All articles starting with S
44,216 articles
Self-Reliance
"Self-Reliance" is Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay, published as Essay II of Essays: First Series by James Munroe & Company; its classic Transcendentalist case for nonconformity, self-trust, and "imitation is suicide" made it the canonical American statement of individualism.
Self-replicating DNA hydrogel
A self-replicating DNA hydrogel is a DNA hydrogel whose DNA network is grown by enzymatic amplification, usually rolling circle amplification with phi29 polymerase, rather than assembled from pre-made strands.
Self-replicating spacecraft
A self-replicating spacecraft, often called a von Neumann probe, is a hypothetical craft that harvests local materials to build copies of itself, enabling exponential exploration.
Self-replication
Self-replication: a system producing a copy of itself, from semiconservative DNA replication (3 billion base pairs, hours per human cell) to virus hijacking of host cells and synthetic cells like SpudCell.
Self-report inventory
A self-report inventory is a psychometric questionnaire in which respondents answer standardized written items about their own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, scored into composite measures.
Self-report study
Self-report study: a criminological survey method asking respondents whether and how often they committed delinquent or criminal acts; pioneered by Porterfield in 1940, refined by Short and Nye, and used to measure hidden crime beyond official statistics.
Self-Respect Movement
The Self-Respect Movement (சுயமரியாதை இயக்கம்) was a rationalist anti-caste social reform movement launched by Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in the Madras Presidency in 1925, working outside electoral politics.
Self-rewarding language models
Self-rewarding language models are language models trained to judge their own outputs and improve through iterative DPO, introduced by Meta AI researchers in a January 2024 paper.
Self-sealing fuel tank
The self-sealing fuel tank is a fuel container, typically a flexible bladder, that seals small punctures on its own; the US Navy began developing the technology in 1940.
Self-seeding in free-electron lasers
Self-seeding is a technique for improving X-ray free-electron laser pulses, in which radiation from a first undulator is filtered through a monochromator to seed amplification in a second.
Self-service analytics
Self-service analytics (SSA, self-service BI) is business intelligence that lets nontechnical users access, analyze and visualize data via tools like Tableau and Power BI, supported by governed data pipelines and central IT.
Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias: the attribution bias of crediting one's successes to internal causes (ability, effort) and blaming failures on external causes (luck, unfair bosses). Large meta-analytic effect (d = 0.96), smaller in Asian samples and with depression.
Self-signed certificate
A self-signed certificate is an X.509 certificate signed with its own private key, so its Subject and Issuer are the same; it is trusted only out of band.
Self-similarity
Self-similarity is the property of an object or process that looks the same at different scales, as in fractals like the Cantor set and von Koch curve.
Self-Strengthening Army
The Self-Strengthening Army (自强军) was a Western-style Chinese army of thirteen battalions founded by Zhang Zhidong in Jiangnan around 1895, drilled by German officers and transferred to Yuan Shikai in 1901.
Self-Strengthening Movement
The Self-Strengthening Movement (洋务运动), also called the Ziqiang Movement, was a Qing reform program adopting Western military and industrial technology, led by Li Hongzhang and Prince Gong from 1861 until defeat by Japan in 1895.
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is a computer vision method that trains a network to predict per-pixel depth from a single image without ground-truth labels, using photometric consistency.
Self-tapping screw
The self-tapping screw, also called a tapping screw or Tek screw, is a fastener that cuts or forms its own mating thread in a pre-drilled hole, eliminating the need for a nut.
Self-Testing
Self-testing: a person collects a specimen, performs a test, and interprets the result in private (MeSH 2021). Includes COVID-19, HIV, pregnancy, and glucose home tests; WHO-recommended for COVID-19 since 2022.
Self-torque of light
Self-torque of light is a property of beams whose orbital angular momentum changes in time along the pulse, varying the twist from one end of the pulse to the other.
Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race
Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, founded by Sri Chinmoy in 1997, is the world's longest certified footrace: 3,100 miles around a Queens, New York block in 52 days, 59.6 miles daily; Aalto holds the 40-day record.
Self-trapped exciton
A self-trapped exciton (STE) is a bound electron-hole pair in which a carrier becomes trapped in the lattice distortion it creates, producing broad, Stokes-shifted emission in halides and rare-gas solids.
Self-trapped excitons in low-dimensional perovskites
Self-trapped excitons in low-dimensional perovskites are excitons trapped in a potential well formed by their own lattice deformation, producing broadband, strongly Stokes-shifted emission used in white-light emitters and scintillators.
Self-verification (prompting)
Self-verification (prompting) is a technique where a large language model checks its own candidate answers, re-deriving the question's conditions from each answer and ranking them by a verification score before answering.
Self/less
Self/less is a 2015 American sci-fi action thriller directed by Tarsem Singh, starring Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsley, about a dying billionaire whose consciousness is transferred into a body with a hidden past; released July 10, 2015 by Focus Features.
SelfCheckGPT
SelfCheckGPT is a black-box, zero-resource method for detecting hallucinations in large language models, proposed at the University of Cambridge in 2023, which checks sampled responses for consistency.
Selfie
Selfie: a self-taken photograph, typically with a smartphone or webcam, shared on social media. First recorded 2002 in Australian English (Nathan Hope forum post); Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013; photographic self-portraits date to Robert Cornelius, 1839.
Selfie (song)
#SELFIE is a 2014 EDM novelty single by The Chainsmokers (Alex Pall, Drew Taggart), with an uncredited spoken-word vocal by Alexis Killacam; a Dim Mak release that hit No. 16 on the Hot 100 and No. 1 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs.
Selfie (TV series)
Selfie (TV series): 2014 ABC romantic comedy created by Emily Kapnek, loosely based on My Fair Lady/Pygmalion, starring Karen Gillan as influencer Eliza Dooley and John Cho as Henry Higgs; canceled November 7, 2014 after 13 episodes.
Selfiee
Selfiee is a 2023 Hindi comedy-drama directed by Raj Mehta, starring Akshay Kumar and Emraan Hashmi, remaking the 2019 Malayalam film Driving Licence; released 24 February 2023, it flopped with about ₹23.63 crore worldwide.