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Bootstrapping

 
Sci-Tech Dictionary: bootstrapping
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(′büt′strap·iŋ)

(electronics) A technique for lifting a generator circuit above ground by a voltage value derived from its own output signal.

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Investment Dictionary: Bootstrapping
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1. A procedure used to calculate the zero coupon yield curve from market figures.

2. A situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital. An individual is said to be boot strapping when he or she attempts to found and build a company from personal finances or from the operating revenues of the new company.

Investopedia Says:
1. Since the T-bills offered by the government are not available for every time period, the bootstrapping method is used to fill in the missing figures in order to derive the yield curve. The bootstrap method uses interpolation to determine the yields for Treasury zero coupon securities with various maturities.

2. Compared to using venture capital, boot strapping can be beneficial as the entrepreneur is able to maintain control over all decisions. On the downside, however, this form of financing may place unnecessary financial risk on the entrepreneur. Furthermore, boot strapping may not provide enough investment for the company to become successful at a reasonable rate.

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Learn the complex concepts and calculations for trading bonds including bond pricing, yield, term structure of interest rates and duration. Advanced Bond Concepts
Investing in bonds - What are they, and do they belong in your portfolio? Bond Basics Tutorial


Wikipedia: Bootstrapping
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Search Wiktionary Look up bootstrapping, bootstrap, or pull oneself up by one's bootstraps in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors that share a common meaning, a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help. The term is often attributed to Rudolf Erich Raspe's story The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, where the main character pulls himself out of a swamp, though it's disputed whether it was done by his hair or by his bootstraps.[1]

Contents

Straps on leather boots

A pair of boots with one bootstrap visible.

Tall boots may have a tab, loop or handle at the top known as a bootstrap, allowing one to use fingers or a tool to provide better leverage in pulling the boots on. The saying "to pull yourself up by your bootstraps"[2] was already in use during the 1800s as an example of an impossible task. Bootstrap as a metaphor, meaning to better oneself by one's own unaided efforts, was in use in 1922.[3] This metaphor spawned additional metaphors for a series of self-sustaining processes that proceed without external help.[4]

Applications

Computing

Main article: Booting

The computer term bootstrap began as a metaphor in the 1950s. In computers, pressing a bootstrap button caused a hardwired program to read a bootstrap program from an input unit and then execute the bootstrap program which read more program instructions and became a self-sustaining process that proceeded without external help from manually entered instructions. As a computing term, bootstrap has been used since at least 1958.[5]

The bootstrap concept was used in the IBM 701 computer (1952-1956) which had a "load button" which initiated reading of the first 36-bit word from a punched card in a card reader, or from a magnetic tape unit, or drum unit (predecessor of the hard disk drive). The left 18-bit half-word was then executed as an instruction which read additional words into memory.[6]

The term was also championed by Doug Engelbart, to refer to his belief that organizations could better evolve by improving the process they use for improvement (thus obtaining a compounding effect over time). His SRI team that developed the NLS hypertext system applied this strategy by using the tool they'd developed to improve the tool. The development of compilers for new programming languages first developed in an existing language but then rewritten in the new language and compiled by itself, is another example of the bootstrapping notion.

Business and finance

Bootstrapping in business is to start a business without external help/capital. Startups that bootstrap their business fund development of their company through internal cash flow and are cautious with their expenses.[7][8] Generally at the start of a venture a certain amount of money, such as $5,000, will be set aside for the bootstrap[9] process.

  • See Startup company, a startup company can grow by reinvesting profits in its own growth, if its bootstrapping costs are low and return on investment is high.
  • See Bootstrapping (finance), the method to create the spot rate curve.
  • See Operation Bootstrap ("Operación Manos a la Obra"), ambitious projects which industrialized Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century.

Biology

Richard Dawkins in his book River Out of Eden[10] used the computer bootstrapping concept to explain how biological cells differentiate: "Different cells receive different combinations of chemicals, which switch on different combinations of genes, and some genes work to switch other genes on or off. And so the bootstrapping continues, until we have the full repertoire of different kinds of cells."

Phylogenetics

Bootstrapping analysis gives a way to judge the strength of support for nodes on phylogenetic trees. A number is presented by each node, which reflects the percentage of bootstrap trees which also resolve that clade.[11]

Law

Main article: Bootstrapping (law)

In law, bootstrapping is a rule preventing the admission of hearsay evidence in conspiracy cases.

Linguistics

Main article: Bootstrapping (linguistics)

In linguistics, bootstrapping is a theory of language acquisition.

Statistics

Main article: Bootstrapping (statistics)

In statistics, bootstrapping is a resampling technique used to obtain estimates of summary statistics.

Machine learning

Main article: Bootstrapping (machine learning)

In machine learning, bootstrapping is a technique used to iteratively improve a classifier performance.

Physics

Main article: Bootstrap model

In physics, bootstrapping is using very general consistency criteria to determine the form of a quantum theory from some assumptions on the spectrum of particles

Electronics

Main article: Bootstrapping (electronics)

In electronics, bootstrapping is a form of positive feedback in analog circuit design

See also

References

  1. ^ "bootstraps--speculation/questions". 2005-08-28. http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0508D&L=ADS-L&P=14748. 
  2. ^ Bootstrap citations from 1800s
  3. ^ Ulysses cited in the Oxford English Dictionary
  4. ^ Phrase Finder
  5. ^ Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University. 
  6. ^ From Gutenberg to the Internet, Jeremy M. Norman, 2005, page 436, ISBN 0-930405-87-0
  7. ^ The Art of the Bootstrap, Venture Beat
  8. ^ Startup Survival Guide, Sparxoo
  9. ^ Bootstrap
  10. ^ Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, pages 23-25, 1995 (paper) ISBN 0-465-06990-8
  11. ^ 1. Bradley Efron, 2. Elizabeth Halloran‡, and 3. Susan Holmes†,§ (1996), "Bootstrap confidence levels for phylogenetic  trees", PNAS 93 (23) 

External links


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Sci-Tech Dictionary. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. Copyright © 2003, 1994, 1989, 1984, 1978, 1976, 1974 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bootstrapping".  Read more