Crossword clues for ascendency
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ascendency \As*cend"en*cy\, n. Governing or controlling influence; the state that exists when one person or group has power over another; domination; power.
An undisputed ascendency.
--Macaulay.
Custom has an ascendency over the understanding.
--Watts.
Syn: Control; authority; influence; sway; dominion; prevalence; domination; dominance; ascendance; ascendence.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
alternative spelling of ascendancy (see -ance).
Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of ascendancy English)
WordNet
n. the state that exists when one person or group has power over another; "her apparent dominance of her husband was really her attempt to make him pay attention to her" [syn: dominance, ascendance, ascendence, ascendancy, control]
Wikipedia
Ascendency is a quantitative attribute of an ecosystem, defined as a function of the ecosystem's trophic network. Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.
One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as “organized power”, because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated willy-nilly. Almost half a century earlier, Alfred J. Lotka (1922) had suggested that a system’s capacity to prevail in evolution was related to its ability to capture useful power. Ascendency can thus be regarded as a refinement of Lotka’s supposition that also takes into account how power is actually being channeled within a system.
In mathematical terms, ascendency is the product of the aggregate amount of material or energy being transferred in an ecosystem times the coherency with which the outputs from the members of the system relate to the set of inputs to the same components ( Ulanowicz 1986). Coherence is gauged by the average mutual information shared between inputs and outputs (Rutledge et al. 1976).
Originally, it was thought that ecosystems increase uniformly in ascendency as they developed, but subsequent empirical observation has suggested that all sustainable ecosystems are confined to a narrow “window of vitality” (Ulanowicz 2002). Systems with relative values of ascendency plotting below the window tend to fall apart due to lack of significant internal constraints, whereas systems above the window tend to be so “brittle” that they become vulnerable to external perturbations.
Sensitivity analysis on the components of the ascendency reveals the controlling transfers within the system in the sense of Liebig (Ulanowicz and Baird 1999). That is, ascendency can be used to identify which resource is limiting the functioning of each component of the ecosystem.
It is thought that autocatalytic feedback is the primary route by which systems increase and maintain their ascendencies (Ulanowicz 1997.)
Usage examples of "ascendency".
The Bedouins with whom I performed this journey were wild fellows of the Desert, quite unaccustomed to let out themselves or their beasts for hire, and when they found that by the natural ascendency of Europeans they were gradually brought down to a state of subserviency to me, or rather to my attendants, they bitterly repented, I believe, of having placed themselves under our control.
The strict morality which so generally prevails where the Mussulmans have complete ascendency prevented the Sheik from entertaining any such sinful hopes as an European might have ventured to cherish under the like circumstances, and he saw no chance of gratifying his love except by inducing the girl to embrace his own creed.
A foul and wicked murder had been attempted, and he had let the murderess escape, and thereby, among other things, allowed her to gain a complete ascendency over himself.
He was constant to me as my shadow, and by degrees he acquired such an ascendency over me that I never was happy out of his company, nor greatly so in it.
After this the Chaldaean provinces gained the ascendency again, and Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar, became the first city of Asia.
But the anti-Grant delegates, though divided as to candidates, naturally made common cause, and in the parliamentary contests of the Convention the personal and intellectual ascendency of General Garfield made him, though in a less active and aggressive sense, the recognized leader of the opposition.
Although this principle rests on a sound foundation, on the truth that the combat is the only effectual means in War, still it is, just on account of its purely geometrical nature, nothing but another case of one-sided theory which can never gain ascendency in the real world.
In leaving the Pedee, with still some doubts of the newly converted loyalists of that quarter, he left Col. Baxter with one hundred and fifty trusty men, to maintain the ascendency which he had just acquired.
The gradually increasing ascendency of the female Alalus over the male eventually prevented the emotions of respect and admiration for the male from being aroused, with the result that love never followed.
Once that was established--once each of them had made his attempt at directing things among them, thus clearly establishing relative ascendencies, then the government of Earth could proceed unhampered by further jockeying.
And the similarities of their respective ascendencies to the chair of St.
Agreeing in some points of his history, they all celebrate his life of penitence, his mortifications, his fastings, his functions of mediator and expiator, the enmity between him and another god, his adversary, their battles, and his ascendency.
The Lords of the Order, in the first year of their ascendency, found themselves squabbling endlessly over rules of order, protocol, religious and political definitions, and over creationism or cybernetic gnosticism or other ideologies.
And to that had destiny subjoined this rencounter to-night, which had, in Bathsheba’s wild imagining, turned her companion’s failure to success, her humiliation to triumph, her lucklessness to ascendency.
Honeypeach only sang when in the ascendency, and Maybelle hated to guess whose bloody and recumbent bodies her father's wife must be currently and unmelodically stomping over.