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1785 In Science
The year 1785 in science and technology involved some significant events. Astronomy * Dunsink Observatory established near Dublin. Aviation * January 7 – France, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and United States, American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England to Calais, France in a gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air. * January 19 – Richard Crosbie successfully flies in a hot air balloon across Dublin, the first ascent in Ireland. Biology * Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy, Antoine François and Étienne Louis Geoffroy publish ''Entomologia Parisiensis, sive, Catalogus insectorum quae in agro Parisiensi reperiuntur ...''. * John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, publishes ''Botanical Tables, containing the different families of British plants''. Earth sciences * March 7–July – James Hutton's ''Theory of the Earth'' is first presented, at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Exploration * André Michaux is sent by the French government to N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ireland
Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelanda sovereign state covering five-sixths of the island) and Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdomcovering the remaining sixth). It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Great Britain and Ireland), North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the List of islands of the British Isles, second-largest island of the British Isles, the List of European islands by area, third-largest in Europe, and the List of islands by area, twentieth-largest in the world. As of 2022, the Irish population analysis, population of the entire island is just over 7 million, with 5.1 million in the Republic of Ireland and 1.9 million in Northern Ireland, ranking it the List of European islands by population, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Withering
William Withering Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (17 March 1741 – 6 October 1799) was an English botanist, geologist, chemist, physician and first systematic investigator of the bioactivity of digitalis. Withering was born in Wellington, Shropshire, the son of a surgeon. He trained as a physician and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He worked at Birmingham General Hospital from 1779. The story is that he noticed a person with edema, dropsy (swelling from congestive heart failure) improve remarkably after taking a traditional herbal remedy; Withering became famous for recognising that the active ingredient in the mixture came from the foxglove plant. The active ingredient is now known as digoxin, after the plant's scientific name. In 1785, Withering published ''An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses'', which contained reports on clinical trials and notes on digitalis's effects and Digoxin toxicity, toxicity. Biography Born in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Condorcet's Jury Theorem
Condorcet's jury theorem is a political science theorem about the relative probability of a given group of individuals arriving at a correct decision. The theorem was first expressed by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1785 work ''Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions''. The assumptions of the theorem are that a group wishes to reach a decision by majority rule, majority vote. One of the two outcomes of the vote is ''correct'', and each voter has an independent probability ''p'' of voting for the correct decision. The theorem asks how many voters we should include in the group. The result depends on whether ''p'' is greater than or less than 1/2: * If ''p'' is greater than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote correctly), then adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. In the limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases. * On the other hand, if ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Condorcet Method
A Condorcet method (; ) is an election method that elects the candidate who wins a majority of the vote in every head-to-head election against each of the other candidates, whenever there is such a candidate. A candidate with this property, the ''pairwise champion'' or ''beats-all winner'', is formally called the ''Condorcet winner'' or ''Pairwise Majority Rule Winner'' (PMRW). The head-to-head elections need not be done separately; a voter's choice within any given pair can be determined from the ranking. Some elections may not yield a Condorcet winner because voter preferences may be cyclic—that is, it is possible that every candidate has an opponent that defeats them in a two-candidate contest. The possibility of such cyclic preferences is known as the Condorcet paradox. However, a smallest group of candidates that beat all candidates not in the group, known as the Smith set, always exists. The Smith set is guaranteed to have the Condorcet winner in it should one exist. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voting Paradox
In social choice theory, Condorcet's voting paradox is a fundamental discovery by the Marquis de Condorcet that majority rule is inherently contradiction, self-contradictory. The result implies that it is logically impossible for any voting system to guarantee that a winner will have support from a majority of voters; for example, there can be rock-paper-scissors scenarios where a majority of voters will prefer A to B, B to C, and also C to A, even if every voter's individual preferences are rational and avoid self-contradiction. Examples of Condorcet's paradox are called Condorcet cycles or cyclic ties. In such a cycle, every possible choice is rejected by the electorate in favor of another alternative, who is preferred by more than half of all voters. Thus, any attempt to ground social decision-making in majoritarianism must accept such self-contradictions (commonly called spoiler effects). Systems that attempt to do so, while minimizing the rate of such self-contradictions, ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marquis De Condorcet
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (; ; 17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French Philosophy, philosopher, Political economy, political economist, Politics, politician, and mathematician. His ideas, including support for liberal economy, free markets, Universal access to education, public education, constitutionalism, constitutional government, and Social equality, equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale – and the Jacobin faction in particular – voted to have Condorcet arrested. He died in prison after a period of hiding from the French Revolutionary authorities. Early years Condorcet was born in Ribemont (in present-day Aisne), descended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water, using the green pigment chlorophyll. Exceptions are parasitic plants that have lost the genes for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and obtain their energy from other plants or fungi. Most plants are multicellular organism, multicellular, except for some green algae. Historically, as in Aristotle's biology, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi. Definitions have narrowed since then; current definitions exclude fungi and some of the algae. By the definition used in this article, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (green plants), which consists of the green algae and the embryophytes or land plants (hornworts, liverworts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean. The region includes Middle America (Americas), Middle America (comprising the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico) and Northern America. North America covers an area of about , representing approximately 16.5% of Earth's land area and 4.8% of its total surface area. It is the third-largest continent by size after Asia and Africa, and the list of continents and continental subregions by population, fourth-largest continent by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. , North America's population was estimated as over 592 million people in list of sovereign states and dependent territories in North America, 23 independent states, or about 7.5% of the world's popula ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
André Michaux
André Michaux (' → ahn- mee-; sometimes Anglicisation, anglicised as Andrew Michaud; 8 March 174611 October 1802) was a French botanist and explorer. He is most noted for his study of North American flora. In addition Michaux collected specimens in England, Spain, France, and even Persia. His work was part of a larger European effort to gather knowledge about the natural world. Michaux's contributions include ''Histoire des chênes de l'Amérique'' (1801; "The Oaks of North America") and ''Flora Boreali-Americana'' (1803; "The Flora of North America") which continued to be botanical references well into the 19th century. His son, François André Michaux, also became an authoritative botanist. Biography Michaux was born in Satory, part of Versailles (city), Versailles, Yvelines, where his father managed farmland on the king's estate. Michaux was trained in the agricultural sciences in anticipation of his one-day assuming his father's duties, and received a basic classical 18 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Society Of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established in 1783. , there are around 1,800 Fellows. The Society covers a broader range of fields than the Royal Society of London, including literature and history. The Fellowship includes people from a wide range of disciplines: science and technology, arts, humanities, medicine, social science, business, and public service. History At the start of the 18th century, Edinburgh's intellectual climate fostered many clubs and societies (see Scottish Enlightenment). Though there were several that treated the arts, sciences and medicine, the most prestigious was the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, commonly referred to as the Medical Society of Edinburgh, co-founded by the mathematician Colin Maclaurin in 1731. Maclaurin was u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Hutton
James Hutton (; 3 June Old Style and New Style dates, O.S. 1726 – 26 March 1797) was a Scottish geologist, Agricultural science, agriculturalist, chemist, chemical manufacturer, Natural history, naturalist and physician. Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology," he played a key role in establishing geology as a modern science. Hutton advanced the idea that the physical world's history of Earth, remote history can be inferred from evidence in present-day rocks. Through his study of features in the landscape and coastlines of his native Scottish lowlands, such as Salisbury Crags or Siccar Point, he developed the theory that geological features could not be static but underwent continuing transformation over indefinitely long periods of time. From this he argued, in agreement with many other early geologists, that the Earth could not be young. He was one of the earliest proponents of what in the 1830s became known as uniformitarianism, the science which explains feat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
