considered to be 1889 to 1892 when he had concert tours throughout Europe. During the 1890s Albéniz lived in London and Paris. For London he wrote some musical comedies which brought him to the attention of the wealthy Francis Money-Coutts, 5th Baron Latymer. Money-Coutts commissioned and provided him with librettos for the opera Henry Clifford and for a projected trilogy of Arthurian operas. The first of these, Merlin (1898–1902), was thought to have been lost but has recently been reconstructed and performed. Albéniz never completed Lancelot (only the first act is finished, as a vocal and piano score), and he never began Guinevere, the final part.

In 1900 he started to suffer from Bright's disease and returned to writing piano music. Between 1905 and 1908 he composed his final masterpiece, Iberia (1908), a suite of twelve piano "impressions".

In 1883 the composer married Rosina Jordana Lagarriga, daughter of the former mayor of the Gràcia district and a former student of Isaac. They had two children who lived into adulthood: Alfonso (1885–1941), who played for FC Barcelona in the early 1900s before embarking on a career as a diplomat, and Laura (1890–1944), who went on to become a renowned illustrator in the arts of drawing and painting. Another child, Enriqueta, died in infancy in 1886. His great-granddaughter is Cécilia Attias, former wife of Nicolas Sarkozy.

Albéniz died from his kidney disease on 18 May 1909 at age 48 in Cambo-les-Bains, in Labourd, south-western France. Only a few weeks before his death, the French Government bestowed upon Albéniz the Legion of Honour, its highest honour. He is buried at the Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona.

Early works
Albéniz's early works were mostly "salon style" music. His first published composition, Marcha Militar, appeared in 1868. A number of works written before this are now lost. He continued composing in traditional styles ranging from Jean-Philippe Rameau, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt until the mid-1880s. He also wrote at least five zarzuelas, of which all but two are now lost.

Perhaps the best source on the works is Albéniz himself. He is quoted as commenting on his earlier period works as:"There are among them a few things that are not completely worthless. The music is a bit infantile, plain, spirited; but in the end, the people, our Spanish people, are something of all that. I believe that the people are right when they continue to be moved by Córdoba, Mallorca, by the copla of the Sevillanas, by the Serenata, and Granada. In all of them I now note that there is less musical science, less of the grand idea, but more colour, sunlight, flavour of olives. That music of youth, with its little sins and absurdities that almost point out the sentimental affectation ... appears to me like the carvings in the Alhambra, those peculiar arabesques that say nothing with their turns and shapes, but which are like the air, like the sun, like the blackbirds or like the nightingales of its gardens. They are more valuable than all else of Moorish Spain, which though we may not like it, is the true Spain."

Middle period

During the late 1880s, the strong influence of Spanish style is evident in Albéniz's music. In 1883 Albéniz met the teacher and composer Felipe Pedrell. Pedrell was a leading figure in the development of nationalist Spanish music. In his book The Music of Spain, Gilbert Chase describes Pedrell's influence on Albéniz: "What Albéniz derived from Pedrell was above all a spiritual orientation, the realization of the wonderful values inherent in Spanish music." Felipe Pedrell inspired Albéniz to write Spanish music such as the Suite española, Op. 47, noted for its delicate, intricate melody and abrupt dynamic changes.

In addition to the Spanish spirit infused in Albéniz's music, he incorporated other qualities as well. In her biography of Albéniz, Pola Baytelman discerns four characteristics of the music from the middle period as follows:

"1. The dance rhythms of Spain, of which there are a wide variety. 2. The use of cante jondo, which means deep or profound singing. It is the most serious and moving variety of flamenco or Spanish gypsy song, often dealing with themes of death, anguish, or religion. 3. The use of exotic scales also associated with flamenco music. The Phrygian mode is the most prominent in Albéniz's music, although he also used the Aeolian and Mixolydian modes as well as the whole-tone scale. 4. The transfer of guitar idioms into piano writing."

Following his marriage, Albéniz settled in Madrid, Spain, and produced a substantial quantity of music in a relatively short period. By 1886 he had written over 50 piano pieces. Albéniz biographer Walter A. Clark says that pieces from this period received enthusiastic reception in the composer's many concerts. Chase describes music from this period,

"Taking the guitar as his instrumental model, and drawing his inspiration largely from the peculiar traits of Andalusian folk music—but without using actual folk themes—Albéniz achieves a stylization of Spanish traditional idioms that while thoroughly artistic, gives a captivating impression of spontaneous improvisation... Córdoba is the piece that best represents the style of Albéniz in this period, with its hauntingly beautiful melody, set against the acrid dissonances of the plucked accompaniment imitating the notes of the Moorish guslas. Here is the heady scent of jasmines amid the swaying palm trees, the dream fantasy of an Andalusian 'Arabian Nights' in which Albéniz loved to let his imagination dwell."

