Social science

Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a "social science". The main social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography and sociology. In a wider sense, social science also includes some fields in the humanities such as anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, psychology, history, and linguistics. The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original 'science of society', established in the 19th century.

Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining the quantitative and qualitative techniques). The term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods.

Geography

Geography (from Greek γεωγραφία, geographia, lit. "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or picture or write about the earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC). Four historical traditions in geographical research are spatial analysis of the natural and the human phenomena (geography as the study of distribution), area studies (places and regions), study of the human-land relationship, and research in the Earth sciences. Nonetheless, modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that foremost seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has been called "the world discipline" and "the bridge between the human and the physical science". Geography is divided into two main branches: human geography and physical geography.

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Contemporary science is typically subdivided into the natural sciences which study the material world, the social sciences which study people and societies, and the formal sciences like mathematics. The formal sciences are often excluded as they do not depend on empirical observations. Disciplines which use science like engineering and medicine may also be considered to be applied sciences.

During the middle ages in the Middle East, foundations for the scientific method were laid by Alhazen. From classical antiquity through the 19th century, science as a type of knowledge was more closely linked to philosophy than it is now and, in fact, in the West the term "natural philosophy" encompassed fields of study that are today associated with science, such as physics, astronomy and medicine.

In the 17th and 18th centuries scientists increasingly sought to formulate knowledge in terms of laws of nature. Over the course of the 19th century, the word "science" became increasingly associated with the scientific method itself, as a disciplined way to study the natural world. It was in the 19th century that scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology reached their modern shapes. The same time period also included the origin of the terms "scientist" and "scientific community," the founding of scientific institutions, and increasing significance of the interactions with society and other aspects of culture.

Class

Class may refer to:

General

Media and entertainment

Books

Circle of latitude

A circle of latitude on the Earth is an imaginary east-west circle connecting all locations (ignoring elevation) with a given latitude. A location's position along a circle of latitude is given by its longitude.

Circles of latitude are often called parallels because they are parallel to each other – that is, any two circles are always the same distance apart. Unlike circles of longitude, which all are great circles with the centre of Earth in the middle, the circles of latitude get smaller as the distance from the Equator increases. Their length can be calculated by a common sine or cosine function. The 60th circle of latitude is half as long as the equator (disregarding Earth’s minor ovality, which is less than 0.3%). A circle of latitude is perpendicular to all meridians.

The latitude of the circle is approximately the angle between the equator and the circle, with the angle's vertex at the Earth's centre. The equator is at 0°, and the North and South Pole are at 90° north and 90° south respectively. The Equator is the longest circle of latitude and is the only circle of latitude which also is a great circle.