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The Web has become an object of our daily life and the amount of information in the web is ever growing. Besides plain texts, especially multimedia information such as graphics, audio or video have become a predominant part of the web's information traffic. But, how can we find useful information within this huge information space? Traditional search engines will reach the limits of their power, when it comes to understanding information content. The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional web in the sense that information in the form of natural language text in the web will be complemented by its explicit semantics based on a formal knowledge representation. Thus, the meaning of information expressed in natural language can be accessed in an automated way and interpreted correctly, i.e. it can be understood by machines. Semantic Web technologies enable the explicit representation of knowledge and its further processing to deduce new knowledge from implicitly hidden knowledge. Thus, information access and information search will be more precise and more complete compared to today's traditional information retrieval technology. Previously heterogeneous data can be mapped and combined based on common knowledge representation and schemata easily extended in a dynamic way. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of Semantic Web technologies. You will learn how to represent knowledge and how to access and benefit from semantic data on the Web.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for Silly Putty, the strange material that ships in an egg and behaves sometimes like a liquid and other times like a solid, necessity came in the form of Imperial Japan. In the early 1940s, as Germany waged war in Europe, the Empire of the Sun invaded rubber-producing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, cutting off supplies to the West. This was more than a minor issue. Japan's invasion of Southeast Asia threatened, literally, the entire war effort. At a loss, the U.S. War Production Board challenged industrial labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber that could be used to meet wartime production demands. Collectively, the chemists working on the problem may have achieved one of the greatest successes in the history of science: They produced a general-purpose synthetic rubber known as GR-S, or government rubber-styrene, in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the U.S.
World War II. One of those wrong turns was made by James Wright in the laboratory of General Electric. Wright mixed boric acid and silicone oil together in the hopes of creating rubber that would make Charles Goodyear proud. General Electric sent Wright's concoction to engineers all over the world, hoping to make something awesome out of the accident. Unfortunately, no one ever discovered a practical use for the "bouncing putty," which seemed destined to fade quietly into history. One man, however, rescued the substance from obscurity. His name was Peter Hodgson, and his vision would eventually lead to Silly Putty, one of the most famous toys in the history of fun and games. In this article, we'll look at the long, strange journey of Silly Putty. We'll also investigate the material's many odd properties -- and the chemistry behind them. Our first order of business: Hodgson's great gamble. World War II had been over for four years, and James Wright's bouncing putty was still in circulation as an invention in search of a practical use.
Unfortunately, no factory or manufacturing plant ever discovered an application for the goop. Peter Hodgson, who owned his own ad agency in New Haven, Conn., was at a cocktail party when he spotted the putty making the rounds. He watched as people spent minutes at a time folding, stretching and squeezing the strange stuff. He approached Ruth Fallgatter, owner of the Block Shop toy store, about listing the putty in an upcoming catalog Hodgson was helping to produce. The bouncing putty became one of the Block Shop's biggest sellers. For reasons that remain unclear, Fallgatter declined to market the product any further, but Hodgson saw its potential. He borrowed $147 to order another batch from General Electric, then hired a Yale student to place 1-ounce (28-gram) wads in plastic eggs. At the same time, Hodgson began to brainstorm names for his product. He evaluated 15 possibilities, but eventually settled on Silly Putty, for which he secured a trademark. Next, he established Arnold Clark Inc. to sell the stuff and contracted with some chemical engineers in Schenectady, N.Y., to derive a recipe based on General Electric's original formula.
Lee Weber, the manager of the bookshop, to ascertain the mysterious link between it and Doubleday. With that endorsement in The New Yorker, interest in Silly Putty skyrocketed. Arnold Clark received more than a quarter-million orders in three days, and Hodgson's great gamble had paid off. The soft, malleable material soon became a fixture in homes across North America and eventually -- the world. Today, Silly Putty continues to amuse and entertain. Up next, we'll take a closer look at its unusual properties and how they can lead to a contradiction in terms. It arrived in an egg and fell out of its shell like a pink blob. The egg had no significance except that Peter Hodgson began selling his product in the weeks leading up to the Easter holiday. It even came delivered in dozen-pack cardboard egg cartons. But the egg quickly became part of Silly Putty's brand, and Hodgson decided to keep the unique packaging long after the first Easter selling season had come and gone.
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