Later period
While Albéniz's crowning achievement, Iberia, was written in the last years of his life in France, many of its preceding works are well-known and of great interest. The five pieces in Chants d'Espagne (Songs of Spain, published in 1892) are a solid example of the compositional ideas he was exploring in the "middle period" of his life. The suite shows what Albéniz biographer Walter Aaron Clark describes as the "first flowering of his unique creative genius", and the beginnings of compositional exploration that became the hallmark of his later works. This period also includes his operatic works—Merlin, Henry Clifford, and Pepita Jiménez. His orchestral works of this period include Spanish Rhapsody (1887) and Catalonia (1899), dedicated to Ramon Casas, who had painted his full-length portrait in 1894.

Impact and legacy
As one of the leading composers of his era, Albéniz's influences on both contemporary composers and on the future of Spanish music are profound. As a result of his extended stay in France and the friendship he formed with numerous composers there, his composition technique and harmonic language influenced aspiring younger composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. His activities as conductor, performer and composer significantly raised the profile of Spanish music abroad and encouraged Spanish music and musicians in his own country.

Albéniz's works have become an important part of the repertoire of the classical guitar, many of which have been transcribed by Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet and others. Asturias (Leyenda) in particular is heard most often on the guitar, as are Granada, Sevilla, Cadiz, Cataluña, Córdoba, Mallorca, and Tango in D. Gordon Crosskey and Cuban-born guitarist Manuel Barrueco have both made solo guitar arrangements of all the eight-movements in Suite española. Selections from Iberia have rarely been attempted on solo guitar but have been very effectively performed by guitar ensembles, such as the performance by John Williams and Julian Bream of Iberia's  opening "Evocation". The Doors incorporated "Asturias" into their song "Spanish Caravan"; also, Iron Maiden's "To Tame a Land" uses the introduction of the piece for the song bridge. More recently, a guitar version of Granada functions as something of a love theme in Woody Allen's 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

A film about his life, Albéniz, was made in 1947. It was produced in Argentina.

The theme from Asturias was incorporated or adapted in several soundtracks including the 2008 horror film Mirrors, composed by Javier Navarrete, and the Netflix TV show Godless, composed by Carlos Rafael Rivera.

In 1997 the Fundación Isaac Albéniz was founded to promote Spanish music and musicians and to act as a research centre for Albéniz and Spanish music in general.

On 29 May 2010, Google celebrated Isaac Albéniz's 150th Birthday with a doodle.

References and sources
References

Sources

title: Isaac Albéniz


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Talk:Incompetence

Untitled
Kind of a silly article, ey?

Ey, yea! The author has assuredly shown that he is himself incompetent! --Seb

Refactor!
This page seems more primed for a disambiguation article; it looks incompetent as it is. Jafet 16:26, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

2007-08-11 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 02:51, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Royal Mail
This page begins:

Incompetence is the inability to perform; lack of competence; ineptitude.
 * Royal Mail .. well this word sums them up

That's quite the lulz, but that doesn't seem very encyclopedic, and there's no supporting argument for that statement. The author has not shown why Royal Mail makes for a good example of incompetence. Anyone got anything, or should I just delete this? NoriMori (ノリモリ) 03:33, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

title: Talk:Incompetence


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ITU-R

The ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and is responsible for radio communications.

Its role is to manage the international radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbit resources and to develop standards for radiocommunication systems with the objective of ensuring the effective use of the spectrum.

ITU is required, according to its constitution, to allocate spectrum and register frequency allocation, orbital positions and other parameters of satellites, "in order to avoid harmful interference between radio stations of different countries". The international spectrum management system is therefore based on regulatory procedures for frequency coordination, notification and registration.

ITU-R has a permanent secretariat, the Radiocommunication Bureau, based at the ITU HQ in Geneva, Switzerland. The elected Director of the Bureau is Mr. Mario Maniewicz; he was first elected by the ITU membership to the directorship in 2018.

History
The CCIR—Comité consultatif international pour la radio, Consultative Committee on International Radio or International Radio Consultative Committee—was founded in 1927.

In 1932 the CCIR and several other organizations (including the original ITU, which had been founded as the International Telegraph Union in 1865) merged to form what would in 1934 become known as the International Telecommunication Union. In 1992, the CCIR became the ITU-R.

title: ITU-R