All articles starting with P
28,818 articles
Pointe-Noire, Pointe-Noire
Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo's second city and economic capital, Atlantic deepwater port founded 1922 as the CFCO railway terminus; oil industry seat, CORAF refinery, population about 1.4-1.7 million.
Pointer (computer programming)
A pointer, also called a data pointer or pointer variable, is a programming value that stores the memory address of data rather than the data itself.
Pointer (dog breed)
Pointer (English Pointer), a British gundog in AKC's Sporting Group and FCI Group 7, points game birds; developed from Spanish Pointers after 1713/1714, AKC-recognized 1878, dogs 25-28 inches, 55-75 pounds.
Pointer analysis
Pointer analysis is a static program analysis that determines which memory objects each pointer may reference, with Andersen's and Steensgaard's algorithms as the classic approaches.
Pointer network
A pointer network is a neural network whose decoder points at input positions instead of a fixed vocabulary, introduced by Vinyals, Fortunato, and Jaitly at NeurIPS 2015.
Pointer states
Pointer states are quantum states that remain intact when a system interacts with its environment, while their superpositions decohere; the concept was introduced by Wojciech Zurek in 1982.
Pointillism
Pointillism is a late-19th-century painting technique of Neo-Impressionism, also called Divisionism, developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac: dots of pure color blend optically in the viewer's eye.
Pointing stick
A pointing stick, best known by IBM's TrackPoint trademark, is a small rubber-tipped stud in a keyboard's center that moves the cursor with fingertip pressure.
Pointing task
A pointing task is a spatial cognition test in which participants point to a remembered target from an imagined position, with angular error measuring spatial memory.
Pointless
Pointless: British BBC One quiz show (first aired 24 August 2009, BBC Two) hosted by Alexander Armstrong, where teams of two seek obscure correct answers scored against a 100-person survey; pointless answers score 0.
Pointless topology
Pointless topology, also called point-free topology or locale theory, is an approach to topology that studies lattices of open sets called locales instead of sets of points.
PointNet
PointNet is a neural network architecture by Charles Qi and colleagues at Stanford, published in 2017, that consumes raw 3D point clouds directly for classification and segmentation.
PointNet++
PointNet++ is a hierarchical neural network for deep learning on point sets, introduced by Charles R. Qi and colleagues at Stanford University at NIPS in 2017 to capture local features.
PointPillars
PointPillars is a fast encoder for 3D object detection from lidar point clouds, introduced in 2018, that learns features on vertical pillars using only 2D convolutions.
PointRCNN
PointRCNN is a two-stage 3D object detector that generates 3D bounding box proposals directly from raw LiDAR point clouds, proposed by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018 and accepted to CVPR 2019.
Points and Lines (点と線)
Points and Lines (点と線, Ten to sen; also translated as Tokyo Express) is Seichō Matsumoto's 1958 debut mystery novel, the founding work of Japan's social-school mystery fiction, famous for its train-timetable alibi trick and the Tokyo Station four-minute gap.
Points classification in the Tour de France
Points classification (classement par points) of the Tour de France, decided by the green jersey since 1953. Created for the Tour's 50th anniversary; points from stage finishes and intermediate sprints, flatter stages paying more; Peter Sagan holds a record seven titles.
Points of Departure
Points of Departure is a 1981 bilingual Hebrew-English anthology of poems by the Israeli poet Dan Pagis, translated by Stephen Mitchell and published in Philadelphia.
Points of the compass
Points of the compass: named divisions of direction from the four cardinal points (N, E, S, W) through intercardinals to the 32-point rose at 11.25-degree intervals, derived from the medieval wind rose and used in navigation and charts.
Pointwise convergence
Pointwise convergence is a mode of convergence for sequences of functions where each point's values converge, without requiring the same rate everywhere; it is weaker than uniform convergence.
Pointwise mutual information
Pointwise mutual information, introduced by Robert Fano in 1961, is a measure of how much more often two outcomes co-occur than independence would predict, with wide use in linguistics and NLP.
Pointy ears
Pointy ears, also called elf, fairy, or satyr ears, are a visual convention marking nonhuman characters. Rooted in depictions of Pan, satyrs, and medieval demons, spread by Victorian fairy art, Tolkien debates, and Spock.
Poira
Poira (Poggio Cocola) is an archaeological area on hilltops south of the Simeto river near Paternò, Sicily, occupied from the Bronze Age, with a 1965-excavated indigenous necropolis and a proposed identification with ancient Inessa-Aetna.
Poirier-Bienvenu neurodevelopmental syndrome
Poirier-Bienvenu neurodevelopmental syndrome (POBINDS, CSNK2B encephalopathy), a rare CSNK2B-related disorder with early-onset epilepsy, hypotonia, developmental delay, and intellectual disability; OMIM 618732, ORPHA 689397.
Poirot Investigates
Poirot Investigates is Agatha Christie's first Hercule Poirot short story collection, published by The Bodley Head in March 1924 with 11 stories narrated by Captain Hastings; the 1925 US edition added three stories.
Poirot's Early Cases
Poirot's Early Cases (Hercule Poirot's Early Cases in the US) is Agatha Christie's 1974 Collins Crime Club collection of eighteen Poirot short stories from 1923-1935, mostly narrated by Captain Hastings, including Poirot's greatest failure, The Chocolate Box.
Poison
Poison: any substance that in small quantities seriously disturbs bodily function and may cause death; studied by toxicology. Distinguished from toxin (organism-produced) and venom (injected); dose determines toxicity.
Poison (1991 film)
Poison (1991) is Todd Haynes's feature debut, an 85-minute experimental drama intercutting three Genet-inspired tales (Hero, Horror, Homo), Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, NEA-funded, and a landmark of New Queer Cinema.
Poison (Alice Cooper song)
Poison is a hard rock song by Alice Cooper, released in 1989 as the lead single from the album Trash. It became his biggest international hit.
Poison (band)
Poison: American glam metal band formed 1983 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (briefly Paris), moved to Los Angeles 1984. Classic lineup Michaels, DeVille, Dall, Rockett; hits Talk Dirty to Me and Every Rose Has Its Thorn; seven studio albums.