Ceramic plate

Ceramic plates (also known as trauma plates) are commonly used as inserts in soft body armor. Most ceramic plates used in the body armor industry can protect against a NIJ level III and IV with a IIIA vest supporting. Ceramic plates are a form of composite armor. Insert plates may also be manufactured from steel or PE.

These plates are often worn by personnel needing protection from rifle fire. In Iraq, the soft armor vest with the ceramic plate helps protect troops from small arms fire up to and including 7.62×63 mm steel rifle bullets.

A ceramic plate is usually slipped into the outer layer of a soft armor vest. There may be two plates, one in the front and one in the back, or one universal plate on either front or back.

The United States Military refer to these ceramic plates as Enhanced Small Arms Protective Inserts (ESAPI).

The approximate weight for one NIJ level III plate is 4 to 8 pounds (1.8-3.6 kg) for the typical size of 10" by 12". There are other types of plates that come in different sizes and offer different levels of protection. For example, the MC-Plate (maximum coverage plate) offers 19% more coverage than a standard ceramic plate.

EMV

EMV is a standard for interoperation of IC cards ("Chip cards") and IC capable POS terminals and ATM's, for authenticating credit and debit card payments. The name EMV comes from the initial letters of Europay, MasterCard and VISA, the three companies which originally cooperated to develop the standard. Europay International SA was absorbed into Mastercard in 2002. JCB (formerly Japan Credit Bureau) joined the organisation in December 2004. IC card systems based on EMV are being phased in across the world, under names such as "IC Credit" and "Chip and PIN". The EMV specification is also the basis of the Chip Authentication Program, where banks give customers hand-held card readers to perform online authenticated transactions.

The EMV standard defines the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. Portions of the standard are heavily based on the IC Chip card interface defined in ISO 7816.

The system is not compatible with the original Carte Bancaire smart cards systematically deployed in France since 1992. However, the French Carte Bancaire now also uses the EMV standard.

The most widely known implementations of EMV standard are:

• VSDC - VISA

• MChip - MasterCard

• AEIPS - American Express

• J Smart - JCB

MasterCard has a Chip Authentication Program (CAP) for secure e-commerce. Its implementation is known as EMV-CAP and supports a number of Modes.

Bluetooth 2.1

Bluetooth Core Specification Version 2.1 is fully backward-compatible with 1.1, and was adopted by the Bluetooth SIG on July 26, 2007. This specification includes the following features:

• Extended inquiry response: provides more information during the inquiry procedure to allow better filtering of devices before connection. This information includes the name of the device, a list of services the device supports, plus other information like the time of day and pairing information.

• Sniff subrating: reduces the power consumption when devices are in the sniff low-power mode, especially on links with asymmetric data flows. Human interface devices (HID) are expected to benefit the most, with mouse and keyboard devices increasing the battery life by a factor of 3 to 10. It lets devices decide how long they will wait before sending keepalive messages to one another. Previous Bluetooth implementations featured keep alive message frequencies of up to several times per second. In contrast, the 2.1 specification allows pairs of devices to negotiate this value between them to as infrequently as once every 5 or 10 seconds.

Direction finding

Direction finding (DF) refers to the establishment of the direction from which a received signal was transmitted. This can refer to radio or other forms of wireless communication. By combining the direction information from two or more suitably spaced receivers, the source of a transmission may be located in space via triangulation. This is called a cross-cut or fix.

For the purpose of direction finding, a large so-called "Iron Horse" worldwide network of FLR-9 antennas was built during the early Cold War.

Some academic research has centered on the use of software-defined radios to perform the DF operations using receivers with one or more separate channels in conjunction with multiple antenna arrays.

Taste

Taste or gustation is one of the two main "chemical" senses. There are at least four types of tastes that "buds" (receptors) on the tongue detect, and hence there are anatomists who argue[citation needed] that these constitute five or more different senses, given that each receptor conveys information to a slightly different region of the brain[citation needed]. The inability to taste is called ageusia.

The four well-known receptors detect sweet, salt, sour, and bitter, although the receptors for sweet and bitter have not been conclusively identified. A fifth receptor, for a sensation called umami, was first theorised in 1908 and its existence confirmed in 2000. The umami receptor detects the amino acid glutamate, a flavor commonly found in meat and in artificial flavourings such as monosodium glutamate.

Note that taste is not the same as flavor; flavor includes the smell of a food as well as its taste.

Paleolithic

Paleolithic means "Old Stone Age." This was the earliest period of the Stone Age. The Lower Paleolithic predates Homo sapiens, beginning with Homo habilis and the earliest use of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens originated some 200,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Paleolithic.

Sometime during the Middle Paleolithic, humans also developed language, music, early art, as well as systematic burial of the dead.

Humans spread from East Africa to the Near East some 80 millennia ago, and further to southern Asia and Australasia some 60 millennia ago, northwestwards into Europe and eastwards into Central Asia some 40 millennia ago, and further east to the Americas from ca. 15 millennia ago. The Upper Paleolithic is taken to begin some 40 millennia ago, with the appearance of "high" culture. Expansion to North America and Oceania took place at the climax of the most recent Ice Age, when today's temperate regions were extremely inhospitable. By the end of the Ice Age some 12,000 BP, humans had colonised nearly all the ice-free parts of the globe.

Throughout the Paleolithic, humans generally lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer societies have tended to be very small and egalitarian, though hunter-gatherer societies with abundant resources or advanced food-storage techniques have sometimes developed a sedentary lifestyle, complex social structures such as chiefdoms, and social stratification; and long-distance contacts may be possible, as in the case of Indigenous Australian "highways."

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a type of anxiety disorder primarily characterized by obsessions and/or compulsions. Obsessions are distressing, repetitive, intrusive thoughts or images that the individual often realizes are senseless. Compulsions are repetitive behaviors that the person feels forced or compelled into doing, sometimes, in order to relieve anxiety. The OCD thought pattern may be likened to superstitions: if X is done, Y won't happen—in spite of how unlikely it may be that doing X will actually prevent Y, if Y is even a real threat to begin with. A common example of this behavior would be obsessing that one's door is unlocked, which may lead to compulsive constant checking and rechecking of doors. Another example is obsession with the state of one's personal items, such as eyeglasses, leading to their excessive cleaning or adjustment. Often the process seems much less logical. For example, the compulsion of walking in a certain pattern may be employed to alleviate the obsession that something bad is about to happen. More often, though, the compulsion is inexplicable, simply an urge to complete a ritual triggered by nervousness. Light switches and other household items are also common objects of obsession.