Index

An index is an indirect shortcut derived from and pointing into a greater volume of values, data, information or knowledge. Index may refer to:

Business

Publishing

Database index

A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data without having to search every row in a database table every time a database table is accessed. Indexes can be created using one or more columns of a database table, providing the basis for both rapid random lookups and efficient access of ordered records.

An index is a copy of select columns of data from a table that can be searched very efficiently that also includes a low-level disk block address or direct link to the complete row of data it was copied from. Some databases extend the power of indexing by letting developers create indices on functions or expressions. For example, an index could be created on upper(last_name), which would only store the upper case versions of the last_name field in the index. Another option sometimes supported is the use of partial indices, where index entries are created only for those records that satisfy some conditional expression. A further aspect of flexibility is to permit indexing on user-defined functions, as well as expressions formed from an assortment of built-in functions.

Index (statistics)

In statistics and research design, an index is a composite statistic – a measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points, or in other words, a compound measure that aggregates multiple indicators. Indexes summarize and rank specific observations.

Much data in the field of social sciences is represented in various indices such as Gender Gap Index, Human Development Index or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Item in indexes are usually weighted equally, unless there are some reasons against it (for example, if two items reflect essentially the same aspect of a variable, they could have a weight of 0.5 each).

Constructing the items involves four steps. First, items should be selected based on their face validity, unidimensionality, the degree of specificity in which a dimension is to be measured, and their amount of variance. Items should be empirically related to one another, which leads to the second step of examining their multivariate relationships. Third, indexes scores are designed, which involves determining their score ranges and weights for the items. Finally, indexes should be validateds, which involves testing whether they can predict indicators related to the measured variable not used in their construction.

Southern United States

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—is a region of the United States of America. The South does not exactly match the geographic south, but is predominantly located in the southeastern corner; Arizona and New Mexico, which are geographically in the southern part of the country, are rarely considered part of the Southern United States, while West Virginia, which separated from Virginia in 1863, commonly is. Some scholars have proposed definitions of the South that do not coincide neatly with state boundaries. While the states of Delaware and Maryland, as well as the District of Columbia permitted slavery prior to the start of the Civil War, they remained with the Union. Since then, they became more culturally, economically, and politically aligned with the industrial Northern states, and are often identified as part of the Mid-Atlantic and/or Northeast by many residents, businesses, public institutions, and private organizations. However, the United States Census Bureau puts them in the South.

Wings (magazine)

Wings (ウィングス, Uingusu) is a shōjo manga magazine published by Shinshokan. The magazine is aimed at a female audience in the 16- to 20-year-old age range and tend to be action- or fantasy-oriented stories. Wings previously had a number of special editions such as Shinshokan South, or simply South, Phantom Club, Huckleberry, Un Poco, and Wings: Story. Currently, only Un Poco, and Wings: Story are still being published.

Manga artists and series featured in Wings

South (software)

South is a database migration framework for Django applications. It was created to overcome the fact that the integrated ORM in Django didn't take changes in models into account: you could create new models, but adding or removing fields was not supported.

Django 1.6 is the latest supported version. Since 1.7 the integrated ORM is to be preferred to South. South is therefore end-of-lifed, and will only get security fixes in the future.

References