All articles starting with S
44,216 articles
Self-avoiding walk
A self-avoiding walk (SAW) is a lattice path that never visits the same site twice, the standard model of a linear polymer in a good solvent.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the capacity to make oneself the object of one's own attention, studied in psychology and philosophy as self-consciousness. Key contrasts: introspection's unreliability, the introspection illusion, Duval and Wicklund's objective self-awareness theory, and feedback-based routes to self-knowledge.
Self-balancing binary search tree
A self-balancing binary search tree, also called a balanced or height-balanced tree, uses rotations and balance rules such as those of AVL and red-black trees to keep operations logarithmic.
Self-care and lifestyle management in heart failure
Self-care and lifestyle management in heart failure is the set of patient behaviors, including daily weighing, low-salt diet, exercise, and symptom monitoring, that guidelines recommend to reduce hospitalization and death.
Self-cleaning glass
Self-cleaning glass is glass coated with a transparent titanium dioxide layer that uses daylight to decompose dirt and rain to rinse it away, cutting manual cleaning.
Self-coherent detection
Self-coherent detection is an optical receiver technique in which a carrier sent from the transmitter lets a simple photodiode recover both intensity and phase, without a local oscillator.
Self-Compassion Scale
The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) is a 26-item questionnaire measuring how people respond to their own suffering, developed by psychologist Kristin Neff and published in 2003, with translations into at least 22 languages.
Self-concept
Self-concept is the set of an individual's beliefs about who they are, distinct from self-esteem. Covers the Shavelson hierarchical model, self-concept clarity, cultural self-construal, aging self-perceptions, and measurement.
Self-consciousness
Self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is awareness of oneself as oneself, expressed by "I", "me", "my". The article covers its history from Aristotle and Kant, higher-order thought theories, pre-reflective minimal selfhood, and its epistemic peculiarities.
Self-consistency decoding
Self-consistency decoding is a training-free inference-time technique for large language models, introduced by Wang et al. at ICLR 2023, that samples many chain-of-thought reasoning paths and majority-votes their final answers.
Self-consistent mean field
Self-consistent mean field (SCF) is an iterative computational method for interacting many-particle systems, introduced by D. R. Hartree in 1928 and underlying Hartree-Fock theory and Kohn-Sham density functional theory.
Self-consolidating concrete
Self-consolidating concrete (SCC), also called self-compacting concrete, is highly flowable, nonsegregating concrete that fills formwork without vibration; it was developed in Japan in the late 1980s.
Self-consumption
Self-consumption is the direct use of electricity generated on a consumer's own premises, usually rooftop solar, and it raises profitability because retail prices exceed prices paid for exports.
Self-contained breathing apparatus
A self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) is a respirator whose air source is carried by the user, allowing work in dangerous atmospheres; firefighters are its most visible users.
Self-control
Self-control: effortful regulation of impulses and delayed gratification in service of long-term goals. Covers Mischel's marshmallow test, Baumeister's strength model and ego depletion, its replication and conceptual crisis, and measurement problems.
Self-controlled case series
The self-controlled case series is an epidemiological method comparing event rates before and after transient exposures like vaccination, using only cases, introduced by C. P. Farrington in 1995.
Self-coup
Self-coup, also autocoup or autogolpe: a leader who took power legally tries to stay in power illegally, dissolving congress or the constitution, with or without military backing; 83 cases 1945–2023, classic case Fujimori's Peru 1992.
Self-Curing of Dental Resins
Self-Curing of Dental Resins: chemical (redox, two-paste) polymerization of dental cements and adhesives, alone or as the chemical component of dual-cure resin cements, used where curing light cannot reach.
Self-debugging
Self-debugging is a technique in which a large language model iteratively fixes its own generated programs using execution results, error messages, or code explanations as feedback.
Self-defeating personality disorder
Self-defeating personality disorder (masochistic personality disorder), a proposed DSM-III-R Appendix A diagnosis of pervasive self-defeating behavior, rejected for DSM-IV and ICD-10 due to limited validity, overlap with borderline and dependent disorders, and criticism for pathologizing women.
Self-defence in international law
Self-defense in international law is a state's right to use force in response to an armed attack, preserved for UN Members by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Self-defense
Self-defense (legitimate defense) is the legal justification for using reasonable force against an imminent unlawful attack in criminal, tort, and international law. Distinguished by duty-to-retreat versus stand-your-ground rules, the castle doctrine, and imminence, necessity, and proportionality requirements.
Self-deprecation
Self-deprecation is self-directed criticism or humor downplaying one's abilities or worth. Studied as one of four humor styles (self-defeating) in the Humor Styles Questionnaire, it can signal humility and build trust, or correlate with low well-being when chronic.
Self-destructive behavior
Self-destructive behavior is damaging action against one's own interests, also called self-harm; includes nonsuicidal self-injury (cutting, burning), affects 3–6% of adults and 17–27% of adolescents, and is treated with DBT.
Self-determination
Self-determination is the international-law right of peoples to freely determine their political status, rooted in UN Charter Article 1(2), realized through independence, free association, or integration, and limited by territorial integrity outside decolonization.
Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is a psychology framework holding that autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs underlie motivation, wellness, and internalization across education, work, and health.
Self-diffusion
Self-diffusion is the random thermal migration of molecules through a medium of the same chemical species, measured by tagging and tracking a small fraction of identical molecules.
Self-disclosure
Self-disclosure is the voluntary sharing of personal information and feelings with others, central to social penetration theory (Altman & Taylor, 1973) and Jourard's 1964 work, governing intimacy, reciprocity, privacy calculus, and online and therapeutic disclosure.
Self-distillation
Self-distillation, also known as policy self-distillation, is a machine learning method in which a neural network imitates its own predictions, introduced as Born-Again Networks in 2018.
Self-doping in hybrid perovskites
Self-doping in hybrid perovskites is the unintentional electrical doping of these semiconductors by their own point defects, setting carrier type and concentration without added dopants.