What is "lasso"

Lasso \Lass"o\ (l[a^]s"s[-o]) n.; pl. Lassos (-s[=o]z). [Sp. lazo, L. laqueus. See Lace.] A rope or long thong of leather with a running noose, used for catching horses, cattle, etc.

Lasso cell (Zo["o]l.), one of a peculiar kind of defensive and offensive stinging cells, found in great numbers in all c[oe]lenterates, and in a few animals of other groups. They are most highly developed in the tentacles of jellyfishes, hydroids, and Actini[ae]. Each of these cells is filled with, fluid, and contains a long, slender, often barbed, hollow thread coiled up within it. When the cell contracts the thread is quickly ejected, being at the same time turned inside out. The thread is able to penetrate the flesh of various small, soft-bodied animals, and carries a subtle poison by which they are speedily paralyzed and killed. The threads, at the same time, hold the prey in position, attached to the tentacles. Some of the jellyfishes, as the Portuguese man-of-war, and Cyanea, are able to penetrate the human skin, and inflict painful stings in the same way. Called also nettling cell, cnida, cnidocell.

Lasso \Las"so\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Lassoed (l[a^]s"s[-o]d); p. pr. & vb. n. Lassoing.] To catch with a lasso.

1807 (v.); 1808 (n.), American English, from Spanish lazo, from Latin laqueum (nominative laqueus) "noose, snare" (see lace (n.)).

n. 1 A long rope with a sliding loop on one end, generally used in ranching to catch cattle and horses. 2 (context computing English) An image-editing function allowing the user to capture an irregularly-shaped object by drawing an approximate outline. vb. To catch with a lasso.

A lasso ( or ), also referred to as a lariat, riata, or reata (all from Spanish la reata), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when pulled. It is a well-known tool of the American cowboy. The word is also a verb; to lasso is to throw the loop of rope around something. Although the tool has several proper names, such terms are rarely employed by those who actually use it; nearly all cowboys simply call it a "rope," and the use of such "roping." To most cowboys, the use of other terms — especially "lasso" — identifies the user as a layman.

A lasso is made from stiff rope so that the noose stays open when the lasso is thrown. It also allows the cowboy to easily open up the noose from horseback to release the cattle because the rope is stiff enough to be pushed a little. A high quality lasso is weighted for better handling. The lariat has a small reinforced loop at one end, called a honda or hondo, through which the rope passes to form a loop. The honda can be formed by a honda knot (or another loop knot), an eye splice, a seizing, rawhide, or a metal ring. The other end is sometimes tied simply in a small, tight, overhand knot to prevent fraying. Most modern lariats are made of stiff nylon or polyester rope, usually about 5/16 or 3/8 in (8 or 9.5 mm) diameter and in lengths of 28, 30, or 35 ft (8.5, 9 or 11 m) for arena-style roping and anywhere from 45 to 70 ft (14 to 21 m) for Californio-style roping. The reata is made of braided (or less commonly, twisted) rawhide and is made in lengths from 50 ft to over 100 ft (15 m to over 30 m). Mexican maguey (agave) and cotton ropes are also used in the longer lengths.

The lasso is used today in rodeos as part of the competitive events, such as calf roping and team roping. It is also still used on working ranches to capture cattle or other livestock when necessary. After catching the cattle, the lasso can be tied or wrapped (dallied) around the horn, a typical feature on the front of a western saddle. With the lasso around the horn, the cowboy can use his horse as the equivalent of a tow truck with a winch.

Part of the historical culture of both the vaqueros of Mexico and the cowboys of the Western United States is a related skill now called " trick roping", a performance of assorted lasso spinning tricks. Will Rogers was a well-known practitioner of trick roping and the natural horsemanship practitioner Buck Brannaman also got his start as a trick roper when he was a child.

Lasso (Andrés Vicente Lazo Uslar) is a Venezuelan singer / composer.

Lasso is an application server and server management interface used to develop internet applications and is a general-purpose, high-level programming language. Originally a web datasource connection tool, for Filemaker and later included in Apple Computer's FileMaker 4.0 and Claris Homepage as CDML, it has since evolved into a complex language used to develop and serve large-scale internet applications and web pages.

Lasso includes a simple template system allowing code to control generation of HTML and other content types. Lasso is object-oriented and every value is an object. It also supports procedural programming through unbound methods. The language uses traits and multiple dispatch extensively.

Lasso has a dynamic type system, where objects can be loaded and augmented at runtime, automatic memory management, a comprehensive standard library, and three compiling methodologies: dynamic (comparable to PHP- Python), just-in-time compilation (comparable to Java or .NET Framework), and pre-compiled (comparable to C). Lasso also supports Query Expressions, allowing elements within arrays and other types of sequences to be iterated, filtered, and manipulated using a natural language syntax similar to SQL. Lasso includes full Unicode character support in the standard string object, allowing it to serve and support multi-byte characters such as Japanese and Swedish, and supports transparent UTF-8 conversion when writing string data to the network or file system.

Lasso is often used as a scripting language, and also used in a wide range of non-scripting contexts. Lasso code can be packaged into standalone executable programs called "LassoApps", in which folder structures are compiled into single files.

The Lasso Server application server runs as a system service and receives requests from the web server through FastCGI. It then hands the request off to the appropriate Lasso Instance, which formulates the response. Multiple individual instances are supported, allowing one server to handle multiple sites, each as separate processes. The server uses a high performance IO-based green threading system designed for multi-core systems.

Lasso can be compared to the server-side scripting languages PHP and Python, ColdFusion, Ruby, etc.

Free for development, Lasso allows partial access to its source code, allowing developers to add or change major components of the language (for example, Ke Carlton's DS implementation of the Lasso Inline). Licensing comes in both SAS and stand-alone versions.

Lasso may refer to:

• Lasso, a loop of rope that is designed to be thrown around a target and tighten when pulled
• Lasso, tradename for the herbicide Alachlor
• Lasso, Burkina Faso
• Lasso of Truth, a fictional weapon wielded by comic book superheroine Wonder Woman
• Lasso (statistics), a technique for L1-norm regularization
• Lasso (programming language), an internet programming language developed by LassoSoft Inc.
• "Lasso," a song from Phoenix's 2009 album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
• Lasallian Schools Supervision Office, De La Salle Supervised Schools

In statistics and machine learning, lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) (also Lasso or LASSO) is a regression analysis method that performs both variable selection and regularization in order to enhance the prediction accuracy and interpretability of the statistical model it produces. It was introduced by Robert Tibshirani in 1996 based on Leo Breiman’s Nonnegative Garrote. Lasso was originally formulated for least squares models and this simple case reveals a substantial amount about the behavior of the estimator, including its relationship to ridge regression and best subset selection and the connections between lasso coefficient estimates and so-called soft thresholding. It also reveals that (like standard linear regression) the coefficient estimates need not be unique if covariates are collinear.

Though originally defined for least squares, lasso regularization is easily extended to a wide variety of statistical models including generalized linear models, generalized estimating equations, proportional hazards models, and M-estimators, in a straightforward fashion. Lasso’s ability to perform subset selection relies on the form of the constraint and has a variety of interpretations including in terms of geometry, Bayesian statistics, and convex analysis.

The LASSO is closely related to basis pursuit denoising.