The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is an annual statistical survey conducted in Great Britain by the National Centre for Social Research since 1983. The BSA involves in-depth interviews with over 3,000 respondents, selected using random probability sampling, focused on topics including newspaper readership, political parties and trust, public expenditure, welfare benefits, health care, childcare, poverty, the labour market and the , education, charitable giving, the countryside, transport and the environment, the European Union, economic prospects, race, religion, civil liberties, im...

Gallup asked representative samples in 143 countries and territories whether religion was an important part of their daily lives. This map is based on the results, and shows religiosity by country, ranging from the least religious to the most religious on a relative basis. Data from [http://www.gallup.com/poll/114211/Alabamians-Iranians-Common.aspx 2009 Gallup poll].]] [[File:Religious importance.png|thumb|Importance of religion by the Pew Research Center (2002)]] This is a list of countries by importance of religion based on a Gallup Poll. The Gallup poll has a broad question: the ques...

The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory," encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. For example, the pain from a stone falling on one's foot is not the actual stone, it's one's perception of the stone; one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; and s...

In information theory and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a metric for measuring the amount of difference between two sequences (i.e. an edit distance). The term edit distance is often used to refer specifically to Levenshtein distance. The Levenshtein distance between two strings is defined as the minimum number of edits needed to transform one string into the other, with the allowable edit operations being insertion, deletion, or substitution of a single character. It is named after Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965. Example For example, the Leven...

The Hoover Company started out as an American floor care manufacturer based in North Canton, Ohio. It also established a major base in the United Kingdom and for most of the early-and-mid-20th century, it dominated the electric vacuum cleaner industry, to the point where the "hoover" brand name became synonymous with vacuum cleaners and vacuuming in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Hoover Company in the United States was part of the Whirlpool Corporation but sold in 2006 to Techtronic Industries for $107 million. Hoover UK/Europe split from Hoover U.S. in 1993 and was acquired by ...

The Kirby Company is a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and home cleaning accessories, based in Cleveland, Ohio. It is a subsidiary of the Scott Fetzer Company (also known as Scott & Fetzer) which in turn is part of Berkshire Hathaway. Dealers are located in over 70 countries throughout the world. Since the 1920s, Kirby's products have been sold only door-to-door using in-home demonstrations. Berkshire does not disclose Kirby's sales numbers, but Gene Windfeldt, the CEO from 1988 to 1997, estimated the vacuum sales at $1.1 billion per year in 1999. About 70% of Kirby's vacuum sales are f...